Musings on art and modern audiences

  Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick : the same, but better? You know a film franchise has got it right when it can recycle its opening titles shot-for-shot and still make a good film. That’s exactly the case with Top Gun . I think many people were actually quite taken aback by how much they enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick , either more so than the original Top Gun or just as much. But what is it about these two films which has made them into such a successful duo? For anyone who’s familiar with the original Top Gun , it’s clear that Maverick is leading us through a very similar storyline. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this case, though. Oftentimes, rehashing the original storyline and just replacing the principal characters with younger versions doesn’t work at all, but that’s not the sense we get with Maverick . By reviving the original story, audiences can lean into a sense of nostalgia they might associate with the original film, putting them more at ease when they’re dealing w...

  Alice in Wonderland : strange new worlds The kookiness and nonsense of Alice in Wonderland is precisely what makes it such a wonderful story. Lewis Carroll was interested in telling the story of a young girl, and her encounters with a strange world, but also interested in redefining the ways in which we might tell a story. Alice in Wonderland does have a linear narrative structure in the sense that we move relatively logically from one scene to another. In other ways, however, the story we are being told does not necessarily have a clear direction. Alice is indeed wandering in Wonderland, following characters she meets, pulling at narrative threads with no particular aim or direction. And as readers, we’re invited to escape in a similar way. We’re invited to simply follow the story in whatever direction it might take us, and not to concern ourselves with waiting for a clear moral or structure. By the time we get to the end of the story, I’m not sure we can necessarily say we’d ...

  Divergent : YA dystopian allegories Conceptually, Veronica Roth’s Divergent works really very well for its target, young adult (YA) audience. It reframes notions of fitting into certain categories by which the rest of your life might be lived, i.e. by selecting a faction. To be “divergent” is to belong to more than one faction - in real terms, to be a rounded human being with multiple core values, rather than just one. Perhaps you can be brave and also be selfless; perhaps you can value learning and honesty at the same time. Divergent ’s faction system throws into question what it might mean to choose an identity, whether indeed we can choose our identity. How do we choose what our core values are, how can we choose who we are (on our own terms) when the world we live in seems to be concerned so deeply with fitting us into boxes?  Tris is an attractive heroine to YA readers because she doesn’t just demonstrate the teenage struggle of being faced with seemingly impossible an...