Selection 1
RA: Reznor/Cash Response
The main themes found in Rezonr’s video are death, healing and depression which could be seen in the symbolism of the corpses, snake, and the lyrics.
Rezonr’s video expresses a feeling of depression and hopelessness in his lyrics and depiction of death. The song is very gloomy. First of all, the video was made in black and white, which makes it appear more depressing and tedious. I also noticed the facial impression on people’s faces. It was sadness and helplessness. Throughout the video, there were many images about dead people and dead animals. Clearly, these images symbolize death.
Reznor illustrates the idea of healing and evil by symbolizing the snake. Darkness could be found with the repeated staring snake clip in the video. Obviously, the director is emphasizing it and he wants to send the audience a message through the clip. As discussed in class, the snake could be a symbol of evil or a symbol of healing. It could symbolize evil because the story of Adam and Eve in Bible. For healing, it could represent rebirth.
Reznor portrays self-harm caused by depression as another theme through the lyrics of the song. I looked up the lyrics after class and realized that some of the words send messages. For instance, “I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel.” The other line says “I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real”. From this, I could feel that he is very lonely and completely lost hope for life. Last but not least, the last line of the lyrics, he sings “I would find a way”. This can be a suicide note since he is so unhappy and cannot handle the emotional pain anymore.
Cash’s video establishes grief as the dominant theme in contrast to Reznor’s video where depression is the main idea. I think Jonny Cash is trying to show the audience the transience of life and he would relive if he could. In the lyrics, he sings “Everyone I know, goes away in the end”. Cash is referring to watching loved one die. There were mixed clips of Jonny Cash’s younger self throughout the video, which might be a visual memoir of his life. It seems like a retrospection. He is just an old man looking at photographs of his past. A clip from the video is the cracked platinum record. I feel like it represents himself. When he filmed the video, he was not in good health condition. So the cracked record symbolizes that he is so fragile that he could die anytime. There were also some clips of his hands. They are so delicate which could show that his life is going to an end. Towards the end of the song, the lyric goes “If I could start again, a million miles away”. Maybe sometimes people want to make changes in their lives, but they just cannot. So they are stuck and they become depressed.
If I have to choose, I found Johnny Cash’s video to be most powerful cognitively while Reznor’s video to be most powerful emotionally. Personally, I think these two videos are so different that they are incomparable. It creates a stronger response because it is not just about depression or death. Instead, it is his view of life, something that is mortal. The message he sends the audience here is the ungraceful of death, and he is sad to see people around him go. Rezonr’s version was more powerful emotionally mainly because the images such as death, hopelessness in people’s eyes, and the decaying of animals.
Commentary: I choose this piece because I was able to evaluate the differences between the two videos using clips from the video and lyrics from the song. The strengths of this response are the well-structured topic sentences and the ability to argue one primary idea in each paragraph. Therefore, the response is more organized. While I was writing it, I made sure that the topic sentences were very brief and clear. Compare to my original post, this revision is more structured. I did not really encounter struggles or challenges during my revision because the peer review was really informative. I basically used the suggestions from my peer to edit my original post in order to make my writing stronger. The revision process was very self-explanatory and I hope I can learn more writing skills in the future by doing this!
Selection 2
RA: Two-Sentence Horror Stories
1. Waking up from a dream, I turned over and saw a face staring at me intently from outside of the window. I live on the 13th floor.
Analysis: When we first read the piece, everything seems normal. It is just a statement describing someone who woke up from his dream. The story starts to change until the word “and”. It creates a momentary suspense because it implies that something is going to happen. The word “and” acts as a turning point to the plot. Hence, it makes the reader wonder what else is coming up. As we continuing reading, the word “staring” increases the level of suspense. It is not “looking” or “watching”, but “staring”. We want to find out who is doing the action. But it does not tell us. There is barely any description of the person. It just says “a face”, which could be a girl, boy, man, or woman. However, we do not know. When we reach to “outside the window”, the readers might start to cringe since the scene is happening during the middle of the night. Everyone should be asleep by then. Then, we move to the last sentence, which reveals our question earlier about who is staring at you. Obviously, nobody could float in the air so whoever is staring is not a human being. As we discussed in class, this is the “Oh crap!” moment.
2. After a long day from work, she came home and went to take a refreshing shower. Through the shower curtain, she saw a shadow of a hand. She pushed the shower curtain aside, but nothing was there.
Analysis: As we discussed in class, horror stories scare people in an unexpected way. This piece also starts off with an ordinary statement. In the second sentence, the word “through” creates a negative anticipation that something bad is about to happen. The word “shadow” intensifies the level of suspense. Because it occurred in a flash, almost like she was having hallucination. Her action “pushed” suggests that she is in an urgency to find out who or what is there. In the last sentence, “nothing was there” leaves a fragmentary ending which makes the reader imagine. If you are in her’s situation, it is very creepy, and most people would probably freak out.
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Commentary: As mentioned in my analysis of both stories, I was able to use descriptive language to emphasize the actions of the character, which makes the stories appear eerie. The language is also very imaginative so I could picture it in my mind. I was surprised to see how powerful language is even in short stories like these from this assignment.
Selection 3
Weekly Reading Response
Snow, Glass, Apples is a very unique retelling of the original fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Brothers Grimm. Neil Gaiman switched the roles of the two characters in the story, which provides an unexpected twist. In his story, Snow White is not the pure, innocent little girl and The Queen is not a jealous, and wicked woman. Instead, Snow White is subverting to a hungry vampire who preyed on her own father, and the Queen is subverting to a caring woman who is trying to protect her kingdom against her evil stepdaughter. In this case, Snow White is the villain and the Queen is the victim.
Two fulfillments of the horror genre in the story are that first of all, Gaiman was able to find a way and describe these two women in a completely opposite way. Second of all, he writes the story from the stepmother Queen’s point of view, which is different from the original fairy tale. Personally, I believe that the use of flashback has a huge impact on the story because it makes the audience feel that you are witnessing the scene as it just happened in front of you.
Tension and tone are manipulated through these subversions and fulfillments throughout the whole story. At the very beginning of the story, the Queen tells the audience that no one knows who Snow White is. Later on, the Queen says that she would not eat with them. The Queen also mentions that the girl has “sharp, yellow teeth”. This description got my attention, and I started to wonder why the author includes this not so flattering picture of the little princess until she drank blood from the Queen. This could be the “oh crap!” moment because the audience now knows that Snow White is the real monster. Gaiman gradually builds suspense by providing little details of the character in the story.
Gaiman is criticizing the culture by demonstrating two types of feminism in the society. Snow White represents the unhealthy feminism, which involves sex and violence. The Queen represents the healthy feminism. She knows her responsibilities as the leader of a kingdom and acts like a mature woman who fights back. Nowadays, feminine beauty or sex is being sold and traded for power. The ending of the story shows us in modern society, healthy feminism is overshadowed by unhealthy feminism, and this needs to change.
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Commentary: In this response, I was able to reveal the message that Gaiman is trying to come across by subverting the characters in the fairy tale. I explained the story without summarizing the entire plot but analyze specific scenes, which makes it interesting for the audience to read.
Selection 4
Sample Thesis Statement
Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman examines femininity through two opposing looking glasses. Healthy femininity that shows the greater good, represented by the Queen, is consistently disregarded and overshadowed by the unhealthy femininity that shares the mainstream views in the society, epitomized by vampire Snow White. This statement can be illustrated when the queen’s purity and normality is undermined by the princess’s consistent sexual prowess. Darkening sexuality and “evil” ironically overcomes the heroine-like and consistent implementations made by the queen to conquer the greater good. As a result, this changes the reader’s expectations towards the typical fairytale ending, to a darker, more subversive ending. Using the common ideals that would illustrate “ideal” femininity, we will discuss how society has impacted and changed the desired virtues sought after in today’s women.
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Commentary: As a group, we wrote this sample thesis statement together using one of the texts we read in the course. I think the strength about this thesis statement is that it has an arguable statement instead of a thesis sentence which tells the reader what the essay is going to be about. The weakness about this thesis statement is that it does not show the outside sources that we are going to use throughout the paper.
Selection 5
Buffy Trope
In the Hush episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we observe that when people could speak, they could not communicate or express their feelings to others but when their voices are taken away by the Gentlemen, it makes them understand each other more and develops an intimacy in their relationship.
One of the tropes I discovered in this episode is “badass in nice suits.” I found this funny because the Gentlemen, who are the villains in this episode but dress nicely. Perhaps it makes them feel like professionals when they are not. However, their physical appearances and they way they act really entertained me. Although they are the Gentlemen, it was so odd for me because they are ugly monsters dressing like gentlemen.
Another trope in this episode is that the characters cannot spit out their love for each other. Buffy and Riley do not tell each other “I love you.” but instead, the babble and talk about random things which are not necessary. The “spit it out” trope is used to extend the storyline. In TV series or real life situations, the girl always waits for the boy to express his affection even if she has feelings for him, too. The boy, on the other hand, is not able to tell his love to her because it means commitment.
Moreover, I have noticed that in most of the films, the victim is usually a female. For some reason, she always ends of tripping and thus, increases the chance to be killed by whoever is chasing after her.
At the very beginning of the Hush episode, the professor is lecturing about communication, which is an irony because later on in the episode, the characters lose their voices creates lack of communication. There is another irony at the end of the episode which takes place when Buffy and Riley get their voices back. The awkward silence comes back and they cannot talk when they have something really important to discuss.
After watching this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I start to understand that “actions can speak louder than words”, sometimes, better than language itself. One example is when Xander beats Spike because he thinks Anya is dead after their voices were taken away. This is when Xander finally expresses his true feelings which he could not say out loud for Anya and she begins to realize that how much he cares about her.
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Commentary: In this discussion, I focused particularly on the way the trope contributes to a metaphorical reception of the scene. The overall theme of this episode is that language is an obstacle. The character are having trouble communicating with each other because their voice is taken by the Gentlemen. This subversion of the horror genre is ironic, as the killer is usually seen as unintelligent and full of meaningless blood lust. Because the Gentlemen aren't the usual killer, we don't know what to expect from them. This ambiguity frightens us. After watching this episode, we realized that sometimes we are better off without speaking.