HOLLA! 9/6/09

So I always used to wonder if there were actual meanings or words to things that occur in our minds. To clarify, we all have had that experience when some starts off by saying something and we automatically fill in the blank without even thinking twice about it. For example, what we spoke about in class; boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, boy breaks girl’s heart, boy wins girl back, and they live happily ever after. This is an example of what Barthes calls tropes, little segments of meanings we’ve seen so many times we start filling in the meaning even though we are missing parts. After learning about this new phrase, it was great to finally have a symbol that I could put along with a universal meaning/understanding. My question to Barthes, or anyone who may want to respond to this considering Barthes really cant, why do tropes even form. How cliché or unoriginal are individuals that they can create a meaning for missing segments in a conversation. You would thinks Americans would be more creative and begin to step away from the norm. I also wonder, Hollywood wise, when a trope is filled with something that goes against the norm, for example, in the movie The Break Up, the normal trope is broken giving the movie a different ending. The Break Up was a very popular movie, but when boy did not win girl back, and they did not live happily ever after the story had a sad ending that a lot of individuals did NOT like at all. So do we follow these tropes because they are a known normalcy or because we only believe in a perfect reality when perfect is the farthest from our normal reality? This is a question I would love to find the answer to as we explore this topic further.