Paper 1

Ob'session (n)______________________________________________________________

a persistent preoccupation, idea or feeling

Where does your mind go when you think about movies or television or magazines or music? Which images or sounds or quotations or clips haunt you or tease you or will not let you go? Movies are my ghosts. I keep watching John Ford's The Searchers or Francois Truffaut's Day for Night. My husband shows every single class he teaches Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One friend has saved for years the 'chocolate' issue of Cook magazine. Another dates his growing up from the moment he watched on the television in his elementary school classroom the Challenger crash.

 

The purpose of this paper is to allow you to investigate an event or artifact, created or brought to you by the media, that possesses you. An investigator's first question is "Why?" And no good investigator stops with the first or the easiest answer. In this paper you should question, probe and analyze. I include below some aspects of our relationships with media productions you might want to consider in your paper. This is not a game plan for your paper. Use these questions and categories as a stimulus to free-writing and brainstorming.

 
  • beginnings: How does each encounter with your obsession begin? Do you call up or revisit your obsession? Or does it call you? Do you want to escape your obsession or possess it forever? Or are you obsessed by the memory of your obsession rather than its tangible presence? You and your obsession are facing each other in a darkened room. How does the encounter progress?

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  •  presence: I recorded Day for Night on a video cassette years ago. The label on the cassette is faded, and its innards rattle wearily when I play it. In places, the picture wavers where the tape is wearing thin. Does your obsession have physical presence? How does it taste, smell, feel, sound?

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  • comparisons (i): Why is your obsession a movie/scene/TV show/photograph/ sports event/etc. and not any other production of the media? What drew you to the genre of your obsession?

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  • comparisons (ii): Why this particular movie/scene/TV show/photograph/sports event/etc. and not the thousands of others in the same category available to you? What specifically appeals to you in your obsession that none of the others possess?

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  • aesthetics: How beautiful is your obsession? How does beauty constitute part of its appeal? Where does the beauty lie? How is that beauty created for you, the consumer, by your obsession's creator/s?

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  • associations: With what do you associate your obsession. A place? A person? A particularly sad or happy time in your life? How might this/these associations contribute to your obsession?

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  • stories: Does your obsession tell a story? How important is that story to your attachment to your obsession? Or are the performers the source of your obsession? Or a mix of the two?

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  • changes: Our relationship to an obsession changes over time. Did you first associate your obsession with a friend or family member and then begin to discover new angles to your obsession as time passed? How do the changes in your relationship to your obsession map changes in your own attitudes or in the way you choose to live your life.

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    Definition from The Collins English Dictionary (Glasgow 1986)

     

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