School and other ponderings

This week has definitely been a bit strenuous. I'm starting to freak out over what I want to write about for my essays and how I don't understand what's going on in my MDA class.

Sex and the Screen is very interesting, but kind of not what I expected. It has been mostly focusing on gender roles and how directing techniques/camera shots (that I thought were just kind of inane and meaningless) actively objectify the stars/actors, namely the women. Having never been a huge movie buff, it is hard for me to read the many scholarly articles analyzing cinema because half the points the authors bring up had never even crossed my mind--and those little things that I could never put a finger on but did cause a little discomfort are brought under a magnifying lens and articulated. I've always classified "good" movies as those that move me and stick in my mind afterwards, the ones that make my breath catch and forget that what I'm seeing is only artistic vision and not reality. As a child of the age of technology and CG, I am spoiled by special effects and "realistic" acting. The special effects speaks for itself--King Kong from the 1930's cannot compare to the CG version of 2004/5/6?. What I mean by realistic acting is that the movies I've seen for class that were made 'back then'...suck, to me at least. I know this is almost blasphemous but I almost fell asleep during Casablanca. I can't get past the type of acting so prevalent in those movies, where every emotion is melodramatic and exaggerated, and every plot line can be predicted before the movie even starts. Everyone acts the SAME way and talks the same way and it's just so campy. Sure, nowadays movies rely a lot on shock value (gore, sex, violence, etc.) but the movies that truly stick with me do so because of their subtleties: the slight tic of the jaw, furrowed brow, biting of the lip, eyes darting left and right. I don't know if I can write an essay about this because I feel limited--I've been lucky that usually when I have to write an essay, I find at least one topic I want to argue about. But this time, all I want to say is, "fuck you directors of the past for only coming up with movies where women have but one choice of acting: to fulfill your sexual fantasies. Women really don't faint all the time. and not every female needs to be punished for her sexual desires. THANKS."

My complete disinterest for this essay is countered by my attachment to my Australia Now essay. We had a choice of either doing a research essay or reading/analyzing an autobiography. I chose to read one about a Chinese-Cambodian girl growing up in Melbourne but amidst her oppressive family and white societal pressures. I was lucky enough to have a fairly liberal upbringing, while many of my other Asian friends were not. I can't say that I completely empathize with what the author says, but I do understand much of what she describes. Her book is funny, but at many times, borders and crosses the line into mocking. I don't like it. At one point she says, "Constantly sighing, lying and dying---that is what it means to be a Chinese woman, and I want nothing to do with it." I want to tell her FUCK THAT. Fuck that, my mother has never been like that (though she puts up with more than she should), nor would she ever want that for me. I want to yell at her to stop giving readers reason to look down on us, that maybe she should have just grown a fucking backbone and that it has nothing to do with being Chinese. She writes about how everyday was a struggle to not look too peasantry, to not look fall under the stereotype of "looking too immigrant-like." I can't even get mad because I realize that's what American-Asians do everyday, that's what I do everyday. We joke around about FOBs and squint and poke fun at their "outrageous" sense of style and the fact that we're everywhere. Because once you start mocking your own kind, that's when you know you're finally fitting in. Even writing this, I feel like an imposter shrieking about all these "injustices." I didn't even have it that bad as a kid. My parents were progressive, but I feel myself nodding my head as I read Alice Pung's book, recognizing what she describes in my own family dynamics, parental advice, or life stories of friends of friends of friends. What she writes hits too close to home. I don't know if I can write this essay objectively without me not-so-subtly trying to counter every negative image she has protrayed in her novel. Yes, I'm defensive. I feel like some of her anecdotes are actually snapshots of my life and my loved ones that she had no goddamn right to show.