brute mayhem

It is a strange thing to feel yourself agreeing with the “Other Side”. We cultivate hard lines to polarize the populace and compel conflict, because the wheels would simply cease to turn…

“… without the energy that conflict brings into the mix.

Ideas arise, accrue popularity/support. One aspect of their service to progress is that they polarize, compel a vote. The incumbent or the challenger? There follows change. So strong is the impulse to differ and defeat, so great are the effects — the benefits – of conflict (as an ever-present Force) that even the Highest of Societies retain murder and barbarity, in some acceptable form… @

Unlike “Charlie”, the movie enemy is easy to spot. He’s wearing little, round glasses and shiny boots, and black flecks of hate shoot from his brute, brute heart. Or he sips whisky, and speaks with a private school accent in the boardroom while his secretary massages his thick, white hair. Or her face is brown and slimy and alien, and her whetted fangs drip acid.

If the hero is a projection of an audience’s desires and dreams, then the villain is the hero’s murky counterpoint, the contrast without which heroism couldn’t be thrown into relief. The enemy might look something like the hero, but he or she is the stranger, the other, the unknowable constant. Although the enemy is as eternal as the hero, particular enemies fade in and out of fashion depending on the filmmaker and the political and social climate in which a film is made.

Over the past six months, Hollywood has deemed the New York terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to be far enough removed to safely make the subject of cinema, as if the West had passed through some invisible time barrier. Universal Studios has announced a thriller, Flight 93, about the attacks, while Oliver Stone is shooting a movie about the subject for Paramount Pictures; Columbia Pictures has optioned a book by two reporters about the interval between the crash of the first hijacked airliner into the World Trade Centre and the collapse of the first tower. The enemies in these stories are Arabic Islamic extremists, a sensitive, controversial and much-written-about subject… @