Final exam : presentation

There was not time for me to pass the oral exam but here's what I've been working for this final exam. 

iZombie

iZombie is an american tv series developped by Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggerio-Wright for the CW. It’s an adaptation of the comic book series of the same name, published by DC Comics. Instead of telling you the plot I’m going to show you the opening of the show which summarizes the main plot and reminds that it’s a comic book adaptation (cf. appendix)

On Rotten Tomatoes, the show is described as "An amusing variation on the zombie trend, iZombie is refreshingly different”. Indeed, what’s interesting here is the way the show plays with the codes and tropes of the zombie genre : here, the main character is a nice and lovely zombie that could be any of us. 

     Zombiism in the show

First, the condition of being a zombie is seen as a disease, like in most zombie movies : it’s  contagious (you can get turned when you get scratched or bitten) and a whole narrative arc focus on the search of a cure. Here, it is through Liv’s allie, Dr Ravi Chakrabarti, that the hope of becoming human again lives. So it is stated that being a zombie might not be a permanent condition and it can be reversed.

But zombiism is also an affliction born from consumerism : it has been proven in season 1 that zombies in Seattle existed because of Max Rager, the leader of a multinational company that produces drinks, called Super Max. Max Rager put new products on the market without testing them only to make more money, even if he knows that it could lead to violent episodes for his consumers.  At the boat party where Liv went, people drank Super Max combined to a drug called Utopium, that resulted in creating the zombies.

Another character, Blaine also represents that: he’s the drug dealer that scratched Liv. He’s always been a bad guy, and after his transformation, he became the leader of a brain traffic, making money from his state of zombie : he voluntarily turn rich people into zombies so that he can make them pay for brains, a very high price. He’s a pure product of our society of consumerism and its flaws, he profits from the need of people. 

A superpower ? Indeed the zombie state can be seen as a positive thing mostly through Liv’s character. But all zombies can go “Full-zombie mode” (which gives them superhuman strength), and they have visions of their victims. Being a zombie gives them power. By helping solving crimes, Liv becomes sort of a vigilante, more powerful than the police (and episode called Cape Town focuses on this aspect and shows how zombies could totally rule the city because they’re not the dumb and clumsy zombies we’ve studied in class, a whole part of their humanity stays after their transformation and as long as they eat they remain fully themselves.

       A new representation of zombies

The zombie condition 

 In the show, zombies live amongst people, and almost nobody is aware they’re here because they look almost like regular people except for the pale skin, pale hair, and the absence of pulse and breath, almost like a vampire. But some of them actually dye their hair and tan their skin so they look like everybody else. 

But what truly distinguishes them from the human beings is what they eat : brains. In the show, the result of this diet is that, in addition to the visions, they take the personality of the deceased from whom they ate the brain. They will also be recognizable because they only eat very spicy food. The way Liv’s takes her meals tend to humanizes the zombie she is : her meals are always looking really appetizing (// Hannibal) and anyone could eat what she cook with brains.

       Two faces of zombiism

 Liv Moore can be seen as the face of humanity : she’s kind of a superheroine as we’ve seen and she insert humanity in the definition of what a zombie is. All she wants is her old life back. She never enjoy eating brains but it’s a necessity. She helps to solve crime as an act of redemption for all the brains she takes at the morgue.

Regular zombies are only showed in 4 or 5 episodes, and only briefly. They’re here to remind Liv and the others of what happens if they can’t eat brains: they will return to the state of the “slave zombie”. They also remind to the audience that it’s what zombies are actually like; they’re not supposed to be like Liv, they’re not nice and innocent creatures. They are an invisible threat.  


So we can say that this show experiments with the codes of the zombie genre, by creating empathy for the zombies, by making them more human than they will ever be.

Appendix

Opening theme : 

Visions : 

 

Class 11 : presentation

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I’m going to talk about something very different from what we’ve seen in class : Harry Potter. The saga written by J.K. Rowling offers lots of hybrid and marginal bodies such as wizards obviously, but also centaurs, mermaids, giants, werewolves…

Here I’m going to focus on the third movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by Alfonso Cuaron. The movie came out in 2004. In this one, the magical world is afraid since Sirius Black, a notorious killer, has escaped from the magic prison Azkaban.

First, we can say that all wizards and witches are marginal. They live amongst people without magic (which they call “muggles”) but they have to hide from them, and by doing so they don’t have a very large free will and freedom as long as they’re mixing with muggles. They have to be cautious of their behavior, and to hide their magic, which is what makes them who they are. It’s a huge part of their humanity that they have to hide.

Sirius Black

But the character of Sirius Black is the real marginal in this movie : he is an innocent falsely convicted for murdering 13 people. He's supposed to represent the part of the magic world that despises muggles because they force wizards to hide. The fact that he’s a marginal is already present in the way he’s represented: dirty, with long hair, he has tattoos all over his body etc. which contrast with the aspect of the other adults in the movie (like Dumbledore, MacGonagall etc.). Even in the magic world, having tattoos means you're a rebel. He’s dangerous and not common even for a wizard. Even if he escaped prison,  he’s not free anymore. He’s not part of the community anymore, and he will run for the (short) rest of his life.

At the end of the movie, he escapes another time with the help of a classic mythological hybrid figure: the hippogriff. The hippogriff is a legendary creature which has the front quarters of an eagle and the hindquarters of a horse. This hybrid creature is sometimes seen as a symbol of love since his parents, the mare and the griffin (another hybrid mythological creature that mixes the eagle and the lion) are enemies. Here, it’s considered as an hybrid, weird yet powerful creature that inspires respect and is, in some way, dangerous. He too is force to live hidden. 

Another hybrid figure that follows the entire series is the half-giant half human Hagrid. Only his size makes him different from others human, marking him as a hybrid. In the book, his difference is more discussed: we are explained that giants are violent creatures, which makes him potentially more dangerous than Buck the hippogriff or Sirius Black. Yet, he is accepted and respected by the majority.

Remus before, during and after his transformation into a werewolf

Fenrir Greyback

The major marginal and hybrid figure of this movie is the werewolf Remus Lupin, nicknamed Moony. He’s the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts. He’s looks make him look weird: he looks poor, and much older than he really is with grey hairs and scars. He disappears once every month. It’s the revealed in the climax of the movie that he’s a werewolf. Werewolves are mythological creatures, humans with the ability to transform into a wolf at the full moon. Lycanthropy is a disease: when the full moon appears, the subject can’t control his transformation and loses his humanity : he can’t remember his friends, those he knows, he turns into a killing beast. What makes him still a human is his ability to turn again into a human after the full moon. Humanity is therefore associated with appearences but also with the ability to feel various emotions and having a memory. However, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we meet another werewolf, Fenrir Greyback, who chose to live forever, physically, as a hybrid: he looks half human and half wolf, whereas Remus looks human most of the time, which makes him more human than Greyback. 

To finish on what happens when magic meets the idea of hybridty, we can talk about animagis : to assist their friend Remus with his werewolf condition, Sirius Black, James Potter and Peter Pettigrew developped, thanks to magic, the ability to change into animals. But unlike Lupin, they can choose when they want to change form. It's not a real hybridity, it's created through magic.

Class 9

The Planet of the Apes is a science-fiction film, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, starring Charlton Heston. Like Fight Club, it’s an adaptation of a novel of the same name. This movie was followed by four sequels.

In this dystopian world, apes have evolved into creatures with human-like intelligence and speech while humans are like animals, returned to the Stone Age.

So we can say that this movie offers a kind of reflection on Darwin’s theory of evolution where he stated that human beings descend from monkeys. Here, there’s been an inversion of this statement. Apes are more evolved than humans on this planet. It’s a sort of “What could have been if…”.

In the past years, two reboots of this series were produced, first Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and then Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). These are in fact prequels, which offer an explanation for the existence of a planet where apes have become more human than mankind.

We follow Cesar, played by Andy Serkis in motion capture, the first “evolved ape”, and how he developed human instincts and feelings, how he learns to speak and act like a human. He was adopted by a scientist, who kept him because he could help with his father’s Alzheimer. We can see how humans react to his existence, and sometimes he seems more human than humans themselves.

But these movies also offers an explanation for the extinction of mankind : a decease carried by the apes that would kill all humans, and would explain their later domination of the planet which is therefore not only due to their ability to evolve.

I think that what’s great with these movies is that they allow us to see that by developing humanity, apes also takes its flaws like jealousy, envy, hatred… So being human is not necessarily a good thing, it can corrupts you.

Classes 7 & 8

During these classes, we studied Fight Club and Matrix. I think that these two movies can be put together and be compared.

For example, Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club has no name; it’s a kind of dehumanization. He feels empty, and cannot see how he can change his life. On the other hand, we have Neo, who has a choice and responsibilities: he can change the world by going against the Matrix, even if he’s the Chosen One, he still have a choice.

Both characters are living a lie. The Fight Club character is lying to himself because of his mental illness. He experiences a kind of reincarnation, through Brad Pitt’s character, his alter ego. Neo also experience reincarnation thanks to Morpheus and his team, by discovering the truth about the Matrix and being his true self.

Both will have to fight to be truly alive. Neo is alive but it’s a lie, and he’s going to have to fight against the Matrix to be free while Edward Norton’s character will fight for himself, so he doesn’t feel empty anymore. Everything in these men’s life is fake. They have to fight something bigger than them : the society they live in.

Indeed, both films are a critic of consumerism that leads to a world corrupted by goods. In Matrix, that even leads to a world ruled by machines. The Matrix is all that is wrong in the world.

In both films, we can see a critic of totalitarism. The Matrix is a kind of totalitarism, same as the society we can observe in Fight Club. And in both movies, we can see a small group rebelling against it. These rebels are outsiders, who have to live in the shadows. But we can ask if their intentions are really going to lead to a better world : in Matrix, the real world is dark and devastated, so why taking down the Matrix will help them to have a better life ? In the same way, the fight club is in itself a kind of totalitarism, it’s not a proper response to the flaws of society.

Classes 5 &6

During these classes we studied Metropolis by Fritz Lang and Ghost in the shell by Mamoru Oshii. These movies are very different partly because they were made sixty eight years apart, in different countries. Furthermore, the second is an anime. 

But they have in common their theme: hybrid bodies. In Metropolis this is the android that looks like Maria. It looks so human that is confuses even the ones close to Maria.  In Ghost in the shell, the main characters, Major and Batou, are cyborgs. They’re enhanced humans. By definition, a cyborg is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. The fantasize of someone half human half machine is very common in science-fiction. They’re usually represented as stronger than humans. 

Major and Batou are partly humans. However, there’s nothing human about the android of Metropolis. It’s a robot version of a human. It is conditioned to act like Maria. It has no free will,  and no real human feelings therefore it’s not human.

But how much free will does cyborgs have ? How much are they human ? To be fair, they're human by nature, they just were given robot parts. We have the same problem in Blade Runner, for example, except that replicants are NOT humans, much like robot-Maria.

In all these movies, the machine, technology, has a strong impact on human lives, and each one of these hybrid bodies leads us to ask : at which point can we say that a body partly mechanic is “like” a human and therefore have a soul, self consciousness, memories and feelings of its own ? 

Class 4

During last class, we studied zombies (and their representation). Everyone agreed that zombies are dead persons brought back to life who try to eat the living. They’re different from other monsters because they’re not particularly known for their intelligence or feelings.

Zombies are very common in the cinematic universe. Soon, you will be able to discover in theaters the adaptation of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. The movie (and the book) takes the character of the Jane Austen novels and puts them in a world where a zombie apocalypse is happening. So the Bennet family, just as odd as in the original book, is slaying zombies too. 

In this movie, the representation of zombies seems to be ordinary : they’re scary, want to eat flesh and are following the “slave and master of slaves” scheme (and they end up dead). 

There are however other ways of representing zombies. As an example we can use the CW show iZombie. The main character, Liv Moore, a promising young doctor, becomes a zombie at a boat party after being scratched by an infected person. After that, she has to quit her old ambitions and starts to work at the morgue, where she can find free brains indefinitely.

In the show, as long as a zombie can eat brains, he remains almost human (except for the color of skin, hair, and the absence of pulse and breath, almost like a vampire). However if they can’t feed, they’re “regular zombies”.

Liv "full zombie mode"

These human-look-alike zombies have super-strengh, and, when angry or in danger, can activate the ‘full zombie mode” (a term used by Liv Moore herself). When they eat a brain, they take the personality of the person it belonged to, which caused Liv some trouble. They also have a special taste for spicy food. In each episode, we can see Liv cooking the brains in a very appetizing way (like in Hannibal for example).

They also have visions about these dead persons. Liv is therefore working with the police to stop criminals, pretending to be a psychic. So we’re pretty far from the “zombie slave” stereotype here. But like everywhere there are good and bad zombies (as there are bad and good persons). However, except for a few people directly involved, the population is not aware of the presence of zombies amongst them, because of their ability to look like regular persons, making them more dangerous and imprevisible.

Furthermore, in this show, being a zombie is considered an illness (referred to as zombiism) that could eventually be cured and that's apparently due to a soda produced by a multinational company...

Class 3

According to Wikipedia, camp is ”a social, cultural and aesthetic style and sensibility based on deliberate and self-acknowledge theatricality”. This style is commonly affiliated with kitsch.

In class, we studied The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Camp is difficult to define and so, the movies that follow this idea of camp are also difficult to find.

To me, the idea of camp is very close to the television and cinematic universe of The Addams Family. Their “gothic” style is very close to what we’ve seen in TRHPS. The tv show and the movies play on the theatricality and on the kitsch side of the images and of the script. For example, I think the style of Morticia and Dr Frank-N-Furter is in some ways similar (with their dark hair, pale skin and gothic style). Both characters are based on the same idea of going against typical beauty.  Both products also play on the "kitsch" side and presents marginal characters that do not look like what we can see everywhere. 

I also find on Wikipedia that soap-operas like Dallas  are considered part of the camp culture. Nowadays, I think that the CW’s Jane the Virgin tv show represents that idea. It plays on the breaking of the fourth wall : interactions with the audience, etc., but takes all the tropes we can find in a classic telenovela. It plays on the dramatization to offer a reflection on what tv shows are. 

Class 2

During this class we studied Blade Runner and the idea of dystopia. This movie is a reflection about what being human means. We can find this idea in a lot of recent movies like Ex Machina or Her, Both of these movies are about artificial intelligence and suggests that, somehow, machines can be as human as us. 

In Her, the disincarnate voice of Scarlett Johansson, even if she's just a computer program, falls in love with Joaqin Phoenix's character. She feels human emotions, and that's why he loves her back and grows attached to her. But as she's not incarnate, she does not have a body, therefore she's not human and they can't properly bond. 

In Ex Machina, Ava, the A.I. portrayed by Alicia Vikander has a metallic body and the hability to feel. But that's not enough; she must have a skin, and be free. She's guided by her desires, as most human beings. 

So being human is more than having a body or having the ability to feel and think. According to Blade Runner, what makes us humans is our capacity of remembrance. 

In Memento, the main character has lost his immediate memory. It makes him a freak, a marginal. He's not even himself anymore. Yet, he's perfectly human. But his disability marks him as an outsider.

But in the previous movies I talked about, if these machines can be so close to human beings it's because they can remember things about their partners thanks to their abilities as A.I. 

But both of these films also demonstrate that a machine acting like a human is dangerous, because it's greater and smarter than us, like ameliorated humans (cf. the cyborg theory, a transhuman body that transcend humans capabilities). 

We can highlight the fact that, in Her, Ex Machina or Blade Runner, the marginal body/artificial intelligence are females. It looks like the extension of the phantasm about A.I : it's something men dream of having, and these female bodies are the object of their desire too. 

Class 1

The idea of hybrid and marginal bodies first summoned in me the character of Edward Scissorhands, half human/half machine. And this hybrid body makes him a marginal body : he doesn't fit into the suburbian lifestyle, even if he tried his best. In the end, he's condamned to live as an outcast, all alone in his dark castle, hated by most of the city.

In fact I think that most of Tim Burton’s movies are about hybrid or marginal bodies: characters out of their time or outside society because they’re, somehow, different, in appearance or behavior, like Jack from The Nightmare for Christmas who lives in Halloween Town but wants to discover new things and is interested in Chrismas, making him a weirdo in the eyes of his peers. These characters are a reflexion of the artist behind the camera : Burton himself doesn't fit Hollywood standards (he worked at the Disney studios for a while but understood that he was not happy working this way, because his aspirations were too odd for the studio and they didn't trust him). 

We started to study David Bowie’s last clip, Blackstar. As an artist but also as a person, Bowie represents the idea of hybrid and marginal body. He does not have a common look, and he embraced his difference to create his art. He also had a huge influence in terms of representations of bodies, genders and races.