Pee-wee

The movie Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is an adventure comedy film and relies on humor a lot, while still following the pattern of a hero’s journey.  Some of the way the movie is formatted compares it to The Odyssey in particular.  In the beginning, Pee-wee receives the call to adventure after his bike is stolen.  He holds out on a physical journey to find it until he receives supernatural aid from a psychic.  While the audience can tell that she is a fake, Pee-wee believes her, which is what starts him on his journey.  His journey is extremely similar to Odysseus’ in format: they are both in an episodic format and they face obstacle after obstacle while on their journey.  While Odysseus faces various monsters and gods that try to kill him, Pee-wee faces getting a fugitive past the police, a jealous boyfriend named Andy, and a biker gang.  Like Odysseus, Pee-wee uses his wits to escape from these situations: he pretends to be a woman, rides a bull, and dances his way into the bikers’ good graces. Another similarity between the two is the fact that they were helped through their journeys by various allies.  Odysseus had Circe, Athena and Telemachus while Pee-wee had Simone, Dottie, and the bikers. Even though Odysseus’ supreme ordeal was killing a bunch of people and Pee-wee’s was running from security guards through movie sets, both have the final reward of returning home with friends and family (in Pee-wee’s case his friend is his bike).  While Odysseus may have had brute strength and fighting abilities, Pee-wee had comedy, which was just as good.

Ma and Jack Adjusting

As we continue reading the chapter After, one of the things that really stands out to me is how for basically the first time in their lives, Ma and Jack do not agree on everything.  As soon as Jack is out of Room, all he wants is to go back to the place where he is comfortable: a small area with Rug and Lamp and Bed and the only other person being Ma. But Ma is basically the opposite.  She is enjoying talking with people and conversing and being in an open area. When she was in the police station, and Officer Oh moves to shut the door, Ma speaks very quickly and says “Don’t shut it.” the thought of being stuck in another enclosed are makes her start to freak out a little.  Ma and Jack are also in conflict about their clothes. Jack loves them and needs them for the comfort and normalcy that he is losing, but only sees them as a reminder of everything that happened.

It’s also really interesting to me to see the ways that both of them are adjusting.  When Ma was taken, she was only 19 during her 20s, she never spent time with people her own age.  As a result, some of her habits are still quite teenagery, such as rolling her eyes, which she does quite often.  Another way that Ma is readjusting is with her language. The whole time that she was in Room, she had to be very careful around Jack and watch what she is saying.  Now that she is around people that are closer to her age, she is back to using common sayings, ones that may not make sense to a five-year-old, such as “I need it like I need a hole in my head.”

Ma is readjusting to a world that she grew up in, but Jack has to adjust to this world that is unlike anything he has ever seen.  Jack is used to a daily schedule and not wasting food and specific clothes. Now that they are out of Room, there is not a need for those things anymore, but Jack isn’t quite ready to change.  Even when he was in Room, he didn’t like change. When Ma tried to rearrange the furniture, Jack couldn’t accept it. But now he doesn’t really have a choice but to accept it, because they are not going back into confinement.  While he may not like the changes at first, he is slowly adjusting. He is sort of getting used to wearing his shoes and getting presents like toys and second lollipops on days that are not Sunday. When his grandma blows him a kiss, he catches it because he thinks that it will make her happy.  He is also practising his manners. Although he may not always get the words right, he is trying and that is what matters.

Dying as Its Own Separate Hero's Journey

This week in class we had the writing prompt about how the chapter Dying in Room could be seen as a hero’s journey in itself.  At first I didn’t really have much to say but after I went back to the handout we got at the beginning of the semester, I realized that this one chapter clearly filled every single one of Joseph Campbell’s basic elements in order.  This is different than the other books we have read, which might have done the same but not in this explicit way. We start off in The Ordinary World, which for Jack is Room which he believes to be the only thing that is real.  There he has the objects that he is familiar with and a regular schedule that he follows every day.  Soon after Jack turns five, he gets The Call to Adventure, and he is pulled away from the ordinary world.  Ma tries to explain to him that Room is not everything and that there is so much more out there to see.  Jack doesn’t want to believe it and Refuses the Call.  Ma tries to reason with him but he doesn’t want to listen.  Jack finally Accepts the Call when he looks out of Skylight and sees a plane and gradually starts to believe what Ma is saying.  Jack then faces his first Test when Ma tells him of her plan to escape.  Jack has his first Ally in the form of Ma being his mentor and guiding him step-by-step.  Although it does not going exactly according to plan, Jack passes the Test and he Enters the Unknown World.  Jack faces more tests in wriggling out of the rug, jumping down, and getting someone to call the police.  Through all of these, he has the Supernatural Aid of Ma’s voice in his head reminding him of the plan and helping him get through the new experience.  He also has a Talisman in the form of Ma’s tooth that he carries with him in his sock for comfort and to remind him that she is with him.  Then, Jack has to face what I saw as The Supreme Ordeal: communicating with the police officers.  First he loses the note, then gets so scared he is incapable of speaking.  When he finally is able to talk, it’s like the police are speaking a different language and communication between them is almost impossible.  Luckily he has another ally in the form of Officer Oh who actually puts in the effort to try to understand him by relating to his love of stories.  There is also more supernatural aid in the GPS satellite images that magically show them where Ma is. Finally there is The Return Home, which Jack sees as the return to Room, but the reader sees that it is also the return to Ma.

Addie Bundren

Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying is a complicated character.  For the entire first half of the book we only see her in a sympathetic way.  She is sick and dying and her family is gathered around her caring for her and morning her when she’s gone.  They even go on this insane and dangerous trip in order to bury her where she asked for it. The whole beginning of the book is focused on love and family but it turns out to be a lie.  When we finally get to Addie’s chapter in the book, we find out that she is a teacher who hates her job and would even go as far as to beat the children. But even with knowing that fact, Addie can be seen as sympathetic.  She is forced into a teaching job because she is a single woman and that's basically her only option. Then she is forced into a marriage with Anse, who is not the best husband, and forced to have his kids, even though she doesn’t want to.  She has feelings that were not socially acceptable for that time period and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Addie gets her revenge by having Anse journey to bury her with a family that she doesn’t even care about.  She sees her death as the ultimate divorce. They are eternally separated by being buried in different towns.  This is where we can start to see the reference in the title come into play. In book 11 of The Odyssey, Agamemnon tells Odysseus that “As I lay dying, that woman with the dog's eye would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.”  He’s talking about his wife Clytemnestra who betrayed him and cheated on him. Anse can be seen as the same as Agamemnon: his wife cheated on him and didn’t care about him, and they ended up being separated by death.  Also, throughout her chapter, Addie refers to Anse as dead. But you can also see Addie as a sort of Agamemnon. While she is married to Anse, she is not dead physically, but in her soul, because of being forced into this relationship she didn’t want and that ended up violating her.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

This week we watched Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? in class and I enjoyed it.  I’m pretty sure that if it hadn’t said that it was based on The Odyssey by Homer, I never would have made the connection, but that was what I liked about it.  It wasn’t just copied scene for scene and that made it a great movie to watch in class and discuss in relation to The Odyssey.  

I found that the setting of the Depression Era South was a great choice for the movie.  Like we discussed in class, this setting and time period is almost like a different reality or a far away mythic land, which is similar to how we feel about Ancient Greek myths.  And then the folk music that went along with the movie (which was amazing and fit perfectly) is almost like the American version of epic poems: they were passed around by word of mouth and no one is really sure where it started or who the true author is.  The South is also sprawling fields with towns that are few and far between, which is not only reminiscent of Ancient Greece, but it serves to make the different scenes in the movie very episodic, which takes us straight back to the Wanderings of Odysseus.

Another part of having the movie take place in the South was having religion take the place of the Gods.  It’s pretty explicitly shown when Everett prays to God and a flood comes and saves him and the others while wiping out all the bad guys, but other instances of divine help are not as explicit as when Athena helps Odysseus.  One thing that came up a few times in class was the hair pomade. Everett would not be the same person without his Dapper Dan hair pomade and it can be seen as a comparison to Athena lavishing splendor onto him, while also adding humour to the situation.  Another time Everett receives divine help is when Pappy O’Daniel steps in and pardons them of their crimes without even knowing what they are. He saw how much the crowd loved them and decided to take advantage of it and use them as pawns in his campaign for governor, which brings us back to the idea of the Gods using humans as pawns in their game and for their own entertainment.

Odysseus

When I first heard we were reading The Odyssey for this class, I was excited.  I’ve always been a fan of Greek myths and The Odyssey has references to a number of them.  I also feel like it’s one of those books that’s a classic that you should read at some point during your life.  At the same time, I was worried because other books that I have read that are older, like Paradise Lost and Doctor Faustus and various Shakespeare novels, I found very hard to read and almost impossible to get through.  With that line of thinking, I expected that I would dread the nightly readings, but I was wrong. I’m glad that we are reading Emily Wilson’s translation because she did an amazing job of getting rid of all the flowery language and the excruciatingly detailed descriptions that I was not interested in.  She keeps it to the basic facts and it makes it easier to concentrate more on the story and characters and get more out of them.
In the Telemachiad, we were introduced to Telemachus and we followed his story for a while.  Like we discussed in class, he was a reactionary character for a lot of it. He spent twenty years moping around the castle until Athena pushed him into doing something.  She led him on a mini-hero’s journey to find out information about his father. We discussed why she felt the need to do this and I believe it was a way for him to gain confidence so he could be more similar to his father and impress him when Odysseus returns.  In the first four books of The Odyssey, we keep hearing about the amazing hero Odysseus and how awesome he was in battle and how he tricked the enemy with his mind and all these other details.  When we meet him in book five, all these things are true, but at the same time I’m not quite sure what to think of them. He is constantly described as talking with careful calculation and tact, which is smart because he wants to be careful with what information he tells strangers, but it still makes him seem sorta sneaky and not exactly someone to trust.  In books 11 and 12, he starts telling his story of what happened after he left Ogygia and how he slowly loses all his crew members. Many of them weren’t his fault and he couldn’t really do anything, but with Scylla, he knowingly sacrificed six men without telling them. I know it was his only option to get past and to finally get home, but it still rubs me the wrong way.  I’m curious what will happen next so I can get more of a feel for Odysseus.

Hero Essay

I've been thinking about this essay ever since we got the prompt and I am still not entirely sure what exactly I am going to write about, but like many others, I am going to write about the Harry Potter series.  I’m not choosing it because it’s popular or because I particularly relate to the characters, but mostly because of the effect it had on me.  I don’t remember exactly when I started reading it, but based on who I was friends with at the time, I’m guessing it was around age 6. I remember playing with my friends and having them say something around the lines of “Let’s play Harry Potter!” and me being like “What is that?” as I had never heard of it before.  But I pretended like I knew what I was doing and went along with it. In the beginning, I wasn’t really at that reading level yet, but after a while of my dad reading to me at a pace of a couple pages every few nights, I believed he was going too slow, and took the book to read myself. And that is when my obsession started.  As basically the first book I ever read, it became the book to compare all others to, and to this day, the inner child in me argues that nothing will live up to it.

To recap the storyline, young orphan Harry Potter finds out he is a wizard and that he is destined to vanquish Voldemort AKA You-Know-Who, He Who Must Not Be Named, and the Dark Lord.  He collects his wand, robes, and trusty owl Hedwig before heading off to Hogwarts.  There he meets his new best friends Ron and Hermione and gets into various forms of trouble before saving the day year after year.  One thing that drew me into this story was the main characters. I tolerated Ron who was mostly just comic relief and someone to serve as Harry’s best guy friend, I was impressed with Hermione who was seriously smart and the number of times she saved Harry’s and Ron’s lives, and then there’s Harry.  The guy that had no clue what he was doing but always managed to come up with something. But what drew me in the most to this story was the call to adventure. What Harry Potter provided for me was a chance to dive into another world and escape from more the boring monotonous life of kindergarten.  When I was that age, it also served as a hope for the future: that something exciting could always happen; that one day I would get my acceptance letter and go off to Hogwarts.