Review of Edward Said On Orientalism

I would like to start by saying that I have enjoyed most all of the films from this course so far, however this film left me with a bit if a different reaction than the others. While I enjoyed listening to Edward Said talk about his roots in Palestine and I fully agree with much of what he presented I found the structure of the film to be very difficult to follow, un-engaging, and generally difficult to understand and follow. I was left disappointed in many ways because I am interested in Said and his ideas but I just couldn't seem to get all that much clear information from the film and I ended up reading about Said and his theories later and feeling as though I got much more from that than the film itself.

I was very much intrigued with Said's description of Orientalism as "the idea that these people (Middle Eastern Peoples) do not change…they are still in time". I thought more about American representations of people from the Middle East and it really made sense. I thought about the Arab Spring and the images that we have seen from the rebellions, especially the revolution in Egypt and it really clicked in my mind why American’s have this representation of Arabs. The images and footage that we are provided with from this revolution make the Egyptian, Bahraini, Syrian (the list goes on and on) people seem as though they are savages. We see images of bottles being thrown, people being beaten, yelling, screaming, bombs, fires etc. and we are left with the thought that these people have no concept of what it means to be civilized. The interesting point that I am trying to make is that it is so incredibly progressive for these dominated groups to have the courage to get together and rebel and yet the images and discourses that American’s are provided with still tell the story that these people are “stagnant savages”. We do not see all of the amazing things that these people have done, we are not told the story of why these people are fighting or why we are seeing the images that we are seeing and so the images take on a different meaning and help to gloss over the stereotypes that American people have of Middle Eastern peoples.

Another point that I found interesting from Said was what he talked about in the section of the film titled “Orientalism and Palestine Question”. Because Said himself was Palestinian he took on a clear stance in the conflict (one of which I happen to strongly agree with) and he presented it in a positive way, with a possible solution. He talked about the importance of coming to agreement of “coexistence” which is so very important in this conflict because both of the peoples fighting for the land have experienced exile and devastation. He does not make it a question of “who gets what” but rather how the two groups can coexist and finally find peace.  As Said put it so profoundly, “Finding a peaceful, human, and just solution will require overcoming Orientalism and its ideas of difference as a threat that must be contained or destroyed”.  This is the case not only for Orientalism and the American representation of Arabs and Muslims but also for American representations of all groups who are different from themselves.

In general this film offered some very interesting commentary on Orientalism from Said but like I mentioned above I found it hard to follow—not exactly “user friendly”. However Said himself is an amazing theorist and someone that I would love to study more in the future.

Midsemester Review of Communication 497AJ

So far I would say that I am really enjoying this class. There is a lot to be said for a professor who can design a class that engages students the way that Professor Yousman is able to do not only with Comm497AJ but also the other classes that I have taken with him. The assignments seem worth it--they don't make me feel as though I am wasting my time doing busy work. I have very much enjoyed most of the readings for the class and though they are dense at times they certainly educate. I particularly enjoyed reading about George Gerbner and the mean world syndrome. Though this class is not the first time that I have visited Gerbner's thesis in college, I feel like I got a lot more out of it in this class than I have in other classes. I feel particularly affected by the mean world syndrome as do I feel many of my friends and family are in the same boat. I find Gerbner's ideas easier to understand than some other theorists and also the fact that they are applicable to me helps in building interest.

I can say that I really struggled with Hall and the different theories of representation and though I understand it better after revisiting the material for the midterm I still feel as though the ideas are hazy in my mind. I wish that I could grasp this thesis a bit better because I can see that it is important and very applicable for the kinds of analysis that we are doing in this class. I feel as though Foucault's ideas about historical context have been extremely important to our analyses since we read the chapter and I just wish that I understood the whole chapter a little bit better.

I have very much enjoyed watching some older horror films and getting the chance to break them down, especially Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist. I think that the blog is a good way to communicate about the films with such limited class time and it seems to be pretty effective for the class as a whole. The film "War on Drugs" was much more interesting than I thought it would be--given the fact that it was quite poor quality, hard to find, and Dutch subtitled. I thought that the information was so interesting that I actually passed on the link to the film to my supervisor who also enjoyed the documentary. It seems as though the films and readings are able to give us all as students a broad understanding not only of the different perspectives about the culture of fear but also the kinds of writing and film making that are done around the topic. It really feels as though the different parts of the class mesh well together which helps keep my interest in the subject and also makes the work a bit more interesting than tedious.

As far as the discussion board goes I think that it is a good way to keep the class discussing the readings and materials from class since we only meet once a week. I am not a fan of Spark however, it seems to have a lot of problems for me--maybe I am just unlucky. I think that the concept should continue if the class runs again as a blended class but maybe at that point there will be a more functional system.

I would say in general I am very happy in this class. This is my final semester and I was really hoping to have a Comm class that I really enjoyed as my last one so that I could leave the major on a high note and I will say this is not only a good one but maybe my favorite. The materials that we have covered have influenced me quite a bit and I would say that I feel more conscious and aware of the culture of fear and what it is doing and has done to society--so I guess the class is doing it's job!

Analysis of the HBO Show Oz

Before this class I had never seen the show Oz. My mom has worked for different cable companies for years so I have had access to HBO and other movie channels for years however I seem to have missed this show which was probably a blessing in disguise because I probably wouldn’t have been able to decode the messages that I was seeing on the screen and would have been caught up, like most of the shows fans, in thinking that it was a realistic representation of a maximum security prison.

After watching several clips of Oz and contextualizing what I have seen with the film “War on Drugs” and the reading by Glassner and Yousman it is crystal clear that the show Oz is not a real representation of prison in the slightest. Yousman states in his article that “The HBO audience is wealthier, more educated, and more suburban than the general population of television viewer. Demographically, this is the precise opposite of the US prison population. Inmates tend to be poorer, less educated, and more urban than the general population.”(266).  This is a very important idea to consider when analyzing the messages that are put out by the HBO program Oz. It is likely that most of the people who are watching this program do not have any first hand experiences or personal experiences with the prison system in our country and thus they have no ability to contextualize what they are seeing on the screen. Then, by default, the viewers of Oz develop a very skewed perception of not only what it takes to end up in prison but also what prisoners’ lives are like. From the reading in Glassner’s chapter 6 and the film War on Drugs it has become clear that most of the people in our real prisons are not in for violent crimes but rather for drugs however, in the show Oz (granted it is a maximum security prison) nearly all the main characters are in for horrible murders, rape, and other very violent crimes. This leads the typically upper-middle class viewers to view prisons are a holding tank for all the misfits and psychopaths of society.

Another thing that I noticed from watching some clips of the show Oz is that the prisoners are essentially free to roam the facility and commit ever more violent crimes inside the iron gates. I watched one clip called “Jaz Hoyt’s Death” in which two men (I assume prisoners) are sharing a hospital room, neither are shackled or restrained and after the nurse leaves the room (yes the young, female nurse in the room with two un-restrained prisoners) one man gets out of his bed and stabs and kills the other man…The nurse able to see it all through  a crack in the door but does nothing about it. This is something that if watched as just part of another episode of a television show that a person enjoys would not resonate as odd however it is extremely unlikely  that that could ever be the possible set up for hospitalized prisoners. The misconception that prisoners have the freedom to roam around and do harm to other prisoners, guards or other persons working in the prison is further pressed in another clip I watched called “Adebisi gets rejected by Shirley” where the prisoner Adebisi tells Shirley to give him oral sex through the cage and Adebisi is then caught and taken away from her cell after she says no and refers to him with a very derogatory term. Just the fact that women and men are ever in a place where that is possible in prison is very uncharacteristic of a real prison. However viewers are fed the illusion that this is how things work in prison.

We have learned from the film War on Drugs and Yousman’s article that “Stories of punishment have long been a source of titillation for audiences, and this titillation often has served political purposes.” (267). This is very evident in Oz and in the real prison-industrial complex. In War on Drugs there are several stories, one very interesting about a young college student who was dating a small time LSD and marijuana dealer. The woman was charged with aiding and abetting a drug dealer for only providing the police with his location. She was in turn given close to 30 years in prison and when her parents were interviewed her father mentioned that the judge had said that the severe charges were only given because they were a message to others about the severity of charges for anyone involved in any way with drugs or drug dealers. This is a prime, real example of how stories of punishment can be used to control the people. The difference between real life and Oz is that the “stories of punishment” in the HBO smash hit are not real and thus they make audiences think that political decisions to build more prisons, be harsher on crime, and continue the War on Drugs are good and just decisions. Since the audience that is primarily watching this program is not from the social group that the program focuses on, it builds a wall between the truth and the illusion. Had this program been shown on another network it is possible that it would have been received quite differently because the audience would have a better or rather, different understanding of the discourse being presented. 

Review of The American Nightmare

This interesting documentary sets out to investigate the "Golden Age" of the horror genre. The helps to contextualize the great horror films of the late 60s and 70s within historical events happening in the United States and in the world. There is a lot of conversation about what horror actually is and what it means to the various directors, writers, and other key persons in the film. Tom Savini, a famous horror make-up artist talks extensively about where he learned the reality of his craft, Vietnam. He defines a line of difference between reality and representations that we are exposed to in films. This information that he is providing is coupled with harsh but important images from the Vietnam War where he was a soldier. I found this to be a particularly interesting part of the film because I think that the Vietnam War was not only important to Savini but also to many of the other horror directors and writers of that time period even if they had not experienced the front lines themselves. The group dissects Night of the Living Dead in many of the ways that can be seen in my previous post as well as the posts from fellow classmates of Communication 497AJ. The cast talks about the cannibalism in the film and the sheer brilliance of turning the nuclear family inside out. I particularly enjoyed the comments offered about human instinct to say things like "you're so cute, I could eat you up!" and how that related to the slaying of Harry and Helen Cooper by their daughter Karen. The cast also talk extensively about the significance of the ending scene in Night of the Living Dead. The brutal murder of Ben at the end of the film had revolutionary mimetic tendency to the heinous civil rights struggles of the late 60s and the death of Martin Luther King Jr. I think that hearing the cast, being that they are knowledgeable not only about the horror film under analysis but also about the historical context of the events represented in the film, allowed me to have a different kind of respect for the film and its message.

This is another film that shows us the importance of historical context. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would never have been as interesting and relevant had it not come out at a time of "No Gas". Also, it is important to note (which I did not know before watching The American Nightmare) that the family of psychopaths who take Sally and the others actually used to be slaughterhouse workers/owners however they had been run out of business. This little detail relates to the changing economy in those times and the fear that if someone loses their job they could in turn lose their mind and end up becoming like Leatherface.

I kept finding myself shielding my eyes from the screen even knowing full well that the things I was seeing were only snippets of the film, and I had no idea of the narrative but I was still scared. I couldn't help but start wondering what this was which led me back to the film. I believe it was Romero who said in the film that he wasn't scared of much but what did scare him was people. I think that I have found that this is true for myself also, however, much like any other average American I am not scared of the right people. I don't shield my eyes when I watch Obama saying that he is approving the Keystone XL pipeline or John McCain saying that we should really start serious air strikes on Syria but I do cover my eyes when I watch a the brutal snippets of killing in The Last House on the Left or Halloween...

IT'S ONLY A MOVIE, ONLY A MOVIE, ONLY A MOVIE, ONLY A MOVIE

The one question that I was left with at the end of the film is what is next. The "Golden Age" seems to have passed on and as we have learned we are in a kind of new horror genre, the slasher film. I feel as though with more knowledge of the horror genre itself, I am very curious to see what films have come, are coming, or will come out as a result of the history of today. I am wondering where the horror film commentary on society is...am I missing it? Has it come? Will it come?