![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Maya Arulpragasam, also known as M.I.A., released a new video, a short movie around her song "Born Free." The music is not my usual speed, but the video is striking (and graphically violent). I watched it last night, and reflecting on it this morning realized I had rarely seen anything like it.
Usually, in American media, whenever you see depictions like this -- stormtroops rounding people up, killing them for fun -- Mel Gibson is there. Or Bruce Willis. Or Sly Stallone. They'll fight back and win, or run away, survive, and get revenge. Our sense of reality is shaped around the idea that the bad guys won't really get away with anything so heinous. World War Two is proof of that, right? The Nazis tried to pull that stuff, and boy did they get handed their asses. If there weren't heroes in real life, Hollywood can just invent some when they tell the story. And even if heroes don't make sense in a narrative, God and nature will set the slaughterers straight.
Maybe this is the nature of narratives. People who participate in overwhelmingly one-sided slaughter don't tell their stories about it. Neither do the ones who are slaughtered. So I suppose the only narratives we have about genocide are from those who survive being slaughtered, or their children.
It's easy to say, "Well, stories with no hero, with no one acting righteous, are just depressing. Who wants to watch that? Who would be enriched by it?" The problem is, though, as I see it, that we've become so used to just assuming that a hero will come along and the bad guys won't win that we've become unable to process reality, because bad guys do win quite a lot of the time. Almost always, I would even say. And since they are winners, certain other aspects of our cultural discourse kick in and we even sympathize with them. The hero stories, though, enable us to side with bullies and abusers even while pretending we don't. It is, unfortunately, a bucket of bull-hockey.
( M.I.A. & Romain Gavras, 'Born Free', NSFW )
Usually, in American media, whenever you see depictions like this -- stormtroops rounding people up, killing them for fun -- Mel Gibson is there. Or Bruce Willis. Or Sly Stallone. They'll fight back and win, or run away, survive, and get revenge. Our sense of reality is shaped around the idea that the bad guys won't really get away with anything so heinous. World War Two is proof of that, right? The Nazis tried to pull that stuff, and boy did they get handed their asses. If there weren't heroes in real life, Hollywood can just invent some when they tell the story. And even if heroes don't make sense in a narrative, God and nature will set the slaughterers straight.
Maybe this is the nature of narratives. People who participate in overwhelmingly one-sided slaughter don't tell their stories about it. Neither do the ones who are slaughtered. So I suppose the only narratives we have about genocide are from those who survive being slaughtered, or their children.
It's easy to say, "Well, stories with no hero, with no one acting righteous, are just depressing. Who wants to watch that? Who would be enriched by it?" The problem is, though, as I see it, that we've become so used to just assuming that a hero will come along and the bad guys won't win that we've become unable to process reality, because bad guys do win quite a lot of the time. Almost always, I would even say. And since they are winners, certain other aspects of our cultural discourse kick in and we even sympathize with them. The hero stories, though, enable us to side with bullies and abusers even while pretending we don't. It is, unfortunately, a bucket of bull-hockey.
( M.I.A. & Romain Gavras, 'Born Free', NSFW )
