It's the Eyes

   So what if Gregor wasn't an insect? What would happen if he had turned into, say, a fluffy puppy? Assuming no one in the family had any allergies, would they react differently? Gregor's appearance has a lot to do with how they react. Yes, as a puppy they still wouldn't be looking at the same Gregor anymore, but puppies aren't so bad. People love puppies. There are shelters and adoption and all that. Nobody adopts bugs. Why? Well there's a ton of them, for one. Also, they aren't very pretty (no offense if they are any literate bugs out there). Seriously, though, bugs - with the eyes and the antennae and being far less closely related to humans than puppies - are not so cute. Giant bugs are even worse, right? You can't avoid the eyes or anything. How many scary bug movies are there in the world? A ton. And then another ton on top of that, so really it's two tons. And how many scary puppy movies are there? ...yeah see? 'puppy' and 'scary' don't really belong in the same sentence. Unless there's a 'not' somewhere in there. I mean really, there's even a kids' television show about a giant dog. Clifford the Big Red Dog. Clifford has all sorts of genetic problems, what with the being ginormous, red, AND GINORMOUS. Yet Clifford is still super cute. Everybody loves Clifford. And then there are the giant bug movies. Note how A Bug's Life still had normal sized bugs. The scary bugs are in Lord of the Rings, Eight Legged Freaks, Empire of the Ants, not to mention how aliens in scary movies always look like bugs. E.T. was a little more humanoid, no?

     This concept is pretty straightforward. We fear what we don't know. Stuff that looks more familiar and more like us isn't as scary. For example, racism on the whole, also tomatoes were thought to be poisonous due to their being red (and yet Clifford gets away with it?), also the entire concept of aliens, and also lots of people find bugs unnerving. Ahem Harry Potter, anybody?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUNg9v5TQ5Q

  I'm imagining something fluffy and adorable with the wet nose and big eyes. He used to be human and his name is Gregor. As a puppy. Nobody's scared of puppies (okay I was, but not anymore!). The Samsas certainly wouldn't hate to look at Gregor. If he goes bump in the night, would they really be so unnerved? A scratch at the door to be let into the living room? Jumping on his mothers' lap for affection? Who could say no to that wagging tail? The story would be completely different, and also lose it's point. I don't think this story is just for the sake of weird. It shows how Gregor's family valued what was on the outside. They got a paycheck out of Gregor. He was as normal and boring as can be imagined before his metamorphosis. Now he looks a little different. But what do you do with a giant bug? They don't do that thing where they look into his eyes and just know deep down that it's still him. Nope, they probably don't want to look at him long enough to think about it. Sorry, buddy, but looks still mean something. Also, Grete. Anybody notice how at the very end of the book, her parents look at her and instead of seeing the strong, responsible,  independent girl she has exhibited herself to be, they see a pretty girl who needs a husband? Anybody? It's all about her beauty, and Gregor's lack thereof. Even Gregor understands that he's kinda gross. He has to be gross or there is no story. That clip we saw Wednesday where Kafka couldn't decide what Gregor would turn into was ridiculous for just one more reason. Kangaroos are too cute. Bananas, we are pretty comfortable with. It had to be something bizarre, not something some guys with a scary number of knives stuffed up his sleeve thinks of as a friend. Gregor Samsa in his present state is nobody's friend. Nobody lines up to pet him. And nobody ever will. Not even his family, apparently.

Also for fun, I give you bugs... (there's some blood if you're at all squeamish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaWCkQzKopo

and cute puppies...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpl-IkGg3tI

D'awwwwwwww

Endings

Upon finishing Mrs. Dalloway and The Sun Also Rises, I felt like both of them were really anti-climactic. Both books ended in an extremely familiar place. While I like that sort of ending, I feel like the point is to show how the characters are in an almost identical place as they were when the story started, and be such different people. The goal is to show just how much has actually changed, usual internally, and make that change stark against a familiar backdrop.
Mrs. Dalloway ended with all of the Bourton characters back together for Clarissa's party. We finally got to meet all of these extremely influential people and see how they compare to Clarissa's view of them in the past and how they affected her when she was younger. Clarissa is standing in this party with all of her old friends beside her, contemplating suicide, and then she doesn't. She goes back to society and is almost completely unchanged from where she started that morning.
The Sun Also Rises ends in exactly the same place it started. Jake and Brett are in a cab driving who knows where and talking about the hopelessness of their situation. Neither of them have any new opinions about it and appear to be unwilling to change anything about their situation for the better. They also don't appear to be any more resigned to the facts than they were before. The dialogue exchanged is even the same as before.
With both of these books, the end didn't feel like any sort of resolution for me. The characters end the story with exactly the same problems as they started and the entire book seems to serve the sole purpose of explaining what the problem is and offering no solution to it.  I think this is really representative of the feelings of hopelessness associated with the post-war world, but it isn't typically what I enjoy about a story. I always want there to be something satisfying about the end, where something has significantly changed in the situation. For Mrs. Dalloway, it seems like the whole point is that nothing exactly changed for Clarissa. The same thing really goes for Jake as well. He and Brett are still far from resolving their relationship issues at the end of the book, but we went on this great journey through Europe with them.
I think this in general is a theme with 20th century novels. The point is not to have a conflict and a resolution, but to show nothing but conflict, really. There was so much conflict that these novels aren't about happy endings, but realistic ones. Fiction helps us understand things that are going on in the world that are hard to deal with in our own lives. Some character can screw it up for us and we suffer no consequences while still watching how everything plays out. Since we know Virginia Woolf committed suicide, I have to wonder just what Hemmingway's problem was.

Richimus

     So, I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, even after finishing The Hours a while ago, but I wanted to talk about the Richard/Septimus character(s). There's obviously Richard Brown, who shares the name Richard but is similar to Septimus, but there's also his dad, Dan Brown (not the mystery author). For a while, I thought Dan was supposed to be Richard. He's got that general happiness and simplistic lifestyle. He's completely in love with his wife and can't see how unhappy she is. Laura seems to be an ideal to him. He tells the story of how his idea of her got him all the way through the war and back. He has such an abstract idea of this girl he had never really met, but yet he decides to marry her. Similarly, we aren't entirely sure just what about Clarissa Richard's in love with in Mrs. Dalloway.
     We talked about how Clarissa marries Richard because he's the 'safe' choice for her. At the same time, he's in love with her in a way that's not obvious from Clarissa's point of view, or anyone else's. I almost wish that scene where Richard can't quite bring himself to say he loves Clarissa had come up in the movie. The movie characters, however, would not have fit that bill as well. Dan is very open and gushes about his family and how happy he is all the time. I felt like that open gushing would have made it harder for Laura to tell her husband how she was feeling. She really does seem to want to make her family happy (ex. the cake).
     It's pretty obvious that Laura doesn't share the same enthusiasm and love of life that her husband does. At the beginning, she is resting and  sounds tired. She also seems to be forcing a smile for Dan's birthday. Then she almost commits suicide and it's pretty clear that she's an extremely troubled woman. We learn later that she left her family, which is perhaps a much better thing to do, even if Richard's poetry is all about 'that monster'.
     Richard Brown, contrary to what the name suggests, is closer to Septimus. There's the obvious reason of his suicide, but there's also the fact that he is sick. His life is dictated by doctors and pills and Clarissa's visits and her nagging. Septimus' life was also dictated by his caretakers. They both needed people to take care of them, so I'm not saying this aspect was all in their heads, but they both hated the fact that they were dependents. I believe that Richard killed himself for similar reasons as Septimus. Not only did the filmmakers copy that scene almost directly from the book, but Richard even said that his life had lost meaning. He wanted Clarissa to move on.
     Between these two characters, I think we get several aspects of both Richard and Septimus all smushed together and then split differently. Richard Brown was not in the war and is able to explain his unhappiness. Dan Brown has the war experience and the fabulous wife (in his eyes), but he also completely falls apart after she leaves (as we hear Laura hint at later).
     Where some critics argue that Virginia Woolf's whole novel was about making people understand shell shock and recognize it as a real disease, The Hours didn't address that specific problem at all. I didn't think that necessarily took anything away from the story. I was just different and had a different focus. It's their prerogative and I actually liked what they did with the story. For more than half of the movie, however, I was struggling to figure out where the movie was going. That came mostly from not realizing exactly which movie characters were taken directly from the book characters. After finishing the movie, however, I really liked it. I think reading the book beforehand helped me figure things out to some extent, but The Hours really stands on its own.