Dream Interpretation of the Film Lost Highway Essay -- Lost Highway Mo

Dream Interpretation of the Film "Lost Highway" Cop: Do you own a video camera? Renee: No. Fred hates them. Fred: I like to remember things my own way. Cop: What do you mean by that? Fred: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened. A dream can mean everything, or it can mean nothing. According to Freud, if we take its contents seriously, it has the potential to reveal things about ourselves that we scarcely believe could be true. But often the fragmented oddness of such a vision damages its credibility, and one is left wondering how something so disjointed could contain insight of any value. Such is the dilemma with "Lost Highway," a movie seemingly bent on walking its viewers down one path, and then, when they begin to understand the nature of it all, to abruptly change course and begin anew. Hitchcock's "MacGuffin" - the term he coined to refer to the apparent plot of a story, which is merely a cover for the underlying, more important thread - is both irrelevant and vital in this film. The viewer will watch what is happening, trying to get a sense of the plot, but the plot, really, is unimportant. The very nature of plot demands a sense of linearity, and this movie lacks such a characteristic. However, th e plot is also the most important aspect of the film, because, ultimately, almost everything each character does seems to be part of a dream in the mind of the central character, Fred Madison. Consequently, what happens is not merely manifest content to be brushed aside. Hidden within it is the latent content which will give the viewer an understanding of what is happening in the mind of this man. How do we know it is a dream and not merely poor story-telling? How do we know... ...on to detail complements this approach quite well. In either case, the effect works. One of the most difficult tasks in a movie is to let the viewer inside the mind of one of its characters. This is much easier in literature, which can employ the faculties of narration and omniscience. In a film with no such leisure, a director must rely on images and dialogue alone to accomplish this feat. To visually represent the emotions of a character can only be well-executed in a few distinct ways. One such, effective way is to film the dreams and fantasies occurring in the mind of that character. Lynch's approach works, and Fred's emotional and psychical states of being are clear, if the viewer can just look past the manifest to find the rich, latent content buried beneath. Bibliography Gay, Peter, ed. The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989.

How does Wilfred Owen Create Sympathy in his Poem “Disabled” Essay

Wilfred Owen uses a variety of poetic devices to make the reader feel sympathetic for the disabled person portrayed in the poem. Many of Owens ideas of sympathy are not easy to find and the reader picks them up more subliminally unless he were to study the poem. Firstly, the most important point to convey sympathy is the theme of retrospect and tense in this piece and it runs clearly throughout. Owen starts the first stanza in the present tense and we immediately see that he is lonely and inactive. â€Å"He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting†¦Ã¢â‚¬  shows us that he is unable to move and can only sit, his life is controlled by doctors and his ability to make decisions is compromised by injury. Furthermore, the word â€Å"waiting† shows that all he can do is sit around and wait for things to happen, he cannot create or instigate something to cheer him. The poem then, in the fifth stanza he reminisces about what he thought war might be like, â€Å"†¦jewelled hilts† and glory. However, at the end he says, â€Å"Now he will spend a few sick years in institutes†. We feel sorry for the man as we think he has been cheated and lulled into a false sense of security. Owen also uses contrast to evoke sympathy in the way he rhymes at the end of the sentences. The rhyming words contradict or juxtapose one another. â€Å"Knees† and â€Å"disease† are used for contrast as having knees symbolise health and normal lifestyle and it’s what he had before the war. Disease on the other hand symbolises a lack of knees or bad health and it is what he was left with after the war. The juxtaposition of good and bad things makes us feel sad for the man and also make us feel his regret of joining up. Another vessel which Owen uses to make us feel sympathetic is metaphor and simile. He says, â€Å"Poured it down shell holes till the veins ran dry†. This shows us how angry he is with himself in the fact that he is saying he might just as well have poured his blood and his life away. He feels like he made no impact on the war and only bad has come out of it. Caesura is also used to break up sentences and disrupt the flow of a poem. They can create sympathy as sometimes they can be ironic or rhetorical questions. â€Å"He thought he’d better join – he wonders why† is a good example as it shows his remorse for joining the army and the fact that it is out of sync and without a rhyming pair makes it stand out in our memory as a definitive thought of his. The poem also ends with questions like â€Å"why don’t they come† which tell the reader that since the war he is completely reliant on others and he despairs with his lack of freedom. Owen also uses women and war officers to make us feel sympathetic. â€Å"Smiling, they wrote his lie† tells us that the officer signing him up knew that he was not eighteen and was not doing his job properly. It shows that the officers cared more about the numbers in the army than the actual wellbeing of English people. He also describes women as being shallow and their eyes â€Å"passed from him to the men that were whole†. This shows they do not care about a man’s personality and character, only his looks and sexual appeal. This makes us feel angry towards women for being so shallow and want them to not be so driven by seemingly unimportant things.

Filial Piety An Important Chinese Cultural Value

Filial piety (Ã¥ ­ , xià  o) is arguably Chinas most important moral tenet. A concept of Chinese philosophy for more than 3,000 years, xià  o today entails a strong loyalty and deference to ones parents, to ones ancestors, by extension, to ones country and its leaders. Meaning In general, filial piety requires children to offer love, respect, support, and deference to their parents and other elders in the family, such as grandparents or older siblings. Acts of filial piety include obeying ones parents wishes, taking care of them when they are old, and working hard to provide them with material comforts, such as food, money, or pampering.   The idea follows from the fact that parents give life to their children, and support them throughout their developing years, providing food, education, and material needs. After receiving all these benefits, children are thus forever in debt to their parents. In order to acknowledge this eternal debt, children must respect and serve their parents all their lives. Beyond the Family The tenet of filial piety also applies to all elders—teachers, professional superiors, or anyone who is older in age—and even the state.  The family is the building block of society, and as such the hierarchical system of respect also applies to ones rulers and ones country. Xià  o means that the same devotion and selflessness in serving ones family should also be used when serving ones country. Thus, filial piety is an important value when it comes to treating ones immediate family, elders and superiors in general, and the state at large.   Chinese Character Xiao  (Ã¥ ­ ) The Chinese character for filial piety, xiao  (Ã¥ ­ ), illustrates the terms meaning. The ideogram is a combination of the characters  lao (è€ ), which means old, and  er  zi  (å„ ¿Ã¥ ­  ), which means son.  Lao  is the top half of the character xiao, and er  zi, representing the son, forms the bottom half of the character.   The son below the father is a symbol of what filial piety means. The character xiao shows that the older person or generation is being supported or carried by the son: thus the relationship between the two halves is one both of burden and support. Origins The character xiao is one of the oldest examples of the written Chinese language, painted onto oracle bones—oxen scapulae used in divination—at the end of the Shang Dynasty and the beginning of the Western Zhou dynasty, about 1000 BCE. The original meaning appears to have meant providing food offerings to ones ancestors, and ancestors meant both living parents and those long dead. That intrinsic meaning has not changed in the intervening centuries, but how that is interpreted, both who the respected ancestors include and the responsibilities of the child to those ancestors, has changed many times. The Chinese philosopher Confucius  (551–479 BCE) is most responsible for making xiao a pivotal part of society. He described filial piety and argued for its importance in creating a peaceful family and society in his book, Xiao Jing, also known as the Classic of Xiao and written in the 4th century BCE. The Xiao Jing became a classic text during the Han Dynasty (206–220), and it remained a classic of Chinese education up until the 20th century. Interpreting Filial Piety After Confucius, the classic text about filial piety is The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety, written by the scholar Guo Jujing during the Yuan dynasty (between 1260–1368). The text includes several fairly astonishing stories, such as He Buried His Son for His Mother. That story, translated into English by U.S. anthropologist David K. Jordan, reads: In the Hà  n dynasty the family of Guo Jà ¹ was poor. He had a three-year-old son. His mother sometimes divided her food with the child. Jà ¹ said to his wife: â€Å"[Because we are] very poor, we cannot provide for Mother. Our son is sharing Mother’s food. Why not bury this son?† He was digging the pit three feet deep when he struck a cauldron of gold. On it [an inscription] read: â€Å"No official may take this nor may any other person seize it.†Ã‚   The most serious challenge to the bedrock of xiao thought came in the early decades of the 20th century. Lu Xun (1881–1936), Chinas acclaimed and influential writer, criticized filial piety and stories like those in the Twenty-Four Paragons. Part of Chinas May Fourth Movement (1917) Lu Xun argued that the hierarchical principle privileging elders over youth stunts and inhibits young adults from making decisions that would allow them to grow as people or have their own lives. Others in the movement condemned xiao as the source of all evil, turning China into a big factory for the production of obedient subjects. In 1954, renowned philosopher and scholar Hu Shih (1891–1962) reversed that extreme attitude and promoted Xiaojing; and the tenet remains important to Chinese philosophy to this day. Challenges to Philosophy The admittedly gruesome set of Twenty-Four Paragons highlights long-running philosophical issues with xiao. One such issue is the relationship between xiao and another Confucian tenet, ren (love, benevolence, humanity); another asks what is to be done when honor to the family contrasts with honor to the laws of society? What is to be done if the ritual requirement demands that a son must avenge the murder of his father, but it is a crime to commit murder, or, as in the story above, infanticide? Filial Piety in Other Religions and Regions Beyond Confucianism, the concept of filial piety is also found in Taoism, Buddhism, Korean Confucianism, Japanese culture, and Vietnamese culture. The xiao ideogram is used in both Korean and Japanese, although with a different pronunciation. Sources and Further Reading Chan, Alan K.L., and Sor-Hoon Tan, eds. Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. Ikels, Charlotte (ed). Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.  Jujing, Guo. Trans. Jordan, David K. The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety (Èrshà ­sà ¬ Xià  o). University of California at Santa Barbara, 2013.Knapp, Keith. Sympathy and Severity: The Father-Son Relationship in Early Medieval China. Extrà ªme-Orient Extrà ªme-Occident  (2012): 113–36. Mo, Weimin and Shen, Wenju. The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety: Their Didactic Role and Impact on Childrens Lives. Childrens Literature Association Quarterly 24.1 (1999). 15–23.Roberts, Rosemary. The Confucian Moral Foundations of Socialist Model Man: Lei Feng and the Twenty Four Exemplars of Filial Behaviour. New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 16 (2014): 23–24.