#response10

[awasikonis]

There’s a She Wolf in the Closet

Wolves are everywhere in our media, stories, literature. . . everywhere. Why do we associate so much towards the “wolf”? I think about all the wolves in my life and I don’t know if it’s just because when I was growing up, Twilight was a popular werewolf movement which created a bunch of knock-off YA books with shows and movies centering around the supernatural beings, which led to the popularization of the wolf. But if you think about it, wolves have been with us through ancient times.

Romulus and Remus were raised and suckled by a she-wolf, and because of that upbringing they were ravenous and almighty kings. As much as we think about wolf and humans being separate with this competition of man vs nature, in a way man is wolf and wolf is man in a semiotic relationship. Man can take on the spirit of the wolf and use it when they want to for their advantage. Man reverts back to his primitive nature.

While most wolfs and werewolves in stories are predominately portrayed as male with a patriarchal carnivorous angle, the she-wolf is something entirely different. Feminine wolfs are portrayed as more spiritual and are a reconnection back to the earth to the idea of what is wild. It’s almost empowering to read about women who embrace their wild side and accept the natural world.

[ncgonzalez-blog]

Resurrecting Hassan (Dir. Carlo Guillermo Proto 2016) was an interesting film experience which for me was also helpful in understanding many different perspectives on the concept of death and the afterlife, as well as life itself. 

Denis, Peggy, and Lauviah all had very similar perspectives, given they are all a part of the same family and are all blind. They all had the same perspective when it came to the death of their son and brother Hassan, who could see. They had all believed he was not fully gone. They also all lived their lives very similarly. However despite all of these similar ideas in their heads, they all thought very differently about their own actions and decisions in their personal lives. None of them seemed completely happy in their lives and found different things to have faith in in order to feel fulfilled. Peggy chose Phillou, Lauviah chose singing, and Denis chose the resurrection of his son.

During the discussion with the director of the Documentary after it was over, I was reminded of The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock, because people asked questions about what the director chose to show us in the documentary to get across what he wanted us to see. I thought of how the room in the reading was rearranged or how the photo of the skull was “faked” and how in a way, many documentaries are “faked” because the person directing wants to get a point across or make the viewers feel something specific and so they choose to show us certain things that happen or leave others out. Unlike the film Another Year (Dir. Shengze Zhu 2016), when there were no cuts, there were cuts and certain scenes where the ending or beginning was meant to leave the viewer with a specific idea of what was happening or what to feel.