YES
-Media as means for conveying fear and sense of doom; fear is prolonged and never goes away because of these guys;
-Media as powerful controlling institution, they decide what is important for people to know, what people should think about,
-Kafka also writes about the intrusiveness of technology
-Sense of impending doom: repetition of trauma contributes to a similar feeling in Spiegelman- “sky is falling” “waiting for the other shoe to drop”
-Obsession: K and arrest/trial, Spiegelman and 9/11

NO
-Media is accessible, their motivations are discernible, you can still think what you want, not all-powerful, it’s a business, you can keep the media out of your life (Spiegelman actively seeks out media input)
-Presence of the past is not fundamentally Kafkaesque; the repetition of trauma assists with sense of impending doom but it doesn’t actually cause the sense of impending doom (in Kafka, there is usually one major traumatic event); the past is not a factor in Kafka, the future is the greater concern;
-Sense of doom: Spiegelman believes bad things are going to happen because bad things have always happened (see 8), whereas Kafka’s sense of doom comes as a change and it’s a sense of coming doom (bad thing hasn’t happened yet!)
-Trauma actually happens in Spiegelman’s world, but it is rare in Kafka
-Kafka’s fundamental aim is not that of Spiegelman, which is to help himself understand something that happened to him
-Frustrated search for meaning is missing- he looks for meaning after 9/11 and is dissatisfied with it, a completed and bitter quest
-Visible institution, but it’s nuts; figures of Bush make the sense of doom come from the powerful institution, whereas in Kafka the sense of doom comes from the inaccessibility of the institution

Pox Americana sign: Pax Romana was the period of peace under Caesar when the Roman Empire conquered countries and then enforced “peace;” pax Americana the same thing?; pox Americana means “the American disease”- criticism of American imperialism

The “Down Upside” world: alternate reality; Bush with a toy sword walking hand in hand with a capitalist pig carrying a pirate flag; deformed figures following them carrying flags and weapons; looks like a crusade, with a false prophet or false idol; the fascist figure is shouting “redemption” (we will be saved) while the priest is shouting “pre-emption” (we must strike first); who is right side up?; unthinkable has become reality; red for “bad” guys; whole panel is in red white and blue- red for vitality (monsters) blue for perseverance (sky) white for purity (Spiegelman)

Flags in the middle look like 2 halves of a broken heart OR one flag that was on 2 poles and has been ripped

Red and Blue groups

Doves (peace, not real americans, alienation) versus hawks/eagles (Americans, warlike)

Comic 8

Conspiracy Theory Man- Spiegelman playing up how stupid/gullible people were, but he also looks like the figure who feels the need to prop up the Leaning Tower because he feels afraid that it will fall; wife’s snoring is sawing the towers rather than sawing logs; media and government both seem to keep the trauma fresh but in a way that makes it hard to recover and exploits the public’s fears;

recurring image in every comic= image of the glowing skeleton of the towers, seems like all Spiegelman can see/remember, thye’re almost literally burned into his memory, they replace his eyes and become the lens through which he sees everything, the words that are over these glowing towers from strip to strip connect together into one extended thought

war as a hypermasculinity thing

media furthering terror and unpleasantness- in the comic at the bottom, the media the character sees drags him down into further paranoia, idea of “news poisoning,” so many 24-hour news channels and everyone is inundated/saturated with it from TV, radio, newspapers, blogs; even what you do to relax can be flooded by it (TV at the gym, posts all over Facebook, etc.); image of him jackhammering goes back to comic 6 (“he no longer knows which holes were made by Arab terrorists … and which were always there.”) but he’s also doing it to himself; horrible image of his head seeming to break open, and it doesn’t matter where he’s looking because all he can see is the Towers

Destroying the Statue of Liberty- destroying liberty itself, reflection on the statues of Saddam Hussein which were torn down, feet of clay (?)

Old comics-  thematize something, recurrence of the past

Un/reality is becoming hard to ignore.

Comic 5
Government response is obviously not helping (tossing oil on a fire?) and is also being politicized to further unrelated goals; Uncle on 5 also shows up in 2 spanking the tower twins (punishing them for being on fire?); Uncle tries to deal with bees because they’re so small and fly away, so it’s just easier to squash the giant Iraknid; Uncle seems to think that by giving oil (which is the most valuable resource, which is money) he is helping without actually assessing the problem at all; running from the bees the door of the house is obviously open, but the government figure runs inside and locks the American people out, keeping them from being safe although they had the opportunity.

Comic 6
Image of Spiegelman falling- Through the Looking Glass-type image, tumbling from somewhere normal to somewhere completely insane; comparing himself to the jumpers; in free-fall; down (on his luck)
Little Nemo- perpetually lost inside a dream world, only to be awoken by his mother; is the homeless woman experiencing something similar, like being snapped out of a dream?; appearance of this and other old comic images becomes a symbol of “the presence of the past,” the way trauma always keeps returning, also the way old comics satirized the weird little things in the world and now the world in them seems to have come to life
The picture of the street woman’s inner turmoil- even she was affected by the events of 9/11, and they seem like a dream or a scene from Dante’s Inferno; everything in the whole world is on fire; the pale horse, the eye at the center of the wheel, horsemen of the apocalypse, and other images taken from Revelation; cross and crescent as conflicting religious symbols; the way the image interrupts a straightforward progression of time and then the story resumes as normal after it
What happened on this day is so crazy that it can only be undersstood as the manifestation of an insane woman’s visions.

In previous comics, time was a bit scrambled.  The progression of panels was sometimes unclear and reading them in one order or another didn’t seem to make a great deal of difference to the overall meaning.  Specifically in comic 4, each panel appears as a freestanding snapshot of a moment. No meaning is lost by reading them in whichever order seems reasonable.  There is a complicated story being told, but the specific moments don’t exactly need to occur in order.

In comic 5, this changes.  Spiegelman begins working on a metaphorical, parodic level.  Now the progression must be very clear or meaning will be lost.  I tried reading the panels on this page by columns instead of by rows, and it’s a useless attempt.  The story is too difficult to understand when the order of events is shifted.  By placing them in a manner that allows the timeline to be easily understood, Spiegelman is able to begin a parable of sorts about the way government reacts to crisis.  When Americans are threatened, the government reacts by literally tossing fuel on the fire, essentially throwing valuable resources and money at the problem without pausing to assess what is actually needed.  When things go awry, the nearest source that can be blamed is targeted without consideration for culpabiliy.  Meanwhile, Americans who need help are left to handle the problem on their own.

Comic 6 works in the same way.  Spiegelman is resting a great deal of meaning on the woman spouting epithets on the street.  A simple snapshot of her would not have sufficed to explain her significance.  He must guide his reader through this story arc in the correct order.  By doing so, a woman who would once have been considered simply crazy becomes a representation of American attitudes immediately following 9/11.  In grief, humans feel the need to place blame and lash out.  An entire country in grief can result in catastrophic lashing out.  Theories about who was responsible and insane propositions for solving the issue flew everywhere.  Spiegelman inserts himself as the voice of reason, trying to suggest that perhaps accusation is not helpful.  Unfortunately, the reasonable voice seems only to drive others away.

In this section, I love Spiegelman’s use of metaphor.  This could not have been achieved if he had not streamlined his collage-type layout and made temporal progression through the story easier to understand.

Now, we have an amusement park culture.  At most amusement parks, there is at least one ride named after someone or something that has absolutely nothing to do with coasters.  There are nine different Batman rides, a couple of coasters that are tributes to the children’s cartoon “The Fairly Oddparents,” and even Hard Rock Park has “Led Zeppelin: The Ride.” None of these figures has anything to do with rollercoasters, yet the names are slapped on as a way to draw in riders for two minutes of disorienting speeds, drops, and directional changes.  Welcome to the American government’s handling of 9/11.  The next few years were marked by governmental decisions labeled “Patriotism” and “Security” but which were, in fact, fancy rides that flipped Americans upside down and dropped them out of the sky until they became so disoriented that they forgot to examine what the government was actually doing.  But it’s shiny and has an appealing name and long lines, so we forget to pay attention to the fact that the supports are rusting at the bottom.

Aside from a metaphor that went a bit longer than intended, I’m impressed by Spiegelman’s ability to convey his emotions and recollections of the time.  I had anticipated that without a great deal of text, he wouldn’t be able to convey emotions quite as well as novelists.  I was wrong.  His visual choices are genius; I love that we read the book sideways and that pictures are laid one over the other with a clear narrative but no specific order in which you must read them.  Perfectly executed.

Interesting note: in searching for a roller coaster name to use as an example, I came across this:  http://sethkahn.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/even-lefties-like-roller-coasters-but-this-is-ridiculous/ .  Read the comment at the very top.  I almost cried.

1- Fear and longing as the essence of the human situation
We approach this through the sense of impending doom (fear) and search for meaning (longing)

2- Kafka’s prose can’t be read at face value
We connect the qualities of parable to the frustrated search for meaning

3- Paradox
Power and paradox- the institution is everywhere, yet you can never get to it; paradox is also attached to the struggle to understand conflicting meaning

4- Contrast between worlds
court vs “normal” life, and also connected to un/real elements

Our struggle/ search for meaning is also vitally connected to Strelka’s accent on the Jewish elements. The whole point is to search for God, search for meaning, and the answer is hardly important.

Strelka’s definition is perhaps more expansive than ours, but that suits his purposes and our definition suits ours.

Housekeeping matters
Wednesday: project day- bring multiple copies of work and email one to Windham, meet in downstairs Colonnades
Friday we start the last book
There will be 5 days reserved at the end of the semester for project work

Kafka & Nietzche (linking then through Dionysus, the Greco-Roman god of fertility, wine, and shenanigans): For Nietzche, when you engage in these activities, you engage in them in a spirit of “oneness” in order to become one with other entities. In many of Kafka’s stories, the protagonist willingly effaces the ego (by getting  in order to seek unity. Notably, The Trial “doesn’t count.”

Paul Malone’s article: because Kafka relies so heavily on the medium of words, any adaptation to another medium is necessarily untrue to the original. Even in translation it’s impossible to just produce a copy of the original, and this is more than translating words, it’s translating ideas.

Friday Keynote

Saturday Keynote

Elements of the Kafkaesque: sense of impending (unseen) danger, frustrated search for meaning, inaccessible controlling institution(existence in doubt).

False
1. Medium: it can be hard to call anything that isn’t literature Kafkaesque.  This is especially because Kafka relies so heavily on ambiguity and subjective interpretation as the reader searches for meaning.  By creating a visual representation of things which are previously left unclear, much of the fog is lifted.
2. Beginning: Because the film starts with the parable, Welles provides the viewer with a sort of roadmap, which removes much of the frustration inherent to the search for meaning which Kafka’s reader undertakes. (On the other hand, a viewer may wonder what the purpose of the parable is and dismiss it, continuing some of the confusion.)
3. Characterization of K: Total demoralization is present in the novel, but missing from the movie.  This may be because the movie seems to happen so quickly, and in the book K spends a year dealing with the court and having his spirit ground down.  He seems less frustrated, less miserable, less hopeless at the end of the movie than the end of the novel. Even the speculation about the possibilty that he could have tried to throw the grenade back indicates a basic difference between the two versions of Josef.  In the novel, there’s a distinct sense that K is driving himself towards his own doom: he agrees that he’s arrested, voluntarily appears in the Court, even goes calmly with his executioners.  The movie makes him into more of an American hero, the single man standing against a corrupt system
4. Concreteness of the system: In the film, K figures out exactly what’s wrong with the system and defies it.  In the novel that simply would not have been possible because the Court is so strange and inaccessible.
5. Emphasis on social/ political commentary: The movie is much more clearly a critique of political absolutes, whereas the novel seems to be a possibility in any society.
6. Percentages:  Novel- 40% Kafka, 60% reader.  Movie- 40% Kafka, 30% audience, 20% Welles, 10% mayhem
7. Controlling institution: More accessible in the film than the novel.  There are still questions, but there are distinct allusions to 1930s Germany.  This institution is very much like Hitler’s regime, with a similar level of confusion on the everday level about the levers of power, but there is an absolute knowledge that it’s there.  There’s a lot more confusion in the novel.
Example:

It’s a piece of aluminum! It can’t make you stop, but everyone does.  It doesn’t have cameras or guns, but it still works.  That is what The Trial is, in the written form.  People fear the possiblity of enforcement, fear retribution from authority, but how often is there a visible consequence?

True
1. Welles restores ambiguity and disorientation via visual elements.
2. Elements of the Kafkaesque are all present. K searches for meaning from many sources, including the Court, Fräulein Pittl, Leni, Hastler, and the usher’s wife.

Big questions:
Is The Trial a Kafkaesque film, or is the film a social commentary which uses elements of the Kafkaesque to make its point?
Can works of other genres actually be Kafkaesque or must they only intersect with the Kafkaesque and make use of its characterizing elements?

1984 Lev:
adaptations are suspect because Kafa leaves so many gray areas and ambiguities, and any adaptation is colored by subjective interpretation
Welles emphasizes only the political and social aspects of the novel, a representation of a man in a totalitarian state
Welles creates a landscape rooted in everyday but well outside everyday yet not entirely foreign
criticises Welles’s K as being much more active

2002 Adams:
step-by-step guide through the movie, displaying how the Kafkaesque and film noir are very similar (especially as groups of characteristics rather than genres or descriptions) and how Welles uses film noir techniques to create the Kafkaesque (light, shadow, geometric shapes as symbols for a fragmented psyche)
“trial would not have succeeded so well if it had not been preceded by classic noirs”
“our contemporary sense of the Kafkaesque remains more authentically noir than Welles’s noir-influenced interpretation.” (are these statements not opposing?)
also 152 references to Titorelli’s studio and Freudian concepts (castration anxiety/ oedipal guilt)
deformed women as a parallel for the deformed law
Leni as a parasite for the men she’s attracted to: convinces them of and condemns them to guilt
dubbed over voices/ injected sounds (foley artistry) creating a sense of disorientation

Interesting that these authors all seem concerned with how Welles failed to capture their personal interpretation of the Kafkaesque (has a lot to do with Lev’s assessment of subjectivity)
active/ passive: veiled statue of justice = justice can’t act
eroticism, including prohibited eroticism (young girls, overtly gay men)
Leni as a femme fatale (except for her webbed hand, giving her a perfect Welles/Kafka twist, and she even shows him her deformity very quickly, very openly, and he actually seems a little attracted to it) (black widow)

Question of the Day: What elements of the Kafkaesque is Welles emphasizing?

Murder scene doesn’t work!  Josef doesn’t seem to make up his mind as he does in the novel: won’t take the knife, yells at the men, ends up dying by hand grenade.  He reaches down to pick up something, couldn’t he have thrown the grenade away?  Why did he undress? Is he preserving his dignity?  Maybe he’s lost his mind by the end.  “You!!” as an act of defiance- he wants to die in a way that requires the system to deal with him personally, but the grenade is more of the Court’s usual impersonal dealings, so it’s appropriate but frustrating. (What? Mushroom cloud? Seriously?) He even gets to the point where he scares the thugs with his sudden self-awareness.  Some part of K wants to die, to be rid of his trial, saying “game over, but screw you.” (defiant but kind of in a stupid or childish way)  (kind of like this guy)

After the scene with the painter, Josef seems to lose his whole grip on reality.  He runs through sewers, yells at the priest, laughs at his own death scene… it’s all just wacky and kind of awkward.

The end of the film seems detached from the rest, with a different camera style.

Improbable leaps through space/time: It seems like at the very end K and the thugs have walked for hundreds of miles from the chapel out into the country.  The transition from painter’s house to chapel seems just too strange (tunnel through boards, then sewer, then arches, then barred windows, then suddenly outside into the church).  Physical spaces are skewed too. The chapel’s location is confusing: indoors, outdoors, factory with no machines?  Hastler’s house was also distorted.

Welles seems very interested in mortality, whereas Kafka isn’t.  He “takes Kafka for what it is and what it could be, but not what it isn’t.”

Eroticism in the movie: Women in the book, especially Leni, seem like they’d be really frumpy.  But the film makes them all hyper-sexual, harkening to the femmes fatales of 1940s film noir.  There is an air of eroticism through all of the scenes with Burstner and then with Leni.  Even the way Leni plays with K’s button is hyper-sexualized.  The lawyer in his bed is overtly hitting on K, talking about how attractive accused men are.  The painter and Block also give us a strong sense of homoeroticism.  There’s no real reason for all of this, except perhaps that Welles seems to have interpreted power and danger as sexuality.

Film noir developed from German expressionist film, which uses geometric shapes and sets to depict psychological concepts.  This is very clearly visible in the difference between Josef’s home (neat, ordered, bland, organized) and Hastler’s home (horrifying, messy, disorganized, possibly dangerous).  In the scene when Josef talks to his lawyer in bed, the straight lines of the window behind K contrast sharply with the opulence in the background of the lawyer, representing their two very different psyches. (Interesting, then, that Josef’s clean and clear psyche is accused with a guilty conscience, and the disturbed and confused psyche of Hastler is not accused.)

The moment when K leaves Hastler’s house, Leni tells him she doesn’t have the key to go out, and he breaks down the door and goes anyway.   This is just like the man before the door to the Law!  Go K! Be defiant!

The painter’s house is like a prison at the top of the stairs.  This could be a symbol of the artist in a totalitarian state, as prisoners reduced to producing pure entertainment.  Even his clothes look like prison uniform.  The shirt blends him in to his surroundings, making him seem like part of his environment.  The crisscrossing lines everywhere are a common expressionist symbol of inner turmoil.

K and the painter discuss a new form of justice.  Justitia, the one we usually think of as the blinded goddess with the scales, has been replaced with Victoria (goddess of victory) or Diana (goddess of the hunt).  This reflects the covered statue in the first section of the film: is Justice being hidden and a new goddess put up in her place?