Movie Poster of “The Age of Stupid” (Reader Response)

Going solely by the poster, “The Age of Stupid” appears to be a movie about how the human mind has polluted the Earth with stupidity and bad ideas to the point of nuclear war or other total annihilation of humanity. Another interpretation could be that the pollution is not actually a symbol, but that this text is literally about polluting the Earth (i.e. regarding global warming), which has destroyed the environment. This second scenario turns out to be the actual plot of the film, to this writer’s dismay, however in the movie India does fall to nuclear war.

Visually, the advertisement follows the rule of thirds as the picture is cut up into background (lowest section), content (middle section), and title (top section). Within the background there is dried up soil, which could easily represent the sea of ideas that have dried up in the world (or the seas just actually drying up due to climate change). We also see an urban environment behind that dried sea, with enough industrial infrastructures to suggest it is a business oriented city. The city landscape does not contain any points of interest or landmarks like the CN Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, which could suggest that this is a global disturbance with no one true origin. The text on the bottom, “Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance”, alludes to the global warming plot of the movie, and how the main character is seeking out the answer of why humanity did nothing to stop it. The clothing that the man dons has an unusual collar that resembles a robe, which he appears to wear under an overcoat. However, this neither matters, nor does it give away that the movie takes place in London in the year 2055.

The middle section of the poster features what is assumedly the main character (the top of the poster has the actors name), whose mind appears to be expelling toxic waste into the atmosphere. Plot-wise, this does not represent anything symbolically. The story revolves around the unnamed main character, who is put in charge of archiving all of the artistic and intellectual endeavours of humanity, and who is investigating why the Earth was allowed to become so tainted. It is not his mind that pollutes the Earth in the part-drama, part-documentary movie, but rather the lives of the individuals it documents, which are not represented in the poster. The top section of the poster, which includes the title, references, and the actor’s name, does not divulge anything about the story itself. The style and shading of the title graphic puts more emphasis on the words “THE” and “OF”. This makes the meaningful words of the title blend into the background of the poster, and makes them more difficult to read. The use of red in the referencing text looks out of place in the poster, which was possibly used deliberately to attract the eye.

The actual movie “The Age of Stupid” seems to be very postmodern. From viewing the trailer, it depicts several diverse voices in its interviews, has ties to hyper-consumerism, rejects linearity through scattered narration, rejects the authority of world leaders and politicians, shows self-awareness, and blurs the line between what is fact and what is fiction. It was the first film to use “crowd funding”, a form of viral campaigning, to fund production. The makers of “The Age of Stupid” were also the pioneers of the “Indie Screenings” method of distribution, which allows anyone in the world to screen the movie and claim the profits for themselves. The movie really pushes the impact of globalization, and lays out the pros and cons of such an interconnected world.

Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” and “A Girl Worth Fighting For” Songs (Feminist Critique)

Mulan is a movie produced by Disney about a girl named Fa Mulan who poses as a boy in order to replace her grandfather, Soon-Tek Oh, for recruitment in the war. The themes of the movie Mulan deal primarily with the boundaries of gender roles, which is why feminist critique is the most effective way to analyse the songs within. Even at first glance it is noticeable that both, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” and “A Girl Worth Fighting For”, deal with the stereotypes of gender. To make a man out of someone is nothing more than a saying, as it has no biological merit. It suggests helping someone go from being weak and unfocused to attaining the ultimate strength and balance of a man. In the song, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” there is the lyric, “Did they send me daughters when I asked for sons?” By making a link between weakness and women, the movie insults an entire gender, which is inexcusable even coming from a pre-transitioned character.

As a text with the goal of spreading equality amongst sexes, Mulan wavers in providing responsible character development for the characters. After all of the warriors “become men”, the movie follows with the song “A Girl Worth Fighting For”. This song has each of the warriors confessing the kind of woman they would like to come home to after their victory in war. The responses the men give depict them as shallow and insensitive animals, who only care about women liking them and less about who that woman is inside. Mulan makes it apparent with the line “How 'bout a girl who's got a brain, who always speaks her mind?” to which the men respond “Nah!” The only man who does not care about appearances, Chein-Po, still has faults in the form of his desire only for a woman who can cook well. The song is supposed to be light-hearted, and takes place before they absorb the reality of death and war, before they mature as men. In that sense, the movie shows understanding that to be a man one must be more than “mysterious as the dark side of the moon”, that they must bear certain responsibilities. While this does not fully forgive them for their lack of compassion during the song, the men show understanding during the dark time of the film.

Both “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” and “A Girl Worth Fighting For” play their roles in the movie to advance the plot and define characters. However, the backlash they get through negatively depicting both men and women is ultimately hurtful to the audience believing in the development of the characters. While these two songs are important in transitioning the group from the individual to the collective, they don’t seem to take into account that Mulan is acting like a man on purpose to fit in. They do not provide gender redemption for the movie. When Mulan reveals her identity to Li Shang, he abandons her. It is not until she has thoroughly saved the day that Li Shang approves of her as a warrior. The message of this may be “it is not who you are, but what you do that defines you as a person”, but that undermines the use of conscription and the basis of the plot. Even at the end of the movie gender stereotypes are still being used, as he falls head over heels in love with her, and this strong warrior is rendered speechless. Mulan fails in representing genders appropriately, regardless of whether or not they are used to exemplify the changing ideologies of the characters.

“Friday” by Rebecca Black: (Descriptive Theory)

“Friday” is an “awful” viral teen pop music video on YouTube, written and produced by Ark Music Factory and performed by Rebecca Black. The song is about a schoolgirl who is tired of the tedious and rushed schedule of the week, and is hoping to find liberation in the weekend to come. This is an archetypal plot for many songs directed to/by the teenage audience, where the freedom to have fun is of the foremost importance. It can be considered that “Friday” is both a readerly and writerly text, as it adheres to the practices of the “current music video”, form- and content-wise, but leaves too much up the audience’s imagination to be considered a one-dimensional text.

As mentioned, the video follows the typical conventions of music videos, stylistically and narratively. The introduction, as the new tradition, presents the credits for the music video. This establishes the video as a mainstream text, and gives the audience the sense that the video will play out cinematically. It begins with familiarizing the audience with the main character, Rebecca, who is a teenage girl getting ready for school. It visually supports this fact with the school supplies showed in the opening shot, and with the use of backpacks and bus stops to symbolise a teenager’s typical trip to school. The target audience of adolescent schoolchild is addressed by the colourful settings and wardrobes, as well as by the diction of the lyrics (e.g. “We so excited. We gonna have a ball today”).

The story plays out linearly, beginning with Rebecca getting ready for school, and ending with her performance at the party. To begin, the lyrics describe her morning schedule of getting ready for school, which is inferred as boring and repetitive both audio and visually. The lyrics are sung in a monotonous and unemotional voice, and are accompanied by visuals of her family “rushing” around and an un-amused look on her face. Once she makes contact with her friends during the pre-chorus, the narration becomes more relaxed vocally and develops more complicated harmonies. This continues for the chorus, where there is a certain “call and answer” aspect to the lyrics.

 Although the video follows the formula for a typical teen pop music video, it proves that quality and content is still respected in today’s culture by the response of the viewers. However, it could be argued that “Friday” is directed towards a very specific audience that YouTube dilutes throughout the video’s 161 million views, and among that audience it is a more highly respected text. On the other hand, what cannot be argued is that “Friday” (and to that effect Ark) use the discourses of the modern day music video to shape what it delivers to its audience. It is a cinematic video that, for the most part, uses the appropriate forms (i.e. Lighting, framing, camera movement) to both deliver and enforce the message of the lyrics. 

DreamWorks “Flushed Away” (Psychoanalytic)

The movie “Flushed Away” is an animated film by DreamWorks and Aardman Animations. The movie centres on a pampered and posh house-rat named Roderick “Roddy” St. James, who is the beloved, but lonely pet of an upper class family in the Kensington district of London, England. After the family leaves on vacation, leaving Roddy alone in the well-decorated abode, a sewer rat by the name of Sid finds his way into Roddy’s now empty house and decides to stay there. When Roddy’s plan to remove Sid by flushing him down the toilet goes awry, he finds himself “flushed away”, down into the sewers of London. It is there where he meets Rita Malone, a cunning and independent “tomboyish” rat, who owns the boat Roddy needs to get back “up top” to his home.

According to Sigmund Freud, Rita plays the role of the Id in “Flushed Away”, and opposes Roddy who is the Superego. Rita is a street smart scavenger born and raised in the sewers of London, the oldest child of her obscenely large family. She characteristically trusts no one but herself and her family members, and prefers working alone. She exemplifies the Id well because she is sporadic in her actions, and does not conform to a single set of rules. Her decisions are often high-risk, high-reward and come from emotions and less from rational thought, which is what initially plunged the two characters into their fray with The Toad. Her sympathy for Roddy and his quest to get back home help Rita realise her own potential for trusting people.

Where Rita is intelligent and sporty, Roddy begins as an ignorant and un-athletic house pet who has no family or friends due to his refusal to leave his home. His character is content with a life of boredom and loneliness as a sacrifice to security, but it is not until he meets Rita that his true desires for companionship surface. Roddy is a classic Superego, one who obeys the rules and performs solely on logic, as he is rather unknowledgeable of the world outside of his fantasy playhouse. He is a germaphobe (an ironic trait for a rat) and a coward on the surface. He is capable of heroism, but only after he meets Rita, who sets them off on their journey.

As a team of two, Roddy and Rita together form a pair that can be considered the Ego of the film. They both struggle internally with their issues of distrust and insecurity, but together they help each other overcome these problems to achieve a balance between themselves. Rita learns to relax the way Roddy has his entire life, despite her family’s hectic lifestyle keeping her tense. The turning point for her comes when she accepts the emerald Roddy offers her to help stabilize her family, and she realises that there is genuine good in people. Her development as a character is not as drastic as Roddy’s, but she still experiences personal growth.

Over the course of the movie, Roddy becomes more comfortable with breaking the rules as he learns how to truly live without fear. During his negotiations between his Superego past and the present Id, Rita, he finds himself performing increasingly intense actions, such as riding on the extended hand of the Jammy Dodger while escaping from The Toad’s henchmen, or swinging by Le Frog’s tongue in order to save Rita from the clutches of The Toad, or flying through the air hundreds of feet above London with only a plastic bag parachute. He makes the symbolic transformation from hatchling to bird, boy into man as he comes to terms with the reality of the dangers of the world, and secondly that happiness is not material. The fight to balance the Id and Superego is concluded when Roddy decides to stay with Rita and her family in the sewers, and leave his old life behind him. 

Film Festival: (Reception Theory)

The film festival Western Tech held on Wednesday, May 24^th was comprised of short films from the various classrooms of both Western and Delphi. As such, each class brought a different understanding to those texts, which was evident in the audience’s reactions. For the films that Western showed, Western students  could relate to the text more than Delphi’s students because they could recognise and understand parts of the text that were clearly directed to them, such as the Student Council documentary.  Likewise, Delphi brought films that may have had a different reception in Western than in their own school. They presented a film about a girl who drifts away from her boyfriend to start a relationship with a female. The tolerance/acceptance of LGBT’s is different in all schools, and it was apparent that Delphi was more illustrative of this than Western during the festival.

                Schools aside, even the specific classes that each videos originated from could contribute to the different understandings and reception of each text. The “logo-fly” clips from Mr. Siroishka’s class were great examples of an audience NOT knowing their text. Coming from that class, I personally knew the work and skill required to make those short eight second clips. However, when the videos were played, their length was the most discussed aspect, and not their quality. In contrast, the “Hyper-consumerism” documentary was a text that was perfectly fit for its audience, but which may not have had as powerful an impact on some of the guests at the event, including Mr. Bailey’s English class. In this example, the diction/content set apart the viewers rather than the form of the logo-fly’s. One class is meant to create media and the other is meant to analyse it, but both are somewhat ignorant of the other’s efforts.

                On the individual level, the videos were somewhat split into “videos with people you know” and “videos with people you don’t know”. Obviously, the former always got the most attention and respect from their respective audiences. During the music video for “Kiss with a Fist”, an audience member’s reaction was that it was, “self-indulgent and narcissistic”. Yet, they were not from Delphi and may not have understood that perhaps the video maker, at the individual level, brought to the text their own interpretation of “art” and “talent”, which may have been ironic. A convincing but subtle parody should not always be condemned as the act it’s parodying. Additionally, the creators of said work may not believe it is narcissistic to them, but that is all part of what made the festival such a diverse experience. 

Epic Meal Time: (Postmodernism)

Epic Meal Time is a weekly updated Canadian-based YouTube cooking channel hosted by Harley Morenstein, an ex-substitute teacher from Montreal and co-founded by Harley and the cameraman Sterling Toth. They are most well known for their excessive use of bacon and alcohol in their meals, and their disgust of vegetables and haters. Their videos usually follow the same formula. Harley and his friends go shopping for their assorted meats/fast food. Then they return to their home-front cooking station and create large portions of aesthetically appealing dishes. After the meals have been literally constructed, the group devours them in a sloppy, barbaric fashion, often utilizing unusual serving utensils. They are a postmodern text in the way they go against the universal goal of a healthy lifestyle. They also blur some lines between their show and the real world and reject the conventions of cooking shows. Lastly, they show rejection of the sacredness of food as they tie their inglorious eating habits to their hyper-consumerist society.

                Harley Morenstein said that, "In this day and age, I feel like there's a big emphasis on organic foods or a lot of negative media in regards to obesity and stuff like that. We are there eating this, and [viewers] are eating vicariously through us." Here he describes both their popularity as an escape from reality, and how their popularity demonstrates the real desires of society, being freedom of the body. By rejecting healthy living (insofar as calorie intake levels), they reject the message of the authorities related to health, such as Health Canada, and the World Health Organization. However, they still agree with the importance of exercise (an imbedded contradiction), as one of their episodes featured a massive protein bar, where the audience learns that the beloved character “Muscles Glasses” is the personal trainer of the group.

                In a few episodes we see the EMT cast go to real-life restaurants, such as Restaurant Nupur, and other locations, such as Queen’s University, and have scripted interactions with the workers/students. By taking real world sites and people (i.e. Deadmau5 in “Cheesy Grilled Cheese Tower”) and incorporating them in their cooking show, Epic Meal Time dips into the “diverse voices” attribute of most postmodern texts. While they may not have lines, EMT allows their creations to be influenced by the different cultures and designs that the people they feature represent. Their meals include Canadian cuisine (“Sugar Shack”, “Angry French Canadian”), Indian cuisine (“Epic Indian Experience”), Chinese cuisine (“Epic Eggroll”), Japanese inspired cuisine (“Fast Food Sushi”), and Mexican inspired cuisine (“Tequila Taco Night”). Other dishes are festive, such as the “TurBaconEpic”, “Chocolate and Hearts”, and “Special Delivery” episodes, as they take inspiration from everyday life.

                Being a parody- and satire-based series, Epic Meal Time finds nothing sacred in the world of cooking and etiquette. The previously mentioned “Special Delivery” episode featured a turkey giving “birth” to a rabbit. The two cooked animals, attached with a bacon umbilical cord, completely took the innocence and beauty out of birth. The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have expressed their disgust in Epic Meal Time through their website, which praised the parody, “Vegan Meal Time” in opposition to the meat marauders. Ironically, Vegan Meal Time seems to be a parody of both EMT and the vegan lifestyle itself, as it presents vegans as aggressive and histrionic animal lovers/protectors.

                Epic Meal Time is the soil in which flowers of intertextuality bloom, but rarely are they intertextual themselves. A noteworthy mention is that they have referred to themselves as the “Jackass of food”, and have admitted that is where their “skull and knives” logo originates from. However, their lack of intertextuality does not make this unique show any less postmodern, as they exhibit more than a few characteristics of postmodernism.

Community (TV show): (Postmodernism)

The NBC TV show Community is a meta-comedy about a group of students who attend the dysfunctional Greendale Community College. The show is centred on a hot-shot ex-lawyer named Jeff Winger, who is forced to go to community college to legitimize his lawyer degree, where he founds a Spanish study group in order to get close to his love interest, Brita Perry. As the show plays out, Jeff Winger learns to trust and care about people other than himself, while still retaining his snarky and dignified personality. The show uses pop culture references and meta-humour as its main comedic selling points. Needless to say, it exhibits most of the qualities of postmodernism, such as intertextuality, self-awareness, and a portrayal of diverse voices.

 The show references real life characters and movies, usually through the character Abed, whose whole personality is he “connects with people through movie [references]”. The running gags of Jeff Winger looking like Ryan Seacrest and Brita probably being named after a water filter are some classic examples of the kind of references they use in the show. The Seacrest joke is actually an intertextual reference to Joel McHale’s work as the host of The Soup, where he was the bud of the same joke. This blurs the line between fiction and reality as well, having the same character played across several TV shows. The history of the show’s creation itself is relatively intertextual, being based on the life of the show’s writer Dan Harmon. Another thing that blurs the line is the “OldWhiteManSays” twitter account. What is simultaneously a joke on the show and an actual twitter account; the lines from the show are broadcast live during the playing of each new episode. It is also a fact that an episode or pilot of Community was released exclusively as a twitter conversation between the actors playing the rolls online.

 The episodes, such as the Presidential Debate Episode or the Zombie/Halloween episode, are usually themed episodes which fully satirize the conventions of whatever they are spoofing on. They mock twist endings in the Conspiracy Theories episode. They challenge the discourse of what makes a good leader in the Presidential Elections episode. They even parody meta-films and postmodernism itself in the Documentary Filmmaking episode. As a postmodern text Community exhibits self-awareness through Abed’s dialogue where he submerges their lives in an “episode” metaphor, in addition to other methods. He refers to his friends as “characters”, and the days in their lives as “episodes”, defined by their archetypal plots. For instance, in “Cooperative Calligraphy”, Abed outright states that that day is a “bottle episode” after they find themselves trapped in the study room with no escape achievable in the near future.

The show takes common, stereotypical characters like the buff jock and hip senior and enhances them with elements of personal depth (e.g. sensitivity, phobias). All of the characters exemplify this diversity and rejection of universality, and not just physically. As the show progresses, each character unveils something new that changes the audience’s perspectives of them. This often involves moving away from the storyline by interrupting the linear flow of time. Interestingly, the “Flashback” episode of Community flashed back to never-before-seen footage of their adventures (probably ideas that never made it through development), which is a rare feat for a TV show. The effort the producers put into the show is partially why Community is such a well-received program, the other reason is quality, which the show seems to radiate.