In verbal narratives, there are of course various kinds of unreliable narrators, and James Phelan has recently described many of them: “Narrators perform three main roles,” he writes, “reporting, interpreting, and evaluating… . They may, therefore, deviate from the implied author’s views in one or more of these roles… . Unreliable reporting occurs along the axis of characters, facts, and events; unreliable reading (or interpreting) occurs along the axis of knowledge and perception; and unreliable regarding (or evaluating) occurs along the axis of ethics and evaluation” (50). In other words, narrators may misrepresent or fail to represent part of the story, misinterpret or fail to interpret part of the story, or misjudge or fail to judge part of the story. Phelan calls these six types of unreliability “misreporting, misreading, … misregarding - and underreporting, underreading, and underregarding” (51).

-Emily R. Anderson, Telling Stories: Unreliable Discourse, “Fight Club”, and the Cinematic Narrator

Booth, of course, argues that the easiest way to establish the characteristics and locations of implied authors and narrators is to examine cases of irony. In an unreliable verbal narrative, specifically, the narrator does not speak “for the norms of the work,” which the implied author establishes and which the reader understands; the implied author winks at the reader behind the narrator’s back, as it were. These narrators, misaligned with their implied authors, misinterpret or misevaluate the events they relate. In order to construct a coherent narrative out of flawed data, then, the reader must be able to differentiate between the narrator’s voice and the agent behind it.

-Emily R. Anderson, Telling Stories: Unreliable Discourse, “Fight Club”, and the Cinematic Narrator

If we describe films as if they do things, as if they have agency, Chatman suggests, we may as well ascribe that agency to a narrator. Definitions of cinematic narrators are too few to say there is a consensus, but the best is Chatman’s own: A film’s narrator is the combination of mise en scène, cinematography, editing, and sound. Other accounts are limited either to one of these - usually cinematography - or to acts of literal narration - such as voiceover or the reading aloud of letters. The virtue of Chatman’s broader definition is that it includes all the means by which a film tells a story, much as our definition of a novel’s narrator would include all of the means by which he or she tells a story.

-Emily R. Anderson, Telling Stories: Unreliable Discourse, “Fight Club”, and the Cinematic Narrator

Since the Cahierists introduced the notion of the auteur , critics have been inclined to refer to the director as though he were the sole creative force behind a film. This usage has become, of course, shorthand - one cannot possible list the hundreds of people actually responsible for creating a film. But auteurism does highlight our need to ascribe intentionality to someone or something, be it a director, a producer, or a studio. Because in film we have no single author, we create an entity - usually identified with the director’s name - to which we can attribute intention, the source of meaning. In order for us to receive a message, even a message as banal as “it’s a wonderful life,” there must be a “Frank Capra” out there somewhere, even if he is encased in scare quotes.

-Emily R. Anderson, Telling Stories: Unreliable Discourse, “Fight Club”, and the Cinematic Narrator

In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.

– Harun Farocki

my thoughts on cruella’s prospective development/plot for cruella (2021) sequel

so i’m basing things on the statement above from the director and everything i’ve learned and analyzed from the first film, of course. as we know, cruella is self-destructive to a detrimental level. that is, she will do things she knows cause her great harm and it all stems from a self-hatred she’s yet to escape from, even upon the finding that the baroness murdered her mother. as we know, the voiceover takes place as cruella stands over estella’s “grave” aka after every event in the film besides her and the gang driving to hell hall. in this voiceover, she still discusses her mother’s death as partially attributable to her, unfortunately. “let’s skip past the part where i killed her.” though it had once seemed like cruella had gotten past that blame when she’s shown saying “it wasn’t my fault,” the chronology attests that a bit of regression has taken place and that’s understandable given the sheer level of trauma she had to endure.

by the film’s conclusion, cruella is not stable whatsoever as she’s still grappling with the weight of what coming into her true self means- as we saw in the monologue, she faces inner turmoil between embracing herself and how she perceives that to be letting down her mother- and not everyone around her is exactly the most supportive given their continual discussion over “missing estella.” point being, this instability only deepens the chasm in which self-loathing can accrue for her.

as i’ve been over in other posts, cruella’s intentional creation of an evil public persona is both her most notable advantage in that she has effectively created a shield between her and the rest of the world that she is weary of but it’s also her most notable disadvantage because the creation of this persona will lead to a massive amount of hatred from the public. by crafting a (FALSE) narrative tor herself that has the masses believing she brutally murdered and skinned three dogs, she is bound to be despised because to the outside world, that is the “real her.” only she and those close to her know that she’d never do such a thing and that the persona is all a facade: antithetical to who she actually is as a person. essentially, she wants a way to protect herself from a society that’s been cruel to her for all of her life but the way she chooses to do this is one that she knows will bring her immense and likely unbearable amounts of pain.

cruella isn’t going to want to stop at the tale of her skinning three dogs. knowing she has an ever expanding platform, she’ll amplify the narrative and this is where an homage to the original 101 dalmatians could come in. essentially, i think she, with anita’s help, will plant a story in the press that supposedly identifies her as the killer of that many puppies/dogs and it will somehow tie into a fashion show of some sort. after all, i reckon that as the empress of what’s emerging to be the world’s most prominent fashion house, she’ll want the house of de vil to make an unforgettable debut and an apparent murderous origin from a whole line of clothing- or perhaps one massive statement piece- would do just that along with her other momentous goal to have the world hate and fear her in equal proportion such that no one can get close enough to hurt her again. with nearly unlimited access to resources now given her acquired wealth, she’ll be able to keep upping the antics, making her persona more and more formidable.

in reality, the so-called “murdered” dogs will be rescued by her and heaven knows there’s enough room to tend to a large amount of dogs in her mansion. anyway, the point is that the amount of hatred she’ll be mailed with from what could very well be millions of people if the story goes global, as i have no doubt would happen with that kind of thing, will destroy her confidence and self-esteem. it’ll make life miserable for her. yes, she knows that isn’t who she is, but to be treated LIKE she’s a heartless killer by everyone and to have to play that role to the media perpetually…i couldn’t even begin to imagine the kind of toll it would take on her, but i know it would be agonizing.

in a way, this would devastatingly further subvert her entire journey thus far, which has already been alluded to with her directly stating she’s begun to play a role for the media. “but people do need a villain to believe in and i’m happy to fit the bill.” she’s gone from having to hide under a feigned submissive personality trait- who she was as estella- to a brief time period where she could be fully herself to the outside world without being notoriously known as a killer and then directly back to having to project a fake persona, only this time, it isn’t a demure woman. it’s that of an absolute monster who murdered dogs.

the increasing trauma will likely become more and more debilitating to her as she won’t be able to even show her face anywhere without being met with loathing and contempt by all who recognize what i call the anti-cruella aka the fake version of her she’s procured to keep people away. as such, in her efforts to fend off the outside world, that world will swallow her whole with its resentment of “her” due to the method of defense through deception she utilized. therefore, as the director said, she’d be destroyed as in utterly damaged from worsening mental illnesses and in pain and this destruction will have aborned from within herself as she is the engineer of the anti-cruella persona.

all i can say is they better give my baby the happiness she deserves by the end meaning that they should write her to ultimately feel as though she doesn’t have to hide behind any personas anymore and can simply be herself: cruella de vil. a woman who isn’t always some ball of sunshine on the outside but is and has ALWAYS been an incredible person. someone who fights for justice unapologetically. a brilliant, creative woman who has and will continue to take the fashion world by storm. i want her to feel comfortable not having to put on a show of “sweetness” or one of a deplorable being to live in this society. her apprehension about this does NOT make her a bad person. she’s very rightfully afraid to be who she is because she knows society is cruel (“hello, cruel world”) and will misjudge her without even attempting to understand her but creating these personas are all just self-destructive measures that will do her more harm than good.

as a bit of a side note, the baroness could play into my aforementioned thoughts on cruella shedding her personas. cruella would of course need to show the public that the dogs are alive and well to prove that the evil persona was all fake. however, the baroness could complicate matters (after escaping jail given she still has a network of people who are loyal to her and just like her, they contribute to a corrupted justice system) by actually stealing the dogs and killing some of them, framing cruella and leading the world to believe that she’d lied and really was just a horrible person. if something like this were to happen, i’d hope that the truth would come out, that cruella’s name would be cleared, and that she could live happily and truly free from the confinements of living in the shadow of a fake version of herself.

cruella. deserves. to be HAPPY. the end.

“Punctuated by clues that repeatedly point to Rebecca’s, Danvers’s and Fontaine’s queer desires, the novel and film weave nonheterosexual lures into their narrative fabrics. Rebecca’s sapphic menace is constructed on the coattails of homophobic stereotyping: Rebecca is monstrous, diseased, nonreproductive, destructive, unnatural, masculine, and a man hater. She is also strikingly beautiful, powerful, and alluring enough to sustain the attentions of her housekeeper and her successor and to jeopardize the success of the film’s primary heterosexual union. That the queer’s most influential and engaging attributes belong to a character who is physically absent from the film underscore both the potency of her threat and the limitations of patriarchal structures of representation—structures in which queerness is relegated to discourses of invisibility and silence.”

—Rhona J. Berenstein, from “‘I’m not the sort of person men marry’: Monsters, Queers and Hitchcock’s Rebecca”

I really do wanna find that post about how it was such a well done cinematic sequence after Stiles essentially committed manslaughter in self-defense, called the cops, then realized he had blood on his hands, and Dylan’s performance too, ugh like the post included that scene and the score and everything and discussed film theory.

letcasbehappy:

Stranger Things 3 Theory

Alright, I thought of this a couple days ago and have been dying to share. So, in the end credits scene of ST3 (spoiler alert) a couple Russian dude are about to beat a prisoner up. One goes to open a cell but the other dude stops him saying “No not the American” or something along those lines.

Now hear me out. THAT is Hopper. When the machine exploded and “turned him into dust” he actually ended up in the Upside Down. We’ve seen this happen before, where people supposedly turned into dust/vaporized and actually ended up in the Upside Down. We saw this in season 1, when Eleven defeated the demogorgon.

Now how did Hopper end up in Russia when the portal was in Hawkins? Simple. The Russians rebuilt the machine they made in Russia, and this time it worked because the portal was also open in Hawkins, which is where Alexei explains the machine works because the portal was open once before. The two machines are connected somehow. So Hopper went through the portal in Russia and got captured.

This would also explain why the demogorgon is somehow alive and how the Russians managed to get their hands on it. It was never dead.

With the new teaser out, I’d just like to point out my old post and say I’m at least 50% right

Loki goes from suicidal to homicidal to neither from Thor 1 to Infinity War

Do you think Loki’s homicidal urges stem from suicidal ones cuz I definitely do

Dropping off the Bifrost in Thor 1 was absolutely a suicide attempt this is fact he definitely thought he was gonna die and after finding out what a hated monster he was he really wanted to

Then the chitauri give him the option to do something dangerous (invade earth and take it over with the chitauri) or be tortured “he will make you wish for something as sweet as pain” something like that. So he wants to die not live and feel even more pain than what emotional trauma he’s already dealing with so fuck it why not slaughter everyone? These guys just gave him a motive PLUS it’s dangerous? And he plans to die anyway so that makes for no lasting physical or moral repercussions.

But then he doesn’t die he just gets locked up.

And then somewhere between A1 and Thor tdw that ‘I don’t care who or what I kill as long as it includes myself’ turns into ‘well I’m obviously not gonna die so I might as well just kill other people’ hence converting suicidal to homicidal actions

Until Odin dies in Ragnarok which I believe is the turning point for him. When Odin says “I love you my sons” and Loki gives that look of ‘you just called me your son even though we both know I’m a monster and you told me you love me in the same sentence as Thor this including him and making us equals and that is all I ever wanted’ And then his attitude changes.

He’s still a conniving little shit cuz thats just his personality but from Ragnarok on I really think he doesn’t want to die or kill anyone he doesn’t have to (cuz not killing ANYONE is not an option in superhero movies everyone does it) so by infinity war when he seems to suicidally fling himself and a fucking butter knife at Thanos it’s not entirely out of character because it represents suicidal urges, but it must be taken into account that he feels a lot better mentally now and isn’t a dumb fuck. He doesn’t want to die for once so why wouldn’t he at least TRY not to die?

I didn’t mean for it to take this turn but I suppose this is somewhat evidencing the fact that Loki is still alive.

Oh well it’s true.

Theory that Sigyn (Loki’s wife) does exist in the MCU we just don’t see her

It’s theory time let’s go let me know if you think it adds up:

So briefly some background cuz it happens in comics from the 70’s and ain’t nobody got time for that— Loki has Sigyn’s husband-to-be killed and then disguises himself as the now dead fiancée and goes through with the wedding before revealing himself as Loki after the ceremony is finished. Odin is mad af but Sigyn is like actually he’s my husband so I’m duty-bound to him now. Odin is like “damn you’re really gonna put up with Loki? Props to you.” Then he makes her the goddess of fidelity. Likely as per mythology but I’m focusing just on Marvel.

So anyway Sigyn sticks by Loki’s side throughout the comics but suddenly disappears after the Ragnarok event in Thor II. We assume she died.

So bringing that over to the MCU…

Ragnarok happens obviously there’s a whole movie on it but Sigyn is never mentioned or shown in the movies. Possibly because the movies always follow Thor and not Loki. And I know the movies are hardly detail for detail to the comics and I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t have another piece of evidence but I’m gonna make the claim that Sigyn dies in Ragnarok the movie like we can assume she died in the comics.

This isn’t the ‘another piece of evidence’ I mentioned before but take a look: Loki gets significantly softer in general after the Ragnarok event. He’s on the ship with every last Asgardian and has probably seen that Sigyn isn’t there. He doesn’t outwardly grieve because he’s Loki but the sadness does soften him up enough that we get that ‘I’m here’ scene with Thor and a little smile.

Now here’s my evidence that in the MCU Loki and Sigyn were married and she did die in Ragnarok however circumstantial it might be. Anyway. Loki specifically uses the word fidelity when talking to Thanos and I know that’s just a fancy word and Asgardians talk fancy but still if all of The Hounds Of Baskerville (Sherlock) can be based off of the fact that this guy said hound instead of dog or wolf or something then I can use this wording as solid evidence. Especially since Loki is known to choose his words carefully and deliberately. He emphasises “undying fidelity” both as a signal to Thor than he doesn’t plan on dying right then and for himself in memory of Sigyn, the goddess of fidelity, who had died no more than an hour previous.

I rest my case.

volturialice:

elfwreck:

traegorn:

iheartvelma:

utopians:

that crunchy vibe that 70s/80s movies have that modern movies simply cannot capture… that kind of quiet empty vibe to em that can be played for either bleakness or a peaceful energy… why do all modern movies (even the great and pretty ones) feel overproduced after watching an older film. what is it I can’t put my finger on it but it’s there I can feel it

1. Shot on film
2. No digital colour grading (today’s films are horribly over processed)
3. No in-the-computer composite layered scenes with virtual sets etc.
4. practical sets and effects
5. hand painted mattes / hand animated vfx
6. You used the light you had instead of endlessly tweaking it
7. Sociologically, people stopped going to movies as much in the late 1960s / early 70s because television had really taken off, the era of the ‘tv movie’ started, so studios greenlit a lot of low budget auteur films that had to focus on meaning & relationships instead of spectacle.

8. Pacing.

This is the biggest thing, and it’s not even something most people will even realize they’re noticing. Movies became more uniform in their structure, as hollywood found the “formula” for a hit movie. It means you lose quiet, peaceful scenes that don’t fit into the pattern. That uniformity has done more to hurt the emotional tone of films than any visual effects tricks.

Why Does Every Movie Released These Days Feel Exactly the Same? This Book.

In 2005, Blake Snyder released a book: Save the Cat! It discussed movie “beats” and and gave an outline for movie pacing.

That outline has been followed like it’s religious dogma for the majority of Hollywood movies ever since. It’s enough that you can literally count the minutes in movies and say “ok, here comes the antagonist’s big move.”

it’s not just pacing but also average shot length (sometimes shortened to “ASL,” but not to be confused with american sign language.) a movie that only cuts every 12 seconds is gonna feel drastically different from a movie that cuts every 2.5 seconds.