Billy Budd

After the masterpiece documentary “The Salt of the Earth” about the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, the extraordinary German director, Wim Wenders, stumbles in his most recent fictional drama, “Every Thing Will Be Fine”. Here, the iconic filmmaker works over a script by the Norwegian Bjorn Olaf Johannessen and entrusts to James Franco, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Rachel McAdams, the main roles. The story is based on Tomas Elden (Franco), a writer who’s making an effort to maintain in…

Mahoney AP English Literature and Composition October 9, 2015 A Non Linear Journey Through Space and Time: Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut’s semi autobiographical satirical war novel Slaughterhouse-Five journies through the life of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim. Following his abduction by alien, he becomes unstuck in time; his life is no longer linear, but sees the past, present and future all happening at once. Discovering this. Pilgrim realizes he can never die, because even if he is dead…

in time. Billy Pilgrim is dislodged in time, experiencing events of his life like a playlist of memories set on shuffle. Most of the book is centered on Billy’s time in the war, his time on the alien world of Tralfamadore, and his life in between. While reading Slaughterhouse Five, the reader meets a version of Billy who has experienced different moments of his life many times over. While the story is pure science fiction, transfer the theme to the real world, and it appears that Billy Pilgrim…

However, if we were to trust these autopsy reports and Marilyn Monroe died from drug overdose of sleeping pills, did she commit suicide? Here’s some perspective: being a Hollywood star is not always the glamorous life that we, the general public, believe it to be. At the end of the day, Marilyn Monroe was human with her own tragic, internal struggles. She would wake up and lay in bed for a few minutes, maybe hours, just contemplating whether if it was even worth the effort of getting out of bed.…

Norma Jeane Mortenson was born June 1, 1926 in Los Angeles, California. Marilyn Monroe was labeled a “sex symbol” but she was actually a unique woman. She is important because although she was labeled she never tried to change her appearance. She had a very intricate life. Marilyn wrote a book about herself, My Story. She died on August 5, 1962 and was found in her floor holding a wine bottle, she had overdosed on Barbiturate overdose. Marilyn was born to an unstable mother and an absent…

Margot Robbie does a fantastic job as the former figure skater Tonya Harding in a comedic biopic directed by Craig Gillespie who, despite the spirited tones engendered to dissect this polemic story, didn’t surpass his 2007 comedy “Lars and the Real Girl”. If the cited Australian actress got our eye through a fine performance, the Ohio-born Allison Janney, who plays her mother, LaVona, is absolutely insuperable. Curiously, Janney aspired to become a champion skater at a younger age, but an…

Olivia Ann Tangren, born July 22, 1997, at 12:11 AM at the Mayo Clinic in Owatonna Minnesota. I weighed eight pounds eleven ounces, and was twenty-two inches long. My mom swears I had the largest head in the history of the hospital. At that time gas cost $1.20, and everyone was watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S. In concerns for gross motor development, I progressed along at the rate most children do. I first rolled over front to back at four months old. When I was exactly seven months old I sat up…

Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” and Judy Grahn’s “I Have Come to Claim Marilyn Monroe’s Body” both detail how the intense Hollywood cult of celebrity can lead to dizzying heights of fame, transforming ordinary people into worldwide stars with legions of adoring fans and admirers. Such fame and notoriety, however, does not come without a cost. Both Norma and Marilyn, Hollywood stars of these respective narratives, came to see the fame that once dominated their lives devolve into a destructive…

novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, is about the life of protagonist Billy Pilgrim, and his experiences in World War II and his adventures as a result of being “unstuck in time.” Billy being exposed to the idea of no free will through time travel and an alien species, discovers that “among the things [he] could not change were the past, the present, and the future” (Vonnegut, pg 60). In Slaughterhouse-Five, a lack of belief in free will causes Billy Pilgrim’s passive listlessness and the atrocity of…

In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim follows a non-chronological journey while being “Unstuck in time”. As Billy is captured and held as a prisoner in a POW camp and then taken to Dresden during its bombing, he experiences many atrocities. Once the bombing was over, Billy and the other soldiers are put to work, digging up the diseased bodies of those who did not survive. After the war, Billy has trouble returning to his normal life, as he spends some time in a mental…