a blog to trace the pathway of students in his/iar552 at the university of north carolina at greensboro

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Posts for this week and last week

Wall E
Having never seen this film before, at first glance I was somewhat surprised by its apparent critique of an uninhibited economy. Its plot and setting revolve around an imagining of an exacerbated trend in global capitalism, with a contingent concern about political power in an increasingly economically driven society. With its invocation of the political/corporate president figure, it suggests that the state has become basically indistinguishable from the reigning economic conglomerates. In this way the film reflects some of the anxieties that the Herman/Chomsky article gave voice to: the idea that mass media is implicated in the politics of both the state and the economic system to such a degree that there is nothing free about the press, either economically or ideologically (Durham/Kneller, 257). The film certainly reflects this notion, with the proliferation of advertising and behavior modifying media it portrays.

The film also points to how these possible results are also products of a kind of imperialist logic, though I think it runs up against some limitation in how it plays this idea out. The Schiller article notes that "media cultural imperialism is a subset of the general system of imperialism. It is not freestanding; the media cultural component is a developed corporate economy supports the economic objectives of the decisive industrial financial sectors" (Durham/Kneller, 296). Media in the world of the film does seem to reflect this framework; the media presents the frontier as boundless, while everything within it is property for humans to possess or consume. The imperialist slant of this social structure is reflected not only by the attitudes toward space and things, but also by the social hierarchy that operates between humans and non humans. The media in the film reflects the social place of the rouge robots, as it clearly parallels a police 'wanted' broadcast. Wall E and Eve are social undesirables because they break the normative protocol wherein robots obey and serve humans. Yet I think the film ends up reifying the logic of this social hierarchy more than it challenges it. We are looking at a system of forced labor here, and the idea that this is the robots' only purpose doesn't seem to totally hold up, since at several points in the film we see robots defying their primary directive in favor of something more personal; this is the apparent emergence of a kind of free will. What they do with this free will is telling; both Wall E and Eve are glorified as the heroes of the film because they help redeem the humans, at great risk to themselves. It would seem then, that even if the return to earth might upset the organization of the labor system, the overall hierarchy that keeps the empire (which is after all trying to recolonize) running may remain fairly untroubled at film's end.

At the beginning of the film, I was pretty excited by the prospect of what robot love might look like. Seeing that media was creating Wall E's desire for friendship, I thought about how cool it would be to see that narrative play out with robots, where I thought that human gender roles wouldn't need to operate in the same way. I was hoping the film would do something with a model of love more based on companionship than romance. Clearly I forgot who made the film when I was thinking this. But, Disney's illustriously heteronormative history aside, I realized that of course my expectations wouldn't hold up because of the fact that both the robots themselves and the media which shapes their desires are made by humans, and therefor already imbued with gender. I'm thinking of Prown's notion that gender binaries are subconsciously embedded in the formal construction of objects here (Prown/Haltman 20). While I'm inclined to see more ambiguity, it does seem clear that in the film the robots, particularly Eve, are clearly marked as gendered. The humans on the ship even refer to her as "she," and the name carries the ultimate gendered genesis reference. In this sense then it would seem that the creations of humans couldn't totally avoid taking on gender scripts, though I think it's also significant that those genders only really take on meaning for the robots relative to the media model they encounter- the humans imbue notions of gendered characteristics but their meaning is constructed through the ways the robots interact with one another and with media.


Everything is Illuminated
I thought that Csikszemtmihalyi's idea about the purpose of things spoke to this film well. He notes that objects serve to anchor people in identity, to provide tangible reminders of the life and sense of self they have had and continue to have (Lubar/KIngery, 23). The film points to the importance of objects by using them to characterize the two main protagonists. Jonathan has a map of his entire life made up of things, which represent important times, places and people for him. In some ways then he is the ultimate embodiment of this idea of the importance of things; he is "the collector" because that is how he constructs the narrative of his life. Though Jonathan is the most apparent example of this, the film also shows how Alex constructs his identity through the things he surrounds himself with. At the film's beginning, he prizes American style clothing as a sign of his generationally distinct and transnational cultural identity, but by the end of the film he has also adopted wearing a yarmulke, as a physical acknowledgment of the Jewish identity he has discovered.

In the film, the objects do not have innate significance for the characters, though. Rather, their meaning must be constructed through experience and memory. As the William's piece suggested, it is in lived relations that social structures are made and experienced; meaning comes from the interactions of the base rather than the finished product (Durham/Kneller, 130). In the film then, the meaning of most of the objects is created only through some kind of linguistic or personal mediation. Augustine's wedding ring is meaningful for Jonathan because he learns its story from her sister. Without that interaction, its significance would be arbitrary. Similarly, when the grandfather sees the remnants of german tanks in the field, they have a great and terrible meaning for him because they evoke a certain set of memories of his own past. This necessity of context and interaction in the making of meaning also reminds me of Haltman's introduction to our material culture book. Any explanation of an object's meaning almost certainly relies on language (Prown/Haltman, 4). I think this film points to both the importance and the instability of language in the discovery of meaning for objects. On the one hand, the need for a narrative that explains the objects is clearly a huge driving force for the characters. Jonathan needs to understand what the necklace and picture of his grandfather and Augustine mean, and for that he has to make his journey. Similarly, the best way that Alex can think of to make sense of the value and meaning of his experience of the journey is to write it all down, making a story that gives clarification, illumination as it were, to the meaning of all of these things. Yet at the same time the film points to all of what can be lost in translation. The fairly comical grandson/ grandfather translations to english demonstrate this instability, but so do the accounts that the older characters in the film give, or don't give, about their experience of the war. This is not only because of the translation barrier, for even with Alex there is a sense that Augustine's and his grandfather's explanations of the past cannot entirely evoke even the staged images that the audience is privy to. I like that the film plays with this set of ideas about meaning, pointing to the subjective, never finished but continually meaningful process through which identity is constructed and altered with things and words.

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