by Terence A. Anthony
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| SOURCE: ONEOTAFILMFESTIVAL.ORG |
Take a cardboard and make a circle out of it. Divide it into 7 parts and colour each part a corresponding colour from a rainbow. Poke a hole in the middle and stick it to a small make shift pole. Then spin it around as quickly as possible. You will notice that all the colours would fade away and merge into white.
From the seven colours of the rainbow, came white.
That to me is a representation of the contradiction we face when we criticize what we love. This can be your ideas, philosophy, culture, society or anything that permeates our lives. Sometimes we over-criticize what we love because we expect it to be better and not just achieving the bare minimum. It does not mean that such scrutiny means we want a system to fall down. However it is to point out the holes to make sure people aren’t stuck in their own illusion.
The opposite is true. There are things or ideas in this world where we vehemently oppose but in the way we portray them, we accidentally point out what glorifies these ideas. While it portraying the idea, we might accidentally destroy the full representation and only create lies. That is an injustice to the listener or the reader.
Recently, I stumbled upon a video essay (embed below) by this pair of Dutch vloggers called “Storytellers”. Their film analysis of “Apocalypse Now” explained how Francis Ford Coppolla refused to label his movie “anti-war.” Instead he preferred the term “anti-lies.” He refuses to dilute elements of the movie that could be misinterpreted as glorifying the Vietnam War.
One part of their analysis that struck me was when they broke down the beach scene. In the scene as described in the video showed an American cavalry bombing a Vietnamese beach with Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries in the background. The movie wanted to show the horrors of war yet it is filled with excitement and adrenalin. The vloggers made this interesting juxtaposition with a scene from Jarhead, another “anti-war” film that showed the exact same scene. The marines in Jarhead, this time during the Gulf War instead got all hyped up for war and imitated what they saw on screen.
It is a reminder that what is horrifying can also be exciting. What we can argue as morally wrong can also be seen as fun at the same time. The same way, the stylized violence in Kill Bill is fun and exhilarating. Yet, Quentin Tarantino as a person is a vocal critic of police brutality and faced threats due to what he has voiced.
You can love an idea or you can hate an idea, but there are things that you can admit that there things you enjoy out of it. It is not being hypocritical in any sense. That’s why a black and white world view isn’t able to process post-modern criticisms.
To show the excitement in the danger instead is to tell the truth, not recklessness.
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