Final Paper

Last Paragraph Add-On




Ryan Newcomb
Midterm Paper
Professor Wexler
Film as Literature
Blame Mom
As far back as we can remember mothers have been the main form of a Childs upbringing. This in my opinion is what I am going to argue is the birth of an ego. Mothers hold high standards for their sons mainly more than their daughters and this is why they form such an ego. The mother regards the son much higher than any other boy and often times much higher than the father like figure. This nourishment of the ego makes it large and in a child can cause severe harm in later adulthood. I will offer several texts in which the overbearing love of the mother is what drives the enlargement of the ego in multiple men.
I am not Jewish but I have my own ego. My mother was not the overbearing type and my ego is not a problem, but I do a little dance whenever I win an argument or am proven right. Ego is not always an unhealthy thing; we all need a little amount of ego to reassure our own beliefs and aspirations. Ego should help us rise against those who try to put us down, but it should not lift us up above those who are upon equal ground as us. It is a difficult balance that is hard to maintain.
In Portnoys Complaint we saw that the Jewish mother saw her son as a real fine man, even at a younger age he was the man of the house more so than the husband. The mother cared after the child and made sure that he grew up to be a fine man and not do things like eat French fries. When a child is put under this weight of love than he thinks himself truly greater than any other guy, he sees this in his father. The father is the only other man that is looking for attention from mother, and when mother pays more attention to the son than the father it sends an image to the child that he is valued and hence more important than the husband. When this love is placed deeply within the child at an early age, the man can grow up to be quite the egotist.
In This Side of Paradise, the son continually talked about his mother and how she was so loving and wonderful to him, though he was not Jewish and it was not really his customs, she was the reason for his ego in adulthood. I can tell this by when he mentions the mother in such a high esteem, we all love our mothers but putting her up on a pedestal and telling others that he would be nothing without her is something that I find quite creepy. Yes I love my mother but that isn’t the point. The point is that I don’t have an ego and people in the tales that we have studied in class do, I just found a correlation between overbearing mothers and ego whores. This Side of Paradise is a prime example of an ego. Amory sees himself above other not only because his family’s’ riches but also because he just plain thinks that he is better than others in all ways shapes and forms. This ego in him is not such a healthy thing in the eyes of most people, not his rich friends, and comes from a single prime source. Before he knew money, before he knew power, he knew love. He knew the love from his mother and knew that if his mom paid so much more attention to him than his dad than he might be special as well. The mothers love is what gave birth to the love of the finer things and thinking that he deserved them. Ego is a powerful thing and can harm one ’s self and others.
The mother can be a powerful form of attraction that breeds ultimately into ego, and one case of this is in the first three Star Wars movies. I am referring the chapters not the sequences in time in which they were released. Anakin Skywalker was a young boy trapped on Tatoonie and was enslaved by a cruel bug like creature. He knew nothing of his father but he knew the love of his mother. The love of his mother was the only thing driving him to be free from his slave hellhole on the planet in which he loathes so very much. After he gets off that planet and realizes that he is a Jedi, he still yurns for the love of his mother and her reassurance. His ego slowly forms as he evolves from a young boy into a stupid teenager. The love for his beloved Padme and the knowledge that one day his mother and him will be united is what drives him to be a particularly spectacular Jedi. There is a powerful scene in the second film in which Anakin loses his mother and through his own anger kills all the sand people. From the men to the little sand children, he kills them all. The rage of not being able to have his mother’s love drives him into thinking he is better. This is kind of a stretch but when you look at his character development throughout him living with his mother to her demise, there is a huge growth in his own ego. This giant ego forms into his overconfidence and his abilities with the force. The third film ultimately leads to his downfall as his ego drives him to turn to the dark side and kill all the young Jedi children. (He has a thing for killing kids apparently) This overgrown ego thinking that he is better than his Jedi masters ultimately leads to his defeat by his previous master Obi-One-Kenobi. Even in defeat all Anakin thinks about is ruling the universe with an iron fist because the Jedi were weak.
Anakin’s ego ultimately led to his defeat, and same is with the case of This Side of Paradise. Both are prime examples of how an ego can kill. Killing not in the literal term but in the general term for life’s failures is what I am referring to. Amory lost everything he had, from his riches to his lifestyle; everything was gone due to his ego, the same with Anakin. Anakin lost his wife, missed the birth of his two children, and his debonair looks all in one fell swoop. His personal lust for power through his thoughts of superiority is what led to him looking like he got in a fight with an oven. Ego is never a good thing and will always lead to such tragedies, so my argument is blaming mother on this. I have given ample evidence to show that mothers are a leading cause in creating such egos. I am not trying to imply that mothers should not praise their sons, but knowing when their sons have to be shown reality is a quality that all mothers should use. A swift smack in the face with reality could have saved these men from their ultimate demise, and it saddens me to know that such tragedies will be forever told in film and literature.
Finding the birth of a person’s ego is not an easy task to accomplish, but I am here to state that having an over loving mother will help the process of an enlarged ego along. Let me make myself perfectly clear that I am not saying that egos only come from over loving mothers, and I am also not saying that any loving mother can cause this damage. I am saying that a mother with an over obsession with the son can possibly be the reasons for a son having an enlarged ego. An enlarged ego means that the person sees himself over others in the sense that he is better than them in all ways. He might have more power, he might have more money, he might have more women, the cause does not matter, and the point is that he is better than all others. When a child is young he does not know much past what his mother tells him. We all know the phrases and games we grew up with and what mother taught us was right and wrong. Right and wrong was taught to us by our mothers and if our mother thinks that it is right for us to think highly of ourselves, higher than others, than it is right in the mind of the youth.
Upon further research I have found no other scholarly text that I could find that involves directly this argument. I have found people talk about the mother and infant care but nothing about mothers and their over-bearing points in the later child development. I am sure that there is something somewhere that has this same type of concept but for the time being I can’t seem to find any other argument that resembles this one. I have reached a dead end of this paper, I really can’t seem to find any other way of continuing this paper, and I would have preferred to have spent more time in class working on such an elaborate paper. Oh well.

Ryan Newcomb
Midterm Paper
Professor Wexler
Film as Literature
Blame Mom
As far back as we can remember mothers have been the main form of a Childs upbringing. This in my opinion is what I am going to argue is the birth of an ego. Mothers hold high standards for their sons mainly more than their daughters and this is why they form such an ego. The mother regards the son much higher than any other boy and often times much higher than the father like figure. This nourishment of the ego makes it large and in a child can cause severe harm in later adulthood. I will offer several texts in which the overbearing love of the mother is what drives the enlargement of the ego in multiple men.
In Portnoys Complaint we saw that the Jewish mother saw her son as a real fine man, even at a younger age he was the man of the house more so than the husband. The mother cared after the child and made sure that he grew up to be a fine man and not do things like eat French fries. When a child is put under this weight of love than he thinks himself truly greater than any other guy, he sees this in his father. The father is the only other man that is looking for attention from mother, and when mother pays more attention to the son than the father it sends an image to the child that he is valued and hence more important than the husband. When this love is placed deeply within the child at an early age, the man can grow up to be quite the egotist.
In This Side of Paradise, the son continually talked about his mother and how she was so loving and wonderful to him, though he was not Jewish and it was not really his customs, she was the reason for his ego in adulthood. I can tell this by when he mentions the mother in such a high esteem, we all love our mothers but putting her up on a pedestal and telling others that he would be nothing without her is something that I find quite creepy. Yes I love my mother but that isn’t the point. The point is that I don’t have an ego and people in the tales that we have studied in class do, I just found a correlation between overbearing mothers and ego whores. This Side of Paradise is a prime example of an ego. Amory sees himself above other not only because his family’s’ riches but also because he just plain thinks that he is better than others in all ways shapes and forms. This ego in him is not such a healthy thing in the eyes of most people, not his rich friends, and comes from a single prime source. Before he knew money, before he knew power, he knew love. He knew the love from his mother and knew that if his mom paid so much more attention to him than his dad than he might be special as well. The mothers love is what gave birth to the love of the finer things and thinking that he deserved them. Ego is a powerful thing and can harm one’s self and others.
Finding the birth of a person’s ego is not an easy task to accomplish, but I am here to state that having an over loving mother will help the process of an enlarged ego along. Let me make myself perfectly clear that I am not saying that egos only come from over loving mothers, and I am also not saying that any loving mother can cause this damage. I am saying that a mother with an over obsession with the son can possibly be the reasons for a son having an enlarged ego. An enlarged ego means that the person sees himself over others in the sense that he is better than them in all ways. He might have more power, he might have more money, he might have more women, the cause does not matter, the point is that he is better than all others. When a child is young he does not know much past what his mother tells him. We all know the phrases and games we grew up with and what mother taught us was right and wrong. Right and wrong was taught to us by our mothers and if our mother thinks that it is right for us to think highly of ourselves, higher than others, than it is right in the mind of the youth.

Jewish Annoyances

I have now seen a couple completed film by Woody Allen and i can firmly can state that i am tired of his form of comedy. Now his form of characters is what really angers me now that i have seen basically the same character about 3 different times. With every great comedian they have to have new material, and Allen has new material in his films, yet in film the character has to be different or else it is the exact same film. If you look at Dane Cook, you might not like his comedy but that doesnt really matter. If you look at the characters hes played in different films such as Waiting or Employee of the Month, his brand of comedy is still the same but the characters he plays are completely different in morals, looks, and ways in which they bring forth Cook's brand of comedy. Allen seems to have difficulty not playing a nerotic, whiny, sex-crazed, jewish boy. I understand the comedy in that type of character but it gets incredibly stale if you see it over and over again. The similarities between the two films of his Manhattan and Annie Hall are astounding. He starts of loving somebody else, falls in love with that actress, then has so many problems that he himself couldve easily solved that the relationship eventually breaks up and it is never quite healed. If you look at his films compared to the modern romantic tales, his are darker in many ways because in the end he does not really get the girl. I am not sure if this is because he wants to prove that not all good love stories have a happy fairy tale ending, but it gets incredibly boring and depressing after so many times.

Issac Dumped Himself

As i was watching Woody Allen's film Manhattan i realized that in the storyline, allen had made it very apparant that he was dumping himself, it is a long shoted concept but please follow along as best as you can. Okay so i am terrible with names so i will do the best i can to represent the characters through other means. The woman who played Annie in Annie Hall, she was having an affair with Yale. She loved him but did not want to break up his relationship with his wife, so she broke it off. she later than dated Issac because he was fun, funny, smart, and other reasons that i will not get into (sexy). while Issac and the chick were still dating, she realized that she still loved Yale. Now what i find fascinating is that even though you might still love some one you do not leave your current partner unless something from an old relationship has changed. Well nothing had changed in Yale's life, he was still willing to leave his wife in order to be with "Annie" and nothing else has changed. Yale's personality had not changed in the slightest, nothing had changed. what had changed was "Annie's" ability to accept Yale leaving her wife, the reason for this was because of a chance on perception towards the men in her life. She saw that being with Issac was not as good as being with Yale, thus she had accepted the terms in which Yale had set for her in order for the two to be together. In a long convoluded way, Issac's own love with "Annie" was what drove her away from him. It is sad but in a strange way, Issac Dumped Himself.

Adorno/Monet

This piece of monet painting really makes you feel not as good as if you were looking at it in person. The essence of this painting is supposed to fill the soul with beauty through the almost river like flow of the blue and green. Finding this on the internet took me about 3 seconds and yet took the artist months to complete this masterpiece of work. The blues and greens are tainted by the internets inhumane like stature which corrupts all other art in its internet based form. The real aura or soul like spirit that comes from this piece of art can only be interepreted by the soul in person and can only be experienced inside a museum of classic art. Art is not meant to be repeated and because of that there are laws in which creating false masterpieces is considered illegal and can be put in jail for such an offense. Art is something that is true beauty on a page, not an internet page. Having machines replicate a master piece of artwork is like tearing it up into small little pieces and blowing them away in the wind. It ruins this sense of essence we get from Monet's painting and other master painters/paintings. Art should be eternal, a single eternity posted on a wall that people should pay to see, not take 3 seconds to download on the internet.

Horny Jewish Teenager

Now i have never been jewish but i have known a jewish friend. He was never as horny as Alex Portnoy in the book Portnoy's Complaint. That guy is so horny it breeds self-hatred because masturabation in the Jewish culture is forbiden. So is marrying/having sex with a shische (i know i messed up the spelling) which is a non jewish woman. Portnoy has multiple issues including his love is his mother and his renouncement of his religion, but i can make a correlation between Portnoy and Allen. Allen's characters in his films have a wide variety of nerosies which is something that Alex Portnoy could relate to. Woody Allen married his kinda sorta step daughter, which you can say mirrors Alex's fascination with his mother as a child. The difference is not the relation by family, but the simple fact that the age of the two individuals is changed. In Allen's case he was older, and in Alex's case he was younger.

Weekly Post

This week we started reading Portnoy's Complaint, which to my knowledge so far is about a young jewish boy dealing with his over-bearing mother and his constant need to self satify his sexual needs. There is an entire chapter devoted to his own masturbation ventures where in which he suffocates himself on his older sister panties, and other such disgusting tools of sexual satisfaction. This to me disgusts me not because of the masturabation thing, but the way he goes about touching himself is what i have the serious problem with. I know and fully accept the fact that all men and a decent portion of women masturbate, but to my knowledge they do not use such perverse methods of satisfaction. The mother in the story is a complete psychopath, she is the traditional jewish mother who is the strong personification of a stereotypical jewish mother. As i go throughout more of the storyline i hope that this tale will stop looking so grim and disgusting and have a much lighter side to it.