{"id":770,"date":"2009-04-28T22:08:14","date_gmt":"2009-04-29T03:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=770"},"modified":"2009-04-28T22:08:14","modified_gmt":"2009-04-29T03:08:14","slug":"corporations-and-flat-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=770","title":{"rendered":"Corporations and Flat Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of you have commented on the parts of Shooting War<\/em> that seemed flat (the characters)\u00a0or gimmicky (the ending).\u00a0 I agree with those comments, but I also think that the book gives us a very real sense of the fine line between our current way of life and a full blown dystopia.\u00a0 As Don DeLillo points out in “The Guardian,” corporations have become a fatally important part of our society, deemphasizing the power of our own government.\u00a0 Our current market is run according to the idea of exponential growth.\u00a0\u00a0Corporations go uncontrolled, wreaking havoc on the environment and the economy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the first things we hear about in Shooting War<\/em> is “eminent domain.”\u00a0 In the dystopic America that Burns lives in, the government has the ability take private property and redistribute it to the corporations who can promise the most revenue.\u00a0\u00a0Although we don’t see this idea fully fleshed out, it is easy to imagine the horrors that would accompany this law.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In this scenerio, the government doesn’t work for the people anymore, but for the big corporations.\u00a0 Lappe shows how the government is not only ineffective,\u00a0but actually harmful.\u00a0 All the government actions we see, such as the masacre of citizens, culminates to the final action in the book.\u00a0 The last thing we hear about the government is that McCain will not run for another term, a sign that our government has failed.<\/p>\n

Getting back to the idea that the characters were flat, what did people think of Abu?\u00a0 Like most of the characters, I felt like he wasn’t very developed.\u00a0 The psychological underpinnings of a terrorist just weren’t there.\u00a0 I was hoping for more complexity from that character, but instead I got things like “of course I may die, but this isn’t about me.”\u00a0 His dialougue often seemed cheesy and\u00a0oversimplified.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But to be fair, Burns\u00a0and Crash are\u00a0not very complex characters either, so perhaps its just a flaw of the medium. I have to admit, I’m not an avid comic reader, so I’m not sure how the medium may stifle some\u00a0the psychological development of\u00a0characters.\u00a0 Unlike the terrorists in Shooting War<\/em>, DeLillo gives an eery look at terrorism: “He builds a plot around his anger and our indifference. He lives a certain kind of apartness, hard and tight. This is not the self-watcher, the soft white dangling boy who shoots someone to keep from disappearing into himself. The terrorist shares a secret and a self. At a certain point he and his brothers may begin to feel less motivated by politics and personal hatred than by brotherhood itself. They share the codes and protocols of their mission here and something deeper, a vision of judgment and devastation.”<\/p>\n

I think this passage does a better job getting at the psyche of the terrorist.\u00a0 DeLillo shows the terrorists’\u00a0intense sense of separation from the rest of the world.\u00a0 In one passage he discusses\u00a0the lifestyle of the terrorist, their vision, their motiviation, and their sense of self, which is more than we see out of Abu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of you have commented on the parts of Shooting War that seemed flat (the characters)\u00a0or gimmicky (the ending).\u00a0 I agree with those comments, but I also think that the book gives us a very real sense of the fine line between our current way of life and a full blown dystopia.\u00a0 As Don DeLillo … Continue reading Corporations and Flat Characters<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[7,38,101],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-15-graphic-novels","tag-delillo","tag-horror","tag-shooting-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":775,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions\/775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}