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Customer Reviews: Average Rating:  Rating : - Authoritarian Madness
I bought this dvd based on the trailer viewed on another dvd which gave the impression that it was going to be a movie about a heartbroken mother who wanted her child back, a dedicated sleuth who looks for the child, racing against time and maybe a gang of sickos. It was pretty shocking to discover that the biggest sicko in the movie was the mother herself. I'm not going to go through the plot and actors and so on since so many other reviewers have done that. I want to talk about something else.
I noticed the opening monologue, but didn't realize that this was the big clue to how the movie was going to end until it was a done deal. At the beginning, Casey Affleck as Patrick Kenzie, says in a voiceover:
"I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they'd accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those. I lived on this block my whole life; most of these people have. When your job is to find people who are missing, it helps to know where they started. I find the people who started in the cracks and then fell through. This city can be hard. When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to His children. "You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves."
Unfortunately, he was neither; he was just naive and brainwashed by his religious tendencies and this is what led to the very disturbing ending: the destruction of many lives - including that of the child herself - because one man was so hung up on rules that he could not see that there is good, there is evil, and there is the specific situation that determines which is which. For Patrick Kenzie - as for George Bush and other authoritarian personalities - things are black and white and this black and white thinking literally destroyed any possibility that he could see his way to make the RIGHT decision.
And yes, in my opinion, he made the wrong decision. That, of course, does not mean that I think that the cops involved in the "benevolent abduction" did the right thing either; they clearly did not. But life is never so simple as the Patrick Kenzie's of the world would like to think. Sometimes very hard decisions have to be made in very conflicting situations, and most often, the conflicts are the result of cognitive dissonance created by our programmed belief systems that often do not serve as adequate models of reality.
The main problem of Kenzie's choice is that it was a choice based on an artificial construct: morality, rather than on conscience. Oh, of course, he THOUGHT it was his conscience, but he made it clear in his opening monologue that true conscience had nothing to do with it when he said: "I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are."
Nobody chooses to be born in Boston as opposed to Beijing.
When talking about morality, the idea of good and evil can be very different for different people with different beliefs. That means it is subjective rather than objective. And here I use these terms in the sense that objective means "the way the Universe with its comprehensive perspective views itself" as opposed to the way an individual or even a group of individuals may view events in the universe.
It could even be said that no one ever does anything deliberately in the interests of evil, for the sake of evil, per se, but rather that everyone acts in the interests of good, _as he understands it_! But everybody understands it in a different way! As a result of these subjective views of evil, human beings inflict all kinds of suffering on others in the interests of what they consider to be good. That's the dilemma portrayed in this movie, whether accidentally or intentionally.
George Bush, killing a million Iraqis in order to "force democracy" on them is one example. Israel occupying Palestine based on the claims of their religion, and committing genocide on the Palestinian people is another example.
What we see, then, is that there is no morality common to all. One set of moral precepts can - and often does - contradict another set. What is moral in Boston may not be moral in Beijing. What is moral in Helsinki, may not be moral in Ethiopia. What is moral in Judaism, is not necessarily moral in Christianity or Islam. What is moral to the lowest classes - generally controlled very well by religious beliefs - is not necessarily moral to the educated classes.
Morality is more directly related to rules and laws, black and white interpretations of what is good and bad. Two very moral men from different cultures may consider each other very immoral. More than that, the more `moral' a person is, the more `immoral' will he think other moral people from different cultures!
In this case, Patrick Kenzie thought of himself as a VERY moral person and he saw the cops, who had taken a child of the lower classes to raise as very immoral. They weren't, though certainly their methods of going about doing what they did were extremely questionable. (It's even questionable that anybody would ever actually do something like that - but that is a plot problem that others have addressed.)
The problem is that we do not need morality, we need conscience since conscience is the interior connection between all normal humans (those who are not pathological). The mother, in this movie, was clearly pathological.
The idea of conscience is based on a different interpretation of reality, one that does not necessarily include hard and fast rules that apply in every situation such as our culture espouses under the influence of Judao-Christian influences. Conscience is reflected in a much older system that existed among many tribes of Celts before it was overcome and destroyed by the imposition of Judao-Christianity (by force).
The destruction of Celtic culture was so complete that we know very little about their religion - we have to infer principles from rags and tatters of evidence. We do know that they celebrated their "rites" in forests and by lakes without erecting any covered temples or statues of divinities. Tacitus tells us:
"They do not think it in keeping with the divine majesty to confine gods within walls, or to portray them in the likeness of any human countenance. Their holy places are woods and groves and they apply the names of deities to that hidden presence which is seen only by the eyes of reverence."
Plato had doubts about the Greek origins of Homer's work because not only do the physical descriptions in his poems not correspond to the Greek world, but also the Homeric philosophy is very different from the mainstream Greek philosophy we know about today. The latter is based on the dualism of two opposing elements, thesis/antithesis, good/evil, life/death, body/soul, etc. This is also the perspective of the related Judao-Christian system - at least as it has come to be known in our modern world. It could be said that the early Jesus people were more in tune with the ancient Celtic system as is evidenced by their God of Mercy. But that's before the gospel writers came on the scene and created myths. (See Burton Mack's "A Myth of Innocence" for detailed analysis.)
Since Plato's times, many have sought to derive "synthesis" from opposing elements, with little success.
According to Homer, the philosophy of the ancient world was that there was a third element that linked the opposing elements. Between the body and the soul, there is the spirit. Between life and death there is the transformation that is possible to the individual, between father and mother there is the child who takes the characteristics of both father and mother, and between good and evil there is the SPECIFIC SITUATION that determines which is which and what ought to be done.
In other words, there are three simultaneous determinants in any situation that make it impossible to say that any list of things is "good" or "evil" intrinsically, and that the true determinant is the situation.
In any event, the symbol of this philosophy is the triskele, representing three waves joined together.
The simultaneous existence of the third element does not mean that the notion of "good" and "evil" did not exist or was not reflected in the Celtic law. What was clear was that it was understood that nothing could be "cut and dried" in terms of law, that each situation was unique and the circumstances had to be carefully weighed.
And so, considering the Third Force, the specific situation, I would suggest that what the cops did was definitely evil; but what Kenzie did afterward, was also evil. The whole movie was about evil, authoritarian personalities all of whom, in one way or another, were engaged in efforts to use other people for some, even the best of aims (according to the view of the individual initiating the action), without their knowledge and understanding. Manipulating others, using others, either by producing in them faith or by acting upon them through fear, is evil. It seems to me that depriving people of knowledge, and inducing their compliance or participation to the aims of someone with a subjective morality, under conditions of what can even be called brainwashing, is what is the essence of evil. To deceive naive people and produce in them faith, infatuation, enthusiasm, and even fanaticism for subjective aims - even if the person subjectively thinks those aims are "good" - is evil authoritarianism.
The authoritarian personality comes in two flavors: the top dogs and the followers, and the two types are motivated differently even if both are under the heading of "Authoritarian Personality." The reason for this is that it takes the followers to support the top dogs and together, they make a social structure that seems to be a part of any society to one extent or another. It is only when such a structure begins to dominate that society as a whole, that problems follow because the essence of authoritarianism is righteous totalitarianism.
The top dogs are a rather small group - a fraction of the total authoritarians - and they are described by social scientists as having "high dominance needs." "These are people who seize every opportunity to lead, and who enjoy having power over others," John Dean, author of Conservatives Without Conscience, and, more than that, they feel no remorse whatsoever about using others and breaking the rules to service their own agendas. This is clearly seen in this movie in the roles played by the cops in the "benevolent kidnapping" of the baby.
The followers are something else altogether - and they complement the tog dog types completely. These are people who accept the rules of "established authorities" pretty much without question. We see this aspect of Kenzie in his dogged determination to follow the rules no matter how many people it will destroy, including the child. Such people usually are brainwashed by religion very early and this gives them a deeply rooted conviction that "higher authorities" not only know best, but are "unassailably correct."
Such individuals will also aggressively support their chosen authority. They do not hesitate to inflict pain, suffering, even destruction, on others they see threatening the "legitimate authority."
Authoritarian followers also have very conventional, black and white, views of reality. They restrict themselves very closely to the rules that are laid out for them in whatever milieu they are born. They don't stray from their own kind, their own communities, and believe that they were born in a certain "place" and must stay in it. This conformity can be extreme to the point that such individuals become insular with their own kind, feel hostile to outsiders and novel information and ideas, and completely uncritical of the authority in their lives as they were growing up. They are able to juggle extreme cognitive disparity, accepting bizarre contradictions in thought, and are usually unable to see their own hypocrisy. They also generally feel that they are moral and righteous in all they do.
Watching this movie, the various characters and how they interacted, reveals these characteristics and dynamics in blatant display.
Now, read again what Patrick Kenzie said at the beginning of the movie and see the inner landscape of the authoritarian follower:
"I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they'd accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those. I lived on this block my whole life; most of these people have. When your job is to find people who are missing, it helps to know where they started. I find the people who started in the cracks and then fell through. This city can be hard. When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to His children. "You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.""
In this movie, an authoritarian follower came up against outsider top dogs, and therein lies the tale...
A fascinating psychological drama for those who can see these layers, a generally good movie even if you aren't fascinated by such questions.
I would have given it five stars if it had not been for the gratuitous profanity. I noticed that other Bostonians writing reviews have pointed out that this wasn't very realistic. But then, maybe they don't move in those "circles." I, personally, just don't like to have to hear it in order to follow a story. + See Full Customer Review |  |
