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qmandomillones · 4 years

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IT IS TIME WE PUT RESPECT ON EMMA ROBERTS’ NAME

SPOILER WARNING

After years of kid-aimed productions like Unfabulous, Nancy Drew, Grand Champion and Spyate, Emma Roberts started the journey of making a name of her own in the entertainment industry. Even if she revealed not getting the part of Wendy in the 2003 adaptation of Peter Pan, she did get some pretty iconic roles to take over our screens with. Here are some remarkable roles from her long film/TV career that I believe are some of her best.

Wild Child

In the 2008 production, Roberts plays Poppy Moore, a bratty teenage girl with a problematic attitude that gets sent to a boarding school in London, because that’s the most normal replacement for good parenting when you’re from Beverly Hills.

During her days in the Hogwarts-looking school she makes some friends, gets in fights, and sets half the building. The movie is all about redemption, because apparently, being bratty is the worst thing a person can do. The role of Poppy Moore paved the way for more mean girl characters Emma has played since the beginning of her career.

We’re the Millers

Casey Mathis is the name of the runaway junkie Emma plays in the 2013 movie. She gets involved in a Narcos-like adventure, after posing as Casey Miller, a quiet typical American girl on a drug smuggling mission alongside Jennifer Aniston, Will Poulter and Jason Sudeikis. This film is such a fun watch and Emma shows off hilarious comedic skills.

Now, leaving comedy behind let us focus on Emma’s best genre, horror. Emma has showcased some real scream queen abilities when it comes to horror productions, from big franchises to Ryan Murphy productions and she has nailed all of them. From the final girl to the killer, she has the skills to make a name for herself in the horror genre. She is often referenced as the 2010´s scream queen and I could not agree more.

Scream 4

In the 4th installment of the high grossing franchise, Emma plays Jill Roberts, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell)’s cousin, a young girl-next-door type kind of girl that at the end of the movie turns out to be one of the killers haunting Prescott for the 4th time in her chaotic life. During her motive reveal she explains that her reason for committing serial murders was jealousy and fame-hunger, and I personally think that is the most valid motive for killing people, just saying.

In the last quarter of the movie, while Jill is trying to frame the murders on her douche ex-boyfriend Trevor, Roberts serves us one of the most memorable set of scenes of the entire franchise; personally, I have thought of running towards a picture frame and slamming onto a glass table more than once.

AMERICAN HORROR STORY

If there is a show where Emma has mastered the scream queen title is in the Ryan Murphy production American Horror Story, in which Emma has had the chance to participate in 5/9 seasons.

In the 3rd season, Coven, Emma plays Madison Montgomery, a child actor with drug abuse problems and a bad reputation who also happens to be a powerful witch. You probably know her from her often quoted “surprise, bitch”, but she is way more than that line.

She was set up to be one of the fan favorite characters, being brought back in 2018 in the messy 8th installment of the show. During this season, we get to see a much more nice and understandable side of Madison’s character, ending up in a redemption arc, going from a total bitch to a better and nicer version of herself.

Madison was perfectly portrayed by Emma, with such great line delivery and style.

In the latest season of the show, AHS 1984, Emma plays Brooke Thompson, a young and sweet college student that, after being attacked by Richard Ramirez agrees to work as a counselor at Camp Redwood with a bunch of her new friends; of course there is some serial killer waiting for them to get there and of course Emma, alongside Angelthe final girls. During the season, Brooke is put through hell and back after being framed for all the murders and dramatically spitting at Leslie Grossman’s character who is responsible for her death sentence.

Emma plays the innocent final girl gone bad with ease, and we are thankful for that!

Honorable mentions: Maggie Esmerelda (AHS FREAKSHOW), Serena Belinda (AHS CULT)

Scream Queens

Here we go with one of my personal favorites. In Scream Queens, Emma plays Chanel Oberlin, a weird and fresh take on the final girl trope. We see her as a sorority president in the first season and a MED student in the second and last installment.

Chanel Oberlin is not a nice character, she is shown as a typical white American brat, who is also super politically incorrect and most likely voted for Trump. She does not appeal to sympathy and often bribes her way through the killing spree.

Chanel has probably the hardest lines to deliver, speaking on 300x velocity and making pop culture references. Emma positively did an outstanding job playing this character; delivering lines that are truly hard to imagine being said by anyone else. Her melodramatic portrayal of a bratty sorority president and a MED student surely left a mark in the most recent moments of pop culture, as she is often praised by her iconic quotes, lines and drags (that she often had to apologize to her cast mates for).

Streets are saying Scream Queens is getting a third season after being cancelled by FOX in 2017, as the creator, Ryan Murphy hinted at being working on a new chapter of this horror-comedy show.

It is not an unknown fact that Emma Roberts is one of the most fresh faces in the industry, after a long career with multiple characters in comedy, horror and drama, she has managed to make a name of her own, and has often given us memorable portrayals.

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ericwollersberger · 5 years

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Crybaby: Lil Peep and the Abject Sublime

Lil Peep was a rapper who came up in the Soundcloud rap scene of the late 2000s and after his death of an accidental fentanyl overdose would achieve chart success with posthumous singles like “Falling Down (feat. XXXTENTACION)” and his second full-length album Come Over When You’re Sober, Part 2 (Billboard, 2018). Though he was one of the most popular rappers to come out of the Soundcloud scene and went on to influence a revival of emo music in the trap scene, he elicited extreme positive and negative reactions, often within the same person. In an article for Vice, “Is Lil Peep’s Music Brilliant or Stupid as Shit?” Drew Millard repeatedly makes reference to the “stupidness” of Peep’s songs, which according to him “oscillate between asinine and laughable,” but also seems genuinely fascinated with him: “I’m not sure whether it’s out of enjoyment, morbid fascination, or a genuine concern for the guy’s well-being, but I can’t stop listening to him” (Millard, 2016). Lil Peep’s music touched on a variety of dark topics like drug addiction, depression, and suicide, and featured instrumentals that melded trap-style beats with music that recalled and sometimes directly sampled emo songs from the 2000s by artists like Underoath, Avenged Sevenfold, and Brand New, an amalgamation of sounds that Millard deemed “gimmicky” and as “scream[ing] ‘bad taste’” (Millard, 2016). Antony Fantano had a more unambiguously negative view of him: “He’s trying to convince you of how depressed he is...but yet his lyrics are so substanceless [and] so meaningless and so vapid, it’s like he’s depressed for the fashion of it...The way he frames [his music] it’s like he’s creating this sexy, glossy, moody fantasy, not the literal mental hell that some people have to struggle with every day” (theneedledrop, 2017). In this post, I will attempt to explain the appeal of Peep’s music through a series of comparisons to the “abject sublime” appeal of country music that Aaron A. Fox describes in his essay “White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime: Country as ‘Bad Music’” (Derno, 2004).

In his essay, Fox said of country music that “the real star performer is the speaking object - the talking jukebox, the house full of furniture but emptied of love, the bitter goodbye heard on an answering machine or read on a Post-It Note stuck on the bathroom mirror, the bottle or glass that ruthlessly seduces the drunken fool, the picture of a lost love on the wall that continues to accuse across the years” (Derno, 2004). There are uncanny equivalents in the music of Lil Peep, but transplanted into a modern context, with lyrics about heartbreaking text messages, cocaine, regrettable casual sex, and self-harm. Fox said of country music, while comparing it to cigarettes: “It is consumed in a fit of self-assertion mixed with self-loathing, with a passion for pain as a feeling one can at least inflict sometimes on oneself” (Derno, 2004). Lil Peep, like the abject country singer, is constantly (and knowingly) the victim of his own actions, but the tone of it is almost braggadocios at times, mirroring the “self-assertion mixed with self-loathing” that Fox attributes to country music and cigarettes. “Country music,” Fox says, “affects the stance that it is trashy music for trashy people, with a knowing wink,” and presents the following lyrics by “hard country” artist Dale Watson’s song “I Hate These Songs”: “Note by Note/Line by line/It cuts to the bone/Man, I hate these songs.” He points out that these lyrics are all references to other country songs and that “such narratively embedded intertextuality is a canonical trope in hard country music” (Derno, 2004). Lil Peep’s music functions quite similarly at times, but rather than referencing music that he despises, he samples music that according to Millard, “literally everyone [else] hates” (Millard, 2016). He samples songs by bands like Underoath, Avenged Sevenfold, and Owl City in extremely unsubtle ways, bands that were never particularly critically beloved (and importantly, marketed mostly to teenagers), and now are broadly considered to be relics of a bygone era (perhaps even “trashy”). A particularly interesting example is “Yesterday,” a song that prominently features a sample of the Oasis song “Wonderwall,” and features the lyrics “Today is gonna be the day that I’m gonna go back to you/I know I did a little blow and I never wrote back to you” sung in the same melody as the verse of “Wonderwall” (Lil Peep, 2016). “Wonderwall,” while undeniably a popular and beloved song, isn’t a sample he’s trying to impress music critics with, but there is an undeniable kind of bravado in his use of it. Conversely, the narrator in “I Hate These Songs,” Fox says, “lovingly demonstrates a deep familiarity and passion for the songs he professes to despise, as he wallows in his own drunken misery” (Derno, 2004). While it is unclear to what extent Lil Peep’s referencing of these songs was ironic, or if it was at all, Millard points it takes “a certain bravery” to use music like this as the central sample of a song in today’s musical world (Millard, 2016).

Lil Peep’s music could be shocking in its ugliness, and while some people read this as honestly and vulnerability and others read this as potentially problematic posturing, the fact remains that for better or worse, he made a huge impact on the current trap landscape. This could be simply chalked up to the fact that, like the music Peep is inspired by, it is mostly marketed to teenagers and explicitly affects a very teenage demeanor, but I believe there is something deeper at work. Fox describes the futility of analyzing country music’s “musical badness” by explaining that “badness,” at least in the case of country music, is “determined by social relations structured in hegemonic dominance and resistance, ease and abjection.” In other words, country music fans often love country because of its perceived “badness” or “trashiness” by people in better social and economic conditions. To the working-class bars of Texas, Fox claims, “country music becomes [their] music, experienced not as a pleasurable diversion of a solipsistic exercise in the judgment of aesthetic worth, but as a brilliant way of re-valuing trash, of making the ‘bad’ song, bad feelings, and the bad...subject not only good, but sublimely good” (Derno, 2004). I believe Lil Peep’s music functions similarly, although perhaps more on an emotional level than an economic one. He knew how to affect abjectness and depression in a way that, although it didn’t always seem genuine, and at times his tone could come off as laughably inappropriate, was at least enough to make (sincerely or not) posturing as a depressed person seem fun enough to at least temporarily alleviate any real problems someone could be facing, mirroring the “abject sublime” appeal of smoking and country music that Fox describes (Derno, 2004). Although acting out depression may be seen as unlikable or unhealthy behavior to a more well-adjusted person, it can provide a strange, temporary, and perhaps shameful pleasure to the person doing it, and Lil Peep built a career on this impulse. Whether you perceive him as genuine, musically gifted, or tasteful all become somewhat irrelevant in the face of this realization. Fox concludes that, in the case of country, and I believe this could just as easily be applied to Lil Peep, “discriminating judgements of musical badness and goodness miss the rhetorical point of the music itself, and the cultural essence of its practice. It’s all good because it’s bad” (Derno, 2004).

References:

BILLBOARD (2018). Lil Peep Chart History. [Online] Available at: https://www.billboard.com/music/lil-peep/chart-history/hot-100 [Accessed 24 October 2019]

DERNO, M. & WASHBURNE, C.J. (eds.) (2004) Bad Music: The Music We Love To Hate. London: Routledge.

LIL PEEP (2016). Crybaby [MIXTAPE]. USA: Independently released.

MILLARD, D. (2016). Is Lil Peep’s Music Brilliant or Stupid as Shit? [Online] Available at: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nznmag/is-lil-peeps-music-brilliant-or-stupid-as-shit [Accessed 24 October 2019]

THENEEDLEDROP (2017). Lil Peep’s Come Over When You’re Sober, Part 1: NOT GOOD. [Online Video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q7UpIFY6xg&t=250s [Accessed 24 October 2019]

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thegoing-gayhoax-blog · 7 years

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“Ars Ratio” Reflection (Second Draft)

Kara Ireland

WRIT 3160

Reflection

What's in my portfolio? In my portfolio are various modes of the depiction of how the myth of going gay functions in society. I've compiled a series of gifs, pictures, and scenes from various shows. These shows include MTV’s Faking It, ABC’s Glee, FOX’s Scream Queens, and Freeform’s The Bold Type. My argumentative piece follows these depictions. I used MTV’s Faking It pilot episode as my main source of scrutiny. I listed numerous discrepancies I had with the show. Mainly, I wanted to highlight how damaging the very first portrayal of lesbians on mainstream television since The L Word was. It was revolutionary for me because I was struggling with my own sexuality at the age of fifteen. Seeing two women in a same sex relationship at any stretch was good exposure for me, it increased my sense of normalcy. It wasn't until I got older, got more experience, and a wider world view that I began to see how awful the show’s premise was. My argumentative paper ventures into how I felt it missed the mark. I then have a comedy skit that will be supposedly performed at Atlanta’s Gay Pride. This original piece is modeled after the kind of comedy I'd seen at my own experience at Pride 2017. Most of the comedy was made at the expense of heterosexual people. In a safe environment full of people who have had similar experiences, it was okay to poke fun at the majority. The skit touches on inappropriate touching, unrequited crushes, and personal experience with girls supposedly going gay. It addresses some of the bothersome situations lesbians often run into in a lighthearted way.

My third argument was a series of tweets I’d composed in response to real-life depictions of “going gay.” I searched buzz words on twitter, such as “be gay, go gay, try girls” etc. to reply to. Though confined to 140 characters – even less, because of the handle, I felt that I’d used Aristotelian appeals accurately to challenge their beliefs.

The gif set from The Bold Type contrasts the problematic tropes shown in both Faking It and Glee. It supports a stereotype, then dismantles it. In the first gif set, Kat is shown identifying with the lesbian experience, but saying that she didn't think she could get past “all this” referencing to the female anatomy. The lesbian character of the show, Adena, countered her statement with “it's not about all this. It's about this” in reference to her heart and emotion regarding a person.

I believe this is relevant to my discussion because Kat admitted that the sexual nature of their budding relationship was offputting, as she did not identify as a lesbian. She was merely exploring her sexuality, and she'd done so by kissing Adena. They hadn't gone further, and she didn't think she could pursue a relationship because of the sexual barrier that existed between them. Adena validated it, but also said that it wasn't about the body. Being in a relationship transcended sex and the parts involved. It rested solely on the heart and the emotion surrounding the couple that determined it's sustenance. This was the point I was trying to convey, myself through my argumentative paper. Too many people believe that “going gay” is about sex, when it is only a mere part of the exploratory experience. To truly give oneself to a same sex relationship, it needs more substance than an attraction and willingness to explore. The Bold Type executed this well.

ABC’s Glee enacted several stereotypical tropes about lesbians and gays throughout their series, but it was mostly for educational purposes to highlight and identify bigotry. Nevertheless, the openly lesbian character, Santana, was made out to be predatory in several instances. Quinn was one of her best friends, and they eventually had sex together. The scene where it happened was on prom night, when they were both single and feeling lonely. Alcohol was featured heavily in the episode. It implied that intoxication can make someone “go gay”. Quinn then emphasized the fact that she'd never slow danced with a girl before, and Santana smirked at her. This is the predatory lesbian fallacy being portrayed. The scene then cut from Santana leading her away by the hand from the party to a suggestive morning after scene. Additionally, with prior knowledge from the season, Quinn had gone through a rebellious bad girl phase, and this was amongst the last things she did. It was never explicitly said that this was part of her regime, but it can be interpreted that way.

FOX’s Scream Queens was a satirical show that was made to offend people in the masses. There was no stroke to identify why the quotes were problematic, but it was understood by most that it was satire. There was one butch lesbian on the show, who was one of the first killed during a serial killing. She was dubbed Predatory Lez immediately, and we never learned her real name. In her brief duration, she developed a superficial relationship with Chanel #3 based on lewd jokes. Naming a character Predatory Lez does not help the view that lesbians really are predatory and infringe on boundaries. Viewers never got insight on the intricacies of their peculiar relationship, but at one point, Chanel #3 begs the killer not to kill her because she was “sort of gay now too”. Beyond the implication that a few kisses and explicit jokes made between one another changed someone's sexuality, it was also used as a discriminatory saving grace. She partially identified as a member of the LGBT community to be pardoned. She denied it later. This abrupt change makes it hard for people to come out. Though the show is based on satire, it does have parallels to real, ignorant people that think this way.

Through this class, I have discovered that argument transcends pro and con. Essentially, everything is an argument. Commercials, designs, font choice, music, inflection, gesture, clothing, hairstyle – everything has the potential to be an argument. Anything can be designed to persuade. After analyzing various shows, I began to consider them differently. Words are not the only mode of argument because everything has the power to make a statement.

I have learned that the color scheme of a product or an advertisement serves to persuade someone, years prior. Since being in this class, I have learned that the mere existence of the product is an argument within itself. The product serves an argumentative purpose initially. It was difficult to wrap my mind around, but throughout the semester, my mindset has been malleable. It has increasingly made more sense. In reading Heinrichs, mostly, I was offered several new perspectives through relatable material. I would like to thank you, Dr. Harris, for assigning such a book – rather than a text that is purely academic. It was much easier to read and retain. By reading Heinrichs, it has become more apparent to me that argument lives in everything.

The philosophy of argument and writing is something I’m not entirely well-versed in. I understood it minimally when I came in, and I still have a tentative hold on it now. When I was a junior in high school I learned for the first time what ethos pathos and logos were. At Chamblee, Coach Smith taught it to us. It’s funny because we never even did anything with that information. I think we might’ve had one project or assignment that incorporated it, then I put it on the backburner. We learned the basics. When I came into WRIT 3160 three years later, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t plan on delving into Aristotelian appeals because I didn’t know about them and truthfully, I didn’t care about that stuff. For every argument I’ve made in the past, every persuasive paper, it was solely the rights and wrongs and do’s and don’ts. It was all pros and cons. Never once did I think that my delivery itself was part of the argument, that my rhetoric was just as influential as my facts.

I didn’t care about the technicalities of argument. I didn’t care about the impact of pathos, logos, and ethos in real life situations. It was fascinating to discover that they’re all around us all the time. Reading Heinrichs was tedious for me at times because even though he made it relatable, I still couldn’t get engaged. This class was good nevertheless because it kept me writing when I didn’t want to and often times I resented the fact. As a writer and an author, I needed that push. This can now be used in my books, because my communication can be stronger.

The concept of rhetoric is still somewhat lost on me, just because it encompasses so much. I would not say that I’m an expert, nor that I could effectively explain it to someone new. It’s still confusing for me, but this class has offered a little clarity. Assigning a weekly riff and response forced me to read for comprehension. I would skim Heinrichs, then have to go back and read it over again because the meaning was lost on me. Because rhetoric is all new to me, it was hard to absorb and apply the information. However, creating a riff and understanding how an author initially wrote their piece turned out to be the key to comprehension for me. This was an incredibly original recurring assignment. You forced us to read for interpretation, and you can’t effectively interpret something that you don’t understand. The riff and response held me accountable for my reading. Without it, I very well may have skipped the readings altogether because being introduced to new topics I haven’t had any prior knowledge about intimidates me, and I just opt out of participating. The riff was easier to produce than the response, for me.

I learned about syllogism and can decipher it when it happens. I have noticed that people use syllogism incorrectly, more often than not. The most recent one I can remember hearing and identifying was on the premise of who can say the N word and who can’t. Essentially, the argument was: Black people are people of color. People of color say the N word. Mexicans are not black, but they are still people of color, therefore they can say the N word. People were using this syllogism to defend their right to say a word that didn’t pertain to them. I’ve also been noticing fallacies since being exposed to the different types.

Since discovering the intricacies of rhetoric, I have subconsciously been noticing and labeling certain moves as such. I’ve been decoding people’s decorum and spotting disingenuous advances. I’ve seen it a lot at work with my managers, the difference between their interactions with the customers at Target and their interactions in the break room. I can identify more deadly fallacies when I speak to people. The main ones my counterparts fall victim to are tautology, slippery slope, and the red herring. They love to change the subject. I’ve seen all of the Aristotelian appeals in play at work as a cashier, ranging from children using logos to get a toy, parents using ethos to justify their refusal to buy said toy, older adults using pathos to get a discount, people using Kairos to justify their splurging (“It’s on sale!”). I’ve noticed code grooming a lot too, especially within mixed racial crowds. White people’s decorum shifts when in a predominantly black environment, they begin code grooming. Those are the few from Heinrichs that have stayed with me, those that I can readily identify. Without this class, those behaviors would not be blanketed by any academic terms. The child would be whining, the parent would be annoyed, the old people would be trying to mooch, and the splurgers would be irresponsible. My managers would’ve just been fake, just as the mixed crowds. I’m glad that I can pinpoint all of this as forms of rhetoric, even though they are not the conventional argument we automatically think of. Being in this class and reading these books give me a stronger sense of interpretation as I go through the world. It’s one of the more valuable things I’ll take from any class since I’ve been in college.

As far as my e-Portfolio is concerned, it is not ideally what I wanted. When I was first assigned this project, I was excited because I got to create a blog regarding something personal to me. I had already been using tumblr for most of my teenage years, so I thought it would be easy enough. My use of tumblr consisted of me, mostly reblogging relevant pictures and quotes. I’d never focused on the posting and the organization of it all. That was a more daunting task than I’d expected. My gifs did not post accordingly, in the grids I’d always seen them. They took up way too much space and required too much navigation. Originally, I had the vision of having my gifs with explanations and analyses beneath them, but the reflection wouldn’t allow me to do that effectively. I also didn’t have the tabs that I thought I would. Everything is just straightforward and narrow. I thought it would be more exciting, but the material was more important that the aesthetics of it all, so I left it alone.

#wip #second draft #rough draft

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thegoing-gayhoax-blog · 7 years

Text

Reflection (First Draft)

Kara Ireland

WRIT 3160

Reflection

What's in my portfolio? In my portfolio are various modes of the depiction of how the myth of going gay functions in society. I've compiled a series of gifs, pictures, and scenes from various shows. These shows include MTV’s Faking It, ABC’s Glee, FOX’s Scream Queens, and Freeform’s The Bold Type. My argumentative piece follows these depictions. I used MTV’s Faking It pilot episode as my main source of scrutiny. I listed numerous discrepancies I had with the show. Mainly, I wanted to highlight how damaging the very first portrayal of lesbians on mainstream television since The L Word. It was revolutionary for me because I was struggling with my own sexuality at the age of fifteen. Seeing two women in a same sex relationship at any stretch was good exposure for me, it increased my sense of normalcy. It wasn't until I got older and got more experience and a wider world view that I began to see how awful the show’s premise was. My argumentative paper ventures into how I felt it missed the mark. I then have a comedy skit that will be supposedly performed at Atlanta’s Gay Pride. This original piece is modeled after the kind of comedy I'd seen at my own experience at Pride 2017. Most of the comedy was made at the expense of heterosexual people. In a safe environment full of people who have had similar experiences, it was okay to poke fun at the majority. The skit touches on inappropriate touching, unrequited crushes, and personal experience with girls supposedly going gay. It addresses some of the bothersome situations lesbians often run into in a lighthearted way.

#reflection #first draft #rough draft #wip

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