Nature and Wilderness

 Into the Wild (2007)

The movie Into the Wild is the true story of Christopher McCandless and his journey to Alaska. He grew up with very wealthy parents and he went to Emory University where he was a top student and athlete. While his parents wanted him to go to law school, he had dreams of living off the land in the middle of Alaska. He took lots of classes focusing on global social consciousness so he had a different social construct of nature. He truly valued the wilderness and he wanted to "be free" from society. McCandless donated his money to charity, got rid of his belongings and set off on his adventure. It took him over 2 years to finally get to Alaska where he lived out of an abandoned van where he eventually died. He journaled during the whole process and that he how we know of his story.

All 3 movies show how different groups of people viewed nature and the wilderness very similarly but at different degrees. Never Cry Wolf shows how we can learn from our environment and animals. Tyler was sent out to the Arctic to study wolfs and how they are surviving without the caribou in the area. He was expecting to find some sort of mass murderer who has been killing the caribou population, but he did not find that at all. He sees how the wolves have adapted to their environment and now hunt mice for food. To really get immersed in his research, Tyler starts to eat mice for every meal to be like one of them. He soon realizes that humans have more of a negative impact on the land and the wolves who has a large role in the Arctic. 

Comparing this to Into the Wild, humans have an impact on our environment whether they are out friends and family or complete strangers. McCandless' family and friends did not want him to set out on his great adventure to Alaska, but he went anyway. In order to help him get to Alaska, he worked odd end jobs for strangers to get money and food. After 2 years of making his way up North, he finally reaches the Alaskan wilderness and coincidently finds an abandoned bus to live in. During these 2 years, he journals and really reflects on what life is really about. All of his writing related back to the wilderness and how humans need to connect with it. For example, he wrote "You are wrong if you think joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has places it all around us. It is everything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living." He wants people to realize that there is more to life than just have human connections. People need to get out and get lost in the wilderness in order to find true joy and to find out who they really are.

The movie Night Moves takes preserving the wilderness to an extreme. A group of 3 people set out to blow up a dam because they fill that technology has taken over agriculture and no one has been listening to their protests on protecting the land. The film does not focus on the actual event of bombing the dam, it really drags out the process of getting the supplies and planning the "attack" and then finally the backlash and result from the bombing. While the group thought that they were doing something good for the Earth, they ended up killing a person in the process. The guilt, sorrow, and fear the group had after the fact was overwhelming to the point where one of the characters had to run away and change his name and essentially start over. That is very similar to what McCandless did when he set out to Alaska. He did not want any of his family to find his, so he changed his name to Alexander Supertramp. On his adventure, he is so caught up in the wonderlust of the wilderness in Alaska which ultimately leads to his death. His desire to be free from society and to fulfill that freedom is what's driving him to the wilderness. While he has this goal, it leads him to a slow and painful death due to starvation. Both films show the build up of the goal than actually focusing on that goal the entire time.

Ovall, all of the films show how people value the wilderness and nature. We can learn a lot from our everyday surroundings, but actually getting out and experiencing the outdoors can be good for the soul. As McCandless wrote, "The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure" and I think that it's true. People get excited about experiencing new things and nature is full of unknowns. That is why people are so drawn to it.

Off the Road (Roget Ebert)

Following his Trail to Danger and Joy (New York Times)

Communication and Media

 The Circle (2017)

The movie The Circle is about Mae Holland who lands a job at the world's largest tech and social media companies. Those who work at the circle have really created their own network society where they eat, sleep and breathe off of what their smart devices tell them to do and how to improve their lives. All of this information is tracked on a massive blockchain for everyone to see across the world.  The CEO of the circle wants to launch an experiment and wants Mae to be the main test subject. The experiment is about being 100% transparent online and it pushes the boundaries of privacy, ethics and personal freedom.

Communication and media is constantly changing and evolving. In the past 50 years a lot has changed for better and, in a way, for worse. In The Post, newspapers were one of the main sources of news. People got the paper delivered to them everyday typically once a day. Most households at this time had a television so they could keep up to date watching the news as well. The newspaper kept people involved in public discourse and people really paid attention to it. Not to forget that newspapers were a big business relying on subscriptions and ad money to fund it. Comparing newspapers to The Circle, news and information can be looked up within seconds. Changes can be noted almost instantly on the internet whereas a newspaper can be updated the following day. The Circle can actually view what's going on as it is happening since Mae is wearing a camera 24/7. It's being funded by people who watch her stream and those who purchase circle products and subscriptions.   

Social media has also taken news and information to the next level. In The Social Network, we see the humble beginnings of Facebook which is the leading social media platform in the world with 2.23 billion users. Facebook was only meant for college students to connect and keep up to date on who's dating who and what people are up to. Mark Zuckerberg did not have the initial intentions to make the platform worldwide. The Circle takes this idea and extremely pushes the limits. The circle wants Mae to be 100% transparent to the point where she wears a video camera all day everyday and the footage is shown live on social media. People become so obsessed with watching her life that they will go up to Mae and act like they are best friends when Mae does not even know the person. In this case, social media has altered reality so much that people do not know what is "real" and where that line is drawn.

While The Circle is a fiction movie, it does reflect what is going on in the media today. People are becoming very consumed with social media and the instant gratification that comes with it. Social media companies want to know more about us so they can change algorithms and push predictive ads so they can create "online egos" of every of us to get us to buy certain products, change our beliefs, and control our lives. I think watching The Post and The Social Network then The Circle is a great way to show where media was and where it is going today. Communication and media is constantly changing and new platforms are always being created by using technology and innovation.

The Circle (Roger Ebert)

Film Review: 'The Circle' (Variety)

Postmodernism

 Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

In the movie Austin Powers in Goldmember, British spy Austin Powers learns that this father has been kidnapped and must travel back to 1975 to bring him back. He must defeat a Dutchman named Goldmemeber who has been working with Dr. Evil, Powers' arch-nemesis, in order to save his father. 

While the Austin Powers trilogy is filled with raunchy jokes and innuendos, it is a great example of postmodernism for many different reasons. The first and most obvious is the intertextuality used throughout the film. This is essentially a parody to the James Bond movies from coping the image of the villian, naming Goldmember after Goldfinger and Powers' car turning into a submarine. Meta is also briefly used in the film at the very beginning where we see Powers jumping out of an exploding helicopter and when he turns around, we see that it's Tom Cruise instead of Mike Meyers. As the scene ends, we hear someone yell "cut" and the camera widens to show a movie set where Steven Spielberg is directing the movie about Powers' life.

Postmodern films clearly aren't all that serious. In the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, postmodernism is used in a playful way such as in Austin Powers in Goldmember. To show this, the film primarily uses graphics from vintage Japanese video games to show that Scott Pilgrim's world isn't entirely "real life." Pilgrim's main goal is to kill all of Ramona's ex lovers in order to win her over so each ex that he kills he earns points like you would while playing a video game. This concept is very random and the film does not follow a typical narrative arc. The beginning of Austin Powers in Goldmember also has that feeling of randomness to it as well. After seeing the movie set, Powers jumps into a musical setting where he references to Singing in the Rain by dancing with umbrellas. Then the scene jumps to an orchestra playing the song that he's dancing too. Powers continues to dance and ends up on set of a Brittany Spears music video. This all truly does not make one bit of sense, but that's the point. Postmodernism has a sense of uncertainty and show that there are no generic rules to anything. While it might be unsettling, it is meant to shake our beliefs and show that things don't have to be a particular way.

While La La Land was a bit more sophisticated, it still exemplifies postmodernism. The film is very nostalgic from the 1930s text used throughout the film to the brightly colored costumes worn. It feels like you are watching an old Hollywood musical since it references films including Singing in the Rain, West Side Story, and Grease. Austin Powers in Goldmember also references to Singing in the Rain and to multiple James Bond movies including Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die and many others. The movie also referenced a lot to hip hop which was very popular in 2002 when the film came out. The text throughout the film was also used in the 70s which also made it have a psychedelic vibe. Both films had references back to pop culture which revolve around simulacra.

Got Lots of Mojo, Needs a Little Love (New York Times)

Austin Powers in Goldmember (Robert Ebert)

Justice and Geographies of Power

The Social Dilemma (2020) 

The film The Social Dilemma is a documentary that dives into the fears and pitfalls of social media and how it affects today's society. Jeff Orlowski, the director of the movie, interviews multiple executives from top social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest to hear their side about the functions on the sites that they created and how they ended up taking control of 2 billion people's lives. This panopticon, otherwise known as Big Brother, has been tracking our data to essentially create a 'digital ego' of ourselves to predict our wants and needs. These platforms have so much power and have manipulated human behavior to the point where we do not even need to talk to each other. We just open up apps to get our daily news and entertainment intake, browse and shop around on predictive advertisements, and obsess over getting likes and comments from people we do not even know to be rated on popularity. 

While Fruitvale Station and Son of Saul have very different plot lines compared to The Social Dilemma, there is one thing that is the same: while it may not be in sight, the fear still lingers. In Fruitvale Station, Oscar Grant was an unemployed African American man who was trying to get his life back on track. He had been in prison before and he knew he did not want to go back or get involved with the police again. When he had his altercation with the police, he tried to plead his innocence when all of a sudden he got shot in the back by one of the officers. Many people on the train captured video of the incident on their cell phones which was then spread around social media. As mentioned in The Social Dilemma, information can spread very quickly and cause social change. Since the videos of Grant's encounter spread around Facebook, it caused protests all over the country demanding social justice and police reform. Without the power of social media, the Fruitvale Station story would not have been looked at.

Son of Saul was very much so based on mind control and inflicting fear onto those who were not involved with the Nazi party. Saul was a Sonderkommando member who worked for the concentration camps that killed other Jews in gas chambers. The film is very personalized to Saul's experience working in the camp so much so that sometimes main characters are unidentified for quite some time to demonstrate the psychological chaos going on in that environment. This can somewhat be applied to The Social Network because people follow bloggers and influencers on social media and grow attachments to these people that they do not even know. Common people are consumed by these influencers that they think they know every aspect of their life when they really only know what they see on their screens. This psychological chaos is caused by social media and is changing the way people interact, shop, and believe in. 

The Social Dilemma (Roger Ebert)

'The Social Dilemma' Review: Unplug and Run (New York Times)

"Fruitvale Station" and the Weinstein Company's Push for Social Justice (Mother Jones)

Son of Saul (Roger Ebert)