Author Archive | Harrison

Intro Moves: Kaboom!: Violence, Sadism, and Paranoia in Kiss Me Deadly The atomic box opens. Screams and flames emerge, roaring through the soundwaves as Mike and Velda scramble wounded toward the beachline, with treacherous, apocalyptic fire behind them. This is the final sequence in Robert Aldrich’s seminal noir film, Kiss Me Deadly (1955). This essay […]

I sure do wish I’d taken 299 Sophomore year instead than at the end of my English requirements–that would have been a savvyer way to go. One of the main things I took from this class was a feeling of process. It was nice to go slo mo though the researching process.  I tend to […]

Harrison Elkins Professor Vander Zee ENGL 299 30 October 2016   Kaboom!: Violence, Sadism, and Paranoia in Kiss Me Deadly   The atomic box opens. Screams and flames emerge, roaring through the soundwaves as the Mike and Velda scramble wounded toward the beachline, treacherous, apocalyptic fire behind them. This is the sequence in Robert Aldrich’s […]

Emi’s chapters on Thursday and Friday pick up on those themes of media and distance that we’ve been mapping out since reading Tropic of Orange. It’s starts out with the usual funny banter between her and Gabe–she’s at the hairdresser’s getting a weave. Gabe says, “Trim. Cellophane. Weave. It all sounds like editing.” There is […]

There’s a working question in the Differences chapter that deals with political correctness. It seems to me that in a lot of cases political correctness has the potential to hide prejudice. You can be when we hear things like ‘African-American,’ ‘Homosexual,’ ‘Mentally-handicapped person,’ ‘Native-American,’ and so on, you get the sense that people are saying […]

I haven’t been able to decide what to write about, so I just picked one of the “Working Questions.” There’s one at the end of the Subjectivity chapter that asks something like: Most of us would agree that advertisements have relatively little effect on our decisions, so why do advertisers advertise? This reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s […]