Written on the Wind

Scene

"Quote"

This was written about the same film which German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who himself has remade several of Sirk's films. Recently termed "a great, crazy movie about life and about death. And about America." It is a film, argues Fassninder. in which "nothing is natural. Ever. Not in the whole film ...

Question

Taking into mind the comments made on melodramatic structure and themes/ideals during the 1950's, the movie seems to be hinting at a theme of uncertainty. How has the film portrayed this, if well?

Suspended Judgement Through Storytelling

"Peripheral processing may lead to an attitudinal change in the moment but it does not last. By contrast, people process stories by immersing themselves in the story, striving to experience vicariously the events and emotions that the protagonist do. They suspend the proclivity to counterargue, to raise doubts about the veracity or relevance of the information they are hearing. Crucially this is true whether they have a stake in the issues featured in the story. Readers suspend disbelief in a way that has a lasting effect" (Polletta, 291).

In Freaks and Geeks the protagonist encounters and interacts with a group of outcasts ("freaks") that would traditionally associated with negative connotations of rebellion and drug use. How does the show work to suspend the audience's judgement upon these individuals in order for us to perceive their "scene" in a positive light?

Affron and Polleta: Questions and Quotes

Dominique MarmenoFilm 392R

Affron:

By standard critical canons the laying out of truth is too excessive and causes melodrama to be looked down upon; why does a complete enlightenment of all of the character’s appeal to the managerial class? Why does the bourgeoisie think they are above the truth? 

Polleta:

What is the purpose of stock characters? Why do we, as an audience, accept the same stories and narratives we have seen and heard before? Is there an advantage to using the same characters that appeals to the managerial class? If we changed up the characters would certain works of film still be melodramatic, examples? 

The Limits of Plot - Quote & Questions

"By contrast, an approach to narrative that privileges dominant status beliefs emphasizes the difficulty of making women the protagonists of classically heroic stories. Tell a story in which a woman responds to a threat assertively and instrumentally, and readers  will probably not like her or identify with her. They will not derive from her story the message that, if they are in a similar situation, they should behave in the same way. They will hear a different story: one not about heroism but about the dangers that women face or the dangers that foolish women face.Dominant  gender norms trump the power of genre in shaping readers' interpretation and evaluation of what happens in the story."

Poletta, 294

Does this idea that gender norms influence viewers/readers more strongly than genre ring true today? In what way is this different now than women in classically heroic stories?

Quote and Question: Poletta and Freaks and Geeks

“What stands in the way of adapting old stories to new circumstances? More generally, how do time and place-specific beliefs shape stories’ interpretation?

... We argue that they do so by way of character. In other words, narrative does limit people’s capacity to imagine alternatives to the status quo, but not by way of canonical plots. The same events can be inserted into different genres of plot, whether heroic or tragic, comedic or ironic, to yield quite different conclusions. But audiences’ expectations of character are more rigid. Time- and place-specific ideas about how people properly behave – about how ambitious women should be, for example, or how emotional men should be – limit audiences’ ability to imagine them playing roles associated with different plot genres. Plots are transposable; characters are less so.” (Poletta 290)

 I’d like to speak on the questions posed in the paper itself. Specifically, “What stands in the way of adapting old stories to new circumstances?” Why do some classic stories that have set a model for future films sometimes flop when story runs too similar to the original? Do people crave originality after seeing the same storyline redone over and over?

"Sam, you want some advice....be a man." 

"It sure would be nice if you guys back me up every once in a while. My sister does and she's a girl"

Freaks and Geeks, Episode 1 (8:14-8:20)

3 Reading Quotes and Freaks and Geeks

"Most important, social change and upheaval became a primary background for melodramatic action. The earlier melodrama, however much it may have advocated some kind of social reform such as the abolition of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, tended to portray society within the story as static. Individuals rose and fell, but society went on in much the same way" (Cawelti 40).



"The family melodrama, by contrast, though dealing largely with the same Oedipal themes of emotional and moral identity, more often records the failure of the protagonist to act in a way that could shape the events and influence the emotional environment let alone change the stifling social milieu. The world is closed. and the characters are acted upon" (Elsaesser 78-79).



"Characters do not have "lives"; we endow them with "personality" only to the extent that personality is a structure familiar to us in life and art ... . Even fantastic narratives require inference, guesses, and expectations according to one's sense of what 'normal persons are like' - understanding normal in its descriptive and evaluative sense. This is where standard role expectations, stereotypes, prejudices, social biases, and dominant ideologies come in. Believable, sympathetic characters are shaped by prevailing beliefs about how people in those circumstances should behave" (Polletta 293-294).



What are the challenges of providing a story with character types with many expectations, stereotypes, and conventional beliefs but ones who break these conventions and act differently to change the status quo?

Freaks and Geeks: Melodrama in the High School Setting

The first episode of Freaks and Geeks establishes character roles with very clear stereotypes of high school students. We were introduced to the jocks, the cheerleaders, the bullies, the burnouts, and of course, the "freaks and geeks". Throughout the first episode, we are shown an initial persona for each of the main characters, but after only one episode, different sides to some of the characters are revealed. The first element of melodrama that I noticed was the use of music in the opening scene of the episode. It opens with a very vanilla, upbeat guitar song as we see the cheerleader and football player talking about their very complex and intense relationship problems, then there is a stark change in the music to the song "Running with the Devil" as the burnouts are introduced. After this, the geeks are introduced with the song "I'm Alright", a reflection of how they feel until the bullies arrive and the music is cut off completely.

In Francesca Polletta's "Limits of Plot", she explains how people respond to stories with different plots, and the results were as follows:

"If the main characters in the story matched dominant expectations about how people of that status typically behaved, then readers relied on a logic of genre in evaluating the characters, filling in missing parts of the story and extracting a moral from the story. If the main characters did not match those expectations, then readers interpreted the story in line with conventional beliefs about how people of that status behaved. In short, dominant status expectations did not preclude a genre-based reading, but they did set the conditions for one. As we show, this poses real difficulties for those who would use stories to challenge the status quo."

In terms of Freaks and Geeks, we are initially presented with highly stereotyped characters that match how we'd expect them to behave, so we continue to expect certain behaviors from them. We can begin to assume certain elements of this genre and think ok, it's another classic high school story of the studious girl who falls in love with the "bad boy". However, as the episode continues, we see some characters in a more complex sense. We are introduced to Nick's passion for his massive drum set, Kim snaps at her friend for making fun of Lindsay's dancing with Eli, and Cindy shares a dance with Sam. This is how the show pulls us in. We may have thought that these were your stereotypical high school characters, but as they reveal that there is more to them, we want to find out what else they may be hiding.