I looked over the notes from this week’s lecture and began to realize just how massive an undertaking the dissertation is. Though I’m not afraid of it, as many great people have said throughout history: Nothing in life that’s worth doing is ever easy
Taking note of what Andy and Simon said during the lecture and after spending most of this week looking into each idea in turn, I’ve made the following decisions about my four topic ideas:
1. Autism In The Media – Out of all my ideas this was the one I was hoping to use for my dissertation. I was able to find a wide variety of sources in different media from the manga With The Light to episodes of popular American dramas House, Scrubs, Cold Case and several American films such as Adam, The Boy Who Could Fly, Bless The Child and even a Thai martial arts film Chocolate. While I found plenty of sources I found they were all either in some way or another glamourizing the disorder, or having the autistic character act very out of character such as in the episode of House where the autistic character, a child, gives House his PSP, something extremely unusual, in the film The Cube the autistic character was a savant who was essential to the group escaping the Cube prison, of everything I looked at only the Scrubs episode and With The Light seemed to portray autism realistically and even then in Scrubs the autistic character was barely on screen. I decided that I couldn’t make the topic into a good dissertation and decided to abandon it, with the proviso of returning to it only if the other options were un-doable
2. A critical comparison of Japanese and Western horror films – I spent the better part of two days researching this idea and tracking down films I wanted to compare. Chaw and Jaws for Creature Feature, Battle Royale and Friday The 13th for slasher, Tomie and Saw for psychological horror and Freddy VS Jason and Ring (the original Japanese film that inspired the later Hollywood one) for big budget film. It started off well but after reading several books including The Oxford History Of World Cinema, I started to realize just how big this idea was and how much I would need to cover. I thought about abandoning the individual sub-genres and focusing one on film from Japan and Hollywood but even then, the amount of material available and potential areas for discussion were simply too big, I didn’t trust myself enough not to get drawn off on a tangent or use up all 10,000 words without actually answering my intended question: How do Japanese and Western horror films differ cinematically. If I ever decide to do a masters or a PHD thesis this would likely make for a brilliant topic but now, for my dissertation, it’s simply too big
3. Anime as a creative medium – I looked at this idea first and then abandoned it early on after realising one major problem: I couldn’t come up with a good question to write my dissertation on, a very bad sign, so this idea was immediately abandoned
4. The group work/cooking show – I kept this idea as my fall back option and after going over it with the other two group members, Jak Matthews and Matthew Kincarr, I felt this was an idea I could really work with and make something good out of and the Jak and Matthew were, form my own experience with working with them in the past, very reliable. I made the decision to do the group project with them but if for one reason or another, it fell apart I would return to my original autism idea and try to make something out of that.
With my dissertation idea chosen I’m looking forward to knuckling down and getting some serious work done, here’s to the future!
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