Potentialities and Limitations of Mockumentaries
Film Begets Film and Real Begets Fake: Woody Allen’s Zelig
Though predating the official “Mockumentary Era,” Woody Allen’s Zelig remains a class example of the mockumentary at its finest. Zelig fulfills the mockumentary’s potentialities of clever parody that: shows the fallibility of “historical” archival footage; bares and mocks human nature and its striving for assimilation and acceptance; American culture’s gullible, easily manipulated public, who are drawn to phony celebrity culture; and the oddly simultaneous soothing nature of the mockumentary. Zelig also shares the mockumentary’s limitations, as parasite and slave to the documentary and the film format, as well as repeated imitation to the point of far less effective staleness.
Victorian women: social roles and cultural contexts
¶ … Jude the Obscure," by Thomas Hardy, "The Awakening," by Kate Chopin, and "The Odd Women" by George Gissing. Specifically, it will show the Victorian women's struggle for emancipation, even if it meant dying for it.
King Lear
Both of the women servants in the Decameron experienced better results than the characters in King Lear, since most of the latter ended up dead by the end of the play. No one died in the two Boccaccio stories, which were intended to be humorous, although one of the servant women received a very bad beating. Unlike these servants, who were members of the lower classes and quite literally nameless nobodies, the Earl of Kent was an aristocrat who has always served King Lear totally and without reservations. He was definitely not a hired man, but bound be feudal oaths of loyalty to his sovereign. Kent did trick the mad king into believing he is simply a servant named Caius, but with the noblest of intentions and he received no rewards or incentives like the housemaids in Boccaccio's stories. When the king banished him from the palace and sent him into exile, Kent owed no more allegiance to him at all since their bonds were formally broken, yet him stayed with him until the end of the play and died almost immediately after him. Kent is literally loyal to the death, displaying far more virtue and friendship than the king.