The thing seminar reflection

In this seminar, we mostly talked about the movie “The Thing From Another World.” But we were by no means restricted by that. We mostly talked about the themes not only of this movie but also the major themes of the cold war. Regarding this movie, we talked about: quotes stated in the movie (“There are no enemies in science. Only phenomenon to study”) and this relates to this whole project talking about fear and paranoia, all though you have to realize that this is coming from a scientist and most people wouldn’t think this way (or in other words the directors representation of the military). Some of the other things that we talked about were “Why was the monster mad?” and an even bigger question that you need to answer “Who’s fault was it that the monster was mad?” And the answer to this question is not obvious, everyone has a different interpretation and no one is wrong. The two major sides you can approach this question is Liberal or Conservative. If you’re conservative then you’re going to believe in militarism and using brute force so people critical of conservatives (liberals) are of course going to blame the military. However, the flip side is if you are a liberal you believe in Détente and the conservatives say the the scientists (represented by the liberals) caused the hatred by wanting to experiment on him but it would still be a form of capturing. So as you can see there are many different answers to this question. But it deffinetly led us to other bigger topics. Ones like “could the monster have been scared even when he first arrived?” There wasn’t really an answer to this question, and unfortunately that’s how most of our seminar went only because so many people had stuff to say and so many questions so we kind of skipped over some ideas. But overall I thought that we had a really good seminar. When I was watching the movie I started to get lost and then I just gave up on the movie but once we got into seminar everything just seemed to click and everything was just so clear. So I got a lot out of seminar.