by Sam Woodruff
Content
NUDE
by Deidrene Crisanto
Jambula!
by Emily Bade
The Death of a Girl
by Ian David Hawkes
Land of the Sun
by Mark Leavy
Speed Racer and the Child Empowered
by Amanda Barwick
The character depictions of Rex, Speed, and Spritle in Speed Racer (2008) demonstrate a range of how children can be empowered within their own environments and understanding. The aesthetic, technology, and depiction of the family in the film allow Speed, the representation of the empowered child, to exert control over his situation and express himself through his own strengths.
The Language of Color in Gattaca
by Daniel Tu
Gattaca uses three basic colors to denote different shifts in the main character’s identity—yellow to illustrate his past, blue to depict his future and green to bridge the two. These subtle cues help us to understand on a subconscious level the ways that a restrictive, genetically classist society can manipulate and harm an individual.
Serial Absurdity: Arrested Development and Wartime Comedy in the United States
by Anne Hart
This essay explores the contrast between American wartime cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining two popular comedy television shows in each century: Larry Gelbart’s MASH and Mitchell Hurwitz’s Arrested Development. While Arrested Development uses many of the comedic devices employed in MASH, it deviates in critical ways that expose the atmosphere shift of a 21st century disillusioned by and removed from its previous century’s traditionally presented attitudes.
Canceling the Apocalypse: Globalization Processes in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim
by Deidrene Crisanto
Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 science fiction fantasy film, Pacific Rim, is a visually striking narrative that depicts an unconventional alien invasion and humanity’s equally exciting response. A summer blockbuster with high entertainment value, this sci-fi narrative is a colorful exhibition of globalization processes. This essay explores some of the processes of globalization exhibited in this narrative world.
Editor’s Note
The theme for this year’s publication of Aperture is Truth.
Unharnessed by human subjectivity, Truth is things as they really are, not as they are perceived to be. We often arrive at Truth through experimenting with and challenging our own subjective lens. In this way religion, art, and academia become channels which lead to an intersection between our perceptions and Truth. Jon Wainwright says that, “Truth is the single currency of the sovereign mind, the knowing subject, and the best thinking—in philosophy, science, art—discriminates between the objective and subjective sides of the coin, and appreciates both the unity of reality and the diversity of experience.” The work presented in Aperture utilizes essays, screenplays, and new media to arrive at Truth. Each form functions as a method for finding it, whether by reason, supposal, or reinterpretation, and acknowledges the intricacies and nuances of Truth, which arise from its existing on both sides of that objective/subjective coin. The challenge in all of this—for the creator as well as the spectator—is to give ourselves over to Truth and allow our own perceptions to undergo renovation. In publishing this new edition, we hand the creative process over to you, our readers, so that you might experience your own intersections and expansion of understanding.
