Stephanie Rothrock: Class Film 5: Random Clips/Concepts

During one of the class periods, everyone watched and reviewed clips provided by the professor. This ended up being one of the assigned blogs. Unfortunately, I was absent for this particular day and it was a bit more to swallow than a normal movie. It was kind of themed experience and so I will be taking a different approach.

I will be analyzing a few course concepts that I found meaningful during the semester. Agape and Eros were by far my favorite idea. I loved the story of Eros and am taking a class where we are analyzing the Symposium. I also love the idea of unconditional love in general as I think people have the tendency to put expectations on love.

I really liked the two films we used with these concepts. Babette's Feast had a great deal of Agape and the film had a nice structure. I really loved Like Water for Chocolate though and wish we would have had time to watch the whole thing. I loved the transference of emotion that took place with her cooking. I also like the humorous details where the sister gets an upset stomach. One of my favorite clips that we did look at was the scene where one of the girls runs naked towards the man on the horse. It was so bizarre and random, exactly like Eros.

I think the concept relates really well to Abraham Maslow. He is famous for his hierarchy of needs but he also expanded beyond the branch of behaviorism and into humanism. When his child was born he realized that behaviorism could not account for the innate feelings of love that he felt for his new child. He went on to better develop ideas of self-actualization and love. Having come from a traumatic background, he emphasizes the importance of unconditional love. He states that this is real love and goes into the positive impacts that it can have on our lives. I believe that he effectively demonstrated the importance and degree that we underestimate Agape.

Finally, as a romantic I am deeply into the notion of Eros. In society today, everything is technological. Interpersonal and deep interaction has been replaced by facebook. Chilling with friends has become messenger. Innocence and growth have become outdated and I worry that in our cyber world passion too will die as a result of our technological focus and obsession with efficiency.