Memorialization
Season two of Agent Carter focused on zero
matter, and its creator, whitney frost. For many, zero matter was something
that would destroy the world, but for whitney, it meant having power. Her want
for power stems from having grown up in a humble, single parent household,
where her mom had to prostitute herself in order to support whitney and herself.
As she moved to Hollywood and started to surround herself with people in power,
her desire to become powerful only grew.
Ekaterina V. Haskins explains the way in
which we can have different interpretations of a memorial, “public memory and
its meaning depend not just on the forms and figures in the monument itself but
on the viewer’s response to the monument, how it is used politically and
religiously in the community, who sees it under what circumstances, how its
figures enter other media and are recast in new surroundings” (Haskins, 90). In
agent carter, other than whitney frost, the actors see zero matter as something
unknown and then as something that can bring total destruction to the human
race. Dr. wilkes descries zero matter, “zero matter is unlike any substance
that we have ever seen. I’m starting to think that it’s more dangerous than
anything we’ve ever known.” Dr. wilkes expresses his fear about zero matter
because it is an unknown substance to many. Frost’s take on zero matter is
different, she states that “she is the only on that knows what zero matter can
do.”
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In the above picture you can see how she
was at the beginning of the show. In the bottom picture you can see how she
ended up because of the memories she had of zero matter, that resulted in her
going crazy.
the memorialization of zero matter is not a
concrete monument, it is engraved in the mind of whitney frost after zero
matter has been destroyed. At the end of season 2, Whitney has lost all of her
control over zero matter and all of her memories of zero matter are all in her
head. She reminisces over what she lost, “it’s gone. it’s all gone. Everything I
worked so hard to accomplish.” Zero matter to whitney was a remembrance of how
far she came, from being a young girl raised in a broken home, to being a Hollywood
star with a successful career and a substance that she deemed could “change the
world.” It also gave her hope that she could accomplish what she wanted and not
just because you came from nothing you couldn’t be anything in the world, like
many people in her early childhood and adult life told her.
Links to videos you can watch that
support my claims. I was unable to upload them.
http://abc.go.com/shows/marvels-agent-carter/video/most-recent/VDKA0_hnxyjwb0
Read!
ReplyDeleteYou have a nice description of zero matter here, and the images are a nice illustration of that, as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's not entirely clear how this is using the method. You're clearly talking about memory at the end of the post, but you need to connect your description to the methodological portions of the post.
Little writing tidbit: capitalize names (so Whitney, throughout). :)