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RBA Starblade posted:Buying this ten inch action figure just reinforces my belief in the ideals and glory of the USSR. Where the gently caress do I get a Cherno Alpha figurine? MUST HAVE NOW.
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Aug 21, 2013 15:53
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MariusLecter posted:This movie really did break people's brains, amazing.  
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Aug 21, 2013 15:54
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Bonaventure posted:Congrats to OldPueblo for being even stupider than Jefferoo. The deep reading is so bad that I can't even get a simple point across and people are going too deep into my own simple comments. I watched all Alien movies. Not once did I see them as walking penises seeking to gently caress everyone and I'm not talking metaphorically. Their penis literally were killing people not loving them. It's pretty much that simple. I haven't denied there being a sexual inspiration behind it, but not once did I see an alien in the missionary position who smoked a cigarette afterwards. Okay next Pacific Rim topics. Raleigh obviously shaves his chest, what deep imagery and meaning can we glean from that? Later Tendo Choi when he walks up to discover a double-event readout is eating a donut or a bagel. Does that represent man returning unto itself or perhaps mankind's desire to eat it's own tail? Hannibal Chau wears lovely sunglasses, what does it mean! Okay we should be back on track now. OldPueblo fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 16:01
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The monster is literally pregnant and gives birth with an umbilical cord. There is no "deep reading" here. At least on the "are the monsters female" issue.
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Aug 21, 2013 16:03
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Doflamingo posted:Where the gently caress do I get a Cherno Alpha figurine? MUST HAVE NOW. I don't think you can, sorry.
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Aug 21, 2013 16:06
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Has anyone considered that male kaiju get pregnant, like sea horses? We should probably work up a second Bechdel score just in case.
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Aug 21, 2013 16:27
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Maxwell Lord posted:So does everyone have to have a fully-formed thematic and political reading of every movie they see before they can argue if it was any good or not, or even buy a piece of merchandise? Let's say you are a chimpanzee. If you want to play minor-league baseball, you're going to need a powerful arm and a rudimentary understanding of the game, like the ape in Ed (1996), starring Matt LeBlanc. In this analogy, Ed represents not only a heartwarming adventure for the whole family, but the importance of communication skills (baseball skills) in everyday life (baseball).
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Aug 21, 2013 16:47
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OldPueblo posted:The deep reading is so bad that I can't even get a simple point across and people are going too deep into my own simple comments. I watched all Alien movies. Not once did I see them as walking penises seeking to gently caress everyone and I'm not talking metaphorically. Their penis literally were killing people not loving them. It's pretty much that simple. I haven't denied there being a sexual inspiration behind it, but not once did I see an alien in the missionary position who smoked a cigarette afterwards. It's not possible to watch a film without some implicit reading of metaphor. Sometimes, as in this case, it is just wildly misread. You're adopting the erroneous deep/shallow high/low false dichotomy bullshit that posits an anti-intellectual approach to art. Also you're beleaguered examples to try and find some wild extreme of visual symbolism are passe, food and eye imagery has been rife since man started talking. vvv Let's always post together. Danger fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 16:54
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OldPueblo posted:The deep reading is so bad that I can't even get a simple point across and people are going too deep into my own simple comments. I watched all Alien movies. Not once did I see them as walking penises seeking to gently caress everyone and I'm not talking metaphorically. Their penis literally were killing people not loving them. It's pretty much that simple. I haven't denied there being a sexual inspiration behind it, but not once did I see an alien in the missionary position who smoked a cigarette afterwards. I don't think you get subtext. The whole point of subtext is that it's unwritten, implicit. If it's announced or described, it's text, not subtext. An inability to grasp subtext (especially in social situations) is one of the core barriers of autism spectrum disorders.
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Aug 21, 2013 16:56
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Lt. Danger posted:I don't think you get subtext. This post has subtext. The subtext is that I am suggesting OldPueblo has an autism spectrum disorder of some kind. Note how I didn't explicitly say that he has autism, or might have autism, or sounds like he has autism. However, the implication is clear. Of course, if OldPueblo is correct, the above is wrong, because that would just be reading too deeply into a post on the internet.
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Aug 21, 2013 16:58
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Paolomania posted:You are fighting old battles in this thread and in effect straw-manning a resistance to reading certain specific symbolism in Pacific Rim as an anti-intellectual denial that anything can be symbolic at all. It is telling that your defense of symbolic readings uses no examples from the movie Pacific Rim. If you remember my contribution at all the to Prometheus thread, I was totally on-board with reading sexual subtext into that movie and early on I went beyond SMG's initial "pandora's box" reading to interpret even more sexual themes. Pacific Rim is not Prometheus. It's become pretty clear to me that some posters really do have a problem with the idea that anything is symbolic at all (originally it was "obviously" symbolic). I never said those people's views represent everyone who disagrees with any specific interpretation of the film (although from what I've seen other posters are making the same mistake of confusing the literal biological sex of the Kaiju with whether masculine or feminine symbols are associated with them). I was hoping to progress the discussion about specific imagery in this film by going back to basics and tackling the interpretation of imagery in film in the first place. I took examples I (naively) thought were too obvious to deny- a picture of a rubber duck, the creature from Alien, the homosexual imagery in Prometheus. I wasn't trying to make direct comparisons to Pacific Rim, just to get people discussing the root issue. Which I think I did.
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Aug 21, 2013 17:12
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I don't feel confident making any interpretative declarations about the film w/r/t it's treatment of femininity, because it's very mixed. I believe that the clear intention was to have a legitimately positive protagonist in Mako, but that the film failed to carry through on this at multiple occasions. I will say that friends of mine, men and women who self-identify as feminists, have reacted very positively to Mako and to her character arc, and for them at least the takeaway from the film of its gender politics was largely positive, and so that informs my own view on it--as I've said before, the reception of the general audience is very important to me, I am largely an audience-centered critic. That said, the Kaiju utilize mythic imagery of the abyss, and of chaos monsters. Off the top of my head I cannot think of any strictly male chaos monsters in any world mythology--Tiamat, Leviathan, etc. are usually explicitly female (at least, they start out that way). The bat kaiju, obviously, was pregnant, and then there is the valid observation of the rift dilating to birth these monsters. So yes, there is a great amount of imagery, especially mythic imagery, that is traditionally "feminine." Does that actually act as a commentary on femininity or an articulate statement of gender politics? What does that in fact communicate to the audience? If my friends are representative (they may not be), then it seems 'not much,' because they're far more concerned with the actual human character that is a woman than with the "feminine chaos monster" imagery used with the kaiju. edit: the jaegers, as representatives of order against chaos, are of course stylized and coded to be masculine, in spite of being called "she." I suppose it's possible that referring to the masculine robot as "she" all the time could be an act of deliberate gender-balancing (as is having Raleigh and Mako co-pilot it), but I personally find that doubtful. Bonaventure fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 17:33
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Maxwell Lord posted:So does everyone have to have a fully-formed thematic and political reading of every movie they see before they can argue if it was any good or not, or even buy a piece of merchandise? From your general approach through posting, I see a subtext of ideological and political intent, that of liberalism. Now this isn't to say you in reality relate to that ideology, I can't say that, but your posting comes across as such. The failing of your liberalism through posting is that it tries to present itself somewhere in the middle(like all liberalism). Between the textual/subtextual/symbolic context of what's presented within the movie that isn't shutting out any influences(interpretations) surrounding the movie(the heritage the movie pays homage to, toy chat, box office gross, politics, feminism, elements both visual and textual and so on) all the while bringing that back to give greater context(power/strength/weight/compelling) to an interpretation of Pacific Rim. The other side of it with no less valid interpretations/examples always seems to stop short of actually trying to say something substantive from that subjective interpretation*(again SMGs provocations, for me, are to spur further thinking/searching/discussing a symbolic cycle of death and rebirth). Entertaining the idea in the extreme of a vacuum, where nothing means anything, to paraphrased "well, that's just like you're opinion man", as if all opinions should be treated equal leads to the example OldPueblo unintentionally demonstrated(not to detract, it was a great demonstration). You must give further context or insight beyond the reference to how these elements interact with Pacific Rim's own depiction and interpretation of these elements(broader cultural factors play into this). This I would assert belittles the movie, all those involved in making it and those trying to interpret it, there must be an element of rehabilitation in all our communication(interactions) "Go big or go extinct"(this point will undoubtedly be misconstrued). Otherwise you run the risk of becoming slave to your reference, unable to see(create/imagine) beyond it. I included points you talked about intentionally, but they are simply parts of a greater whole, in search of the truth behind What is Pacific Rim? What is Pacific Rim about? we need to answer that question with authority. Not picking and choosing what has more or less significance, thus allowing anything to be ignored, rather all has significance and that there may be some form of political/ideological hierarchy at play. How else can we understand or define our relationships with the movie(experience, further discussion and so on)? e:edited for clarity, apologies. *Not the best wording, wrestled with it for too long, just hope the spirit of it can read correctly brawleh fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 17:50
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BTW, do NOT get the iOS/Android Pacific Rim game. It's literally little more than a high school cafeteria slap fight with jaegers and kaiju instead of dopey kids. No freedom of movement; the jaeger and kaiju literally step up to each other and can do little more than dodge left and right and flail their weapons at each other. It feels like a lovely 3DO game where they decided they used up all the polygons rendering the characters, gently caress actually providing any gameplay. No running between buildings or majestically hurtling through the air. Just flail away and hope something hits the kaiju, worst controls ever. Stacker just dryly deploys you all over the place with a short explanation of why you have to go there. Every fight begins with the Jumphawks dumping you next to the kaiju, they just cycle through five or six different kaiju and change their skin color. No jaeger specific moves, just lovely IAP weapons with different sound / graphic effects. You can't even get Cherno to smash his fists together, assuming you haven't already given up grinding through kaiju for the ingame money you need to unlock him. If you manage to beat the kaiju and do a "FINISH HIM" as shamelessly lifted from Mortal Kombat, you get to see 10 seconds of additional animation of your jaeger either stomping the kaiju in the head or putting him in a sleeper hold until it collapses. There might be more finish animations but I couldn't be bothered to go for them. All Pacific RIM iOS/Android is good for is creating a groove on your tablet's screen.
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Aug 21, 2013 18:21
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meristem posted:Except that "science&tech=male, nature=female" is an outdated, regressive association. It was made in a different period of history - when it was true. It doesn't really suit our current life, and I feel that imputing it in movies made currently - in the dearth of stronger evidence, both textual and meta, that this association is intentional - is actually actively pernicious, to the movie and to the audience. I really hate injecting personal info into a general discussion, but as a human, a woman, a tech nerd and a Ph.D. in bioinformatics, I definitely feel much more in common with the Jaeger pilots than with the big, dumb, destructive beasts. The association you are purporting feels completely absurd to me. And, as I've said several times in this thread already, more than a little offensive. The film doesn't feel excluding to me; the interpretation does. This is a really interesting point - when do we stop describing stereotypes and start perpetuating them? In the last ten or fifteen years, we've managed to measure semantic associations empirically. With a set of stiffly named psychological instruments like the Implicit Association Task or the Go/No Go Association Task, we can detect subconscious links between concepts - 'black person' and 'violence', for instance, or 'woman' and 'nature'. We're not sure yet exactly how much these associations drive behavior or attitudes, but it seems like the answer is 'at least a little'. I ran an experiment for several years in which college undergrads, genuinely committed to racial justice, consistently murdered unarmed black men in a simple video game about split-second shoot/don't shoot decisions, and it seems like this is driven by the kind of unconscious stereotypic associations I mentioned here. I became an obnoxious feminist in part because the raw numbers coming out of these tests are so telling. As a society we're really good at pretending not to hold outdated, regressive associations...but they're still there, below awareness, and in certain situations, they drive behavior. I don't think intentionality is required for these associations to show up in current movies, because these associations are all over our current lives. So - I'm not sure that saying 'the kaiju are coded as feminine' is necessarily an attitude that's hostile to women viewers (although I recognize the troubling aspect that I'm a guy saying this to a woman). This is a movie made by guys in a studio system (and a society) dominated by men. I don't think it's ultimately a movie that feminists should be happy with or hold up as any kind of exemplar. My problem with Pacific Rim gender-wise is that it feels like a movie that wants to have its gender norms and eat them too. Mako is an interesting character who gets real moments of subjectivity, and there's no question in my mind that she could carry the whole film if she wanted to, with Raleigh as the embittered veteran sidekick. But it isn't Mako's movie - her character arc ultimately ends up subordinate to Raleigh's, and there's no question the movie is told from his point of view. The women in the background are mostly either absent or silent. Mako's not allowed to be the hero in the moment of ultimate heroism, the moment when every man present is permitted an act of self-sacrifice. If Pacific Rim were made in a more egalitarian world, it could just be a movie that happens to focus a little more on its man characters, and we could all be happy with that. But I don't think it's enough for a movie to be sort of okay about gender, to have one woman character who's really quite cool but never threatens to unseat the male lead as the person with the primary share of screen time and narrative investment, or the person who serves as the audience's eyes in the movie. The praise Pacific Rim has received actually makes me really uncomfortable, because on the one hand I can't argue with people who are overjoyed to see someone they can identify with on screen, someone who's not a love interest or sexualized and who gets to fight on equal footing with the men. But on the other hand, it feels to me like Pacific Rim still falls below what should be minimum expectations about gender in an egalitarian movie. In terms of its characters and where it allocates its lines and screen time, it's a total boy's club. With specific respect to the Kaiju, I don't disagree with any of your examination of the male coding (although I think it's worth noting that sexual dimorphism doesn't run the same way in all species), and I'm not sure myself what to think of the birth scene. So I guess I've failed to engage with most of your argument  Even as I type this last bit it feels kind of stupid, but here goes - I do think there's a fundamental connection between the semantic association experiments I mentioned above, Pacific Rim's gender failings, and your discomfort with marking gender in Something Awful Dot Com posts. So much of human reasoning seems to be driven by this stupid, frequency-based associative heuristic - we create norms based on mere statistical exposure. We derive a subconscious unmarked state, a sort of prototypic default, from the most common traits of people around us. People associate black men with violence because they constantly see black men associated with violence in media and in cultural imagery - and this becomes self-reinforcing without active, aggressive countermeasure. SA posters, like posters on a lot of internet communities, assume that any given poster is a guy because most SA posters are male - and this leaves women in the difficult position of having to mark their own gender, an uncomfortable and sometimes actively dangerous proposition even on SA. And Hollywood screenwriters, overwhelmingly male, often seem to begin with all their characters in an unmarked state, a white male gestalt, and then introduce differences by degree: the black guy, the Asian guys, the woman, the gay guy, so on. I think this is why so many movies hit trouble in their depictions of real, diverse people: when your cast is mostly the default, each of your standouts has to be written as an ambassador for their whole group, and there's no way to give them all agency and interesting character. I guess what I'm saying is that we need a lot more women characters, a lot more women involved in the filmmaking process, and a lot more consciousness of of the invisible heuristics that shape perception and behavior. What I am not saying is much of substance about kaiju gender coding. 
General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 18:27
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Lord Krangdar posted:Are you even reading what I've been writing? Calm down. We can't ever know what a word will signify to someone else, because each person's understanding of it is a product of their own history and personal baggage. We can guess, and choose words accordingly, and usually that's good enough for communication to happen. This is not the same as  WORDS HAVE NO MEANING.Images are a hell of a lot more complicated than words, so their meanings for different people will diverge even more than words' do. It doesn't mean communicating about them is impossible, just that we shouldn't fly into a tantrum when other people don't see the same things we do.
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Aug 21, 2013 18:34
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Movies are more than their subtexts, though. The major purpose of all art, I would argue, is to elicit an emotional response, and most narratives attempt to gain our willing and temporary suspension of disbelief. When I see a movie for the first time I usually am not looking for what the core meaning is. If it's obvious enough I'll pick it up but first and foremost I am aware of whether I am enjoying myself, am I engrossed. Afterwards I ask myself why the film elicited the emotional response it did, whether it was the style or the characters or the themes I perceived. And in working through my reactions I usually come to define more of the subtext. But that's still one viewing. It's not enough to form a full academic thesis with footnotes and citations and every possible point worked through and every theoretical objection answered. To use your analogy, baseball is a professional sport for which players are paid. The requirements to organize a sandlot pickup game are much looser. We're amateurs. Are you going around every film thread policing it for non-academic chatter? Because I'm fairly sure we're not the only ones talking about surface bits we enjoyed or box office.
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Aug 21, 2013 18:39
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Clipperton posted:We can't ever know what a word will signify to someone else, because each person's understanding of it is a product of their own history and personal baggage. We can guess, and choose words accordingly, and usually that's good enough for communication to happen. This is not the same as The question you originally asked me was "who decides which imagery is obvious and which isn't?", followed by claiming I wanted to be the one person who decides (as if either of us believes there is one). So with written language, who decides which meanings of a word are obvious and which are not? We can't ever know what a word will signify to someone else, because each person's understanding of it is a product of their own history and personal baggage, but can we say that this:  -is not telling a driver to floor the gas pedal, or is that interpretation just as valid as any other? No, it's not. There's an obvious interpretation of that sign to a person literate in English and learned in the rules of the road. Next time you drive try telling fellow drivers, or police, "So you're the one who gets to decide which meaning of STOP is obvious and which isn't. That must be nice for you." Language is not just a matter of "good-enough" guesses, its something that must be learned. The guesses work precisely because people have learned common meanings for words or symbols, just like we've learned an abstract rubber duck represents the animal species we call "ducks". The platypus interpretation is inferior because it represents a failure to learn that shared meaning, or illiteracy. quote:Images are a hell of a lot more complicated than words, so their meanings for different people will diverge even more than words' do. It doesn't mean communicating about them is impossible, just that we shouldn't fly into a tantrum when other people don't see the same things we do. If we can't reasonably expect agreement even on something simple like a picture of a rubber duck representing a duck then it does mean communicating with (not about) images is impossible. Choosing to focus on the platypus interpretation and not the duck is choosing to focus on the noise rather than the signal. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 19:40
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Are you seriously putting "alien worm = penis" on the same level of obviousness as "stop sign = stop"? And if so, when did we all "learn" that? I must have been sick that day in school.
Clipperton fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 20:07
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Haha, this is so great  Do you have a source video?[edit] Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFMkIlkyav4 about 1:20 in.
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Aug 21, 2013 20:25
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Good god this Alien derail is making me pull my hair out.SuperMechagodzilla posted:
Also what the gently caress? I'm glad you don't make the rules, SMG, because then nobody would be able to buy any merchandise ever, and people walking out of the theater would say to one another "Did you like it?" "I can't really say yet, I have to go write a loving essay first." 
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Aug 21, 2013 20:29
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OldPueblo posted:The deep reading is so bad that I can't even get a simple point across and people are going too deep into my own simple comments. I watched all Alien movies. Not once did I see them as walking penises seeking to gently caress everyone and I'm not talking metaphorically. Their penis literally were killing people not loving them. It's pretty much that simple. I haven't denied there being a sexual inspiration behind it, but not once did I see an alien in the missionary position who smoked a cigarette afterwards. Sexual imagery isn't just a subtext in the film. It's part of the actual text.
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Aug 21, 2013 20:35
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teagone posted:Haha, this is so great Ahahaha, she's adorable. Seems like a lot of the people involved just really loved doing it, regardless of it being a great role or not. There hasn't been anything negative really about working on the set aside from the terrible designs of the suits(not being able to sit, not being able to go to the bathroom), right?
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Aug 21, 2013 21:22
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Guys, let's talk about semantic meaning in the abstract in this thread about robot punching. I agree that Alien is all about dicks and vaginas in space, but Alien is also so overtly about sex, rape, and reproduction in general. The premise lends itself way more to that area of interpretation - an egg shoots out a hand-baby with a vagina in its palm, which also has a secret retractable penis which ejaculates inside people's throats and grows a fetus dick-baby in their chests, which then penetrates out through the sternum in a violent birth scene, before growing into a razor-sharp rape monster made primarily of claws and dicks. Compared to that, Pacific Rim is totally lightweight. I don't see the kaiju as specifically feminized, but rather as polymorphous and transsexual as an extension of their "otherworldliness." For the same reason they have toxic blue blood, they're of indeterminate sex - and in fact combine vaginal and phallic imagery to the end of being difficult to comprehend. That's where I object to an interpretation of the kaiju as "feminine." Femininity is actually a fairly specific and recognizable label...which is generally used in these kinds of stories to *disempower* an enemy by coding it as weak or ineffectual. In Pacific Rim, the kaiju aren't disempowered. They're an active and horrifying threat. They're the Other in a very general sense, of which their sexual ambiguity is one facet. Claiming they are specifically feminine (or specifically ethnic, or specifically underclass, or specifically any particular human category) feels inappropriate to me because I don't see any of these threads explored concretely enough in the story. I think GDT used a visual vocabulary for his monsters that references tons of other franchises, that may very well be about sex or race or class, but this story in particular doesn't come close to the thematic and aesthetic precision with which Alien explores sex.
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Aug 21, 2013 21:37
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Clipperton posted:Are you seriously putting "alien worm = penis" on the same level of obviousness as "stop sign = stop"? And if so, when did we all "learn" that? I must have been sick that day in school. Of course they aren't on the same level, the 'alien worm=penis' example is in fact much more implicit. Man has been abjecting their sexual anxiety since the very start of civilization. It's a key part of our psychosexual development.
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Aug 21, 2013 21:39
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Danger posted:Of course they aren't on the same level, the 'alien worm=penis' example is in fact much more implicit. Man has been abjecting their sexual anxiety since the very start of civilization. It's a key part of our psychosexual development. According to whom?
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Aug 21, 2013 21:43
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Freud et al. Here is a good starting point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem_and_Taboo
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Aug 21, 2013 21:48
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Hasn't Freud been completely debunked as anything approaching scientifically accurate? I get that creatives and writers use his theories everywhere but trained psychologists learn it the same way that Aristotle's animal classifications are taught in beginner biology classes.
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Aug 21, 2013 22:03
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Freud influenced stuff works well on media because it's so concerned with symbolism. It's not advocating for using psychoanalysis on humans, just creative works filled head to toe with symbolic meaning.
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Aug 21, 2013 22:12
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Good point. Anyways, there's more interesting stuff to share, like these unused shots from the intro narrative. I'm digging the church of kaiju. http://twopunch.tumblr.com/post/58012173888/some-nice-pics-from-the-mirada-site-for-the
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Aug 21, 2013 22:20
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A Dirty Sock posted:Good point. Hardship is an interesting choice of name for a Kaiju. Especially one we didn't get to see that we know of. I love the stuff with the graffiti and the punks/fashion models dressed up like the Kaiju. Uncle Wemus fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 22:43
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The emphasis on our psychosexual anxiety and it's association with the abject feminine (Kristeva's 'primal repression') has been a defining aspect of sci-fi and horror films since...well since they started making sci-fi and horror films: Barbara Creed posted:At times the horrific nature of the monstrous-feminine is totally dependent on the merging together of all aspects of the maternal figure into one-the horrifying image of woman as archaic mother, phallic woman and castrated body represented as a single figure within the horror film. However, the archaic mother is clearly present in two distinct ways in the horror film. The full article is incredibly relevant to this discussion of Pacific Rim, plus it's a quick read. Clipperton posted:According to whom? "We may call it a border, abjection is above all ambiguity. Because , while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it--on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But also because abjection itself is a composite of judgement and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives. Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be... The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder. The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language. It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, "with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling." Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
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Aug 21, 2013 22:44
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Neurion posted:I'm glad you don't make the rules, SMG, because then nobody would be able to buy any merchandise ever, and people walking out of the theater would say to one another "Did you like it?" "I can't really say yet, I have to go write a loving essay first." Why not? It's an ideal to strive for. I believe in literacy, and if the choice is a binary between hoarding merch and being literate, then burn Hasbro to the ground.
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Aug 21, 2013 22:49
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I'm sorry, but if you are going to say that the mouth of a shark is scary because it represents a vagina rather than scary because it represents the mouth of a predatory animal then I am going to say that your critical framework is calibrated such that pretty much everything turns up vaginas.
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Aug 21, 2013 22:52
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A Dirty Sock posted:Good point. Tacit Ronin, no!  That kaiju church is really rad looking, though, I prefer the bits of the exterior you see in Shanghai and how it's been built around the old kaiju bones. I hope that if there's a sequel, the kaiju cult has a bigger role than background stuff.
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Aug 21, 2013 22:55
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Paolomania posted:I'm sorry, but if you are going to say that the mouth of a shark is scary because it represents a vagina rather than scary because it represents the mouth of a predatory animal then I am going to say that your critical framework is calibrated such that pretty much everything turns up vaginas. Can't it be both? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeth_%28film%29 (I only remember this movie from a GBS thread about it years ago. It could be bad.)
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Aug 21, 2013 23:03
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What's your kaijusona's name? I would be interested too in learning just what an apocalyptic religion can offer you. It's all very cult of cthulhu-lite
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Aug 21, 2013 23:06
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Paolomania posted:I'm sorry, but if you are going to say that the mouth of a shark is scary because it represents a vagina rather than scary because it represents the mouth of a predatory animal then I am going to say that your critical framework is calibrated such that pretty much everything turns up vaginas. The quote isn't talking about any shark but specifically the nightmarishly huge shark of Jaws that swallows men whole and must be fought by the combined forces of Law, Science and Rugged Individualism. You can also watch the weirdly synchronous hit film Sharknado - which climaxes with a chainsaw-wielding man jumping down a shark's throat, cutting a slit in its belly and emerging reborn after thought dead. I know you're being commonsensical, but commonsense can't account for the surprising popularity of 'vorephilia' and 'unbirthing' pornography. Google them to see!
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Aug 21, 2013 23:09
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Maarak posted:Freud influenced stuff works well on media because it's so concerned with symbolism. It's not advocating for using psychoanalysis on humans, just creative works filled head to toe with symbolic meaning. What Danger said was Danger posted:Man has been abjecting their sexual anxiety since the very start of civilization. It's a key part of our psychosexual development. That's not media criticism, that's a definite statement about human history. And if all s/he's got to back it up with is pseudoscience ... (I mean, I'm no anthopologist but even a cursory Googling of the subject shows that Freud is held in not much higher regard among anthropologists than he is among psychologists.) And anyway: why use Freud even for media criticism, if Freud's been debunked? Once you knock out the scientific support for psychoanalysis, what reason is left to use Freud's set of symbols instead of some purely arbitrary one (JAEGERS=DONUTS)? Same goes for the Creed thing, since the footnotes are pretty Freud-heavy. The Kristeva link is broken.
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Aug 21, 2013 23:24
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Clipperton posted:Are you seriously putting "alien worm = penis" on the same level of obviousness as "stop sign = stop"? No. Before taking on a specific example, from Pacific Rim or Prometheus or Alien or whatever, lets first establish that symbols can have obvious meanings. Can we both agree that a stop sign has an obvious meaning? Then we both agree it is possible for a symbol to have an obvious meaning. Having established that, the next question is where did that meaning come from, and can common symbols in film also have obvious meanings which come about in a similar way? quote:And if so, when did we all "learn" that? I must have been sick that day in school. You and OldPueblo haven't learned it, that's the whole problem. You haven't learned to be literate in the language of film. More specifically, the wider issue is that people are able and willing to interpret a film enough to understand the basic plot (like, its just about robots punching monsters) but they see that as somehow separate from finding "deeper meanings" there, a process which is assumed to be arbitrary bullshit. That division falls apart, though, once you realize the process of interpreting the literal plot and discovering the "deep" imagery or themes are really one and the same; a process of finding meaningful patterns of language in a series of lights and sounds that we call a film. Denying that phallic imagery exists because you're not used to the idea would be like me denying the meaning of the words "sens caché" because I don't speak French. Your own lack of vocabulary, in English or French or the language of film, doesn't mean that vocabulary is meaningless. Lord Krangdar fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Aug 21, 2013 |
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Aug 21, 2013 23:27
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