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In the context of the narrative itself ... And you gotta start there. See, I disagree that it has to start there. I love the movie, but I analyze it that Dan

by jerrya 14y ago

In the context of the narrative itself ... And you gotta start there. See, I disagree that it has to start there. I love the movie, but I analyze it that Dan O'Bannon wrote a script in the 80s for an 80s crowd, and he knew that the audience and the purchasers of his script would love seeing a shapely Ellen Ripley in her feminine white panties one moment and in a masculine yellow loader the next showing all the military men she was their equal or better. It was a rah rah feminism moment, one of many you go grrl moments in cinema. (And O'Bannon also knew about Chekhov's gun and knew it would be good for the audience to introduce her talents with the loader early in the movie.) So I see the internal narrative as a function of what scripts could be expected to sold and be successful in the 80s. Similarly, Aliens can also be analyzed outside the narrative of the movie as a Vietnam War movie, and in the early 80s when it came out, that was a pretty big deal, especially since the movie was a science fiction movie, set in the future, about the Vietnam War.

jerf 14y ago
The problem with your analysis is that it has no information content, in the sense of information theory where "information" has the ability to distinguish between two outcomes. A movie made in the eighties is unavoidably a movie made in the 80s. There is no distinguishing power between 80s movies if you insist on their metanarrative being "correct", for any value of correct other than "comes from the 80s". They all fail equally. I've seen attempts to make movies or write books that somehow avoid the context of the time they were made in for a variety of reasons (political correctness, avante garde art attempts, etc), but when I look at them decades later it's clear to see that they merely demonstrate different aspects of the prejudices and context of their time, not that they even remotely succeeded at being a product of another time. If what you say is true, then there is nowhere to start changing attitudes, because the metanarrative, while interesting and important to consider when analyzing a work, can not be modified, can not be chosen, can not be rewritten. You're stuck with it. You can not write or watch movies from the metanarrative of the 2050s. And if you could, it would surprise you. I guarantee you nobody actually knows what the 2050 metanarrative will be. Any attempts to guess would themselves only be prejudices of the 2010s.

by jerrya 14y ago

jerf 14y ago

The problem with your analysis is that it has no information content, in the sense of information theory where "information" has the ability to distinguish between two outcomes. A movie made in the eighties is unavoidably a movie made in the 80s. There is no distinguishing power between 80s movies if you insist on their metanarrative being "correct", for any value of correct other than "comes from the 80s". They all fail equally. I've seen attempts to make movies or write books that somehow avoid the context of the time they were made in for a variety of reasons (political correctness, avante garde art attempts, etc), but when I look at them decades later it's clear to see that they merely demonstrate different aspects of the prejudices and context of their time, not that they even remotely succeeded at being a product of another time. If what you say is true, then there is nowhere to start changing attitudes, because the metanarrative, while interesting and important to consider when analyzing a work, can not be modified, can not be chosen, can not be rewritten. You're stuck with it. You can not write or watch movies from the metanarrative of the 2050s. And if you could, it would surprise you. I guarantee you nobody actually knows what the 2050 metanarrative will be. Any attempts to guess would themselves only be prejudices of the 2010s.