Before Sunset Reflections

I suppose in retrospective that saying that Celine and Jesse would meet again but not under the promised pretenses would have been a safe bet to make in my reflection for Before Sunrise but I guess we can all be half right in our respective assumptions on whether or not we thought they would meet in the promised 6 month time span. I have to say off the cuff that I did rather enjoy the film, and while the ending was not what I would consider ideal or realistic in any stretch of the imagination we have to carefully remember that the story between the two lovers in nowhere near ideal or realistic, nor are the lovers themselves. If Jesse and Celine had to be grouped into a particular relationship archetype I would see them as the ones that almost got away, not quite the fated couple or the star crossed lovers but rather old flames that never died out fully.  While in Before Sunrise Jesse was seen as the bright eyed young adventurer and Celine the beautiful yet bored damsel in distress of her own making, the characters didn’t progress much in terms of moving beyond those roles in the sequel. Instead they are both seen as slightly older versions of themselves yet Jesse is still gallivanting across the globe, only this time as a successful writer, and Celine is still making her normal life miserable for herself despite her apparent success.  Celine is seen as having fallen into a sort of dormant romantic state, a strange mid ground between being in love and wanting to be loved; instead she wants to feel love on her end. To me Celine is facing the rare predicament of being the beloved, placed so high on the pedestal that she is isolated from experiencing the feelings that other have for her. She experiences an absence of feeling because being with Jesse for that short albeit intense 24 hour time span has effectively raised her threshold for what she sees as the ultimate high of love to the point where no one else can stimulate her feelings. However can the feelings that exist between the two really be referred to as love, perhaps it drifts dangerously close to the desire side of the boarder. In the café scene of the film where the two discuss desire I found it oddly reminiscent of the famous telephone scene at the restaurant in the first film, Jesse openly address what it’s like to be freed from your desires but Celine steadfastly counters that desire is a necessity for life most likely due to their predicament where Jesse has spent the last 9 years trying to let this girl go and she has spent the past 9 years being resentful about letting him slip through her fingers.

Steve Almond

On the 12th of March in the year 2013 an amazing writer named Steve Almond came to give a lecture about his writing on the themes of love and desire, and a certain prosthetics and orthotics major who attended his lecture would never be the same again. In all seriousness Mr. Almond was a fantastic lecturer and if given the chance I would most definitely attend another lecture given by him, he had an amazing presence and charismatic control of the audience which let it be known that this was an open forum for any kind of question. However keep in mind that it was no holds barred on his end and that if you asked a question you were going to get your answer regardless of whether or not you were really ready for the answer. Mr. Almond had the amazing ability to take 2 of the things in this world that make me the most uncomfortable, put them together, and make a rather nice story about called Skull. Based on my chosen field of studies you can assume one of two things about me, either A. that I am an amputee fetishist, or B. that I am terrified of amputee fetishists. I hate to spoil it for you but I fall in the latter category, anything involving that subject is incredibly uncomfortable for me, after all I'm trying to put them back together once they've been stripped down not strip them down and then put them back together. Therefore addressing that this is a unique career issue that people come across from time to time is something that I have wholly avoided thus far no thanks to Mr. Almond! The other factor to my discomfort was the graphicness of his sex scenes, graphic literary sex scenes are something that I have never been too keen on, after all when you follow a character you watch them grow and surmount obstacles, its like watching a dear friend progress through a period in their life, and do you really want to watch your dear friends describe sex on a brutally honest level? I certainly hope not. All of this being said I am glad that this happened because while he took me to a peak of some very extreme discomfort he didn't leave me there, just like the main narrator of his story, he took us there and back to the safe place of understanding without abandoning the reader or the character.  The way Mr. Almond treats his characters is the way a lot of people wish they could confront life, a gentle hand pushing them towards both good and bad but never ever abandoning them along the way. When he read Skull aloud I was shocked, but by the end of it once I had taken a moment to process everything I appreciated that Mr. Almond was such a fantastic writer, I wasn't alone in my experience, I was right there with the narrator sitting on his couch internally begging his buddy to not continue down the path of over sharing, and while we were both powerless to stop the experience (a feeling akin to watching a train wreck: frozen by the horror but its too good to look away) we are wiser people for it. The way that Mr. Almond applies the themes of love and desire to his work is amazing to put it simply,  He treats it as a challenge to himself as a writer to be able to successfully portray this complex set of human feelings. Sure he could have chosen a different set of equally complex feelings like grief and misery, but by portraying love and desire he challenges himself to work past the cliche fantasy of love that most art forms abuse. Just like he noted in his lecture that pornography is the fantasy of sex, I saw a parallel that most mediums in the art world are a fantasy of love but that desire has the unique ability to persist as something not quite artificial in either portrayal.

Sexuality and The Police State (Halfaouine)

Like  most films for this class I like to go in with a blank palate and an open mind so I try my hardest to resist the ever nagging temptation to just go ahead and look up all of the spoilers a girl would ever need, and in this case I am especially glad that I was able to resist that temptation because I feel like going into this film blindly really opened me up to not passing an early judgement on it. Halfaouine is an onion of a film if there ever was one, layers upon layers of different meanings, the film is still quite enjoyable on the superficial end of things, more risque on the innuendo level, and a serious allegory in the subtext, but overall I think that any open minded audience (generally the same population of viewers that don't mind subtitles) could find a good lens to see things through that helps relate the movie to their own life. Now granted without Dr. Lang's lecture I will be the first to admit that I would have missed out on the entire allegorical subtext that alludes to the change of power in contemporary Tunisia which was an incredibly powerful realization for me and it gave the film so much more of an impact. At first it came off as a slightly risque and goofy coming of age film with undertones of civil unrest. The undertones of civil unrest I felt were mirroring the unrest that adolescent Noura was feeling with his place in society, being too old to be privy to the secret lives of women yet too young to be able to run with the bulls so to speak. At that point in life Noura faces the challenges of gaining recognition in the eyes of male society while at the same time having to betray the trust that the female society puts in him as an innocent young boy, we see this when he steals his aunts bras and trades them to a local teenager, when he infiltrates the bath house to spy on the local girls, and when he tricks the young beautiful housemaid into some suggestive situations. Noura feels uncomfortable being in between these two worlds as we can see when he seeks maternal comfort after getting in trouble, yet I cant help but wonder is the maternal world being too coddling for Noura? Being the first born son in any culture sort of puts you at an automatic predisposition to be spoiled beyond all belief and from my view point his mother was too protective and too babying, while on the other hand his father was nowhere near the father figure that he needed. In a society where a young man can only prove himself as a man by being defiant and acting out sexually there is no real place for a 12 year old and Noura was forced to grow up too early in my eyes, however when portrayed by the film its clear that he didn't mind at all. To bring it all together Nouras coming of age reminded me oddly enough of the story of creation and the banishment of Adam and Eve. Where we can see God and the garden of Eden as the fruitful maternal nurturing private sphere of women where young Noura was safe, and then once tempted by thought of growing up and knowing the world of men Noura subsequently banishes himself from the women's world by gaining knowledge he was not yet meant to have and is therefore doomed to spend the rest of his young life toiling for the things he once had such free access too.