Reflective Memo
There were many other excellent options for this project. I seriously considered doing Harvey, because I thought it would be interesting to explore the perception of reality that the film portrays so well. Another contender was The Birdcage, where I could talk about the implication of counter culture, acceptance, and Robin William’s fabulous dance moves. However, Harold and Maude was most interesting to me because I did not fully understand it. One of the ways I learn about something is to write about it, and I thought doing my last MWA3 on this particular film would help me better comprehend the message of the movie. I was also intrigued by the varying degrees of symbolism in the film, and the nature of Harold and Maude’s relationship. Because it is a film, I knew multi-modality would have better options available to it than a piece of writing. I planned on using film clips and pictures from the movie, which expanded my options beyond using quotes.
When I sit down to write something, I usually spend a couple of days gathering information. I can’t simply hammer out a paper, which I suppose is good for non-procrastination purposes. For Harold and Maude, I watched the movie, skimmed reviews, and read multiple articles about the film concerning it’s content and style choices. I then picked three of the articles I found to be most applicable to what I wanted to say, and used those for this project. I chose to not be wildly funny for this MWA3. While a very funny movie, there is also a serious undercurrent to Harold and Maude that I wanted to address. The movie is about a counter-culture romance, yes, but it is also about morality. The briefness of life, learning to love, and discovering the kind of person you want to become are all factors within the film. I wanted to write about those. As such, I aimed for my rhetoric to give insight into the film by mainly exploring the symbolism of the characters and the character’s actions. A portion of my rhetorical analysis was devoted to mise-en-scene, such as discussing the meaning behind Harold’s light-split face in the first scene, and the daises turning into gravestones as a image of life and death’s cycle. My rhetoric needed to be persuasive to the degree of convincing my audience I was not making this stuff up, which is why I used images and video clips from the film. They became my “hard evidence” to prove what I was saying. However, my rhetoric did not need to car-sales-man level of persuasiveness, nor did it need to be exceedingly lofty or colloquial. I wanted a balance between the two. I considered talking about the Cat Stevens’ songs that play throughout the movie and including audio clips of them. However, I decided against it because it strayed from my objective of talking about symbolism. The songs added a lot to the film, but I was unable to find a way of tying them in seamlessly with the rest of my analysis.
I think that the structure of my writing worked well for this piece. I used Harold and Maude as foils for each other and what they both stand for, and then extrapolated that meaning into something bigger. Within that structure I talked about the meaning of objects and appearance that give the characters more depth. Unlike a lot of films, Harold and Maude does not have extraneous footage. The dialogue and scenes each carry their own weight and have a purpose, which made it much more interesting to writing about than, say, Expendables 2. I also think the video clips I use work well. I could not effectively portray the narcissism of Harold’s mother as well as Vivian Pickles. I decided not to put in the clip of daises turning into gravestones because I pulled the dialogue out of the scene to write about, and having both the written analysis and video seemed redundant to me. For the ending, I thought the video clip of Harold dancing and playing the banjo would be more powerful than me simply writing about it. What failed about the project for me was the complexity of website building. Despite the fact Weebly is fairly intuitive to use and my attempts of experimentation, I am just not a technologically savvy person. This is, of course, a bit unfortunate given the century we live in. If I were to do it over, I would spend more time delving into Weebly’s various modes of website-creating. I also think it would have been interesting to compare Harold and Maude to another film from class, especially one that it has little in common with—like Dr. Strangelove or Young Frankenstein. It would have been a good challenge to draw connections about the class between two very different pieces of art. (Following this line of thought, comparing Dr. Strangelove and Young Frankenstein would be interesting since both chose to be black and white films instead of color, but for different reasons...) However, I’m also glad I did not write about two films at once. It gave me the chance to really focus on Harold and Maude and process my thoughts about it.
I learned a lot from this project. Usually, when I write about metaphors and symbolism, it is about a piece of creative writing. I am very used to both reading literature with rhetorical devices in mind and then writing about it. What I learned from this class was how to apply those skills to different types of creative outlets, namely music, comics, and videos. Before, I would watch movies as a form of escapism. I still do to some extent, but I think more about what I’m watching than I did back in August. It was our class discussion on Harold and Maude that got me really interested in the meaning of the film, because it reminded me so much of how I analyzed literature.
I also learned about how styles of film have changed over time. Before this class, I had not seen very many older movies—none that were made before the 1950s. I liked seeing the shift in pacing and acting from films such as Modern Times and Duck Soup to films like The Birdcage. The humor was different, as well. Older movies focused more on being clever, and cinematically sneaky (like the mirror scene in Duck Soup), while The Birdcage’s humor was much more focused on sexuality and character identity.
Another aspect of this class I found interesting from watching such a wide breadth of movies was the change in beauty ideals for women. While not a direct objective of the course, I did notice how different women in 1930s movies looked from ones today. Women in older movies actually looked like real people. They were healthy weights, had simple hair styles, they did not look like super models. They did not have an unattainable level of beauty that seems to be a main qualifier for actress’ today. It made me aware of the culture I have grown up in, and how high the expectation of beauty and sexualization is in American society now as compared to when my grandparents grew up.
Overall, this class has made me more aware of sources of information we use on a daily basis. Movies, literature, and music count as sources of information because they contribute to molding our identities and ideologies. I did not trust FOX news before this class (I have been appalled by it the few times I’ve actually seen it,) but learning about the fact news programs do not have to report accurately on news really put me on my guard. I learned that humor is not only an extremely powerful tool of rhetoric, but is also a complex subject matter, such as: why is taboo humor sometimes funny and sometimes not? How do we use humor to identify with other people? Why can it be more effective than seriousness? Humor is a powerhouse of information because it can be used in so many different ways, and it can bypass ideologies and stigmas in a way other forms of communication can’t. So, thank you for this course. It has given me a new perspective on culture, media, and my own belief systems.
There were many other excellent options for this project. I seriously considered doing Harvey, because I thought it would be interesting to explore the perception of reality that the film portrays so well. Another contender was The Birdcage, where I could talk about the implication of counter culture, acceptance, and Robin William’s fabulous dance moves. However, Harold and Maude was most interesting to me because I did not fully understand it. One of the ways I learn about something is to write about it, and I thought doing my last MWA3 on this particular film would help me better comprehend the message of the movie. I was also intrigued by the varying degrees of symbolism in the film, and the nature of Harold and Maude’s relationship. Because it is a film, I knew multi-modality would have better options available to it than a piece of writing. I planned on using film clips and pictures from the movie, which expanded my options beyond using quotes.
When I sit down to write something, I usually spend a couple of days gathering information. I can’t simply hammer out a paper, which I suppose is good for non-procrastination purposes. For Harold and Maude, I watched the movie, skimmed reviews, and read multiple articles about the film concerning it’s content and style choices. I then picked three of the articles I found to be most applicable to what I wanted to say, and used those for this project. I chose to not be wildly funny for this MWA3. While a very funny movie, there is also a serious undercurrent to Harold and Maude that I wanted to address. The movie is about a counter-culture romance, yes, but it is also about morality. The briefness of life, learning to love, and discovering the kind of person you want to become are all factors within the film. I wanted to write about those. As such, I aimed for my rhetoric to give insight into the film by mainly exploring the symbolism of the characters and the character’s actions. A portion of my rhetorical analysis was devoted to mise-en-scene, such as discussing the meaning behind Harold’s light-split face in the first scene, and the daises turning into gravestones as a image of life and death’s cycle. My rhetoric needed to be persuasive to the degree of convincing my audience I was not making this stuff up, which is why I used images and video clips from the film. They became my “hard evidence” to prove what I was saying. However, my rhetoric did not need to car-sales-man level of persuasiveness, nor did it need to be exceedingly lofty or colloquial. I wanted a balance between the two. I considered talking about the Cat Stevens’ songs that play throughout the movie and including audio clips of them. However, I decided against it because it strayed from my objective of talking about symbolism. The songs added a lot to the film, but I was unable to find a way of tying them in seamlessly with the rest of my analysis.
I think that the structure of my writing worked well for this piece. I used Harold and Maude as foils for each other and what they both stand for, and then extrapolated that meaning into something bigger. Within that structure I talked about the meaning of objects and appearance that give the characters more depth. Unlike a lot of films, Harold and Maude does not have extraneous footage. The dialogue and scenes each carry their own weight and have a purpose, which made it much more interesting to writing about than, say, Expendables 2. I also think the video clips I use work well. I could not effectively portray the narcissism of Harold’s mother as well as Vivian Pickles. I decided not to put in the clip of daises turning into gravestones because I pulled the dialogue out of the scene to write about, and having both the written analysis and video seemed redundant to me. For the ending, I thought the video clip of Harold dancing and playing the banjo would be more powerful than me simply writing about it. What failed about the project for me was the complexity of website building. Despite the fact Weebly is fairly intuitive to use and my attempts of experimentation, I am just not a technologically savvy person. This is, of course, a bit unfortunate given the century we live in. If I were to do it over, I would spend more time delving into Weebly’s various modes of website-creating. I also think it would have been interesting to compare Harold and Maude to another film from class, especially one that it has little in common with—like Dr. Strangelove or Young Frankenstein. It would have been a good challenge to draw connections about the class between two very different pieces of art. (Following this line of thought, comparing Dr. Strangelove and Young Frankenstein would be interesting since both chose to be black and white films instead of color, but for different reasons...) However, I’m also glad I did not write about two films at once. It gave me the chance to really focus on Harold and Maude and process my thoughts about it.
I learned a lot from this project. Usually, when I write about metaphors and symbolism, it is about a piece of creative writing. I am very used to both reading literature with rhetorical devices in mind and then writing about it. What I learned from this class was how to apply those skills to different types of creative outlets, namely music, comics, and videos. Before, I would watch movies as a form of escapism. I still do to some extent, but I think more about what I’m watching than I did back in August. It was our class discussion on Harold and Maude that got me really interested in the meaning of the film, because it reminded me so much of how I analyzed literature.
I also learned about how styles of film have changed over time. Before this class, I had not seen very many older movies—none that were made before the 1950s. I liked seeing the shift in pacing and acting from films such as Modern Times and Duck Soup to films like The Birdcage. The humor was different, as well. Older movies focused more on being clever, and cinematically sneaky (like the mirror scene in Duck Soup), while The Birdcage’s humor was much more focused on sexuality and character identity.
Another aspect of this class I found interesting from watching such a wide breadth of movies was the change in beauty ideals for women. While not a direct objective of the course, I did notice how different women in 1930s movies looked from ones today. Women in older movies actually looked like real people. They were healthy weights, had simple hair styles, they did not look like super models. They did not have an unattainable level of beauty that seems to be a main qualifier for actress’ today. It made me aware of the culture I have grown up in, and how high the expectation of beauty and sexualization is in American society now as compared to when my grandparents grew up.
Overall, this class has made me more aware of sources of information we use on a daily basis. Movies, literature, and music count as sources of information because they contribute to molding our identities and ideologies. I did not trust FOX news before this class (I have been appalled by it the few times I’ve actually seen it,) but learning about the fact news programs do not have to report accurately on news really put me on my guard. I learned that humor is not only an extremely powerful tool of rhetoric, but is also a complex subject matter, such as: why is taboo humor sometimes funny and sometimes not? How do we use humor to identify with other people? Why can it be more effective than seriousness? Humor is a powerhouse of information because it can be used in so many different ways, and it can bypass ideologies and stigmas in a way other forms of communication can’t. So, thank you for this course. It has given me a new perspective on culture, media, and my own belief systems.