Rue is an Angel

Could there be a better film to show exactly what Adorno & Horkheimer think filmmaking can do to a society? Nope, Hunger Games hits it right on. In the fictional world, the Capital has been hosting and showing the hunger games for over 70 years. It is both propaganda and distraction. The people gain a little bit of hope, enough to keep going. This hope isn’t in their own life or situation, but for the character created on the television screen. Their life’s as good as it’s gonna get. The show creates a unity. There is a classical harmony to the games – it’s exciting, competitive, and full of emotion. This unity is unbalanced, problematic. It shows kids killing kids, yet only a few – like Cinna – are able to see the reality and brutality of it all. Another way they create unity and stitch people into the games is how they film it. They have so many cameras that get really good quality footage. The cameras fly around and can always get the best vantage point. In life there is always the fight between how things are and how they ought to be. By creating an image that looks more and more realistic, the Capital is able to show the game’s reality as if it were how life ought to be, not just how it is right now. They even show clips of old games with awe and respect; it’s a never-ending process.

Hunger Games could also be viewed under the lens of our own reality and what it says about Hollywood and society. One of the saddest things about this film is not what they portrayed but how some people reacted to it. Hunger Games went against a cliché by making some of the most admirable and honorable characters black. Cinna, the only Capital citizen we see who really understands how messed up the world is, and Rue, the innocent, angelic girl who dies helping Katniss succeed. I’m so happy and proud that Lionsgate made those choices. There is no need to perpetuate the idea that black people are less awesome or more likely to be villainous. That’s preposterous. Many fans were upset that these two characters were black. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-hunger-games-were-you-upset-rue-was-black-because-a-lot-of-other-people-are-2012-3 This website has a few twitter posts in it like, “Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you picture.” She could not have pointed out the cliché much better than that, and this probably describes many people’s ideal and what they wished they had seen. They wanted Prim’s twin to be shown. Blonde hair = angel, not black hair. Here’s another article with more quotes that infuriate me: http://jezebel.com/5896408/racist-hunger-games-fans-dont-care-how-much-money-the-movie-made “Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad #ihatemyself.” The first quote is upsetting because she was basically saying that little white girls should be the cute innocent ones, and not little black girls. But this last quote is almost beyond words. He had the gall to say that the color of her skin made her worth less and made her death less valuable or substantial. There is a reason that some deaths, some situations don’t make the nightly news. It’s because people are still racist, and I hate that.

And lets be honest, she's probably one of the cutest little girls, black or white, that I've ever seen.

Ooh is that a text. Excuse me I'll have to get that.

The readings and the film Digital Nation (2010) gave me a lot to think about this week. One of the biggest conclusions I’ve come to is that details can’t bog us down because there are a lot. Should Media Literacy Education (MLE) have a political agenda; should it be a separate subject or taught within existing subjects; should we encourage production; should MLE be supported by media organizations? Having to have every question answered is being politically correct to a fault. Nichole Pinkard decided to act instead of taking part in a never-ending philosophical debate. She helped create a program. It may not be perfect, but it is helping students now. Yes, it will need adjustments, and yes, it may not be perfect for every student, but I would much rather be a part of that program then the multitude of studies being done on the topic of media and it’s affect on children. I would rather be involved with helping people then sitting and looking at the world cynically.

Cynicism is the problem that I had with Digital Nation. Yeah students, including myself, multitask when it isn’t the most efficient way. Yeah we probably have a shorter attention span, and many people don’t read books anymore. But how dare they define and stereotype everyone. Guess what? I, a young woman, read over 30 books this summer, and many of them I read on digital devices. I sometimes forget my phone at home and don’t really care that it’s missing. I write my notes in class with pen and paper, and I rarely bring my laptop with me. Maybe I’m an anomaly; it wouldn’t surprise me. I have hope for my generation. I think we will find balance.

Well, after taking a long break from writing on this post, I guess I should come back and finish it. Oh wait there’s a post on Facebook I have to go take care of.

Another problem I had with the film is the in-proportionate amount of time they spent on video games. Video games can be addicting and over-used. That’s not new. It’s been a part of video gaming since it was first created, actually before that. What’s the difference between the new video game shops and arcades of the 80s. Some kids spent all of their time in arcades trying to beat the high score, other kids – or adults – spend copious amounts of time playing dungeons and dragons or LARPing. This is nothing new, and people can always find a fantasy world to escape into if they really want to. You shouldn’t blame media for being abused by humans. You should blame people: parents, marketers and other business people, the kids themselves for accountabilities sake. Media can be good or bad.

I just felt like the overall mood of this film was negative, and I didn’t like that. I loved Henry Jenkin’s little speech, but he got nearly no airtime. That made me frustrated. The guy who was one of the narrators (the one that had a necklace when they showed a clip from a few decades ago) showed us an Asian country, Japan?, that sang songs and taught their students how to have good etiquette on the internet, but then he said that it wouldn’t work in the United States. Why? He never explained, which seemed odd to me. Technology is never going to go away. We are not all going to turn off texting or Facebook. Instead of complaining, we should learn how to use them better.

 Then at the very end he said, don’t worry I still have hope for digital media in the future. It felt like a band-aid to wrap up the film. I think he has grown up into one of the old fuddy-duddies that he used to make fun of. Do we all become that someday? I guess I’ll just be Bubbie and make Jewish foods.

Dead-On vs Neon

The relationships between media, self, and society are deep and varied. They give and take, affecting each other for good or for ill. One especially complex relationship is between society and film re-makes. Media is often a good indicator of what society finds important at the time of the media’s creation. Re-makes this idea a step further because there is an earlier document to use as a comparison; this comparison reveals which elements have been diminished and which have been brought into the limelight, showing the current priorities.

In Media Literacy Education, a class I’m attending at BYU, we watched Hairspray (1988). I hadn’t seen it before, but I had seen Hairspray (2007) once, a few years back. The two, with nearly twenty years separating them, are quite different. One of the biggest distinctions, that I noticed, is their portrayal of the romantic development between Tracy Turnblad and her dashing counter-part Link Larkin. In the ’88 version, the two start dating almost immediately after Tracy joins the show. There is not much fuss about it, and the story turns its focus onto racial inequality instead. In ’07, the romance takes much longer to develop; the story focuses more on this relationship than anything else. Audiences love a good love story. The ’07 film panders to this by making the story about a chubby girl wooing Zac Efron. It’s a shallow cop-out.

What it also shows is that media, in this vein at least, cares more about money than anything else. The Hairspray from ’88 was made for about $2 million, and it made back over $6 million on that investment. Compare that to the one filmed in 2007: its budget was $75 million and it made $200 million worldwide. They got big names, made it a musical, added in sleek, colorful art design, and lost all the deep meaning that Hairspray had going for it in the first place. Yeah, it still had much of the same storyline, Penny Pingleton still fell in love with Seaweed, but it lost its bite, its power.

One of my favorite scenes in Hairspray ’88 was when Mrs. Pingleton wandered around the ‘bad side of town’ looking for her daughter. Her fear was over the top and ridiculous. She screamed and freaked out at nearly every turn, and it was easy to laugh at her and the fantastical way she acted. The reason I loved it, though, is because it spoke of a sad, true reality. I’m from a city in Georgia, and yeah, there are parts of town that white people rarely go. Twenty-five years hasn’t changed that. Race relations is a hugely important topic in society still, though some people believe that racism is done and gone. I think those people are crazy, and I’m so sad that films like Hairspray are being re-made with dulled messages and pure spectacle. Hairspray ’88 may have been silly and over the top, but it kept its eye on the prize and never forgot what it was about.

Socially Spiritual People

Spirituality is all about the human experience, whether that is with friends and family or solo.  What I would like to note is that people are spiritually healthier when surrounded by loved ones.  Some describe Spirituality as the reasons why we do things, the internal motivations.  In the LDS church we believe that we should be as Christ-like as possible, which implies that we are always thinking of others.  Therefore, if a person is experiencing life by themselves then they have no one else to think about and they cannot be Christ-like.  In the film Ponette, the little girl, for whom the film was titled, pulls away from everyone around her.  She wonders why God is ignoring her, and she ignores that she is the one that detached herself.  Eventually her mother metaphysically visits her. This connection brings her back spiritually and ends much of her suffering.

            I would like to point out that her father was away for most of the film, and that made me cringe. How could he leave his daughter at such an important junction in her life? She could be seriously scared, and he up and left her.  I believe that family is more important than anything else.  Familial interaction is so vital for children to grow up and mature. I especially liked Dean’s article about family home media. I think technology (tv, computers, video games, etc) can really detach people from each other and hurts them spiritually.  I loved Dean’s article because he was trying to reintroduce parent attention, conversation, and other necessary family interactions back into the minds of the BYU magazine readers. Sometimes it is easier to just zone out and go about life not really interacting with people, but there are consequences for that spiritually. The effort of really being mentally and emotionally with other people, and not distracted, is worth it.

            In Matthew 13, Christ describes why he teaches in parables. Basically, it requires effort to understand. The message becomes more personal to them and also more valuable when all of that effort is expended trying to decipher its meaning.  Media consumption becomes a more worthwhile venture when we put in the effort to understand what we are watching it and how it affects us, “and in modeling such active reading, we insure that our children will become informed and literate.”  I can think of no better way to serve children then to give them more time and effort, especially when it comes to media because it surrounds them so well.

What Family's For

Portraying family in media is always a fascinating thing. There are many different outlooks on how it functions, if it naturally works well or poorly, how the different members act, etc. In The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Peter is a young hooligan who will not listen to his mother’s sage advice. In the end, Mrs. Rabbit is proven right, and Peter returns home shaken from his encounter.  He did not lose his familial rights, and Mother took good care of him despite the trauma.  The charity seen between people, or animals, of different generations is so nurturing and humane; it is humanity.

I really enjoyed watching the home movies.  It defies all of the books and films we have watched because of how real, how genuine, and how irrefutable it is.  You could see the joy and awe of Thevenin family in their little children.  I enjoyed watching Ben’s face light up as he watched his children; there is something in little home documentaries that is worth more than any Hollywood film.  Trying to capture children on camera while they are still young is almost a knee-jerk reaction. You know they will grow old so quickly, so you film them to try to bottle up experiences while they are still young.

I Wish has a really interesting perspective on intersubjectivity and on family relations.  The two brothers are separated one with each divorced parent.  In films like this normally one parent or the other is the bad guy, but I don’t think that this happens in I Wish.  They are both imperfect but do what they can.  The older boy, Koichi, desperately wants his family to live together again, but over the course of the film he comes to realize that this won’t and maybe shouldn’t happen.  The younger boy, Ryunosuke, tries to make the best of the situation, and even manipulates his father when he needs money.  Family relations are all about give and take. It isn’t perfect, but when you need to get out of school a nice grandpa who has your back can sure help convince a hardnosed teacher.  The film was delightful. I loved seeing the children find a common family in each other as they tried to get miracles from watching the bullet trains pass.  Though many, or all, of the miracles will never happen, the two brothers were able to reconnect and strengthen each other, which is what family is for.

Exploit or Empower

Why are critiques of politics and society so prevalent in children’s media? I believe that one reason is that children are the only sincere and innocent people left in our post-modern world.  With a push for moral relativism, there is almost no ground to stand on. These critiques use children to find a place to stand. In Gene Deitch’s “Munro”, by putting a young innocent child into an army, many of its practices are portrayed as absurd and ridiculous.  This would be difficult to do without the child to do it with.  And this was just a cartoon, so it doesn’t hurt any children or put them in real danger.

But sadly some films do. The use of critique through children’s media is often very exploitive of children and diminishes any semblance of empowerment.  Children are used in political arguments a lot because they are very effective at emotional appeal. They are shown as helpless and in need of saving. Adults need to take action for these children. Children become the victims of ideology and society. The clip of “Harvest of Shame” is a perfect example of this. The rich white filmmakers impose themselves on the poor black family. The black family isn’t empowered, but the white guys are because they feel like they have really helped someone and made a difference. Even though they were being just as exploitative as the companies that hire the black migrant workers.

Children just need to be treated correctly because they can be the cause of great and important change.  Like we talked about in experimentation, children don’t have the stiff structure of mind and will that adults have. This means that they can truly think outside the box and imagine the most crazy, but often genius, solutions to different problems. Instead of exploiting them, they should be heard and given power, a voice.

In Princess Mononoke, I believe that the characters Ashitaka and San exemplify more child-like perspectives. San is a very alienated youth and fights against human society with every power she possesses.  Ashitaka is different; he is able to stay aloof and mingle with both the nature spirits and with Irontown.  He is the empowered one who is able to help enact change for the better.  He realizes that both nature and Irontown have a right to exist, and that they can co-exist if they are pressed to.  The character that is used and taken advantage of is Eboshi.  Jigo uses her to get the head of the Forest Spirit. Jigo is the kind of person that can become so focused on a task that no one else matters, and everything can be destroyed as long as his objective has been accomplished. This film critiques this kind of person because what would be the point in eternal life if the only thing you could do is watch the world burn. This film has a lot to say about nature and politics, and that it isn’t clean cut. One is not evil and the other good. They are just shades of gray. 

Tumbleweeds Festival

On Saturday the 16^th, I went to a children’s film festival called the Tumbleweeds Film Festival in Salt Lake.  I got tickets for a film called “Eliot and Me”. It was an Irish film about the relationship between a young girl and her dog.  Though it was a fiction film, it tried to have a more documentary film feel.  It was about the Lucy’s experience with her life.  Lucy’s parents had divorced and the alienation was clear.  She was combative and argumentative with her mother, and she could only talk to her dad via telephone.  She struggled and it was all shown in striking detail.  The audience was full of families and children, and I wondered how children interpreted what we saw. How do they understand the dark complexities of life? I wonder how much they know about divorce and other topics.

One of these topics I wonder about is safety.  In the film, Eliot goes missing. Long story short, Lucy goes alone to a man’s house to steal him back. He catches her doing it. She is a young defenseless girl, and as a young woman myself I instantly worry for her safety.  The film almost becomes a morality tale, but she is able to get the dog and get away safely. Is that the reality of what would happen in that situation, or wishful thinking? We just don’t know.  The young kids watching can definitely understand and empathize with wanting to get Eliot back, but I’m super curious how well they understand the danger she is in. I just don’t know enough about kids I guess. It was a very good film, and did a wonderful job of portraying Lucy’s everyday life and struggles.

Before they showed “Eliot and Me”, they showed an eight-minute short called “The Boy in the Bubble”.  This film was a very imaginative piece. It was completely narrated with no dialogue, and the narration was in the form of poetry.  It also had an interesting take on the conflict between emotion and rationality after being hurt romantically.  After the pain, rationally he wants to avoid having to go through the same thing again. So he uses magic to put himself in a bubble, trying to doe something physical to protect his mental well-being. In the end, a girl breaks through the bubble as a visual representation of getting through his ego to his Id. It was a stunning film, and it was narrated by Alan Rickman, which was a huge plus.