THE POWER OF MONSTERS INC.: CONTRUCTING SEPARATENESS AND SPACIAL/RACIAL DIFFERENCE IN CINEMATIC DISCOURSE

THE POWER OF MONSTERS INC.: CONTRUCTING SEPARATENESS AND SPACIAL/RACIAL DIFFERENCE IN CINEMATIC DISCOURSE
Adam Garcia – Final paper for Seminar on Racial and Ethnic Relations, led by Dr. Hernan Vera

Racial differences and spatial separation are often co-constructed in discourse. In this paper the animated film, Monster’s Inc., is analyzed specifically, along with portals as cinematic narrative devices in general, in terms of the discursive reproduction of race as differences

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVE SPACE, SUBJECTIVELY CONSTRUCTED

All maps are projections. They distort the areas and shapes of the bodies of land and water they represent in order to transform a spherical surface into a flat one. Troetje Lowenthal, a Dutch multiculturalist, once lectured on how the choice of projection is used to enhance the size of northern countries while shrinking those close to the equator. Political maps and globes create a similar fiction by representing the earth as eminently divided into nations and states. Each territory is color coded in contrast to its neighbors to emphasize its political shape, difference from without and homogeneity from within. Due to such maps, in part, we have the perception that the world is divided into more or less autonomous regions. These regions are seen as the containers of cultures that are by definition separate and different from the cultures of surrounding regions. The questions this paper seeks to explore is how this notion of culture as regionally bounded and spatially contained is produced and how it related to the idea of race as a system of subdividing the world into genetically [and otherwise] separated groups. To accomplish this, the film Monsters Inc. will be analyzed along with a common cinematic device, the portal, a narrative device usually used in fantasy and sci-fi films to depict the linkage of two radically distinct worlds. Through this analysis I hope to advance the awareness that race is a concept that is not only a remnant of the past or that it is only present in the world of material social relations, but that it is also an interpretive framework stored and utilized in works of fiction, which can operate independently of the racial categories thought to exist in the material social world(s) of our daily lives.