Blog Assignment #7

Metaphor In Film: Affliction

Affliction is the culmination of a truly brilliant film released in 1999. It stars Nick Nolte as a small-town cop who begins to fall apart as he puts together the pieces of what he believes is a string of murders taking place within the city. His mother dies, forcing Nolte to spend more time with his abusive, alcoholic father. The more time spent with his monstrous father (and the more subsequent events that occur in his city), Nolte becomes similar to his father whose temper, violence and love of drinking begins to take a toll on Nolte’s life. Nolte feels he’s become afflicted with his life (hence the title).

The scene begins with a violent outburst that Nolte brilliantly represented from a nasty toothache that he cannot seem to ignore. Getting worse and worse throughout the film, this climatic scene showcases the removal of the tooth with a pair of pliers and a bottle of scotch to a wash down the blood. This dramatic scene is designed to symbolize the internal pain and suffering Nolte experienced over the years. The pain and suffering that had been bottled up within him for years had finally been relieved. The neglected tooth represented a downward spiral in his life to the point of relief once it was removed. I feel the scene also represents how instant solutions, such as pulling the tooth with pliers instead of proper treatment, can be worthwhile at first, but could lead to more problems in the future. Though the scene ended the movie peacefully, Nolte's life was still stressful with or without the toothache.

It's an impressive scene because it leads to one of the most horrific self-mutilation acts within the movie, but Nolte determines that pulling the offending tooth is the only thing that helped him feel better. Unfortunately, he and his father are shown in the final shot watching a boxing match on TV, silently sharing a drink, which symbolizes a mirror image of one another. Nolte had become his father.

Warning: This scene is kind of graphic with a lot of swearing.

Blog Assignment #6

Google has become one of the largest businesses in the world. Google began in 1996 with Larry Page and Sergey Brin developing it as a research project for their PhD at Standford. Google first produced an image, the one above, when Yahoo! was the prominent search engine on the internet. The original logo was designed using a program called GIMP, which was a free graphics program to create computerized lettering. The exclamation point was used to mock the Yahoo! logo, but they ended up going with a logo without it.

Sergey Brin explains it best:

Google ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules.

Google ended up using the same logo for 10 years until recently changing it to look more “modern” to the average searcher. The new logo was first tested in November 2009, but was officially launched in May 2010. According to Google, it follows an identical font to the previous logo, yet features a distantly-colored “o” in place of the previous yellowish one, as well as more subtle shadowing of the letters.

Google has become an iconic image over the years because of its simplicity, but has been criticized for its stand on spam. Though Google strongly believes in spam and identity protection, it’s ironic how Google’s Gmail platform is one of the most spammed email clients on the internet. The image to the left is a perfect example of Google’s attempt to protect against spam because instead of blocking actual spam emails Gmail has decided to add its own network to the spam folder. Is Google trying to block itself? I highly doubt it, but it just shows that no matter how much they talk about protecting the average user they must first make sure they’re protecting their brand. Obviously technology encounters many bugs in the programming, but the least Google can do is make sure people see emails from their own network.

Blog Assignment #5

Photography has created an environment of imagery is which parts of the war were broken from context and mixed together to enact a form of surrealism.  In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag argues, “That our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images – might be called the conservative critique of the diffusion of such images” (109). Sontag is not correct in assuming that an ordinary snapshot creates some form of aggression when you look at the images of the actual effects of violence. Sontag was once criticized for not providing photos of knowledge, but the appearance of knowledge. For one thing, every image (in print and media) creates a thousand words in the mind of the viewer. There’s no immediate visceral impact. Documents and photos do not simply showcase combat consequences. They are part of the rhetoric behind war. The “good taste” of editors and other positions of power in the choices of these “moving images” shadow a number of concerns and anxieties of public order and public morale. For example, Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima” represents something rare in the history of war movies - an event that one of the country to empathize with the director to tell a story from the perspective of a former war enemy. A more impressionistic approach of imagery in the movie emphasized the unbearable psychological pressure caused by prolonged labor, deprivation and bombardment. The claustrophobic element is obviously required, but Eastwood makes it possible to breathe through the movie with action engaging characters. Eastwood’s choices of images are used for strategic purposes as the photographer's role is more ambiguous. Because of the density of the historical references to the war, the way that we would prefer not to imagine the war is a task that is painful because the stirring images can only supply an initial spark of fear.