Hey everyone! This week I write to you as a class blogger. I truly enjoyed reading my classmate’s interpretations of our discussion this week, and have some input I would like to add myself. This week’s main focus was on the avant-garde, black and white style of Satrapi’s Persepolis, and an article by Hillary Chute: The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Both pieces of work inspired a wide range of interpretations and responses from my classmates, however the one I would like to draw attention to- and extend upon- is the normalization of violence through media in our modern world. 

Erin began the body of her blog by addressing the alarming speed at which the character Marji in Satrapi’s graphic narrative Persepolis was forced to grow up, “She is exposed to harsh political realties and violence by the age of ten, thus compromising the childhood innocence many of us took for granted.”, Erin writes. Violence is a regrettably frequent theme in Marji’s life; a truth evidently expressed through the combination of traumatic experiences and everyday occurrences in a single panel of visuals. Erin stresses the abnormality of such violence by drawing on her own experience of growing up in California. She writes, “The North American reader of Persepolis cannot fathom the intensity and frequency of violence in a young girl’s life”. The combination of violence and normalcy contrast almost as well as Satrapi’s chosen style: black and white children’s drawings.

Through the, as Peter stated in his blog, “juxtaposition that comic books enable”, Satrapi was able to convey horrific violence through the unwilling scope of a child’s imagination. These unrealistic and simplistic (black and white) depictions of brutality-such as the image from Persepolis of a man who has been cut into perfectly clean pieces- help to prevent the further promotion of violence as normal. Peter’s blog argues that Satrapi uses this child’s point of view as a tool so as not to desensitize the “horrific violence we would see in an actual photo”. I agree with his claim that in Western society the MIddle East has become synonymous with violence; with almost all media coverage on the Middle East relating to war or a heinous act of terrorism. I also believe that these horrible occurrences have become so common to the public eye that we have become horridly desensitized to the violence that wracks our world and threatens to strip us of our humanity.

Therese’s blog adds a new perspective to my argument of desensitization by citing a couple of popular movies from her childhood, the first being Rambo(2008). She describes Rambo as being one of the most violent movies she’s ever seen, and emphasizes the traumatizing nature of its realistic violence, “Lives weren’t valued. Nobody  mourned. Killing became ordinary.”. I found these words to be incredibly thought provoking, driving me to recall some of the more violent movies i’ve seen, and realize that the realistic acts of violence they portrayed were never followed by an adequate level of mourning or terror by the actors. There is even an entire genre of movies dedicated to turning violence into comedy ( ie. Tropic Thunder, Kick Ass, The Dictator, Scary Movie..).I realized that the movies we watch are normalizing violence to the point of replacing our tears with laughter.

Thankfully Satrapi realized the same thing while writing Persepolis, and allowed her style of writing and drawing to evolve away from the normal portrayal of trauma. Kate uses the same picture of a man cut into pieces to argue that “by drawing this image from a child’s perspective, it almost shows the trauma more effectively and horrifically than simply describing it with words or a more realistic image.”. Kate elaborates her claim by explaining how seeing the drawing from a child’s perspective helped her to process the trauma being shown. Through her use of simple black and white contrasts, Satrapi allows us to understand the violence without glorifying it-a tactic that is far too under valued in our society. My class’s discussions of Persepolis and Satrapi’s use of non traumatizing portraits of violence have left me with some questions: Have we as a society become desensitized to violence past the point of return? And based on the amount of power that the media has in our society, will things ever change?

To recap this weeks blogging, Erin emphasized the amount of violence that polluted Marji’s childhood by comparing it to her childhood in California, while Peter focused on the violently skewed view that the West has of the Middle East. Kate and Peter both talked about how they found Satrapi’s style to soften the blow of the violent images, and Therese brought in violent movies from her childhood to help portray how incredibly desensitized we as a society have become to violence.

Thanks for reading guys!

Mia