Fanon and Lee

In the Movie Do the Right Thing and the book The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon is see some of the ideas of Spike Lee and Frantz Fanon in that they are both trying to show the struggles and minorities of begin colonize by different groups. Although Frantz focuses on more a worldwide views then that of Spike. Frantz look at it as a big picture, while Lee looks at it more of a detailed look. Lee focuses on a neighborhood while Frantz looks at the struggles of Algeria. In the movie you see the different struggles that race go thru in ones neighborhood that has such diversity. While in the book it look more at two areas in which France and Algeria are fighting and try to get there independence.

But one area that I see different is that Frantz seems to attack more of the white person for the problems that are begin caused. While in Lee’s movie it show that it just can not be blamed on just one side, he shows that all people involved in the situation of the movie are the different race are just as responsible. In Lee movie it seem like black people are colonizing the neighborhood. I think you see this when the character Buggin Out it trying to force Sal, the Pizza Place owner to chase the Wall of fame and add African-Americans to the wall. But Sal does not want to put any African-Americans on the wall. There are some connections between Frantz book and Lee’s movie but there are also some disconnections that the work does not look at in the same way.

A SIngle Numberless Death Blog

After reading, A Single Numberless Death by Nora Strejilevich there is a passage in the book that I found fascinating. It states that “The secret of assimilating into the new culture was to never look back.” When I read this it made me think about my family coming to the U.S. Although, I was a the first generation to be born in the U.S., I still felt that I had a lot of the custom that I inherited coming from an immigrant family. In order for me to settle and become part of a new culture was going to school and watching on TV, also what my parents would try to teach me.


There was a time in my life that my mom had gotten a promotion but needed to learn more English in order to be successful at her new promotion. She asks my brother and me to stop speaking in Spanish to her and to speak English so she could learn the language. Looking back at this moment now I see that our family was starting to adjust to our new American culture just like Nora was trying to adjust to the life in Argentina. Even assimilating in school it was hard to do because of the language barrier that I had, I was always able to speak the language, but grammar would always set me back, and it was hard to be part of a culture because I was not able to write the language.


Although my experience is not as severe as Nora’s experience because they would force them to perform acts that I could not image happened in the U.S. One of the experiences that the book mentions is that they made people who were Jewish do Nazi practices and tell them to hail Hitler. The worst punishment that I had was to maybe do more homework, but as a youth this experience was not enjoyable. It just that when you are trying to settle in to a new culture you need to let go some of your old custom in order to assimilate into a new culture.

Hostel

After watching the movie Hostel, directed by Eli Roth I thought that the movie was excellent scary or horror movie. I do not find much interest in movies like that, but Hostel is one of my favorite movies. One scene that stands out to me is when Josh played by Derek Richardson and he is begin torture and one of the surgeons cuts the back of Derek ankle, this part of the movie make me feel so squeamish. But the scene that I want to look at, is that there was a scene that I thought I was very interesting. It has to do with the one of the scene towards the end of the movie where the character Paxton played by Jay Hernandez where he follows the Dutch business man into the bathroom.


In a way it reminds me of a event where a U.S. senator of Idaho named Larry Craig. In where the senator was at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport bathroom and he got caught by undercover sting trying to pick up another man, to have sex with in the bathroom. I see the comparison this to Paxton roll in the bathroom scene because it was in a public place where allegedly a lot of gay men pick each other up in public bathrooms. In the movie there also a scene where he meets an American Client that is ready to kill someone, and he compares the act to sex. The reason that I think that Paxton might be a bi-sexual is because in one of the begin scene of the movie it looks like he is having a three some with one of his friends.


So to me it seems that he could be exploring with some homo-sexual tendency even though thru out the movie he might seem he is not a homosexual. So I can see the connection that Paxton is having a gay experience by doing this act in bathroom. Because he is getting he revenge and is begin satisfied with the enjoyment of killing the Dutch business man, because if he just wanted to get even then all he had to do was caught the man fingers of but he went on a step further and killed the man and he is not relieve till the man is dead and lying in his puddle of blood. Just like a man might dehumanize a person after sex.