In Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Ray Bradbury portrays an authoritarian social formation in which reading and keeping books are strictly forbidden. The protagonist Montag who works as a fireman charged for burning books happens to question both his job and the dominant anti-intellectual ideology. Following a crisis of conscience period, Montag challenges the function of repressive state apparatus and manages to flee to wilderness where he meets a group of men who are willing to reconstruct society by enabling people to learn about their cultural heritage through the books they have secretly memorized. Using Althusser's theory on ideology, this paper reinterprets Bradbury's imaginative society scrutinizing the use of state apparatuses to interpellate subjects by the ruling ideology and the motif of resistance to such a powerful disseminating ideological call.

Published a decade after September 11, 2001, Amy Waldman's novel The Submission recounts the events about the project to build a memorial for September 11. Two years after the attack, a jury is commissioned to decide the winner of the blind memorial competition. After winnowing five thousand entries, the jury chooses two finalists: the designs named "the Garden" and "the Void." Following the long discussions about how the tragedy should be remembered in that memorial space, the design named "the Garden" wins. When the submission file is opened, the winner's identity as a Muslim-American is revealed which leads to a debate among the jury members. The news regarding the identity of the winner is leaked to a journalist and the chaos in the jury becomes nationwide. The debate on the symbolic associations and the practice of the memorial space goes along with ruminations on mourning, art, Islam, equality and democracy. Using Henri Lefebvre's socio-spatial dialectics as a theoretical framework, this study examines the representation and practice of "the Garden" in The Submission as a space to memorialize and mourn.

Pleasantville presents the experience of the teenage twins David and Jennifer who are transported to the 1950s TV soap opera named Pleasantville via the TV remote control. The twins introduce free sex, arts, literature, rock and roll, and jazz to this perfected town in which residents live in order. This clash of cultures results in social unrest as the residents become aware that the order is an outcome of submission and challenge the roles attributed to them. The transformation from control to resistance is the dominant motif of the film. Using Foucault's theory of heterotopia, this study scrutinizes how the heterotopian principles in the spatial presentations provide a good lens to negotiate forms of control and resistance.

In The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick presents Jack O'Brien's attempts to come to terms with his past. The most traumatic experience in his past is his brother's death which gives not only Jack but also other members of the family a great agony. Similarly, Miracles from Heaven deals with affliction. Inspired by a true story, Patricia Riggen dives into the lives of the Beams projecting both physical and psychological agony since the 10-year-old daughter Anna (Annabel) suffers from a deathly illness. Even though Anna is miraculously healed in the end by divine intervention, both films interrogate death and suffering as a process that threatens the meaningful order of a cosmos ruled by an almighty powerful transcendental creator. Pondering on especially the term theodicy as a theoretical framework, this paper elucidates how these two films deal with the problem of suffering in which humanity loses touch with a meaningful cosmos and how they offer spiritual solutions to this problem by engaging in cosmic voyages.