What Monster?

I've liked all kinds of monster movies but I've always just looked at them for entertainment. I really find it interesting to look at different monsters as metaphors. It gives a lot broader range of ideas when thinking about the movies and I feel like many writers deserve more credit for the fact that they can critique the world through such a medium. It gives issues more importance when you can see them as a physical manifestation that can have an obvious effect.

In another class of mine, we talked about how Godzilla is a famous metaphor. He represented American nuclear testing and the movie was made in protest of just that. Watching the movie before and watching it again thinking about that, it's astounding to see just how many little details there were that connected him to a nuclear bomb. The flash of light just as he attacks a ship, the radiation left in his wake. It all points at real life aspects of nuclear bombs but it does it in a subtle way.

Vampires as a manifestation of sexuality really brings up some interesting thoughts as well. The thoughts like virginity being pure and clean, while in stories vampires are corrupt and evil. Their bite takes away a persons humanity making them a vampire like having sex takes away your virginity. It's an interesting parallel that comes from the fact that vampires are a metaphor. It takes a spin off sex and turns it into this much greater reality that makes it more exciting in a way.

Monsters as metaphors really allows topics to be delved into more deeply and as I said, it's an amazing medium for writers to use. I think that finding the parallels that monsters represent allows you to understand the topics they are using and for me, it's a great way to better understand and think about from a different angle than if it was just up front.

There's No Place Like Home

When I was a kid, my sister loved theWizard of Oz, so I watched it all the time when she did. Back then, I thought that it was a flashy musical that played off the use of color versus black and white. Looking at it now, I almost feel the same way. I didn't know that it started as a book but now that I've read the book, I think the movie really just took it to make a movie.

The biggest thing for me is the fact that in the book, it's not a dream. I think that was fact changed the entire view of the story. The movie added characters and the characters in the dream paralleled characters in her real life. To me, that took away the meaning of the original characters of the book and just made them into something of her subconscious view of the new characters. There was a lot of details from the book that I thought were important enough to what they left in the movie that were still taken out anyways, such as the winkies being enslaved by the witch. They still react to the witches death but it almost doesn't make sense without a backstory. The fact that it was a dream also made the ending seem unsubstantial. She just wakes up, starts pointing out people saying you were there and you were there, looks confused and everyone thinks she's lost it, and that's the end. Even though the end of the book was very abrubt, it was still more meaningful than what the movie portayed.

I think another issue raised by the film were the slippers Dorothy recieves. In the book, with the silver slippers, it really does give some economic undertones such as the silver standard. It gives the story a lot more to think about when you go deeper and look into these facts. However, in the movie, they switched it to ruby slippers. Whatever the reasoning to that may be, I honestly feel like they did it because it was flashier to see. To me, all the movie was is something that they could sell. It pulls apart a lot of the issues you could see beneath the story of the book and just made them into something meaningless. It bothers me because I don't see a lot of what people say about how the movie brings out a psychological understanding of the character Dorothy. I get what they are saying as her dream is a challenge to authority, but I don't feel like that is actually the case. I thought the movie was just a movie and that it lost a lot of what the book was trying to point out.

Religion vs. The World

When I was young, I used to go to church with my family. Needless to say, I don't remember anything about going there. To me, it always felt forced and I never really connected with it. However, there are a bunch of stories that I remember from when I was a kid that I've come to find out are from religion. I didn't know it at the time, but they were stories out of the bible that were popularized to try to compete with a secular world.

Probably one of the biggest ones for me to find out was from the bible was Noah's Ark. I knew the story had god in it but I never realized it was specifically from the bible. Looking into the differences between the original version from the bible and the popularized version most people know, I noticed how much people get from popular culture rather than from actual church. Anytime I've ever heard anything about the story, it's always that he gathered two of every animal, a male and a female, so that he had one pair of each. In the original, he actually fourteen of every animal making seven pairs of each. I never knew that detail about the story and it makes me wonder how much religion relies on popular culture now to get out its stories into the world.

On the flipside of things, it also makes me wonder how much religion has had to change in itself in order to compete with everything else in the world. Originally, going to church was, in a way, the only form of entertainment people had. Over time, those who weren't actually devout had other things that they could do. As more people found other forms of entertainment, the church had to try to compete and its from this that more popular versions of stories in the bible were created. In order to continue spreading its message in today's world, religion must continue to find ways to grab peoples attention or else it will begin to fade as the world becomes more secular in its ideas.

My Popular Culture

There are many different aspects of popular culture which people deal with on a daily basis. In modern society though, technology shapes that culture as it becomes more advanced and newer things become available. The video game industry is a part of popular culture that changes regularly based on technology because it is so interwined with it. I love playing video games in my spare time so these changes often affect me and what I do.

I remember when I was a kid and the games I had to play were these little blocky images with 2 or 3 button to push to play. Over time, these games started get more vivid and the objectives started getting more technical but they stayed similar to older flat graphic games from the past. Then came the 3D era, bringing with it a huge shift in technology and style for games. The first ones to come out weren't the prettiest by today's standards but at the time, such technology was amazing. Games also got more complex with the controllers having more and more buttons with different functions. Moving on to today, game companies are competing to have the most visually advanced games out there and controls are almost excessive for some games. From beginning to modern times, video games have changed dramatically and quickly over time.

The reason this has affected me so much is I've grown up as these games progressed. As I get older, games are getting more advanced. They're still fairly new in the grand scheme of things, but for me, they've been there longer than me and are growing faster than me. That means I can watch as popular culture changes in the gaming industry. It's wierd to see how different things are now and what is in style for games but I still love them regardless and I'm sure that I will continue to love them for a long time.