The Day of the Locust

                                              The riot scene from The Day of the Locust

These past two classes covered various interesting topics and stories such as Nathanael West's tragic depiction of Hollywood in The Day of the Locust and we backtracked a bit with Jack Thorne's Hanover, or the Persecution of the Lowly , a story about the 1898 race riot in Wilmington NC. I was planning on discussing a little bit more on the racial violence until we were shown the final scene from the 1975 film adaptation of The Day of the Locust. I felt that I actually experienced a big difference in what it is to watch a violent scene that is adapted from text. This part is about ten minutes long and the emotional build up is quite erratic. The scene starts off quite loud and chaotic since we see the streets filled with hundreds of excited people gathering for the big movie premiere. It gives off a claustrophobic feeling to the viewer right from the start even when the crowd isn’t yet a violent angry mob. You already sense the uneasiness from the start especially when you see Homer Simpson approaching the scene in a zombie like trance ready to “spread” the anger and violence he has within like an infectious disease. After being taunted and hit with a coin purse by a little boy (or girl? a bit androgynous but true to the time period) he then takes to chasing the child and stomping him to death. This scene is quite graphic since the viewer usually isn’t used to seeing such violence toward children in movies. This is arguably the catalyst for the riot which carries out quite rapidly after the crowd witnesses Homer's actions. A man (reminiscent of Hitler) who is in charge of hosting the premiere is unaware of the violence and amps up the crowd as if nothing criminal is taking place. The scene gets more and more intense and you notice it through Tod who is injured and unable to move or escape. This causes him to realize that his project The Burning of L.A is coming to life through the form of this angry mob. This is probably one of the movies that does a good job of recreating a scene that is meant to cause the reader/viewer discomfort. It was as emotional and tragic as West had wrote it out to be.

Addition to my last post "Without Sanctuary"

I forgot to touch upon some of the mandatory prompts for blog #2 and instead i went on to talk about the photos of the lynchings and how it made me feel about the stagnant social views that this country still predominantly holds(hopefully this blog still counts). When it comes to Zizek's terms on violence, such as "subjective" and "objective" and which one pertains to white supremacy and lynchings it would have to be objective violence since it was/is ingrained into the social structure of generations of white American bigoted families.

*Subjective violence is violence that is actively done, which can be attributed to a certain subject; the event of one person perpetrating harm on another

*Objective violence is the violence that always-already exists and maintains the social fabric that subjective violence interrupts.

*Systemic Violence (which branches off of objective violence) is the catastrophic effects of economic and political systems

Without Sanctuary

MLK-Paul's Letter to American Christians 

Mondays class was a very insightful yet deeply disturbing class. We were shown photographs and postcards from a book entitled Without Sanctuary depicting gruesome lynchings from the early 1900's. These images brought up a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas especially the idea of modernity. These images or specifically these acts of violence were committed without consequence not so long ago and continued until the 1960's. I feel like times haven't changed that much despite the fact that this cannot be publicly committed any longer. The reasons for such change can only be attributed to things other than respect and equality. The united states needed to redeem their image as a world power due to acts that were severely contradicting, such as being an allied power in WWII (White supremacists fighting against white supremacists?) as well as the Cold War. Another reason for such change is religion. This country boasted their christian beliefs so heavily and so much that they misconstrued "the word of god" (a god who is supposed to be good and accepting of all) by interpreting the story The Curse of Ham from Genesis. Ham,Noah's son who is  apparently mentioned to be "black" was cursed and his descendants were condemned to forever be servants. Christian slave owners would try and Christianize their slaves by having them attend sermons in which the uneducated slaves were made to believe that they were inferior. This was flawed and sure to backfire especially when these slaves were becoming more learned. Once emancipated their was obvious fear and the only way to control the fear of the white man was to cause even greater fear to the freed black man who was seeking independence and education. Religion and its use to justify slavery and white supremacy was spoken about in a great speech by Martin Luther King Jr. entitled Paul's Letter to American Christians. I have supplied a link to the whole thing above but have decided to quote a specific part

"I understand that there are Christians among you who try to justify segregation on the basis of the Bible. They argue that the Negro is inferior by nature because of Noah's curse upon the children of Ham. Oh my friends, this is blasphemy. This is against everything that the Christian religion stands for. I must say to you as I have said to so many Christians before, that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus." Moreover, I must reiterate the words that I uttered on Mars Hill: "God that made the world and all things therein . . . hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth."

I feel that if it weren't for the self liberation of the African Americans (and other racial minorities) we would still be dealing with lynchings today. White supremacy and oppression is still strong in this country but not as physically violent or blatant as before (Well, not blatant if you haven't been following politics and the possible Republican presidential candidates recently).

The Huffington Post (Recommendation to my fellow classmates)

Free Write/Reflection

I was quite excited when registering for ENN:195 Violence in American Art and Culture to fulfill my urban study requirement. I am a Fine Arts major who hopes to get into the Illustration/Graphic novel field so I thought that this would be an enlightening course for me since violence is a prevalent theme in comics and graphic novels. I initially thought we'd have projects or assignments that would be more personal to us and our individual surroundings considering we live in a city that has been known for acts of brutality and bloodshed on multiple scales. I also expected there to be a trip of some sort considering it is an urban study and I was required to go on many trips for my Art and Society urban study/humanities class. I was pleasantly surprised after receiving the syllabus and seeing what we'd actually be covering and how the assignments correlated with the work. Some of the coursework in this ENN class is in relation to much of the information that I just covered last semester in my Themes in American History 2 course. We didn't get into much detail with the violent and psychological aspects of the draft riots or the civil rights movement rather than an overview of these events so I feel a bit more prepared for this class than I primarily thought I would. What I'm most elated about is that we are also studying violence in film rather than only in short stories and novels because it gives us a chance to analyze how  differently violence can be portrayed in both film and writing since one relies on visuals while the other is solely words.