I began taking supporting characters and giving them my emotional reactions. The elderly women at the co op, Grace who has to bring a child into this damaged world, Lenny’s parents who worked so hard just to see America’s own version of Soviet Russia and it’s collapse. These characters began to receive my sympathy because I didn’t know any of their flaws, so hadn’t been disgusted by them.

The imagery of aging was really shocking for me too. I could talk all day about the ugly representation of a sexualized and fetishized youth, but what made me cringe more was the terrible desceiptions of people deemed “old.” In the society we live in, Lenny is not on the percipice of death or anything. She the constant discussion of his hair loss and graying, his flabbly skin and his wrinkles was a little strange to me. His friends, like Noah, had been pushing so hard to become youthful again the became charicatures, where Lenny didn’t know how to fight it, but in the end seemed to be the only one to get out.

We know from the begining that this couple splits, there is no suspense, no asking “What will happen?” We know this because of the note that introduces us to the couple, discussing regrets about breakup and casually running in to one another. This tells us that the plot points aren’t necessarily the most important thing to take away, it emphasizes instead, a need for scrutiny. Prepared, I began trying to read into every detail, one of which being the prices. I know this is a fictional auction and I know no one is buying these items, but some things I took notice of were comparisons of similar items in each o=person’s life. Books for instance, photography books were more expensive than her cooking ones. I found those instances interesting. Sometimes, like in the case of the sunglasses, the prices were about equal, so i can’t make a sweeping statement, making my question about price somewhat difficult to answer.

Speaking of pricing, the Valenitine’s Day menus were interestingly priced. They were $50-65, far more than any other hand written note seems to have been. The “Auction” being dated for Valenitine’s Day, this seemed significant to me. The menus list off food, but offer no specifically spelled sentiments, which makes the food itself the sentiment, something auction goers would not be able to buy anyway. Her carefully prepared menus, then, are the remnants of the two closest things to her heart coming togethe; food and Hal.

Speaking of food, Lenore’s food love seemed to border on obsession for me. She not only works in the food business through her column, she also keeps a pretty detailed list of food that she consumes throughout the day. She keeps meticulous track, which makes me wonder about her relationship to food, since keeping trackof what one eats is often a tactic used in dieting. She often records healthier snacks, like celery and apples, but spends her days making cakes. I found the contrast interesting. The food obsession continues with Lenore’s lamentations about Hal’s disinterest in food. He is not a foodi and this makes her upset. He seems to usually support her career by buying her cookbooks and things for presents, but she needs more.

This brings me to gifts. I was startled when Lenore buys Christmas presents for Hal like salad tossers, but I was equally confused when Hal buys Lenore an expernsive camera. It felt to me like the pair were projecting their own interests onto one another, which didn’t seem particularly healthy. Why would a non-foodie want salad tossers? It didn’t make much sense to me.  Hal doesn’t want a dog, so he gifts dog figurines to Lenore? That seemed to me like rubbing salt in the wound, but I guess her dog sitting does destroy his rubber shark, so who am I to judge?

The sunglasses that used to belong to an ex were a little disturbing, but what really made me cringe was that the couple called a t-shirt the sex shirt because wearing it meant they were ready for sex. This would possibly be a cute little inside joke, until you learn that the shirt belonged to Lenore’s ex boyfriend, adding a creepiness level for me.

Overall, this book made me feel really uncomfortable, not because of the content, but because of what we were doing. Inspecting such personal items felt sad and a little dirty to me. Looking at a two page layout of Lenore’s bras made me feel incredibly instrusive. I wanted to get out of their heads and out of their bedroom. The tactic was unique though, and it forced us to build an incomplete narrative into something we could understand. This was a pretty strange experiment, but makes you think.

Well, maybe not end of story, because I then began reading Expressive Processing and started to think a little more about the details behind the game. First of all, the work behind the game is stunning. A game that when I asked my boyfriend to download it for me on his computer (mine might implode if I attempted such a feat) he laughed heartily. The program though has a pretty impressive range of responses based on what you type. It recognizes far more commands and comments then Galatea and is able to work out some semblance of response even when it clearly does not understand.

I learned that these responses are cleverly designed because of a series of beats. I never had a term for them before, but of course I realized that the characters need to have a series of goals to complete, it would be necessary to keep them on track. However, the planning and programing involved in reaction to the series of responses is interesting. If I agree with Grace first then Trip, overall response is different from what I would do in reverse while still remaining on track with the beats is more complex than I orginally had considered.

Expressive Processing is a term I think fits well when I expreienced Facade. There are always parameters set by the author, even if the program varies in response somewhat. For instance, the female reaction in Facade is very different than the male reaction. The man, when confronted or upset gets volotile and angry. The woman in a similar situation becomes weepy and exasperated. This happened for me almost every time. This must fall within some sort of parameter. Trip was also the only one, in my experiences, to physically interact with the scenery. They both looked at pictures and discussed sculptures, but Trip initiated the making of drinks and always answered the door. Homosexual flirtations were only acceptable in a female with female context, not two men. These observances point out authorship that formed particular identities for the characters and shaped the conclusions. This also relates to the idea of interactions being politicized (like the example of September 12). It isn’t as servere a political overtone, but it exists all the same.

I loved reading about the SimCity effect. I was among the many who was intrigued by watching my city grow and perhaps mercilessly allowing it fail. It failed because of my choices, not because of the game. While playing, I never thought about the relationship I had with the rules of the world, but looking back, I understand the response of the eleven year old girl, “That’s how the game works.” I knew the basics of what response the computer would have to various actions but didn’t give much thought to the fact that I was aware of programming. It’s a lot more complex than games I’ve played that preceeded it. In Super Mario, for instance, I could be sure of the paths my enemies would take and every movement the world projected. A lover of Mario, I hate to say that the predictability revealed more the The Eliza Effect, simplicity being revealed by attempts at masking it. The outcomes don’t rely on as many variables, you jump on the turtle and it is beaten, or you don’t and it gets you, you push the shell against these blocks, they will break in exactly the same order no matter how many times you try.

The Sims do rely on more variables, but there’s one thing you can be certain of, if you remove all doors and windows from the room they’re in, they all do the same thing. if you take away the ladder in the swimming pool while they’re in it, it doesn’t matter what personality they have, they’re doomed.

DeWitt spent so much time making me hate/respect her choices in season 2 I think I confused myself. She is no doubt clever in her execution of an overarching plan, but do the ends justify the means? When exactly did she decide to be a “good guy,” she was not always, otherwise she wouldn’t have experienced the inner conflict that read her to some serious drinking. She ironically turns into an actual mother figure instead of deluding herself into believing she was one. She is another character that can’t seem to relinquish control, even in the end she chooses to usher her flock of lost ex-dolls into the world.

Boyd is the character that made me crankiest, he helped plan the downfall of his company, in order to try and thwart it, showing a huge sense of confidence and egotism in his capability to maintain control. He could have easily found a way to go through corporate means in order to get a hold of the evolved echo, he was just too twisted in his power to trust the job to anyone but himself personally. He needed to control the outcome up until the very last second he has a personality left. 

Then there’s Topher. I’ve done a little bit of hating on Topher and i sort of feel bad, I think he might have evolved more than Echo through this season. He realized a conscience which pulled him out of the Dollhouse and on a crusade to bring down the evil corporation that had been funding all of his toys for years. He protects Echo because he feels he should and ends up losing his sanity for the most part in order to make things right. Even in his confused state, he insists on sacrificing himself and only himself in order to save the world. In a moment of clarity, he tells Adelle that she needs to stay to fix the world, he must die alone. A scary proposition. It could be argued that in a way, Topher refuses to lose control of the situation and that pushes him toward his mental break, he caused this so he felt he had to fix it. Up to the end he is still the genius that saves everything. I still felt that he was admirable in the end.

Whiskey still throws me off. We just lose her at the end of epitaph 1, chronologically that is the last time we meet her and we never know how she got back into Whiskey-state in the first place. She is Clyde and then who knows? Child-body-Caroline suggested she came back to the dollhouse at some point and that she is Dr. Saunders the last time Caroline saw her, but we don’t know. It seems she had chosen to relinquish all control, but something was still left, pushing her toward saving survivors. I wish we knew more about that situation, but I guess when a show is cancelled they wrap up what they can, whiskey just fell through the cracks, I guess it’s good that Dr. Saunders never found out her lover was the founder of Rossum, but still!!!

I felt like the show worked to solve that issue for me in Echo (and to some small extent Alpha, Victor, Sierra, November and in the Epitaph 1 episode Whiskey). For the most part, these people are wiped clean of any memories or even personalities. At first, Echo begins seeing clips of her old self and being confused by it, but as the series progresses, she does not only pick up ideas from her old self, but all the selves she has been. She remembers her handler fondly since he put himself on the line for her. She responds based not on the memories of Caroline, but on Echo’s memories. This was important for me. It proved that Echo as a character did not have to be only a puppet, but a living personality that had emerged from experience. There might have been confusion and naivete,  but she forged through as a person molded by her experience. They built a personality despite her having been wiped, she became something else. The other actives began to respond based on old memories from old personalities, this made them more problematic for me. I could not relate to characters I had been given so little to work with. Sierra wasn’t a person, she was a doll with ghosts of her past, but Echo was different. I felt like Alpha’s child-like attraction to Echo may have been something, but it is difficult to say since we get so little, and he did attack Whiskey in a way he would have with his old personality intact.

Whiskey in the last episode proved to be something interesting to me, and slightly creepy. She reverted back to a wiped doll, even though it is unclear whether she lost her mind or it was wiped. She did remember certain things and have a basic need to help the real people and gas the infected. This might be an instinctual response, but I doubt the other dolls would have had such prescence of mind to distingush between people who mean serious harm and innocent people. I’m not sure how I feel about her, but it does pose some questions. Why revert back to Whiskey? She went back to a wiped person, not some other personality or her original one.

It’s hard to feel for any of the other characters, since their motives are continuously suspect, but the dolls have no motivations so they might actually be the most likely candidates for empathy, for me anyway. But then again, their old personalities may have had some unsavory motivations they just don’t remember. Discussing this series in terms of characters is a bit of a conundrum.

Now that I got all the initial reaction business out of the way, let’s talk narratice for a bit. It took me longer than it probably should have to realize that each story was running concurrently. The difficulty with that for me was the shortness of each students’ personal narrative. I started seeing this film as a series of concurrently running narratives smooshed together. Each student has overlap with others, but their lives do not really effect one another. There’s the boy who’s more responsible than his drunken dad, the girls that want to spend every waking moment together and cannot deal with seperation and share bulimic tendancies. there’s the young couple and the photographer. The sheer number of little narratives is impressive. Each character can at least be recognized as an archetype from teenage films. The problem that I discussed with relating to characters probably has a lot to do with this excessive number of characters. The more baby narratives and character names to be remebered and processed over the course of the film the harder it becomes to grow attached to one of them and the less details and understanding we can gain from one of them. I started to respond to the very first student we meet, and then we don’t see him in any significant capacity until the end. They named a character we only meet for seconds and rarely repeat any names at all. It becomes frustrating and the smooshed together narratives start to feel like they’re not narratives at all. Until the last scenes NOTHING HAPPENS. Nothing prompts those ending scenes and therefore the mini narratives might not be narratives at all. Afterall, didn’t the Ryan article suggest that the main character had to change something in the plot or setting to make this truely a narrative? I suppose this film, according to that definition, these little stories are not actually little narratives, they have narratology, but can’t be narratives. What are they then? Are the only real characters those characters that killed? What does that make Benny, the student we only meet at the end who escorts another girl out the window? He changes something, but is given no back story, not even a little bit. This film does not just comment on the subject matter, it makes you really think about how narrative works.

Long takes gave me some trouble. There were a few reallu interesting and inventive ones that impressed me. For instance, when the three girls go through the lunch line, eat lunch, walk to the bathroom (as the camera takes a short cut through the kitchen) and then all vomit together in the toilet. This take was breathtakingly long and interesting. On the same note though, following a character walking across a field and down halls from behind felt more tedious and like an extension onto the necessary length of the film. I thought maybe they could have been more selective on which of these takes to keep for filmic value and which might have been superfluous. The directors and editors may have had good reason to keep them all, but I ended up finding that less can sometimes be more.

Thomas Elsaesser

The Thesis: Mind game films are a phenomenon instead of a new genre in and of itself because they represent an evolution of the film genre. They expand on the solely visual narrative into a text that both shows a narrative and forces the audience to interact with the production, making mind game films an evolution of film as an art form (especially genres like science fiction, horror  teen film and film noir), not a genre of its own.

What is a mind game film?

There are two levels:

            1: Information is withheld or ambiguously presented in order to play games with the character (The Game, Se7en)

            2: Information is withheld or ambiguously presented in order to play games with the audience (The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, Memento)

            The film may also combine 1 and 2 to withhold from both the audience and the character (The 6^th Sense, The Others)

            This also refers to unreliable narrators that are mentally compromised

All mind game films intend to play a trick in some way on the viewer.

Motifs recognizable in Mind Game Film;

            -A suspension of cause and effect if not outright reversal of linear progression (Memento, Donnie Darko,Lost Highway)

            -Lines are blurred between reality and imagination, reality is questioned, said reality tends to be nothing more than a simulation. Sometimes protagonist has a friend, companion or mentor that turns out to be imagined (Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, Donnie Darko)

            -Protagonist questions existence of himself (The Sixth Sense, The Others, Blade Runner)

            -A character is unsure or mistaken about the existence of parallel worlds based on mistaken cognitive perception. Character is often convinced by family, friends or doctors that someone, often a child, does not or did not exist.

A mind game film must suspend the contract between film and viewer, which is that the film will not “lie” to the spectator, but are truthful and self-consistent within the premises of their diegetic world.

Argument:

            A mind game film cannot be its own genre because it brings no new stories to the table, but presents them in a different way.  “Narratologists tend to perceive mind-game films either as occasions for refining existing classifications or as challenges to prove that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to storytelling” (21)

“Computer driven and internet demands for more “dynamic” and “real-time” feedback and response are putting pressure even on (post)-modernist narrative.” (23).

Meaning the demand by consumers for surprises and interpretation to be readily available,; the consumer needs the film to ask them to rise to the challenge, but also to give a motivation to interact with the film.

The mind game film is advantageous for the young mind to interpret the world in varied ways. They teach appropriate ways to navigate issues of automated surveillance and control. (33)

The appeal stems from a duality of interpretation. These films can be viewed from an outsider looking in, academically dissecting the film and therefore the world it is situated in. It can also be discussed as its own world with presupposed rules that aren’t questioned. These discussions ignore the fictional contract and accept the world as real life, focusing on what internally goes on there, not addressing the world itself. (45)

Pathologies:

Often used as a device to “reboot” consciousness. What we later find out to be insanity is presented to the audience as normal. The audience originally accepts this unstable character’s perception and therefore the later discovery heightens the mind game.

3 Types:

            Paranoia

                        -Conspiracy theory movies. They can represent the “paranoid women” movies that the motif section discussed who are assured by family and friends nothing is abnormal, but the protagonist is suspicious. (The Forgotten, Flight Plan)

            Schizophrenia

                        -Where the protagonist’s delusional or imaginary world becomes melded with the “real” world. The audience, like the narrator is unable to distinguish between real and imaginary. (A Beautiful Mind)

            Amnesia

                        -An amnesiac hero is easy to program by other characters, he retains basic instincts and therefore can be used for others’ purposes. The audience, like the hero, is programmed to emotionally react with the hero and does not know they are being deceived until the hero does.

These disabilities are not always represented as hindrances, but advantages in the world the movie creates by tapping into some other world, intuitive thinking or protest movements. Within the world of the film, they are treated as “productive pathologies.”

In conclusion:

The new contract between audience and film no longer relies solely on passive voyeurism; instead it is based on engagement between film and audience where specific rules are established.

What brought these relationships to my attention was the nagging feeling i got that Powers only wants damaged women in his life. He, being emotionally lost, needs someone to take care of, to live for. Constantly throughout the text, Powers says how he wrote for C, to cheer her up. He talks about how he moved each time because she “needed to.” Every time she feels a need for a walk, there’s Powers telling her it is all for her. Near the end, he comments that he “played the martyr.” C was lost from the beginning, not sure what nationality or career she wanted. Powers thrived on being what he referred to as “caregiving.”

Helen, as a human female is obviously incomplete. She needs Powers to show her the world and to take her places. Everything she knows, she must get from him. Powers is world, like he and C were each others’ world. He wants a two person existence, and that’s precisely what he gets from his relationship with Helen. He gets conversation without rejection or fear of not living up to expectations. He has complete control over Helen’s education and he becomes enthralled with the concept.

Powers creates A in his mind’s eye. This makes his obsession with A incredibly creepy to me. He believes he loves this woman he doesn’t know. He “loves” her enough to ask her to marry him, to imagine running away with her and using book money to make it so she would never have to work. He imagines a world where they can exist only for one another, where she’d be reliant on him and what he offers. He would be able to take care of her, make her his life. He gleans some sort of brokeness  from her description of her family and her frustrations with Literary Politics. He presumes that she is an open space for him to pour his needs into her. She proves to be less lonely than Powers assumes and more ambitious than C was, not ready to run from society and form a life with this strange, older man.

Diana posed a problem for Powers. She is sweet and understanding, loving and smart. A little sassy but kind hearted. Powers never is able to connect with this woman who doesn’t need him. She has the power to exists with her children in a world all their own. She is a caregiver and she saves Helen from certain destruction in order to make Powers happy, the role reversaol does not settle well for Powers. He can’t handle that kind of woman.

In the end, i really thought Powers was going off the deep end. He nearly stalks A. He gets to the point where he’s driving by this woman’s house, a woman he doesn’t know, not to mention half his age. He searches for an unknown student by the picture! Just to find out this girl’s name, who he’s never heard speak. He imagines a life with a woman he’d seen maybe twice and never heard speak. The assumptions he makes about her personality are striking, and made me uncomfortable.

On the subject of names, there’s the lack of names attributed to uniquely important people and spaces in the novel. C is the most important person to ever step into this man’s life, yet she is nameless. It struck me as odd that someone who shaped the protagonist’s entire existance would be identified as a letter in the same way that the succession of machines are originally named (Imp A, B, C etc.). Similarly, U was a place of growth, discovery, mentorship and poignant memories for Powers. Why then, is it so vaguely described. Evidently, there are long winters, it is in the U.S and harbors a university. That is the extent of details that we are given. Why so vague? Is it too painful to fully return, so the narrator would prefer not to utter its name? Is it too frightening a proposition, the Voldemort (excuse my nerdy reference) of Powers’ life? What about B? The placee of love nests and reading hungrily, sharing of creation and destruction of identity should have a name. Maybe naming any of these things is all too painful. Maybe it represents an intentional vagueness, fairytale worlds and people never to be fully realized like C’s parents’ hometown, described in detail but never tangible. I’m not sure, but the lack of names is distractingly noticable.

Except Helen. She (perhaps the real protagonist?) is not even human, but has her own name. Like it was the obvious choice, the decision is made and she is christened in a matter of seconds. Her name and gender come easily. Why a girl? Why Helen? Men refer to cars and boats as female, but they don’t have reasoning skills, they don’t speak to us. Helen does. Powers claims that the answer came “without hesitation.” It was the obvious solution to a particularly hairy question, as he plans on teaching this machine literature, gender being monumentally important in many cases. Now that Helen is forming an identity, Powers will become more attached, exactly when Helen is most likely to pine for some independence. What then?

Fitting the two narrations that are going on simultaneously together is very clever. Helen cannot understand the world without zillions of unforseen bits of background. every little piece is important to the final product, necessary for complete comprehension. Helen’s digital need for background before she can move forward parallels the reader’s need for the background of the protagonist. To the “main” plot, C and her homecountry, Powers and his father, Taylor, none of them should matter. But they all do. The protagonist needs motivation, a reason to put of with Lentz, pain to make him unsocial and any number of other factors to make this story work. The book shows us how the ripple of nerons inside of Helen work, through a ripple of memories inside a human brain.

I enjoy Facebook now that I have accepted it into my world. That being said, I wonder sometimes if this easy access to EVERYONE actually makes people less intimate. Instead of calling people on the phone or meeting up to share pictures and stories, a short tidbit status and posted pictures have taken their place. You don’t even need to speak to someone to know how their day went or if their vacation was enjoyable.I also wonder about the definition of “friends.” Most people have “friends” they knew from a class or in high school that they haven’t seen since, previously I would have defined these people as acquaintances, but now they receive a more intimate title. Then there are online games, both Facebook and other forms. I know several people that have “Farmville friends” they know only through that application, what does that make them? My boyfriend, who is far more excited about these internet worlds than I, knows people through XBox live more intimately than some friends he made in person. They play games together but they also converse about their activities and lives away from XBox, going as far as helping XBox friends through stress of new children and the pain of divorce. This baffles me.

Narratives are similarly tricky to pin down as classifying digital age friends. My understanding of narrative is basically the stringing together of a story. Almost anything can do that theoretically. I work in a vet’s office and I can pull up any patient’s chart and tell a pretty coherent narrative  based on medication, diagnosis and in some cases simply weight history. Those charts tell me a story, despite having never met patient or owner. This isn’t typically what comes to mind when narratives are discussed, but it’s true.

I think the digital world allows us to create personal narratives as we’d like them to be believed. I read the facebook status’ of people I know in person and smile at how different they sound, their persona is edited. They tell the world what they want known, making themselves the heroes or victims and others the villain. Carefully weaving a tale about who they want to be. I see it in blog comments and look around the grocery store and wonder if the tough hot-head is really the meek girl getting barreled out of the way by a rude shopper, or if the cool and collected compassionate soul is really the rude and cranky lady yelling at the cashier. The digital world has successfully allowed us to be whoever we’d like for a time. Is it really us or are we role-playing in a fantasy land?