Don't forget

Support your answers with direct refereneces (documented quotations where possible) to "Parable of the Cave" and scene descriptions from the movies. This not only serves to illustrate how you reasoned to your conclusions, but it also shows that you've read and viewed the material thoroughly.

Answer any one of the questions below:

  1. Directly compare/contrast Plato's "Parable of the Cave" with any one (or more) of the films listed on this week's schedule. And, in fact, you are not limited to that list; if you can think of other movies not on the list which fit (Blow-Up, Momento, even episodes of The Twilight Zone series will work for this), that's fine.

    Note that the films will likely not compare exactly, but some element or suggestion of Plato's dialogue needs to be present in the film you compare (for example, the film may be about limitations based on human senses or incomplete knowledge due to people observing things from one specific time/space or ____ ).

  2. In the lecture I try to show that literature and film can often have implications beyond the simple story or most obvious message/theme. For example, Plato's dialogue suggests that there is some sort of transcendent state that might be akin to godhead or heaven--a place of true sight.

    The Wachowski brothers' The Matrix takes the basic premise of "what we think is real is not really real" and adds many dimensions, many possible ideas for discussion. Discuss the reading and/or the movie focusing on any one of the discussion ideas introduced near the end of Lecture 1, and be sure give actual/concrete/detailed real-world examples whenever possible.

    Note: when I say "actual/concrete/detailed real-world examples," I mean something like this:

    Last week NBC, ABC and FOX ran a week of stories insisting that tensions in South America were about to boil over and that Americans needed to expect increased gas prices. However, other news agencies around the world, notably BBC, downplayed the impact of a political scuffle in Ecuador. Clearly both stories could not be true, and it makes one wonder if this manipulation of the media was an organized excuse to raise gas revenues while trying to lessen public protest.

  3. This is the same as Question 2 above, but if you'd rather pick a different film than The Matrix, that's fine. See what ideas from that film you can relate to real-world examples. Again, make sure they are actual/detailed examples; do not generalize.

  4. Mark Zuckerberg (facebook co-founder; have you all seen The Social Network?) commented that privacy is no longer the social norm. If you're old enough to have watched the first German and British (and to a lesser extent the first U.S. season) of Big Brother, you participated in a show that allowed internet audiences to watch a group of people sequestered in a house for months; cameras in bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms--everywhere--guarenteed these contestants would have no privicay; they were living in a fish bowl. Discuss the following trend in blurring reality with fantasy/entertainment:

    Movies such as Peter Weir's The Truman Show, Mark Nevaldene and Brian Taylor's Gamer and Daniel Minahan's Series 7: the Contenders, exaggerate current trends in reality television, where regular people (often in unrealistic situations) are the entertainment.
    Is this an indication that audiences nowadays are just voyeurs? a suggestion that privacy is a dying concept? something more enlightening or insidious? You can, if you choose, discuss television examples (Temptation Island, Survivor, Jersey Shores, etc.) for this topic, but please remember thi that this is not a good/bad, like/dislike question; it needs concrete observations and actual examples (scenes from specific shows or actual interactions, quoted exactly, from facebook or some such source).