Prompts for Week 2: Screening
January 31st, 2008 by BobHere are some topics and questions to keep in mind while watching Love and Death on Long Island. Feel free to respond to any of them here, or to raise other questions / share other perceptions about the film.
- How is this a movie about fans and fandom — i.e. what is its particular characterization or “take” on the phenomenon? (Some things you might want to think about here: characterization of individuals, of mass and elite culture, the fan’s values, the lifestyle or “etiology” of fandom.)
- What does the film say about texts and the uses we put them to (or that they put us to)?
- What is the role of desire in the film? (Keep in mind the many ways that desire might be defined or measured, from sexual orientation to poetic longing or textual investment.)
- What relationship does the film suggest between “high” and “low” culture? Between aesthetics and value?
- How might the film itself be “readable” as a fan text, whether we consider that to mean “a text that lends itself to fannish investment” or “a text that is a product of fannish investment”?
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A general policy for screenings: please silence cell phones or other potential distractions to the viewing experience; have pen and paper or laptop in front of you to jot down notes, questions, and reactions. You will find it extremely helpful to have your notes as a memory aid during discussion on Thursday.
Posted in Prompts, Screenings | 2 Comments »
More than anything else, I felt the film served as a compelling argument for the affective fallacy. The film bends over backwards to emphasize how superficial Bostock and his films are – he explicitly *says* to Giles that he doesn’t really know what Giles is talking about when he compares his performance to the painting. It’s something to debate, anyways. Is there anything to Bostock’s acting, or is Giles seeing what he wants to see?
Also, did it strike anyone else that the screenplay that Giles was preparing for Bostock might have had metaphoric significance? It occurred to me in class today that the idea of a deaf and dumb person, with no life to speak of outside of the media that consumes him, serves as a (somewhat exaggerated) metaphor for fandom in general and for Giles’ case in particular.
Actually, were I to assign symbolic meaning to Giles’ screenplay, it would be about Ronnie: a person who, to Giles, has no agency or voice, acting the way the media wants him to.