Supermassive Games’s Until Dawn tasks its players with helping eight teenagers survive a night of terror. All eight playable characters may live or die depending on the player’s choices and gameplay proficiency. Despite its intricacies, the game still relies heavily on horror movie tropes, which the characters embody, and they face different treatment based on their gender, race, and sanity. Particularly, the weapons available to them and the scenarios for their deaths and survival contribute to trapping the characters within their given characteristics and forcing them into a role that they cannot ever fully break free from. While the branching narrative style opens up the possibility for the hegemony to be challenged, the characters are so stiffly created that, in spite of the multitudes of choices and paths to go down, all the characters are confined to their archetypes and stereotypes related to their identities regardless of the player’s choices.

Libby in Limbo is a scripted narrative podcast that follows Libby as she moves back to her small hometown, gets a job as a librarian, and learns to navigate life in a small, tight-knit community. This podcast serves two main purposes: to create entertainment media about a library that does not promote harmful stereotypes about libraries and to create awareness and accessibility of scripted podcasts.

This paper examines the concept of brand-funded documentaries that center on the issue of climate change and uses Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle to better understand how the films use rhetoric in communicating their message. A rhetorical analysis was conducted using four brand films from Amazon, Corona, Patagonia and REI and the results are intended to demonstrate the best methods of persuasion and the most effective rhetoric utilized in brand-funded documentaries. Because brand-funded documentaries not only make an argument about a particular issue, in this case climate change, but also must communicate a particular brand’s values and commitments, examining the rhetoric in these films proves particularly interesting and informative both for advertisers and filmmakers. The research shows that using emotions such as fear, awe, sadness, and joy serves to complement information dissemination in documentaries and allows for stronger engagement with audiences.

Dante Alighieri’s transcendental work the Divine Comedy is masterfully appropriated in this cartoon mini-series titled Over the Garden Wall in order to explore the issue of suicidal ideation and depression while contradicting Dante. Through different textual and conceptual appropriations, the show invokes the imagery of the Divine Comedy while creating an ending that is the complete opposite of its source text, turning Dante on his head and becoming an anti-Divine Comedy. The different characters of the epic poem are reimagined for these purposes, and the result is a work of art that makes the personal into the universal.

An analysis on Evelyn Waugh's novels: Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, and Vile Bodies as well as their film and television adaptations. The paper relates all of these works to Waugh's idea that the true value and reason why students should attend university is not because their degree will earn them a massive salary, but because it allows for another four years of sequestered development away from adult society. Waugh stated that the true value of his time as an undergraduate at Oxford was because it provided him with the opportunity to drink, throw parties, discover art, etc...which therefore gave him an appropriate amount of time to grow up gradually. All of these novels, films, and television series provide substantial evidence as to why Waugh's point was correct and is still valid.

Deslanting the Lens examines the historical and sociological implications of how Asian men have been represented in popular American film. From the early days of “yellowface” to caricatures like Long Duck Dong, Asian men have been relegated to perpetual foreigner status in American cinema. This paper will explore why the portrayal of Asian men has been limited to very specific ideas about Asian and Asian Americans are in society. This analysis will also include how socio/political events have shaped and influence popular perceptions about Asians, that inform how Asian men continue to be depicted in film.

Nonfiction, Documentary, and Family Narrative:
 An Intersection of Representational Discourses and Creative Practices explores the role of personal memory, family history, and inter-generational storytelling as the basis for making a nonfiction film. The film, American Boy, tells the story of my mother’s immigration to the United States after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, opening a discussion of four generations of my family life in the context of historical events, exile, self re-invention, and identity formation. As a media producer and nonfiction author, I narrate my understanding of these events to my infant son, as a way of communicating my grandfather’s role in the revolution, my mother’s childhood, and my own mediation of my family’s trauma. Through the use of archival footage including newsreels and commercials, as well as my own archive of family photos and documents, I re-construct the existing materials to build my own associations concerning time, memory, and place. The film, as my creative practice, leads to a theoretical analysis of representational discourses which inform the work. This deconstruction of nonfiction and meta-analysis includes my study of several practitioners in the craft of non-fiction: Kati Marton, Robert Root, Primo Levi, Eva Hoffman, Patricia Hampl, Dinty W. Moore, Peter Balakian and others.

Cute As A Button explores powerlessness, vulnerability, illness and addiction all wrapped up in tender buttons and a cute, cuddly creature. Using animation, sculpture, sound and an intimate space, I surround the viewer in a saccharine nightmare, one that references the dark underbelly of the cute and the sweet. The visual and aural elements are representative of the psychological and emotional states of powerlessness, which are overcome by the act of making and exploring a medium over which I can have complete control.

This thesis utilizes theories and ideas from the field of psychology to inform intertextual and interdisciplinary readings that compare and contrast theatre and film texts. In Chapter One, I compare Carlos Fuentes' drama Orchids in the Moonlight to Nicolas Winding Refn's film Bronson in order to investigate the extent each oscillates between Carl Jung's notion of the collective unconscious and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's schizoanalytic paradigm. I found that while these vacillating aspects helped illuminate different perspectives of each text, Orchids in the Moonlight more closely represents the collective unconscious, while Bronson more robustly embodies schizoanalysis. In Chapter Two, I examine the magnitude to which the play and film version of Jean Cocteau's Orpheus illuminate his self-portrait. By analyzing the similarity and differences between how Cocteau depicts mirrors and the female personification of Death, I discovered the film version to more profoundly evoke and depict Cocteau's self-portrait. Finally, in Chapter Three, I discuss my process of writing a new play with film elements called Flooded—before providing a sample of the text, and later analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of the film contents in the play.

This purpose of this dissertation is to utilize womanism and ratchetness to determine how the actions of Tyler Perry’s Madea and Christianee Porter’s Miss Shirleen characters represent Black women’s agency through their ratchet actions. This dissertation analyzed two Tyler Perry films and five Miss Shirleen videos to determine whether their actions conveyed cultural and liberative significance beyond entertainment. This research discovered that both characters engaged in resistance to disempowering narratives through actions that embraced a radical subjectivity and subsequent dismissal of respectability politics that embraced the strengths of Black womanhood in affirming, creative, and audacious ways. This dissertation also found that ratchetness and womanism as liberative agency leave room for Black women to redefine themselves and evolve based on their own indigenous knowledge and create a language that is familiar and uplifting for themselves. Moreover, Black women can be ratchet, womanist, and respectable simultaneously regardless of class status thereby rejecting a pathologized Black womanhood.