If you read this letter one day, it will mean that probably I am not on your side. I probably am not near you while you almost fall asleep, to sing you lullabies; to brush your hair lightly while reciting magical tales from the faraway lands. I'm afraid, when you read this, I am thousand miles beyond our home. But, my dear, you will know by this letter of how much I love you. And how much it tears my heart apart, knowing that you can't see by your eyes a father who loves you and who is fond of you.
Dear love,
Your dad is not a man who always acts as he thinks best nor remains faithful to his dreams. And worse still, not only my dreams, but I also sacrifice you and your mom. By now you might often wonder, "Why is my dad not here like my friends' dads?" And I can only think of how painful you think of our family as incomplete. Or how you are longing for the chances that we go to the zoo together, laughing at the clumsy giraffe, or perhaps complaining why they have to keep the tiger inside the steel cage when you think it should belong to the African jungle as you read it on the book.
Dear my beloved daughter,
The truth is, your father is the tiger. Locked in a steel cage called "job". As the tiger trade its freedom to roam the jungle so that the zookeepers have money for their family to buy food, your dad gave away his freedom so that our family have money, too. For you, for your mom, and occasionally for your grandparents. But unlike the tiger who is there against its will, I gave it to the government by choice.
Right now you probably are mad at me. Perhaps thinking of how silly I am to give up my dreams. I can understand that, dear. But I don't expect you to understand my decision. Instead, of this I tell you, let me be locked, but you must be there free in the jungle. Do not let them lock your dreams. Be the fiercest tigress ever in the jungle.
You must remember, that even though the tiger is locked, you must not thoughtlessly go near it, as it may hurt you. It may be locked, but at its mind it is still tiger, with its ferocious quality. And so is dad still keeps some of his dreams with him. Nothing can prevent dad from thinking about things beyond my measly job as government officer. So should you, dear, since the world is not your limit. You must think beyond that. You must go beyond the stars to the edge of the universe. Do not stop learning. Do not stop reading, even though I am not there to guide you. Be always curious of how this world works. One day, when I come home, I will tell you of how wonderful this universe is. I hope you will be interested by it, and build your dreams from it. And only by keeping and fulfilling your dreams you can be the best tigress, even much much better than dad and mom. Of this I endlessly hope for you.
Dear love,
To be the best tigress in the jungle, remember, you must be humble. Be kind and compassionate to others, especially to those who are weak and oppressed. Be sensitive to injustice committed against anyone anywhere in this world. You must - at the words of a poet, Rudyard Kipling - be able to talk with common people and keep your goodness and walk with kings without losing your humility. Do not dislike people because of their skin colors, or where they come from. Do not hate persons because of their religions, or because they love person with the same genders unlike your dad loves your mom. Do not like to avenge, forgive those who hurt you instead.
Be the best not because I told you to, but be the best because of you yourself think that this is good. You may not be proud of your dad's unimportant job, but you must be proud of yourself as I am always and always will be proud of you.
The jungle there awaits for you, dear. And soon, the stars above.
Give my kisses and hugs to mom.
With love,
Dad
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Thursday, October 10, 2013
The Emergence of Banal Evil
The day was Thanksgiving. A quiet Pennsylvania suburb was soaked by rain. The air was damp, with grey, disconcertingly cold, and sombre nuance. The trees were bare and stripped of their leaves, welcoming the winter. Enter two families, The Dovers and The Birches. Warmth radiated from these neighbors, exchanging fresh deer meats shot in the opening scene by the older kid of Dovers family, Ralph (Dylan Minnette) with traditional turkey-based Thanksgiving banquet. And what you see next is just typical friendly banters between two very normal families. Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard), asked Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Grace Dover (Maria Bello) to request songs so that he can play with his rudimentary trumpet skill. While Franklin's wife (Viola Davis) sat next to him in jovial undertones. The youngest of both families, Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons) and Anna (Erin Gerasimovich) asked to play outside. The parents are reluctant at first, but then permit them as long as they were accompanied by their older siblings, Ralph and Eliza (Zoe Borde). Ralph and Eliza dragged them away from a suspicious RV. After that Joy and Anna ask to go to the Dovers' residence, to find Anna's lost red whistle. This time, they went without their older siblings. And they were missing. They weren't on Dovers' house. The Dovers and Birches searched frantically on their neighborhood. Ralph then pointed out the aforementioned suspicious RV as the potential suspect, but now it was already gone.
Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), the local ace detective, led the investigations. He and some police finally located the van and arrested the driver, who turned out to be a man in his late twenty but with 10-year-old-kid mentality, Alex Jones (Paul Dano). The lack of evidence forced the police to release Alex. Keller, in his desperation and distrust to police's capability, decided to hold Alex captive and torture him to get an answer. Meanwhile Detective Loki, cursed by his perfect "always solved" record little by little succumbed to his own personal demon. He slowly fell into obsession as the trails to find the girls were becoming more obscure.
And that was "Prisoners", a quasi-police procedural thriller by Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve masterfully crafted "Prisoners" in dreary atmosphere not unlike Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" or David Fincher's "Zodiac" and "Se7en". In fact, I thought Gyllenhaal's portrayal of obsession-ridden detective quite reminiscing to his Robert Graysmith character in "Zodiac". Jackman, however, reminded me of Jimmy Markum (played by Sean Penn) in "Mystic River"; a dad who gradually descends to moral anarchy in the wake of losing his beloved daughter. Howard, Davis, and Bello each acted superbly as depression started to cripple them all. Paul Dano, while not memorable, performed decently, too.
The music was minimal, almost none, even. If Susan Hill said "short story is unforgiving form", then criminal procedural series like "Law and Order" and "Criminal Minds" suffer from this short period of storytelling. Conflict resolved too fast, and the victims' characters are rarely explored in-depth. But "Prisoners" is on the right amount. It will imprison your attention, stealing your breath with each revelations that unfurls. Some of you will exit the cinema a little bit drowsy and worn-out. It is, in my opinion, one of the most emotionally exhausting neo-noir films in the last 5 years.
"Prisoners" sparks again the memory of post-9/11 USA, with the torture-crazed administration, Abu Ghraib, and whatnots. Unlike, the series "24", the film "Zero Dark Thirty" or "Unthinkable", the torturer in "Prisoners" is not a government agency. The torturer is a more-or-less a normal human being. A human being without political leaning and fascistic jingoism. "Prisoners" is a more harrowing allegory for us, precisely because it is an "intuitive pumps", an easy-to-chew "ticking bomb scenario" narrative unlike those hodge-podge thought experiments. It dares to ask us, "what will you do if you were Keller Dove?" while not depriving us of the thick descriptive details of both the torturer and the tortured. Alex Jones was not "masked" to make us less sympathetic to him. His scars and bruises were shown vividly. His tearful eyes were heart-wrenching. Even more so, Jones, an unfortunate man with mental retardation, might be the worst possible victim ever chosen for torture. Keller, essentially, had tortured a kid. And it is easier for us to relate to Mr. Dover, a generic family man, than imagining us to be the person in charge of Guantanamo or CIA. The image of a family man who tortured a mentally retarded man sure will agony to our moral sense.
It is more disconcerting, as so many of us were like Keller. Sure, Keller might be championing machismo, fervent religiosity, and doomsday prepper mentality. But deep down he was pressured by his own thought. His conscience was never really dead. He was drown in compunction, justifying his actions as nothing more than just desperate measures in desperate time. He repeatedly told Jones "Where is she? I promise, I'll let you go!" There was one scene when he recited Our Lord's Prayer before applying torture, then cried on the line "...and forgive us our trespasses." He couldn't continue saying its following phrase, "...as we forgive those who trespass against us" as he saw his humanity crumbled before him. He was unable to forgive those who trespass him.
Keller is the very embodiment of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil." This banality means two things. One, is that cruelty becomes so prevalent that what is once considered cruel, might evolve as something that is being perceived as normal; that our collective conscience is numbed. But it can also mean the second thing, that is, the isolated cases of evil things committed by people who in our judgment would never commit such atrocity. The trouble with Keller was he, and the many, were neither perverted nor sadistic. Those who committed banal evil they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. "This normality", warned Hannah Arendt, "was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together." Because if the so-called "normal people" supported torture, then what is left from us to be the vanguard of ethics and morality and humanity? No need to stretch our imagination, even Americans are more pro-torture now than during Bush's era. And what about some people who neither oppose nor support torture like Franklin and Nancy Birch? This is another face of banal evil, those who intend to enjoy the apparent "security" acquired from torture, but refuse to get their hand dirty. They know that it is wrong, but opt to piggyback it as free-riders. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. And Elie Wiesel warned us that ambivalence and neutrality "helps the oppressor, never the victim."
Machiavelli once wrote in "The Prince": "...and in the actions of all men [...] one judges by the result." As all ticking bombs scenario, the usage of torture is the millenia old question of whether the ends justify the means. But is torture effective enough for us to justify the means?
In some cases, victims can even keep remarkable amounts of information hidden for days or weeks, or even spewed gibberish or outright lies. During World War II, American pilot Marcus McDilda tricked Japanese interrogators by saying the US was about to drop atomic bombs on Kyoto and Tokyo. In 1944, Gestapo officers subjected conspirator Fabian von Schlabrendorff to 4 weeks of tortures by metal spikes and beatings so severe he suffered a heart attack. But Fabian broke his silence only to give the Gestapo a few scraps of vague information when he feared involuntarily blurting out serious intelligence. There was also the case of Abdul Hakim Murad. For 67 subsequent days, Filipino police beat Murad, broke his ribs, burnt his genitals with cigarettes, subjected him to water-boarding, laid him out on an ice block, and pumped his stomach with water, but nothing out of his coercion resulted in a clear cut plan told to the investigators. In fact, his plan was uncovered from the computer seized from his apartment in Manila instead. Keller was not stupid, but he was in sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity. And indeed, torture is never the panacea thought by Keller to solve his problem. His humanity has gone, and gone for wrong and futility. Without giving away the ending, what Keller did to Alex Jones not much advanced the investigation and search for the missing girls.
It disturbs me (thankfully "Prisoners" is fictional) when the question whether Keller will go to prison is answered "maybe" by a legal authority figure. For me, the question of torture must turn from individual ethics to law and public policy realm. Laws against torture should be enforced in all cases. A plea in mitigation might be considered only in cases with a proven urgent and immediate danger and massive impact, akin to ticking bomb scenario. Then, it must be followed by a voluntary confession by the officers doing the torture. But even so, the torturers should be removed from their job and spend some time in prison. I think this can be defended from a wide variety of ethical or metaethical perspectives. But the intuition is simple: if the situation is grave enough to warrant resort to torture, it’s certainly grave enough to oblige someone to take actions that will result in losing their job and going to jail.
But even if we win the battle (or find the missing girl) but lose our humanity then what have we really won? How do we pay justice to those whom we torture - for whatever reason? What if we torture an innocent person? How can we fix the damaged soul of the wrongfully tortured? What atonement must we endure to redeem our wrongdoing? It is the core message of this disturbing film: the losing of humanity and the emergence of banal evil.
And in the end, it is the inability to forgive one's self that gives rise to obsession and unhealthy fixation. In this case, Keller couldn't forgive himself for his failure to protect his family (exacerbated by his own machismo and his wife's depressive complains). He then projected his innate anger to Alex Jones. Loki, on the other hand, couldn't forgive himself as his perfection demanded that he solve this case. And it drove him crazy. It drove him into tantrum.
Forgiveness is hard. Jacques Derrida was right. To be able to forgive is to be able to forgive the impossible. Forgiving can never be finished or concluded – it must always be open, like a permanent rupture, or a wound that refuses to heal. And nothing is almost impossible as forgiving one's self for making failure. However, it is the only way for us to escape from our personal prison.
Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), the local ace detective, led the investigations. He and some police finally located the van and arrested the driver, who turned out to be a man in his late twenty but with 10-year-old-kid mentality, Alex Jones (Paul Dano). The lack of evidence forced the police to release Alex. Keller, in his desperation and distrust to police's capability, decided to hold Alex captive and torture him to get an answer. Meanwhile Detective Loki, cursed by his perfect "always solved" record little by little succumbed to his own personal demon. He slowly fell into obsession as the trails to find the girls were becoming more obscure.
And that was "Prisoners", a quasi-police procedural thriller by Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve masterfully crafted "Prisoners" in dreary atmosphere not unlike Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" or David Fincher's "Zodiac" and "Se7en". In fact, I thought Gyllenhaal's portrayal of obsession-ridden detective quite reminiscing to his Robert Graysmith character in "Zodiac". Jackman, however, reminded me of Jimmy Markum (played by Sean Penn) in "Mystic River"; a dad who gradually descends to moral anarchy in the wake of losing his beloved daughter. Howard, Davis, and Bello each acted superbly as depression started to cripple them all. Paul Dano, while not memorable, performed decently, too.
The music was minimal, almost none, even. If Susan Hill said "short story is unforgiving form", then criminal procedural series like "Law and Order" and "Criminal Minds" suffer from this short period of storytelling. Conflict resolved too fast, and the victims' characters are rarely explored in-depth. But "Prisoners" is on the right amount. It will imprison your attention, stealing your breath with each revelations that unfurls. Some of you will exit the cinema a little bit drowsy and worn-out. It is, in my opinion, one of the most emotionally exhausting neo-noir films in the last 5 years.
"Prisoners" sparks again the memory of post-9/11 USA, with the torture-crazed administration, Abu Ghraib, and whatnots. Unlike, the series "24", the film "Zero Dark Thirty" or "Unthinkable", the torturer in "Prisoners" is not a government agency. The torturer is a more-or-less a normal human being. A human being without political leaning and fascistic jingoism. "Prisoners" is a more harrowing allegory for us, precisely because it is an "intuitive pumps", an easy-to-chew "ticking bomb scenario" narrative unlike those hodge-podge thought experiments. It dares to ask us, "what will you do if you were Keller Dove?" while not depriving us of the thick descriptive details of both the torturer and the tortured. Alex Jones was not "masked" to make us less sympathetic to him. His scars and bruises were shown vividly. His tearful eyes were heart-wrenching. Even more so, Jones, an unfortunate man with mental retardation, might be the worst possible victim ever chosen for torture. Keller, essentially, had tortured a kid. And it is easier for us to relate to Mr. Dover, a generic family man, than imagining us to be the person in charge of Guantanamo or CIA. The image of a family man who tortured a mentally retarded man sure will agony to our moral sense.
It is more disconcerting, as so many of us were like Keller. Sure, Keller might be championing machismo, fervent religiosity, and doomsday prepper mentality. But deep down he was pressured by his own thought. His conscience was never really dead. He was drown in compunction, justifying his actions as nothing more than just desperate measures in desperate time. He repeatedly told Jones "Where is she? I promise, I'll let you go!" There was one scene when he recited Our Lord's Prayer before applying torture, then cried on the line "...and forgive us our trespasses." He couldn't continue saying its following phrase, "...as we forgive those who trespass against us" as he saw his humanity crumbled before him. He was unable to forgive those who trespass him.
Keller is the very embodiment of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil." This banality means two things. One, is that cruelty becomes so prevalent that what is once considered cruel, might evolve as something that is being perceived as normal; that our collective conscience is numbed. But it can also mean the second thing, that is, the isolated cases of evil things committed by people who in our judgment would never commit such atrocity. The trouble with Keller was he, and the many, were neither perverted nor sadistic. Those who committed banal evil they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. "This normality", warned Hannah Arendt, "was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together." Because if the so-called "normal people" supported torture, then what is left from us to be the vanguard of ethics and morality and humanity? No need to stretch our imagination, even Americans are more pro-torture now than during Bush's era. And what about some people who neither oppose nor support torture like Franklin and Nancy Birch? This is another face of banal evil, those who intend to enjoy the apparent "security" acquired from torture, but refuse to get their hand dirty. They know that it is wrong, but opt to piggyback it as free-riders. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. And Elie Wiesel warned us that ambivalence and neutrality "helps the oppressor, never the victim."
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elie_wiesel.html#7cXF2j2eJoo5ILIf.99
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elie_wiesel.html#7cXF2j2eJoo5ILIf.99
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elie_wiesel.html#7cXF2j2eJoo5ILIf.99
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elie_wiesel.html#7cXF2j2eJoo5ILIf.99
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elie_wiesel.html#7cXF2j2eJoo5ILIf.99
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/elie_wiesel.html#7cXF2j2eJoo5ILIf.99
Machiavelli once wrote in "The Prince": "...and in the actions of all men [...] one judges by the result." As all ticking bombs scenario, the usage of torture is the millenia old question of whether the ends justify the means. But is torture effective enough for us to justify the means?
In some cases, victims can even keep remarkable amounts of information hidden for days or weeks, or even spewed gibberish or outright lies. During World War II, American pilot Marcus McDilda tricked Japanese interrogators by saying the US was about to drop atomic bombs on Kyoto and Tokyo. In 1944, Gestapo officers subjected conspirator Fabian von Schlabrendorff to 4 weeks of tortures by metal spikes and beatings so severe he suffered a heart attack. But Fabian broke his silence only to give the Gestapo a few scraps of vague information when he feared involuntarily blurting out serious intelligence. There was also the case of Abdul Hakim Murad. For 67 subsequent days, Filipino police beat Murad, broke his ribs, burnt his genitals with cigarettes, subjected him to water-boarding, laid him out on an ice block, and pumped his stomach with water, but nothing out of his coercion resulted in a clear cut plan told to the investigators. In fact, his plan was uncovered from the computer seized from his apartment in Manila instead. Keller was not stupid, but he was in sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity. And indeed, torture is never the panacea thought by Keller to solve his problem. His humanity has gone, and gone for wrong and futility. Without giving away the ending, what Keller did to Alex Jones not much advanced the investigation and search for the missing girls.
It disturbs me (thankfully "Prisoners" is fictional) when the question whether Keller will go to prison is answered "maybe" by a legal authority figure. For me, the question of torture must turn from individual ethics to law and public policy realm. Laws against torture should be enforced in all cases. A plea in mitigation might be considered only in cases with a proven urgent and immediate danger and massive impact, akin to ticking bomb scenario. Then, it must be followed by a voluntary confession by the officers doing the torture. But even so, the torturers should be removed from their job and spend some time in prison. I think this can be defended from a wide variety of ethical or metaethical perspectives. But the intuition is simple: if the situation is grave enough to warrant resort to torture, it’s certainly grave enough to oblige someone to take actions that will result in losing their job and going to jail.
But even if we win the battle (or find the missing girl) but lose our humanity then what have we really won? How do we pay justice to those whom we torture - for whatever reason? What if we torture an innocent person? How can we fix the damaged soul of the wrongfully tortured? What atonement must we endure to redeem our wrongdoing? It is the core message of this disturbing film: the losing of humanity and the emergence of banal evil.
And in the end, it is the inability to forgive one's self that gives rise to obsession and unhealthy fixation. In this case, Keller couldn't forgive himself for his failure to protect his family (exacerbated by his own machismo and his wife's depressive complains). He then projected his innate anger to Alex Jones. Loki, on the other hand, couldn't forgive himself as his perfection demanded that he solve this case. And it drove him crazy. It drove him into tantrum.
Forgiveness is hard. Jacques Derrida was right. To be able to forgive is to be able to forgive the impossible. Forgiving can never be finished or concluded – it must always be open, like a permanent rupture, or a wound that refuses to heal. And nothing is almost impossible as forgiving one's self for making failure. However, it is the only way for us to escape from our personal prison.
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