The Illustration of Spectacle in Coraline

For Halloweekend, one night a friend and I binge-watched a series of spooky movies, during our week about spectacle. Thus, this movie marathon left me thinking. In correspondence to the related film, Nope by Jordan Peele, this idealization of another entity, whether it being an alien spaceship or an alternative universe, engrasps our characters to a point where curiosity has no return. There is a sinister feeling when it comes to the animals of both stories, they seem to be omnipresent within the story, or all-knowing, as they, too, are subjects to human speculation. The iconography of films involving illustrative depth describing spectacle is commonly characterized as thriller or psychological because it draws in the viewer to see worlds outside of the “typical” human perception. Or the what-ifs of the world. This categorization formulates the attention economy we spoke about in class discussion. The film characters, like Coraline faces the entrapment of her parents due to her infantilization of a parallel world and Jupe falls victim to death due to his corresponding infantilization. Finally, for the viewer, it draws in an audience that wishes to be encompassed by the idea of alternative realities as well, like if we could teleport between worlds or if aliens did exist.

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