"Yard Work is Hard Work" But So Are Relationships

I really enjoyed Jodie Mack’s animation, “Yard Work is Hard Work”, namely because of the catchy songs and her amazing use of magazine clippings. But I also really liked it because the couple in the story tried to work through their problems instead of giving up. Many couples call it quits when things get hard and nothing can be more emotionally distressing than money problems. They cried with each other, they fought with each other, but in the end they tried their best work through it.

I took the renovation of their house to symbolize a renovation of their relationship. They both agreed that they needed to make a change and they worked very hard to do it. Yet, in the end they did not win the competition, even after all of the hard work on their house. I took this loss to also mean that even though they tried hard at their relationship, something still wasn’t right. I interpreted the end of the animation as having the message that even after a couple works really hard at their relationship, sometimes things just don’t work out. The ambiguity of the ending made me think that the couple had two choices: try again, or give-up. Regardless, I admire the character for trying hard in the first place, especially in a world where it has become the standard to just give up.

Communication

            I really enjoyed the variety of poems that Garren Small offered during his lecture. It touched on a lot of different but equally powerful types of love and desire, some of which we have not addressed much in class, such as his poems about parental love, or feeling the power of seeing someone else’s love from afar. The hustle and bustle of city life in many of his poems highlighted the importance of communication and the difficulties that come with attaining it, something that Small seemed particularly passionate about. His poems had the warmth of a content love along with the coldness that comes with being alone in a crowd of people.

            In many questions that have to do with morality, I often find myself saying that the answer is communication. How can you protect your daughters from the hegemonic representations of women in the media? Talk with them. How do you protect your sons from the ever growing ease of access to pornographic images? Discuss it with them. How do you help someone grieve for a lost loved one? Get over a break-up? Apologize for doing something wrong? The answer is always communication.

           But Small’s lecture helped remind me that communication is not only a solution but a preventative. It’s a way to stay on a path, not just to get back onto it once we’ve strayed. Communication can keep a relationship alive, not just revive it. Many people forget about communicating with each other until the relationship is already at its breaking point. Yet, Small’s poetry still left me with the question of why we sometimes find it so difficult to share what we are feeling and thinking with others. Is it because we are afraid of being honest with the other person, or is it because we are afraid of being honest with ourselves?

Love on the Brain

I’ve heard people say that they were addicted to love. I’ve had friends that would fall in love over and over again, only to give up on the relationship after a brief amount of time to fall in love with someone else. I had thought people like this were silly. Their loves were so numerous there was no way that they got the chance to get to know the people that they “loved”, but nonetheless they were obsessed and possessive and would torture themselves while waiting for the cellphone to ring. How pathetic, I thought, until I listen to Dr. Lucy Brown’s lecture and explored her website (seeyourfeelings.com).

Suddenly instead of pity, I felt sympathy for not only the serial daters, but anyone who fell in love. This delusion seems to be completely out of their hands. They are so excited by these chemical reactions in their brains and feelings spreading throughout their bodies that they don’t have a chance to step outside of the situation and ask themselves if they really even know the person that they say they’re in love with.

This scientific aspect of love and desire only furthers the idea that it is so easy to be in love with love that it doesn’t even matter who the person you are in love with really is. This helps explain why people are so surprised when the person they are in a relationship with does something wrong, such as cheating, and why people are so ready to take that same person back time after time. It’s easy to fall into the trap of loving being in love, rather than loving the person you’re with.

Love Slave

I really enjoyed Dr. Anthony Reed’s lecture, “Slavery’s Interior--Cinema and the Performative Traumas of History”. Looking at representations of race through the context of “perfomative traumas” was much more inclusive than simply looking at race in the media.

Dr. Reed explained that the slaves are portrayed as being innocent and the enslavers, guilty. The enslavers either have a change of heart or they are defeated. This made me think of Conchita and Žižek’s idea of the masochistic man being enslaved by the women. The women, or the enslavers, are not defeated in the typical villain sense when it comes to stories of sexual desire. Instead, the women is conquered and this obviously happens when the man finally has sex with her.

In further comparison, when Dr. Reed defined slavery as “the art of keeping alive someone who would rather die”, the idea of being slaves to love becomes even more ridiculous. Even as the masochistic slave, the man is inherently in control. When he feels that he is so in love, to the point where he wants to die, he is the only one keeping himself alive. The woman is a pseudo-enslaver. The man can successfully enslave himself, the woman is just there for show. This is clear in Conchita. Two different actresses can play the same role because it doesn’t matter. She is just for show. The real love is all in the mind of the beholder, the slave.