(Im)Possibilities

Why is it that almost every disaster movie, whether it is natural, alien, zombie, etc, occurs in the United states. I’m not saying that there are not plenty of disaster movies that occur in other countries. One disaster movie that I enjoy in particular is Train to Busan, a zombie movie that occurs in South Korea. However, I find that the majority of popular disaster movies occur somewhere in the United States. More specifically, these movies tend to focus on a select few states like New York, California, and the nation capital, Washington DC. Does this simply occur due to the shear amount of movies that are produced in the US, or is there more symbolic reason behind it. I obviously cannot provide you with this answer, but I will give you my opinion.

Applying this to the question of why so many disaster movies are set in the US, we can see a few explanations. One possibility is that these states are highly populated and with plenty scenic views that many city or suburban dwellers could relate to. A second option is that these types of cities/states can be found all over the world and are more cost effective to film in since they are closer to Hollywood than, lets say China. A third and my last idea as to why this happens is due to hometown bias illustrated by some Hollywood producers. It is my personal belief that it is a mix of all of these options that lead to most disaster movies being produced in the US. According to www.Statista.com, the US produces the highest movie revenue of any country. Even though they are far from producing the most amount of movies each year, it can be said that more people pay for movies produced in the US than that of other countries. Therefore, it can be said that if any of these ideas are correct (if any) it sure does show.

Regardless of what causes movie producers to set most disaster movies in the US, they are using the US as an effigy. They can’t set a movie in every country and therefore choose to do it in one. Directors and producers are using the US as a stage for what is happening in the rest of the world. Going back to our course discussion on Joseph Roach’s “Echoes in the Bone”, Roach defines the word, “effigy” as,

“a noun meaning a sculpted pictured likeness. More particularly it can suggest a crudely fabircated image of a person, commonly one that is destroyed in his or her stead, as in hanging or burning in effigy. When effigy appears as a verb, though that usage is rare, it means to evoke an absence, to body something forth, especially something from a distant past (OED)[…]it fills by means of segregation a vacancy created by the absence of an original” (Joseph Roach).

As to why these producers use the US as an effigy, I can not definitively say; however, they are doing so nonetheless. In doing so, they seem to act according to one one of two reasonings.

They might be acknowledging the limitations of movies and using specific locations of economic and/or cultural importance. These sites are usually well-known regardless of where the movie is released and are therefore going to be seen as at least somewhat familiar to viewers, even if they have never visited the site. Additionally, through this well-known state/city/landmark, they represent the world at large. It “fills by means of segregation a vacancy created by the absence of an original”. Since the whole world would be both difficult and expensive to film for a singular movie, they use what is closest and what is well known. For example. I want you to look at these two pictures. One is a picture of New York and the other is a picture of Beijing. Picture 1. Picture 2. Ignoring the names of the cities being present in the links, how easy is it to tell which picture is of which city? Sure there are certain landmarks unique to each one, but a city is a city is a city.

The second option, is very much like the first. However, they are using the US as a representation of the world, not because it is what they are limited to, but because it is what they know. Again, the situation is the same in that a city is a city is a city; however, here it is simply because they know nothing else. Writers who try to depict what they are unfamiliar with, might have a hard time doing so. Sure they have the internet to look at pictures and articles about various locations, but without ever experiencing the land for themselves, a true representation might never be achieved. Therefore they write about their home country/state as they are familiar with it at even the street level. If a writer really wanted to illustrate another country that they had never visited, they could hire an informant who could help them bring their illustration to life, but that costs time and money.

I honestly cannot say which of these options are the right answer even if there was an answer period. I believe that the reason could be a mix of each in that setting placement is a matter of time, money, familiarity, and ability to illustrate. Though producers, directors, and writers may have their own agendas beneath the overall reasoning, again I will say, they use the US as an effigy to represent the world at large.

“Echoes in the bone refer to not only to a history of forgetting but to a history of empowering the living through the performance of memory.” —Joseph Roach, “Echoes in the Bone”

I felt my most profound stirring at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem when I entered the Children’s Memorial. Continue reading “Instruments for and against memory”

Last semester, I went to the event Professor McCoy and Steve Prince organized on Main Street, where students, faculty, and community members alike were invited to create woodblock prints that were then arranged around one that Prince had created. The focus of the piece was trauma and healing, inspired by the trials and tribulations of Emmeline the bear, who was run into by cars multiple times. As such, I immediately recognized Prince’s art style when confronted with it in class in the piece Katrina’s Veil: Stand at Gretna Bridge, pictured belowImage Credit

Prince’s work deals with remembrance: in the case of his project at Geneseo, remembering trauma and moving on from it, and in his series done in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, remembering and bearing witness to the atrocities caused by the hurricane, but also by those in power that we are supposed to trust, namely the police and the government.

This brings me to the quote from Roach’s “Echoes in the Bone” that has so vexed and fascinated the class: “Echoes in the bone refer not only to a history of forgetting but to a strategy of empowering the living through the performance of memory” (34). What does it mean to “empower the living?” More importantly, how can we both forget and remember? Continue reading “Art and Empowerment: The Performance of Memory Through Artistic Expression”

“To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” – Elie Wiesel

For my first blog post (I’m shocked but also pleased with myself that I’m doing this now and not later), I’d like to delve further into the discussion we were having on Monday, in regards to memory and forgetting because it really sparked my interest. But first- Catherine already so-brilliantly tackled this subject in her blog post that you can (and should) check out here. I would like to further expand on this.

Continue reading “Is it Possible to Remember and Forget all at Once?”

We only ever hear one question asked in the academic decathlon central to the plot of The Day After Tomorrow: “Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro defeated this Incan emperor at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca. What is his name?” “Atahualpa,” Sam answers, and he’s correct. Beth suggested to us that we might consider writing on this topic, and looking for examples of how memory might be performed in the context of Peru, I thought the Inti Raymi fit the concept well. Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, was celebrated by the Inca on the winter solstice from 1412 until 1535, when it was banned by the Catholic church. In 1944, the Inti Raymi was reenacted in Cusco for the first time in 400 years by Faustino Espinoza Navarro, a Peruvian actor and the founder of the Academy of the Quechua Language. The reenactment was based primarily on writings left by Garcilaso de la Vega, a half-Spanish, half-Inca chronicler who came of age in the years following the Spanish invasion of Peru and wrote about the Inca based on the recollections of his maternal family — a memory, in short, recreated from memories handed down to a man writing about a world that had already largely passed out of existence by the time he was writing about it. Inti Raymi has been celebrated every year since 1944 on June 24th. Though in the time of the Inca it was celebrated in the center of Cusco, it is now reenacted at the fortress of Saqsayhuaman, above the city, with an actor playing the role of the divine Inca emperor, and the animal sacrifices simulated instead of truly performed.

Inti Raymi strikes me as exactly the kind of echo in the bone Roach describes as “a history of forgetting [as well as] a history of empowering the living through the performance of memory.” The elements that would have lent the festival its weight during the height of the Inca — religious devotion, sacrifice towards ensuring a good harvest, loyalty to the Inca state — are absent in a time when the Inca religion is no longer practiced, tourism is the region’s economic backbone, and an entirely different system of government oversees people’s lives. The event has been duly criticized as catering more towards tourists than to locals: a blogger writing about the subject laments (perhaps patronizingly) the lack of access of indigenous Peruvians to a festival “regenerated for them, not by them, by an intellectual middle-class of European or mixed-blood descent, who saw in its practice a chance to romanticize and mythologize their own history and identity.” Still, I think it would be hard to entirely write off the reenactment of any violently suppressed indigenous tradition, no matter how long after its disappearance it resurfaces.

As a last thought, it would be hard to consider Inti Raymi in the context of “Echoes in the Bone” without dwelling on Roach’s comparison between Western tragic drama’s presentation of catastrophe as a “singular fate yet to be endured,” and the spirit-world ceremony’s pacing of catastrophe “in the past, as a grief to be expiated.” Which of these does the festival of the sun do, if either? Explicitly, it is a celebration and not an expiation, but it isn’t possible to conceive of the present-day festival without remembering the catastrophes of European invasion and epidemic that set the stage for the celebration’s 400-year absence. Having never seen a performance of Inti Raymi, I don’t know whether this history is addressed within the festival itself, but it seems to me that the act of revival is itself an act of expiation.

“There are certain topics that are off-limits to comedians: JFK, AIDS, the Holocaust. The Lincoln Assassination just recently became funny. ‘I need to see this play like I need a hole in the head.’ And I hope to someday live in a world where a person could tell a hilarious AIDS joke. It’s one of my dreams.” -Michael Scott, “The Office”

This quote from one of my favorite television shows popped into my head during today’s discussion on memory versus forgetting. Michael’s reference to not being able to make jokes about “JFK, AIDS, and the Holocaust” relates to the immense tragedies involving the topics, but also to the timeliness of the issues. Compared to those three things, the Lincoln Assassination occurred very long ago. The problem with timeliness of the commercialization of or jokes about topics from history is apparent in this quote, as well as in our discussion of the “Tot Tanic” image Beth showed us in class.

Continue reading “Cultural Remembering and Forgetting: A Response to the “Tot Tanic” Bouncy Castle”

Our class discussion about allochthony and autochthony reminded me of something we talked about in the Civil War Historical Novel class I took last semester with Dr. Rutkowski. In the class, we focused heavily on the divide between Union and Confederate, North and South. The border that separated the two and divided America was a contrived boundary that grouped together two groups: “Americans” and “other Americans.” These communities that did not exist in name before the advent of the American Civil War were fabrications. Though geography and stance on slavery linked a majority of people in these communities, to say that the two were dichotomous is an exaggeration. Continue reading “Autochthony and the Imagined Community”

Ever since our discussion at the beginning of class regarding the UK’s “right to roam”, I’ve been fascinated by the idea and decided to look into it further. As of this moment, the countries with a “right to roam” law or something approaching those lines, are Ireland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, The Czech Republic, Switzerland, and of course the UK. A few honorable mentions are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I researched the United States’ stance on this law as well, after remembering Beth talking about the “Stand your ground” policy in Florida; what other states have “Stand your ground”, and why is it just so hard to be a wanderer in today’s day and age?

Continue reading “Ramble on, Rose”