Though many have historically criticized Shakespeare’s early play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as shoddily written, re-examination of the text over the last several decades has leant new prestige to this entertaining ‘classic’. Most scholars agree that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a light and frivolous accompaniment to the celebration of a wedding; and […]
Category Archives: Drama & Theatre
Dita and The Darkness: Desperately Seeking Gaze
Another classic ‘chicken and egg’ question (that of content versus context): what determines a music video’s classification, its narrative, its style, its form? Do the technical specifications of its projection on TV override a music video’s cinematic construction? Is it true, as Marshall McLuhan so famously proclaimed, that “the medium is the message‿? While a text-based analysis of their narrative and stylistic elements in videos by Madonna and The Darkness reveals deliberate crafting as mini- (or perhaps art-) films, an audience-based analysis, on the other hand, exposes a televisual likeness. The music video, then, seems a film caught in a TV’s body, a ‘glanced’ production that so desperately desires to be ‘gazed’.
Marginalizing the Soft Paunch
From television’s inception, programs have been loaded with latent hegemonic value and belief systems; the white, middle-class nuclear family of American dreams, in particular, seems to have found its niche in the small screen. For in the same way that it sponsors convention and distinguishes “norms”, the television set has a unique ability to identify and isolate the unusual, different, and marginal.