[click image]Just in case you thought my mini film festivals are some kind of a real distraction. I use them to unlock my concentration on the karma playing out all around the world, release the physical distress from so much mental anguish, but the true mind never sleeps and it watches movies without the remotest idea of entertainment, of anyone needing entertainment.
I went off down the garden path this morning before setting out my dreaming. I only can recall now that there were some choices being given to me and I was passing a test as I was making them. It woke me up into further consideration of the doom I was seeing behind the Liam Neeson movie I was watching the other night.
He's a retired intelligence op whose daughter is kidnapped by a human trafficking ring in Paris, and he goes to get her. I already told you that I had some reservations about it, about who are always the bad guys, and the much-too-intense-for-me violence in some rough patches, even though I thought over all it was a pretty good movie. The fact is: it is just another piece in the social conditioning being done in almost every bit of television or cinema that comes in front of you.
I remember I was couch surfing after leaving 86 right before I ended up having to go in for spinal surgery, and 24 and The Shield were the two hot shows at that time. I was appalled. I was ranting about them being planted on the tube to condition people, to make them both fear and trust maniacal cops, to make stuff that used to feel completely unthinkable okay if the authorities were doing it. This happens in a thousand other places and ways, and they are now also conditioning you to accept certain really immoral and moronic survival of the "fittest" stuff as normal. You don't have to keep promises anymore if money is at stake. You have to sell out your friends if the rules say so. Young Middle Eastern men will hurt you. Old ones will buy your daughter from kidnappers and use her as a sex slave. People from distressed Eastern European countries will kill anyone they can't buy to maintain their illicit businesses. You are not safe outside the United States. You can't travel anywhere without being in immediate danger of death or worse. So if you have a dad who can waste everyone who impedes him finding you, you're jake, but otherwise the same child molesters who would have snatched you when you were five will now take you and ransom you off to the highest bidder or kill you horribly, whichever way the cookie crumbles. You are not safe.
You are most especially not safe if you are wealthy or famous. You need to pull up the drawbridge over your moat and you need constant protection from the feral hordes on the street... aka the general public.
If you have money, you need protection and you will get it. If you do not, you need protection and you can't get it. Soon you may become someone who they need protection from for real or your circumstances will be reduced beyond recognizing, and even if you will never become aggressive toward them despite starving to death, you will be treated as though you are a clear and present danger.
There was poor Liam, stuck not able to make the bucks, having to live as a schmuck while his agency friends came around for charity's sake and his family looked down their noses at him. Just about disappeared into nonentity, except for his certain exceptional skills, stuff too horrible for most, but the only stuff that could make him a man worthy of respect in this society.
Don't believe me. Just turn on your tv.
Actually, I just watched this also. My opinion is the main character is supposed to be a father, I can understand a father doing anything, and I mean anything to protect his family. Where I didn't like it is where it's revealed in scene #666
ReplyDelete"Long steel nails are driven into the kneecaps" and old school torture is discussed on how it's outsourced but bla bla bla..
I have to agree it's a social conditioning scene. Just like 24 (the series.)
Still in the end, I can't help but being glad about the pile of dead bodies vs the invisible pile of dead kidnapped drug addicted victims and their devastated families.
PS: I went for the directors cut, not the theatrical version.
~p
The photo reminds of the night at the entrance to Paria Canyon when the dry thunderstorm rolled in.
ReplyDeleteWe were huddled in our dome tent, fearful of the aluminum poles supporting it, as lightning bolts repeatedly struck the low rock formation we were camped at the foot of.
Striking no more than 50 feet over our heads every 20 to 30 seconds, we often heard the electricity sizzle the air prior to the deafening thunderclap.
Our hair was standing on end from the charges in the air.
We felt we would be much safer in the car, but it was about a 50 yard dash out in the open to get to it - that was out of the question. So we sat there for about an hour and a half beofore the storm slowly moved away from us.
I know it's weird, but I go completely calm, completely Zen, blissful in the middle of electrical storms. I was once caught in one while camping near the Anasazi ruins, and it sat over me, didn't budge, for a few hours, ear-splitting thunder at least once every ten seconds, pouring buckets instead of drops, and I just totally blissed-out in my tent and fell asleep.
ReplyDeleteI once lived in a house in Steven's Point where one of the legs from the city water tower rested in my back yard. During electrical storms the tower would be repeatedly hit. One particular storm was so crazy with lightning that it was almost continuously being hit.
ReplyDeleteAnd at a farmhouse I lived in the plumbing would somehow become charged by close lightning bolts and a large spark would jump from the kitchen sink nozzle to the sink drain. We kept hearing a loud snap in the kitchen and finally saw the source one day. We no longer did dishes when the weather was threatening.
Electrical storms, and misty rain... NO THANKS. I almost got hit by lightning (15-18 inches away), it comes FROM the ground and goes TO the sky (from my first hand experience) -FYI
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That it does, Phil, though it usually LOOKS as though it's the other way.
ReplyDeleteOne day I will have to visit Carmel, and get photo's of the Stager house east of the squeaking Carmel Beach sand. We also had "HO HUM" on 17 Mile drive. but I DOUBT sadly I will ever find that again as my grand mother is now dead. (She died in Aptos/Rio Del Mar)
ReplyDelete~p