Ari Week 6

Dear Great-Aunt Helga,

I hope Orlando is treating you well this time of year. I guess the seasons really don’t affect much over there, but still, you never quite know when a hurricane might just roll through. I’m writing to you because you had asked me about the paper I am writing for my Myth in Hollywood seminar for my Myth Cluster, and so I thought I’d say a little about it as well as some problems I’ve been facing and some their possible fixes. You remember hearing about Interstellar, that “another space movie,” as you called it when it played during commercials, right? Now, I know you have never been very keen on Sci-Fi, but my paper is looking at how Interstellar is really a sort of myth, kind of like how one of your favorite movies, O Brother Where Art Thou, alleges itself to be based on the Odyssey. In particular, I have been looking into how the movie is saying something about us as a country in contrast to what is says about us as people. Its been a real challenge for me to make sure I structure it right, as I have a lot I want to say and am not sure I know exactly where I want what to be said. Additionally, I am handling a lot of different pieces of info that I have gathered, and so I am looking more carefully at how to examine what’s happening in the movie in terms of exactly what the messages are and how they are portrayed with what is happening behind the scenes. Since this is a myth and a film class, a lot of what I want to say is also reliant on how visual things like pictures or movies differ from books and other writing and also how religion and story get tied into all of that, so the level of interconnection is looking a bit like those gnarled and twisted banyan trees you used to take me to see near the everglades back when I used to visit every summer. So anyway, I am working to make sure everything has its own place while still flowing smoothly like one of those crocodiles you always mention that go down the stream. Anyway, just thought I’d write to you about how my time has been in this class. If my teacher Griffin ever gets famous from writing film stories, I’ll make sure to get you his autograph.

Hope to see you soon,

Ari