Capitalism: You Can't Escape

The seven minute clip shown above from the movie Glenngary Glenn Ross, depicts capitalism at is best, or depending on your perspective maybe at its worst. Alec Baldwin’s character is sent to give a pep talk gone wrong to the lowly, proletariat, office workers of the real estate business. The audience knows immediately that there is a definite class distinction between the workers, and the new man who has entered the scene when they hear the words “the rich get richer, who belongs to the BMW?”(Glenngary Glenn Ross) These men aren’t used to seeing expensive cars around their workplace because evidently, their work isn’t worth the kind of salary that allows for expensive things.

Immediately the workers and the new man in town begin to establish their hierarchy. Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser claims “all the agents of production, exploitation and repression must in one way or another be ‘steeped in this ideology in order to perform their tasks ‘conscientiously’” (1337). Each player must know his role in the game, and abide by it. Alec Baldwin’s character starts our saying, “Lets talk about something important.” (Glenngary Glenn Ross) implying that anything the office workers had to say or do is unimportant. “The tasks of the exploited (the proletariats), of the exploiters (the capitalists), and of the exploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers)” (1337) are easily identifiable: the workers are the exploited, the rich man delivering insults is the exploiter, and Mitch and Murray, the faceless owners of the company are the auxiliaries.

Ultimately each worker sits down and complies with Alec Baldwin’s character once faced with the threat of losing their job, which indirectly means losing their livelihood. The ability to keep labor power in such a large business “is ensured by giving labour power the material means with which to reproduce itself: by wages” (1336). Even though the clip already establishes that the office workers salaries aren’t nearly as much as the man who is threatening them, the workers still value their lowly salary enough to stay and listen to the exploiter’s vulgar motivation tactics. The salary becomes a way to scare the workers into doing exactly what the company wants, its equitable to a young child being threatened with the removal of television from their daily routine. In this scene, the workers are being reduced to the existence of a child. Althusser also mentions that “this quantity of value (wages) necessary for the reproduction of labour power is determined not by the needs of a ‘biological’ guaranteed Minimum Wage alone, but by the needs of a historical minimum – i.e. a historically variable minimum” (1336). These workers have accepted their minimum, as has Alec Baldwin’s character. The difference is that Alec Balwdin’s character has a minimum salary of what he claims to be $970,000. The worker’s salary is so meager that he declines to say what it is (Glenngary Glenn Ross).

The workers are deemed to be losers, absolutely valueless numerous times in the clip. However they all remain in their chairs, acting like sponges made specifically to absorb Alec Baldwin’s demeaning comments. Why don’t they get up and leave? Perhaps because of something Andrew Ross mentioned in “The Mental Labor Problem,” because “being trained in the habit of embracing nonmonetary rewards- job gratification is self-actualizing – as compensation. As a result of this training, low compensation for a high workload can become a rationalized feature of the job” (2590). These men don’t see anything wrong with the job they have at and, in fact, they want to keep it so badly that they will subject themselves to anything and everything Alec Baldwin’s character can spit out at them. They have accepted their high workload and low paycheck, and they value it.

The workers allow Alec Baldwin’s character to go so far as attacking their home personas and their family life. In capitalism’s eyes, as well as the rich man in the clip’s eyes, the relationship to money is all that matters. The rich man makes statements like, “You’re a nice guy? Good father? Go home and play with your kids. If you want to work here, close” and “ If you can’t play in the man’s game, you can’t close them, then go home and tell your wife your troubles” (Glenngary Glenn Ross). In the world of capitalism, Alec Baldwin’s character is making some valid remarks. Capitalism “has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (Marx 659). The relation to one’s career, to one’s salary, to the work at hand has torn apart the relation that individuals in the family have with one another. The focus is all about work, and value. In this way, the individual has become commodified; all the office workers have become are products that produce some kind of monetary benefit for the company.

In a way, the essence of this whole clip can be identified in the words of Karl Marx, “the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital” (671). The office workers as well as the rich man are all caught up in the self-expansion of capital. For them and for us all, the option still stands: work and produce capital or get fired and try to mooch off of someone who works and produces capital until you can produce it on your own again.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

Marx, Karl. "Capital, Volume 1." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

Marx, Karl. "The Communist Manifesto." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

Ross, Andrew. "The Mental Labor Problem." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI

The Inception of Dreams

“Dreams feel real when were in them,

it’s only when we wake up

that we realize

something was actually strange.”

-Dom Cobb in “Inception”

“Inception,” is made from the stuff of dreams. In this movie, a team of mind manipulating thief’s band together in efforts to plant a single idea inside the deepest level of a man’s unconscious being, believing that this idea will stir him to act in different ways once he is awake and active in the real world. For myself, sitting in a theater for approximately two and a half hours, enduring this wild, mind twisting thriller was exhausting yet rewarding not only in the sense that my thoughts and worries were completely lost in the false reality of this movie, but also in the sense that I exited the theater with an inspiration to make connections between “Inception” and Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.”

One belief that Freud and the movie “Inception” share is that “the multiple determination which decides what shall be included in a dream is not always a primary factor in dream-construction but is often the secondary product of a psychical force” (820). Freud thought this force was an unknown entity, however in “Inception” this force takes human form in the characters Dom Cobb (the inception professional, and leader of the team), Aurthur (Dom’s right hand man, the organizational genius), Ariadne (the architecture student who constructs the physical surrounding of the dream), Eames (the member who can forge signatures as well as projections of actual people), and Yusuf (the chemist who enables multiple people to inhabit the same dream space and time). Together, these people create and destroy the dreamer’s unconscious reality; they determine the dreamer’s location, and length of time spent there, the only task for the subject is to then fill the space with their secrets.

“Inception” centers on the idea that a single idea planted in a person’s unconscious mind has no limitations. Dom Cobb strikes a proposition with powerful business mogul Saito, promising that he can inhabit the unconscious mind of Saitio’s rival Robert Fischer. The goal is to plant an idea in Fischer’s mind that he can ruin his fathers business, and become his own businessman. Thus, Fischer would no longer be a competitor in the business and Saito would continue to hold control and power. In exchange for this, Saito offers Dom Cobb the ability to return to his home and children in America.

Dom Cobb has a past that refuses to let him rest, literally. His deceased wife infiltrates every dream he has. She yearns for his return to her, in a dream world that the two of them constructed together, and spent a dream’s lifetime growing old in. In fact, the dream’s reality was so enthralling that Dom and his wife couldn’t tell the dream from reality any longer. Dom convinces his wife that they need to die in order to wake from the dream, and return to reality, to their home, and to their children. However, once they are home Mal begins to reverse reality and the dream world. Dom Cobb sees that “the consequence of the displacement is that the dream-content no longer resembles the core of the dream-thoughts, and that the dream gives no more than a distortion of the dream which exists in the unconscious” (820). Mal then resorts to a framed suicide, in which Dom is the murderer. In her mind reality is the dream. Her dream- content and her dream-thoughts have been exchanged with the ultimate reality. Dom is then forced to flee the country to escape life in prison for his wife’s murder.

This significant experience in Dom’s life evidently weighs heavily upon every decision he makes in life. The team member Ariadne can see this, and pleads with Dom to explain his relationship with his wife. Finally, in a long monologue Dom talks about the alternate world he created with his wife; he tells Ariadne what it looked like, how long they spent there, about his children, and about the tragedy of his wife’s death. This scene shows that “dreams are brief, meager, and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of dream thoughts. If a dream is written out it may perhaps fill half a page. The analysis setting out the dream-thoughts underlying it may occupy six, eight, or a dozen times as much space” (819). Even though Dom Cobb wasn’t writing out his dream-thoughts, it was clear that he spent much time analyzing what happened in his long dream sequence with his wife. Interestingly, there is a scene towards the end where Ariadne shares in Dom’s alternate reality that he created with his wife. She finally understands all the sights that took Dom so many words to explain, with just once glance.

“Inception” embodies Freud’s statement that “dreams feel themselves at liberty. Moreover, to represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dream thoughts as a positive or as a negative” (824). By the end of the film, I wasn’t sure if in this context, controlling a person’s unconscious was beneficial or harmful, but I did feel that I shared in the excitement of a passionate love, a thrilling chase, and the unwavering creativity of dreams.

One last parallel that the movie “Inception” brought to mind has more to do with the writing process than with Sigmund Freud. When one is writing fiction, the process converts into a dream. The deeper one goes into the unconscious, the more creative one becomes. At one level the writer is simply the writer, sitting at a desk or a computer of some kind, on a deeper level, the writer is no longer conscious of being the writer, but is more conscious of the story they’re creating; their own work of fiction becomes their own world of reality. At the deepest level, the writer becomes their own protagonist, feeling, eating, breathing, smelling what their character smells; hoping to produce a believable, grounded character. At this level, writing and dreaming become synonymous in the sense that “it is never possible to be sure that a dream has been completely interpreted” (819). Writing and dreaming are such personal yet universal beings, knowing that one has been interpreted completely or correctly is nearly impossible.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sd0ff1sbJU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3XzUYd6nrU

Man and Wife as a Semiotic Relationship

Being Jane

His hand is sweating. It means he’s nervous. True, it’s the middle of the summer and probably 90 degrees outside, but I know him. I know that this sweat is the nervous kind. But somehow, his hand cradling my own hand creates a kind of solace that exists despite the sweat, despite the fact that my mind is producing thoughts that multiply at a speed unbeknownst to man, despite the reality that when I leave this ceremony today, I won't be who I was when I entered it. I’ll be Mrs. Andrew Scott. No longer a girlfriend, no longer a fiancé, no longer a bride even, but a wife.

I look down at the crisp, magnolia white, lace material that hugs my body like a long lost friend. I hold on to my dress for dear life, as images of my future flash in my mind: 5-year anniversaries, family dinners, and dirty laundry. I whisper softly under my breath, “we’re going to make it.” He doesn’t hear me.

Our past is a rocky one, filled with family histories, ex-relationships, and random simple arguments that managed to blow up to the size of my hair… But through it all, I wouldn’t give him up. At the risk of sounding cliché, I don’t want to imagine my life without him. Yet, somehow on this day I have to imagine it. This day, when my identity becomes fused with another, I force myself to stand as an individual for one fleeting second. In this second, I am my own woman ready to pledge my dedication, my honor, and my love to this man.

He squeezes my hand, and the sweat bubbles that formed between our palms burst with wild energy. I feel his eyes gazing at me, and I turn to meet them.

“Are you ready?” Andrew asks, his mouth curved into a small smile.

I simply nod and press my forehead to his, never letting go of his hand. Hoping that after today, I can learn to be a wife to my husband while never letting go of being Jane.

Man and Wife as a Semiotic Relationship

When women think of marriage, do they only see the beautiful white dress, the flowers, and the ring? When the word wife is thrown around on the unwedded woman’s lips, does she mistake the concept of wife for that of a bride? Let us not mistake the signifier and the signified in this relationship between the woman and her title as a wife. When considering the semiotics according to Ferdinand de Saussure in his work, "Course on General Linguistics," one can come to understand the titles that women in relationships acquire as well as the feelings that Jane acquires in the above short story, “Being Jane.”

On her wedding day, we see that Jane feels that she is part of a whole with her fiancé Andrew, however is worried about their dynamic changing once she becomes “Mrs. Andrew Scott.” This is where identifying that the signifier being the sight of the bride should produce a signified mental image of the white dress and the ring, while if the signifier is wife then the signified should become something more familial for example, the life after the wedding. This concept of the signified is what Jane worries about.

If all values are composed of “a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined,” (858) then it only makes sense that Jane would come to the understanding that being a fiancé, being a bride, and being a wife create the sum of her existence as Andrews counterpart. She must understand herself through her relation to her lover. Through semiotics, it is evident that “both factors are necessary for the existence of a value” (858).

Just as in semiotics, “language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others,” (858) in Jane’s relationship with Andrew they must adapt to the new system of interdependent terms that result from the existence of the other: marriage. In the photograph, this relationship based on the presence of both members is evident; they're holding hands, one in black pants one in a white dress, both looking down. They are opposites, yet they remain a united entity.

Ultimately, Jane, standing side by side with her fiancé, her future husband, she realizes something that Saussure points out, “whatever distinguishes one from the other constitutes it” (863). She must learn to be both Jane and wife simultaneously. She can be herself in the midst of being an essential part of the binary between man and wife; which ultimately adds more to her character. In the end of the narrative, both reader and Jane emerge with a new hope.

Works Cited

Saussure, Ferdinand. "Course in General Linguistics" Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

http://www.thebridescafe.com/index.cfm?catID=2&StartRow=17

Best Quality Sublimity

Longinus argues that “real sublimity contains much food for reflection, is difficult or rather impossible to resist, and makes a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory” (138). The movie clip from “The Joy Luck Club” presented above does all of those things with a certain emotional quality that exudes inspiration. Every time I see this section of the movie, I leave from it with a particular aura of hope that I did not have before. The characters June, and her mother exhibit sublime qualities while identifying the true meaning of being a sublime person: having a “best quality heart.”

The clip depicts two childhood friends, and their families seated around a dinner table; where most family spats begin. Waverly begins to attack June in order to set herself apart as the successful person. She claims that June’s copy for the law firm was of poor quality, and that “it just won’t work” in a sophisticated firm like hers. If Longinus were analyzing Waverly’s behavior, he would most likely decide that her actions backfired. He claims that “nothing is truly great which it is great to despise; wealth, honour, reputation, absolute power” (138). In this way, June takes her rightful place as the sublime character, who simply defends her copy and says it only needs to be “fine tuned.” Longinus would consider June to be truly great for she is the person “who could have these advantages if [she] chose, but disdains them out of magnanimity” (138). June represents the unpolished, grammatically imperfect work that has the inspired emotion that surpasses Waverly’s simple political correctness.

June’s mother is initially seen betraying June, when she claims that Waverly has style that June doesn’t have; people “must be born this way.” Longinus would argue that June’s mother has a natural reaction to the situation. Longinus says that, “it is a natural inclination that leads us to admire not the little streams, however pellucid and however useful” (151). However, June’s mother’s reaction when having a direct conversation with her daughter elevates this movie clip to something moving, and awe-inspiring.

June lets out her feelings about the argument at dinner very slowly at first, and then with an explosion of emotional pain directed towards her mother’s lack of praise and approval of her accomplishments. Her pain stems over a lifetime worth of disapproval and shredded hopes, and finally June is able to express these feelings to her mother. Longinus says, “There is nothing so productive of grandeur as noble emotion in the right place. It inspires and possesses our words with a kind of madness and divine spirit” (139). Waverly’s antics hurt June, but the fact that her own mother didn’t stand up for her and instead indirectly claimed that Waverly is innately superior spurred on a new wave of madness and an ability to set free the feelings she had locked away for so long, bringing the clip to its emotional climax.

In the clip, June concludes that no matter what her mother hopes for her, she won’t ever be more than what she truly is. Finally her mother is able to understand what she means, and can enlighten June with a new understanding of what being of the “best quality” means. In this exchange of thoughts and emotions, both June and her mother see that despite June’s imperfect exterior by societal standards, she is willing to take things like the “worst quality crab,” ultimately giving her the “best quality heart.” June’s mother ends the conversation with a brilliant arc, stating that June is the one with “style that no one can teach.”

Longinus would declare this clip as something that “penetrates not only the ears, but the very soul. It arouses all kinds of conceptions of words and thoughts and objects and melody” (152). This clip redefines success, and allows us to ponder whether each one of us takes the best quality for ourselves, or becomes the one with the best quality heart. This section from "The Joy Luck Club" is the best quality of sublimity: it provides food for thought, it’s irresistible, and memorable.

Works Cited

Longinus, Cassius. "On Sublimity." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjpgeCKL2ng