Context seems to be a much more important term then most of us may have known. For instance today in class we saw the videos of Tom and Jerry, the whole mood/picture/feeling changes when you are told the entire story behind the clip you see.
In Shivers its obvious there are multiple ways to view what is going on. The perspective that shows this awful creature living within a human and driving them to sexually assault others does not portray a positive image. Yet in class we discuss whether at the end this “creature” really was negative once everyone became infected. I would argue that even though the people of the community seemed “normal” or “functional” after the entire community was infected, they aren’t in fact normal, therefore to me this is not a positive outcome.
When I think about the pattern in which a person spreads this infection, it’s anything but positive. These sexual assaults take place against a persons will, and this isn’t even taking in to consideration the actions that some of the people take who are infected against those who are not. Looking at the character Nick he murders the scientist because the scientist is trying to save himself from this creature burning his face. He has no sense within himself to look outside of the situation and realize that killing a man over this “thing” is not the right thing to do, which shows abnormality, especially considering what this “thing” is. In this instance we can say for sure, that this creature is not doing any good for anyone in this situation.
I suppose the bottom line of it all is that it can depend on what point we look at the community. If we were to only look at the end of the movie where everyone leaves the community looking great all as friends, then yes we could say this movie and whatever events may have taken place had a happy ending. In order to come to this ending though, the whole movie taken in to account, I could not say these people are “functioning normally.” This goes for multiple other scenarious as well. We talked about the movie “How to Lose a Guy In Ten Days,” if we didn’t understand the context behind why Kate Hudson acts the way she does all we would see is a crazy girl in the movie who has no ideas on how to handle men. But this of course is not the perspective we are to take. We are to understand why she is acting the way she is instead of simply believing she is just
This could be a stretch, but bringing Austins writing into the swing of things, he discusses that we read things based on how they are portrayed (ex: punctuation, capital letters etc.) this is how we as the audience understand what is being said to us. If we look at Shivers only from the end, these people are portrayed happy and “normal” but when you look deeper (when Austin brings in the idea of whether what is being said has intent of being truthful) we are not so sure that the people of the community are “normal” or even happy for that matter, because is this new being really them?
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