ADORNO AND HORKHEIMER (ex) - "That is the secret of aesthetic sublimation: to present fulfillment in its brokenness ... By constantly exhibiting the object of desire, the great beneath the water ... it merely goads the unsublimated anticipation of pleasure, which through the habit of denial has long since been mutated as masochism .... It reduces love to romance ... The mechanical reproduction of beauty ... no longer leaves any room for the unconscious idolatry with which the experience of beauty has always been linked. " (111-112)

LIL SHOP GIRLS (ex) "someplace, but not here in the present, the rich are falling in love and discovering in the process that they have hearts. It is not true that they are heartless: films refute what life would make one to believe. Outside business - which admittedly would not be the right place for heart - their hearts are always in the wrong place" (300) "The business is called eroticism, and the preoccupation with it is called life" (296)

Eisten + Film Form extra: "...comparing each new image with the common denotation, power is accumulated behind aroces that can be formally identified with that of logical deduction .... the conventional descriptive form for film leads to the formal possibility of a kind of film reasoning ... this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole though process" (62)

FILM BODIES: GENDER, GENRE, AND EXCESS

1. "... the bodies of women have tended to function, ever since the eigtheenth-century origins of these genres in the Margques de Sade, Gothic fiction, and the novels of Richardson, as both the moved and the moving. It is thus through that Faucault has called the sexual saturation of the camel body that audiences of all sorts have received some of their most powerful sensations" (4)
   "these 'gross' body genres ... cannot be dismissed as evidence of a monolithic and unchanging misogyny, as either pure sadism for male viewers or masochism for females. Their very existence and popularity hingers upon rapid changes taking place in relations between the 'sexes' and by rapidly changing notions of gender " (12)
2. I found this whole reading incredibly interesting. One thing in particular that caught my attention was that despite the target audience of female bodies are used as the center of internees emotion intended to create a physical reaction in the spectator. It would be interesting to unpack how this relates to Muvley's theories on the spectator being a heterosexual male.
   I learned a lot of new things in this essay as I had never considered how porn, horror, and the melodrama would be related as at first they seemed to be to be very different genres of film. However, in reading this I learned how they operate on similar principles - excess, the female body as the cite of this excess, etc. - while also all functioning as a way of reframing society, especially as we relate to gender.
   Regarding more questions I have, I think it would be fun to unpack how the roots of these three genders could be found in literary movements such as Gothic fiction.
3. I found this scene from Me Before You to be particularly interesting since, first, it shows the example of a female body being the cite of intense emotion as Louisa watches Will die. However, this can also serve as an example of a more complex portrayal of gender on a number of points. For one, Will is the one dying and this puts in Louisa in a place of power while also using her as the site of emotional insanity. She makes the decision to stay with him while he dies, serving as a comfort and source of strength in his most vulnerable moment. Two, in their body positioning Louisa is above Will, which certainly has some sexual overtones but again it places her in a more position of power. Also both parties are equally vulnerable and emotional which is a more complex portrayal of masculinity.
   Will Death Scene

JEAN LOIS BAUDRY AND "THE APPARATUS" by noel carroll

1. "... the unconcious has instinctual desire to manifest itself to consciousness. This suggests that cinema is one means of fulfilling this instinctual desire. For in simulating dream, cinema satiates the desire of the unconcious for aknowledgement" (Caroll 782)
2. From this reading, I was able to understand the fallacies with Louis-Baudry's claims regarding the claims about film as an expression of something innate to the human psychological experience. That being said, though generally speaking I agree with Carroll about the absurdity and fallibility of much of Louis-Baudry's argument, I think there are some aspects of Louis-Badury's reasoning that could be helpful in understanding film. The quote above is an example of one piece of Louis-Baudry's argument that I think holds true in regards to film, or at the very least can function as a way for us to understand film. The idea that film acts as an expression of the unconcious is similar to the idea posed in "little showgirls" in which the author explored how film is the dreams of society and represented in lies about how the world functions that we wish were true.
3. Ane ample of this from film that could be analyzed in this matter would be Pretty Woman, which we have discussed previously in this course. This movie could be read as the unconcious desire of people for a wealthy love-interest to come in and save them form all their problems, a desire that is built on the desire that if one just had love and money all their problems could go away. Really, rather than being the unconcious desire to the invdual this would be read as more of an unconscious desire of society and the hidden ideology that defines our understanding of the world. Notting Hill Would also be an interesting film to examine in this manner as society's unconcious desire for a superstar to fall in love with them. Pretty Woman
   It would also be interesting to do a study of people's favorite movie and examine them as an expression of that person's unconcious desire.

VIDEODROME
This film could be viewed in light of some of the ideas found in the article "Film Bodies: Genre, Gender, and Excess". In many ways this film epitomizes the idea of "excess" and particularly relates to ideas that female bodies tend to be the cite of excess and that the persistence of these films relates to an ever-increasing complexity of our understanding of gender. Though in this film women's bodies are often the site of excess, men's bodies are also the cite of excess, and the agreement could be made that they are more than the female bodies in the film. This film was also brought up in the article as an example of contemporary horror that portrays gender as complex and is used as. away for society to work through this complexity. An example of this from Videodrome is the variety of scenes in which Max's body is the cite of excess, such as when he inserts the tapes into his body.

SULLIVANS TRAVELS
Sullivan's Travels serves as a good example of Mulvey's discussion of the male gaze and what it means for a woman in film to be viewed scopaphilically. This film employs fetishistic scopaphilia as the female character doesn't necessarily add anything to the plot but serves as a beautiful spectacle that the assumed heterosexual viewers can see with pleasure. This film also appeals to the hetersexual views narcissism as they are called to identify with Sullivan as a figure of agency who gets the money and the girl in the end.

TELEOLOGICAL ARGUEMENT AND RELATOIN TO PIE/GAG + CINEMA OF ATTRACTIONS:
teleological argument def:

• first understand idea of telos (predetermined point)
• teleological argument in film is that film has been moving towards the point (telos) of being the most advanced storytelling medium
  
  

GUNNING ARGUES AGAINST THIS ARGUEEMNT! He claims that there is value in the spectacle and non-narrative aspects of early film and points to how they are still in operation in modern films, argues that the reason we like film is not totally because of the narrative but because of the spectacle.
This relates to many of the other theories we have discussed, including Muvley's theories on the male gaze and the female body as a spectacle and our disused of body genres and how they operate on the idea of "excess" being a sort of spectacle as it creates bodily reaction in the viewer.

BLACK LOOKS

1. "In their role as spectators, black men could enter imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation. This gendered relation to looking made the experience of the black male spectator radically different from that of the black female spectator." (118)
   "Even when representations of black women were present in film, our bides and being were there to serve - to enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze" (119)
2. After doing this reading I gained a much better understanding of the impact of intersecting identities on the spectator and their experience in the movies. I have read The Bluest Eye and thus was familiar to some extent with the ideas presented on the black female spectator, but certainly not to the depth was was exposed in this essay. This opened my eyes in many ways in the impact of identity on spectatorship, perhaps even more than Mulvey's theories and their exploration of gender and film, though I think the two in tandem with each other were very helpful in exploring film
   I have a lot of questions regarding how the intersection of various identities impacts the spectator experience. For instance, race, gender, and sexuality. It would also be interesting to look at identities such as SES and ability, as well as cultural reactions to various films and the differing types of films produced in different cultures.
3. A good example of particularly the second quote is the movie Gone with the Wind. In this film, the white women are portrayed in alignment with Mulvey's male gaze - designed to be sexual and attractive or punished depending on the scene - while the black female bodies in the film are set to serve, literally and metaphorically, the white female bodies .
   

Voyeruistic Scopafilia

1. views through investigating and punishing women as a way of dealing with the fear of castratoin that occurs through looking

MARYLIN MONROE in Seven Year Itch

HER BODY HIMSELF EXTRA
"Horror films thus respond to interpretation, as Robin Won puts it, as "at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams of their audience - the fusion made possibly by the shared structures of a common ideology"" (191)

HANICH

1. “Typically, scenes of cinematic disgust are not just disgusting – they are often something else as well” (27)
   “Apart from the question of affective co-occurrence yields other categorical insights. Firstly, one could raise the issue of pleasure/displeasure (or valence, as psychologist call it) of the emotions involved. Either both emotions are negative and thus located on the displeasure end of the valence axis (like disgust and horror or shock); or the second emotion is positive and hence we deal with two emotions of different valence (such as disgust and amusement or A-emotion admiration)” (29)
2. I am much better at understanding disgust as an emotion and the ways in which it functions in film. I had never considered how complex the experience of and creation of disgust in film was and found this reading very eye opening. I was particularly interested on the discourse surrounding the mixing of disgust with other emotions, both positive and negative, and would love to learn more about how disgust mixed with different motions can either create or destroy empathy.
3. For instance, the attached scene from Legends of the Fall includes both empathy and disgust for me. As a viewer, I was both empathetic towards the Brad Pitt character for his grief and guilt and anger over the death of his brother, as well as able to feel sympathy for the major C-PTSD he was likely experiencing based on his actions throughout the rest of the film. However, I was also disgusted by his murder and scalping of the German soldiers. Revenge for Sam Scene

'FORCED EMPAHTY': MANIPULATION, TRAUMA AND AFFECT IN VIRUTAL REALITY
"The viewer is overcome by the power of emotion so that empathy in fact mitigates against positive behavior change"(834)

"... the central thesis is that knowing is not enough, that we must be made to feel and that exposing individuals to emotionally difficult and even distressing representations of victimization engages them in transformative processes which have a desirable social, ethical, and political impact .... we content that the useless of such notions is undermined by the ubiquity of their application to representations of atrocities and injustices, with little empirical evidence ... building a politics of empathy out of sense that traumatic experiences can be shared across dime and space raises the danger that such politics may be put to manipulative and coercive uses..."(834-835)

MY REACTION VR:
I found this articles incredibly interesting on a vast array of points. Regarding the "The Metaverse is Bad" article, I can honestly say that I finished reading it and was terrified. In terms of my more intellectual reaction, I found it interesting how this article explicitly drew the link between VR and capitalism. This was a link I had never really considered and certainly saw how all technology, but especially VR, would be used by large companies to gain power and influence that encompasses our experience. This theme of linking VR and capitalism was found in the there articles, but it was most explicitly stated in this one.
Regarding the "Dystopian Virtual Reality is Finally Here" article, I had never really considered how our current use of technology - always connected to smartphones, social media, etc. - really is a form of VR. I finished this article and then was looking at Insta, and though I generally try to use social media only to post hi lights and keep up with friends this article made me consider how it is not real and through connecting to people through media I am entering into the VR world. I wonder how things such as phone calls and FaceTime fit into this framework, since they aren't really escaping reality more like transcending distance to bring various aspects of reality into conversation with each other.
Regarding the "Forced Empathy" article, I again had never considered the danger of using media to create empathy, both because this is a false sense of empathy and because this use of empathy can be manipulated since it is often severed from intellectual reasoning. It really calls into question human nature and the best way to promote change: it is through appeals to logic or emotion? How do we reconcile the two? Overall a very interesting article and. concept, though rather dense so I feel as though there are parts I missed.