Final Paper: Blindness

We make ourselves blind; blindness is something we can control according to 12 Angry Men and Dancer in the Dark. We think we see something, get obsessed with the vision we have for ourselves, but it may not really be there.  Can't blame nature, genetics, or the outside world. If we are blind to other people's advice, we will end up living in perpetual ignorance. Its about seeing all the facts and judging what is the truth rather than looking out for our own self interests. Looking out for our own self-interests is what makes us blind. the only way to clear the cataract is to consider others when making personal decisions.
12 Angry Men: Jurors blind themselves by having biases and secret personal agendas (getting to the ball game), quote: "You want to see this boy die because you personally want it, not because of the facts."; different professions=different intentions, skills people (architect, nurse, clock maker, house painter) vs. communication people (businessman, stockbroker who manipulate people by soft-selling), woman witness happened to be blind w/o glasses & majority of jury trusted her blindness therefore making them blind; by the end, jury never finds out the real truth, just that there's enough reasonable doubt; play isn't concerned with whether or not boy actually killed father, just whether or not men's biases are uncovered in order for them to see all the facts
Dancer in the Dark: Selma starts off being able to see with glasses, but by the end she is literally and fully blind; she comes to America to save her son's eyes/get him the procedure, but the catch is that he can't know or else his condition will worsen and it won't work. "American dream" is not all its cracked up to be: even when Selma works hard in the factory to save up enough money, people still take advantage of her (police officer); musical numbers and staging are meant to depict an alternative reality, one where the ideal American life is all well and good.  Sound of Music as her fantasy of getting what she wants, quote: "Nothing bad ever happens in musicals." Selma comes to terms with her literal and figurative blindness by giving up her own life in exchange for her son's eyes.
Other ideas...
-ignorance as a starting point...ignorance is the blinding agent & knowledge of truth restores vision
-Reginald Rose and Lars von Trier make characters think that they know the truth b/c at some point, someone lied to Selma and jurors and they believed them. No one told them that they might be wrong...need to think for and about themselves to see the real truth in the world

Dancer: Ebert Review

Ebert's review calls Dancer in the Dark "... a bold, reckless gesture." Reckless makes it sound like it has no direction or purpose. But maybe it means that it's intended purpose is to wildly contradict the status quot. I think that's what the musical scenes do; they contradict anything the viewer expects.  I see why "It is valid to dislike it, but not fair to criticize it on the grounds of plausibility, because the movie has made a deliberate decision to be implausible: The plot is not a mistake but a choice." 
In this way, Dancer in the Dark is an outsider in it's own genre of American film. Naturally, viewers are going to dislike it because it is unconventional. But it is actually very conventional; it goes back to basics, by omitting flashy camera  tricks. The level of staging that it employs may come off as fake to some people, but I would argue that it makes it more real. We can see everything the camera does; the film doesn't hide behind any edits or enhancements. It's raw and believable because it is staged, because we see everything the director does.  

Dancer in the Dark first impressions

That was a very difficult film to watch. At first I thought Selma was actually Gene's sister because she looked so young. I thought adults would help her because of that. I also thought Jeff was a creepy guy, waiting to drive her home every day. But this is another film that tells the audience that people are not always what they seem. The cop and his wife looked like they were the only ones to help her, but they were responsible for her downward spiral. All Selma wanted to do was give her son what she couldn't have: sight. She physically and metaphorically lost her sight, trusting the wrong people to help her.
The film was also very staged. Selma was an actor in the Sound of Music, and once she took herself out of it, her whole life became a musical as a way to escape her tragedies. She used rhythms and dancing to get her through her tough times. In every single "number" that Selma fantasized, a man was always there to help her (the police officer forgiving her, her son singing "you just did what you had to", workmen on the train tracks with her and Jeff, Novie who tap-danced with her on the judge's desk). At the final close of the curtain (literally and figuratively), a quote affirms what Selma always thought: the last song never has to be the last song if you don't think it is. The phone rings after her last song, but she has been given closure when Cathy gives her Gene's glasses.

Ebert Rashomon review & motivations

Ebert's review is very interested in Kurosawa's use of the camera and what it reflects. It says,"Because we see the events in flashbacks, we assume they reflect truth. But all they reflect is a point of view, sometimes lied about." In this way, Rashomon soft-sells its audience; it never directly says to trust one character's story over another's. Kurosawa claimed, "... in his autobiography, 'Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves.'" The normal human response is to immediately conclude that the bandit committed the murder because, after all, he is a bandit.  
But the film's goal is to have us trust the criminal just as much as much as the innocent woodcutter. Camera use reflects this; "Because they are usually pointed at real things, we usually think we can believe what we see. The message of "Rashomon" is that we should suspect even what we think we have seen." Kurosawa plays the 8th juror by purposefully leading us through a twisted story line to show that the bandit's testimony deserves just as much weight as the woman's, or the medium's, or the woodcutter's. All humans err, and all humans have the ability to start over.

Rashomon first impressions

The film had a lot to say about human morals. I liked the concept behind the plot, but I grew to strongly dislike the way the director filmed it. It seemed like the camera would just sit on a character's face for three minutes longer than it had to. Unfortunately, this slowed down the movie way too much for me.  The viewers spend about four-fifths of the film trying to find out the truth of who killed the husband. There was a lot of hysterical laughing and crying, which came off as fake at some points. But at other times there was absolutely no emotion. Maybe this has something to do with the "lost faith in humanity" bit. I thought that finding justice would be the main message of the film.
But the characters did a fairly good job explaining why they thought what they thought. And they successfully conveyed that it's not about what happened in the past; it's about changing the second we know we have done something wrong. That is why the ending, when the man adopts the baby, was so rewarding. I suffered through the film but finally reached an ending that was conclusive. The man says, "I don't understand my own soul," which sets him apart. Even the priest is not as introspective as he. This movie is about understanding one's soul and knowing enough to change it, which was what I though the wife was trying to get at when she told the two men to fight over her.

12 Angry Men

The climax of the play is right before the end when the 8th juror says to the 3rd, "It's not your boy. He's someone else."  Everything stops in that moment.  The 3rd  juror thinks that he knows every kid in society;  he thinks they are all the same rotten, disrespectful, violent human beings like his son may have been.  All of his prior notions and prejudices fall away in that one second. The view of children shifts as the jurors' votes shift. Juror #10 thought that kids were born liars. He even tries to insult the foreman by saying, "Stop being a kid, will you?" The pig-headed 3rd juror spits insults too: "What are you, the kid's lawyer or something?", as if it were a crime to defend a child. But Juror #8 refuses to blindly believe all the "facts" presented in the case. He doesn't try to force his opinion on anyone, but rather he simply points out the flaws in their arguments. As Juror 11 points out, "Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people that present them." That is exactly what I think Jurors 3, 4 and 10 were trying to do. But the 8th juror was able to appeal to the 3rd's humanity and reconcile his past. We never find out who really killed the father, but that is not what's important in this play. This play is about children being caught in tough positions and having a group of peers see with an objective eye what he really has gone through.  

Ebert Review/Post-initial analysis

"Nature is always deeply embedded in Malick’s films. It occupies the stage and then humans edge tentatively onto it, uncertain of their roles.....They are nudged here and there by events which they confuse with their destinies."
Holly confuses Kit with what her destiny should be. Kit is essentially homeless and finds himself gravitating towards homes through the film. He starts by burning Holly's house. Then he decides to build a new treehouse home for just him and kit, a place where the happy couple can start a life together. But as they keep running into trouble they start taking over other people's homes- Cato's, the mansion- until he finally returns to his car, his only safe place, and forces Holly to live there with him  and that's when their relationship starts to fall apart. At first, Kit is a victim of society, forced to live among the emotional trash that other people have discarded. Then the idea of nature comes up; Holly's fish gets sick living in the house and she is unsettled about "setting it free" to die outside. Nature, in this case, is a release from the world of the home.
Ebert's review says, "Malick’s direct inspiration was the story of Charles Starkweather, the “Mad Dog Killer,”." So in this case, Kit is the same as Holly's father. The dog is the one thing Holly is closest with and her father takes it away to teach her a lesson. Kit thinks that he can profit from making his coworker eat the dead dog. Similarly, he thinks he can find some identity by taking Holly away from her home, in a way "killing her dog". The home has now lost its love and emotionality; Kit thinks love and emotion can be traded like loose change. In the end, Kit never finds love; he gains a fan base because of the newspapers, but he gets executed just like Holly's dog while she receives probation.