If this was a love story....

I've decided to rewrite "Translations" and turn it into a love story. So here goes:

If this was a love story, Manus would be the main, hunky character who is drop-dead gorgeous but still a bit reserved and mysterious. He's incredibly caring, but he has a twisted and unknown past that causes him to be scared to fall in love.

Maire would be the overly-confident woman who flirts with everyone and never settles down until the story has resolved and she randomly finds someone. 

Hugh would be the old man that everyone tolerates but who never actually adds anything to the story except for 5 minutes of inspired wisdom that blows everyone's minds. 

Sarah would be the secretly beautiful woman who everyone just passes over but then she takes off her big, dorky glasses at the end of the movie and BOOM! she's the love of Manus' life!

And everyone else wanders around filling the space in the movie!

Roll credits!

Sisterhood of the Traveling HeLa Cells

During class on Monday, I was struck by a memory of a scene in the second Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie that reminded me of the overlap of emotional and scientific ties to the HeLa cells. In the scene, Bridget is in Turkey at an archaeological dig, and she is asked by her leader when a person's death stops being an emotional thing and becomes something to study scientifically. Bridget's answer is that that transition occurs when the last person who knew the deceased person dies. Her leader questions her answer, but it is not elaborated too much further in the scene.

This reminded me of Henrietta's life because that transition never happened. She became a scientific being before she was even dead! Her children were never even given a chance to mourn her before her body was being slashed open in hopes of recovering her immortal cells.

This book emphasized most to me the importance of a mourning period. If that period is abandoned or skipped, it will have to creep back up eventually. If there's one thing I've learned in my life, emotions have a way of finding you no matter what you try to do to evade them. It's best to just deal with them as soon as possible, but Henrietta's family wasn't given that chance.

Man I feel like a woman!

In Satrapi's book, she portrayed her mother as a strong woman. However, I noticed in the movie that her mother was much stronger in one scene of the movie than in the book in particular. When her mom was confronted at the grocery store by the man who threatened to rape her, she shouted back at him in front of Marjane. In the book, we only see the mother after the traumatizing experience when she is in tears talking to her husband. Also in the book, Marjane was not with her mother when the offensive man confronted her mother. The mother tells the husband that she yelled at the man in the book, but she is also crying, and in our culture, we associate tears with weakness. Marji's mom proves to her daughter that women don't have to be weak even if they experience emotions. Bravo, Mrs. Satrapi!

Persepolis

I'm going to comment on the absurdity of some of the things that occurred in Marjane's life. They all, of course, make sense in the story, but they are still absurd. Therefore, they deserve to be commented on.

First, Marjane pretended to smoke pot during her adolescence when in fact she wasn't even inhaling anything. Obviously, it isn't a bad thing that she wasn't partaking in these illegal actions (at that point in her life, at least) but it's still bad that she felt obligated to pretend. This just shows that peer pressure exists everywhere, not only in America. Wherever there are teenagers, there will always be peer pressure and kids succumbing to it.

Secondly, I admired her father for allowing her to marry Reza even though he knew it wouldn't work out. It must have taken a lot for him to watch his baby girl enter into a marriage that he knew would be ending in the next few years. But he was right, she needed to realize on her own that it wasn't going to work. It was smart of him to at least have the meeting with Marjane and Reza before they were married that forced Reza to admit that he would allow her to divorce him if she so wished. But still, it's absurd that he couldn't at least warn her that she was making a mistake. Oh well, though.

Here's a little video of my favorite way to say "that's absurd" from one the funniest and most ingenious musicals ever written.