It's Hip to be Square

On Monday, one of the questions pertaining to the Music Man was "How is culture created
here (in the movie)." The little city already had their own culture when "Professor" Harold
Hill showed up. Hill brought popular culture to the small town. In our textbook (I don't
have the book in front of me and I can't remember the exact page), popular culture is
defined as "manipulative because its primary purpose is to be purchased". Hill fits
perfectly into description of popular culture because, as it is clearly seen in the movie, he
manipulates the people into wanting to sign their boys up for the band so they don't grow
up to be people who say "swell".

I liked that in the Saussure reading he writes about binary relationships. As professor
Wexler said in class, the two items in the relationship depend on each other and there
can't be one without the other. Especially with concepts similar to those of good/evil. This
kind of reminded me of one of Newton's laws: "for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction".

In de Beauvoir's "Woman as Other", I liked how she talked about women's struggle to be
equal and men's misunderstanding of women's position. What I really liked, however, is
that she pointed out that just because someone is under the name "woman", it does not
mean that all women get along with women even though we go through generally the
same problems. Some women try, like the example of the female author who wanted to
be included in the men's author group, to integrate themselves into the men's world.
What came to mind when I read this was the movie G.I. Jane with Demi Moore. She
wanted to be a Navy SEAL and to do so she had to quite literally become one of the guys.
In one scene, a female corpsman is tending to Moore and Moore tells her to not give her
any special treatment. Moore, like the female author in de Beauvoir's example, wanted to
be a part of the men's group rather the women's.

I love the business card scene in American Psycho. To the audience, it is utterly
ridiculous that they care so much about such a trivial thing, especially when all of the
cards look the EXACT same. It struck me as odd that even though they all were stock
brokers (I can't quite remember if that's what their job was. Let me know if I'm wrong!)
and that in itself is a pretty spiffy, well to do job, but all of their business cards said "vice
president". It took a high class job and reduced it back down to something completely un-
special.
Lastly, in the scene when Bateman axes (lame pun totally intended) Jared Leto's
character, I thought the song choice was hilarious. In class, people were talking about his
elaborate introduction to the song, but I thought that the actual song proved to be slightly
ironic. While Huey Lewis is telling us that it's "Hip to be Square", Bateman is doing a
very "un-squarish" thing by murdering Leto and then screaming at the body while he's
still hacking away.