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Earth
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?
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It has led to some very intriguing results, though.
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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.
no subject