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.