Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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- All Subjects: Film
- Creators: College of Integrative Sciences and Arts
The United States and Great Britain were major, allied forces during the Cold War. Despite their allied positions, they had unique politico-social perspectives that greatly reflected their immediate involvement in the conflict, in addition to their respective political histories and engagement in previous wars. As the Cold War threat was a large and, in many ways, incomprehensible one, each country took certain elements of the Cold War situation and used those elements to reflect their varied political social positions to a more popular audience and the culture it consumed.
In turn, filmmakers in both countries used their mediums to make overarching political commentaries on the Cold War situation. This analysis looks at five films from those countries during the 1960s, and explores how each representation offered different, often conflicting, perspectives on how to “manage” Cold War tensions, while simultaneously reflecting their conflicted culture and political decisions. The films analyzed reveal that each country focused on contrasting perceptions about the source of the threat posed by Soviet forces, thus becoming tools to further promote their distinct political stances. While the specifics of that commentary changed with each filmmaker, they generally paralleled each country’s perspective on the overall Cold War atmosphere. The British message represented the Cold War as a very internal battle—one that involved the threat within UK borders via the infiltration of spies the tools of espionage. In contrast, the American films suggest that the Cold War threat was largely an internal one, a struggle best combatted by increasing weaponry that would help control the threat before it reached American borders.
Set in 1999, the film focuses much of its time on exploring alternative visual interpretations of a color-saturated digital space, and contrasting these with a less-vibrant analog world. This contrast intends to provide a visual differentiation between the digital and analog worlds, serving as the basis of the film’s storytelling. The built worlds privilege the emotional context of the internet, and contain an inherent thesis statement: that the digital experience can be as rich and meaningful as that of the analog, if not more so. The visual direction is the result of integrating several perspectives, including contemporary representations of the internet on film, personal observations, digital themed art installations, and experiences of others on the internet. As such, this film intended to engage with the existing body of work, and provide an artistic contribution to what already existed within the film and music video landscapes.
With this, I intend to use storytelling as a tool for conceptualizing worth. Specifically, with the centering of two Black women as romantic interests, I hope to provide a nuanced affirmation in a space where representation is often lacking.
An entire decade of films that emerged from the Hollywood system during the blockbuster era of the 1980s is often summed up as one marked by a “curious and disturbing phenomenon of children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults — films that construct the adult spectator as a child, or, more precisely, as a childish adult, an adult who would like to be a child.” If it is possible, as film theorist Siegfried Kracauer proposed, that “in recording the visible world — whether current reality or an imaginary universe — films … provide clues to hidden mental processes,” what are we to deduce about the mental processes of the American public who would pay to sit in a movie theater and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Rambo: First Blood (1982) for multiple viewings? In addressing this questions it may be helpful to turn again to Krakauer, who reminds us that a box office “hit may cater only to one of many co-existing [mass] demands, and not even a very specific one,” and that even if one could draw conclusions about the “peculiar mentality of a nation” by analyzing the “pictorial and narrative motifs” of box office hits, this “by no means implies a fixed national character.” This is a key insight because it implies a diverse national character composed of mass demands that remain unmet by the “children’s films” produced for adults which remain emblematic of Hollywood during the 1980s. In this thesis, I argue that the mainstream Hollywood film Beverly Hills Cop contradicts this notion because it employs sophisticated strategies to work as resistance against the dominant American cultural ideologies of the mid-1980s. I briefly contextualize the film in its historical and cultural setting. Then, I analyze three narrative aspects of the film. First, I begin with the various interactions Eddie Murphy’s character Axel Foley has with several “gatekeepers” throughout the film. Next, I analyze a scene in which Foley is assaulted by Sgt. Taggart of the Beverly Hills Police Department. Finally, I analyze Foley’s relationships with the supporting characters Mikey and Jenny. Beverly Hills Cop is one of the most popular and successful American films of the 1980s. Its subversiveness suggests the possibility that a host of other popular films from the decade are similarly sophisticated. This points to the need for a reexamination of a decade of American cinema that has been cast as “children’s films conceived and marketed largely for adults.”