Robot stories is totally Asimov, which I'm
definitely a fan of.
I think that both movies
took something inexplicable human and tried to quantify it in a mechanical or
formulaic sort of way-love, relationships, and emotion as mechanics of a set
world.
I think that sci-fi in
general either goes balls-to-the-wall bang bang adventure fantasy sort of
explorations or goes into some hypothetical future that reveals something about
ourselves or the current world. We're reading mostly the latter- the adventure
isn't as fun to analyze, probably,- and I think that these stories talk about
deeper themes by over-sciencing something. The water story takes lying and adds
rules and logic: if it’s a lie, there’s water, if it’s not technically false,
you’re good. The movies take childcare and relationships and mortality and
quantifies/measures them, and asks, “What does this change? How does this
affect the ways we should think about those things?”
(I’m a little bit rambly today. Excuse the terribly informal
writing.)
I think it’s also worth noting that the young actors in EBU are
youtubers (I think? I remember someone talking about that in class.) With the
Oscars, I think there’s been a lot of discussion about minorities in acting
(which I’m totally happy for), but there’s also been a lot of backlash.
However, I do think that Hollywood, whether or not it does “sympathy-nominate”
(a term I have so many problems with but won’t go into right now,) is biased
against minorities, just because they’re not cast as often or auditioned to
play major roles and a million other small things (most of our biographical action
movies are white-centric, your typical ‘suave’ character is white, a director
wants to fill an archetype and that archetype is, hey, traditionally white).
But there’s actually so many minority internet icons- the most popular makeup
artist is Michelle Phan, I think, there’s a ton of POC on Vine, “black twitter”
is a whole thing, etc.
I’m not really sure where I was going with that, but I just
find it interesting.
Karen,
ReplyDeleteI think your point about seeing POC more online than in "Hollywood" based films and movies is super interesting, and the more I think about it the more I see that too. Perhaps it could be because the internet is such a new phenomena that it doesn't have those traditionally white archetypes. Anyways, I think its great that the internet is much more diverse (though still probably white-dominated) than cinema, it gives me hope for our generation lol