“Why we need another Robocop?”

Robocop is totally a Cinderella story—officer Kyle Murphy goes from DPD uniform rags to OCP robot body riches.  So if Robocop is a Cinderella story, and we already have thousands of those, why the heck do we need a new Robocop?  Can’t these Hollywood hacks come up with anything new?

These were the sorts of questions I asked myself Tuesday night as I sat down in front of Netflix to watch the Robocop remake.  Note that I had already decided to watch the film even as I was questioning the point in doing so.  I’m not one to normally get upset about adaptations or sequels or remakes.  I say, go ahead, see if you can top Verhoeven’s surprisingly clever satire of consumerism and privatization.  Padilha responded in a smart way.  He didn’t try to top Verhoeven.  Instead, he made an earnest examination of traumatic injury and PTSD.  I didn’t like it as much as the original, but I liked it more than I expected to, and exceeding my low expectations is a success, however small.

I think therein lies the answer to the question.  We do need another Robocop because there are other things one can say or do with the robot cop trope.  It’s no less timeless and no more fantastical than a princess and her fairy godmother, and it would not really matter if it was.  In less than thirty years, we’ve seen Robocop play allegory for the excesses of the 80s and the traumas of the 2000s.  What other purposes may he serve?  Why not one comedic?  Could he be she, Officer Kelly Murphy?

And that’s just looking at it from an intentional angle.  Even if Padilha had chosen to try and beat Verhoeven at his own game, even if he had gone all Gus Van Zandt and tried to recreate the original shot for bloody shot, his Robocop would have reflected symptoms of a different context.  Of course, he didn’t (and thankfully so—Vince Vaughn has become too jowly to be an action star), and so the intentional changes he made reveal so many more symptoms of his context.

So we need another Robocop, Cinderella, whatever, because there are infinite potential Cinderellas, Robocops, whatevers, and they can all show and tell us interesting things.

A sight-reading of Italo Calvino’s “All At One Point,” a note to Possible World theory

Here (X), right there, marks a bite in the ass, mine of course, for waiting to write reflections. I now attempt to reflect on a sight-reading of Calvino’s “All At One Point,” a post-modern story that in five pages depicts otherworldliness and absurdity. It's a whirlwind to be sure. Here is the danger: I do this for the audience of my classmates and Dr. Busl, who wrote her dissertation on the narrative structure of Calvino. Here we go.

            Before we begin to read the narrative, the title and the epigraph offer a setting and a foundation. The epigraph describes Edwin P. Hubble’s calculations of “the galaxies’ velocity of recession,” calculations of this recession offer a “moment” when all matter was “concentrated in a single point” (43), thus “All At One Point.” The narrator, Qfwfq, begins with “Naturally” (43), an opening that by design we must question. But, the reader is then thrust into a world that immediately seems anything but natural, a world without time. The narrator, Qfwfq, also questions space, “Nobody knew there could be space” (43). How does a narrative work in a setting so outside our own actual world, a world without time and space? Thomas Pavel suggests that in creating an APW, the text establishes “a new actual world which imposes its own laws on the surrounding system. . . In order to become immersed in this world, the reader must adopt a new ontological perspective” (Ryan 3.1.2). Calvino creates this APW that seems out of reach, but he hangs it on the masterplot of a creation story. And so it works. Although there are multiple characters, time and space for much of the narration is centered upon one point. There are enough hallmarks of this masterplot, though, that we find comfort in the recognizable and can therefore immerse ourselves. If not during the first read, the second. The concepts of time and space become realized upon the expansion of the point, caused by the generosity of Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀s. And another APW, one that more closely resembles our own, is created.

            Should I have written “bum”?

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Possible Worlds.” the living handbook of narratology. Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, University of Hamburg, 27 Sept. 2013. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.

Sight Read of Jorge Luis Borges

We looked at Labyrinth's by Jorge Luis Borges, and even after the first read, we could easily understand that multiple worlds existed at the same time within this narrative. For instance, the narrative opens with the first point of view, and from here, we are informed that the narrator is a slave in Babylon. Then, from this point, the narrator informs of the lottery system in Babylon, and I would argue that the lottery system is linked to the slavery system. The lottery system may even be the slave system. If one aspect of the story seems obvious here, I would argue that it is the fact that one world builds off of another.

To elaborate on my point above further, the slave world is linked to the lottery world just like the lottery world is linked to the company and so on. A hierarchical system exists of some sort, and at the root of these worlds is somewhat of a universal truth. I would argue that the universal truth here is people's greed for power. Borges writes, "The system was elementary, as you can see. Naturally these 'lotteries' failed. Their moral virtue was nil. They were not directed at all of man's faculties, but only at hope." (Borges 31) I underlined this quote in my reading because it applies what we discussed in class about narrative worlds. Mainly, most of us realized that these worlds do not have to make sense; they do not even have to fit together in any particular way, but these worlds are always unified somehow thematically, and in this instance, I would argue that the theme is the narrator's voice. The narrator cautions against people's greed. I may be doing what Abbott talks about in this week's reading here; I may be filling in the gaps to overread or underread this piece, yet nevertheless, there seems to be an underlining universal truth here that readers can identify with: one man's greed, leads to another man's greed, and as the chain continues, the society is doomed.

Blivens The Babysitter Analysis

The Babysitter-Coover Analysis

      In understanding the Babysitter the reader is pulled into the lives of several characters. Each of the characters’ stories is interwoven with their sexual fantasy. These racy stories are spliced together and create two narrative levels: what actually happened and the characters different fantasies. Several endings are proposed which are all mutually exclusive so the reader is left to interpret for themselves what actually happened. The sexual language used in the short story is a clear indication at the start of the reading that sexual imagery will play a key role in the story.   While there are many elements that could be discussed including each characters fantasy and what that says about them, the connection between the characters, and the use of violence the structure is what stood out to me the most.  The way the short story is structured makes it hard to understand. I quickly realized this was not going to be a fast, easy read but through examining the overall structure the reader can gain a better interpretation of the short story. A clear correlation can be found between the television scenes, plot, and characters.

     

    The story clearly incorporates details from the different television shows as it tells the plot and fantasies of each character. On the television we see a musical, western, spy, mystery, romance, and news. Each one of the television shows has a connection to one of the characters fantasies. For example, the spy show is mentioned before Jack’s spying fantasy with the babysitter. Jack and Marks fantasy matches with the mystery television show. Each one of the shows links to a fantasy that a character has in the story.

    

    Also, if we look at the overall structure of the short story it speeds up when the babysitter, using the remote starts clicking through channels on the television.  Both the story and discourse time speeds up at the end. The story speeds up because there is more switching between characters with shorter paragraphs. Not only does this link to the babysitter switching channels quickly but speeds up of the story as whole.

   

    While the structure may not be what stands out the most in this short story it does establish a clear link between the characters and fantasies. It also points to greater meaning behind the fantasies and allows for more interpretation. 

Embedded Stories: Depth in Brevity

My group’s sight read was done with a collection from Lydia Davis. Here, I’m going to write about embedded stories in one of the short shorts: “After You Left.” There are a few kinds of embedded stories here. One type is pretty easy to spot. The passages begin “Imagine the scene”  and  “I imagined.” This is the kind of embedded, or what we called nested, story I usually think of when I think of embedded stories. Far more interesting is the embedded story which reads, in its entirety, “I told him how you and I had spent our time together.”

This line is the largest story in the shortest space in the whole text. As an allusion, this example shows us how an embedded story moves the mind’s eye away from the ‘and then and then and then’ and into a new space time. We don’t know what the story the narrator is telling the “him” referred to in this passage, but we can picture them there exchanging anecdotes. This one line is like a Russian nesting doll. We don’t hear any of these embedded stories directly, but because of our life experience we know what this kind of scene would look like.

If a single line can unfold this way, imagine what the kinds of insight we can gain into narrative through the course of an entire conversation. I suspect if we analyze more dialogue and free indirect discourse we will find the reader’s eye moving everywhere.  So often we think of a story as it is presented to us, from beginning to end. But if we think of space as abstract we can see the complexities in the movements of every allusion, every tangent, every memory.