Good Example Of Essay On Appropriation And Commodification

The term appropriation is a technique used to describe a character that is taken from its environment and placed in another unfamiliar environment without any significant changed done to them. The book blood and guts is about a young Mexican girl Jenny, who leaves her home town of Merida in search of a new life in the United States. During her former years in Mexico, she has a sexual relationship with her father who she considers to be many things including her spouse. In the period following her affair with her father, he starts losing interest in her after he starts getting interest in another woman. As she later comes to know, he lost interest in her due to the fact that he considered her to be confining him against his wishes, since he wants to live his own life. As a result he lets her go to school in New York, America.
On reaching the states, her father continued to send her money for her daily upkeep but stopped shortly after. This forced Jenny to find work so that she could support herself. She found work in a local bakery but was hated by the customers for her bad reputation of having sexual relationships with multiple partners. She ended up having two abortions after getting pregnant twice during the course of her employment in the bakery. The years that followed saw Jenny become a nymphomaniac and she seems she cannot stop having sexual relations with anyone who is willing. Her behavior goes from bad to worse and she joins a gang based in the New York called The Scorpions. While on one of the gangs escapades, the police pursue them and in the chase, their car crashes and she is the only survivor. After this incident she moves into the slums of New York City where thieves break into her house and sell her into sexual slavery. Janey later dies at fourteen.
Another method of appropriation used in this book is parody also known as spoof. This is where one author uses the work of another as a form of ridicule of a character in another literary work by use of satire or ironic mockery. Critic Susan Hawking in her review of Blood and Guts in High School, says another method that Kathy Acker used for appropriation is pastiche. Pastiche or disambiguation as it is sometimes referred is basically the opposite of parody. In the case of pastiche, the author uses the work of another author as tribute or praise of his or her work.
For using all this methods of appropriation Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School has been term as confusing and disorienting to the reader. The plot of the story is unstable and unreliable according to some critics. Some of the work that Kathy as an author has plagiarized is the famous Huckleberry Finn and the author Sherry Levine. After all that criticism the author was still undeterred and continues to plagiarize several more of her works including Don Quixote and Empire of the Senseless. As earlier stated she openly admitted to using other authors’ works and termed this as postmodernism.
Pixar’s Wall-E is a story about a garbage collecting robot left on Earth after the planet has evacuated. The robot meets another named newer generation robot called Eve after a while and develops since in the movie the robots have been programmed with emotion. After the robot Eve has accomplished its mission which is to find vegetation in planet Earth, it switches into standby mode. This leaves Wall-E confused by what has made the formerly cold but now friendly robot seem turned off. A space shuttle comes to collect Eve to go back to the space ship called Axiom.
The events that follow see the auto piloting robot steal the single vegetation that Eve secured from Planet Earth. This makes Eve seem like it has malfunctioned and is sent for repair and Wall-E is taken along for cleaning. Wall-E thinks that Eve is being taken for torture and attempts to go for the rescue and accidentally releases other robots that are in for repairs. The auto piloting robot sees Wall-E and Eve as rogue robots since they intend to take the plant to the captain of Axiom which is against its programmed wishes.
A scuffle follows which sees Wall-E save the plant from an exploding pod destined for Earth. They manage to take the plant to the captain and the human population is ordered back to earth since reports collected by Eve showed that the earth could again be rehabilitated. Wall-E is later brought to Earth and reactivated which makes him forget all about Eve and become just a garbage collecting robot.
Unlike in the review of the first literary work, the movie Wall-E by Pixar has utilized its appropriation freedoms. The work seems to be original and the product of the writers own creative thinking. Although the film does not uses plagiarism and other infamous methods of appropriation like parody, there are instances of pastiche throughout the film.
The film is set in the future after the earth has been abandoned and it lays in ruin. Before Wall-E was made there were other films set with the same elements of earth after apocalypse. A movie released prior to Wall-E called 28 days later has the same post apocalyptic setting. This movie shows events before and after the abandonment of Earth. Both films show how earth was a waste land that was full of garbage after it was abandoned. The main characters seem to be wandering the expanse of the ruined planet without company in a future world that is devoid of any human life.
Both films show the main character roaming the middle of what used to be a vast city; the movie plays the noise of mayhem in reference of what the city used to be. This effect brings out the difference of what the world is in the future and what it used to be. Another element of pastiche is brought out by the fact that in both movies is that there is a sole survivor or is left by the former inhabitants of the earth as in the case of Wall-E. Both movies show the main character on earth alone with no hope of being joined by anyone else, eventually though, both of the characters are joined by other characters and the plot goes on.
In both works there is an aspect of hope. The main characters are joined by other supporting characters and together they strive to survive and rebuild their environment. Wall-E collects memories of Earth like the plant Eve took to Axiom. In the movie 28 days later, West a character in the movie does and keeps an infected soldier in chains in his back yard. In Wall-E, the follower is the element of hope that the former inhabitants of earth needed so that they could return to earth. In 28 days later, the chained infected soldier is the only way the survivors had to save their city. This similarity between the two movies brings out the element of pastiche that the Pixar used when making the movie.
Both movies seem to angle for a happy ending. In the ending of the movie 28 days later the survivors see a fighter jet pass through them while the infected are dying on the streets due to starvation. In the movie Wall-E, the robots Wall-E and Eve are able to save the plant and take it to the captain who orders the space sheep to go back to earth so that the inhabitants can rehabilitate the earth to its former glory. The similar characteristics between the two movies indicate the use of pastiche in the making of the movie Wall-E.