Brief thoughts on the Frontline Oswald Video

The frontline video gave a really interesting picture of Lee. It made Lee come to life more than the book usually does by giving pictures and sound bites of him. When the film talked about how Lee cut his wrists to try to get the KGB to let him stay in the Soviet Union, that reminded me of in the book when he shot himself in order to stay in Japan. Linking those two things makes the historical aspect of Libra all that more real.

I feel like the book is doing a better job at describing Lee's transformation into this person who shot JFK better than the film. The film sorta glosses over his childhood and goes straight into his days of being in the military. Without those details on his childhood, it sorta frames him as a monster and doesn't give us the side of seeing that he's a product of his environment. It's very removed from Lee and his thoughts, which without reading the book at the same time would lead me to believe that he was always a horrible person.

I guess if you want to respond to this blog post, do you think the film tries to sway us toward Oswald being a bad person or not?

You better beLEEve it

While I was reading the life of Lee as a child, his personality just creeped me out. Within “In the Bronx” he seemed fairly normal to me. It seemed like just a weird quirk a small child could have to be fascinated with the sounds of trains and the feeling of riding them. But, as he started to grow older I started to get a weird creepy feeling from him. The way that Robert Sproul describes him after seeing him with blood on himself from one of his usual fights is what really started the feeling for me.

“He seemed to be grinning. It was just like Lee to grin when it made no sense, assuming it was a grin and not some squint-eyed tic or something. You couldn’t always tell with him.” (33)

This sorta begins to paints Lee as a person who likes having control of things like how people think. We get more of this controlling nature as we progress through “In New Orleans.” Once he buys the gun, we get a very weird insight into the thoughts of his mind.

“The reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, perfection of control, her pale legs slightly parted, arms at her sides, eyes closed. He makes the picture of her come and go. It is what he knows about her, how he controls her, alone at night, watching her motionless on the bed, above the rain-slick streets.” (47)

He feels like he has power over this girl. The way he describes her also feels very eerie to me. All of the details are more innocent, but there is just so much attention to her appearance that it feels odd. This isn’t the only time he’s described a girl like this. He also described Robert Sproul’s sister in the same creepy fashion.

“She was just the right height. Not to tall. Her liked her air of restraint, the way she moved the pieces on the board, almost bashfully, giving no hint of the winning or losing involved. It made him feel animated and rash, a chess genius with dirty fingernails.” (39)

He likes her because she makes him feel like he’s a genius with power. This power aspect seems to be one of the main things forming within Lee. I’m curious to see how it develops within the book.

Although Lee does give me these creepy vibes, I also think that the narrator is not trying to shape him towards being exclusively creepy. There’s lots of evidence that he’s a product of his environment. With his childhood in the book, we can humanize Lee a bit more and start to consider that his family background along with getting bullied for little things having an yankee accent (33) could have steered him towards the path of assassinating JFK like he did. However, with how all this information is presented in a straightforward manner, I think we’re left to piece together how we feel about Lee. What do you all think? Is our opinion of Lee being shaped by the narrator or are we being left to decide what we think for ourselves?

Parallels of the 1800's and 1976 in Kindred

The other day in class we started talking about the parallels of certain coincidences within Dana and Rufus’s world. There are a few scenes that seem oddly familiar to me. We learn that Kevin is always nagging Dana to type his manuscripts for him and gets angry when she refuses and admits she doesn’t like typing. Dana mentions that, “He said if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he asked, I could leave (109).” It seems weird that he’d get angry at her refusing to help him even after she tells him she doesn’t want to. And, it even reduces their relationship down to Dana being obligated to do things for Kevin like he has that sort of authority over her.  

In a way, this is like Rufus’s relationship with Alice. Rufus doesn’t seem to understand that Alice doesn’t like him, and doesn’t want to have sex with him. And, he gets mad at her for refusing him, in a way that was deemed okay in his time since Alice is black, and eventually his slave.  Although Kevin doesn’t force Dana to type his manuscripts in the end, the way he gets angry at rejection before trying to consider her feelings is the same type of anger Rufus exhibits.

In both scenarios, Dana is part of them, and is guilt tripped for not doing what the men want. Kevin makes her feel like she’s not being a good girlfriend with the “couldn’t do him a little favor” bit, and Rufus makes her feel like she’s not being a good friend to Alice with “all I want you to do is fix it so I don’t have to beat her. You’re no friend of hers if you won’t do that much” (164).

Another thing that seemed really familiar to me was all of Dana’s thoughts about Kevin’s views about race changing while he was in the 1800’s. She doesn’t think anything will happen to his views (and in the end she was mainly right) because of how different 1976 is from the 1800’s. However, we learn about Kevin’s sister, Carol, whose views changed even though she is living in 1976.

She didn’t even believe the garbage she was handing me-- or didn’t used to. It’s as though she was quoting someone else. Her husband, probably (109).

Carol, whose best friend was a black woman, seemed to go through a lot together with her before she married her husband and they drifted apart. In manner, Butler says that although Kevin doesn’t change, people in 1976 can still change for the worst.

In a way, it seems that Butler is trying to subtly fit in a message about how in ways Dana’s world is still like Rufus’s, except usually more mild. Do you think that she’s trying to present that there are still bad remnants from Rufus’s time that go undetected in our time-- sorta like like how the planter oppressors didn’t think slavery was bad then?