Sunday, January 25, 2009

Critical Reading - A Powerpuff Girls Example

FL 200

In class last Wednesday we saw how even seemingly trivial texts such as a cartoon episode can yield intriguing and ultimately critically relevant questions when subjected to a special kind of "reading": critical reading.

In a nutshell, this is exactly the kind of treatment we are going to be giving literary and non-literary texts in this class.

What follow is a more organized version of the notes on the Powerfpuff Girls episode we watched.

Powerpuff Girls: The Bear Facts




After Mojo JoJo kidnaps and blindfolds him, the Mayor has to rely on the Girls’very different individual accounts of the crime to figure out exactly what happened. But he is still at a loss to explain why the Girls keep giggling at him.

1.What’s in Chemical X? ¿What kind of experiment was this?
2.Why a scientist, a middle-aged, single man, Professor Utonium, feels compelled to create “3 perfect little girls?
a.How does that relate to what other “mad” scientists did before him, such as Frankenstein, Dr. Faustus (Faust), Rotwang (Metropolis), Lex Luthor, (Superman), Herbert West (Re-Animator), Bruce Banner (Hulk), Dr. Eldon Tyrell (Blade Runner), etc.?
b.What does his experiment suggest about him, sexually, socially, politically?
c.What does his peculiar name suggest about him?
3.Why is the Mayor depicted like the old monopolist in the board game Monopoly?
a.What does that suggest about the links between the corporate world and political power?
4.The “Play-School” telephone that serves to communicate with the Powerpuff Girls sits on the Mayor’s desk. Whose idea it was to have such an infantile looking gadget to confer with super-heroes every time the city is in danger?
a.Does this item serve to underline the Mayor’s infantile qualities?
5.Why can’t the Mayor read?
6.Is Ms. Sarah Bellum really running Townsville? For whom does she work?
7.Why does the Mayor draw a picture of himself as a “He-Man”? Is his own masculinity a source of anxiety for him?
8.Why does he call for his “Mommy” when he is attacked by Mojo Jojo?
9.Why is the girls arch-enemy also a “mad-scientist” like the Professor?
10.Why is he a super-gifted monkey?
11.Why does he speak with a Japanese accent?
12.There is a fade-to-black for a minute or so while the Mayor is in captivity. Why is this? How does this work? How does it relate to the conventions guiding the fade-to-black recourse in film?
13.Each of the girls tells the story of what happened differently.
a.What visual and narrative resources are used to illustrate each narrative focalization?
b.Are the stories the “same”?
c.What happens to the other two siblings in every single one of the individual narratives?
d.What does this say about the nature of stories and the possibility of an “objective/universal truth?
14.There is a pun between the term “bare facts” and the Mayor’s condition as revealed at the end?
a.Is this pun also undermining the notion of a true objective account or total truth?
15.Buttercup asks Blossom “Why is everything always about you?” after she starts narrating her story: Are narratives always about the narrator or narrative voice?
16.Why are Ms. Bellum’s spectacular hair and body always visible but her face always out of view? Is this how power works?
17.On another moment one of the girls complains the other’s story is “not making any sense”.
a.How is “sense” generated in a story?
b.What makes a story “make sense? Who decides that?
c.Is “sense” dependent on who is it that tells the story?
d.Is “sense” dependent on conventions regarding time (when) and place (where) and narrator (who)?
18.Are Mojo’s nunchakus part of his performance as a “Japanese” style villain?
19.Why are the little girls so ultra-violent?
20.Bubbles concludes her story and begins anew tying the end of a tale to its beginning and forming a narrative loop.
a.Is this a postmodern wink in which the narration’s self-referentiality suggests that tales are ultimately only about themselves as tales, as texts, as narrative?

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