After Life and La Captive, the two films that I watched in class over the past two weeks seem to me to be very similar, both in subject matter and in execution. At a first glance these two films don’t seem to have all that much in common. With After Life focusing on how precious our memories are and what memory, when one were forced to do so, stands out among the rest as your most important, and La Captive spending it’s narrative following the crumbling relationship of a young couple who are enabling each other to live an unhealthy life there doesn’t seem to be any one thing that stands out like a beacon to the viewer to point to them being similar. But as we saw them both during our ten week quarter on the writings of Marcel Proust and the topic of memory I find myself inclined to believe that there are, in fact, many connections between the two films and, most likely, similar connections between every film and extra text that we have been assigned to view and read during this spring quarter.

One of the most present connections that I found linking After Life and La Captive together is that of the human placement and understanding of value and what things mean to us. In After Life  the whole goal of the two week long session is for each recently deceased person to place the most value on one specific memory and this placement of value varies in many ways. For some of the residents, the most valuable memory was when they felt the happiest, often when they were in the presence of a loved one but for others, mostly those who fail the initial memory selection process and stay on as caretakers, the value is harder to place. There is talk amongst these people of their life possibly lacking value or that picking one specific memory does a disservice to other, equally valuable aspects of their life. Eventually, the placement of value comes back to happiness, though containment may be a more appropriate term, when the protagonist chooses his one memory to be the memory of him looking at the people that were most important to him, the other caretakers. He felt happiest there and to the protagonist, true happiness lies in remembering the people that you shared your happiness with.

This connection can be seen in a very different light in La Captive where the couple, a paranoid man and a secretive woman, place the value of their lives in aspects separate from happiness, like control and escape but these placements of value are proven to be false and their true placement of value is revealed to also be that of happiness, or, even more appropriately, contentment.  The relationship, as toxic as it may seem, has worked for this couple so far because they have accepted the oddities of the other, albeit more the woman accepting that mans oddities, in order to lead a content life of knowing that things are unhealthy but feeling comfortable in the environment that they have built together. Unfortunately this too is a false placement of value on the couples part, specifically seen when the man decides that he can longer trust his partner and breaks it off and later when the woman, after getting back together with the man, swims out to sea and drowns. Both of them realize that the relationship is bad and both of them get to a breaking point in the personalities and lifestyles that just can’t allow them to continue the facade that they have created for themselves. It appears to me that both the man and the woman, though again more so the man, strive for comfort but only comfort for themselves and have little care of the other, though they often deny this fact. When it becomes to much the act out in an attempt to keep what comfort they have but because their sense of value has been lost due to the steady decline of their relationship they act out very irrationally and this sadly leads to the death of the woman.

What I am trying to explain is that both of these films put forth the idea that the most valuable thing in life, more so than happiness, comfort or success is who you spend your time with and how you spend that time with them. Whether we like it or not we are defined by those around us, unless we are alone and even then we may begin to draw definitions of ourselves and because of this it is incredibly important to be aware of who you spend your time with and how. La Captive shows that this couple doomed themselves by not accepting the fact that they were a bad combination to spend time together and After Life shows the bittersweet nature of the protagonist only finding the people he truly cared for after he had already died, and that because he didn’t spend enough time truly being where he was and with who he was in life, he was unable to choose the memory that best represented these feelings for him.

These connections may be widely inaccurate but I found it interesting to discuss nevertheless.

I am six years old. I am leaving my last day of class. I am in kindergarten. I am leaving kindergarten. I am becoming older, but I don’t want to. Walking down the hallway at Brown’s Point Elementary near the first grade wing of the school I see my friend Nate walking in his class line opposite mine. We always leave school in our class lines and separate once we get out to the parking lot. I look at Nate’s first grade class and how cool and tall they look and wonder how tall I will be when I’m a first grader. I take the blue school bus home most days. The bus isn’t actually blue but has a laminated paper with the word BLUE on it in blue print. I always wanted to take the orange bus home because that was my favorite color but that would take me up the hill towards Federal Way and the Aquatic center where I took swimming lessons. So I took the Blue School bus with my friend Matt. He lives several houses down from mine in Brown’s Point, WA. Matt is my best friend and, in the sport of being six, I often tell him fables (lies) about my life before coming to kindergarten, somehow convince that I anyone that the five years of my life prior to kindergarten are the most eventful years anyone has ever experienced.

I was born in Hawaii and lived there until I was four years old. I use this to tell all the kids in my class (mostly Matt) that I am interesting and that they should be my friends. I tell them that I am thousands of years old and am a pirate who washed up on the shore of Brown’s Point. I use a fake shipwreck sculpture that a house down the road from my parent’s house has in their front yard to solidify my story. To everybody I meet, that boat is what I took to get to Washington in August of 1998. To me at times, that boat is what I took to get to Washington in August of 1998.

I get off of the school bus at the bus stop in front of my house and walk with Matt up to the front door. He stays for dinner but only eats part of the bun of his hamburger and barely touches his corn. We play Bomberman 2 on the Super Nintendo that my father had hooked up in my room earlier that year. We jump up and down in frantic spurts, unaware of how to play this video game but loving it all the same. Matt walks down the street to his house and I eat his leftover hamburger (without the top bun with a bit mark in it of course).

My mom asks me how my last day of school was. I enjoyed it even though the other kid named Matt in my class kicked the teacher for some unknown reason and had to go to the principal’s office. I tell my mom that I don’t want to be in first grade in the fall and that I would rather stay in Ms. Nelson’s kindergarten class forever. I tell her that I want to be six years old forever. I tell her that I want to be a 3000-year-old pirate from Hawaii that sailed here on the boat at that house by the park. I cry and my mother is quiet. She tells me of a time when I was two, when she was putting away laundry and watching the old black and white version of the movie titanic on silent. She tells me of how I cry out when the men on the titanic begin to jump into the water. I yell, “Don’t jump in the water! It’s too cold! The daddies are jumping in the water and it’s too cold!”

My mother tells me about how she believes that I might have been one of those men on the titanic before I was born as Austin. At the start of first grade, I begin to tell my friends that before I was Austin, I was a 3000-year-old pirate who sailed around the Pacific Ocean, eventually landing in Brown’s Point and founding the town. The kids that I tell my story to are not like Matt. They don’t play games like Bomberman 2 or like The Land Before Time (The Land Before Time is a great film and I cannot believe that any child did not love it as much as I did it is ridiculous). The kids that I tell my story to don’t know how to react so they laugh. Not at me I think but at my story, as though I was telling a funny joke. For the rest of first grade I pretend to be the class clown. For the rest of first grade the kids keep telling me to stop making sound effect noises and star wars jokes.

Wesley Anderson, professionally referred to as Wes Anderson, has been writing and directing films since his early childhood and has been known by the public since the late 1990’s. He has won several awards for his screenplays of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and is well known for his quirky narrative style that emphasizes on uncomfortable truths in both plot structure and movement. For example, if a character in one of Wes Anderson’s films has to run down a long hallway it will take an uncomfortably long amount of time to do so.

Wes Anderson is well known among the public eye, even more so now due to the mass success of The Grand Budapest Hotel, mainly for his unique way of filming but also for his very common recasting of actors who have been in his previous films. For example, the actor Owen Wilson, whom Anderson met while attending college, has been cast in a whopping six out of Anderson’s eight full-length films while the actor Bill Murray has appeared in an even more impressive seven out of eight of Anderson’s works. Other commonly recast actors include: Adrien Brody (3 films), Willem Dafoe (3 films), Jeff Goldblum (2 films), Anjelica Houston (3 films), Harvey Kietel (2 films), Edward Norton (2 films), Jason Schwartzman (5 films), Tilda Swinton (2 films) and Luke Wilson (3 films).

Wes Andersons films are also widely known to be comically in a witty and, at times, very dry sense relying on over dramatization and bluntness to deliver most of the laughter. This style of writing is far out of the norm for a “popular” film maker and can definitely shy people away from his films at first but it is indeed worthwhile to get used to the formula as it has worked on so many occasions.

Recently, Anderson has been working on a multitude of short films after the release of The Grand Budapest Hotel but is rumored to be starting on another feature in the not too distant future. Regardless of what the film maker creates next, it is certain to be well attended by the public is if follows his recent success pattern as it should be.

This is the hardest class that I have taken at Evergreen and I couldn’t be happier to say that. I will miss this class a lot. To be completely honest I probably shouldn’t have taken this class because of the amount of work it required which was bound to clash with my work schedule and my scattered attempts at creating an independent lifestyle but I’m glad that I did because, while I’m exhausted after the ten weeks of this program, I feel like I have grown immensely and have a better grasp on how to plan my priorities.

My favorite thing about this class was the seminar time that we had on Monday and Wednesday. I felt like seminar was crucial to my understanding of Proust and I even started reading Proust out loud during the last two volumes because it seemed to help so much in seminar. I also really agree with what Stacey said on the last day of class about how this is an incredibly diverse program and I think that can really be seen in our seminar groups. I have been in seminar style classes a lot in the past five years and never before have I had a seminar that was both this diverse and this interesting. Usually if a group is too different things are too quiet or too chaotic but I feel like our seminar had a perfect balance of agreement and disagreement.

I plan on beginning a full read of In Search of Lost Time, hopefully getting through a full volume every 3-6 months (though I wouldn’t be surprised if it took a full year for each volume). I really enjoy Proust’s writing and I think it’s a great addition to the other authors (Sartre, Beckett, Hemingway, Woolf, Plath, etc.) that I plan on reading more of in the near future. I think I would have passed up on Proust if it wasn’t for this class, seeing the 4,000 pages of text and feeling like there just wouldn’t be enough time, but if I can get through nearly 2,000 pages in ten intense weeks I can definitely get through the full read in several years, if not less. I feel like I’ve learned more in this class than I am aware of, and I look forward to figuring out just what I have learned from this program.

I love music. I love to listen to music, to play music, to read about music. Oftentimes, I surround myself with music so much that I forget that it’s such a huge part of my life. Recently, I’ve been taking surveys online, for both my enjoyment and to make a small sum of money and oftentimes these surveys ask similar questions. Questions like: “How many times to you shop for groceries in a month?” or “How many video game consoles do you own?”. One question seems to come up more often then not goes like this: “How many hours a week do you spend listening to music?”.

I’m never able to give a truly accurate answer to this question, not one nearly as accurate as how many trips I take to the grocery store in a month at least (it’s two). After being presented with the question several times and responding inconsistently with answers ranging from “8 hours” to “around 20?” I decided to actually measure my time spent listening to music and my hour count was a bit surprising. It turns out that I listen to around 55 hours of music a week (at least for the week that I measured it). I’m sure this data would be far more accurate if I averaged it with other weeks of recorded time listening and if my measurement were exact (I mostly rounded up or down the minutes to 5 minute intervals) but I feel like it’s in the ballpark of how much time I usually spend listening to a tune in the background somewhere.

After realizing that I spend over two days of my 7-days-in-a-week life cycle listening to roughly 100 or so artists on my iPod and (seldom) on the radio I started to think about when and why I spent so much time doing this. It’s not like I spent all these hours only listening to music. In fact, a part from listening to calming music every once in a while at night to fall asleep, I rarely just sat down to listen to music. The one exception being the hour I gave to listen through Sufjan Steven‘s new album Carrie & Lowell, which had just released several days prior to my experiment. Overall, I spent most of my time (around 35 hours of it) listening to music on the way to school, from school, or during work (I spend my weekends delivering pizzas to the friendly folk of Northeast Tacoma). I asked myself why I listened to music so much in the car, instead of listening to the outside world or just basking in the silence of being alone and at work. Habit, is my guess. I do love music but more so I love comfort and having the freedom to choose specifically what I want to hear during the course of my day is a very comfortable thing to do that, after a while, just becomes my usual response to sitting in a car and driving somewhere. While I love music, I felt like I was missing out on being present in the world and have decided to roll my window down and listen to what is outside every once in a while. I feel like that can be music too, in a cheesy what is life sort of way, and I want to see how a release from that part of technology effects my feelings.

I’m sure that I have many other habits and hobbies that take up more time that I think that they do and ,though I don’t know what they are yet, I intend to find out.

– Austin

At the beginning of my reading of Swann’s Way, when I first started to hear of M. Swann, I was intrigued. He was mysterious and unorthodox, straying away from high society with such care that almost nobody knew that he was living multiple lives. In actuality, this type of person and this type of lifestyle is not all that uncommon (at least in my experience) but it was the way that we heard about M. Swann through the eyes and ears of the narrator that made him more interesting to me that other people that I have read about and met in the two decades of my existence. It was wonderful hearing about him through the inaccurate conversation held by the narrators family and by the narrators own recollections and assumptions but when the novel transitioned into Swann In Love and we began to see more detail about M. Swann’s life I have to admit that I was disappointed. Not in the novel, but in M. Swann himself.

M. Swann doesn’t appear to be honest with himself in really any aspect. Maybe this is because it’s not really told through his point of view or maybe that is just how people acted in Parisian society of that time but M. Swann does not appear to be this unconventional man that we had been told he was. Instead, M. Swann appears to be no better than his high class associates and possibly even worse. I say this because while the high class of Paris that we are told about in the novel appear to be rather manipulative and impersonal at least they are being this way to each other and are aware of the intricate details of high class social politics. M. Swann, on the other hand, is acting this way towards everybody that he finds interest in, most of whom are of a lower class than his own. It seems poor of his character to interact with people this way because, as it appears to me, M. Swann is not separating himself from high society because he actually enjoys the company of middle and low class citizens but because he can get more of what he wants from them and with far less accountability.

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