sastephens

Beautiful and diverse article! People so often tend to be uncomfortable while watching sex scenes, which makes sense if they aren’t comfortable in their sexuality because it is making them feel something that they don’t quite understand and aren’t use to, but this is only masking them from their true nature. Humans are creatures of the earth, we’re animals. We aren’t these perfect, chaste things that simply fuel off of happiness and butterflies and rainbows. We have our visceral instincts that are the foundation of our beings– food, sex, passion. I’m not a Christian and I don’t know much about the bible but why in the name of St.Joseph would God make sex feel so euphoric if it was such an evil thing. To attract us to the process of procreation? Perhaps, but why would that euphoria continue even while we’re infertile?

I love the wide range of your commentary of sexual images in film and i agree with all of it. Some films merely consist of sexual images in a basic level, to sell tickets and attract people but in many others sex is used to advance the narrative in some way or to better represent the characters by something so fundamental to their nature. The Wolf of Wall Street is vulgar and debasing on purpose. Through filthy and superfluous sex imagery Scorsese depicted the greed and vanity of stock brokers of that time.

That Oscar Wilde quote that an additional ending that you hadn’t included that I find to be the most powerful part of his message: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Sex is one of the main feelings that drive us and it gives us power. It gives us a power that some us feel we lack in our daily lives and have to compensate, but power nonetheless. We all want to feel large. We all need to build our egos at least a little in order to preserve our sanity and for many of us we find power in sex.

Her was an excellent movie! While I agree that one of it’s central themes was human connection and the lack there of, I think the movie was mostly about the concept of consciousness and its limitations. Movies like The Matrix, I Robot, Terminator and Her are all cinematic attempts at perfectly posing the philosophical question of the consciousness/existence of artificial intelligence. They all seem to have one similarity: consciousness in the hands of technology is a bad thing. Her depicts this but in a lighter way. Instead of killing off humans in an attempt to become the superior beings of the Earth, Her’s operating systems simply fall in love with humans only to break their hearts after becoming mentally advanced in a way humans can’t understand. Technology is an amazing thing but will it one day become too amazing?

One way to interpret Luhrmann’s continuous write-hero role is to assume that he is trying to show the average audience how to see with a different perspective, but rather I think Luhrmann true intent is to romanticize the perspective of the writer/storyteller. Writers are hardly ever viewed as the heroes in reality and the main reason they are represented as heroes in books is because they write the books. Writers run the world, they tell amazing stories and convey multiple perspectives at once and I think that’s what Luhrmann portrays in his several writer-hero narratives.

I agree with your interpretation of this reoccurring symbiotic relationship between writer and protagonist/hero in Luhrmann’s stories. If Luhrmann really desired he could’ve minimized Nick’s role in Gatsby but his direction actually maximized Nick’s presence in the book. By expanding the time distance of the frame in the narrative, beginning and ending seemingly several years in the future, the movie portrays that this whole, extravagant story is from Nick’s scholarly, third-person perceptive, and while this is a giant factor in the book, it is able to be shown more explicitly in the movie. Nick and Gatsby both gain what they desire and same with Shao and Zeke in The Get Down.