This essay explores the ways that the “Legend of Zelda” series has purposefully capitalized on religion. The essay demonstrates how the series accessed religion, how religion developed organically within it, and how the series centered around it, and the implications this has for religion and ritual surrounding new media. The suggestion is made that religion has actually played a vital role in the success of the series, providing both a familiar sense of cultural structure, as well as a valid religious experience.
An Eco-critical Perspective of Building Communities via the Face of the Other
by Samuel Moynihan
This essay employs the work of Lawrence Buell, Marc Augé,and Emmanuel Levinas to examine Agnes Varda’s Visages Villageswithin an eco-critical context. The text shows that Visages Villagesand its makers work to create communities by transforming the liminal spaces, from symptomatic to modernity , into places that are connected with the people who inhabit them. This connection is facilitated by street art that amounts to an encounter with the “face of the other” described by Levinas.
Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory suggests that movie viewers experience an immobility that makes watching a film akin to dreaming. Spectators are unable to freely move, unable to affect what they see, and unable to differentiate between self and other as well as the ideologies of a film and their own thoughts. Theorists like Noël Carroll criticize Baudry’s concept, claiming that viewers maintain at least limited movement while watching a film and, therefore, retain ideological autonomy. Director Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) can be used to explore Baudry’s idea of whether or not a spectator blindly accepts the subliminal ideologies of a film through the way three of its characters experience motion.
Thanks to the dream scene which occupies most of the running time of the film, Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch, can be read as representing the internal conscious and unconscious states of its protagonist. In this paper, I will argue that Mulholland Drive characterizes its protagonist using two mirrors of identity, the Jungian way in which she perceives herself in the dream (as opposed to how she really is) and the projection of Rita (an amnesiac stranger in need) that she subconsciously invents in order to try to fill her empty identity with the love of another.
This paper utilizes the Japanese anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood to evaluate different uses of facial close-up. Drawing heavily from the theoretical works of Bela Belaz and Maya Deren, the examination reveals that the seriously realistic and absurdly impossible are often juxtaposed in anime, yet do not contradict each other. Instead, the combination of realistic close-up and “super- deformed” aesthetic is employed equally to demonstrate a variety of emotional responses in recognizable, stylized ways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
