Jodie Mack: Yard Work is Hard Work

It’s hard to know what you want out of life. We are continuously swayed by our culture and the opinion of those around us but even if we tried to block them out it is hard to know how much of our own opinions are truly our own? The influence of others permeates just enough that we need to be questioning our motives in an attempt to figure out what is truly right for us. Jodie Mack’s Yard Work is Hard Work was a short animation film about two people who get married quickly and try to throw themselves into the American dream. Soon mortgages and other money problems mount up causing them to be miserable. They attempt to get out of their predicament by throwing more money at other things but in then end find that they are continuously in debt and unhappy.

We desire to not only have all of these material objects but we also contain this desire to be loved. To me marriage is a union between two people who agree to love each other no matter what. While it is pleasant to think that you’ll have someone forever it is a very selfish thing. It is hard to deny ourselves the benefits of an eternal love but sometimes it isn’t for the best and the commitment is only made because someone is scared. In these cases the comfort can end up causing us misery. We are told to grow up and get into college where we can find a nice educated boyfriend or girlfriend to marry. I know very few people in this college life that have any semblance of being ready for marriage. Yet too many of my peers are starting to freak out about not being in a serious relationship because they’re finally in their twenties. We push ourselves too quickly into situations that we think will make us happy only to find that they are not actually what we wanted. This is extremely frustrating because we actually work and fret to get to this point which ends up merely being a point of unhappiness.

One possibility of why we get to this point is because we are in such a rush to grow up. When we are under 13 we desire to be a teenager, when we are under 16 we wish to have a driver’s license, when we are under 21 we wish to be able to order alcohol, and so on. It is an exhausting process where we are never really happy with where we are. We spend too much time thinking that we’ll be happy in the future instead of being happy in the present. Rushing into buying a house directly after paying for a marriage ceremony just because you want one and it is the next step to make is never a good idea because you’re going to have absolutely no money and be in debt forever. By pushing things before we are ready for them we get into trouble.

Garren Small

Being transported between worlds that ranged from the quiet beauty of the mid-west to the boisterous passion of the New York subway system was definitely the highlight of my Tuesday. As Garren Small presented his life of simple words with complex emotions I was drawn into and mesmerized by his honesty and reflection. His poems are almost psychiatrists telling the world that to be cohesive we need to have conversations. It is extremely difficult to gain happiness in this world. We live lives that are constantly trying to stomp us down, where comfort isn’t even an option. If we could just have conversations we could at least work together to be there for each other. If we just tried to communicate and were able to open ourselves up a little more we could try to find the hidden happiness that seems to be so elusive. This inability to express ourselves leads to lost opportunities for love and relationships. The poem that Small read about two people having a failing conversation affected me the most because I saw myself so clearly in the situation. How many times have a opened my mouth to say what I really felt only to watch the words I thought someone else wanted to hear tumble out? My inability to stay true to myself at all times has kept me from showing someone who I really am and has created a fake reality that has fragmented me. In one situation I am one person but in another I have to change my façade.  Sometimes I think that talking is a burden, an ability that I have yet to hone into something worthwhile. Garren Small helped me to realize that maybe if I reflect on my words and finally exposed myself to someone I could be a happier person. 

Dr. Lucy Brown's Lecture

Love is such an abstract thing that it seems strange and almost wrong to break it down into something that can be quantified and analyzed. It is such an over powering emotion that it consumes us whether we want to or not. Words of love have been written into diaries and letters claiming that no one could ever feel the way that we do when we are in love. Love is historically expressed through arts and music in ways that show the audience that we are so consumed by love that we are unable to stop thinking about our beloved. In the lecture from Dr. Lucy Brown a clinical professor of neurology at the Einstein College of Medicine I learned that we all feel similarly in love and are chained into these feelings, whether wanted or not, by our own brains. Being overwhelmed by love is such a common thing that there is even a scaling system that has been determined by several psychologists to determine just how in love you are. Being able to quantify love in such a way tells us that we all feel these extreme emotions in similar ways.

To help analyze why we need love Dr. Brown and her colleagues performed brain scans on a population of people who looked at pictures of their loved ones. With this data Dr. Brown found that the area of the brain that was lit up was the ventral tegmental region. This is the area in the brain that deals with our subconscious and tells us to do things when we need to; such as drink water when we are thirsty. This means that we cannot control love. Love merely occurs and does what it can to keep our minds from being productive. We have a yearning for love when we are lonely just as much as we have a yearning for food when we’re hungry. This yearning can be harmful not just to your productivity but when the love is lost there are also uncontrollable consequences. The adverse effects of love have also been analyzed such as the pain from losing one that you love. This heartache from love is so powerful that it is manifested into an agonizing physical pain. It was found that the pain you feel after a breakup is equivalent to what one feels when the have a tooth ache. 

Dr. Anthony Reed

Cinema has always intrigued me with its ability to really transport the senses. The knowledge you can gain by being put into the shoes of another person is irreplaceable and our movies allow this interaction to occur. Yet, there is a bad side to this power. The director can attempt to cloud our senses. This can be done through the use of music and symbols which can enforce a pathos which makes us feel a certain way about what we are seeing on the screen.  This in turn makes us more susceptible to the opinion and views of the director whether it is historically accurate or not.

Dr. Anthony Reed, from Yale University, showed us that by looking at the basis behind slavery movies you can see that they aren’t that much about black slavery at all. The true intention of these films seems to be to make the whites feel better about their past. In the end of Amistad you are filled with a gratitude for John Quincy Adams who freed the slaves with his passionate words. You feel a gratitude that the white people allowed the slaves to go back to Africa. This sense of happiness prevails in the end when it is determined that the rich white folk are finally switching over the side of goodness. These emotions are being used to take your thoughts away from what is really going on with the slaves in order to make us feel better about ourselves.

The more recent film about slavery was done by Quentin Tarantino who directed Django. In this movie the story line is so covered in blood and action that the historical accurateness is completely disregarded. After talking about this film I found myself thinking about how this movie is actually racist. This is because it conforms into several stereotypes that were set up during that time period in order to justify having slaves. One such stereotype was that the black would be dangerous if they were let loose. This movie conforms to this by pivoting around Django shooting people up and being ruthless in order to get what he wants. Also, in order for Django to learn how to live he has to be under the tutelage of a white person who will show him how to survive in society.

These movies are important to show us how traitorous we can be but we should not sugar coat our past to make us feel better. We should use cinema as the powerful tool it is to educate people about ourselves and others but we should avoid any misrepresentations that may occur. Even while in the depths of a film the brain should still be working and trying to figure out what could be true and what could be false. The movie should be used as a starting point for our opinions not as the reason for our opinions by letting it do the thinking for us.