Infinite Content, Infinitely Content

I. The Intersection of Arts and Cultures With the end of the semester comes reflection, and after spending four months reading a variety of literature, I have a lot to reflect on. Particularly in the last weeks, as we finished The White Boy Shuffle and watched Sorry to Bother You. On top of that, I watched a film called Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (which is not black media, but is connected in many ways to The White Boy Shuffle), and read the poem “Somebody Blew Up America” in class. And all of these things have been connected, leaving me with similar questions. And the way I’ve consumed all of these things is deeply affected by my own life, but they’ve also affected how I’ve gone about living my life. And they will continue to do so. So in honor of the film Mishima, here’s is a four-part sweeping comparison of these artworks and a contemplation of their impact. As Gunnar increasingly takes suicide more seriously, he reads a lot of Japanese literature, courtesy of Yoshiko. He r...

After reading Loewy’s post about Gunnar’s friendships with the Santa Monica boys, I started to think about how the fact that David is Jewish affects their relationship, and does it? For one thing, what Beatty is doing by depicting Gunnar’s close friendships, both David and Scoby, is showing what “true” friendship is. In both relationships, Gunnar and the friend click immediately, have things to bond over, and can have intellectually stimulating conversations. Gunnar acknowledges that David is white, but says that he’s “off-white”, and the fact that he’s Jewish and Gunnar is black is something he recognizes. However, Gunnar says that the only time race really entered their conversations was when they were “debating who Hitler would kill first, David the diabolical Jew or me the subhuman Negroid,” (pg. 40). It’s a weird thing to bring up, mostly because it shows that even while being taught color blindness they acknowledge that they are different, but that they were also both part of h...