Stranger Things Group Presentation

Here is the link to a group project I did with my fellow classmates. In this presentation, we discuss the idea of the reverse portal fantasy and dissect the nature of the "Upside Down" and the way in which the show discusses internal and external problems through the lens of 80's nostalgia.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tgm18G26HccLL87MdZWw_rBzciJuZKh62WuA1YJ1JwA/edit?usp=sharing

The Blissful Suicide Captain Beatty:

    

     One of the final scenes in Fahrenheit 451 has been on my mind lately. Near the end of the novel, Montag is driven in anger to kill his former boss Captain Beatty by burning him to death. While on the run from the police and robot dog, Montag reflects on killing his former friend.

“Beatty wanted to die. In the middle of the crying Montag knew it for the truth. Beatty had wanted to die. He had just stood there, not really trying to save himself, just stood there, joking, needling, thought Montag, ......How strange, strange, to want to die so much that you let a man walk around armed and then instead of shutting up and staying alive, you go on yelling at people and making fun of them until you get them mad,” -Bradbury, pg. 116.

Could it be true? Could Beatty have wanted Montag to kill him at that moment in front of his house? If so, why would he do that after trying to convince Montag to stay away from books and the potential threat they impose on society?
    
I find Fire Chief Beatty to be the most interesting character in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. He is constantly portrayed as the logical extreme foil for Guy. While Montag is unhappy and ignorant of the world around him until the intervention of Clarisse, Beatty is unhappy while having to be a well-read man in a society that has conditioned him to burn books for the greater good of society. Practically every single conversation between the two men until his death had been Beatty using his above-average intellect to convince Guy that books and the ideas of the division they can spread are a detriment to their way of life.

"It was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them. Look where they got you, in slime up to your lip. If I stir the slime with my little finger, you'll drown!"
-Bradbury, pg. 111-112

Beatty never claims that he’s never read books. Far from it. He’s possibly the most well-read character aside from the traveling scholars Montag joins up with at the end of the novel. Beatty clearly at some point had a love of books, writing, and literature, but at some point along the way decided that the security, cooperation, and universal control of society was more important than intellectual freedom. In his mind, books open the possibility of human discourse. The more well-read someone is, the more likely they will form their own opinions, which will lead to disagreements, which will ultimately lead to the utter collapse of human civilization.

"What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."
-Bradbury, pg. 59

In my honest opinion, the reason that Montag thinks that Beatty wanted him to kill him was to prove him wrong. Beatty sees the desire for knowledge and his wanting to change the status quo in Montang, and wants to show him the result of giving up on free ideas and individuality. Beatty often taunts Montag with the idea that fire is a source of purification and rebirth and “destroys responsibility and consequences”. At the end of the novel, the idea of the mythical phoenix bird is brought up. A symbol of rebirth and purification. Beatty wanted Guy to use the fire he so loved to purify him of his sins as a fireman. A book burner. The cause of so much intellectual destruction.

The Incredible Shrinking Man: Our Shrinking Place in the Universe

    Last class, we watched the 1957 Science Fiction classic “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” In the film, Grant Williams plays Scott Carry, a man who’s hit with a toxic mist while on vacation with his wife. This mist causes him to begin rapidly shrinking in size. At first, he only loses a few inches, then begins to lose two feet, and in the final stretch of the film becomes smaller than a spool of thread. The film can be interpreted in any number of ways, but I am going to examine it through the lens of Modernism. Modernism is a term that usually refers to a cultural shift that began in the early 20th Century of American and European history, arguably around 1930. The term is used to refer to a philosophical movement in which people we’re becoming self-aware in an increasingly industrialized world. People began turning away from religion and organizations like the church to become more immersed in the realm of science, logic, and free thinking. New forms of art, literature, and new media such as photography/film are examples of modernism. One concept to be examined and debated was the idea of the traditional nuclear family. The film was released less than twenty years after world war two. Scott’s shrinking body could be a representation of mans shrinking place as the “Head” of the household. During World War II, many women began to enter the workplace to fill in for many of the men who were overseas fighting in Europe. When they came back, many women didn’t like the idea of having to step aside and return to the sole role of mother, and child bearer. This became the spark for many woman's rights movements. Scott begins the film in a place of dominance, making his wife get him a beer, and ends the film with his wife being forced to provide him with food, shelter, and safety. He is possibly becoming obsolete in a world that is no longer ruled and decided over solely by men. Scott's realization is that he’s simply a single person in a larger universe is what the films ends on, and the audience could see this as a message of globalization. The US was no longer a country able to act on its own but now had to be part of a greater union after the events of two world wars.

Guy Montag: Turning the Page on Authority

    In last weeks discussion of Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, I briefly talked about how the apes had split the roles of society based on race. A brief recap, the Gorilla’s are the strongest apes, often taking up army, police, and enforcement roles. The Orangutangs are the gatekeepers of knowledge and the major inventors/scientists of ape society. And finally, the Chimpanzees who are often seen as the laborers, menial workers, and “common” citizens of a ape kind. In our classroom discussion about these rolls, my professor made an astute comment about the novel. To summarize, he made a claim that not only are the roles of society assigned to apes at birth, but they see no need or have any desire to deviate from these rolls. For example, in Boulle’s novel, Gorillas will never question being hunters, bruisers, or police figureheads. They follow orders because that’s what society asks of them, and they see no need to change that role they fulfill. They are static in their philosophy. Gorillas hunt and Orangutangs innovate. This is the way of the world. They enforce rules and authority on the people because that’s what they’ve been taught from birth. But what if one of these Gorillas decided to start thinking about the role they occupy? What if they decided that they no longer want to enforce the rules of the state forcefully with an iron first? Enter Guy Montag.

    In my 26 years on this spinning cerulean orb, I had never read Ray Brad Bury’s Fahrenheit 451 before seeing it on my Spring 2019 reading list. As a lover of science fiction, and literature, this a true shame that I’ve now remedied, The novel is a portrayal of a future dystopia in which people have been become so detached from one another, that they would prefer to have the television talk with them than another person in the room. Reading and owning books is now against the law, and anyone caught with them is either killed or sent to jail. Firemen in this world no longer put out fires, but instead go to any location containing books and burn them to the ground. Our protagonist, Guy Montag, is one such Fireman. Society has given him the role of an authoritative oppressor. and for the first portion of the novel, he’s more than happy to torch libraries and burn books “for the greater good”. It’s not until he meets an eccentric young girl, Clarese, that Montag begins to see what society has become through the explosive growth of technology and too much leisure time. After this encounter, he begins to secretly steal and read books from the houses he tasked to burn and eventually begins to question his role in society, and the heavy responsibility of what it means to be a Fireman, and the weight of what “burning” really means.
    
     Montag’s turning point comes when he's turned his kerosine house on his superior Beatty. He’s physically burning someone who’s a threat to him, but this could also be seen as Montag severing his last link with his old life, and ultimately, with society. He’s decided that the oppression of free thinking and knowledge that he was tasked with undertaking was no longer something he could agree with on a moral level. His turning of the hose is also a turning of a new page. The end of this novel in which Montag joins a group of wandering scholars could be seen as the beginning of a new chapter on his road to atone for this sins of the past, and away from the authority he once served.