Cultural Events: becoming: Hillary Erin Russell at Gallery 924.

On April 3rd, in Indianapolis, Indiana, I attended the opening of the very first solo art show of Hillary Erin Russell, "becoming". I've been following Hillary's art for about eight years, since she was first starting out as a Photography major at Shepherd. Her art (or HER's art, if you like funny acronyms) covers many of the walls of my house. Hillary, incidentally, is my sister.

Her art deals with pornography, and how it's images can relate to her own feelings, as well as her own personal stories. One of the most striking pieces is a folding table we had bought for her on clearance at Target. In it, she has carved the names of every girl she had a crush on, growing up in the closet in West Virginia. Her art touches a lot on her experience as a lesbian, and it happened that her show was scheduled for the weekend after that law was passed in Indiana allowing for discrimination against gay people by local businesses.

I think that her art was the perfect amount of provocative at the perfect time to really  effect culture. She was featured in several local publications, including Indianapolis's biggest gay newsletter. Her opening was packed, and it seemed to garner a really positive response. I think that going out and exhibiting art that deals with lesbian issues, in one piece she used photos from OKCupid and gold-star stickers to obscure faces of the women she met, is very important to create understanding of the struggle of lesbians.

Cultural Events - Natural History Museum

On March 14th, I also visited the Natural History Museum on the DC mall. The main reason for attending this museum was the current exhibit on Indian-American culture, showcasing the struggle of Indian immigrants to be successful in America. Featured was a large wall of famous Indian Americans, including M Night Shyamalan, and Mindy Kaling. At the end of the wall was a sign that said "email us if we missed any Indian American trailblazers". I noted to my girlfriend that Aziz Ansari was conspicuously absent from the wall. She pointed out that it was a wall of Indian American firsts, and we couldn't think of anything he was the first to do.

The exhibit also showed many cultural artifacts and religious symbols, as well as contemporary Indian American art. I thought it was very important to see art so closely linked to another culture, but still coming out of an American locale. The culture of Bollywood and of Indian Americans was on show, and as weird as it is that they placed it in the Natural History Museum, particularly with the American History Museum half empty, it was a great show of culture.

Cultural Events: American History Museum

On March 14th, I was in Washington, DC on the mall. I went, with high hopes and childhood memories, to the American History Museum. My hopes were satisfied, my memories were less so. Many of the long-standing exhibits, including the ones that covered the history of television and film, from Seinfeld's puffy shirt and Dorothy's red slippers to Oscar the Grouch's trash can, were under construction, and in their stead was a much smaller version of the same exhibit, lumping cultural artifacts from the colonial era just 20 feet away from Tony Hawk's skateboard and an old Apple II.

Regardless, the cultural importance of the items on display was great. There was a large exhibit about wartime America, which helped to connect me to the time of my grandmother's youth, as well as an exhibit on food culture in america, covering everything from the first drive-thrus to Julia Child's kitchen, remade in the museum's space. There was a large exhiibit on Edison's light bulbs, and on the invention of the Internal Combustion Engine, prompting me to give my girlfriend a long-winded explanation of why we need internal combustion engines powered by hydrogen, and how global  warming wouldn't have happened if the Hindenburg never crashed...

Being in this muesum made me feel like the "American" identifier meant a little more than I'd previously felt. It was also pretty funny to see the exhibit on First Ladies, clearly written before the 2008 election, juxtapose the question "Who will be the First Lady to the first female president?" next to a photo of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Cultural Events - Quilt Exhibit at Scarborough Library

On March 11th, I went into the Scarborough Library to see what the "Quilt Exhibit" that had been run on our calendars all semester was. I was surprised to find, after looking at all the quilts, that they were all made by the same woman, Phyllis Nichols Rowe, when I picked up the program. I was also confused by the date listed on the program indicating that the event should have ended months ago, but that's alright.

I never understood quilts. I've been perpetually confused by what the meeting point between art and blanket is, and why anyone ever thought to make such a thing anyway, but then I remembered that I own 4 different zebra-print blankets, and figured that's probably weird to someone who likes their blankets in basic beige. Quilts, I suppose, must be a fashion, but one that comes from a cultural background that I don't really understand. I respect, however, the artistry and effort that goes into a quilt. I don't think I would be able to machine-sew a quilt, much less hand-sew and embroider a story into each panel.

So I suppose the great value in this exhibit is helping to explain the artistry and  culture behind quilting to people like me who are completely ignorant of the form.

Cultural Events - March 7th - Laurel Art Guild 46th Annual Juried Open Exhibition

On March 7th, I attended the opening of the Laurel Art Guild 46th Annual Juried Open Exhibition at the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland. The program celebrated local artists in the Prince George’s County and Montgomery County area. Many great works of art were on display, primarily photographs, paintings, and drawings, alongside a small handful of digital art and mixed media. The event was attended by most of the artists featured. It was interesting to see so many people able to walk up to the artists and ask questions.

I felt this event was culturally important because local art events show the world that the gallery is not a place of elitism. Anyone can be a great artist and have a chance, and open events such as this one show that off in a beautiful way. There was no notion of superiority at this event. The curator walked the room the same way that the attending audience did, the same way that the artists did. A small handful of children were playing in the hall, and rather than scream or get upset, as one might expect from an art gallery curator, he was entirely gracious and forgiving, understanding that contemporary art is not always a child’s greatest interest.

I think that the world of art as a place of acceptance, rather than elitism, is what makes an event like this truly special and important. I hope that future art events I visit have a similar attitude.

Wrapping up 4 Inches + Concerns on Distribution

As of the time that I write this post, production has finished on 4 Inches of Danny Jefferson. The first film shoot took place on February 7th, 2015, and the final shots were taken on March 7th, 2015. In the span of the month, there were four shooting days, February 7, 24, 25, and March 7. Over 30 gigabytes of h.264 footage was shot with a Canon t3i camera on it's stock lens with custom Magic Lantern firmware to allow for live audio monitoring, paired with a shotgun mic on it's own tripod. Most of the footage has been processed and color corrected in Premiere Pro CS6, with only scene 8 remaining for editing before the film gets a final audio cleanup and is ready for a final render.

Remaining in the main part of the project is the production of a press-kit, as well as the creation of a deliverable film file and DVD. I am currently considering a few options for distribution. The three contenders are:

Free Streaming - The obvious options here are YouTube and Vimeo. While this has it's perks, there is so much content of quality on these sites that it's very easy for things to get lost in the shuffle if they aren't aggressively promoted. This is good for the audience, but not great for the creator.

Free/Premium Download - I'm very curious as to the specifics of a program like BitTorrent Bundle - where audiences can get into a project with a certain amount of material for free, then pay a small fee for a larger amount of material + extras. This is both audience and creator friendly, and the competition is sparse. Premium download for indies is also available from GOG.com, though it seems they may be more selective than BitTorrent Bundle.

VOD/DVD - Thanks to CreateSpace's Amazon ownership, getting put on DVD or Amazon Instant Video is so incredibly simple that it might as well be the same as YouTube. This comes with the added bonus of IMDB crediting, but ultimately that is little more than a piece of resume flair that doesn't impress many people in the film industry. This isn't good for the creator of the media because it's just as hard to find your media as YouTube, and the audience isn't going to be willing to pay for unproven film.

Ultimately, I'm concerned about self-promotion, and I feel that a unique method of distribution, such as BitTorrent, is more likely to draw attention than yet another indie short on YouTube.

Melodrama = Tragedy + Time

The most profoundly important writing on the subject of playwriting is Aristotle’s Poetics, which outlines the elements of a tragedy in the Greek form, with a special interest on the “perfect” play, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. In mythology, this is equaled by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which outlines the essential elements of any mythological text, from Gilgamesh and the Bible to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

Melodrama is rife with “perfect” texts, but has not been analyzed to the structure of Campbell’s mythologies or Aristotle’s tragedies. The closest thing to a structural analysis of melodrama is a series of identifiable motifs present in films of the genre, and the universal archetypes, first theorized by Carl Jung, that are present in all genres. Hollywood Melodramas are, arguably, closer to Greek Tragedies than nearly any other form. The elements that are different between the two genres reflect the differences in attitudes between the eras in which they were conceived. Tragedy is a product of a hopeful time, when gods and kings were the driving force behind society. Melodrama is the product of a cynical time, a postindustrial world where Karl Marx is more influential than god. Thus, the old adage, comedy equals tragedy plus time, is more aptly applied to melodrama than comedy.

Tragedy, in Poetics, is described as the story of a character with a high social standing, with a tragic flaw, or hamartia, that experiences a change of fortune, which in turn provides catharsis, or emotional release, to the audience.

Melodrama is, essentially the same. Class conflict is a heightened portion of the story, with the protagonist being some sort of victim to it, though a high social standing is not necessary. Many melodramas concern the middle class, and the desire for upward mobility, or the lower class, and the desire for respect. The tragic flaw that melodramatic characters have is often related to this class conflict, i.e. vanity (in American Beauty), or disillusionment (in Ordinary People). The change of fortune in melodrama, however, is reversed. Lester Burnham goes from having to worry about keeping up his vain illusion to, in his words, “waking up”. The catharsis comes from the expression of extreme emotion in a character that has previously been stoic.

The essential part of melodrama that differentiates it from tragedy is modernity. Greek tragedy, to the modernist, would be absurd and hamfisted. Melodrama is the imposition of tragic story onto a modern world.

Belongingness in Melodrama

This week, I wanted to do some research into the idea of belonging in melodrama, as a sense of familial belonging is an important element in "Four Inches of Danny Jefferson". For a critical analysis, I will discuss my own viewings of "Goodfellas" and "Ali: Fear Eats The Soul". For a scholarly background, I will be looking at Nichola Rehling's essay “It's About Belonging”: Masculinity, Collectivity, and Community in British Hooligan Films".

In Goodfellas, Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, finds belonging in his life by joining the mafia, eventually forming a sort of family with Conway (De Niro) and DeVito (Pesci). But Goodfellas is not a melodrama, rather, it is closer to tragedy, due to the fact that, unlike Lester in American Beauty, Henry is unable to choose to preserve the sacred because of his tragic greed. Thus it is my opinion that the difference between tragedy and melodrama is what Aristotle called hamartia, meaning a tragic flaw, that prevents the hero from choosing the sacred over the secular, as per Garry Leonard's essay that I reviewed last week.

In "Ali", the theme of belonging comes from Ali's struggles with racism, and his difficulty finding a place where he belongs, only ever finding happiness when with his eventual wife, Emmi. However, even this is spoiled when they return home from vacation and she begins treating his culture as a novelty for her newly-accepting friends. He only finds belonging when he and Emmi reconcile later on, though by then it is too late, and the stress of being an outsider is killing him at the end.

Rehling's work looks at British hooligan films, the type of film that the greater public knows through Trainspotting. The films discussed use violent crime as a meeting point for masculinity, youth, and identity. Identity, here, is found in the homosocial relationships between hooligans. Ultimately, Rehling's work suggests that the violence of the hooligan films comes from a desire of homophobic young men to be masculine enough to maintain strong homosocial bonds with other men without coming off as gay to anyone. Violence is a bonding point that keeps these men together, while also keeping them secure from their own homophobia.

At the beginning of my film, Danny has no real place in the world, but by the end, his place is clearly with Jenny, as a father to their unborn child. This is both a moment of belongingness, because he has found a place where he can be happy for the first time in his life, and a moment of redemption, because he gets to counter his father's parenting methods with his own.

Hollywood Melodrama: American Beauty

"Tears of Joy: Hollywood Melodrama, Ecstasy, and Restoring Meta-Narratives of Transcendence in Modernity" by Garry Leonard explores the Hollywood melodrama first by defining it in psychological and philosophical terms through the works of Freud and Marx, among others. It then analyzes Hollywood melodramatic structure, by comparing themes used in American Beauty (1999) and Broken Blossoms (1919).

The psychological and philosophical portion of the paper is a bit dull, but ultimately boils down to melodrama as an expression of sentiment and overwhelming emotion that audiences are easily able to identify with.

The Hollywood Melodramas explored in the paper are structured as follows:

Disillusioned protagonist must choose between gratification and sacrifice, ultimately choosing sacrifice.

In American Beauty, this is seen primarily in the scene between Lester and Angela, where he begins to undress her, then, upon her declaration that she is a virgin, decides instead to act in a fatherly way towards her. He has sacrificed gratification for something that is, in the film's terms, beautiful, or in Leonard's terms, sacred.

Leonard explains that melodrama takes our secular modern world, and transforms it into something sacred. In American Beauty, Lester feels an overwhelming sense of ennui and disillusionment, until he meets Angela, and she opens up to him the sacredness of beauty. He has the chance to take the beauty for himself, but chooses not to do so, sacrificing his own desires to maintain the beauty.

This essential conflict is present in many films, even those that don't seem to be melodramas at first glance.

In Fight Club, the sacred is identity, and gratification comes from anonymity. Jack is searching for something to end his own sense of ennui and disillusionment, and finds two options: Tyler Durden and Marla Singer. Tyler Durden uses anarchy as a way of creating brotherhood, hitting on the secular desire to fit in with others. Marla Singer, however, expresses herself as an individual regardless of other's feelings. Marla's sense of self is such a point of contention for Jack that he becomes a hypocrite by chastising her for doing the same things as him with the support groups. When Jack fights Angel, he succumbs to gratification, saying, in a line that foils American Beauty, "I wanted to destroy something beautiful". When Jack kills Tyler, he embraces the sacredness of individuality, redeeming his actions of gratification, and sacrificing the power he had as a leader of Project Mayhem.

In my film, responsibility is sacred. Danny quits drinking in the climax of the story, sacrificing his secular desire to remain youthful and free spirited. He could very well have continued to drink, and gratified himself, but he doesn't, because he sees the beauty in a family life and the sacredness of adulthood. He proposes to Jenny not out of obligation, as he might have at the beginning of the story, but out of a desire to experience responsibility. In this sense, I am making good on my desire to create a melodrama.

Nerd Culture and American Culture

In ."The Revenge of the Nerds", Gary Hoppenstand argues that shows like The Big Bang Theory prove that nerd culture has become mainstream. The popularity of that program is credited as showing that nerdiness is no longer something of which one should be ashamed.

While I agree with Hoppenstand's result, I do not agree with his most explored example. The Big Bang Theory may be hugely popular, but it's success may be in spite of nerd culture's mainstream appeal, rather than because of it. It is true, as the author explains, that comic books and reading are interests that receive far less chastising from peers than ever before, but this is, perhaps, not because we are willing to watch nerds on TV, but because we are willing to consume the same media as them.

The top grossing film franchise of all time is Harry Potter, #2 is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Nerdy films make money, and they have been continuously doing so since X-Men came out in 2000. The money train on nerd films shows no signs of stopping, with releases announced into 2020.

Does The Big Bang Theory portray nerds the way they want to be portrayed? In a world where nerd culture is mainstream enough for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be as successful as it is, it seems counterfactual to portray nerds as socially inept, as the show does. While there are people in the world who fit the nerd archetype that are socially awkward, not all nerds are poorly adjusted, and, it has turned out that the ones that are poorly adjusted have tended to have issues beyond an obsession with the culture.

Do people watch Big Bang Theory to empathize with the nerds, or to laugh at them? The characters aren't role models socially, though their academic careers are stereotypically impressive, so one might look to the latter. Then what are we laughing at? The characters' awkward social graces hint at some sort of psychological disorder, such as autism or Asperger's. Is that really funny?

Regardless of whether he gave a good example, Hoppenstand's point about nerds being cool stands as true, though with more credit to Hugh Jackman than Jim Parsons.

Film Bodies: Gratuitous Emotion in Melodrama.

In "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess", Linda Williams describes her theory of body genres, which are those film genres designed to use excess to create intense emotional reactions in the viewer. The genres in particular that she pinpoints in her work are pornography, horror, and melodrama. In my current work, I am particularly concerned with how these elements impact melodrama, rather than horror or porn.

I feel the need to clarify that Linda Williams is a professor of film studies at University of California, Berkeley. I clarify this because there is another Linda Williams on the administration at Berkeley, and a Linda Ruth Williams doing film studies in the UK. There is a lot of room for confusion in this area if a reader of this blog wished to go about their own research on the topic.

Regardless, Williams writes a compelling argument for the value of melodrama, but examines melodrama in a way that is perhaps far too narrow. She states that melodrama is defined by "lapses in realism, excesses of spectacle, and displays of primal, even infantile emotions, and by narratives that seem circular and repetitive." This is an adequate measure of the sensationalism of melodrama, but she goes on to say that, for the purpose of her thesis, she will look only at those melodramas that concern feminist critics, what she calls "weepies", or what we may characterize as the elements of a Lifetime Original Movie, sad movies made for women stuck in traditional gender roles. She rejects a greater definition of melodrama because it could be argued that all three body genres, pornography, horror, and melodrama, are all really types of melodrama. This misses, then, a greater genre of melodrama not directed at women under patriarchy, the type of movie that uses overly intense sensational emotions without losing it's ability to appeal to a wide audience. The prototypical melodrama play, Under The Gas Light, would struggle to stay in the genre under the feminist critical definition.

A broader definition of melodrama brings in things like crime dramas and dark comedies, but doesn't break Williams's thesis that body genres are designed to excite us through excess. Good Will Hunting, for example, could be argued as a melodrama under a broad definition. The portrayal of weeping that qualifies the film as a "spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion", does occur in the female form via Minnie Driver's character, but she is anything but a woman in a traditional gender role, and the more memorable weeping comes from Robin Williams and Matt Damon.

Another element of body genres that Williams looks at is ecstasy, expressed in melodrama as "overppowering sadness" In my film, this will be seen not in tears, as Williams's weepies would show it, but in the alcoholism of Danny Jefferson, who drinks when others might cry. Williams argues that, in all the body genres, women are the "embodiment of pleasure, fear, and pain". In my film, the main character's foil, Beth, is the expression of his pain in the sense that the audience will ask why he is depressed, then her actions will in turn give explanation.

Statement Of Intent: 4 Inches Of Danny Jefferson

For my Capstone project, I will be making my longest, most ambitious film to date: Four Inches of Danny Jefferson. I have chosen Jason McKahan as my Capstone director. I'll be moving on to graduate school after Shepherd, and this might be my last chance for a while to make a film. I've had this screenplay drafted since July of 2013, and it's received quite a bit of polish as a result of continuous drafting.

The movie will tell the story of Danny Jefferson, a nerdy college dropout (after only one semester) with a taste for collecting toys and drinking whiskey. When Danny's father dies suddenly, he is convinced to return to his hometown and attend the funeral, much to the ire of his stepmother, Beth, that's only three years his senior. When he gets home, old feelings for his high school sweet heart, Jenny, come back, complicated by her revelation that she is pregnant with his child. These factors come together to a point that Danny is forced to grow up.

I plan to also integrate some fantastical elements, such as Beth, the evil stepmother, turning into an 8-bit dragon during a wedding reception. Animation for this sequence would be a simple After Effects job with image manipulation and particle effects.

Rough idea of the 8-bit Dragon, wings would flap in final version.

So far as tools, I'm looking at editing in Premiere, doing titles and the aforementioned dragon scene in After Effects, and composing a soundtrack in LMMS's synthesizer, allowing for a mix of realistic synthesized drums and bass guitars with synthesizers that emulate the sound of Game Boy to fit with the overall nerd-culture feel of the film.

A lot of nerd-culture films and TV shows are either overly referential (Scott Pilgrim) or somewhat reductive (The Big Bang Theory). I want to make a film that integrates nerd-culture in a way that acknowledges the mainstreaming of nerd culture. Research into the mainstreaming of nerd culture would be necessary. I will also be researching the Mono-myth, as I hope to explore how a melodrama can fit into or not fit into the criteria of Hero With A Thousand Faces, despite not being a mythology per se.

A theme of the film is the idea of belonging. Danny proposes to Jenny with an action figure because he attributes a sentiment of belonging to the toy that he wants to attribute to his new family. The use of this theme in other films would be worth looking into.

Of course, to link this work to later research I have planned for graduate school, I'd like to explore Linda Williams's work in the idea of "body genres". Here, the "body genre" is melodrama, as opposed to horror or pornography. Although, Jenny's employment as stripper, and Beth's transformation into a dragon could allow for some degree of crossover, even if the dragon looks cartoonish.

Despite a 35 page screenplay at the current draft, I think that, because I have most of the cast already picked out and committed, I can begin shooting almost immediately, and burn through most of the script in a minimal amount of time. Editing will be very straightforward, and I predict that the soundtrack can probably be composed in a day or two. This gives me plenty of time to do research on the topics outlined above. I am confident in my ability to make this project work well and be well thought out.