That 70's Show

After the fantastic opening shot, The Conversation flails in outdated technology and hair and eyeglasses combinations. When it ventures toward the timeless, in the form of a sad sack main character named Harry Caul, the film's emotional potency increases. Still, The Conversation is anti-drama; a hermetic study of a single, loveless man who wants only to pass through life unnoticed. Under Coppola's magnifying glass gaze, Gene Hackman portrays a man who acts only when no one is looking. Harry Caul is perpetually uncomfortable around people. You get the impression he can only relax when he is alone. He is devoutly religious and will only reveal himself to a faintly lit lattice slot in a church confession booth where hopes there is an attentive priest on the other side. Caul descends into paranoia by the film's conclusion and one is left with the feeling that he is lost forever by the time he guts his apartment trying to find a bug recording his every sound.

this week's blog

I was going 2 write a post abt our reading assignment for this week, but m rly sorry i spent the whole time on fb lol

"War is no longer what it used to be..."

Baudrillard's critique of the handling of the Gulf War reminds of Marshall McLuhan's evisceration of the televised 1976 Presidential Debates.

"In this forum of war which is the Gulf, everything is hidden: the planes are hidden, the tanks are buried, Israel plays dead, the images are censored and all information is blockaded in the desert: only TV functions as a medium without a message, giving at last the image of pure television."
-Gulf War Did Not Take Place, pg. 63

Baudrillard writes that the war did not live up to the scale and media coverage of previous wars. It seems to me that Baudrillard's experience of the Gulf War is primarily through television. In his essay he doesn't complain about how the war was written about in the press - his observations sound solely derived through McLuhan's ultimate cool medium. This is why the two philosophers remind me of each other.

Roland and Tumblr

The studium that Barthes speaks of is the knowledge of what exists apart from the photograph that had a hand in its creation. Specifically, he wants to encounter the intentions of the artist in creating the image(s). I would argue that in an endless stream of images that you can find on Tumblr.com, the intentions of the photographers are nil. I can't make a blanket generalization for everyone, but due to the glut of images on said website, certain people I know scroll through their subscriptions at breakneck speed: This is good, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks, this is good... The studium doesn't seem to matter at all, all that matters are the images themselves.

Thin Blue Line, with it's meticulous reenactments strikes me as a biased camera masquerading as an objective one. The impressive camerawork in Children Of Men seems to be a disembodied character in the film, one who moves independently of the characters at times.

Moon and Blade Runner

Self-awareness is something artists must possess. In post-modernism, the artist delves inside to come up with inspiration. What if a person learned that they were not even a person at all? This is the premise to Moon and Blade Runner. Our protagonist is a clone or a robot that doesn't know what it is. Eventually, in the case of Moon, and arguably in the case of Blade Runner, our non-human protagonist develops the self-awareness it needs to act on behalf of it's own needs. The infererence of Scott's Blade Runner is that the main character, Deckard doesn't know he is actually a robot. All of his memories have been implanted in him by a corporate magnate. This in and of itself is a concept rife with meaning. Haven't we all been programmed since youth by commercials and other TV filler? Television is a rite of passage for kids; we all spend a great deal of time sitting in front of it. Some of us outgrow the tube and others don't. If we media-brats look back to our earliest, primordial memories we may find it difficult to separate what really happened to us with something we watched on television.

Marshall McLuhan

It seems to me that the world, at least in his time, needed to catch up to Marshall McLuhan. What enamored him to me was something that seemed to puzzle his interviewers: his appropriation of vernacular to suit his ends. He co-opted the terms "with it" and "hot" and "cool" to elucidate his theories. I find that extremely effective. When I listen to McLuhan's interviews he is so provocative that his interviewers get defensive and try to force him to explain himself. But I find that he what says, which may have seemed outrageous at the time, is actually very prescient. His use of the term "high definition" struck me as particularly prophetic. I can see why people would be skeptical of McLuhan though, because he really has little data to back up his theories. He has a vast knowledge of literature and a strong interest in popular culture from his professorial background. He uses examples from literature all the time in his writings, and these analogies make his ideas even clearer. But when it comes down to it, you either agree with McLuhan or you don't.