1. My strength as a writer is that I don’t settle with common themes. I think I am good at coming up with innovative topics and finding evidence to support them. At the same time, I think my papers normally have a clear structure, and I am good at expressing my claims and arguments in a clear, unambiguous way. As for weakness, I think I need to practice writing the most specific theses. A lot of the times I come up with a thesis that is too general for the readers to know what exactly I am arguing for until they finish reading the entire paper. I also think that I tend to be absorbed in what I am writing currently and forget to view the article as a whole in the process of writing; in doing this, I sometimes put unbalanced effort on different parts of the essays, making the readers wonder what exactly the main focus is.
2. I think most of my papers written for the cluster has an interesting and debatable thesis; they have a fairly common but clear structure. There were a few times however that my TA told me I need a more specific thesis or that my arguments are underdeveloped, which I believe are my weaknesses in writing.
3. The paper I am currently working on is my trial to explore a new structure of writing. Since I am writing a piece of criticism, which is a less formal type of writing, I can be more bold to make changes such as moving my thesis to the middle of my essay. I have tried to make the most specific statement so that my paper has a clear focus, but I am still working on balancing the work I put in each part of my paper so that the readers would not feel as if my argument is underdeveloped or that I have too much summary in the paper. The cluster writing experience has made me more bold in asserting my opinions; I have read so many papers that starts with a bold assertion and ends with satisfactory argumentation to persuade the readers. I have learned to read between the lines when reading, and I have been able to discover so many hidden meanings under the story plot or movie scenes.

To Mr Mundt.

I think using nationalist tradition to market the movie “Farewell my Concubine” is a good financial decision because of the unique connections it create among people who share the culture, but also because of its distinct features pertaining to a specific country, it is also attracting for people who do not share the same culture.

First, as an award-winning movie, Farewell My Concubine reveals a facet of Chinese history less known to outsiders but shared by most people’s family. This movie is both a love story, with constant referral to a historical story that most Chinese kids were taught in school, and a historical account of China in the 20th century, which the older generations in Chinese families have experienced. This movie has always been one of the most influential Chinese movies, featuring Leslie Cheung, the most popular and remembered Chinese actor. For Chinese people, this movie is definitely worthy for collection.

On the other hand, while most Americans are used to their own movies receiving awards at Cannes, seeing a Chinese movie pop up among all the western movies that received awards might be very intriguing. The embedded Chinese traditions and history in the movie, even though they are not shared by the Americans, could attract them just because of the fresh, exotic, non-traditional (in the American sense) feeling it brings to them. For Americans who thoroughly know all the twists and turns of Marvel hero stories, the taste of a foreign myth could just be more attractive.

For this movie, the nationalist approach is better than any other because this makes it distinct from most movies in the American market. We could also see nationalist movies rooted in a foreign background making success by looking at the Disney cartoons such as Mulan and Moana. This movie reveals the side of a foreign country that is not seen on news or cartoons.

Best,

Eva

My first goal for the final draft of my paper is to finish the second half of it. My first draft only addressed the movie Call Me by Your Name, but it did not fully discuss the movie Farewell My Concubine. In the second half of the paper, I will claim that with the historical story “Farewell My Concubine” as a underlying model for this movie, we could conclude that the main character Dieyi has fit himself into the character of the woman he is playing in the historical opera “Farewell My Concubine” , so his love for his stage partner resembles more to a woman’s love than a man’s love. Even though this story happens between two men, we could not assume that it is a typical male homosexual movie addressing men’s attraction to other men.

My second goal is to make clear the underlying model/story for Call Me By Your Name. In the first draft, I mentioned pederasty because I thought of the age difference between Elio and Oliver, but I did not have a pederasty story. I also mentioned Alexander and his lover because the movie name “Call Me by Your Name” comes from this source, but I still haven’t found any other direct evidence supporting that Elio and Oliver are like Alexander and Hephaestion, so this still does not constitute a complete model. I will continue to search for other stories or dig deeper into the Alexander and Hephaestion story to find the best model for this movie.

The last goal would be to refine my analysis. The previous draft was very sketchy in that I did not fully develop my claims and argumentation. I did not describe fully the distinctness of the love between Elio and Oliver, and many implications to ancient Greek was still not addressed. I only talked about a few minor details of the movie. At the same time, my argument for pederasty is still underdeveloped, as I mostly only pointed out their age difference but overlooked their personal attributes which might or might not support this argument.

Dear Great-Aunt Helga,

How is the spring in Orlando? Los Angeles is getting warmer and dryer as we approach the end of the spring quarter. I am writing to you about my paper for the myth cluster class I told you last time. For this paper I am writing a piece of film criticism comparing two movies – Call me by your name (2017) and Farewell my Concubine (1993).

The reason why I chose to write about these two movies together is because they are both telling a story of a boy complicated feelings for another human being – more specifically, another male, in an age when homosexuality was stigmatized or even totally unacceptable. I found the comparison between these two movies to be very interesting because they each took place in a completely different setting：Call Me by Your Name took place in an ordinary summer in Italy, 1983, while Farewell my Concubine is a story in the turbulence of China before its unification; while affection between males is only somewhat stigmatized in the former story, it is unimaginable in the latter.

Oh I should probably give you a more detailed account of the two stories. In Call me by Your name, the 17-year-old Elio meets his father’s summer assistant Oliver and falls in love with him. After weeks of secret struggle, he reveals his feelings to Oliver, who initially avoided the discussion but eventually could not resist his feelings for Elio. They spent the last a few days in Oliver’s six-week stay together, and Elio watches Oliver leave at the train station. When Oliver calls back in the following winter, he is to tell Elio that he is marrying another woman, but he still remembers their own secret of calling each other by their own names: “Elio, Elio, Elio… “, “Oliver…”

This is a very simple movie in that there is no obvious conflict in the story, everything seems to take place within our expected range. The other movie, however, is much more complicated in its plot and setting.

Farewell my Concubine tells about two boys who grew up being trained in Peking Opera. In the harsh environment of training, they were each other’s support, and they grew up to be the most successful opera singers with their famous work “Farewell my Concubine”. Dieyi Cheng plays the concubine and Xiaolou Duan plays the lord. The former had always had an emotional attachment to Duan, and in playing the concubine for so longs, he started to see himself as a woman, or Duan’s real lover. Duan, however, only saw Cheng as his brother, and married a prostitute Juxian. Cheng’s jealousy caused his anger to both Duan and Juxian. In the following years, came China’s most turbulent time. The opera theater’s status continued to drop. All three of them endured hardship and mistreatment in the years when the Japanese army was still in China, during the civil war in China, and especially during the Cultural Revolution. Juxian lost her unborn child, and Cheng was deeply addicted to opium. During the Cultural Revolution, Duan was publicly accused, and he was forced to say that Juxian was a prostitute and he never loved her, which deeply disappointed Juxian and she hung herself. After some years, Duan again sang the opera “Farewell my Concubine” with Cheng, he tricked Cheng into singing the wrong line “I was born a boy” (which was supposed to be “I was born a girl”), Cheng suddenly realized that he had taken himself as a woman for all those years. Unable to to accept the reality, he killed himself with the sword he was holding in the opera.

The potential problems I have with writing this paper is specifying what exactly is the deep connection between these two movies, except for them all being a love story between males. I am also hesitating between whether I should choose Alexander the Great as the underlying myth story for Call me by your name or the Greek pederasty story. I feel like Alexander the great might be of more connection to the story because it is implied in the theme song’s lyric for this movie and also implied by Elio and Oliver calling each other’s name. As for connection with Farewell my Concubine, I think they are similar in having a mythological story as the “format” for their relationship. Elio looks up to Oliver, just as people look up to Alexander the great; while Cheng’s love for Duan was expressed with the presumption that he was actually a woman, just as the Concubine is; Cheng also killed himself, just as the Concubine killed herself at the end of the opera.

Best,

Eva

I personally feel like The Terminator is, although simple, a movie of complete plot and character development. The movie successfully implies its bleak vision of human future by inserting fragments about the hardship in the future life; at the same time, it exhibits a smooth progress in the relationship between Sarah and Kyle, making it easy for viewers to see them being a across-time couple in the second half of the movie.

However, some viewers might still argue that the movie lacks depiction of the future world. In 2019, we have seen enough future-predicting movies that it is no longer difficult to imagine a future nuclear war or a utopian/distopian future world dominated by undefeated power holders. In 1984, however, when the movie first came out, many viewers might have only seen star wars, so the post-nuclear war generation being watched by emotionless human-shape robots could just be as intriguing as the plot itself. Some viewers would therefore wish that the movie provided shots on the future governors, the future city, and even the robot manufacture scenes.

It is also possible for people to feel as if the plot, especially the romantic part of it, is too simple. “A woman falls in love for her savior, who died in the end.” For people who always look for some intriguing love stories in all movies, this might be the most underdeveloped story line. Before the couple had shown enough tenderness on screen, one of them is six-feet under. Since Sarah’s transformation is fueled by her experience with Kyle, this might contribute to a feeling of insufficient foreshadowing for Sarah’s transformation into a strong woman, who, in the closing scene, pregnant, alone, but still determined to drives toward whatever future that awaits.

The movie I am writing about is Call me By Your Name. The category for my paper is film criticism.

The movie Call me by Your Name is a love story between a seventeen-year-old young man Elio and his father’s academic assistance, who is a 24-year-old American professor, Oliver. They met in a summer in Italy, when Oliver came to Elio’s father’s house to help with research. During the six weeks, Elio eventually reveals his love for Oliver, who was also in love, and they spent the rest of the six weeks together before Oliver leaves Italy and goes back to his normal life. In the winter, Oliver calls back to Elio’s family, telling that he was getting married to a woman, and the movie ends with Elio crying alone before the fireplace.

The argument I want to make is that the Elio and Oliver are a modern example of the ancient Greek pederasty, and how the movie makes use of multiple symbols related to love between males. I am also going to give opinion on whether the symbolism helps improve audience’s experience with the movie.

Concern: I do not know what exactly counts as mythical elements in the movie, and I don’t know how to incorporate a second movie into this film criticism.

The movie The Graduate works within the archetypal tradition by narrating the universal dilemmas of young people in their 20s – uncertainties about relationship and future. Even as the so called “successful graduate”, Ben is not exempt from the uncertainty about his future. Different voices revolves him, as everyone seems to know what is best for him except himself: his dad wants him to go to graduate school and some other person wants him to work in plastic industry. He himself, however, being puzzled by both his own confusions and the chaos outside voices, chooses to numb himself with sex and idleness: he sleeps with an older woman with the hope of breaking the current stalemate in life, and he floats in the pool for days and days due to a lack of motivation and as an evasion from reality.

The nationalist tradition underlies the movie by providing specific settings for the plot. A graduate from Williams college, Ben is placed on much hope and stress due to the reputation of the college, or more specifically, the possibilities that grows from people with a higher education degree in the most prestigious college. “Graduate school” or “plastic industry” are all illustrations of the American’s representation of success in that age. Either becoming successful in academics, or becoming the richest. Yet, in the 1960s, with the civil rights movement and Vietnam War raging, the college students, who were most exposed to debates about reality issues, were most prone to doubt, and Ben was one of them who lived under the double pressure of the elderly who firmly believed in the American dream and the self doubt that grew from his college experience.

The biggest difference between the two confrontation scenes in the movie Sunrise and Red River is whether the fight is symbolic. Personally, I see the confrontation in Red River as a symbolic fight – which means that its actual influence on the relationship between Matt and Dunson is trivial; Matt and Dunson’s reconciliation is mainly not the result of this confrontation, but is marked by the existence of this confrontation.

On the other hand, the river scene in Sunrise plays the decisive role in developing the plot. Before, the man was determined to go to the city with his city lover, but the confrontation scene on the river seriously shakes his belief and motivation, creating the doubt and fear in him that eventually caused his reconciliation with his wife.

The Sunrise confrontation is therefore so much more significant in its actual effect on the characters. In Sunrise, the man’s decision could decide whether his wife will die or not; in Red River, however, the reconciliation of the two men was a result built up from their years of emotional bond and a series of events that happened beforehand. The only thing at stake in the Red River scene is Dunson’s dominance over Matt, which has obviously been lost in the course of their trip; it was only for Dunson to accept this reality, and the fist fight was “the last straw”, as a somewhat inappropriate analogy, that forced him to accept his loss of power and admit his love for Matt. As we can see, Dunson’s reactions before and after the fight are drastically different. In less than five minutes, he turned from someone who could shoot Matt to who would add Matt’s name on the brand and admit his transference of power to Matt. The motivation of accepting Matt’s dominance has always existed, but it needs this final confrontation as a last push for Dunson to change.

The movie Call Me by Your Name is a piece of artwork; it makes use of visual and audio sensations to trigger the most vulnerable parts in its audience. Music, especially, plays a big role in creating the unique atmosphere for different scenes in this movie.

In the first half of the movie Elio and Oliver tumble in their own feelings for each other; in the background the music is light-footed, with no lyric. The climax comes when Elio reveals his feelings for Oliver; while they finally engage in a relationship, separation also approaches. At this stage of the movie, Sufjan Steven’s songs became the background music. As a gifted songwriter, Sufjan’s writing style is incredibly consistent with the features of the movie – direct in his lyric but complex in melody, just as the movie is, with a simple plot but complex emotion expressions.

The audience would encounter an emotional burst when Oliver told Elio about his marriage to another woman. “Oliver, Oliver, Oliver…” In the phone, Oliver called Elio by his name, as they used to do. “Elio…” Elio called Oliver back, with also his own name. This was very probably their last phone call, the last moment of their intersection in life, but something that tied them together still remains, secretly, in their own minds. The creation of this last scene was facilitated by Sufjan’s song, Vision of Gideon, when Elio looked into the furnace fire with tears dripping down from his face. “Is it a video…vision of Gideon…” All those that had changed his life in the past summer seemed now to be only a mirage.