Cosmicomics

On Monday night I sat for two hours in what turned out to be one of the more interesting lectures I've ever attended. What are the ideological implications of the ways in which particular social classes are staged and narrated cinematically? I've got a sneaky suspicion that this will be the question on my mid-term in a couple of weeks in which case I should probably look up what a social class is. Lolz.

Regardless of what the class is actually about we actually got onto talking about some quite interesting subjects. For instance, why is it that I love mainstream cinema? I go to the cinema every week and am never disappointed by films with a good narrative and explosions and cool stuff like that. I guess I know what to expect and don't ever ask questions...

But here's what my professor thinks. We think we can go into a film completely oblivious to what we're going to be shown. We as spectators are completely subjective to film and it is us who ultimately structure them... Right? Wrong. We're never made to feel uncomfortable in films - in fact, we as spectators watch from a visual ideological calm. We're never made to question anything. But what is there to question?

What even is ideology? You might say it is an unwritten law that we have no control over whatsoever. How do we question the invisible? Is this narrative I love in films not just ideology? Think of it this way ... It's Valentine's Day. Why are we conditioned into buying flowers etc for our significant others by a holiday that was effectively coined by a greetings card company? All those choices and the need to buy something - this is the Valentine's Day narrative. How do we look beyond this?

I'll prob fail the mid-term. All this stuff is so subjective and I find it hard to actually agree with any of it, hence all the questions.

Anyway, Cosmicomics is a collection of short stories by an Italian writer named Italo Calvino with each story taking a scientific "fact" (though sometimes a falsehood by today's understanding), and builds an imaginative story around it. An always extant being called Qfwfq narrates all of the stories save two, each of which is a memory of an event in the history of the universe. The first story, The Distance of the Moon, takes the fact that the moon used to be much closer to the earth, and builds it into a romantic story about two men and one woman in a tribe of people who used to jump up onto the moon when it passed overhead.

Awesome.

Jonty x