You’re on a subway, headed to work. It’s a normal business day, the rest of the riders sporting their suits and dresses and briefcases, holding onto the handrails or reading their e-books on portable devices. You’re sitting by the window, the sun caressing your back with its early warming rays; and then you notice the man across from you staring. Perhaps he’s looking at the advertisement next to you; maybe he’s dazing off into post-dream reflection; maybe he’s studying a crumb on your cheek from breakfast. You brush your hand over your mouth and nose, quickly, so he doesn’t realize this gesture is due to his gaze. And still he stares. Your stop comes. You get up to leave the subway and exit to your platform, and turning back, you see his head swivel like a tracking device as you move. As the train departs, you see him clamber onto the subway seats, eyes focused directly on you. …show more content…
People fixate on objects without realizing it; they stare, and forget they’re staring at someone. Yet Philip Kaufman’s 1978 horror/science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers – and the original 1956 film and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers on which both are based – questions whether paranoia of strangers is as crazy as it first seems. In fact, there are multiple questions posed by Kaufman’s excellent adaptation of the source material, including how much one can really know a close acquaintance; how one would know if someone has changed; and why anyone who could grow a mustache like Donald Sutherland wouldn’t do
In Tim Burton’s drama entitled Edward Siccorhands, he suggests that looks are often misleading, and that you should never judge someone on their appearance alone, especially if you don’t know them. He conveys this idea through tilt camera movement, diegetic sounds, and close up shots. Burton’s purpose is to inform the person who is watching in order to tell them to not say anything about a person before getting to know them. He includes a hopeful tone for judgeful people to try and make them rethink about their actions, and make them into a better person for the future.
Christa Moore was spending the day at a playground, watching her two daughters having fun on the swings. She began getting a strange feeling when she noticed a man “eyeballing” her children. Moore quickly realized her gut instinct about the man was right. Before she knew it, the stranger had managed to walk up behind her two-year-old, rip her off of the swing and tear the little girls pants and diaper off of her.
On the first excerpt, the man attempted to catch the waiter’s attention by raising his hand. Consequently, the waiter acknowledged the gesture of the customer, and returned it by locking eyes with him. However, the former was not able to attend immediately to the needs of the man because he was about to hand me the pub’s menu. Meanwhile, the man, who was the subject of the second excerpt, also tried to be noticed by the waitress by establishing an eye contact. But, because their location was far from one another, the waitress failed to notice that someone needs to be attended.
As he returns to the subway, struggling to deal with the doors,
Connie, the main character in Joyce Carol Oates’ short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a young woman with palpably low self-esteem. This vulnerability allows Arnold Friend, the main antagonist of the story, to successfully attract and manipulate Connie. The story begins by highlighting Connie’s daily rituals of self-assurance (369). In order to feel secure with herself, even for a fleeting moment, Connie looks at herself in a mirror to make sure that she is satisfied with what she sees; this ritual is coupled with her tendency, when in public, to scan the area in order to make sure that no one is making any disgruntled looks about her appearance (369).
On the daily, most of us will encounter countless of strangers. Whether if we’re on the bus, the subway, going to work, or in a cafe, we get to see different individuals going about their day. Sometimes, we like to observe those strangers, but, there are times where we might observe them a little too much. We somehow become quickly fascinated, and that can lead us to stare at the person. Though, what can a stare do?
Sam Roberts in the article A Decade of Fear argues that Americans turned against each other because of McCarthyism. Roberts supports his argument by explaining and describing the many occurences of paranoia caused by McCarthyism. The author’s purpose is to persuade the reader that McCarthy’s gross grab at power caused tension between Americans. It is clear that the author is directing his claims to an older and more educated audience, due to his cynical tone. I strongly agree with Roberts’ claim.
There are many ways to find out how individuals would react in certain situations, for example, by putting individuals in a simulation. Causing stress and discomfort to individuals in order to gain knowledge is at times necessary. For example, Stanley Milgram’s experiments which focus on obedience to authority and the extent a person is willing to ignore their own ethical beliefs and cause pain to another individual, just because he is ordered to do so. Stanley Milgram writes about his experiments and results in his article “The Perils of Obedience”. In his experiments Stanley Milgram causes subjects who have volunteered to be a part of them some stress and discomfort in order to receive relevant results.
Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958) was voted the “best film ever made” by the 2012 British Film Institute, and for good reason. The plot is elaborate and intriguing and the cinematography is legendary. On top of this, the characters, like good characters should, all have their own needs and wants that are evident in the film. The needs of these characters affect each other and they affect the story and they all follow one common theme: control. Our protagonist, John “Scottie” Ferguson’s wants and needs differ greatly throughout the film, but his only constant is his yearning to get over his acrophobia, or fear of heights.
However, film critic, Robin Wood, argues that ‘since Psycho, the Hollywood cinema has implicitly recognised horror as both American and familial’ he then goes on to connect this with Psycho by claiming that it is an “innovative and influential film because it supposedly presents its horror not as the produce of forces outside American society, bit a product of the patriarchal family which is the fundamental institution of American society” he goes on to discuss how our civilisation either represses or oppresses (Skal, 1994). Woods claim then suggests that in Psycho, it is the repressions and tensions within the normal American family which produces the monster, not some alien force which was seen and suggested throughout the 1950 horror films. At the beginning of the 60’s, feminisation was regarded as castration not humanization. In “Psycho” (1960) it is claimed that the film presents conservative “moral lessons about gender roles of that the strong male is healthy and normal and the sensitive male is a disturbed figure who suffers from gener confusion” (Skal, 1994). In this section of this chapter I will look closely at how “Psycho” (1960) has layers of non-hetro-conforming and gender-non conforming themes through the use of Norman Bates whose gender identitiy is portrayed as being somewhere between male and female
The Pigman, written by Paul Zindel, is the adventurous story of two teenagers who befriend a nice, lonely old man and their time together. Although there were many wonderful memories involving John, Lorraine, and Mr. Pignati (the Pigman), sad memories were also made. The Pigman dying was a difficult time for two of the main characters, John and Lorraine. The pigs from the Pigman’s special collection being broken; and the baboon, Bobo, dying were the largest contributions to Mr. Pignati’s death. There may have been other factors; however, these had the most impact towards his death.
Stephen King Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American horror author. King’s life became a hard one at a very early age. When King was two years of age, his father left the family under the pretense of "going to buy a pack of cigarettes" leaving his mother to raise two children by herself. At times they came under great financial strain. At the age of 11, King’s family had moved back to Durham, Maine.
She argues that the act of moviegoing satisfies these voyeuristic desires in people. She writes, “The mass of mainstream film portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy,” (pg. 186). In this essay, I will further discuss her viewpoints on cinema and voyeurism, and how it connects to the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock. Rear Window is a film that follows the
In the realistic fiction novel Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech, a 12 year old girl named Phoebe is friends with Sal and they spend a lot of time together. In this story Phoebe is paranoid about everyone she encounters. For example, Phoebe says on pages 19 to 20 “‘Mrs Margaret Cadaver?... She scares me half to death… First there is that name: Cadaver… Do you know… what her job is… she’s a nurse… would you want a nurse whose name was dead body… that hair… is spooky… that voice.
Eye contact also plays a vital role in effective communication. There are times when we experience words that come out of our mouth and the ways we communicate through our body language are totally different. In this kind of situation, the receiver has to determine whether to believe verbal or nonverbal message. Regularly the receiver would select the nonverbal as it is more natural and it truly displays the speaker’s true feeling and intention. The gestures such as the way we sit, how fast and how loud we talk and how much eye contact we make send strong messages to the receiver.