Monsters vs. Aliens in the Attic

Disney, the father of all animation, and now owner of nearly all animation production companies, has long been the producer of female-based stereotypes. They have assigned for generations the roles of sexual identity to girls, but as times shift and views towards women slowly become more progressive, these animated motion pictures have started producing new images of women. However, the newest version, Monsters Vs. Aliens, is still reliant on the dichotomy of "the images of "angel" and "monster" [that] have been so ubiquitous through literature"(812) in order to define female personality and identity.
In the opening scenes of the movie, we meet Susan. She is by all intensive purposes the ideal Angel of Gilbert and Gubar. Like Honoria before her, Susan debases herself in order to further her fiance. When she learns that their honeymoon will have to be postponed in order to help further her fiance's career as a weatherman, the disappointment in her doe eyes is expressive, but her words contradict her own desires. She makes sacrifices to her own happiness, because her "essential virtue, in other words, is that her virtue makes her man 'great'. In and of herself, she is neither great nor extraordinary...[she] has no story except a sort of antistory of selfless innocence based on the notion that 'Man must be pleased'"(814). Giving away her own happiness, Susan furthers the happiness of her fiance. She sacrifices her own life because as the image of the angel, she is taught to subordinate her own desires and her own life to that of others. Gilbert and Gubar write of the characteristics of the angel that "the arts of pleasing men, in other words, are not only angelic characteristics, in more worldly terms, they are the proper acts of a lady"(814) and we witness this through the expressive emotion in Susan's eyes. Her initial disappointment is suppressed by herself, as she decides to forgo her own emotions and focus on the role that society has assigned for her. Her fiance flatters her with talk of their relationship as team work, and although she fully buys the lies, it is clear that he is only concerned with himself and that "it is the surrender of herself - of her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both - that is the beautiful angel woman's key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice which dooms her"(815) to always be living in the shadow of her successful fiance.
However, before Susan is allowed to say her vows and give her life and freedom away to her man, she is struck by a radioactive meteor that causes her to grow to an enormous, monstrous size. This could not be a more clear interpretation and representation of what Gilbert and Gubar describe as the literal "monster", the antithesis to the angel. She is a literal monster now, and captured by the United States government to be kept hidden from society, and hidden from her fiance as well. While confined to a compound with the other monsters, she speaks mainly of her love for her fiance and how she wants to be reunited with him again. Once again, though she has taken on the monstrous form, she still retains the details of the angel in that she is only concerned with the man in her life.
When Susan, renamed Ginormica, begins to realize her new monster strength and use the strength to battle outerspace aliens she is finally enthused with confidence. It is her acts that have filled her with pride, no longer the acts of the man she stands behind. As her personality begins to grow and become more self-focused, her monstrous strength also begins to grow. She is growing into the role of the selfish monster woman, merely because she chooses to do something for herself and to make herself proud. When she wins her freedom and goes to see her fiance, she is rejected by him. It has become clear that her newfound success is something unappealing to him and that he does not want to live in the shadow of a woman. Because this disaster has caused her to abandon the role, and physical form, of the angel, and take on the form of the monster, she is heart broken. But this heartbreak slowly imbues her with new strength. She is now her own character, her own woman, and when the choice comes to return to her normal angel form and resume her life, or to forever choose to be the monster, she chooses the latter.
This twist, the decision for the woman to choose to the solitary, yet strong life, over the happy ending could be some sort of expression of feminism in society and the acceptability of women to achieve new roles and still be a role-model for young girls. But why must she choose between being gorgeous and loved, or hideous and alone? Are the two mutually exclusive?

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 812-825.

Foucaultian Analysis

What if you could insert your significant other into a situation full of sexual and emotional temptations and then watch how they behaved? What if you could do all this, and never have them know that you had a watchful eye on the whole scene? What if you could televise it? Modern man may have found ways to sail through the air, send messages across the globe in the blink or an eye, or send rovers to examine the terrain of far-off Mars, but we also invented the reality show, and it does not get any better than the X-Effect. The X-Effect is a show, created by MTV, in which exes who find themselves both enjoying new relationships, are thrown together for a steamy weekend. They are separated from their new boyfriends or girlfriends and forced to spend a whole weekend in a room together, talking about why their relationship failed. All the while their current loves are shipped off to another room in the hotel where they get to watch and listen to everything going on between the pair of exes.
At first glance this show does not seem to have much in common with bigger ideas behind Foucault's Discipline and Punish but in actuality there is a lot of subtext underneath that relates a silly reality show to larger concepts. Foucault discusses the idea of the Panopticon, or rather a prison that is self-disciplining. This means the prison is designed so that all the prisoners have the sense of being observed at all times, and theoretically this is going to cause the prisoners to modify their behavior to be appropriate. None of the prisoners can see each other, so there is no chance of them influencing one another. The only influence to be felt should be the effects of big brother, or rather big guarder, since the prisoners constantly feel that they are being watched. Whether they are or are not is insignificant, because the illusion is their to cause them to modify their behavior.
Foucault's argument that one's awareness of being watched will cause a modification in behavior, is not necessarily challenged with the X-Effect, but it is certainly thrown into conversation. The participants on the show are often caught by their current better-halves, and confronted with all that their lovers have seen them doing or saying to the ex-lovers. Once it has been established that everything they have done has been witnessed, we see the participants over-flooded with intense emotions of guilt and very apologetic for all they had done. Foucault would say that it is society as a whole that projects these feelings of guilt onto it's subjects and causes us to punish ourselves, so that we do not need to go through the disciplinary cycle. This is a post-modernist idea because it introduces moral relativism. Just because we discipline ourselves for doing something when we are caught, does not mean that we really regret the things we've done or that there is any sort of moral standard in a society for how we feel we should behave. We feel badly because we are told to feel badly. The participants on the X-Effect only suffer the first pangs of guilt when they are confronted with anger for the things they were witnessed doing.

Marxist Group Participation

My group presentation was for March 17th, the Marxist group. I contributed greatly to the group. First of all, I was integral in planning to meet at a particular time, as well as with Andrew, and we spent a lot of time e-mailing back and forth over our various ideas that we wanted to portray through our presentation. It was Andrew's idea to simulate a real-life market, but I added to and supplemented his ideas with my own and strived to make the presentation representative of capitalism as a whole.
During the meeting time with the group members I was very vocal, as I often am during class, with my ideas for what we should do. I had numerous ideas, such as passing out quotes from Karl Marx to members of the groups and having them interpret them to earn extra marx-cash. I then thought that we should pass out quotes to every individual member of the class, and if they are running low on resources they would then have the option of explaining their quote aloud to the class in order to earn more resources from our group, the so-called "Government". It was also my idea that one group should be the Bourgeoise group and that the rest of the groups should be wage-laborers, or Proletariats.
As far as the division of labor within our group (no pun intended), I took it upon myself to get the fake money that we would distribute amongst the groups, and also to make cookies so I could plan my own small presentation of what a commodity is by showing the intrinsic value of a commodity (ie the cookie). This way the class could get cookies and at the same time learn about how the concept of Value is established according to Karl Marx.
Overall, our presentation was planned in order to let the class members demonstrate their own knowledge of Capitalism and make it fun and interactive, rather than lecturing them about the principles behind the concepts.

capital self-destruction

Will Capitalism still live on into the future? Is it possible that in thousands of years, human beings living on galaxy satellites will still be reliant upon a base of wage labor, and the ever-flowing trade of commodities? Karl Marx once wrote that "the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of product and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society"(5). Constant revolution is also another way of saying constant destruction -- the destruction of the social hierarchies that come before, and the destruction of the ruling class as a new revolution creates a new ruling class, and so on. However, once we've revolutionized so far, and become so advance there must be a point at which we top out. There must be a place where the machines are so state-of-the-art that they cannot be made more efficient, when production and input are equal. Once human beings have achieved this maximum amount of production we will still need to find new ways to encourage the market to grow, and for jobs and labor to be valuable.
A society in which human beings are totally reliant upon machinery and technology, and all work is produced through this fashion would be a society that lacked the labor-power of human beings. There would be no one to buy things, and thus the system would fail, since "the condition for capital is wage labor".
Here what Zorg proposes is in order to stimulate capitalism, and life, men must "become an appendage of the machine", by only being employed as laborers and engineers to create new machines. The destructive force that Zorg would promote would destroy all things created by man, and therefore require the machines to clean up the mess. The new machines would need to be created by someone, and this would supply human beings with jobs. This is quite an extreme measure in order to keep the market growing and capitalism stimulated. But this is nothing new, in fact Karl Marx himself wrote that "in these crises[of overproduction] a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed...society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce". To see it written so plainly by Karl Marx is to shed a new light on the character of Zorg. Yes, he is advocating for destruction and death, but capitalism is founded on the constant renewal of itself -- and there can be no renewal without destruction.
The fact that this argument takes place with a priest is very insightful. Is there a meaning behind this? The priest represents God, or mans communion with God directly. He is a symbol of religiosity -- and here he is, vehemently opposed to the ideas that Zorg is voicing about capitalism. But what does he do? Just as Zorg, who in all his awfulness represents the ugly side of Capitalism is about the choke, and perhaps snuff out the hideousness of Capitalism with him, the priest gives him a hearty slap on the back. The slap on the back is like the slap of a new born infant to start his breathing, and here the priest is literally resuscitating Zorg and all he stands for, thus insuring the continuance of Capitalism and with it, destruction.

Marx, Karl. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Chapter 5.

Werewolf. Therewolf.

Freud was the first to suggest that the human brain contained something he called the "unconscious" and that it was "a repository of repressed desires, feelings, memories, and instinctual drives, many of which...have to do with sexuality and violence"(389). This plethora of repressed feelings could be channeled through dreams and could manifest themselves in people by showing signs of neurosis. The unconscious was something we all created internally through our first repressed act, which would have been, according to Freud's Oedipus Complex, the realization that our sexual desire for one parent was impossible, and not an acceptable feeling. That first repression, as it was referred to, would be the metaphorical sewing pattern for a huge bag of emotion that we would all end up carrying around with ourselves, whether or not we realized it.
CoCoRosie's song "Werewolf" deals heavily with a girl who was abandoned by her father at a young age, and spends her adult life helplessly searching for him, or some aspect of him to own. The song begins with the line "In a dream I was a werewolf", automatically drawing up the possibility for Freudian analysis of an unresolved Freudian complex. The band interweaves a narrative of sexuality, abandonment, and dream-like qualities to the scene they paint. Lines like "broken sun down, fatherless show down, gun hip, swollen lip, bottle sip, yeah I suck dick" are shocking to hear. It draws on Freud's idea of the Oedipus complex, and one's early suppressed desire to be sexually involved with the parent of the opposite sex. It's uncommon, and seems wrong, or offends our sense of morality, to hear a song that mentions someone's father and oral sex in the same line. But obviously the subject, because her father left, was never able to resolve the issues of the Oedipus complex and has unresolved sexual feelings towards the father figure that abandoned her. She speaks about her "schizophrenic father" and how she is "searching for {her] father's power".
Throughout the song she makes reference to the fact that her childhood was affected by the absence of a father. Lines like "evil doer doing evil from a baby carriage" and that he was "the bastard that broke up the marriage". All of this is represented through the telling of a dream that the subject is having, a dream that has now been interpreted as a repression of the pain that her father inflicted upon her when he left.
In the last full stanza, the speaker seems to be addressing a lover and her father at the same time. She sings that "I don't mean to close the door but for the record my heart is sore/you blew through me like bullet holes/ left stains on my sheets and stains on my soul" and then later refers to a stranger she sees in her dream as having "your hands and my fathers face". This type of sexual relationship, where a person has specifically chosen someone because of their similarities or resemblance to a parent can be a manifestation of an Oedipal complex that was never resolved at all. And how could it have been, when she was left without a father? Now, as an adult, she is choosing lovers who remind her of her father and who "blow through her", or leave her, just as her father did to her mother.
Constantly throughout the song there are references to the dreams that the subject is having. This song could almost be dissected and put into a dialogue of a patient speaking to a therapist. It is full of Freudian symbolism -- the unresolved sexual feelings towards a father, the over-flood of emotions (sexual and violent) through the manifestation of bizarre dreams.

Work Cited
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Dissecting my Mother

My mother was born in 1950, the second daughter to a family of three. She is the typical middle child, being somewhat left to her devices while attention was lavished on the oldest, and youngest daughters. Not only was she the middle child, forced as Freud would say, to give up her mother to a stranger, a younger sibling, when she was only two years old, but she also missed out on any affection and bonding with her own mother. My grandmother was somewhat incapable of showing love, or nurturing, and in fact my mother was never told that she was loved when she was a child.
During the early forming stages of identity my mother must have searched for something to emulate, someone to identify and someone to long for as an object. Freud said that "it is clear that in their play children repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real life, and that in doing so they abreact the strength of the impression and ... make themselves master of the situation"(433). My mother was lonely, so she created imaginary friends to play with alone in her room when she was little, taking the matter of her loneliness into her own hands. Her imaginary friends captivated her attention and alleviated her loneliness, and at that early age they seemed so real to her that even now it is hard for her to imagine they were merely a projection of what she wanted onto empty space.
Because my mother never received the type of identity-forming nurturing from her mother and father, two parents who really had no idea how to express emotions to their own children, she became stunted. This had a major effect on my mothers growth and development as she reached adulthood, because "anxiety about entry into an adult world perceived as threatening of a too fragile sense of self or anxiety that awakens either troubling memories or drive energies will propel some people to fixate at an early state of development. They will remain attached to early forms of emotional life and sexual activity.."(Rivkin 390). My mother has always suffered from a "too fragile sense of self", and this has resulted in numerous problems. (low self-esteem, drug addiction and alcoholism, inability to act selflessly, or be faithful, and problems relating to other human beings, including her own children, ect.)
So how has it affected me? Having seen my mother through eyes of a child and an adult now, I realize that I must have sensed that she was a fragile person. Whether because I chose to emulate my father, rather than my mother, or because I chose to emulate the opposite of my mother, I have tried to grow into a person that was almost too sure of self. It has always been important for me to at least believe that I am dependent and strong, but it is also possible that this sense of independence is some sort of counter I have invented to pacify myself. Maybe my mother was not the able-bodied nurturer either, because she lacked the example that she should have seen in her own mother. I am close with her, but because she never learned how to be a mother truly. she has instead always taken the place of a best-friend, someone I was very very close to but did not offer the unconditional emotional support. At times I've been angry with her because of this, but I realize her inability to truly relate to her children with unconditional love as their mother is not really her own fault, but the fault of her own family that never accepted her unconditionally.

"Part Five Psychoanalysis and Psychology." Literary Theory : An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin. By Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2008.

Every good story needs its antagonist and protagonist, just like every yin needs its yang. Without white, black does not exist. Without evil there can be no true concept of good. We as human beings require things to contrast, be opposites, in order to understand their values, or meanings. Just in the way that polar opposites are used to form one anothers' meanings, so are signs used to reflect back upon each other. They are capable of mirroring back an image of the sign that perhaps would be exist without its counterpart. As Saussure states, "The two elements are intimately united, and each recalls the other"(61).
Jennifer Aniston is America's good. She is our signifier for ideas of faithfulness, wholesomeness, and wrongly harmed. When Brad Pitt, the man of men, left Jennifer Aniston to begin his steamy affair with Angelina Jolie the world was aghast, and quickly sides were taken. The image of Jennifer Aniston as America's sweetheart was solidified in the eyes of the people, because she was no longer a woman who had everything we women wanted, but now she was a woman who had had it all and lost it -- and worst of all to that bitch, Angelina Jolie.
And thus Angelina Jolie's image was shaped. Stunningly gorgeous and seductive; these things had already been associated with her before the Brad hit the fan, but afterwards she became a signifier for the concept of a home-wrecker. We contrasted her dramatically with Jennifer Aniston, because she was not just another woman, she was her opposite. And this was not just a breakup, it was a battle between good and evil. And evil was winning, how could that happen? How did we craft Angelina Jolie into a representation of evil. and Jennifer Aniston the poster-girl for good, for the sanctity of marriage?
Not only was this a real life story, but these signs were adapted by the media. These women were perverted into a form of culture in itself -- now we could buy our "team Aniston" and "team Jolie" t-shirts, not to mention the near hundred of magazine covers that featured the face-off between these two ladies.
Angelina Jolie's image was corrupted to that of a homewrecker, because many of the public, especially women that had been jilted of cheated on by men, made her the signifier for all their worst enemies -- the women that their husbands or boyfriends had cheated on them with. Had Jennifer Aniston never been in the picture, would we have still rejected the relationship that Angelina Jolie has formed with Brad Pitt, or would we condone it whole-heartedly?