the groundhog day project

In the opening scene of Annihilation , which I saw for the second time today, Lomax (Benedict Wong) asks Lena (Natalie Portman) "What do you know?" She has no real answer for him. The film cuts back to him questioning her a few times throughout, and the more she tries to explain things, the less he probably understands. The lack of conclusive answers throughout the film, though, is fundamental to appreciating it. As Elizabeth Bruenig writes in the Washington Post , the story's central drama concerns the protagonists' efforts to come to terms with something they can't, as mere humans, understand. It certainly leaves a confusing impression: It was only a few days after seeing "Annihilation" that its curious moral logic began to creep, fungus-like, across my conscience. I've begun to think that the particular character of that formless, nameless danger--its eerie, morbid bounty--makes it an excellent villain for our moment. Additionally, like many a...

Briefly in class tonight we were talking about the "mean-world syndrome"—a part of George Gerbner's Cultivation Theory that tells us basically that the more we watch television, the gloomier our view of the world tends to be. Essentially, we watch TV shows or the news that includes say violence and murder and, while it's entirely unlikely for a lot of us to actually be exposed to such things in real life, we start to think it's more likely because, well, that's what we know . TV becomes reality. That got me to thinking about Groundhog Day because, well, everything gets me thinking about Groundhog Day . And, I wanted to say, basically, that Phil Connors, even pre-loop, is not a bad guy. I tend to think that fundamentally none of us are bad people. But, sometimes only certain actions of ours get a response, so those actions get repeated. And, we don't even need responses to be positive, we just need them to be . Phil's insults get more immediate resul...