Wonder Women Made me Wonder

At the beginning of the article by Zipes he starts us off with a, I assume, true story about Albert Einstein. When we was asked by a mother what books to read to her child to help him to become a successful scientist Al, if we can all him that, not only repose with fairy tales but when see asks what else he continues to advocate fairy tales. Zipes does not, and perhaps cannot go into Einstein’s reasoning. I venture to guess that maybe Einstein just felt bad for the boy, and did not want him to be deprived of a childhood because all he would ever be read are collage level science books. Or maybe, and for me this is easier to believe, Einstein knew that a fairy tale could excite the mind in a way that no textbook ever could. If you can make a child wonder about animals talking, time travel, and perhaps teleportation, in a world with characters that he can love and connect with, then that child may stop at to find the scientific answer to the mystery.

There is something about fairy tales that captures our hearts in a way that other thing just can’t. This is why the messages and morals in fairy tales can be more powerful then governments, superpowers, and armies. This is why Zipes mentions that fairy tales can have the power in them of revolution or emancipation. He says that “insofar as they have tended to project other and better worlds, they . . . have provided the critical measure of how far we are from talking history into our own hands and creating more just societies.”

This is why fairy tales, or in the case of Wonder Women, super hero stories, change over time to, perhaps, explain the current situation in society and even give and answer as to what we should do. This give the person telling the story quit a bit of power, and different people will want different solutions to the problems facing society. One example of this is when Wonder Woman gives up her super powers and becomes a weak and helpless woman. Many people are often powerless to realize that we can change fair tales and make them our own. I love how the Woman in the documentary saw this and realized that there was something she could do, she called up the comic book producers and said, “we want Wonder Woman’s powers back.” Wonder Woman in many ways was their only female super hero and she gave little girls something to become someday, not necessarily fly and beat up men, but be strong and stand up for herself.

Another point that Zipes makes while discussing Beauty and the Beast is that before the technology of printing fairy tales, Beauty and the Beast included, were simply hear, and retold. Each time a person would tell the story they were able to tell it in their own way and make it their own. But with the tale becoming a book, there was one way to tell the story, the book’s way. Zipes says that we loose the realization that we can make stories our own. I believe that he is right in many ways. As I said before, many of us except the books we read and the movies that we see as set in stone, but I still remember as a child, much like the lady in the documentary who called up the comic book company, I made the story my own. I remember playing Batman and the adventures and stories that he had were my own. Maybe children are becoming more prone to just watch and listen instead of pretend and play, but I do believe that we can make still make these wonderful stories our own.

I will close with my last little bit of evidence that we still, regardless of our technologies, have the power, as long as we realize it and encourage it, to change our stories and other stories to make them our own. The most poignant part for me of Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, was at the very end during the credits. There is a women who tales her own super hero tale, and it is made by the director to look like it’s own comic book, and in this tale the women in the star skirt actually becomes someone’s hero. I know that we can change our fairy tales and our own real tales to become what we want them to be.

The Network May Inform, But to the Streets We Still Must Go

Before addressing this idea that internet, as wonderful as it is, can only inform and in order to actually change the world we must do it in person, I want to talk about fear and anger. In the article and in class we learned that fear is the emotion of oppression. If you fear for your life, you will only run or try to survive. In the movie Kony 2012 we see that this is happening to the African people under the hands of Joseph Kony. The reason that he has power is because the people are afraid of him. But there is another power that can incite action, and that is anger. Now according to what we read and discussed if anger does not turn to enthusiasm it will not last. It is true, according to Castells’ article, that fear is the trigger to get things happening, but as we saw in Kony 2012, Jason Russell turned his anger of Kony into enthusiasm to get him. If he would not have done this, the government would not have listened to him, nor us. But after the seven years of knowing this is going on he focuses his passion to make a film. Now what powers this film as well is the internet and the networking world. At the very beginning of Kony 2012 Russell does not start off talking about Kony, but the power of facebook. The very first thing that is said is that there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago. Russell believes that the way to capture Kony is to send in USA military add, but the only way they will do that is if the nation cares, and the only way the nation can care is if they know about it. So Russell uses Facebook, the network, to fight his war.

A Death in Tehran also uses networks to inform the world. The most interesting part is when the regime that murdered Neda, offers her mother money for the rest of her life if she says that her daughter died for the regime. It is a little terrifying to thing that even just a few years ago, and perhaps even sometimes today, people and organizations can cover up things they don’t want the world to know. But people like Wei Wei are now equipped with the network and the way to have a voice. Now the average joe can raise a voice to inform the world of the truth and expose the world for what they really are.

But can knowing something change the world. Not alone. Castells says “The consensus seem to be that, at the end of the day, the dreams of social change will have to be watered down, and channeled through the political institutions, either by reform or revolution.”  The overall idea is that because of the internet we can now inform ourselves about so much more, and so much quicker than before. But we see, especially in the movie A Death in Tehran, that being informed is only the first part, once you have won the internet information war, you either have to take to the streets and vote, or take to the streets and revolt. Both are done in A Death in Tehran, and devastatingly, at least for now, both were unsuccessful. Even in Kony 2012 Russell wants us to share on the internet this information but then he specifically asks us to take to the street and put up posters. Both the documentaries were very convincing but the creators’ documentaries know that in order for their videos to be useful, the viewer must do something.

If Black History Month is March, What Kind of History is it for The Rest of the Year?

I am really glad that we were able to see the end of The Night of the Living Dead. We see white cops shoot a black man without even checking to see if he is human or not. This movie is so clearly saying that we need to improve the way we treat other races. We then talked about how far zombie movies have come from that perhaps original message. World War Z for example has not message about really anything. But I quickly realized that the movie Warm Bodies was bring back this original message about how we treat each other. Warm Bodies does give a similar, but perhaps more hopeful message, that Night of the Living Dead says. In Warm Bodies, people who are uncaring, unfeeling, incapable of remorse are zombies. Have we all not been zombies for time to time? But we see in the movie that love and acceptance overcomes the dead zombies and brings them back to life. One thing that I do like about Warm Bodies is that there are different races in the movie but it does not draw attention to them. We know from class that race is real a man-made perception. The race that Warm Bodies focuses on is the human race, I know pure cheese, but it is true in this case.

As for the next idea that I want to address is the idea of assimilated appropriateness. As a linguistic I have learned that to assimilate can mean to gain positive status that is otherwise not naturally there to begin with. One example is the word awesome, which used to mean that something just had some awe or something worth looking at, now it of course means so much more. Often times when we are familiar with something, like our own race, we begin to assimilate it and even give it a level of appropriateness. This means that people different then us is a problem that needs fixing. The one line that I had to notice in X2 was when Bobby goes home and he finally tells his parents that he is a mutant, his mom then asks, “have you ever tried not being a mutant?” In X2 to be a human is normal and even right, but to be a mutant you need fixing and are dangerous. What I love about X2 is that there is more than one bad guy in the movie, we have a human who wants to kill all the mutants and we have a mutant who wants to kill all the humans. At first we are worried that all the mutants will be killed, then Magneto switches the plans and all the humans are targeted, the X-Men are Professor Xavier are the mediators and the balance in this world. It is not right to privilege or destroy either race, as it were, but it is right to save both of them.

The most interesting thing that I want to mention from our discussion about race is that sometimes the people who seem to be fighting it are doing more bad then the ones that are obviously for it. No one thinks that Kl Klux Klan is a good organization to join, but what about an organization that is bringing up racism but perhaps in an unnecessary way. I think that this is true, but I did not realize this till our class. Those who promote races like black history month can sometimes offend people and do more damage than good. If black history month is March, what history is it for the rest of the year?

They are mean, but they are post meanism so it is okay

In Mean Girls one of the first jokes is when Mr. Norbury, Tina Fey, spills her drink on her shirt, and when she tries to take it off reveals here bra. This to me was like Tina Fey grabbed me through the movie screen pulled me nose to nose and said, ‘see, we are over it, this is post feminism. This revealing of the bra is no longer an objectification of women because Tina Fey is doing it to herself, right? Whatever it was I it still made me feel uncomfortable. Also, a younger girl of boy would not know weather it was some evil man or Tina Fey herself revealing her bra. We talked in class about all the women who take off their own clothing, but is it really their choice? Aren’t they trying to be noticed in a world where women who have brains and personality are practically standing still while the half naked hot woman are plastered with fame and fortune. Perhaps we are not post feminism. I know when Tina Fey showed off her bra I thought the joke was cred and plan. No real though was put into this joke, it was silly, stupid, and objectifying.

The male gaze is something that is at work here even though the movie was written by women. All of the party scenes are great examples of this. The men dress up in whatever they want but the girls must dress in lingerie looking costumes. Even at the Cady’s party, the first thing that she is worried about is looking good. She even says something like, this time I was not going to be caught in a costume. She is not worried about the fact that she lied to him about math, or how she plotted to break him up with Regina, she is not worried about any personality traits at all, just how she looks. At this point in the film, cady is no longer the innocent girl from Africa and she has learned that here in the United States what matters is the male gaze. At least this is what she thinks until Aaron Samuels actually finds her. I am proud of the movie for really flipping this idea on its head. Once Cady and Aaron Samuels finally meet up in her room, he is impressed with how she looks but he quickly learns what she is like on the inside and rejects her and the idea of the male gaze. It is possible, according to this movie, to overcome the male gaze and qualify women for who they are and not just what they look like. But at the same time, as I was watching this movie, I feel like they tried so hard to make Lindsay Lohan perfectly beautiful. In some scenes it made sense with the story, but other times I remember thinking, I just want to watch this movie without Lindsay Lohan trying to seduce me.

How we Treat our Enemies

I wanted to quickly tag on a bit about my big idea for this class. My question is what does Mean Girls say about how to treat our enemies? At the very end of Mean Girls, it seems to be saying that we should all be friends. However, both my wife and I agreed that most of the movie was sharing the message to do everything in your power to give your enemies what they deserve. The movie did so some transition from Cady sabotaging Regina George’s life to feeling sorry for what she did, but I wish that more of the movie would have been both Cady and Regina turning around for the good. However, nothing is funny about heartfelt love, and that is why almost the whole movie is full with girls completely hating on each other. The conclusion I came to is that even though you feel good at the end they message that sticks with you is sabotage everyone.