Why Decoding Disney?

Hi! My name is Ethan Susser. I am nineteen years old and from Long Island, New York. Unlike everyone else taking this class, I am a sophomore here at Duke University. I started my freshman year as a student in Pratt, the notoriously work heavy school of engineering at Duke. While a very strong math and science student, I quickly found the course load and requirements not to be too intimidating, but to be way too confining. You are at a world-class institution with some of the most renowned individuals of their respective fields teaching classes, and you don't have the time to experience a wide array of classes and to discover new passions. So I transferred to Trinity, the college of arts and sciences, and never looked back.

A perpetually mediocre writer, I managed to elude writing 101 as a freshman, but was ultimately forced by my advisor to take it this semester. As a rising sophomore I had the luxury of selecting any writing 101 class, for returning students have a earlier class registration window than incoming freshman. When scrolling through the long list of Writing 101 classes Decoding Disney instantaneously caught my eye. While being an average analytical writer, I had always shown more promise when analyzing something of interest. When I get to write about an interest of mine I could usually relate it to an experience or something that had a strong impact on me and thereby write more eloquently. Furthermore, there is an intrinsic spirit of exploration that embodies Disney and as an individual who loves to travel and explore I have always been attracted to that spirit.

My first visible attraction to Disney was to the movie ‘Mulan’. I vividly remember lying with my sisters at the foot of my parents’ bed watching Mulan. We made it a tradition that once a year we all lay in the same spots and watch the movie, each time just as memorable as the last. Even with my sisters out of the house and me at Duke, we still manage to honor the tradition. Cooking in the kitchen it is commonplace to hear a family member howl “Lets get down to business!’. That howl is consistently responded with a “To defeat the Huns!” bellowed out by the other family members in the room. It will never ever get old.

My first trip to Disney Land, however, was the real tipping point in my life when my interest in Disney became a passion. Walking through those gates for the first time was a memory I will cherish forever. There is this magical aura to Disney Land that is hard to put into words. There is excitement in the air and an adventurous spirit that you just can feel through your bones. I was hooked. Over the past several years my fervor for all things Disney has dwindled. But my experiences with Disney, whether it be watching it’s magical films or visiting it’s theme parks, have instilled a thirst to explore and dream. This thirst has led me to backpack Vietnam by myself, to bungee jump in Zimbabwe, and to scuba dive in frigid waters in Iceland. This thirst has led me to learn a lot about my self and countless others all around the world.
With regards to the focus of the course, I look very forward to scrutinizing and analyzing the dynamic and role of evil or a villain within Disney films. I have always been interested in the evil villain in films and I found ‘The Aesthetic of Evil’ to be super fascinating. Maybe my inherent interest in the villain has formed because the villain’s actions represent rebellion in a time that I felt cooped up in the confines of an over protective Jewish mother. I guess this course will give me a whole semester to figure out the reasoning behind this innate intrigue in the villain.