My Own Creation

Skeleton of Script
A Shower

SCENE I
Movie opens with Lear and his friend, Rose, sitting at Barrington Beach, RI on Narragansett Bay. They have a pile of bottles and they are writing messages in them and throwing them into the bay. Lear remarks to Rose on how sending the bottles make him feel connected to everyone, how they will go anywhere in the world. Rose sits contemplatively for a moment, then asks Lear if he wants to go “The Fort.” Lear agrees. They go over to the dunes, find a specific dune, lift it up, and enter a series of tunnels and under-sand caverns made possible by the clay-like sand of Barrington Beach. Rose tells Lear a story about their gullible friend, Joe, who was tricked into going to school that past Saturday. [Lear and Rose are juniors in high school-age] Scene ends with Lear and Rose parting ways, Lear walking up steps to home.

SCENE II
Scene opens with fight in Lear’s household. Lear is yelling at his older brother for breaking his favorite video game “America’s Army 5.” It is revealed that the video game is free and distributed to anyone at no charge by the US Army. Lear, Edgar, and most other kids they know play the game. Lear makes a crack at how Edgar should just keep studying, that he should go up to his room and be alone where he belongs. Edgar, clearly hurt, runs upstairs. As he runs, Edgar tells Lear that if their parents hadn’t spent all their money helping Lear with his mental disorder, he could have afforded to go to a good school—or at least have had a television in his room. Lear goes outside to work on sanding his dory paddles. He is seated on a bench directly under one of the windows looking into the family room. He can hear the television in the background. The television is on a news channel, which incessantly drawls on about an impending meteor shower—one in which golf-ball sized meteors may hit Barrington. Suddenly, it cuts to a special public service announcement—a well-respected and renowned psychiatrist is talking. He speaks of the danger that the meteor shower will impose on people. In a shocking moment, he reveals that kids playing the “America’s Army 5” video game will, by an intricate system of electrical impulses in the brain, be affected by the meteor shower and will become violent and unpredictable in less than a half hour. The psychiatrist suggests locking kids who play the game into their rooms. He explains that he has hijacked the network connection to warn the public—that the government intended to use the video game’s susceptibility to such violence in order to exterminate the working class families that have kids that play the game. He goes on to say that the upper classes have already been warned, that their children have been given the antidote. Lear’s parents watch the TV in surprise and fear, run upstairs to lock Edgar in his room, accomplishing this task but look around desperately for Lear, who is already running down the street.

SCENE III
Lear makes it to “The Fort.” Rose is already there, visibly frightened. She talks to Lear frantically about the announcement, saying that her parents have already fled, that she is glad she never played the game. Rose knows that Lear has played, and asks Lear what he’ll do. Lear explains that he doesn’t thinking it will affect him, because his brain chemistry is already so messed up by the medication for his mental disorder. Lear and Rose sit and listen to the sound of thousands of cars going away at top speed, full of parents leaving their children behind to rot in their rooms. After a half hour of panicking, Rose hears another sound—one sounding like a thousand golf balls landing on the ground. Lear and Rose know that the shower is here.

SCENE IV
This scene shows the shower hitting and the visual effect of thousands of cars in gridlocked traffic trying to escape to where they think children will not be. Meanwhile, the anguished cries of children cry out. After a few minutes, these cries of isolation are replaced by shouts of terror, indicating that the transformation from normal human child to violent zombie-like creature is complete.

SCENE V
Shows various scenes of horrific violence committed by the transformed kids on their parents, who are trying, despite warnings, to take them with them to safety. Eventually, the transformed have gone to the streets, wreaking havoc.

Shows clips of government press release revealing that the Department of Domestic Security will ensure the safety of its citizens by quarantining the affected children in a special facility where they will be rehabilitated. The release denies any claims of governmental conspiracy and assures people that the children will not be harmed.

Cut to clip of Iranian PM denouncing Western excesses and proclaiming this plague of violence to be Allah’s purging of the “Western devil.” To assist in Allah’s plight, Iran announces that they are stepping up their nuclear weapons program in preparation for an assault on the United States.
SCENE VI
Lear and Rose are happily excited that Lear is not transformed. However, this gaiety is more than dominated by a pervasive fear of what is happening above “The Fort,” in the real world. The two know it is mayhem by the sounds they hear. Lear decides that they must go back to his house and see if any of his family is still alive, despite the risk.

In a series of narrow escapes, they make it back to Lear’s house. Lear finds Edgar in his room, listening to the noises outside and clearly frightened. Edgar asks what is going on, and Lear explains it to him. Lear tells Edgar that he is also one of the lucky ones that didn’t transform, but Edgar remarks that he can feel a strong force within him being awakened. Lear passionately asserts that it is completely a machination of Edgar’s mind, but Edgar nevertheless begins to visibly change into one of the transformed [which consists of a haggard appearance characterized by an intense crouch, arms forward, and frothing mouth]. Lear and Rose narrowly escape outside, and somehow manage to get back to “The Fort.”

SCENE VII
Lear and Rose decide to set a trap in “The Fort,” expecting Edgar to find them and go after them, knowing that he has knowledge of the location. Lear and Rose openly discuss how Edgar’s transformation only occurred when they arrived, and question how humans could ever commit such horrific acts. Rose reasons that, if such acts were possible, human nature could not be inherently good, and that society must restrain such profligacy. Lear disagrees, stating that the video game and the government behind it was the source of the problem.

Edgar is heard attempting to break into “The Fort.” He falls into the trap, but hits his head sharply against a rock, rendering him unconscious.

Edgar comes to, and Lear and Rose try to talk to him. He is raving mad, writhing and frothing at the mouth. Lear and Rose remind him that he can fight it, that it is possible as shown by Lear’s resistance. After a while of this, Edgar starts to visibly change to become more human again. Lear reasons that it can be fought by strong willpower, and praises Edgar. In a moment of epiphany, Rose states that perhaps the meteors never did affect the kids—that it was all due to people’s stubborn belief in the corruption of government and the hypersuggestivity that followed from that belief.

Edgar admits that it was a conscious choice to change—that changing to a violent, simple world was easier than staying in a rational one that seemed inherently corrupt and unfair.

Lear goes to let Edgar down from the trap, but the rope snaps as he is loosening it, and Edgar hits his head on a rock again. Edgar dies.

Lear and Rose, stricken with sadness and despair, decide on their course of action. With only a few moments hesitation, they take a pen and paper and the bag of bottles. The movie ends with their rowing to a nearby island in Lear’s dory while mayhem ensues in the background.



RELATING THIS SCRIPT TO EUROPEAN MODERNISM IN ONE PARAGRAPH
The inspiration for this movie script was the philosophy of Modernism. Modernists examined parts of society to evaluate their efficacy. In my script, I evaluated the inefficacy of irrational mistrust of government and hypersuggestivity caused by prejudices. The goal for the script was to show that, in misunderstanding, one can be tricked into performing even the most horrific acts and transformations. I also slipped in subtle theories on human nature as a whole, in the spirit of European Modernists subtly including lofty ideals even in their most mundane poems. The end of the script especially comments on the nobleness of human nature to want to help, even if the only method of help is by sending a glass bottle down the stream. I also honored the European Modernist tradition of using prior works of literature in strange ways in their work by superimposing the Lear and Edgar characters onto mine, when the connection is not intuitively obvious. Further, I used the European Modernist style of titling my work, giving it a title that creates multiple initial reactions, and is revealed to be relevant only later in the work.

Other Work

4. I chose to work with Max Beckman’s Brother and Sister. I found this painting looking for European Modernist painters, finding Beckman, and then looking at his work. After a few failed attempts at making sense of other paintings, I found that this one fit the edict of European Modernism.

The painting is very chaotic and rife with tension and contradictions. At first, the incest suggested by the title repulses the viewer, but further examination reveals that it is more than a portrait of incest. The painting draws the viewer’s immediate tension to the sword in the center, which seems to be the driving force of the message the painting is trying to convey. The sword is explicitly separating the brother and sister, but is not physically harming either. The sword is also black, gigantic, and alone (in the sense that it is not wielded by any person or thing. Since it is acting to separate the incestuous couple, the sword initially seems to be representative of society’s taboo against incest. However, the awkward angle of the brother’s leg seems purposeful; one could reasonably see the sword as a phallic device. If viewed this way, then the very means with which to accomplish the taboo is the very force preventing it from occurring. Thus, the taboo is not some artificial societal construction, but rather a force of human nature. In this way, Beckman seems to suggest that this facet of society is functional, and should be kept intact. By his normative analysis of incest, Beckman is true to the modernist philosophy of close examination grounded in concretes. He closely examines the nature of incest and deems it to be a valid taboo. In his acquiesce to the general sentiment, Beckman is also implying that society is not completely wrong, another facet of the modernist doctrine.

Other elements of the painting further Beckman’s assertion. For example, the brother and sister are lavishly adorned, and lay on a richly colored bed/rug, suggesting that they are wealthy. I equate this wealth with a sort of elitist air that would normally fiercely protect society’s taboos and may even have further restrictions on primal urges. Yet, the brother and sister are still tense in their separation, wanting to be joined. Therefore, the painting suggests that human temptation seems to push subversion of even the strictest taboos. However, the societal force of the sword intertwined with the human force of the brother’s phallus prevents this subversion. Then, people must be noble at least in regard to their current stance on incest—the harsh taboo. As I mentioned previously, this illustrates the modernist method of grounding even the most abstract ideas in concrete things.

Movement Research (#3)

Modernism is a complex umbrella term for a wide array of poets, artists, writers, architects, and others. Despite the vagueness of the term, there does appear to be distinct commonalities among the various subgroups of modernism. Modernism, at its base, calls into question the functions of all institutions and facets of society. The evaluation of each part of society could be either positive or negative. At times, the modernists reject a part of society, as did the Marxists with the capitalist economic system. At others, the modernists exalt a part of society, as did the Futurists with technological advances. European modernists, though consisting of varied subgroups, were primarily defined by their painstaking inspection of the world around them—often without judgment. This subject minutia went as far as poems like C.P. Cavafy’s “An Old Man,” which features an old man reflecting on his life before becoming overwhelmed or Pessoa’s “I Know, I Alone” that delves into the nature of feeling. I use minutia not to suggest insignificance, but to suggest thoroughness of subject choice. By inspecting everything, the modernists were able to pave the way to setting up a better society—their driving force.


I primarily read poems by C.P. Cavafy and Fernando Pessoa’s himself heteronym. These poems were true to modernist philosophy in both form and content. In form, the poems were very direct, with brevity and substance intertwined. To accomplish this concision, the poems employ sophisticated techniques of metaphor, imagery, personification, and figurative language. They also have an iambic, non-rhyming (except the occasional rhyme for generally ironic effect) structure, adding to the informality, directness, and quick pace of the poems. The content of the poem, as mentioned before, consisted of the evaluation of everything, from the loftiest to the most quotidian and humdrum.


In reading the poems, I have come to respect and admire the modernist philosophy. It is a noble effort, a practical effort, and one that is enjoyable to experience. I am usually disheartened when an artist tries to directly tackle such intense things as love, hatred, or society as a whole. These gestalt attempts at discovering truth often fail in a labyrinth of clichés and convoluted language. The modernist edict, in contrast, is one of pithiness and thoroughness; each facet of society is examined. By doing this, the modernists can get at the loftier things such as love, hatred, or society as a whole in an indirect way that is relatable and more valid. “No ideas but in things” is proven repeatedly by the skill and masterpiece of the modernist poems that I read. I think that literature should act in this way; it is uninteresting to see literature attack itself and it appears illegitimate in attempting to directly define grand ideals. Modernist literature gets me what I want—an examination of society or humanity that is valid and genuine.

Explication

2.
As She Passes

When I am sitting at the window,
Through the panes, which the snow blurs,
I see the lovely images, hers, as
She passes ... passes ... passes by ...

Over me grief has thrown its veil:-
Less a creature in this world
And one more angel in the sky.

When I am sitting at the window,
Through the panes, which the snow blurs,
I think I see the image, hers,
That's not now passing ... not passing by ...


(05.05.1902)

'Selected Poems' translated from Fernando Pessoa by J.Griffin.


This poem, though narrow in its explicit scope, is powerful in its technical prowess and its implicit meaning. The explicit scope of which I speak is the simple narrative of a lover/friend/admirer watching his/her lover/friend/object of admiration pass by a window, then learning of her death, then imagining the same lover/friend/object of admiration. At first, I thought that the subject of the speaker’s sight was just a person. However, this is nonsensical, as the speaker seems to become burdened with the knowledge of her death in the second stanza, and later imagines her. This sort of knowledge is not characteristic of a random observer, or even of a secret admirer. A second initial interpretation that I later refined was that the speaker-subject relationship was one of a man watching a woman. Initially, I supposed it to be two friends, but the speaker’s fixation on the actual appearance of the woman suggests a love—or at least interest—beyond friendship. The use of the first-person in the speaker is relevant in that it includes the reader in the speaker’s feelings and reactions. Rather than focusing on an object, place, event, person, or thing on its own as a third-person speaker may do, the first-person speaker allows a second focus—our (the reader) reaction to that object, place, event, person or thing. In this case, that reaction is intricately conveyed, saliently by tone. The poem’s tone is one of sadness, especially conveyed by the second stanza in line five, “Over me grief as thrown its veil:-.” Likewise, the theme of the poem is one of mourning and honoring a loved one in death by thinking of her. Though this theme is far-reaching in its accessibility to all of us, the purpose of the poem is loftier. The poem, if read in the context of considering society, could suggest that we should look to the past, because that past is still pertinent. It is even possible that this poem was an elaborate metaphor for that very message. In that case, “she” would be the progress of society. Society has its great times (her passing), and then we mourn the death of those times, only to barely miss restoring the useful ideas of the period into contemporary practicality. The blurring snow, then, could be society’s lack of introspection, or just peoples’ disregard of history. This factor is held constant in the great times and in contemporary times.


The poem is structured in a way that allows its meaning and effect to most potently be created. The first stanza features the speaker “sitting at the window, ”observing the “lovely images, hers” as she passes by the window. The ellipses in the final line of this stanza create a pace to the poem, almost simulating the pace at which “she” actually passes. This creates an effect of yearning for that person, and intensifies the conveyance of the speaker’s feelings. The second stanza is remarkable in that it does not deal with concrete imagery at all—it is completely metaphorical and abstract. This stanza explicates the speaker’s new feelings (line 5), explains the cause for the grief, and exalts the subject by asserting that, in her death, an angel is created. The third stanza, however, makes the poem. It blatantly echoes the first stanza, with its first two lines a verbatim copy of the first two lines of the first stanza. The other two lines are also similar—only slightly adapted to accommodate the death of the subject. In the 10th line is the volta of the poem, “I think I see the image, hers.” This line firmly establishes the effect of the poem as more than a simple illumination of grief, but rather, a longing for the lost, and a undercurrent of respecting and thinking of that lost one after death. The 11th line makes the sad—and especially, contemplative—tone and effect firmly established. It is also in the 11th line that Pessoa (or perhaps the translator) makes an important decision. Rather than repeat “not passes” three times to echoe the three “passes” in the first stanza, Pessoa/translator keeps the rhythm and pace of the poem by omitting one of the “not passes.” This choice is pertinent because it furthers the parallel structure in terms of the rhythm of the first and third stanzas and because it disallows the reader from being inured with her not passing; rather, it is surreal that she is not there—oddly out of place. Thus, her death is something that can be overcome, rather than something that is paralyzing. After all, the speaker is still able to return to the window and watch the passersby.

Poems Read

"An Old Man" C.P. Cavafy
"Supplication" C.P. Cavafy
"For the Shop" C.P. Cavafy
"Candles" C.P. Cavafy
"Ides of March" C.P. Cavafy
"Ithaca" C.P. Cavafy
"As She Passes" Fernando Pessoa (himself)
"Love is Essential Fernando Pessoa (himself)
"This" Fernando Pessoa (himself)
"I Know, I Alone" Fernando Pessoa (himself)
"Summer" George Trakl
"Trumpets" George Trakl
"The Sun" George Trakl
"II" George Trakl
"Grodek" George Trakl

Reflection (#1)

Dan Aloisio

My first reaction to almost every modern piece of poetry is a sort of awe at the poem’s pithiness. I am nearly always surprised by the brevity of each poem, and further still by the content that that poem managed to contain in such an efficient way. The poems I read were very direct, and generally commented on everyday things, places, people, and events. Because of this, I sometimes felt myself rereading poems as if to look for something with an extraordinary air to it, something “big,” so to speak. For example, C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “An Old Man,” has no war—no death even, no torrid love affair or dramatic moment. Though this may suggest a poor poem according to Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D (see Dead Poet’s Society), I actually enjoyed the poem for its mundane topic. The old man’s plight, though only briefly illustrated and mundane, is infinitely relatable and genuine. I found many of the poems rang true for me in this way.

The European Modernist poems that I looked at used techniques to compress meaning into small spaces. After all, a ninety-one word prose piece about candles could never simultaneously convey the meaning and effect of an enjoyable life moving too quickly. However, C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “Candles,” does just this. This is accomplished, in the customary manner of European Modernist poems (in my experience, at least) by the use of metaphors and imagery to create an effect, meter and lack of rhyme to create a pace that also seems brief, and action working as a conceit to show the meaning of the poem. In this case, the imagery of “golden, warm, and vivid candles” of the future contrasts with the “cold, melted, and bent” candles of the past. The meter of this poem changes by stanza, creating separation of life stages illustrated in each, while the lack of rhyme quickens the pace of the poem. The action of the poem is of the speaker not wanting to turn and see the “snuffed-out candles proliferate,” which acts as an elaborate metaphor to show the meaning of the poem.

Another aspect of the European Modernist poems that I read was that the role of the individual was stressed especially. The majority of the poems that I read were from the perspective of the first-person. This is most prevalent in Fernando Pessoa’s edict of “I Know, I Alone.” This poem is a prime example of the way that European Modernist poems somehow use an introspective approach towards a very external issue or a very real thing. While the speaker stresses how much his/her heart hurts, and how he/she alone knows that, it seems that this introspection was a ploy to get at the nature of feeling, which is explicated at the end of the poem, “Because feeling is like the sky- / Seen, nothing in it to see.”

European Modernist poems seem to have a common tone of reflection and observation—often without any normative statement forthcoming from that inspection. It is possible that this commonality is coincidental, or that I simply read all the poems in a particular state of mind, but this is unlikely. Each poem that I read seems bent on getting at what some thing is—no matter how mundane, lofty, boring, exciting, calm, or violent. This alleged disregard for subject suggests that this group was not simply looking around them to find inspiration because there was none elsewhere, but that they were looking at society from its very foundations upward.

Heart of Darkness Response

Joseph Conrad does not have seemed to buy into Emily Dickinson’s maxim that “Much madness is divinest sense.” In Heart of Darkness, the African wilderness is portrayed as mad, but the European civilizers are also crazy at times, making the characterization of madness more broad and thus strengthening the scope of the novel itself . By this portrayal, the book not only questions the nature of the British Empire, but of all human civilizations and, in a way, power structures in any form. This is consistent with the ambivalence that pervades the book, making the novel not only timeless in its scope but poignant in its unclear message about human nature.
Conrad’s intention to broadly comment on social themes is prevalent in other aspects of the work. Conrad, instead of giving most of his characters clear names, defines them by means of their occupation. There is the “manager,” “lawyer,” and “director” rather than Jack, Rick, and Davy (or whatever). It is not clear whether or not Conrad intends for these characters to simply stand for the institutions for which they are a part, or more vaguely the civilizations in which they exist. Whatever their un-naming signifies, it is clear that these characters only barely exist past Marlow’s descriptions, and that one of the few named characters—Marlow—is the one to whom we should pay attention.
The ambivalence of the work is most clear in Conrad’s physical descriptions. The land in Africa (from the view of the ship) is described as “like a spine sticking out from a man’s back” rather than as peninsulas, bays, etc. The arrows that the natives shoot at the ship as it goes through fog are also, oddly, not creating a panic, but rather, noticed because they may contain a “dangerous poison.” The constant obsession with jewelry is not really clear; the reader is never sure if the jewelry makes the blacks more attractive and noticeable to the whites, or if the whites are just out for the jewelry itself (in their first reactions, of course, given the stated purpose of ivory).
The idea of madness in the novel extends to physical sickness, from which neither race is safe. After all, there are more than a handful of sick people in the book. Marlow himself is not in good health according to the doctor, barely escaping death at the end. The Kurtz seems almost ill in his insanity, acting on impulse as if he has no superego at all. Marlow, past physical health, is mentally unbalanced in his strange obsession with the Kurtz before he even meets him. There are other suicides, cannibal references, and other instances of ailment throughout the book, but it is clear that Conrad views something in the imperial-colonial operation as inherently unstable and wrong. By this broad statement, Conrad seems to question the role of power structures in all human civilizations. The question remains, is the imperializer better off, or his the Kurtz, who is autonomous but inherently savage?

Testing 1-2-3

It works!