The Weekly McGuffin

Something I wanted to talk about in class recently but didn't get the chance to. A quote by Laura Mulvey that began an essay of hers stated that some say analysis kills pleasure and beauty. I would like to argue against that. Analysis kills pleasure, but not beauty. Beauty, as I see it, is a quality of a thing. Pleasure is an acknowledgment of that quality. They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which implies that it needs an observer to exist, but the pleasure brought from that beauty is different from the beauty itself. Analyzing beauty is something that many of us do every single day. When a musician sings a song about their lover and describes their face or demeanor, they're analyzing that person's beauty, and it doesn't kill the beauty. Just writing about it or talking about it doesn't destroy it, it often accentuates the beauty and allows others to appreciate it as you do. If I described my partner's laugh to someone, they might understand the...

Yeah... I don't want to linger on this subject for too long, since I just got finished talking about it with my friends on our radio show, but holy wow that movie was not fun to watch.  It's one thing to see a film about a real person who really lived a really sad life, but this film isn't real at all. It's based on a book that depicted a fictionalized and dramatized version of Norma Jeane Baker's life and made no attempts to rectify these changes. It wouldn't even have been that bad if it was advertised as a historical fiction narrative, but it was not. Every article written about this film calls it a biopic, which implies that it's striving for accuracy which is blatantly not true. The film is constantly berating you with atrocity after atrocity, it never gives you a second to breathe. Every moment of happiness or effort that Norma Jeane scrounges out of her soul is instantly either shut down by the people around her or edited in a way that makes the momen...

The incredible ubiquity of the male gaze in filmmaking is not something that has gone unnoticed in the past. For even the most passive of filmgoers it is not difficult to notice that the camera tends to linger on a woman's chest or legs no matter the context of the film or the character. The prevalence of this... style? trope? habit? is indicative of the way we are teaching, consciously and subconsciously, new filmmakers to construct these films, and something needs to change. On the note of what to call the male gaze, what do we call the male gaze? It's arguable that it's a stylistic choice, but the common aspects of it appear everywhere, no matter the genre, time period, context, or tone of the films that it's seen in. It could, of course, be called a trope, but I would argue that it's more than that. It's not just a trope, there's too much of it for it to be called that. It's not literally everywhere but enough of film is infested with it that I would...

What does one do when someone they look up to turns out to be a bad person? Do they disown them? Do they try to change that person's ways?  There's a conversation to be had about this strange phenomenon, but when it is a respected figure in media, be it film, music, art, etcetera, the question can have completely different answers. The obvious answer is to stop consuming whatever forms of media that person produces. We vote with our dollar so whatever money we spend on that person supports their future endeavors and furthering their career, right? So why don't we do this? It's important to note that there is an element of their question that brings up another topic, that being the question 'should we separate the art from the artist?' which is its own debate in and of itself. The way I see it, there is a line that needs to be drawn on an individual basis, and that refers to the celebrity figure in question and the person who is making the judgment. While there a...