iRain and Snow; Tiger and Lunatic

                Symbols are so manipulative and it seems like weather can have its meaning manipulated the most. I don’t remember if this was stated in the chapter, but in a way it shows the emotion of the scene. In Life of Pi towards the beginning of the story when the family is on the boat with all their zoo animals there is a terrible rain storm. With that rain storm a young boy, Piscine Patel, is stripped away of everyone he loves and is then left to face the hardest time of his life with a Bengal tiger…in the middle of the ocean. Once his family is taken away, Piscine must learn to live with the one animal he was told to stay away from. After I’ve thought about every story I’ve read, watched or been told that has a bad thunder storm while people are traveling by boat or plane, the people, or person, always has everything or almost everything taken from them. It’s a cleansing in a way, but it’s a harsh one to deal with. I doubt I could live happily for more than a week without my parents or any parent figure at that. I guess it does make them stronger as a person or, yah know, it could just make an interesting story to tell. But I think the latter is what pulls most people into reading or, most likely, watching the story.

                Then there’s Stephen King’s novel The Shining that uses snow as the weather since the book is about a family watching and taking care of a hotel during the winter months. At first the snow doesn’t affect the family, but once it gets worse and they’re basically forced to stay inside the hotel, they start to get a little restless and the spirits of past guests start to appear. This doesn’t have the biggest impact on the mother and son, but it does cause the father to go absolutely crazy and try to kill his wife and son. So this shows how snow can have a negative effect on the characters by basically giving the family cabin fever.  The snow acts like a straight jacket since it keeps the family locked in with nowhere to go.

                Finally there’s the iPhone 5 commercial about the facetime feature. In the commercial it shows multiple clips of people video chatting to someone else. The first time I watched it my inner typical teenage girl immediately noticed the girl crying while her friend on the other line asked “Did he at least apologize?” and the girl shakes her head. I figured that clip was about a girl getting her heart broken and her friend being there to comfort her. So one day when the commercial came back on I thought I’d guess which clip will be the one it comes after and so I picked the one where it is raining. Sure enough that was the clip it was after. Then that got me thinking about how the creator’s chose that raining video clip to be the one the girl goes after. And I figured it’s because it’s raining, she’s crying; the girl is heartbroken and the rain shows how she no longer has the person she cares for.