Satire and the Truman Show

  I watched “The Truman Show”, a film by Peter Weir about a man called Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carey) who lived an entire life watched by everyone in the world on his own TV series. His life experiences are controlled by a higher up in the studio and when he starts to get wind of it all hell breaks loose. This is an obvious response for the increasing popularity of reality TV and the surreal quality of those who react to it and how interesting it really is. We live in an age now where people take out their cameras and update the world with their life every single day on Youtube. It can be the most boring day ever but hey people will watch it, millions in fact. Where does this fascination with typical humanity come from? We are a society that can’t get enough of the day to day life of someone else, look at how many headlines the Kardashians make in a week for doing absolutely nothing. I think it comes from a lack of something interesting in the viewer’s life or taking pleasure in one’s pain. Either way this formula relates to people, this film is just the study of that.

  A ton of things are scripted, MTV reality shows are built off of forced drama that goes nowhere. The Truman Show makes parody of this through his entire life being scripted. Majority of the viewers don’t realize it and in reality most viewers don’t either. Fake drama is 90% of our entertainment nowadays and even when there isn’t drama we sometimes create it to keep ourselves entertained. The Truman show is not only a lesson in reality TV but how we can look at something so basic, forgettable and pointless as the normal day of a normal man and turn it into the biggest topic of your day. Is it genuine curiosity or complete and utter boredom with your own life? Take it for what you will but as this ongoing climb of reality shows appearing in all forms of media still goes strong, the message is still relevant.

My future

  I always said my future would go either two ways, doing what I love to do as a career or homeless on the street begging for trash to eat. Gene Simmons once said "Once you give up on your dream, you're just waiting to die", well I sure as hell not planning on dying anytime soon. Within the span of a decade is hard to judge. For sure the next three years I’m going to be here at Ringling getting a film degree, just in time for Trump to leave office. Scary to think he might destroy the economy when I get out making living situations hard but hey look on the Brightside, America might’ve learned their lesson after this blunder. After I get my degree I would hopefully find someone here trustworthy enough to move out with and possibly go to LA. The goal is to be a director in Hollywood, It’s a pipe dream and I know it. I’m very much grounded in reality so I just know the quality of my work here has to be on par in order to have a chance. I do want to move as soon as I graduate, even if I’m poor as I am now. Delaying a moving situation is like delaying a wedding, It’ll eventually never happen if you don’t do it soon and I am not going to let myself be a guy who does local music videos all his life. After that it’s all up in arms. My friends and I have a theory that within this next decade we are going to have a creative resurgence of original content in movies again. You can see the fatigue of super hero films and constant nostalgia pandering already, by the time it’s 2027 I’m positive “Avengers 7” won’t be that astounding of a feat and people will want to hear new stories. It takes one bad apple to ruin a bunch. With that hopeful mindset in my head, I think I might have a chance with all my weird scripts about aliens, monsters and 60’s inspired adventure films could make a couple people happy. I’m not looking for mass success, I just want that one dork to see a movie I birthed and think to himself “this was made for me”. That’s the goal, that’s my hopeful future. Fingers crossed.

A Clockwork Orange and how it fits in

“A Clockwork Orange” is a novel by Anthony Burgess about a young gang member named Alex who lives in a future dystopian version of England. After killing a woman, he is sent to prison where he learns his ways but society doesn’t forgive him. When talking about it’s sci-fi aspects there are very few occasions where it really shines, one of which is language. Burgess created an impressive dictionary of slang words for Alex and his “Droogs” to say, sometimes it’s incredibly hard to read but you get the hang of it as it goes along. Other than that the sci-fi elements are far and in-between, making this story more literary than sci-fi. I think to some it can be incredibly off putting. Questions like “If it’s that far into the future why are they driving normal cars down normal streets?” Come up and sometimes you even wonder why they bothered having it in the future in the first place if the only thing coming out of it would be the language. Wouldn’t it have been easier to write the book without it? I personally think it’s all apart of Clockwork’s charm and what makes it stand out. It uses subtlety to it’s key, it’s not a massive world building epic, instead it’s completely character driven, especially Alex who is one of the most developed characters I’ve ever read. I can relate sci-fi gentrification to something of metal music. There’s thrash metal, doom metal, black metal, shock metal, dinosaur metal, it all exists under the same title. Sci-fi can be from an entire universe of fiction to earth now with a small piece of technology that doesn’t exist. I’m not effected by the lack of aliens and monsters within Clockwork, if it had all of it I think it would distract too far from the base of the story which is about the qualms of accepting the morally unaccepted. Questions of it fitting in never really crossed my mind as the story took the reigns first and foremost. It was like a well rounded cake with a nice sci-fi cherry on it, a plus and nothing more.