Week 12 Wrap-Up

A few months ago, a Laserdisc player mysteriously found its way into my home.

That's right.  I said Laserdisc.  I will pause for your exclamations of shock and wonderment.

(Exclaim Here)

For those of you who didn't have a ton of money to waste on soon-to-be-obsolete technology in the early 90s, a Laserdisc is something like a DVD.  Only it is about the size of a vinyl record and data is recorded on both sides.  In the middle of your movie, the Laserdisc literally flips over, making a really cool noise that sounds something like a Transformer transforming.  (I keep waiting for the Laserdisc player to change into a sports car or a robot, but it never does and my eager anticipation of such has become a bit of a running joke.)

And that's about all I can tell you.

Wait.

I'm actually going to make my point now.

Along with the mysterious arrival of said Laserdisc player, came a large collection of classic movies and operas.  In this collection was one of the most well-known Westerns of all time:  High Noon.

In its day, High Noon was a very controversial movie.  Even before it was released, writer and producer, Carl Foreman, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was deemed an uncooperative witness because he refused to name his colleagues as Communist sympathizers.  As a result, Foreman was subsequently blacklisted from Hollywood along with many other members of High Noon's cast and crew.  Even in 2011, fifty-nine years after its release, this movie gave me the chills.  To me, it's a fairly obvious allegorical protest against the wrongs of the McCarthy era.  But I also saw something else in it: an alternative version of an infamous Judeo-Christian story about a time when God was so disgusted with certain humans that he wanted to destroy them.  The biblical story and the movie both depict the power that a few brave people can have over the fate of an entire town.

That's basically the story of where Prompt 12 came from.

A lot has happened recently.  Frankly, it's all pretty scary.  But it makes me hope that there are still people who are still committed to being fair and diplomatic even when it's unpopular to do so, that we are judged by our best examples rather than our worst and that, most of all, we are not so irredeemable that the universe is better off without our tiny blue planet.

The Responses:

• Madeline explored the vengeance of a woman scorned.
• Michael resolved the Zombie Caitlin Penguin tale . . . sort of.  (I think she still has to take him out for ice cream and apologize.)
• Brooke wrote about a very different type of hostage situation in our Saturday Feature.
• Jes's story described a sort of personal apocalypse.  It was also my pick for our Sunday Feature.
• Michelle Wallace wrote an allegory about a starving artist, a reporter and a madman.
• Trisha gave us our Friday Feature which raised some serious questions about Justin Bieber.
• As for me, I let a new creeper into Bernbriar.

See you all tomorrow!!!