Analysis of an Ad

1. The writer has a strong closing statement and final 2 paragraphs. The reference to copycat slogans offers nice development of the concept.
2. I think the author needs to add details about the ad itself, omit the information about the ad she (he) didn't use, and organize the structure to keep information closer grouped.

H-Let me know please if you needed more than this. If so, I can revise it. `Chelle

Angel’s Character Analysis

Angel, vegetarian vampire detective, wears many masks. With years of bloodstains anguishing his newly possessed soul, he silently shuns himself from humanity. He converses only when necessary, avoids eye contact and skulks alone with late night bottles of blood, like an old veteran contemplates his lost comrades over Scotch. Early into season 2, his resurfacing past, evokes the question: Underneath the masks, who is Angel really (as per his actions in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been)?

The filming offers mixed hero/ villain clues. During the first clip within Angel’s past, the bellhop admits feeling discomforted and apprehensive in Angel’s presence. When delivering his bill, the bellhop hesitates to exit the elevator. When he does build up the courage, the film draws the eye slowly and dreadfully down the dimly lit corridor before the bellboy reluctantly arrives at the door. He taps almost inaudibly at the door, his voice just above a whisper into the room. When he realizes the occupant is inside, he sets the tray on the floor and rushes back to the safety of the elevator. The viewer expects the opening door will reveal some monstrous creature. But the camera slowly ascends to reveal Angel’s face. They use the opposite portrayal near the second to last scene. The heroic vampire rushes into the room where the now elderly Judy has spent 50 years feeding her turmoil to a hungry demon. She ponders, “I don’t hear them anymore,” of the Thesulac demon he just only just vanquished. Good-naturedly, he lets he run her fingers across his face, inspecting for changes. He assures her she didn’t kill him, gently helping her into bed. In their parting words, he accepts her tearful apology, reassuring her with forgiveness.

The plot distinctively repeats the theme of the double life, and of passing for one thing while being something else. Judy is black, passing for white. An actor passes for straight. Fangs aside, Angel is neither hero passing for villain or vice versa. Angel is self-interested, passing for a lost soul in need of redemption.

He has some good guy credentials. Although his bloodlust is keen, Angel will not kill humans. His condition affords him predatorial advantages: super strength, heightened senses of smell, vision, and hearing. Vampirism lends itself to slaughter, but Angel stopped hunting victims when the gypsies cursed (or blessed) him with a soul. He protects Judy from incarceration, beating up a detective, and hiding her stolen money. In his single truly altruistic act, after searching for a way to defeat the demon that plagues the Hyperion, Angel takes Judy’s place in the noose when the hotel’s guests head hunt for the non-existent murderer of the salesman. Finally, Angel defeats the demon, ridding the hotel of its demonic presence.

He also acts the villain. Although he has reason to suspect she might be in danger, he tries to evict Judy from his room, until the last seconds when he notices his own lock being picked. He beats up a detective, even though he suspects that Judy is lying. When interacting, he keeps his back turned, as if to dissuade and shorten conversation. He threatens to murder a bookstore owner and demands free equipment and assistance vanquishing a demon. When he does have the opportunity to slay the presence, he abandons the cause, sacrificing countless lives In order to wallow in his own resentment. Finally, he endangers his friends without telling them they’re vanquishing a demon to attain bargain real estate.

Despite Angel’s hero/ villain conflict, the repeating theme displayed through his actions is nonchalant self interest. At the beginning of the episode, the Hyperion Hotel, his 1952 home, is on the market, but unsalable due to its demonic inhabitant. While he could have vanquished that presence years past, he instead abandoned the cause over hurt feelings. While Angel did not take the lives of the residents who died there after his abandonment (an evil act), his neglect resulted in their deaths nonetheless. The viewer might guess that his return to the Hyperion might be in search of redemption, until the last scene. Once the hotel is free of the evil that has bound it for almost a century, Angel welcomes them to their new home. Angel may have attained redemption by accident, but the quest was a renovation of sorts, a real estate opportunity.

An honest hermit might choose to occupy some abandoned shack or business far from inquiring eyes. Angel instead occupies a busy hotel known for harboring inconspicuous types. He sets himself out for display but apart from others, as if to be observed but not approached. His mask, therefore, is solitary, but his actions indicate he wants to be seen while disguising the want. He wants people to think him a hermit, so he acts like an inapproachable renegade. If someone insists earnestly though, so eagerly it comes off as odd, he will extend himself. Only after catching Judy lying several times, learning she has been hiding behind a wall of secrecy, that she has stolen a large sum of money from her former employer, does he befriend her. His only friends are the lower elements of the world, so he uses their betrayal to justify the wearing of his trust no one mask. Only once it serves his interests (as with the bookstore owner) does he communicate with more trustworthy crowds.

Finally his interactions with Judy, leave him hurt and betrayed. Although he understands that the residents of the hotel are being deceived by paranoid whispers, and that she did no actual physical harm to him because vampires cannot die, he leaves her riddled with remorse. Angel himself is assumed to be struggling with remorse, but turns a cold shoulder to the anguish he can see as Judy’s face blurs out of consciousness. Even after the demon guffaws out a southern laugh, confiding that he can now feed for years on Judy’s pain, Angel disappears, betraying in turn his so called friend. Even if he left the demon there, he could have eased Judy’s pain in any number of ways. He did not, because it did not serve his interest to do so.

Angel may go on to save the world from its own dark forces, even challenging hell for the benefit of mankind. He may champion women, children and the helpless in other episodes. Perhaps he leads mankind in the quest to reunite lost men with their souls, rescuing babies from burning buildings and falling in love with his enemies. In this episode, though, his true character is an amoral self interested, calculating businessman. In Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, Angel is an opportunist passing for a lost boy in search of redemption. He is a capitalist passing for misunderstood with a good heart. He is human. Angel is you, Angel is me, passing for human to mask his indifference.

Hospice

 The small room smelled sanitary and lonely, like peroxide rain in an isolated forest. Flowers hung in photographs on the gray walls, but the overall smell and sense of cleanly isolation hung in the air. The gray walls and floors, chestnut curtains and bedding, and pale blue comforter absorbed the soft pink, orange and jade hues of the framed wall prints, contrasting the scarlet roses on the bedside table. The light from the window at the edge of the room tiptoed cautiously in, dimly, as if unsure whether to return at a better time.

She reached out a frail hand from a skeletal frame reaching for something on the horizon of some unseen place. She wore a sapphire fleece sweater that smelled like tobacco and Robitussin, when you leaned in. When I took her hand in mine, she gasped as if surprised to see me, licked her thin cracked lips and leaned her head forward to speak. Although her mouth formed the words, only a muffle came out. A second time, “You wanna go outside? I think this is the last one for awhile.”

Sometimes, in less than a span of a breath, time pauses, collapses, planets collide, and fear combusts into spiraling shards of broken truth tearing into your broken soul. In less than the time to blink one eye, every fiber of the world leaps up into your throat at once, leaving a dry acid taste and no room for a scream. The otherwise listless walls close in, growing sinister. The deafening boom of the clock’s second hand can be heard just above your thunderous heartbeat as you are seized back to that terrible dizzying breath. Then that split instant immediately escapes as if ashamed or fearful. I breathed in, one deep reorienting gulp of oxygen.

I croaked, “C’mon. You’ll be ok.” I wasn’t sure who I trying to deceive, myself or her. Maybe it was one last grasp at hope. I lowered myself, hung her legs limply to the side of the bed, and placed one of her arms around my shoulder while I gingerly lifted her weak frame into the chair. She called it dancing. Not long ago, I’d needed help to lift her. Now she was lighter than a schoolchild. She pressed her parched tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Do you want to try another sip of water?” “Maybe when we get back,” she fibbed.

I wheeled her slowly, down the fluorescent hallway. Bumps hurt now, more than they used to. She never said so, she was much too tough, but she tensed and gasped approaching cracks and entryways. Warm sunlight bathed us, warming me, breathing color into her cheeks momentarily. Two drags into her cigarette, she started nodding forward, and I returned her to the sunless room. Not her room. Her room was livelier, stacked with rows of books, collections of ocean scented body sprays, smiling family photos and glued together remnants of decades-old kindergarten ceramics. This room was the sanitized charlatan of her otherwise room. I wheeled her softly to this miscreant room nonetheless.

I would’ve lifted her back into bed, but she waved me back. “Let me sit awhile. I talked to Carol, and she’s having the guys move me this weekend.” The reaper lurked in the background behind the chestnut curtains. The second hand thundered again. She glanced a moment toward the curtains, challenging, and continued. “I think I’ll be home by Monday, then. I’ll be glad to be out of here, especially at night.” “Monday, then,” I hoped, surveying the room, looking for any sharp thing. I would have ripped the scythe from his icy hands, slicing his bitter throat, with a haughty victorious battle cry but that I could deprive him of it. The less than breath, less than blink, years-in-a-moment moment shackles you to yourself, paralyzing, silencing any defiant scream you would otherwise utter. In that single space of eternal second, you cannot fraction a bargaining breath, or raise a fortifying arm. The sunlight dared, though, challenged the fiendish creature, chased away the lurking minute. The air freshened, and the grey walls offered a sip of warmer tan. She laughed, then, as if they’d shared a secret which I wasn’t privy, again from the belly as if sharing that secret now, pushed herself out of the chair onto her legs, stepping cautiously forward.

  Driving through the rain on a crisp March evening, the lights dance red and green lights onto the black highway pavement. The road seems to inhale, sigh and shift its weight. NPR has been hosting another fund drive in the background between classical pieces. Despite the drizzle, I roll down the window and change the station, counting on the wind and sound to wake me. Soft piano floats into my drifting consciousness, and I recognize the melody- her song. Instantly, I am aware of the empty passenger seat, the void in the car, the absence of cars on the road, the missing breath from my choking throat and the numb unfeeling hole in my heart where the missing passenger should be.  

  I inhale deeply; exhale slowly, light a cigarette between bursts of wind. A red neon sign approaches. “Prohibited,” the sign warns sternly as I zip past. The small tires on the road hum one long hypnotizing note to the discordant rhythm of the crunching rain. The tempo had quickened. Forcefully, angrily, the wind kicked the rain into my face from outside the still open window. The unsettling feeling of the missing passenger lingered guiltily, and the new approaching neon sign pointed an accusing arrow toward my ring finger. A new burst of wind sweeps the car suddenly right. A purple bolt flashes downward, lingers, vanishes. I slow, stammering uncertainly now, toward the menacing sign. “Prohibited,” the sign insists, without elaboration.

  Stalling now, I pull to the shoulder. The highway will be snaking soon, and I could always take the belt route. Inhale, sigh. Inhale; long exhale. The car smells like stale tobacco, coffee and wet socks. Deep inhale. I got on the road too late, off-course before the engine started, and on the wrong road for some time.

  Accelerating again, I edge toward “Prohibited”. A siren sounds in the distance, and I see blue and red lights pulsing some distance behind me, closing the distance. The rain has calmed some, apparently done raging for now. At least for a moment I’ll share the road. The comfort of the approaching officer encourages me some, and I brave the sign.

  The radio sounds deliberate, long, minor notes, and from the introduction. Beneath the melody, I hear her call to me, and with all my empty lonely heart, I wish I could follow. There’s not a PT cruiser made in any factory that can drive to that highway. The officer has minutes ago past me but I still hear sirens fading.

  The rain is only dripping now, and I can make up some lost time. I didn’t actually begin with a destination, just a need for departure. The house is always so tense, so filled with accusation in the air. The dream he gave was only a wisp, and stole precious months I could’ve had with her. He detested the silence, the void lifeless eyes I that glazed as they looked past him as if he weren’t there, resented the countless hours spent alone while I seethed somewhere else. He’d begun to speak, in his strained “let me monologue at you” voice. Halfway through the first sentence, I’d already stepped into the blue Cruiser and started the motor.

  I wasn’t overdue; wasn’t expected. I’ve been uncharacteristically punctual since March, another March in a time when timeliness could’ve changed my mother’s outcome. Doctors say she died of cancer, breast cancer. Someone could argue she died of corrupt medical insurance. The truth is she died of failure, my failure, my delay in coming. She died of my marriage, my distance, my inability to be close enough to observe, to decide. I have been frantically punctual since, too late.

  I light another cigarette. How many has this been? The ashtray holds five butts and I’ve been on the highway an hour and a half. Metallica is playing now, something fast, I’ve heard before, but the name escapes me. The air dried up. I turn the last curve for awhile. I notice city lights about five minutes out, shining blurrily though some fog yet lingering in the air. The smell of the rain still hangs in the air, crisp. My eyes have become so heavy by the time I pull into a rest stop and recline the seat. I may go home; I don’t want to think about it now. My mind lingers on the highway as I fade quickly, into dreamspace, into another crisp March on another road from another time.