September 25, 2008

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom; Director Steven Spielberg

The implicit racism towards Asians in The Temple of Doom may or may not have been a way of ridiculing racism and stereotypes; whether it was or not, I do not think that employing stereotypes of any kind becomes okay simply because you do not actually believe those stereotypes. Even if we intend our behavior ironically, others have no way of knowing that we are being ironic, unless we always make a point of saying so. Even if we did this, ironically reinforcing stereotypes or racism perpetuates their existence, thereby exacerbating the problem. While completely eradicating stereotypes and racism may be improbable, diminishing their prominence is feasible. It’s important, then, to do what we can to demote binary ways of looking at the world.

One of my brothers makes racist jokes quite frequently; claiming that he does not really adhere to racist attitudes, he thinks making these jokes is okay. Although my brother does not believe he is at all racist, he has often, quite seriously, made derogatory remarks about others because of their race. One time he ranted about some African Americans who were standing in the middle of the street while he was driving; they were giving him a hard time and wouldn’t move. He reiterated the offensive comments he exchanged with them; somehow, the fact that they so rudely blocked the road and refused to move was relevant to their being African American, thereby warranting racist remarks.

Even if we think we do not truly believe stereotypes, stating them ironically on a continual basis (as well as hearing them) begins to affect our attitudes. We’re so malleable that we often internalize attitudes without realizing it—even attitudes we initially believe are preposterous. In the novel Tristram Shandy, Tristram acknowledges how easily we subconsciously internalize the values and ideas we hear. Referring to the influence his father’s “odd opinions” and “skeptical notions” had upon him, Tristram gives “warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such guests [his father’s odd opinions], who, after a free and undisturbed entrance, for some years, into our brains,—at length claim a kind of settlement there…beginning in jest,—but ending in downright earnest” (Sterne 38).

Melissa Brooks

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Pgs. 231-293

The strange man tells Boku, “When Karl Marx posited the proletariat, he thereby cemented their mediocrity” (113). I think Murakami is critical of menial labor, and perhaps any work that constrains people to rigid schedules that are out of sync with a person’s “natural” rhythms. What I mean by this is that many jobs are on a fixed schedule and consequently, every other activity in people’s lives work around this fixed schedule, even sleeping—rather than waking up because we are well-rested, we wake up to alarm clocks so we can be at work on time. It also could just be any job that begins to usurp a person’s own will (for instance, the strange man says his life has no purpose without the boss). As far as I can see at the moment, this criticism seems to pertain to pretty much all work other than that of the artist (writer, painter, sculptor, dancer, etc.), who has the freedom to work based on his or her own personal schedule. All other jobs seem to “dampen the spirit,” in a sense; this explains Boku’s unwavering daily routine, passivity and apathy before he embarked on the wild sheep chase.

The allegiance we submit to jobs we don’t really care about prevents us from “really living.” The manager of the dolphin hotel says, “I sometimes wish I could go off in search of something…I always thought that’s what life is like. An ongoing search” (194). Although he wants to go search for something, he never does. He stays tied to the hotel. Boku’s girlfriend also suggests that the marrow of life is in searching: “This is just the sort of thing I love. Let me tell you, it’s more fun than sleeping witch strangers or flashing my ears or proofreading biographical dictionaries. This is living” (171). Here, the girlfriend refers to each of her three jobs, with which she’s dissatisfied. On this sheep chase, however, she is really living. Murakami may be suggesting that each of us has to search for something…what that something is, I’m not sure. It could be meaning, truth, ourselves, maybe all of these, or something else. But whatever it is, we have to keep searching, because this search gives us spirit; if we get wrapped up in the mediocrity of jobs we don’t really care about, we lose this spirit.

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami Pgs. 1-150

“There are symbolic dreams…that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities…that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councilors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers” (67). This quote makes me think that dreams belong to another, very real, tangible world, separate from our own. The narrator’s life in this book symbolizes a dream from this other world. In this world, there is nothing unusual about a “sheep that by all rights should not exist,” has a star-shaped birthmark, a will of its own, and possesses people to enact its will (112). We have a tendency (at least, I think we do) to reserve all the bizarre, unusual phenomenon, people, or things for dreams. We shirk them in our daily lives and when we encounter them, we hesitate to accept them as real; we try to logically explain them away. But if dreams are real, (and even if they’re not) then everything that’s bizarre (this sheep, for instance) is real as well; maybe they just slipped out of the dream world into our own, just as we slip out of our world into the dream one.

I can’t help but think that our disbelief in the bizarre is debilitating. Our unwillingness to accept things that seem beyond reason has made the world “mediocre,” as the Strange Man says (113). The narrator is only “half-living” because he is stuck in this mediocre world: “Nothing changed from day to day…I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept” (40, 20). He sleeps so often in this text (or at least mentions it so much), and I think it’s because the dream world of the bizarre is preferable to the mediocre reality we’ve created that excludes all that is illogical. If we (and the narrator) allow the illogical into our reality, we’d be more content living in it.

September 4, 2008

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

“Language and imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human” (In Good Faith, 396). I think Rushdie is indicating that our ability to think at such an extraordinary level, and to imagine things and ideas beyond what we see makes us human. Forcing ourselves, forcing language and imagination into a narrow cell makes life mechanical. If we were to lose our imaginations, there would be no source for new ideas and our minds would stagnate. The good of stories that aren’t even true then, is partially that they exercise the imagination, thereby stimulating the mind and enabling us to grow as individuals—they make us human. The sea of stories exemplifies growth as a fundamental aspect of life. Because the stories were “in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive” (72). The stories were alive because they were constantly evolving; restraining imagination sucks a little bit of the life out of us; we become a little less human. Like objects, we become a little easier to define and categorize.