It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
What motivates the salesman? In Influence, Robert B. Cialdini talks about Joe Girard, the greatest car salesman in history. Why was he so successful? Girard reckons all that matters is ‘’finding the salesman you like, plus the price. Put them together, and you get a deal.’’ A few pages later, Cialdini notes that Girard would send every last one of his former customers holid…
Is the main figure in The Penintent, Joseph Shapiro, a narrator we can trust, and when finding a narrator untrustworthy, are we making a general claim or simply regarding their values as questionable to us? Here are some of Shapiro’s remarks. Of many Western women in America: they “dress like sixteen-year-olds, drink like sailors, curse like streetwalkers and whose alleged love is in f…
1 I had no idea if the story was true, but I believed it might be. I didn’t know whether I was the only person he ever told it to, and I supposed it was more a confession than a story. With most stories, we assume that we aren’t the exclusive listener, while with confessions, we are more inclined to assume exclusivity. If I believed I was the only person who knew about it, this rested …
If all films are useful to illuminate film theory, some are more useful than others. A viewer might believe, while analysing a work of popular entertainment, that the theorist is reading too much into it. Seeing Jaws as an allegory of Watergate, or an example of masculinity in crisis, is all very well, but might not add much to comprehending the viewing experience. However, what about a film like …