Author: Rachel

Okay, this isn’t actually going to be a poem or anything, I just don’t think I’ll ever find such an amazing, open, and enriching experience as blogging for Ink. Despite the hard work of my English professors to make me a better writer and thinker, my year and a half with this blog has grown my writing by leaps and bounds by allowing me to explore my passions and critically think about my everyday interactions with forms of art. I’m so sad to say that this will be my last post, as I am graduating in almost exactly two weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

Ink has allowed me to be an expert on whatever I want to be — from tattoos to trees to Manet and Picasso, I have been able to teach myself how to analyze all types of art and make them relevant to myself and hopefully my readers. Once I settle in wherever I end up, I hope to continue to blog in this way because I have never experienced such traceable self-growth in such a short period of time and I never want to stop exercising my critical thinking muscles and artistic impulses.

But enough blubbering already, there is so much wonderful art around us all of the time that I challenge everyone to embrace it, contemplate it, internalize it, and even write about it. The guidelines for this blog were simply to write art and write about art and it’s amazing to see where each Ink blogger took those instructions and follow all of our journeys of self-reflection and exploration of the wealth of the world. I can’t wait to see what the next group of bloggers will bring. Thank you Arts Ink for an amazing couple of years!

Lately, I’ve been enjoying re-watching one of my favorite shows, the first generation of Skins. Unlike many of the other shows I watch, the draw of this show isn’t the drama or the storyline, but rather the kids themselves. I say kids instead of characters because the show blurs the two together as we follow each on on his or her journey. What I mean by this is that not only are the characters very real, raw, and gritty, but the actors themselves also embody these qualities and this is represented in the show. Unlike many shows today where a 16 year old is played by a 25 year old or a high schooler is portrayed wearing seamless makeup and 4 inch heels, the kids of Skins all actually look, act, and dress their age. Many of the female characters are shown without makeup, sometimes in ill-fitting or awkward clothing, and close-ups don’t try to hide the blemishes, braces, or flaws of these real life teens or their characters.

In addition to the physical blur between actor and character, the characters written for these actors also have a way of bringing out the real feelings and fears of anyone who has ever been through high school. In each character, Skins takes something that almost every young person has dealt with and hyperbolizes it. Take, for example, Cassie. Cassie is known by all her friends as an anorexic mental case, but the show allows us to see behind closed doors into her life where she is utterly ignored by everyone around her. Though not all viewers have experienced eating disorders, almost everyone has known what it’s like to feel completely alone and unnoticed. Each character personifies a challenge of youth in such an honest and complex way that by the end of the series the whole cast has become both a projection of your inner feelings and your best friends.

I’m not writing this solely to suggest you go watch Skins (though if you haven’t, you really should), but rather to demonstrate that having honest, flawed, non-glamorous, and real characters can be so much more powerful than those impossibly beautiful and glamorous creations of Disney and ABC Family. These characters fall into a dramatized plot rather than grappling with their own problems and insecurities over the course of the show as is the case with the characters of Skins. I’m not saying that there are no honest characters on TV, but I have yet to see anyone bring the realness that Skins delivered in 2007.

For some time now, binge watching Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon has been the vice of students hiding from their homework. We know it’s wrong, we frown upon it when others do it, and we hide under our blanket to bask in the shame. However, in my own experience I have found that binge watching gives me a better experience of watching the show. Back when cable was the only option, I had certain shows that I watched religiously – Gilmore Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to name a few. The shows played one episode each week or day (if they were reruns) at the same time in chronological order. The problem was, I would miss an episode or the station would skip ahead in the season. This gave me a disjointed sense of these shows by skipping/missing an episode or by my own forgetfulness about what happened in the last week’s episode. Sitting down to watch 3-4 episodes of Scandal at a time gave me a much better concept of the arc of the show and a much closer relationship to the characters. I watched the entire first season of Transparent in one sitting and by the end I felt a deep sense of unity with the characters and it was as though I was a part of their journey. When I binge watch, I’m able to see the concept of the season as a whole. I didn’t realize how much this could do for me as a viewer until I got all caught up on Scandal and had to start watching the new episodes once a week. A lot can happen in seven days of waiting for a new episode, it begins to feel as if you’re only seeing snippets of these characters’ lives whereas in binge watching you can see how the episodes flow into and set up one another. Obviously spending hours staring at the TV isn’t something that should be done too often, but binge watching shows has given me a new appreciation for the production team’s vision for the show and improved my viewing experience.

There’s something really freeing about seeing a movie by yourself. You have no one next to you that you feel obligated to laugh, cry, or share your popcorn with. In this way, you’re totally free to experience the movie your own way in the dark of the theater without pressure and without someone robotically asking you, “so what’d you think?” as the credits roll. So, not having seen a movie at the theater in almost a year, I decided to go on a self-date to the theater. I was between three movies: critically acclaimed Selma, critically acclaimed Still Alice, and Fifty Shades of Grey.

From pretty much the beginning I have repeatedly scoffed at the rise to fame of Fifty Shades of Grey; and though I never bothered to read it, my friends all assured me that the writing was atrocious. It wasn’t until I read this lengthy article that I decided I couldn’t really take a stance on the premise of the story until I had heard it. However, I was in no rush. So, as I raced to the theater (late of course), I told myself Fifty Shades was my last resort. At the counter I bought one ticket to Still Alice where I was informed that I had missed the first 7 minutes already. Fifty Shades was scheduled to start 10 minutes after Still Alice, so at the last minute, I ducked into the theater for Fifty Shades just as the last preview came to an end. Fast forward to the end of the movie, I was shocked and a little embarrassed that I didn’t hate it. Fast forward to now, I’m still thinking about it — usually a sign that I found a movie, dare I say it, thought provoking.

What was it about Fifty Shades of Grey that I liked? To be honest it had nothing to do with the supposedly daring sex scenes or the steamy actors, neither of which greatly impressed me. Instead, it was the pleasant surprise that the movie wasn’t really about sex at all, but rather a psychological exploration of two very interesting character types. I was fascinated by Christian’s dark past of sexual abuse and family trauma and the ways in which this impacted his relationships with women. I was also sucked into Anastasia’s battle between desire and knowing where to draw the line. Lastly, I was impressed by how the director managed to empower this “submissive” female character while still making her human — desiring of love, excitement, and danger. There was a realness in the psychology of these characters that I did not expect. In my opinion, the sex scenes were laughable, especially the first dominant/submissive experience, which looked more like a slow-motion seance than anything too erotic. I’ve seen some really well done sex scenes and this was just not one of them. So, the film that everyone had been so worked up about didn’t even end up really being about sex. Sex was more of a way to show the complexities of the characters.

I still wouldn’t call Fifty Shades of Grey a great movie, and I still don’t think I’d be interested in reading the books, but overall I found it a very interesting exploration of the effects of psychological trauma and human attraction. What I walked into thinking would be a guilty pleasure film at the best and something to laugh at at the worst turned out to be the opposite of what I expected. I attribute a lot of this to the creative vision of the production team, so I’d like to conclude with a quote from the film’s director, Sam Taylor-Johnson:

“I felt like I had a responsibility to empower the lead character,” Taylor-Johnson said. “Anastasia had to go on a journey of sexual exploration, but, by the end, it had to be about empowerment. It is all her choice. All decisions, she’s clearly made. She is not falling prey. That’s the message I want people to walk away with. That feeling of ‘all the riches and success and charisma count for nothing, it’s under terms you cannot accept.’ In Fifty Shades, seemingly Christian has all the power and control—but actually Anastasia does.”

My generation has watched our favorite stars from Brittany Spears to Amanda Bynes to Lindsay Lohan, the ladies we grew up watching and admiring, completely self-destruct. Television stations and magazines, of course, eat it right up and, in a way, so do we by devouring each scandalous detail. Fame can be a really ugly thing, which we already know, but social media has allowed us to watch our favorite celebrities get psychologically abused by the media.

We often forget that underneath the talent, money and glamor, stars are just people. I was shocked when I started to notice the ways in which people engage with these starlets on social media. Miley Cyrus gets comments on her Instagram posts telling her to die and get cancer, and recently Iggy Azalea publicly removed herself from the twitter sphere because of the ways in which media and critics were treating her. Despite much criticism surrounding Azalea, one thing to be said is that she has an amazing way of engaging with her fans. Her twitter was a place in which she retweeted, and talked to her fans in a way that one of us might talk to our friends. She shared her personal thoughts and exuded a down to earth vibe, a rare trait for someone with her level of fame. Recently, she went on vacation and received harsh criticism of her body, which led to her ultimate decision to remove herself from twitter.

Whatever your opinion on Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea, or really anyone, this kind of public shaming can only be equated with bullying, something that our country has publicly denounced. We say “Hollywood destroys these young girls,” but I’d argue that we’re complicit in this destruction. We demand to see a certain body type, we greedily consume the tabloids created by those who virtually stalk and photograph these women, and even hack into their personal information to leak intimate details of their lives. In my opinion, a life filled with these pressures sounds far from glamorous.

I am a firm believer in freedom of speech, but using it to harm these young girls who could be our sisters, daughters, or friends is detrimental to each of them as well as to all of the women of our nation. Shaming Iggy for having cellulite just underscores a culture that tells women that they must be entirely free of imperfections. This is damaging to everyone involved both as perpetuators of bullying and as victims of this way of viewing women. No matter how much you hate/love/are fascinated by these people, let’s just lay off a bit. I think signing off twitter was a wise move for Iggy, but now it’s our turn to stop being complicit in harassment of any kind.

As some of my previous posts have alluded to, I have a really hard time letting go of more “childish things.” I love the bright colors and simplistic shapes of cartoons, I love the games on the backs of cereal boxes, I still eat pancakes with my hands (I swear the rip/dunk method provides the most precise pancake to syrup ratio), I still value many of my stuffed animals as thinking/talking friends, I mourned the day when the people at the dentist’s office stopped letting me pick out a toy, and I’ll never lose my fascination and awe over train sets and bubble wrap. In a lot of ways, I’ve always felt the pressure to give these things up and embrace the rationality and convention of adulthood. I’d hide my stuffed animals under my pillow in my dorm and I’d pick up my fork and knife to eat my pancakes when out to breakfast like a “normal” person. There’s just one problem, I’m not normal. None of us are really “normal.” We all look back on some of the crazy things we did as kids and laugh at our naivety without allowing ourselves to recognize that that kind of play was some of the most fun we’ve ever had. Letting go of childish things is necessary in many aspects of adult life, but in many ways it stifles the imagination and hinders creativity. When I was a kid I made up a game with my best friend where we collected different colored beads and took care of them like pets. I mean come on, what adult person do you know that would ever see a bead as anything other than a bead? I think we need to stop stigmatizing child-likeness in adults. Adults need to learn to play and dream and love like children and the only way they can do that is by allowing themselves to act like children from time to time. Peter Pan was way ahead of his time when he warned us of a time when we’d stop seeing the magic. However, I don’t think we have to stay young forever to do this, we just have to allow ourselves see the world they way we used to — boundless, wonderful, and full of possibilities.