Zombies!!

I thought it was pretty interesting to see Night of the Living Dead, as it is kind of the progenitor of the modern concept of zombies -- flesh eating, reanimated, decaying corpses, as opposed to bodies enslaved by witch doctors. One thing that struck me was that zombies haven't changed much since Night of the Living Dead. They are, for the most part, exactly the same (slow moving, eat people, infectious bite). I guess 28 Days Later zombies are different (though I haven't seen the movie) as they are fast, although those aren't truly zombies: they're infected but still alive.

One thing annoyed me about Night of the Living Dead, and it probably bugged everybody else too, and that was the character of Barbara. She. Is. Friggin. Useless. I'll admit that I cheered for Ben when he knocked her unconscious, and I wasn't exactly remorseful when she was killed by the zombies. I mean, Jesus. She cries, complains, and acts like a 3 year old for basically the entire movie. I'm not sure how she managed to escape from that zombie at the very beginning. Why couldn't she have been developed as an actual character? What's the point of having her be a babbling idiot? At first I thought they just made it that was because she was a woman, but then they introduced other women characters who were actually capable (except for when the one decided she just HAD to be with her husband and get turned into roasted zombie snacks). I don't really understand the decision to make Barbara such a useless character.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about the ending. Near the end, but before Ben was killed by the police, I thought to myself, "funny, in modern horror movies the black guy always dies first and the blonde white girl lives. Here, blondey dies and the black guy is the only one to live." And then Ben gets shot and that thought goes out the window. I do like the occasional bitter ending though, where the protagonist dies or is defeated. It just seems more realistic to me -- things don't usually end up all rainbows and butterflies. That's not to say I want everything I read/watch to end like that, though. That would just be depressing. However, I did like how they finished Night of the Living Dead.

Thoughts on Metropolis

While reading through papers during peer edits, one person's topic – the only one I've seen about Metropolis so far – caught my eye. They paralleled many aspects of Metropolis to the Bible. I found this topic was interesting so I thought I’d talk about it a little for my blog this week.
So right off the bat, Joh Fredersen, or papa Fredersen as I like to call him, is like God. He is the most powerful person in Metropolis. He rules over them all from up at the top of his tower. His power is absolute and nigh-unquestioned (even Maria doesn’t promote rebellion – she just wishes for a link between the top and bottom class).
The Devil – the opposing force to God – is Rotwang. He was once close to Joh but they had a parting of ways, and now Rotwang despises Joh, trying to subvert him and bring about his downfall through use of the machine-man.
Lil’ boy Freder, son of papa Fredersen (God), must then represents Jesus. Indeed, the resemblance is clear. Freder sees the plight of the poor workers and sympathizes. He is horrified by the explosion that he witnesses in the factory and gives up his rich lifestyle to try to help the workers. He is an advocate for the poor and unfortunate, just as Jesus was. He becomes the connection between the brain (papa Frederson/God) and the hands (the workers/humanity) just as Jesus is seen as the connection between man and the divine.
Maria, I am not quite as sure about. The name Maria sounds a lot like Mary, so I’m inclined to compare her to Jesus’s mother. Except Freder and Maria get all lovey-dovey touchy-feely kissy and such, which doesn’t exactly seem like the right kind of relationship. Although, I have to admit that I’m not exactly a Biblical scholar. In fact I don’t know all that much about it at all, so perhaps there’s another figure that Maria represents that I just can’t think of or don’t know.
We also have the Tower of Babel which quite obviously is represented by the Tower of the Sons: man’s hubris, torn down by the unwitting masses in a fit of rage. The seven deadly sins are mentioned explicitly as well, and the Whore of Babylon is shown in Evil-Maria pretty clearly.
I guess that it’s pretty hard to miss that the film is pretty heavily biblically related, and I’m sure that there are plenty more parallels that I’m missing, but I thought it was cool just how deep it goes.

** credit to Kaili for his paper giving me the idea for this post

Fire in Frankenstein

The concept of fire comes up a lot in Frankenstein, and it's what I've decided to write my essay about, so I thought I'd do this blog post about fire, to help myself get some ideas more developed.

The first time that we can relate fire to the story (at least that I can think of; I'll may have to go skim through for more references) is when Dr. Frankenstein brings life to the monster. Frankenstein's creation of a new being is akin to Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man. Fire is man's gift, is his to use and control. Frankenstein gives life to the monster, but not power over fire.

I think I just contradicted myself there. Life is separate from power over fire; all animals have life, but only humans control fire. We see throughout the story how the monster interacts with and takes comfort from fire, but can never wield it himself. So, fire is man's. The monster is given life but not given fire. Frankenstein can create a body, infuse it with life, but he can't give it the gift of fire, which in this sense I think is equivalent to a soul. The monster, therefore, can never achieve equal status with humans as he so desires. He has a fundamental part missing. He may be made out of 100% real recycled human parts, but he doesn't have what you can only get supernaturally: a soul.

Perhaps this is why he is immediately ostracized and hated by any human who sees him. They can sense that he doesn't belong. They can see that, even beyond his ugly features, he is not one of them. He is something to be shunned, to be hunted.

Because he doesn't share our gift of fire.



The monster's first encounter with fire is in the woods: he discovers a campfire left by some woodsmen. He is enthralled by it, attracted to the warmth it provides. This is interesting, I think, because we saw that he was getting along relatively fine in the cold before he found the fire. He didn't need it to stay alive, and he wasn't using it to cook, so really he has no need for the fire, but he is still drawn to it and very reluctant to leave it.

Now, we see that when the time does come for the monster to leave the fire, he is torn. He wants to stay with the fire -- his connection to humanity, even if he doesn't quite realize it -- but he also needs to leave. What he can't do, though, is take fire with him or figure out how to recreate fire when he gets wherever he is going. He can't because fire is not his to control. It is man's.

Anyways that's where I'm going to leave off for now. There are still plenty more instances where fire comes into play in the book that illustrate these points and probably even some others.

Frankenstein!

Frankenstein was an interesting read. It's read as a series of letters being written by the captain of a boat who is transcribing a story told by Frankenstein. Story inside of a story. And then there's the part where Frankenstein recalls the monster's story. A story within the story in a story. We need to go deeper. Storyception.

I couldn't help but wonder, as I read, what the point of the layered levels of the story was. At first I thought that maybe the fact that this was being told to the captain by Dr. Frankenstein was meant to make it seem more like a tall tale or the rantings of a dying man, but the fact that captain Walton actually sees the monster kind of defeats this purpose. So I'm still not entirely sure what the purpose behind this is.


And to change topics completely, I have to say that one thing really bugged me throughout this novel. Dr. Frankenstein is prone to falling into comas when under emotional duress. Somebody died? Out with a fever for 3 months. See the monster? 6 months of comaville. See a scary shadow? Coma time! Does he just have a really weak disposition? The guy must look like a skeleton with all the time he spends bedridden. It just seemed silly to me.

Maybe it's supposed to be Dr. Frankenstein's embellishing his story a bit as he retells it to Walton -- he did come off as pretty melodramatic and emotional as he recounted the tale. Perhaps Mary Shelly does it on purpose. The only confirmation we have of Frankenstein's story is the sighting of the monster. So we know it exists, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Frankenstein couldn't have made up large portions of the story. Something to think about, I guess.