Literary Criticism Of Funny Games

He still laughed easily, his sense of humor whole, but he was no longer transparent. Something had filmed itself around him, making him difficult to read, his head perennially bent towards his Game Boy, looking up once in a while to view his mother, and the world, with a weariness too heavy for a child (173).

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is an autobiography written by Alison Bechdel. The graphic novel takes its readers through Alison Bechdel’s childhood using engaging diction and detailed drawings. One of the big themes of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is the discovery of one’s sexual orientation. Over the course of her life, Alison Bechdel eventually comes to the realization that she is a lesbian. Ultimately, Alison Bechdel uses this novel to recount her experience of events that helped to shape her personal identity, which resulted in a transformation of the way she sees herself. In the end, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a wonderful narrative that shows its readers the complexity of personal identity, and how things like love, the values of

Renowned feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, explores how classic Hollywood cinema is shown through a masculine perspective that fetishisizes women as objects of desire. This perspective is also known as the “male gaze”, which creates a voyeuristic and scopophilic layer to the viewing of film. According to Mulvey, “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” One of the staples of classic Hollywood cinema is women consistently being put or made into a visually erotic role for both the male characters on screen, and the audience. This staple is of course found in the

comedic techniques used throughout this scene are Chris Lilley’s tone of voice while playing Ja’mie in my opinion makes everything funny, also stereotypes were used were funny with the typical white snobby private girl that is displayed throughout this episode and not just this scene. Just like the last scene satire was again used along with taboo, a lot of the comedy portrayed in this television show has a lot to do with satire and taboo. Pseudo-science is portrayed a lot throughout this scene with the sayings Ja’mie with how she will get pregnant and how she is going to leave home at 18.

In Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel composes a graphic memoir to inform readers about her journey of coming out as a lesbian to her parents. To add to this note, Bechdel also gives details about her family and how she discovers her father’s true sexuality – he is attracted to males. She builds the story around the tragic event of her father’s mysterious death.

“But it’s not a game. It’s a form”. This analogy illustrates why the author chooses to tell audiences that there are truths and lies. The author implies that stories are like forms: there are certain ways that are more suitable than others. Sometimes lies can deliver clearer messages than the truths.

Throughout Funny Boy, as Arjie comes to terms with his sexuality, he realizes that his family won’t ever accept him. One event in his childhood that made him begin to realize this was the fight he got in with Her Fatness over bride/bride, which ended in him feeling lonely and unaccepted by everyone. “I knew that I would never enter the girls’ world again… And then there would be the loneliness. I would be caught between the boys’ and the girls’ worlds, not belonging or wanted in either” (39).

Fun Home is a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. Fun Home is a complex autobiography which talks about the Alison relationship with her father and the understanding of her own homosexuality. Alison lives with her mom (Helen), dad (Bruce), brothers Christian and John in Pennsylvania. While growing up Alison and her father both had the issues with gender roles. For example Alison denied to grow her hair, wear dresses/ skirts, etc. Alison and her father both struggled in their life with the issue of the gender roles. Alison wasn’t completely aware until she was in college. She realizes that she is a lesbian at the age of 19. Alison feelings towards other woman and her father feelings towards other men was a common bond between them. When Alison

Several film theorists have used a variety of tactics and view points to analyze feature films since their inception. One of the most prominent theorists of those that analyze films from a feminist perspective is Laura Mulvey. Mulvey is famous for her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which presents an array of theories involving the treatment of women in films. Arguably the most notable idea presented in Mulvey’s work is the existence of the “male gaze” in films. This essay will examine Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo. Vertigo does not fit the criteria of a film that

Today’s filmmakers have three areas to focus on: the event or theme of the film, the audience who will be watching the film, and lastly, the individual characters and the roles they play and how they are portrayed and interpreted. Many of these films bottom line objectives are to focus on the “erotic needs of the male ego.” The focus on fetishistic scopophilia tend to slant the view such that we see the world as being dominated by men and that woman are

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) is an unconventional psychological horror film about two young psychopaths terrorizing a bourgeois family in their home. Haneke rejects the use of conventional violence such as bloody deaths and glamourous explosions and instead, uses dialogue and the overall uneasy and slow tension to disturb the spectator psychologically. For example, there is more dialogue spoken than violence inflicted on the family in the beginning. Paul and Peter emotionally manipulate the family in a genial manner; they behave such that they are not committing any crimes, yet the two achieve to wreak an unsettling amount of horror on this family. Haneke subverts conventional markers of the horror genre again in a scene where Georg

Attitudes towards cross-dressing, transvestitism and transsexuality have changed greatly since the conformity of the 1950’s. Today, the drag queen RuPaul sells cosmetics and a female character with a penis can become a sympathetic addition to a prime time drama such as Ally McBeal. These transgressions from normative gender roles are frequently employed by filmmakers to examine the complexity and fluidity of modern masculinity and femininity. The roots of these explorations can be seen as far back as 1959’s Some Like it Hot, but only in the 1990’s were directors able to use these sliding identities to their fullest extent. By examining Billy Wilder’s, Neil Jordan’s and Kimberley Peirce’s use of

The Game stars Michael Douglas as Nicholas Van Orton, a pompous investment banker who’s having his 48th birthday, a date we soon learn has devastating resonance. His life is solitary and surrounded by cold, modernist furnishings. When we see him, the camera is distant, showing him alone in large venues of empty space. Like most characters occupying the world of money — bankers, businessmen, and sometimes lawyers — he’s portrayed as a conniving and ruthless capitalist: quarterly quota first, people second. This has predictably polluted his personal life; he has only a slightly more affable personality than Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. His wife left him, he has no friends, and he actually enjoys hearing about all the cocktail parties

Also they did not understand why they were limited to who they could play with and what they could wear. This scene relates to the changes that took place because Revolution. Specifically some changes that were related to religion. It helps people understand how new laws impact people’s lives. Also what to wear and who one can be seen with in

Theorist, E. Ann Kaplan in her work, “Is the Gaze Male?”, analyses the portrayal of women in film using Laura Mulvey’s “Gaze’ theory and psychoanalysis. In addition, Kaplan states that historically, females have been the central focus on only the melodrama genre, and while melodrama exposes the constraints and limitations that the family places on women, at the same time, gets women to accept those constraints as inevitable and normal. Kaplan argues that our culture is deeply rooted in “masculine” and “feminine, and dominance-submission patterns. In the end, she concludes that the exclusion from male culture provides an avenue to affect change in film and society. I partially agree with Kaplan that some women take pleasure from being the object of the male gaze as I think that is not entirely true, and specifically, this generalization does not apply to lesbians.