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: Film & TV
Crime in Cronenberg’s Videodrome: A perversion of the everyman’s subconscious
Rena King:
“Don’t you feel such shows [of soft-core pornography and hardcore violence] contribute to a social climate of violence and sexual malaise, and do you care?”
Max Renn:
“Certainly I care. I care enough to give my viewers a harmless outlet for their fantasies and their frustrations…”
The ‘housewife’ and the ‘cityman’: A match made in suburbia?
Last night, for the first time, I ventured to Pointe Claire, Quebec. Pointe Claire is what one could call a typical suburb of Montreal – a small residential sprawl located far enough away from the city to function independently and retain a certain sense of community, yet close enough for its residents to commute to the city centre – for employment, health care, shopping or entertainment – in about thirty minutes.
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’.
Reagan-inspired Dystopia and the Impediment of Human Freedom
While not intended as realistic or plausible predictions, these dystopian texts seek to expose extremist attitudes (such as radical conservatism, religiosity, or technological reliance) as fundamentally threatening to human nature and individualism. Dystopia, then, can be understood as a locale for the constant impediment of human freedom, maintained by a regime’s oppressive control of technology, gender and ideology.