Gooseberries, Oil, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Warning: spoilers for There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood is about an advantageous capitalist during America's oil boom. Gooseberries (the story inside the frame story) is about a ruthless man who does everything in his power to get a farm with gooseberry bushes. 

One loves dirty liquid that can be set on fire, one can't get enough of his own sour grapes. So what do they have in common? In short, pretty much everything. The parallels that can be drawn between There Will Be Blood and Gooseberries are surprisingly numerous. 

Both stories feature a person who has a single fixed idea of what they want, and nothing shall stop them from getting it. All Daniel Plainview wants in life is to be unfathomable rich. All Nicholai Ivanich wanted was a small farm beside a river. 

Both stories feature the main character (Nicholai will be the main character of Gooseberries for all intensive purposes because Ivan is merely the narrator) trampling people in their way to get what they want. Daniel Plainview uses a child as a pretty face to make deals easier, beats a preacher boy (honestly, he deserved it, though), and makes deals with land owners that he has no intention of keeping. Nicholai Ivanich marries a widow for her money and proceeds to watch her die without feeling a hint of remorse. 

In the end, both characters have an extremely distorted view of the world and consider themselves to be great men. Daniel Plainview disowns his "son" after his "son" tells Daniel that he wants to start an oil business all because Daniel only saw his "son" as a competitor at that point, and beats the same preacher boy to death after the preacher boy has the guile to try to sell land he has no control over all because Daniel had hated the preacher boy from the minute the preacher boy acted superior to Daniel. Nicholai Ivanich owns a crummy little farm with a lousy dog yet he feels like he's a great man because his serfs love him for providing them with gallons of vodka. 

Even the endings are similar in that Daniel fulfills one of his life dreams (getting the preacher boy to admit that he's a false prophet), and Nicholai fulfills his life dream of being able to eat home grown gooseberries on his own farm.

A story about a government worker turned gooseberry farmer and a story about a ruthless capitalist making his mark on the world in the early 20th century may not seem to have much in common, but they totally do. The main difference is that one likes gooseberries, and the other likes milkshakes.

One of the best parts of the movie

Plot holes

Warning: Major spoilers for Splinter Cell Blacklist, and Fallout 3

In my mind, there's not much that makes a story fall apart faster than plot holes. Recently I finished played the new Splinter Cell game (Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Blacklist), in which you play as Sam Fisher, special-ops-spy-dude extraordinaire. Sam Fisher gets shot at a lot (actually just dependent on how good you are at the game, I'm not that good so I got shot at a lot), and sometimes Sam Fisher actually gets shot. Getting shot isn't that big of a deal; you go find some cover, chill for a bit, and then you're good to go. fisher's movement speed isn't even affected that much, he can still climb things, jump, shoot a gun, beat a guy to death with his bare hands, you name it. The plot hole comes in during the final scene of the game. Fisher has finally cornered the bad guy and he's set to take him out, but Fisher messes up when disarming the gun and doesn't knock the bad guy out (big surprise). Fisher does manage to shoot the bad guy, but only in the shoulder (because feigning tension is a lot easier than actually making it happen). Now, even though this guy just got shot in the shoulder at point blank range, he still manages to knee Fisher in the stomach a few times then run off. My immediate reaction was something along the lines of "psssshhh, a few kicks? Is that it? I'll just chase him down and beat to death with my face or something." But no, Fisher starts clutching his stomach and limping away. Up until this point I thought this game was really good, but endings matter to me and the ending to this game was really lackluster, so I was severely disappointed.

Seriously? A few kicks to the stomach stopped this dude?

So now that I've rambled plenty about the game, time to go back to plot holes. In general, they are terrible, so why do people still let them happen? They are almost always noticeable, and they almost always hurt a story's reputation. Another example is the whole sword deal in Pacific Rim. Why didn't they just always use the sword? Why even bother trying to punch giant demon monsters when you have a sword that can rip anyone of them in two? Or the vanilla ending to Fallout 3, where you can't send your radiation resistant friend into the highly irradiated pit of death because it's supposed to be your destiny or some other stupid reason like that.

Really? I've sent you to fight off countless Deathclaws, which you happily did, yet you can't just hit a button to save my life?

In short, plot holes are terrible, they destroy realism, they hurt reputations, and they make me mad. Not mad that they hurt the story but mad that the creators of whatever the plot hole is in let the plot hole happen. It's lazy, is all it is. The creators decided to slack on story depth just because they were lazy, not because it was too hard. To fix the Blacklist one, all they had to do was make sure Fisher was shot before even getting to fight the bad guy. There were armed guards pretty much everywhere so why not? I'm only just coming to realize this, but, there's two plot holes at that point. Before leaving the bad guy's compound he says to stick close to the captives because there are snipers itching to shoot them from all angles, then he proceeds to lose his captive and stand in the middle of a field with no protection. Why didn't any of the snipers just shoot him? to fix the Fallout 3 one the developers could have just prevented followers from coming with you by having the place where your character is supposed to die be surrounded by bad guys, so you have your followers fall back to defend you.

To recap (again); plot holes shouldn't exist, they ruin stories, and they're not very hard to fix. Therefor the reason they exist can be blamed on laziness.

Syria's Situations

         In early March of 2011, Syria was still considered to be a "kingdom of silence" compared to the rest of the Middle East thanks to strict security measures, a popular president, and religious diversity. Like most people in the Middle East at the time, Syrians were protesting. Syrian protests in particular started up after some students who were putting up anti-government graffiti got arrested and tortured. Then people across Syria decided to have large protests in the city of Daraa. The president, Assad, retaliated by having military forces, including aircraft and tanks, attack towns where protests were common. Now, after years of the Syrian government killing and torturing its own citizens and protesters fighting back, various superpowers around the world are trying to decide whether or not they should help the rebels. You may be asking yourself "But what does any of this have to do with an English class?" Well I'll tell you. Basically news providers are trying to tell you one of two things: Syrian rebels are bad, this is fact because we're ignorant or Syrian rebels are good, this is fact because we're ignorant. What these have in common, though, is that the Syrian rebels are all normal people, like you and me. The problem with that statement is that it's not true, there are various reports that show the Syrian rebels are backed by America's number one enemy Al Qaeda. So, that shows that the Syrian rebels are victims of the single story. The average American only hears that the poor Syrian rebels are being killed constantly, not that they may be teaming up with known terrorist groups. What I find the most interesting about all this nonsense going on in Syria and various superpowers' decisions is who supports what. Normally, Republicans are all for military intervention and Democrats aren't, but (as shown by the links above) known Democrat John Kerry supports intervention in Syria (he was a big player in Vietnam War protests) while known Republican John McCain is against intervention in Syria. Granted, everyone has their own opinion and what not, and just because you identify with one of the two major parties in a flawed system doesn't mean that you believe in all the ideals of who you identify with. Another interesting little tidbit is that the House of Commons recently rejected Prime Minister David Cameron's proposal to aide the United States in Syrian intervention. The last time the House of Commons and the Prime Minister/King/Queen disagreed on a declaration of war or peace was 231 years ago when King George III wanted to keep fighting the Americans.

Photograph of a Syrian protest