Theme

Today in class we continued on with theme, picking up right where we left off yesterday. Students had to pick a topic from the list created yesterday of abstract vs concrete topics, then create a theme from that topic. After, students had to revise that theme and make it more specific through interrogatives. Using each group's theme, the class determined what made a good theme: namely the specificity clarity balance of good writing and the relevance of that theme to the film. The class moved on to the day's notes about what determines a theme's significance, which included what academic lens we were using to evaluate the text (feminist, economic, historical, etc), its impact on external elements like trailers, and the magnitude with which the theme appears in the text. We noted that magnitude can mean either quantity or quality, and that one important scene may be just as significant as a theme spread across multiple scenes in the text.

The interesting thing about theme for me is that themes can be made from any film, even the comedic ones. I've been looking into watching Blazing Saddles, a Mel Brooks film parodying the mid-west, for my Be Reel blog, and all I've heard about it so far has praised it for deconstructing the midwest genre, dealing with topics like racism, and being hilarious. This seems to be a line satire straddles: being humorous and having serious themes dealing with serious topics. In fact the point of satire is often to emphasize the irony inherent in some topic in order to make a statement about it. Even other, less serious, more ridiculous, types of comedy has themes to it. For instance, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the theme, "Life was dirty, superstitious, and disease ridden in medieval times" is present in some subtle way throughout the whole silliness.