El filme como lenguaje y el remake como traducción

Por Gabriel Alejandro

El ser humano traduce porque es un ser finito pero con deseos infinitos; traduce porque dispone, al mismo tiempo, de una ubicación concreta y móvil (espacio y tiempo) y de libertad; traduce porque, a pesar de la presencia constante de la muerte, está poseído por el deseo inextinguible de empezar siempre de nuevo: traducir es nacer de nuevo, es,como quería el rabí Nahman de Braslav, negarse a ser viejo.

-Lluís Duch

     ¿Remake? ¿Por qué? O, mejor dicho, ¿para qué? ¿Para qué alterar algo que ya funciona (o que no funcionó)? Sin duda muchos nos hemos planteado una de estas preguntas en algún momento. Una respuesta inmediata y sencilla puede ser el dinero, y la necesidad de generar cantidades copiosas por parte de la industria de cine. Otra solución menos verde pero más gris puede ser lo que argumenta Alan Moore, autor de novelas gráficas como Watchmen, V for Vendetta y From Hell. Moore, en una entrevista con el portal Co.Create, arguyó que como las mentes creativas no confían en las grandes empresas con su propiedad intelectual, estos últimos optan por acudir al refrito:   

There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates. As a result, there's a growing number of professional writers now going to small presses, self-publishing, or trying other kinds of [distribution] strategies. The same is true of music and cinema. It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you've got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch.

     Sea cual sea, cual más les guste, la realidad es que cada año vemos más y más propuestas para remakes. Pero, ¿alguna vez se han preguntado a qué convenciones concierne rehacer un filme? Por un lado, las diferencias socioculturales actuales son las que requieren de una traducción para las películas extranjeras. Eso va sin decir. Pero por el otro, el cambio constante de nuestras propias prácticas e ideologías socioculturales sugiere que ciertos filmes sean revisitados con una nueva perspectiva después de cierto tiempo. Estos son como una traducción de Shakespeare del inglés isabelino al inglés moderno. Y, al igual que un libro, el acto de traducir un filme se hace posible gracias a que el cine también contiene y es un lenguaje.

      La idea del filme como lenguaje surgió durante la gestación de la teoría del cine en Francia para la década de los sesenta. En aquél tiempo, los teóricos se anclaron en la lingüística estructuralista y la semiología como punto de referencia para su razonamiento. Concluyeron que, como una obra cinematográfica involucra un guion o texto, el lenguaje escrito responde a una serie de relaciones particulares o “underlining” (contexto o “fondo”) y debería estudiarse sincrónicamente. Un par de años después, un crítico de cine llamado Christian Metz comparó la metáfora de “cine-escritura” con la relación entre langue y parole de Saussure y sostuvo que el cine, como manifestación visual de un escrito, comparte la semejante característica sistemática de un lenguaje y, por ende, es uno (Robert Stam, The Political Companion to American Film. “Contemporary Film Theory”, 2000, 74-77). En resumidas cuentas: El guion o texto de una película se compone de un lenguaje pertinente al entorno social y temporal en el cual fue escrito; y que el proceso de realización de un guion o texto a la imagen en pantalla comparte grados sistemáticos semejantes a esos que existen entre el lenguaje escrito y su manifestación verbal.

      La traducción, contrario a lo que muchos creerán, no es la mera búsqueda de equivalencias de un texto en otro idioma; es mucho más. Conlleva a un intercambio intercultural donde el mediador (o traductor) se rinde ante la negociación infinita con el texto fuente para así procrear un texto meta “conveniente” para su público. Y, de misma forma en que no existe tal cosa como un escrito inocente, las traducciones tampoco lo son. Estas también van de la mano con lo que el teórico André Lefevere llamó el <<universo del discurso>>; o sea, “el conjunto de objetos, conceptos, conocimientos, creencias y costumbres que comparte una cultura en una época determinada” (Moya, 2007, 157). Por lo tanto, la traducción como acto de reescritura conlleva la intención de elevar el lenguaje (y sus convenciones) del texto fuente hacia un estado moderno, sincrónico; de domesticar un universo extranjero. 

      Tomemos como ejemplo el filme Red Dawn, originalmente del 1984 y reescrita para el 2012. En la versión del ‘84, debutada durante plena Guerra Fría, la nación norteamericana es invadida por una coalición entre rusos, cubanos y nicaragüenses (las naciones “rojas” en aquél entonces). El preámbulo establece que la invasión fue posible debido una serie de eventos hipotéticos como la expansión de la Unión Soviética y un golpe de estado en México, lo cual resulta en el abandono de los Estados Unidos ante la OTAN. En el reescrito, los invasores fueron canjeados por los norcoreanos y el preámbulo se basa en eventos que ocurrieron en la vida real como las amenazas de Corea del Norte, la recesión económica y el aumento en tropas norteamericanas en el Oriente Medio. Sin embargo, el factor que más distingue ambas películas son los lugares donde se realizan las escenas de acción. Mientras que la primera basa sus explosiones y tiroteos lejos de la ciudad, entre montañas y bosques, la nueva versión gira alrededor de la infraestructura urbana y su destrucción. Y es que aunque la intención del primer filme fue de “traer la guerra a casa” como establece (cosa que nunca se había dado), tal cosa no fue posible visualizar hasta después del 11 de septiembre de 2001. Desde entonces, la industria de entretenimiento se ha lucrado del tema a través de todos sus medios, particularmente con videojuegos como Call of Duty. Como dato curioso, en el remake, un joven expresa lo mucho que extraña jugar estos juegos y otro le responde: “Dude, we ARE living Call of Duty, and it sucks.” (Hermano, estamos VIVIENDO el juego, y apesta) 

      Sin embargo, no todos los cambios que se hacen son perceptibles u obvios. Ese es el caso de la comedia inglesa Death at a Funeral (2007), que tuvo múltiples adaptaciones como Daddy Cool (2009, Bollywood) y de nuevo Death at a Funeral (2010, en Estados Unidos). Esta vez, el tema de la película que gira alrededor de los problemas familiares y el tabú de la homosexualidad hicieron eco en culturas (y subculturas) donde el elemento de la familia prevalece socialmente. Entonces la adaptabilidad del tema y la característica común de los públicos meta permitió que el escrito no sufriera cambios mayores excepto por la localización del escenario y sus actores; hecho que aún es parte de la traducción. 

      Terrence Hawkes, resumiendo el postulado sobre escritura de Tzvetan Todorov, escribió que “All writing takes place in the light of other writing, and represents a response to the ‘world’ of writing that pre-exists…” (1977, 101) Todo escrito toma de o se inspira en otros textos y responde a una experiencia particular. Para el traductor, esto brinda una cantidad innumerable de opciones cuando le toca fungir como mediador intercultural y le permite crear un texto como cualquier escritor. Tanto la visión del autor del texto fuente como del traductor quedan plasmadas en los resultados porque, como dijo Moya, “… tanto el escritor que cuenta una historia como el reescritor que la traduce ponen algo de su propia cosecha…” (2007, 157) Y es esta “contaminación” bidireccional lo que hace que un escrito perdure y evolucione al pasar de los tiempos. Un escrito necesita la reescritura de misma forma en que la traducción requiere a un texto fuente si desea sobrevivir. Sin embargo, a diferencia del punto de partida, el meta tiene que al menos reflejar algo de la esencia del trabajo de partida y en ese sentido el cine no es muy distinto. El elemento visual permite que ciertas cosas se digan o expliquen sin usar palabras pero como quiera se realiza a través de (un) lenguaje. El remake, como la reescritura, es y será, una herramienta necesaria del sistema lingüístico.

The Twilight Zone and Kennedy-era Optimism: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sixties

by Gabriel Alejandro

"Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."
-John F. Kennedy inaugural address (January 20, 1961)

     The fifties’ last couple of years witnessed a shift in perspective that contrasted with the doom and gloom that had plagued the U.S. since the end of World War II and its subsequent lead-up to the Cold War. The transition peaked when a young Irish Catholic was nominated for the presidential ticket by the Democratic Party and later won the 1960 elections. A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy represented a “warmer” alternative to a nation whose domestic dispute resembled its foreign one; cold.

      One of the main objectives in Kennedy’s domestic agenda involved the reconciliation between the arts and politics, a relationship that the past decade had thoroughly tarnished. Hollywood Blacklisting and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt had pushed many entertainment workers into exile during the forties and early fifties, leaving those who stayed behind without stable employment and in fear of persecution. But now, gone were the days McCarthyism and the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and in their stead were Kennedy’s youthful and progressive prospects. This meant that every writer, actor, director, producer and composer could venture freely into their craft without worry of whiplash by the government which, in turn, had set a precedent for the American audience:

     He [Kennedy] was…the first presidential candidate to mount both a literary and a television 
     [emphasis added] campaign for the office, the only one comfortable in both media, and 
     the perfect man for a time when Americans were teetering on a balance point between image and
     word. (Thurston Clarke, Ask Not, 2010; P. 115)

Television, a medium that had been persecuted for its then-rapid widespread and informative capabilities, was becoming more and more common in every household. This, along with a young president’s embrace of the medium, catapulted the industry’s creativity into experimenting with never-seen-before themes and techniques.

      One program in particular that emerged during this era was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Originally presented as a fantasy/science fiction anthology series, The Twilight Zone constantly touched on subjects that reflected the worries and aspirations of the times. The show’s first episode aired on October 2, 1959, three months before Kennedy began campaigning for the primary elections (January 2, 1960) and was cancelled in late January 1964, less than three months after his assassination (November 22, 1963). But the program’s five-year-run would be enough for it to leave its mark in television history. By exploring different aspects of the human psyche such as that of a soldier’s during war, the possibility of life in other planets, and giving new angles to historical events, The Twilight Zone ventured into territory that would have been deemed unsuitable for television would it have aired some years earlier.
 

      In “Where Is Everybody?,” the first episode that formally aired under The Twilight Zone brand name, we meet an amnesiac Air Force pilot roaming in a deserted town. After much scavenging and self-questioning, the man finally collapses after running from a shop and into a street crossing pole. We then see that the man is not really in a desolated town but in a test chamber, and a group of military personnel observes the unfolding of his delusion. He is a test subject in a moon trip simulator, completely isolated in a town was just an illusion. After being carried out by medics, he gets a glimpse of the real moon and says, “Hey! Don’t go away up there! Next time it won’t be a dream or a nightmare. Next time it’ll be for real. So don’t go away. We’ll be up there in a little while.”

      Aside from the nuclear tension that characterized the Cold War, the space race against the Soviet Union comes in close second. This competition would not have only granted technological supremacy to its victor, but it would have also awarded ideological superiority to the winning nation. The U.S. audience had been fantasizing about space travel since the early years of film and television. But for a while any public “space talk” was avoided amid fears of Russian spies acquiring classified information. That lasted until May 25, 1961, when Kennedy, before a joint session of Congress, gave his "Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs” speech in which he urged the Nation to set the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” A year later, on September 12, 1962, he gave another speech, later known as the “Moon Speech,” at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas. This time he expressed how the trip to the moon would spur an aftermath of technological innovations similar to previous achievements such as the printing press and the steam engine. Even though the goal was set to be long-term (before the end of the decade) and the Russians had the advantage, the Nation had been rallied up and felt that the task at hand was within grasp for the first time.

      Other well-known episodes from the first season such as “Time Enough at Last” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (both airing between November 1959 and March 1960) also carried the spirit of the epoch in more than one form. In the first one we meet Henry Bemis, an avid reader surrounded by uncultured people. He is an admirer of Robert Frost (who, coincidentally, recited a poem during Kennedy’s inaugural) and is mocked by both his boss and wife for his passion for literature. The subject of anti-intellectualism was well-known at the Kennedy camp. A lover of words and history, Kennedy believed past administrations had strayed from establishing an intellectual core and compensated by opening the doors to intellectuals in his administration. Furthermore, in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” the topic veers from current or future events into the near-past. Maple Street is your typical 1950s portrait of an American neighborhood until bizarre incidences take place after a shining object is seen in the sky. Since the residents do not know the cause of these occurrences, they begin to single out each other by creating conspiracies fueling the idea that a monster dwells among them. It is a clever reimagining of Communist paranoia and its blind fervor that stalked the government under Senator McCarthy. The episode ends with a conversation between the culprits, two extra-terrestrial beings who observe the events from afar, when one says: “… I take it this place –This ‘Maple Street,’ is not unique?” To which the other one responds: “By no means. The world is full of Maple Streets. And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other...One to the other...One to the other...” (The “monsters” in the title referring to human beings instead of actual monsters or aliens).

      In conclusion, one could spend countless pages and ink counting the parallels between history
and fiction in every Twilight Zone episode. For many, Kennedy embodied the spirit of the people which sought to distance itself from the practices and ideologies of the past. This resulted in a large manifestation of arts and academic work in government affairs and vice versa. The constant mirroring and exposure of political subjects in television and movies resulted in the “de-stigmatization” of some elements but also in the further expansion of others. In one hand, the possibility of reaching the moon and its advances was tangible; but on the other, the bomb and other scare-tactic representatives were still ever-present in every household. Nonetheless, this did not halt the television and film industries from maintaining the flux of interesting proposals throughout the decade. And even though creativity persisted, the early sixties’ optimism, along with Kennedy, ceased on November 22, 1963.

Playing 9/11: or how video games redeem American history in the twenty-first century

Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

            It is September 11^th, 2012, and I have just led a select team of American Special Forces through Wall Street and into the New York Stock Exchange in an attempt to disable a Russian jamming tower that keeps the city’s skies under foreign control. The conflict? The Russo-American War of 2016. The battlefield? A Sony Playstation 3 console holding one of the most successful video game franchises in recent history on its disc drive, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011).

            Whether we like it or not, the struggle between history, myth, and remembrance has now acquired a new front of discursive contention, video games. Jeremy K. Saucier, in his article Playing the Past: The Video Game Simulation as Recent American History, speaks to this by stating the following:

Driven by new research, new technologies, and new markets at the end of the twentieth century, video games, with their ever-growing narrative and visual sophistication, stand posed to rival the art forms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like other cultural products, such as film, literature, or music, video games express cultural tensions and anxieties. Their subjects and narratives speak to a particular society’s place and time and are thus important sources for historical work. Video games are potentially the most powerful storytelling medium of the twenty-first century.

The narrative power of video games stems from an already established popular culture that accepts the consuming of history in uncontroversial packets of memory as filtered through myth. In other words, we like our reality mythically cooked. And what better way to cook reality than with a simulated work of fiction whose control rests in the actual daily consumer of history, video gamers. This contention makes sense once we realize that 9/11 quite simply exposed mainstreamed conceptions of the world we live in as being governed by the politics of film and its representation. What was the fall of the Twin Towers if not a real life repeat of Independence Day or countless other end-of-the-world scenarios put in celluloid form. This is not to reduce the September 11^th terrorist attacks to an event solely popular in visual culture. But one can argue that Americans, movie-goers par excellence, were subjected to imagery not unfamiliar to them when the towers collapsed. In effect, September 11^th proved we live in a movie-made world. A quick glance at video games after the event contributes to the understanding of such an idea.

            According to Tom Engelhardt, in his book The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, Americans “were already imagining versions of September 11 soon after the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.” With the advent of Hollywood through the newly popularized genre of the war film, post-1945 America became enthralled in a visual culture that gave sense to an event that only a select part of their society experienced. Values and morals in wartime became universal because film mass produced images accepted as war truths. Consequently, war as we know it today had to be re-experienced through film first in order for its meanings to be fully encrusted into the official national narrative. It can be argued that war is a movie experience first when it comes to the common knowledge of it for people that didn’t experience the conflict first-hand. Which brings us to twenty-first century gaming.

            Experiencing war outside of itself remains an endeavor of imagination mediated by popular culture. Now, what is interesting about imagination today is that it has become resoundingly dangerous in representing the past and its present tensions, and repercussions, given the expansion of mediums that play out fiction. And within those mediums, video game consoles are amongst the more powerful.

            Popular culture finds enduring meaning in analogies that employ simple metaphors that mirror reality in an effort to make fiction easily recognizable. Take, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. As explained above, this video game pits players against a Russian invasion of the Western World. The plot is intricately interwoven with ideas such as home grown terrorism, foreign invasion concepts mediated by Cold War history, and destruction imagery specific to a post-9/11 world (meaning city warfare, a heavy emphasis on building destruction by large scale objects like missiles or planes, and dust covered streets littered with civilian casualties). Players get lost in the detail of faithfully recreated weaponry and military lingo, weapons have their official real-world name and technical designation and they are modeled after their newest incarnations.

While this type of information is an interesting phenomenon in itself, it is the conscious attempt at an uncontroversial plot line that stands out as dangerous. Creating a global state of war (the main marketing line for the game was that Modern Warfare 3 waged World War III on consoles) meant for the game’s developers (Infinity Ward) creating an enemy that was both easily recognizable and safe enough to shoot without disrupting socio-political sensibilities. In doing so, they reverted to Cold War enemy stereotypes that actually rescue the Soviet enemy from the recent past and dresses them up in combat fatigues that shy away from Communist red in favor of a more complex shade of gray that projects a sort of historical vendetta, a return to unfinished business that requires an American foreign policy of constant military awareness so as not to repeat new Pearl Harbors.

In essence, Modern Warfare 3’s most dangerous discursive component rests in the fact that they relive historical discourses by fighting specific Cold War battles and situations that remember Soviet enemies and old antagonisms. What is interesting here is that those ideas are still grounded on the 20^th century mindset of war being a stable sphere of American identity. It is here that Tom Engelhardt’s American war story argument comes into play.

The American war story (as explained in Engelhardt’s book The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation) posits itself, in the 21^st century, as a reminder of moral clarity and responsibility inherent in American identity (catering to a sense of military duty after the Second World War). According to Engelhardt, the American war story propels the idea of national innocence in times of war. America is always standing guard at the watchtowers of freedom, seeking out international injustices to squash so long as war never answers to the politics of a first-strike policy (meaning that the United States should never take the offensive initiative). In other words, American war is always a defensive reaction to foreign, and thus evil, aggression suffered on American soil or threatening United States’ national security (see Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, the September 11^th 2001 Terrorist Attacks).

            In Modern Warfare 3, the American war story is upheld through the idea that the enemy struck first, as seen in the very first chapter of the video game when Russians invade New York City, pushing American forces to take to the streets and take out Russian signal jammers that keep the American air cavalry blind. September 11^th is converted into the appropriate setting for the American war story to manifest itself through given recent memory’s pull to the terrorist attacks. In other words, the war story becomes more potent because it fuses twentieth century history discourses with the aesthetic of the post-9/11 world. In fact, it makes the war story more powerful given that the enemy’s first strike is quite literally on American soil, as opposed to Pearl Harbor when one contemplates the meanings of geographic and cultural distances within codes of identity in American politics. When the Pearl Harbor attack occurred certain sectors of the American public did not know what Pearl Harbor was or where it was located (see John Dower’s War Without Mercy). Modern Warfare 3 skips the possibility of confusion or ignorance by making the warzone easily recognizable. 

What is interesting, and dangerous, is that in making it recognizable, the game’s developer dipped fiction into the ink of trauma. New York becomes a symbol of continued defense with the possibility of redemption given the Americans effectively repel the Russian invasion, a responsibility entrusted to the player. Consequently, American gamers are bestowed with the opportunity to redeem 9/11 by the dictum of ‘Never again’, a call of duty for the twenty-first century. And so, upon completing the game by achieving military victory over the Russians, America ushers the age of the virtual veteran, a veteran untouched by the trauma of killing.

Is Yesterday too Recent?: An attempt at explaining Recent History without heavy theory

by: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

     This is not a conventional academic contemplation on history. This is an attempt to explain something made very complex in a, hopefully, simple way. The presence of recent history in our more specific dwellings on historical knowledge today makes necessary a sort of comment that tries to elevate its inner debates onto a broader stage. My definition of it goes like this: recent history refers to a past that still bears meaningful impact upon the activities and social configurations that make up identity today. Now, if the memory of the Second World War continues to bear meaningful impact on identity today, can it still be considered recent? What about the Civil War? Is its memory still recent if the nature of contemporary American politics continues to hold true to the North/South division that was initially defined in the 19th century? Or is it just better to scrap the whole idea of ‘recent’ and just accept everything now in past form as history so long as it is put into narrative? The point is to accept that nothing is out of bounds when it comes to creating knowledge, when its purpose is to inform people on the present problems that take up their experience.

     One cannot assume that temporal distance eases the passions of study and renders a more secure objective reasoning behind the making of history. Just look at the examples mentioned above: World War II and the Civil War. These two stories continue to inspire pop culture into using their history and infusing them into contemporary meanings of war and society. World War II has become most predominantly the main topic in the History Channel’s programming when it decides (and it is doing so less these days) to run historical documentaries. Its variations range from Hitler’s link to alien beings and how Nazis tried to use alien technology to win the war to reviving old videos in high definition form and broadcasting them as the ‘definitive’ way to experience the war.

      In the Civil War’s case we come to a crossroads that seems to be less pop in cultural terms than World War II but still manages to seep into the common knowledge areas through other motives. Take Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012). More a film about the abolition of slavery as a means to end the war, Lincoln makes the Civil War a more political source of historical activism that the memory of it originally catered to. The Civil War is most often set in a narrative that exposes the futility of conflict when it is waged between brothers, a metaphor that speaks to the war’s senseless slaughter of Americans by Americans. Spielberg’s signature close-ups (done to death in this film) pushed by the strings of an overtly sentimental John William’s score makes Lincoln appeal to movie-goers through nostalgia and a sense that politics had more moral weight in the past rather than today. By the end of a very long film, Lincoln has already made audiences care about the past as an example of what politics should be today, even if the presence of slavery is quite merely a tool ordered around to make sense out of politics first and slavery itself second.

      And yet, audiences supported the film. Lincoln’s domestic haul, according to boxofficemojo.com, steadied at $182,027,677. For a film without Captain America or Batman in it, Lincoln became its own superhero event movie. And this is relevant because it reveals just how much pull the Civil War and its main players still hold with cinema goers, for people who pay for entertainment in the hopes of getting educated, informed, in the process. We cannot kid ourselves with these types of movies. They are there to entertain and tell a story just as much as they are there to provide information about a past that still makes sense today, that strives to impact the contemporary experience. Does this make the Civil War recent history? Does a scene between the mythical President and his son arguing about war service too distant or too close (as is the case when Lincoln confronts his son Robert about not giving his life away to the probability of death in the battlefield)?

      Identity can be a tricky subject. We make up ourselves by that we think identifies us most with a shared past. Film can be too dangerous an agent in providing this. According to J. Hoberman, “a movie would be an idea successfully transformed into an industrially produced collective experience.” If we accept Hoberman’s argument, collective experiences that employ history as a narrative tool make temporal distance irrelevant when contemplating the recentness of the past, for no matter how close or distant the past may be it becomes almost entirely relevant to the way we view ourselves in the present time. It is like Eric Hobsbawm states, “Most human beings operate like historians: they only recognize the nature of their experience in retrospect.” But Hobsbawm never specifies how distant in time said exercise in retrospection should be. In fact, it can be argued that, so long as retrospection is taking place, distance becomes close to irrelevant so long as it is consumed as a legitimate part of historic experience. That is what makes history recent, when it becomes relevant in the process of making sense of the present.

      The situation in North Korea makes an excellent example in this final stretch of the argument. The most interesting thing about the whole North Korean situation still playing itself out (regardless of downsized media coverage…now ceded to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden) rests on the idea that its nuclear contingency is still functioning as a Cold War strategy that mistakenly thinks it is still effective. Kim Jong-Un, the son of previous North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, has intensified his antagonism with South Korea and the United States in what appears to be a random display of power he does not have. Claiming a strangling on North Korean economy through U.N. sanctions, the situation escalated when Kim Jong-Un ordered military exercises too close for comfort to South Korea, with instances of missiles flying close to specific zones of both civilian and military spaces.

     Now, the threat of nuclear destruction is what makes the situation so imbedded in mass media as newsworthy. Continued coverage has exposed North Korea as a nation looking for legitimacy in the context of a divided land that shares its narrative beginnings with South Korea in the historical playground of the Cold War. In fact, threats of nuclear annihilation seem out of place in today’s world, where drone strikes can be called upon in a matter of minutes and military superiority rests on technological readiness instead of mass mobilizations of military personnel as a reaction to aggression. As of April 5th, 2013, the United States’ stance on North Korea has been one of “strategic patience,” according to the Obama Administration as reported by The Guardian. By the end of March, defense secretary Chuck Hagel ordered America's most advanced plane, the B-2, known as the Stealth bomber, to fly over the Korean peninsula. The Stealth is invisible to radar and has nuclear capacity. The message to North Korea was intended by the Pentagon to be one not of provocation but deterrence: attack South Korea at your peril. The key word here might be deterrence given it being part of the Cold War jargon, but the focus should be that a single plane, almost imperceptible to the technological eye should it choose to be, can end the situation with the flick of a switch.

      Maybe the Cold War didn’t end for North Korea. The 38th parallel still stands as a reminder of that time and territorial disputes maintain their identity through it. In a sense, the Cold War is still recent history for the Koreas, as it can be for the United States (even if the Korean War, known as the forgotten war, came across as diminished in significance for American history). Still, North Korea just made its Cold War history recent. It gave meaning to conflict and inserted it in the 21st century sense of historical continuity.

      The whole point of history is to show, through the telling of researched stories, how humanity has lived throughout time and how it makes us the species we are today. Having said that, isn’t all history recent then? If we take the idea that recent history is that which still holds sway on the way we make up our identities contemporarily, does it not then make most of the past recent? Maybe it’s better to make away with these kinds of classifications and just stick with history as an outlet of knowledge that helps us understand, well, us, without regard on how far or how close the past really is.

Indiana Jones and the Labyrinths of Academia

by Andrés López Román

     As he laid down his fedora and whip he entered a labyrinth much deeper than any archaeological site. Once Indiana Jones recovered the Cross of Coronado, Academia awaited him at Marshall College, a quiet institution where routine came to be the norm and where he transformed himself from Indy the adventurer to Dr. Henry Jones, Professor of Archaeology. As if the classroom had a filter, change was inevitable, draining his sense of adventure in exchange for cultural shock. This sentiment would quickly catch up to him, finding him at the University; where the journey of learning becomes a red tape process, funding comes to be as dangerous as a gun and the quest goes as far as the paycheck. Still, Indiana Jones wasn’t willing to surrender his passion for History, past cultures or artifacts. The window from his office remained open, and the world wasn’t going to wait forever.

      If one opens a book on History, or more specifically Archaeology, the encounter with a disclaimer separating reality from the character of Indiana Jones would not be rare. Fantasy takes a center role in his movies regarding the way archaeologists work and how history is perceived. Nevertheless, you’ll see many students, writers and professors rooting for the main character in the Lucas and Spielberg franchise. The reason for this is that even though they are able to pinpoint myth from reality, they get to be entertained by these films as they identify themselves with certain circumstances surrounding the Indiana Jones world. Academics are not often chased by giant crushing boulders, Nazis or the occult, but then again, Indy becomes a metaphor of something lost within academia: passion for one’s field.

     As we become closer to the activities inside the walls of knowledge institutions, we find ourselves with a sad reality: The university community has become a drained place full of frustrations. We’ve become so absorbed by routines and financial survival that our fields of study are not what they should be, what they could be. We start pacing through comfortable zones, evading the search for higher questioning, and avoiding risks. Dullness becomes the norm and the hope of changes brought by newcomers becomes a scarce expectation since the newer generations quickly demotivate themselves as they step into an already ill environment.

Universities were once an elite within society since they represented a space of intellectual exchange related to knowledge and information. Lately this reality has come to be the symptom of a problem that rose quite some time ago: knowledge wasn’t accessible to the world outside of academia. We kept writing to ourselves, debating and destroying the work of others as if we were in a campaign for an absolute truth. In the meantime, society stopped caring about us, preferring the much faster and more accessible outlets of information: movies, video games and the Internet.

     The uncertainty within institutions and the frustrations related to the relevance of our work surrounds us with the sense of calling it quits. “When hysteria reaches academia, I guess it’s time to call it a career” (see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...[its not that bad]). Popular culture has taken care of things while academics try to survive in a world of “You can but you may not.” However, that doesn’t mean that Academia doesn’t have a place in society. What it actually means is that it’s time to escape the claustrophobic and fungus-­‐ridden walls of our offices and go out, through the window, to connect once again with the world that we, in effect, inhabit.