Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, was quite an interesting movie. The movie follows a series of irrational and rational events that eventually lead up to the destruction of the entire world as we know it. The film beings with General Jack Ripper ordering his soldiers to go forward with Plan R. According to the film, the general had total say in when to unleash Plan R when they see it necessary without the approval of the president, but as the audience finds out later on, the reason for which General Ripper gave the okay was illogical. He felt as if the Russians were polluting “precious bodily fluids” through fluoridation in US water. The idea of giving a general the green light to attack an enemy when no other person of higher power is available seems like a logical idea because one can assume the general knows best and will have the country’s best interest at heart as well. However, once the general explains the reasons and threats he feels imposed by Communism, it makes the audience and his executive officer, RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, question his sanity. Personally, I felt like Mandrake was the only person that made sense in the entire film. Plan R was a dangerous and risky plan to go along with and make sure this was really happening, Lionel decided to double check with headquarters and after realizing no such order was handed down from higher authorities, he decided to confront Ripper, which of course leads to him being locked inside the room with him. Throughout the film, Mandrake tries to reason with Ripper and to tries to get the three letter coded needed to bring back the plane. Another moment he uses logic and reason was when he told Colonel Bat Guano that if the president wanted to talk to Ripper, and Ripper is dead, wouldn’t it make the slightest sense to talk whoever is one step beneath him, which is him?

While reading the introduction of Simon Critchley’s ABC of Impossibility it reminded me of this post I saw a while back. It went along the lines of a teacher asking the student what the author meant by “the curtains were blue,” then with the teacher explaining that it represented depression or something of that sort, when in reality the author was just trying to say the curtains were blue. However, Critchley was probably not going entirely into this oversimplification direction. Instead he was trying to tell his readers that sometimes it is difficult for us to decipher what the poet is trying to convey in their piece of work because of our “sickness of the eyes.” This phrase refers to everything we were taught by society or our peers and the process of us using/enforcing that into the work in order to make sense of it. To truly get into the nitty grittiness of the work –of its true meaning- we must learn how to “unlearn,” how to let loose and “see, not think.” Through the protagonist of The Daydreams of a Drunk Women, Clarice Lispector is able to illustrate the inner struggle of a woman trying to come into terms of her true identity. So by first glance, this woman is a mother, wife, and homemaker, however she believes she is far more than those three titles combined. It is quite obvious in the reading that she is not content with her current lifestyle and that she does not love her husband. It is even stated that “she was anticipating her love for the man whom she would love one day.” (810) In order to face harsh reality, she drinks. She then becomes a woman she can support and someone who can support her husband, kids and lifestyle. Liquor is her way to lose herself, to break free of society’s judgement and unlearn who she is, even if it is just for a short while.

The perspective 20^th century playwright Samuel Beckett had on the world was certainty not all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows. Through the use of dialogue and interesting characters, Endgame carefully illustrated the nihilist and absurd way Beckett saw the world and life itself. Nihilism is a philosophical concept that basically states that nothing really exists –nothing in life really has a purpose or value and therefore everything we do is pretty much pointless as well. As mentioned in the book, Endgame was written after WWII, a time period where everyone was left at a stage of disbelief and loss of faithfulness in the world. Like mentioned in class, it was hard for most to go back into having a positive outlook in the world and this state of mind is what Beckett used as a basis for his play and his characters, Hamm and Clov. These two personas embodied the absurdity and nihilism Beckett was striking at and in a few instances (I felt) they contradicted those concepts. For starters, Hamm seemed like a cold individual and most of his dialogue seemed empty –as if he didn’t really have a care in what was said because in the end it all wouldn’t mattered, or it presently doesn’t matter looking at the post-apocalyptic setting they are currently in. However, Hamm does seem to care to some extent. In the book Hamm asks Clov, “Why do you stay with me?”, with Clov responding, “Why do you keep me?” and Hamm finally answering with, “There is no one else.” (769) If Hamm were to truly uphold the nihilist principle that everything in the end is pointless, then maybe he wouldn’t have had Clov to be there in there since relationships are meaningless, but Hamm is still human. I guess in a sense we all don’t want to end up or be alone in life and Clov is the only person left. But then again, maybe Hamm is just acting out of self-interest since Clov is the only person whose legs are able to move. In regards to dialogue and language, Beckett is quite repetitive and uses this technique to show how mundane and monotonous life can be. Using a nihilistic tone challenges the audience to see the intended vision, but at the same time it could spark interesting questions/ideas/concepts within them.

Usually, when one thinks about the concept of a film, they would expect for it to follow a common “logical” order. Maybe the film will start at the beginning of the plot, followed by a middle and ending where the problem of a protagonist is solved or the day is saved. Or maybe the film begins at the very end of the order and works its way back into the beginning, solving mysteries of why certain things happened in that order throughout the film. However, in the films: Un Chien Andalou and Ballet Mécanique, the audience may be taken back a bit at what is played before their eyes.

   Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel, had no real order or central plot one can grasp and follow throughout the film. The film sort of jump from one time setting to another and the scenes tended to flow randomly. For example, there is a scene where a woman is trying to escape from the hands of a man and all of a sudden he is trying to pull the weight of two pianos with horses (donkeys?) with bleeding eyes on top, two men and two pumpkins to try to reach her. It could easily be said that the film made no sense, but following surrealist ideals the film achieved its cinematic purpose by abandoning that logical flow of rationality and allowing their audience to let their imagination run wild.

   Ballet Mécanique was also a tricky cinematic piece. The film, created by Fernand Leger, had elements of Dadaism and Futurism. The film carried a repetition of scenes involving machinery and women. Regarding Dadaism, it could be said that the film carries no meaning real whatsoever. It’s just simply a repetition of scenes, however while it is irrational, it still provokes a reaction. Ballet Mécanique also represents progress and technology through the scenes involving machinery –moving forward and further away from the past.

Diary of a Madman, by Lu Xun, tells the tale of a man who returned back into society after being away for thirty years due to a medical illness issue. One day, as he was taking a stroll outside, he could not help but notice that his neighbors and the neighborhood children were whispering about him and this made him have his guard up because he felt like he was being attacked. Later on, the man realizes that these people are cannibals, through having an odd experience on the street, overhearing a conversation his elder brother had with a farmer and by digging through history books. Once knowing this, the man fixes all he sees and experiences to follow this idea. There comes a moment where the man tries to take a step back and rationalize the whole situation, but in the end he comes to accept the fact that most, if not everyone, is practices cannibalism, including his very own brother. It hurts the man to see his brother conformed into such practiced. He says, “Since, he’s a human being too… does it even though he knows it’s wrong?” (249) He later confronts his brother and asks him why he decided to join this group and if he even knows that the other members can easily turn onto him (the brother) whenever they see fit. He pleads his brother and the other cannibals to “change from the bottom of [their] hearts” (252) because if they don’t, someone else will do the job for them.

To tie it to Kafka’s The Judgement, the man in Diary of a Madman and Georg both had to confront society. In the case with Georg, he lost control as to following the norms of society therefore driving him towards his death, whereas the man tried to take control of the situation and create a spark of change (which didn’t really work, but he tried). Another tie that I saw was how much of the authors personal life was poured into the readings. For example, in The Judgement, Kafka sort of split himself between Georg and his friend to discuss the choice between his passion for writing and society norms and Xun became the nameless man to fight against and change Chinese society’s “norms”.

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels immediately sets up the reoccurring theme for their readers by the first line, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Since the beginning of time, there has always been conflicts between classes. In the work of Marc and Engels, they bring into light on the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat after the fall of feudal Europe. The bourgeoisie were essentially successful businessmen/women. Marx and Engels felt that, “the bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (Chapter 1). So in other words, they felt that in the end, money was becoming more valuable to the bourgeoisie than anything else –including the well-being of the proletariat. And also, everything seemed to be in the economic favor of the bourgeoisie due to innovations in technology and colonialism. The proletariat were the salaried employees of the bourgeoisie. They were exploited by the bourgeoisie since they were used only when it financially benefited the bourgeoisie. The proletariat were tired of being reduced to nothing, and they united and revolted against the bourgeoisie. It is then that Marx and Engels state that it is a battle between the “oppressing and oppressed classes.” As stated in G.W. Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic, this relationship between the master-slave/ oppressor-oppressed is a complicated one. Without one, the other is inexistent. Without the proletariat, the bourgeoisie cannot make a dime and vice-versa. Then comes the question of who needs who the most or is it possible to live without the other? Both G.W. Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, relate to the idea of dualism. We have these to binary oppositions, the oppressor and the oppressed, the master and the slave, and each piece of work explains how they need the other to remain as they are.

The Three Spinners, recorded down by the Grimm brothers, focuses on the chain of events lived by an idle girl. The folktale begins with a mother losing her temper and beating up her daughter because she was being quite lazy. The Queen passed by hearing the daughter’s weeps and because she was ashamed, the mother told the Queen her daughter was weeping due to the fact that she was not able to continue spinning because they were too poor to have flax. The Queen impressed by the daughter’s desire to work promised to take care of the daughter and sponsor the flax. If the daughter were to complete the spinning three floors of flax than she would be able to marry the prince. Of course, being as lazy as she is, she had no idea how to spin and bargained three women to spin for her in exchange for an honorary seat and recognition at the main wedding table. All of the flax was spun and eventually wedding bells began to ring. On the day of the wedding, the bridegroom spotted the three women, aka the “aunts”, and pointed out how deformed their bodies were caused by flax-spinning. He got scared for his wife’s sake and decided to “neither now nor ever shall [the] beautiful bride touch a spinning-wheel.” (920)

As mentioned in the beginning of the German Folktale section, the tale illustrates how “the different social classes have strikingly different relationships to work, and…what its happy ending [means] to those facing a life of hard and unrelenting labor.” (918) In retrospect, this tale was not really focusing on the difference between classes, but rather the differences between beauty and ugliness by examining how highly beauty is valued. For example, the idle girl in the tale was poor (“…you shall have my eldest son for a husband, even if you are poor” (919)) and so were the three women. Regarding class, these women were on the same level; the only difference here were the body deformations of the three women caused by flax-spinning, making them “ugly” compared to the girl who never really touched the spinning wheel. Even the prince was frighten for his wife’s sake once he knew of the deformations. He immediately announced to never let her touch the wheel again for fear of her losing her beauty. Working hard was in both ends rewarded, however beauty took it a bit further. This folktale goes along with the theme of dualism and gives another example of the different ends of the beauty and ugly spectrum.

Compared to other poetic works during the Romantic era Charles Baudelaire’s, A Carcass, was jaw-dropping and eye-opening. Baudelaire went against the idea of writing about the beauty of nature stating, “I find myself incapable of feeling moved by vegetation (467),” however kept that theme of dualism flowing in his art. Through my perspective in A Carcass, Baudelaire was able to examine the beauty in death (which is part of nature, but not the physical aspect he disagreed with), “And the sky cast an eye on this marvelous meat/ As over the flowers in bloom (471).” Baudelaire uses such grotesque imagery not to make his readers cringe of imagining such a sight, but to instead appreciate it and use it as another method of communicating inner thought. For example, comparing life and death by using grotesque and beautiful imagery.

In the Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Women-Citizen, Olympe de Gouges argues to its readers that the reason that the French Revolution was fought was so that its citizens, both man AND woman, can achieve economic and social equality. The revolution got rid of its monarchy pyramid and decided to start fresh, with its citizen debating and deciding who and how the new government should be governing. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, served as an outline to describe its citizen’s general rights and de Gouges uses this document as basis to show that the rights must be extended to women as well. De Gouge argues that men and women are created equally (“… he claims to enjoy the revolution and reclaim his rights to equality, in order to say nothing more,” (24)) and questions men to explain to her where and when exactly did men conclude that they were superior to the opposite sex. Compared to the other two pieces, de Gouges’ work calls out and asks for the support of women to start fighting for their natural rights, (“O women! Women, when will you cease to be blind?” (27)) The language of her work is pushing to empower women, (“Whatever be the barriers against you, it is within your power to cross them; you only have to wish it.” (27))

Nelly Rojas Marin

The thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment (as Immanuel Kant puts it) tried to let the public know it was time for them to start thinking for themselves and free themselves from under the authority of “guardians” that do the thinking for them. The Enlightenment was a mental and philosophical revolution. Thinkers like Kant understood how difficult it may be for an individual to “work himself under tutelage which has become almost his nature” (106), however it is vital for them to start reasoning and to start making their own choices in order to grow as an individual and as a community. A quote that really caught my attention was, “If we are asked, ‘Do we now live in an enlightened age?’ the answer is, ‘No,” but we do live in an age of enlightenment.” (Kant 108), because enlightenment was not yet achieved. There was still a large population that had to take that first fall and experience for themselves what the real world is like.