Matthew Gray Gubler

Criminal Minds has Matthew Gray Gubler in it so it is clearly the best show on television. Aside form this adorable boy; the show is very unique in how it presents each episode, often in medias res. The beginning of the show may show the serial killer himself in his home doing very normal things. Only after, will it show flashbacks to his crimes and display two different stories throughout the episode of both the FBI, as well as the criminal. This postmodern way of showing the story leaves the viewer more connected to the criminal and the dramatic irony of knowing who the bad guy is gives an eerie sense of anxiety. The narrative is linear only for one episode; in fact it is two separate narratives (bad guy and good guys). Rushkoff elaborates on shows like Criminal Minds and their linear structure, “(shows) may not be capable of conveying a neatly arced storyline, but the slowly moving ‘metanarrative’ creates sustained tension-with little expectation of final resolution” (Rushkoff 34). The show itself has a metanarrative between the characters, building relationships and going through their own hardships. The viewers know there will never be an end to their own drama, so they are satisfied with a resolution only through each individual episode.

            One aspect of Criminal Minds that is very presentist is that it can be binge watched on Netflix. Unlike traditional narratives or shows that are paced out, Criminal Minds is often watched all at once. People are living in the present: only thinking about what they want to do for themselves in that moment and not about the future. The do not acknowledge the time wasted nor the lack of episodes to be viewed later. Watching the show is not a small pastime; it is an event or an entire evening. This act of watching a show so much at once changes the way the viewer perceives it. The individual narratives seem to fade away and the focus is drawn to the metanarrative. However, this overarching narrative really has no resolution for the show would not go in if it did. Therefore, the viewer is stuck in a trance of watching the show waiting for answers that will never come. Hotch will never get back together with his wife, JJ (yes a girl on the show is named JJ but she is not as cool as our JJ ;)) will never find out what happened to her husband and Reid will never find his true love. Rushkoff discusses how viewers have changed because of streaming, “sponsors no longer have the luxury of captive viewers who will sit through commercials. Many of us are watching entire season’s worth of episodes in a single weekend through streaming services such as Hulu or Netflix. The traditional timeline of television schedules vanishes in an on-demand world” (Rushkoff 36). Watching Criminal Minds is no longer like watching traditional television, for with no commercials, no breaks and a seemingly endless amount of episodes to view, we feel like we are in the show. We become completely disjointed from reality.

            Criminal Minds often has random episodes in a completely different structure just to mix things up. Maybe the whole episode is only through the killer, or we never see the killer, or it is only through the victim. In any case, the viewer is sucked in to a new story; they live in each moment with the killer, the victim, or the FBI. The familiar sense of consistency with most shows whether how they are filmed, the same few sets and camera angles, or how each episode is structured is constantly being broken. The show feels more like real life than many viewers realize. It can engrain certain ways of thinking on you and make you paranoid of serial killers. The “narrative” of Criminal Minds is more like a disjointed reality that never really ends, There is always another serial killer to catch.

Work Cited

Rushkoff, Douglas. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin, 2013. Print

Hemming the Way

Some people give so much detail to their stories, you feel like you know way too much about them. Ernest Hemingway is one of those people for he is always painting the picture down to the ugliest wrinkle on someone’s face so that the reader can get a glimpse of what life was like for him in his novel. He is very particular in describing people’s faces; whether they looked warm and pretty, or were just unbearable to look at it. He has no shame in admitting he judges people very harshly for their looks, yet supports his initial judgments with more background on the particular character. For instance, when he first meets Fitzgerald he describes him in detail, “Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty,”(Hemingway 153). Hemingway does not say whether Scott was particularly ugly or handsome, more in between. This judgment coincides with his relationship with Scott for it is very strange full of moments of complete disgust and other moments of being best friends.

Hemingway focuses on the seasons of the year, for his feelings and life go along with the weather. He has harder, poor and starving times in the winter yet is very hardworking and happy in the spring. Specifically in A Moveable Feast, each chapter does not necessarily go in order; more show important stages in his life and how he evolved as a writer and a person. The season of winter itself is what he considers to end his time in Paris, and therefore end the novel. Thus, the work is very much an example of form following content; the content is misplaced and incoherent, so the novel is set up following seasons of his emotions and specific people who impacted Hemingway’s life.

AP Lang centers on the words and tone an author uses and how they change one’s argument on a subject. Hemingway’s works seem, from a distance, to be just detailed stories of people forming relationships and drinking, but when analyzed from an AP Lang viewpoint, we can reveal how his specific word choices and straightforward tone really reveal another layer to the novel. We can understand his raw emotions, and how the confusing format of the book shows Hemingway’s evolution as a writer through his different experiences and friends he met along the way.

The novel fits under the genre of autobiography for Hemingway portrays events that according to him really happened and show how he grew. His novel reads more like a journal than a book, for it is a combination of mixed events and people that is hard to follow yet all were important to Hemingway at some point.

Work Cited

Hemingway, Ernest.  A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print. 

SAT's Are Stupid!

The most stressful days of most people’s lives are the days of big tests. The days of your SAT, ACT, AP exam, MCAT, LSAT, and many others seem like the most important day of your life; they determine your future. School today creates a public that is set on numbers defining us, because we are too lazy to find another way to define intelligence.

Lazy may not be the best word, but as a society, we have become so accustomed to technology solving most problems for us. Technology calculates, searches, and stores information that we just have to access at the click of a button. Schools have fallen into the same technology trap, with public schools always using scantrons to grade tests for the teachers, SAT scores to decide if you should be admitted to college, and a certain GPA to determine who is smart and who is not.

Schools today aim to create students who are well informed and prepared for college, and furthermore, jobs. However, instead of creating well-rounded, knowledgeable students, schools create robots of students. Students become reciters, not learners, they know what is needed for tests and what will bring them success: high scores. Instead of schools being learning-centered, they are grade-centered. Postman explains how numbers cannot define how smart someone is, “In schools, for instance, we find that tests are given to determine how smart someone is or, more precisely, how much smartness someone has. If, on an IQ test, one child scores a 138 and another a 106, the first is thought to have more smartness than the other. But this seems to me a strange conception—every bit as strange as "doing" arthritis or "having" criminality,”(Postman 183). Postman is referring more to the language of ‘having smartness’, but the point is still valid. People cannot really HAVE smartness; they can act smart, make smart decisions, and answer hard questions.

Smartness is not an object to be obtained; it is an act that schools should teach students to strive to do every day. Instead schools are creating false goals for students of obtaining smartness that cannot be obtained through rote memorization and finessing tests; smartness is an act that can be expressed when students understand concepts and can use them effectively.

Works Cited

Postman, Neil. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New

York: Knopf, 1995. Print.

Let's Get Locke'ed on Frankenstein!

           Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein displays how experiences rather than innate knowledge shape one’s daily life, even if you are a monster. John Locke would approach the novel as an accurate representation of the birth of life. One of Locke’s main points is explained in Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner, “Locke's claim is that all our thoughts and ideas issue from that which we have taken in through the senses. Before we perceive anything, the mind is a 'tabula rasa'--or an empty slate," (Gaardner 242). He thought that our knowledge is developed through experiences of the world, as the mind does not just receive sensation, it processes them.
            Frankenstein’s monster is the perfect example of how someone develops knowledge once born, for the creature is not a baby so in Shelley’s world, he learns quick. The monster seems to be born a complete ‘blank slate’ for it is not until the doctor screams in horror and leaves him alone, that the creature develops a personality. The monster’s main source of knowledge is from Paradise Lost, which teaches him about Satan and how he should speak and act. His other source of learning is from watching a family in their house and hearing them discuss their hardships; it is from his experiences, that he learns what revenge is and how wrongly he was treated.

Frankenstein creates life from nothing, which is a controversial topic in and of itself. However, Locke would view this sensation as a representation of the fact that God does exist, for someone has to do the creating. He was very focused on rationality, “Locke believed that it was inherent in human reason to be able to know that God exists,” (Gaardner 244). Locke would view Frankenstein as the God of the novel; a way to allude to God in a more approachable and relatable character. Shelley of course takes this a step even further, dealing with Frankenstein’s inner struggles and mental instability. He still, however, is a creator of life. Life cannot exist from nothing; the only rational explanation is that God exists.

In general, Locke’s views on life are shown throughout the novel in the ways the monster learns and the fact he had his own creator. In fact, the monster is always set on Frankenstein either wanting to connect or disconnect with him. People treat God the same way, either always praying to him for help or comfort or cursing him for their hardships. Nobody really knows if God does exist, or if we have knowledge before we are born, yet according to John Locke and Frankenstein, both of those questions can be answered.

Work Cited:

Gaarder, Jostein. Sophie's World. New York: Berkely Books, 1994. Print. 

American Exceptionalism

Osama Bin Laden was arguably the most hated man by the American people for he was blamed for the terrorist attacks on September 11^th and more, based primarily on the media’s coverage and statements by members of the government. Substantial evidence has proved that he was indeed a terrible man, however, he was still a man and he should have been allowed a trial and burial. The US government treated him like a vicious poison that they just needed to kill off in order to cure everyone of worry and assume safety for America. The US’s reaction to Bin Laden was an act of American exceptionalism for a man was killed-murdered-not out of self defense, but out of pure aggression without being allowed a fair trial or even a proper burial.

            The sixth amendment to the constitution claims that everyone has the right to a free trial. Bin Laden was denied that right, one that has been engrained in the US as law for hundreds of years. When stated in such a way, that the government completely went against one of its own amendments it seems quite astonishing that the public was not more aware of the brutality of Bin Laden’s death. The media was able to build a cloud of vagueness around the incident, even though the public knew exactly when and where he was being targeted, the fact that he was assassinated in cold blood, defenseless is left out of the news. Noam Chomsky makes an excellent point about the situation, “It might be instructive to ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos had landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic… Uncontroversially, he was not a “suspect” but the “decider” who gave the orders to invade Iraq -- that is, to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” for which Nazi criminals were hanged,” (Chomsky 1). Chomsky explains that Bush did in fact ruin the lives of many innocent Iraqis; just as many innocent Americans’ lives were ruined in 2001. Yet, because of the idea of American exceptionalism, his actions are justified, and the consequences are excused. Of course Bush did have reason to act in such a way, but to Iraqis he was a murderer and a terrorist. If they had acted as Americans, Bush would likely have been killed years ago. There are a scary amount of similarities in the actions of Bush and Bin Laden, which are often not recognized by the public.

            President Bush’s address to Congress uplifts Americans, enrapturing them into a frenzy of patriotism, compassion, and aggression toward the enemy. Bush does not, however, address why Al-Qaeda would be so inclined to attack the United States, for that may not be what he, nor the people want to hear. He ensures the public that America is and will always be in the right, and there will always be an enemy to point to and blame for tragedies such as the events on 9/11. Now of course the actions of Al-Qaeda do not go excused, nor should ever be forgotten, but the lack of information released by the President is unsettling and adds to American hypocrisy. Bush skirts around the reason for the attacks, “Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self- appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other,” (Bush 4). He claims the reason for the hatred is because America is so free, which the public supports, therefore keeping the government in the positive light and making al-Qaeda as irrational and inhumane as possible. He does not address how the American military invaded their homeland and disrupted daily life. He only mentions Afghanistan, and again how the US has been so helpful in their economy. Throughout the entire speech, Bush keeps the people in full support of the government, mesmerized by the uplifting rhetoric, and most importantly hating al-Qaeda. America is always the good guy, the exception to any hatred, punishment, or attack. Who could hate America?

Works Cited

Bush, George W. "President George W Bush's Address to Congress and the Nation on

Terrorism." Speech.

Chomsky, Noam. "Was There an Alternative?" The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com,

n.d. Web. 10 Sept. 2015