Buster Keaton’s Comic Brilliance

Visual humor from the silent-era cinema, like other forms of humor (stand-up, sit-com, etc.), is hard to dissect because of the adage that explaining a joke ruins the joke. Like a metaphor that defines something through an oblique comparison to something else, comedy functions in this angled alignment. Therefore, in looking at what makes Buster …

Tenet Will Not ‘Save’ Cinema or: How to Talk About the End of Cinema Without Reactionary Positing

Most of the reviews for Christopher Nolan's new film, Tenet, argue that its supposed to be the savior of cinema because its the first blockbuster release post-lockdowns. While they largely cite Nolan's Washington Post op-ed from March, which correctly argues that cinemas are socially vital and need our help in hard times, the reviews naively …

Athénaïse’s Ironic Awakening

Kate Chopin’s first published story, “Emancipation. A Life Fable,” sets up the theme to which guides her fiction: freedom from repression. In the story, an animal finds himself bound in a cage where he is given the provisions of a comfortable daily life. One day the door is accidentally left open, but the animal is …

Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory and “Indian Camp”

The Iceberg Theory Ernest Hemingway only made passing references to his ‘iceberg’ theory in the first decades of his writing. In 1932, he made his first reference to the theory: If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the …

The Life of Bud Powell

Earl “Bud” Powell was undisputedly one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time, if not the best according to Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and the author of “Dance of the Infidels,” Francis Paudras. Monsieur Paudras, French by birth, idolized Bud throughout his formative jazz piano training. After learning of Bud’s European tour in 1959, …

Marrying Guido to the Spectator: 8½ and Fellini-Spectator Verification

Federico Fellini composes 8½ according to the limits of his own subconscious, giving his spectators an interesting take on the inside of a director's mind. The film weaves between dream and reality, sometimes confusing the two, but other times introduces a surreal fantasy that projects an unconscious vulnerable to Freudian speculation. The spectator is stuck in …

Isolation and Western Perception in Satrapi’s “Persepolis”

Oppression and misplaced representations of Iranians as foreign ‘Others’ led Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian in exile, to publish Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood; a graphic novel released in Western countries to communicate the unknown virtues of Iranian culture. These virtues unknown by Westerners, Americans specifically for this essay, include the perception of Iranians as …

Where is Freddie Mercury: The Need for a Hero in Science-Fiction Films

Experiencing the uniqueness of Queen’s Freddie Mercury, an occidental bystander will mark him with the distinctness of being both masculine in his rock-star stage persona and feminine in his private-life affairs and outfits (by no means is this observation made in full). According to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Mercury exhibits heroism …

South Central as a Prison in “Boyz N the Hood”

Confined in the streets of South Central Los Angeles, Tre Styles navigates the ghetto sufficiently to the point of liberation by the end of John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991). The location is a prison of death for those that willingly assume roles within the system (the Baker half-brothers) instead of those breaking free …

Genre in A Song of Ice and Fire

Fantasy as a genre is a problematic discussion to most critics because of their inability to cooperatively locate a coalesced definition. They oftentimes examine the fantastic in their research in order to understand the nature of the genre from different novels and stories in the fantasy canon. Todorov defines the fantastic as the hesitation created …