“The Stars” by Edgar Morin and “The Hour of the Star” by Clarice Lispector
Read the short except The Stars by Edgar Morin and watch the movie trailers below. In the comment section, post 150 response to one of the trailers of the kind of Hollywood melodramas that Macabea loves (please make clear which one) as it pertains to her reality versus her imagination. Discuss how Hollywood film creates a “dream of life” and how it reminds you of the relationship between protagonists Macabea and Rodrigo SM in Lispector’s The Hour of the Star.
from The Stars by Edgar Morin, 1957
In other respects Hollywood proceeds in a mood of optimism in order to permit its public to forget the effects of the ‘Great Depression.’ The happy ending becomes a requirement, a dogma. Most films are tinted with an agreeable fantasy, and a new genre, the bright comedy, is enthroned after Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. New optimistic structures promote the spectator’s ‘escape’ and thus in one sense avoid realism. But in another, the mythic content of the movies is ‘secularized,’ brought down to earth.
Finally, already subject to the influence of the Crash (King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread) and subsequently to the progressive currents of the New Deal, the American cinema receives the full effect of social themes in all their realistic vitality (Fury, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Grapes of Wrath).
All these factors determine the evolution of the film. But this evolution itself is controlled by a still deeper current, which is the increasingly middle-class nature of the cinematic imagination. Originally a mass spectacle, the movies had taken over the themes of the popular serial story and the melodrama which provided, in an almost fantastic state, the first archetypes of the imaginary: providential encounters, the magic of the double (twins, speaking likenesses), extraordinary adventures, oedipal conflicts with step-father or stepmother, orphans of unknown parenthood, persecuted innocence, and the hero’s sacrificial death. Realism, psychological awareness, the happy ending and humor reveal precisely the extent of the middle-class transformation of this version of the imaginary.
The projection-identifications which characterize the personality at the middle-class level tend to identify the imaginary and the real and to feed upon each other.
The middle-class version of the imaginary draws closer to the real by multiplying the signs of verisimilitude and credibility. It attenuates or undermines the melodramatic structures in order to replace them by plots which make every effort to be plausible. Hence what is called ‘realism.’ The resources of realism include fewer and fewer coincidences, ‘possession’ of the hero by an occult force, and comprise more and more ‘psychological’ motivations. And the same impulse that draws the imaginary to the real identifies the real with the imaginary. In other words, the soul’s life broadens, enriches itself, even hypertrophies at the heart of middle-class individuality. For the soul is precisely that symbiotic site where real and imaginary encounter and feed upon each other; love, that phenomenon of the soul which mingles most intimately our imaginary projection-identifications and our real life, assumes an increased importance.
Now, Voyager, 1942
Leave Her to Heaven, 1945
Imitation of Life, 1959
Splendor in the Grass, 1961
The Fault in Our Stars, 2014