...The Truman Show There are many different films and genres, but there is one film that both provides a different outlook and is entertaining at the same time. The Truman Show is a movie that is about a man named Truman Burbank whose entire life was televised and set up since birth without his knowledge, which eventually realizes due to a series of events. This TV show was created by a man named Christof, who is in charge of Truman’s life, the actors around him and the enclosed city he built for Truman, called Seahaven. The Truman Show is a good film because of the psychological effect by the idea of the film, the difference between the real world and a perfect world, and the many religious connotations with it and allusions to God. One way this movie psychologically affects our perspective and helps us become a bit more aware because the movie shows Truman Burbank as a normal, regular person whose life was completely setup by a director. Similarly, humans were placed on this earth so perfectly, that everything feels normal with no sign of suspicion that could alter the vision of life. This movie also brings a sense of paranoia, by feeling watched at all times and to confuse the people in one’s life as actors, just like in the movie. Of course, those are just the temporary effects of watching such a movie, as with any other movie that alters the thought process. It seems as if the creator of the show, Christof, really wanted to prove that the world he created is safe and considered...
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...Module B – Witness Peter Weir uses his film witness to express his concerns with the modern world by looking at the binary opposition of the Amish and western society. The Amish represent the old world and it is seen that they live peacefully while our modern world is filled with violence and corruption. Using the themes of conflicting cultures, violence vs. pacifism, and technology vs. tradition, weir is able to explore the conflicting cultures of the Amish and the English. American society is represented as a violent and arrogant group of people, whereas the Amish are seen to be a peaceful and religious group of people Witness presents two very different worlds. Peter Weir can demonstrate this in the opening scenes as he uses a variety of techniques to emphasize the difference between the people of the Amish and the modern world. The unified Amish, dressed in their old fashioned clothing, walk through a picturesque landscape to a funeral. The audience is led to believe that this is a historic film but the world ‘Pennsylvania 1984’ appear on the screen instead. The panoramic camera shot of the lush green fields sets a peaceful tone. Although this is followed by the visual juxtaposition of a horse and carriage followed closely by a semi-trailer. The combined sounds of the horse trotting against the threatening hum of the semi-trailer are conflicting with the soft synthesizer music. This is the first indication that the world of the Amish and the modern world come into...
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...In this response paper I will talk about the movie “Truman Show”. And some opinions and results which I got from it and the movies connection with popular culture First of all, I’ll start from the content of the movie. The main character is someone “who has been adopted by a company for the first time”, called Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), who lives in a giant jar which can be seen from the space (the only building can be seen from space after the The Great Wall) unaware of the World. Truman , who thinks that his little world is “real”, eventually starts to figure out that everything happens around him just about a repetition and everything around him is just about a fiction. However , escaping from his fictional world is not easy as he estimates. Soon, Truman gets forced to face his fears, to go an “unknown” from the world that he is safe inside in order to escape from his “fake world”. In the last scene, director of the Truman Show (Ed Harris) tries to trick Truman (and “of course” the audience).Directors says “ there is nothing better at the “outside”, even inside is better and safe.”. But Truman doesn’t prefer the prison that he is in and escape from it. When I came to my conclusions about the movie is trying to send a message to the audience. For example, in the Truman afraid from sea because he lost her father at sea. Symbolic meanings in any language of the sea means freedom. Truman is afraid of the sea because it is not free. Truman does not exceed the sea following...
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...Manipulation through film techniques… In the film ‘The Truman Show’, director Peter Weir shows many ways of manipulation through film techniques such as camera angles, background music and camera frames. He shows in the film how a viewer can be so mindlessly absorbed by others surrounding them on television. The director also shows how easily our minds can be involved and enwrapped in a storyline or plot, and how this can affect the way we see things and how our perspective on reality can change from this film manipulation. Some of the films techniques that are used to draw in an audience or manipulate them are screen shots such as close ups, extreme close-ups, mid-shots, long shots and extreme long shots. Generally in TV shows such as ‘Big Brother’ or ‘American Idol’, close ups are used to show deep emotion. For example, in ‘The Truman Show’, Truman is given a close-up when reuniting with his Father after many years of separation. In this close-up Truman appears to be crying with happiness and loss, which in many cases would influence the way the audience feels, possibly making some cry of happiness or making them feel overwhelmed with emotion. Close-ups are just one of the few types of screen shots that draw in an audience and are a much-used technique in the film ‘The Truman Show’. Another film technique commonly used in ‘The Truman Show’ is music. Music plays an important role in films to lighten, deepen or strengthen the mood of a scene. During ‘The Truman Show’, we see...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper: A Woman's Struggle Pregnancy and childbirth are very emotional times in a woman's life and many women suffer from the "baby blues." The innocent nickname for postpartum depression is deceptive because it down plays the severity of this condition. Although she was not formally diagnosed with postpartum depression, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) developed a severe depression after the birth of her only child (Kennedy et. al. 424). Unfortunately, she was treated by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who forbade her to write and prescribed only bed rest and quiet for recovery (Kennedy et al. 424). Her condition only worsened and ultimately resulted in divorce (Kennedy and Gioia 424). Gilman's literary indictment of Dr. Mitchell's ineffective treatment came to life in the story "The Yellow Wallpaper." On the surface, this gothic tale seems only to relate one woman's struggle with mental illness, but because Guilman was a prominent feminist and social thinker she incorporated themes of women's rights and the poor relationships between husbands and wives (Kennedy and Gioia 424). Guilman cleverly manipulates the setting to support her themes and set the eerie mood. Upon first reading "The Yellow Wallpaper," the reader may see the relationship between the narrator and her husband John as caring, but with examination one will find that the narrator is repeatedly belittled and demeaned by her husband. On first arriving at the vacation home John chooses...
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...Analysis on “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. Gilman was a writer and social activist during the late 1800s and early 1900s. She had a tough childhood. Her father, Frederick Beecher Perkins, but he abandoned the family, leaving Charlotte's mother to raise two children on her own. Gilman moved around a lot as a result and her education suffered greatly for it. Gilman married Charles Stetson in 1884 and the couple had a daughter named Katherine. Sometime during her ten year marriage to Stetson, Gilman experienced a severe depression and suffered a series of uncommon treatments for it. This experience is believed to have inspired her to the short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1892). The story takes the form of undisclosed journal entries written by a woman who is supposed to be recovering from what her husband, a physician, calls a "temporary nervous depression”. This haunting psychological horror story chronicles the narrator's descent into madness, or perhaps depending on your interpretation, into freedom. The author’s use of setting, conflict and point of view, provide this short story with the drama needed to capture the reader’s attention. The author begins the story using the key element setting to keep the readers mind in a constant roam. The narrator's view of the setting is colored by her limited and troubled perspective. She sees the yellow wallpaper in the room as a mostly evil and troubling...
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...How many teenagers never ask for anything, and always obey their parents? In truth, not many adhere to such behavior. Certain characters in literature follow similar adolescent patterns--we sympathize with Harry Potter’s struggle with his extended family and criticize Dudley Dursley’s selfish behavior. We applaud Oliver Twist when he eventually asks, “Please sir, may I have some more?” In Willa Cather’s short story “Paul’s Case”, she portrays the protagonist, Paul, in a similar light, proving that teenage years entail a certain disrespect and disdain for one’s life. Indeed, Paul struggles in adolescence with his focus on aesthetics, selfishness, and contempt for authority. Paul’s aesthetic paradigm immediately appears in his dandiness and his lack of appreciation for his own life. Cather notes, “There was something of the dandy about [Paul], and he wore an opal pin…and a red carnation in his buttonhole” (109). For Paul, dressing nicely entails a great sense of pleasure, “[Paul] began excitedly to tumble into his uniform…and thought it very becoming” (111). Cather highlights Paul’s fashion-oriented obsession and how it affects Paul’s judgment of others. For example, Paul criticizes poorly dressed people: “He decided…[the English teacher] was not appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sit…in such togs” (111). Here, Cather depicts Paul’s materialism not only as Paul’s juvenile obsession, but also as a tool for his judgment of others. On top of his sartorial dandiness, Paul...
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...In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, just like group 3 mentioned in slide 2 that the mood gets sadder throughout the story, which I happen to think the same, I think the color that symbolizes this mood is the color brown. The person telling us this story lets us know that all she wanted to do was to change the wallpaper because it was driving her crazy but kept on being rejected by her husband, and it upsets her that he does not take her seriously. At first, the wallpaper was seen as “ugly” by the narrator but in the end, the wallpaper is seen as a symbol of the narrator’s oppression (group 3). Of course, the readers would sympathize with the narrator because she was “imprisoned” by someone who supposedly loved her, which makes the color of the mood of the story, brown (sadness), seem a little more realistic. There are also many meanings given throughout the story but one specific meaning somewhere at the end caught my attention. “I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?” (Gilman) - from this, I understand that when the narrator ripped off the wallpaper, the woman who was trapped behind it was finally freed and this led the narrator to finally realize that the woman behind the wallpaper was really herself all along. She was the one who’d been “creeping” (Gilman). The narrator knows there are other women who are just like her but the...
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...Gender roles have always existed, but Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows how these gender roles had extreme consequences for women in the 1900’s. “The Yellow Wallpaper” addresses several topics in De Beauvoir and Gilbert and Gubar’s texts by illustrating the passivity forced onto women, the aura of mystery that subsequently surrounds the feminine, and the mental illness that inevitably follows. Gilman’s text is a tale that warns of the dangers of forcing inactivity onto women. The narrator’s husband, a physician named John, diagnoses her with a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 648). He prescribes for her uninterrupted isolation: a “rest cure.” This was a common treatment for hysteria and nervousness for women in the setting of this story, and the narrator is no exception. She is forbidden from doing even the most menial tasks, much less pursuing the writing she so desperately craves. Gilbert and Gubar explain the reason of this happening in The Madwoman in the Attic when they say “for women in particular patriarchal culture has always assumed mental exercises would have dire consequences” (1934). The narrator has always had an active imagination, especially when she was younger: “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store” (Gilman 650). The men in the narrator’s life believe that any intellectual stimulation...
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...The unnamed female main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is put in an isolated mansion by her husband, a doctor, to help with her “nervousness” or hysteria. She is infantilized by being kept in a nursery and treated like a child by her husband. In addition to being patronized, she is also forbidden to work or even see her baby as it is believed she must solely rest. Her perceived as well-meaning husband gaslights her feelings and experiences, in an attempt to help reduce her “nervousness.” The main character’s disjointed, secretive journaling of her feelings represents her spiral into psychosis due to her isolation and treatment by her husband. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” reflects on the treatment of women’s mental health and how marriage and gender roles reinforce this treatment. At the beginning of the story, she describes how she is staying in a colonial mansion that is being let to them cheaply. She describes her husband’s disdain for all things that are not logical and how he does not believe she is sick. The deliberate use of language in the introduction and description of her husband reinforces that she recognizes that her husband does not believe her and puts all the blame of her “illness” on nervous depression or hysteria. During the late 19th Century any time a woman was not content in life or in any way upset it was blamed on her having hysteria. During this era, hysteria was commonly diagnosed as the primary cause for female nervousness and...
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...In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator and her husband John are renting a house for three weeks. Her husband, who is a physician, believes she suffers from temporary nervous depression. “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression” (Gilman 275). He makes her stay in a room and orders her to get as much sleep as possible. He believes it is best for her not to write or do any activity she enjoys. Being confined to a room, she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and believes a woman is trapped inside the paper. She eventually tears all the wallpaper off and says the woman is now free. The narrator’s attitude towards the wallpaper changed throughout the story. The wallpaper is not just paper; it is a symbol for the narrator’s state of mind. At first, the narrator finds the wallpaper unpleasant. “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (Gilman 276). “The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others” (Gilman 276). Being confined to this room and with nothing else to do, she became obsessed with the wallpaper. “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper” (Gilman...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a woman suffering from postpartum depression, where she is under her husband’s orders in the mandatory resting cure in bed hopes to get rid of her illness. This leads to her slowly going insane from being locked in the yellow room with nothing to do. Gilman’s use of the color yellow can be seen as ironic because, while typically associated as being a cheerful, joyous and warm color. She uses the yellow room in ways one does not at first associate with the color, creating a powerful symbol for the different emotions displayed in the text. One of the emotions expressed by the color of yellow is acting cowardly. This can be seen throughout the story when Jane is...
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...The emotional damage that results from the tragedy of the loss of his son reflects in the way Garp continues living and in how he writes his new novel. The family soon after moves in with Jenny in her childhood home, where she now runs a women’s refuge house, here the family goes through a period of recovery Garp writes a book, Duncan comes to terms with his disability, and Helen makes peace with Garp. The book Garp writes is about a woman who is raped and this causes a paranoia in her husband that leads to the demise of their family the novel is so graphic and controversial that Garp’s mother and his publisher John Wolf convince him to leave the country for a while. Both Garp and Helen agree for they fell as if they must set a new tone to their family Helen has recently giving birth to a daughter and Garp feels as though he has lost the drive to write. The birth of a new baby brings peace to Helen “When Jenny Garp was born… Helen was grateful; she felt for the first time since the accident that she was delivered from the insanity of grief that had crushed her with the loss of Walt” (Irving 443). Helen has come to realize that a person cannot cheat death, but something new can be created from it Jenny Garp is not a replacement for Walt, but she reminds the family that life goes on. This realization comes in a different way for Garp as he and Helen began to age Garp comes to terms with death. After the death of his mother, Garp recognizes and writes, “Death … does not have...
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...The Yellow Wallpaper The attitudes towards women’s mental and physical health in the 19thcentury vary greatly from today’s views on practicing medicine. During that time, there was prevalence for the oppression of women and the general treatment for mental illness was a popular method known as resting cures. The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, serves as a critique of this popular treatment as it is an account of an unnamed narrator who descends into madness when receiving this type of treatment for her illness. The author, Charlotte Gilman addresses themes of madness and insanity through the narrator’s collection of journal entries, which comprise the story. In the beginning of the story, the narrator is confined to bed rest in a rented house with her physician husband, John, who believes that total rest is in her best interest for her condition. Gilman’s disapproving views over rest cures and doctor/patient relationships are initially revealed through the narrator’s description of her husband. The narrator describes him as a man who “scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figure”(355) and refuses to see his wife’s illness as a true condition. Through the narrator’s description, Gilman begins to point out the flaws in medicine’s understanding of mental illness and its shortcomings in treatment. The narrator writes in her journal as a way of escape from the monotony and solidarity of her treatment. While she loves and trusts her husband...
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...In the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses first person narration to describe protagonist character, Jane’s mental state of mind. The narrator conveys this message through yellow wallpaper. The wallpapers color/smell and pointless pattern communicate the narrator’s unspoken suppressed feelings/emotions and thoughts. Furthermore, the symbolic detail of the wallpaper reveals the narrator’s mental state of mind, confusion and absence from reality. The bedroom is imparted by the narrator as a room that is big/airy with sunshine galore yet confined by barring windows and a bed nailed to the floor. “It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore”...
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