Welcome...and initial guidelines...

This blog will be used in the spring of 2008 by 80+ students at Drexel University to investigate the effects of Iraq on culture and the reverse. Our goal will be to better understand why the US is in Iraq, and to question whether literature can help us on this journey.

Weekly plans and other materials will always be posted in Vista, not this blog. So go to Bb Vista to get the discussion prompts and other instructions.

I intend this blog to manage our discussions and track our collective investigation.

You should have received an email from me inviting you to become a contributor to this blog. The email was sent Monday afternoon to your official Drexel email address.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

David Lynch and the good kind of violence

Is it wrong to like films that contain things that most people consider to be disturbing? David Lynch is one of my favorite American directors and I believe that his work reflects a good amount social issues at the current time periods from which the emerged from. His films Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Muholland Drive, and Inland Empire are all extremely unique works that all contain fairly disturbing material. But Lynch does not exploit his content for negative reactions without a cause, when someone sees something that provokes negative feelings they almost instantly feel uncomfortable. Lynch uses these images when he wants to the audience to know something is clearly bad. He will do this for certain characters and places in his films as to clearly label “good” and “bad”. I think this is a clever film technique of Lynch. He uses psychology to his advantage; it is an effort saving technique that many other filmmakers use aswell.
Many folks believe violence’s present in films to be a bad thing, but what they are missing is that not every director is putting it there for frivolous purposes. Many times violence is used to provoke a distinct emotion reaction that many directors take very seriously. Not every director is trying to pollute the minds of the youth, many are trying to just express their art and violence is necessary to the message.

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