Spontaneous Musings

Just finished watching Syriana, the fim about the oil industry. Before I watched it, I read a review in a friend's journal about Ian McEwan's Atonement, in which she states that the book is brilliant, but not a world she wishes to inhabit and was a bit painful to read. Watching Syriana reminds me a little of reading Atonement. Except for the fact that I know I inhabit this world. I may not see it on a daily basis or have a direct involvement with it, but unlike the worlds depicted in fantasy shows or films such as Superman Returns, Pirates of the Carribbean, or X-Men Last Stand, these worlds are real ones. Fictionalized perhaps, but they exist. And not just in the author's head, the author is acting as camera lense that we see the world through or say a bunch of fun house mirrors. The mirrors exaggerating those bits and pieces we would prefer not to see.

Before watching Syriana and reading the friend's review of Atonement, I spoke with a friend who had just seen Pirates of the Caribbean. She didn't like it. Felt it was over-long and silly. I replied that I enjoyed it for its absurdist humor and while I love the absurdity of the sequence where the captives are pushing their cages to the other side of deep ravine, I admit the film would have worked far better if this sequence and the bits that proceed and follow it on the island of cannibals had been edited out. Both my friend and I ignored the offensiveness of the sequence, but now that the film has become the cultural phenomena it currently is or blockbuster, I'm thinking society as a whole would have been better served without it and maybe the filmmakers need to be a tad more sensitive to such concerns. Like sexual violence, misogyny and gay bashing, racist portrayals of minorities is not something we can just throw around and sing la la la with fingers poked in our ears if anyone criticizes us for it -  there are dangerous consequences to such portrayals in art, particularly in a society that is struggling to overcome its own absuses and crimes regarding such minorities and in fact, in many areas, is still committing them. We can not risk condoning such things in popular arena of art and culture not without appreciating the consequences. Every action or non-action has a consequence.  But that is a discussion that I think has been exhausted for lack of a better phrase. At any rate, what I told my friend was that films like Pirates do well because people want to escape the pains of life, not think about them. They don't want to analyze, ponder, worry, or get angry. They just want to have a little fun in a cool movie theater on a hot and sticky summer day.  (Even more reason why such things probably should be left out of entertainment that on its surface  at least is meant as little more than a bit of fun in the sun.) Life is hard enough. Why worry about things you can't change or control? Why deal with folks in a movie that are nasty and don't get punished - we see enough of that in every day life. If you want to think and ponder about the world - you go see Munich or Syriana, I told her.

Munich made me angry at the middle east, primarily Israel. Syriana makes me angry at the US corporations. Although I realize it is not that simple. As the commentators state in the special features section on the DVD, there are no bad guys in the film or rather there are no good guys either. The line between good guy and bad guy in real life is surprisingly thin and blurry.

I remember reading Atonement a little over a year or so ago. I read it quickly. Scanned most of it, not because it was not well written, it is, but because I I had a violent reaction to the main character or protagonist, whose point of view you are in through the majority of the novel. She is a little girl when the novel starts and we follow her and her sister and her sister's lover through World War II.  When I discussed the book with the book club I was in at the time they did not understand why I was not sympathetic towards the little girl. "She's just a little girl," they stated. "Can't you understand why she did it?" "It was a mistake that she clearly regretted and tries to atone for through writing, as a writer, you must understand that?" Ah, yes, perhaps that explains the reaction - I felt and I think McEwan fully intended me to feel this way, that the protagonist, who is a writer in the novel, was using her writing to twist events to make herself look good and be remembered fondly. She was using writing in a way that I had always run away from and feared. To promote oneself and for one's own personal gain at the expense of someone else. The writer as monster. And I think, more than a year later, still haunted by the novel and I've read many novels in between that I cannot remember nearly as well as this one, that may be the root of my discomfort with it. It hit upon a my own fears and dark desires. McEwan is interested in exploring the dark side of human nature. 

What does this have to do with the film Syriana? Ah.

Syriana like Atonement also talks about the dark side of human nature. It explores what people are willing to do to get oil. And how they justify these actions to themselves. The justifications are important, and it is in fact the justifications that McEwan explored in Atonement that continue to haunt me. I think the reason people are able to hurt one another and still sleep at night is those justifications. In Syriana, they justify the assaignation of a political figure based on the view that he is "evil", they demonize him. He's evil. He wants to take our oil away from us. He's disrupting his country. We are protecting it. When in truth, he merely wants to create a democratic government, give women the right to vote, and provide a strong economic infrastructure instead of continuing to allow foreign interests to suck his country dry of its natural resource. It's tempting to see the foreign interests evil, but they aren't - they are equally worried about the people in their country, the unemployed in Texas and other states due to an encroaching oil crisis. 

The answer, if there is one, is to find another resource other than oil. Not to depend so much on your car. To use public transportation more. But it's not that simple. It's not like Superman, where the evil Lex Luthor is trying to destroy the world and Superman flies in to stop him. The oil barons are not monsters, but men attempting to provide jobs to other men and women, attempting to protect their way of life, just as the arabs are trying to protect theirs and both sides are willing to do anything for that to happen.

Watching Syriana makes me want to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me. It is not a world I wish to live in. Any more than McEwan's world is.
But I know that both will haunt me and that I can't hide from them. Or ignore them. Any more than I can ignore the discomfort I feel when I think I enjoyed the absurdity of the island of the cannibals in Pirates. It's easier to ignore it. To avoid such unpleasantries. Focus on things of beauty. But much like the closeted and sheltered Victorian poet who leaves the taunting party crowd that insists on throwing these things in his face, only to get attacked in an alley by demon, I'm not sure I can afford to put my head in the sand either.  Or I risk inadvertently joining the demons I'm working so hard to ignore.

The question then becomes how does one combat such things? Do more volunteer work? Join the peace corps? Watch more films and read more books on racism, terrorism, ethical journalism, gender politics, or whatever else comes up?  

I think the answer isn't so simple or clear-cut. I think it is a matter of being aware. Of constantly challenging one's views and opinions. Opening up to new ones which may make one feel uncomfortable or uneasy. And to give up things. That whole statement - "do no harm" - is not as easy as it sounds. I think sometimes its impossible not to.

Syriana is a film that makes one think. It is not an easy film to watch. Many storylines built on top of each other. And the film has the same scattered narrative structure as Crash and Traffic. Lots of interlinking characters, some of which never really meet. The three stars, for instance, Clooney, Jeffrey Wright, and Matt Damon never speak to one another, but each one's thread affects the other. It is a sprawling story told more in dialogue and meetings than with visuals. It requires one to listen, more than I wanted to, and to think. It acquires attention to detail. I missed many things when I watched it and I found it slow at certain points. It is not a film I would say I enjoyed,  almost put me to sleep tin a few places to be honest, but like McEwan's Atonement, it is a film that I think is worth watching, because it is one that you come away from with your perspective alterred in some small way.