Archive for the ‘Narrative Analysis’ Category
A Fate That Binds: Understanding the Narrative of Final Fantasy XIII
Over the years, it has become progressively easy to take the Final Fantasy series for granted. Cynicism and skepticism are seemingly the only responses that spring up in message boards and blogs whenever a new title is announced or released. Whether it is the graphics, the characters’ artwork, the premise, or the gameplay, there is always someone who would raise an eyebrow and question the integrity of the series and, consequently, launch a personal interpretation on where and when it has gone wrong. But the truth of the matter is that Final Fantasy had never had a directive path to begin with; it had never adhered to a grand scheme that it would borrow its ideas from; it had never, most certainly, pertained itself to someone or something. Just like The Legend of Zelda, developers usually come and go, directors and producers are swapped and shuffled, and old mentors are rehired to come up with new ideas. The question that presents itself is whether it is fair to impute the recent Final Fantasy XIII of faults it has never committed; that is, to deem it flawed simply because it didn’t abide the rules created by its antecedents. For self-conscious (and hopefully sensible) critics, the answer should be no.
On Fragile Dreams and Other Related Thoughts
I hurt, I tire, and I collapse. When I’m staring into the darkness, I find somehow entranced by it. Suddenly, I hear laughter. Fearless, mean, and yet kind. It calls to me. The days we spend together are long gone, drifting away like clouds in the breeze. Even though memories are often fleeting, all I need to do is close my eyes and your face appears, clear and forever young.
~1~
The furnished setting is that of a post-apocalyptia, but the crux of the narrative is something unusually different; Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon casts a cursory glimpse on the mass destruction of humanity, a realization that hardly warrants the severity of its conscious aftermath. By default, it’s a curious composition, as few games of similar fashion rarely heed the grievances of the survivors above the calamity, or at least within equal shifts. And, ironic as it might seem, seeing it plays more like a survival horror than anything else, the game’s objectives have nothing to do with survivability. Our justification to delve through Fragile Dreams focally pivot on the game’s uncommon protagonist, who is so hopelessly unremarkable that we cannot take our eyes off of him. His name is Seto, a young drifter who harbors a critical angst against his circumstances and that of the world that has surrendered to silence. His strident resolve to end his solitude propels him through the horrors of a declining civilization for the sake of finding a confidant who would pacify his frustrations. His odyssey, in other words, is not about surviving the aftermath, but rather about discovering the right reasons to survive through it.
The Worker and the Employer in Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Perhaps it is safe to say that Franz Kafka‘s literary uniqueness lies in the fact that he dramatizes conventional figures of speech and endows them with full and consistent detail; his tales act out the implications of metaphors buried in the text. Yet, to see nothing but an extended metaphor in Kafka’s work is not to see enough. The tale is too long, too packed with statements, too rich in meaning to be defined simply as a metaphor, no matter how extended, simply to the fact that it ignores the numerous statements in the narrative that deal with the presented conflict. These alone make for a textual and poetic complexity, which in hand eschew the overburdens of the single metaphor theory.
Unflinching Yates: The Grim Reality of the Grimes Sisters
Almost every past reviewer and book critic who had discussed Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade started the exposition with a personal preamble, generally on how daunting the first sentence of the first paragraph of the book, which goes like this:
Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.
However, as someone who got accustomed to his inexpressive tenor and his evasion to melodramatic expressions, such a lurid example of a Yatesian introduction didn’t quite catch me off guard; as a matter of fact, I was anticipating it and hungering for it the moment I picked up the book, for I sincerely find great delight in his devastating realism. There is, indeed, a poetic element in his stories. An elegy that parades the different facets of human’s futility, which not only is susceptible to any compromising opportunity, but also sordid in its own functions. The Easter Parade, just like Yates’s previous compositions, could have evaded its inextricable quagmire if the characters acted selflessly, and without a resignation or surrender to their ill-fated circumstances. But, once again, this demonstrates the paradoxical philosophy of the narrative, because The Easter Parade stands as one of those compact, quiet masterpieces that speaks volumes about the fundamental sadness at the heart of everything, and which poses that most unsettling of questions: can we ever really comprehend ourselves?
Screwball Conventions: The Comedy of Errors and Courtships
Screwball [pronounced skrue’bol] is a noun that means unbalanced, erratic, irrational, and unconventional, in which became a popular slang word in the 1930s. It was applied to films where everything was a juxtaposition: educated and uneducated, rich and poor, intelligent and stupid, honest and dishonest, and most of all male and female. When two people fell in love, they did not simply surrender to their feelings, they battled it out. They lied to one another, often assuming indifferent personas toward each other. They often employed hideous tricks on each other, until finally after running out of inventions, fall into each other’s arms. It was fossilized comedy, physical and often painful, but mixed with the highest level of wit and sophistication, depending wholly on elegant and inventive writing. ~ via Modern Times
My introduction to such subgenre of comedy is very recent, and for someone who openly discloses his affection for romantic comedies, it is indeed a blissful discovery. In the last two weeks I have seen more films that I usually do in a single month, and my enamored admiration for the classics has never been as vigorous as it is now, and that what has led me to write this post in the first place. Truth to be told, however, is that I have had to truncate my original draft in order to make my exposition more concise and piercingly focused. You should grasp the matter of consistency that pervades the films that I have selected for my discussion below, as I try to elucidate meticulously their differences as well as their similarities. The bigger portion of the discussion will be reserved to what I believe is the quintessential screwball comedy, and that is The Philadelphia Story.
On Vanity
Perhaps the best approach to gloss over the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel is by introducing this snippet from “Fitzgerald’s Radiant World,” a critical piece written by Thomas Flanagan of The New York Reviews of Books:
This Side of Paradise had had a success, which was almost freakish, capturing the aspirations of a generation and especially of those within that generation who, like its author, aspired to be great writers. Reading it today, one blanches at its emotional and rhetorical excesses, and yet, as Matthew Bruccoli says, it was received as “an iconoclastic social document—even as a testament of revolt. Surprisingly, it was regarded as an experimental or innovative narrative because of the mixture of styles and the inclusion of plays and verse.” It was the autobiographical first novel of a very young writer who took himself very seriously, and who had not provided for his hero those escape hatches of irony . . . But it was not, by any stretch, the work of a man who planned a career as a writer of commercial fiction.
Even after more than ninety years of its publication, This Side of Paradise doesn’t quite exude a nostalgic archaism of narrative prose as one might generally expect, nor it purposefully exercises an ambition in creative writing or a contract to a lucrative career. While the novel might have laid the groundwork for Fitzgerald’s repute as a lyrical and clever innovator, the very stylistic elements he strings -episodic narrative, wavering point of view, stream-of-consciousness, the almost mystified mixture of prose, verse, and dramatic writings – are defiantly and consistently original for anyone who just started reading his oeuvres. His ostensibly experimental narrative, paired with a keen study of American contemporary in adolescence and young manhood, certainly cements This Side of Paradise as a perpetual classic of whenever and wherever.
Aboard the Microcosmic Boat
“You’re only thinking of yourselves,” cries the devious, hulking Nazi to the others passengers of the lifeboat during a vertiginous typhoon sequence, “you’re not thinking of the boat.”
That line best highlights Lifeboat‘s maxim, Alfred Hitchcock’s World War II film, which points to the cause for all of the dangers to follow. That the “enemy” utters that line made it particularly indignant in 1944 (when critics lashed out at Hitchcock for his unpatriotic portrayal of Brits and Americans), and perhaps it still resonates today: we (as in anyone who’s not a Nazi) may have rallied together, expressed our contempt after the many hours of history lessons, and deservingly ridiculed the Nazi regime to great measures but, since then, we’ve certainly become more petulant, materialistic, and egotistical than ever.
The funny question in all of this is who would’ve pegged Hitchcock for a moral humanist? Certainly not me. I would like to believe that my universal humanism is more intricate to be correlated with a man whose métier was the psychological horrors that distort the glam of the American/British bourgeoisie. But I digress, though I’d like to acquiesce with the the selective consensus that, despite the film’s lack of technical excellence, this is probably the most characters-driven film within the director’s voluminous canon.
Quickies: Stoner – Still Walking – Dead Space: Extraction
- Book: Stoner by John Williams
John Williams’s Stoner is simply a novel about literature, those who love it, and those who spend most of their lifetime living on its nourishment. William Stoner, whose the book is dedicated to, had spent his childhood and few of his adult years in a most banal of bucolic lifestyles, until unexpected circumstances sought him to the University of Missouri to pursue the academics of agriculture, where he discovered the uncharted love “of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and of the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print.” With a deadpan prose and a discreet evasion from sentimentality, Williams unfolds Stoner’s trials and tribulations in many arresting, though despondent, instances: his marriage miserably fails, his daughter’s life is dishearteningly sheltered, and his career as a professor is hindered and ravaged by discomfited conflict. Still, Williams makes sure to distill Stoner’s daily life with enough reciprocated love and beauty to cope with such miseries, whether through the leaves of literary books or occasional friendships and love affairs. What emerges from the novel’s unhurried chapters is a burdened college professor, whose life is dovetailed with a stern observation on humanity, and how absurd, confounding, beautiful, mundane, and poignant it can be. Stoner is both a celebration of life and an elegy of reality, told with an honest overtone, delicate structure, and profound respect to the minimalism of everyday existence.
Turning Over an Old Leaf
When it comes to predictability in cinematic storytelling, the revenge variety is perhaps the most stagnant and superficial; the film usually features an afflicted protagonist (or a group of individuals) who has been robbed of something quite precious, leaving him (or her) devastated for quite some time until he musters the conviction (or seizes an opportunity) to take matters into his own hands. As an audience we might not relate to such extreme measures, but our delight from watching a couple of hours of blood gushing out of the screen (because killing is almost inventible) is often tasty despite the tasteless execution. However, in Denis Dercourt’s aptly titled The Page Turner (“La tourneuse de pages” in French) the retribution doesn’t proceed as generally expected, the journey doesn’t dwindle on grotesque executions, and the avenger doesn’t necessarily evoke our sympathy, but the aftermath, regardless, remains permanently destructive.
A Year in Reading – 2009 Edition
For me, 2009 was a great year as an avid reader despite the dark times and despaired thoughts that engulfed me in the bulk of it (an experience that I rarely share with anyone). I think the reason I was able to survive my own dejections is due to the great journeys these books have embarked me along the way. It was a form of escapism that I was able to receive something out of it at the end, and it was quite profound, quite personal. Of course, not every book listed here is bound to fit your literary flavor, but I must say that I don’t regret anything I have read so far, except perhaps a book or two. For now, you’ll also have to accept two or three sentences condensing my thoughts regarding each book, as I really don’t have the time to discuss all of them in detail. I hope that I’ll continue building a better library as this year goes by and I hope that you do too.
