Sorry! I’m kind of late to the party with this blog, but
here are my thoughts on Tuesday’s class to the best I can pin them down. I came
into class on Tuesday expecting to see some awful stuff and was pleasantly (to
my confusion) surprised. Yes, the majority of it was quite sad with movies such
as Small Hands and World of Glory (and the occasional
tragic poem reading.) However, I found myself befuddled by the inclusion of the
odd little emotional outlier, Fridge.
Other than the grim color scheme, I didn’t find this film to be terribly
depressing. Honestly, the part I found the most shocking was the fact that the
boy was alive at the end.
I have always thought that tragedy was mostly a description
of the ending of any given story. It’s the difference between The Lion King (not a tragedy) and Hamlet (the tragedy it was based on.)
Both have a son who has to deal with the traumatic death of his father, which
is a tragic event, but not enough to label the show/movie a tragedy. Hamlet is
decidedly heavier throughout, but considering the age difference in intended
audiences this is to be expected so that isn’t the deciding factor either. It’s
really the ending that makes one of these stories tragic, not the events
leading up to it. In Lion King, Simba
claims his rightful place as king and in Hamlet
(SPOILER ALERT!) everyone dies. That spoiler alert was meant to be sarcasm
because of course everyone dies. It’s a tragedy. That’s not to say that a
tragedy has to end in death. (Oedipus Rex, anyone?) Rather, a show that ends in
tragedy is (in my opinion) a show ends with the death of hope.
This is why it puzzled me so much that Fridge was included in our collection of tragic videos to watch.
Hope is very much alive at the end of this short. The boy was saved (by one of
the ruffians, no less.) I suppose you could say that the behavior of the people
who refused to help the couple save the boy was tragic. However, from the way I
understood it, it wasn’t that others were refusing to help a suffocating little
boy, but that they were refusing to listen to a dirty man that was yelling and
banging on their windows and doors like a lunatic. So this isn’t a tragic view
of society’s declining ethics or something, but instead just some tragic and
somewhat more sympathetic misunderstanding. Again though, it’s a tragic
misunderstanding without much real tragedy as every character still has the
possibility of turning their bleak situations around and some are even
showcasing signs of positive character development towards the end. I would classify this short in the same sort
of genre as 400 blows perhaps, but not a straight up tragedy. Maybe I just
completely missed the point, and when we say tragedy in this class we really
just mean anything that isn’t overtly happy. In that case I apologize because
this was completely unnecessary. Well, if you’ve made it this far, thank you
for spending your time reading this huge and (lets be honest) completely
pedantic and pointless response. Now for your viewing pleasure, enjoy these
links that shows exactly how thin the line between tragedy and comedy really
is.
Or if you prefer…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQw5d_S0Zlc
No comments:
Post a Comment