Earth

[avad]

Ugh.
I just watched the film 'Earth' by Deepa Mehta. And, as the teaser promised, I am emotionally devastated.
Human cruelty is That which I..just can't...understand..which absolutely breaks my heart.
Here's a spliced description:
"Earth, The second film in Deepa Mehta's controversial trilogy is an emotionally devastating love story set within the sweeping social upheaval and violence of 1947 India. As her country teeters on the brink of self rule and instability, 8-year old Lenny, an innocent girl from an affluent Parsee family, is in danger of having her world turned upside down. As the simmering violence around them reaches a boiling point, Lenny's beautiful nanny Shanta (Nandita Das) falls in love with one of Lenny's heroes,… the charismatic and peace-advocating Hassan. Love, however, can be dangerous when religious differences are tearing the country apart, and friendships and loyalty are put to the test. ./Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Parsees alike buzz like bees around the lovely flower Shanta, the Hindu nanny of sheltered 8-year-old Parsee girl Lenny-baby. This sunny Eden of racial harmony plunges into darkness when independence brings the partition of the empire and sets ethnic groups against one another in civil war./ Building to a shattering climax, Earth is a devastating human drama in which desire unfolds into a stirring tale of love and the ultimate betrayal. "

Yes, I do recommend the film highly... and give Kudos to Mehta for expressing such a jarring perspective and showing the sad irony of violence between groups of people who once were friends.
Has anyone seen it?

Comments

[hopeevey.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see it - assuming anyone would go with me. I strongly suspect I'd need the emotional support afterward. And lots of tissues during.

[avad.livejournal.com]

It's actually on video...so you can sob in the privacy of your own home.:)

[wandruska.livejournal.com]

not seen it but i'd like to, there is a huge community of asians where i live and would be nice to have a better understanding of their history. i'll keep an eye out for tv schedules, it's the only i think i can get to see it.

[avad.livejournal.com]

I have some Pakistani friends and have also felt SO ignorant of their history. I had been ogling over gorgeous photos in a photography book of Kashmir from the library when my friend Akhlaq looks at me with some surprise and says "You DO know that is the disputed land?"
um..uh..why? :(

[chaizzilla.livejournal.com]

we're a species that went insane early on and has yet to find its way back, but has no honest excuses for not doing so.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

Except that we're insane, so, you know, the whole insanity thing.

It occurs to me that racism and war would be impossible without co-operation.  Without co-operation, we compete with everyone.  With co-operation, we compete with some people, frequently those sharing some characteristic with us (like proximity to a water-cooler).

So the logical end to racism and war is to extend co-operation to everyone.

So are we progressing to sanity from solipsism via paranoid schizophrenia?

[avad.livejournal.com]

HMMM!!:)
that would make paranoid schizophrenia a 'healthy' thing, no?
*relieved*

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

Well, not so much healthy ...

... paranoid schizophrenia, as far as I know, involves people trying to make sane decisions based on insane information.  Solipsism is wilful; in schizophrenia at least the sufferers are making an attempt to interpret the universe.  Unfortunately, the universe they see is partly hallucinatory.

[chaizzilla.livejournal.com]

i didn't think schizophrenia was an induced disease, so i'd say no. i don't believe we're anywhere near this screwed up by nature, but like one sees in generations of families, once it's there it's pretty tenancious.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

Hmm ... it does depend what you mean by screwed-up.  I think some of our tendency unethical behaviour is innate, for example.  This isn't saying we are forced by our natures to behave unethically, any more than we are forced to walk down hills.  However, we can roll down hills, and I think there are some tendencies it takes effort to overcome.  I also think it's valuable to realize this where it applies, as it's possible to walk up a hill, but very difficult to walk through it.

This is not to say all our tendencies are bad, as some claim.  I think, basically, our tendencies are good but they can become misdirected, and this misdirection can amplify.  My analogy with schizophrenia was that schizophrenics are in many ways sane people, but whose information about the world is insane:  the strange behaviour of many schizophrenics has been characterized as a sane reaction to an insane universe, as experienced by the sufferer.

In this sense, I think people's attempts to interpret and deal with the universe are sane responses to insane data (or assumptions).  It's late and I'm not sure how I can justify that ... anyway, I do think this.

I'll probably have better ideas in the morning.

[chaizzilla.livejournal.com]

no i think you're doing fine, but we might have different pov's on it. i'm pretty cynical about people, especially since i do believe enough folks 'ignorance' is very active, though i empathise with what pain can do to a person's relationship with themselves and the world as well as perception, it can wear the strongest people down. but i don't think suffering is the root of the problem as much as the psychological damage passed down through abuse. in a sense it's not sp much humans then, but their dominant culture, that's insane. which jives with the idea of 'who would want to rule the world but a whack job/enneagram 8 gone horribly wrong?'. i'm not at all prepared to assign it to innate human tendancy, at least not for the large majority of people.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

It's interesting you should mention ignorance, because I think a lot of bad things are attributable to just that.  Genocide, and the enormous amount of effort that goes into it, would seem not to be one of them.

However, it did occur to me recently that where people blame objectification for various evils, it could simply be failed personification:  the amount of processing that must go into modelling a person, as opposed to an object, can only be huge, so it would scarcely be surprising if it failed sometimes or was suppressed in cases where the object under consideration might not be human.

Also, I think it's possible for terrible evil to be done cumulatively by large numbers of people all doing the mildly unethical.

[avad.livejournal.com]

Loved the entry you linked!
My futurist-optimism that many see as naive is largely based on this idea of personification and on hopes that technology can help to spread 'faces' across the globe. That we may, in the coming years, recognize the persons within what were faceless masses and in that way at least confound/fog our mad rushes of aggression.
Unfortunately, the movie mentioned above had another strong and devastating point...that SOMETHING, something within man has the power to reverse even that...that faces can become faceless, friends become foe when the nameless force of cruelty within is let out of its cage. I would love your opinion on the movie and this part in particular if you get the chance to watch it.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

What you've said is true:  I don't actually understand how, but objectification does exist, even though I suspect the label is misapplied in some cases.

I'm sitting here staring blankly and wondering if I'm an alien, because I really, really can't get my head round it.  You can't delete concepts, so how can a person look at another person they cared about and see an inanimate object?

I'll try and see the movie.

[avad.livejournal.com]

I really don't know. Really, I just don't understand cruelty, torture, it rips my head and breaks my heart...I can only describe the feeling it stirs as anguish, or a deep pain in my chest.But I see it exists...oh does it. And I long to offer some sort of medicine to exhort the demon from the masses who seem to have it. *shakes head* I don't know...
I started a book a while ago..'Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Glover'-
but couldn't continue, though the author shared my hopes, I just couldn't handle the daily dose of knowing/remembering/imagining the cruelties.My partner, seeing me in tears again and again, day after day, was relieved when I decided to let that particular book go.

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

I suspect, like me, you don't have any shielding.  I tore all mine out in a fit of altruism sometime during my adolescence.

It has led to some very intriguing results, though.

[avad.livejournal.com]

Actually, on the topic of genocide and facelessness...here is a post from my old diary from a certain time: http://freeopendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=A392439&entry=10054

[andrewwyld.livejournal.com]

To the terrorists, the buildings were just big boxes.

Scary ... the thing is, I can see people justifying bad policies that caused massive death by saying "well, of course we didn't want everyone to die" ... the genocidal killings can't be justified, but it's very much easier to abdicate responsibility when yours isn't the hand that pulls the trigger, and when the hand that pulls the trigger is nearly paralyzed by fear of a dictator and the many, many other hands that will pull triggers if this hand does not.

When September 11th happened, sickened by my own numbness in the face of death and my ability to weep at even quite banal movies, I imagined dead people, their grieving relatives, the horror of a human life extinguished, until I hit my capacity.  I got to about thirty.  Thirty dead people is about as many as I can imagine.

[avad.livejournal.com]

*sigh* *nods*

THAT FILM IS AMAZING

[ambitioushope.livejournal.com]

I SAW IT IN CLASS IT RULES !!!
i am so seeing "water" sometime soon.
and hoping/praying that "fire" ets past the sensors

Re: THAT FILM IS AMAZING

[avad.livejournal.com]

I was so shocked to find Fire at our Blockbuster!!! Things have changed! It may be just this area..enough requests, I don't know. But I remember once upon a time not being able to find even Henry and June and now gay/lesbian theme films galore! As a whole, I think Earth is just 10 times better...but Fire was necessary.