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selenakSomething which came back to me in the midst of all the Jackson and Tolkien love when watching the EE: my one issue, or perhaps it’s merely an observation, not with Jackson, but with Tolkien and with most – but not all – of the fantasy sagas that ensued following his mighty footsteps. I also recalled a recent observation by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
londonkds, and something deborah_judge said. It all comes down to this: Orcs, Uruk-hai, and assorted villains are uniformely, unambiguously evil. As are their goals. They can be slaughtered by the dozens and hundreds without the reader having to wonder about Mrs. Orc at home, and their kids – or does anyone do that when being amused by Legolas and Gimli competing in Orc killing and head counts? Nobody has ever to bother wondering whether one could negotiate with them, since they’re clearly only out to kill everyone else, and not to be reasoned with.
(Yes, I know, there is the passage in which Sam reflects about the dead Easterling (or was it a what-are-they-called-again? ), reflections which in the film version are given to Faramir (in the extended edition of TTT). But that is one passage against more than a thousand pages.)
About the only big fantasy book saga which doesn’t follow Tolkien’s lead in this – providing armies of evil who can be killed without ever Our Heroes or the readers having to regret any of their deaths – is George R. Martin’s yet unfinished fantasy twist on the Wars of the Roses. Wherein we get the perspectives of both sides, and get characters from both sides to sympathize with. But it’s an exception. Now, I get the advantage of the concept. I’m not sure I’d want Legolas and Gimli to reflect on the Mrs. Orcs they’ve just widowed (before any Tolkien purist jumps on me, I’m aware that Orcs were once elves who got twisted and transformed and aren’t a natural race etc.) instead of celebrating the victory at Helm’s Deep. But I sometimes wonder whether said concept of Armies of Evil doesn’t lead, in some people, to a transference of this concept to Real Life.
Londonkds, when talking with me about the enduring popularity of Nazis as movie/tv show/book villains, said that one reason probably is that the Third Reich is as close as you can get in Real Life to the fantasy concept of the Evil Empire. Hence the seductiveness. Here, too, you have villains who are so unquestionably in the wrong that negotiations are never on the menu. Anyone opposing them is utterly and unquestionably in the right. The knowledge of genocide makes killing them not something the readers/audience has to reflect upon.
I remember Wolfgang Petersen, in an interview, describing how the first viewing of Das Boot (for anyone who hasn’t seen it in either its cinematic or TV incarnation – the story of a German submarine crew in WWII) in the US went. When the film started with the preamble saying how many U-Boats in WWII were sunk and how many crews died, there was wild applause. Petersen said he and those members of the film crew and cast who were present were completely shocked. (Also very relieved when by the end of the film, the audience reacted very differently and had come to like and sympathize with the characters.) Now, flawed as Petersen’s most recent oeuvre, Troy, might have been, it did make a point of presenting both Greeks and Trojans as equally deserving to live. And I do suspect that might have been one of the reasons why it wasn’t that popular. There were no Evil Empire or Armies of Evil around.
Sci-Fi does love its space Nazis, too, but in sci-fi, I recall, perhaps due to being imprinted with Star Trek as a teenager and adult, a lot more attempts to show their, for lack of a better term, humanity. (Let’s just overlook the embarassing TOS Pattern of Force, though.) Ever since TNG introduced the Cardassians in the episode The Wounded, and especially since DS9 promoted them to center stage and fleshed them out, they’ve been a favourite vehicle for the writers for tackling Third Reich related issues, and by and large, they did a good job. AN episode like Duet brings up the full horror of camps, slave labour and genocide, and investigates the different ways of guilt – from giving the order, to being silent and contributing through being a part of the bureaucracy, without prettifying and whitewashing them – but when, at the end, a Bajoran kills the Cardassian, we’re not meant to cheer and applaud (and I don’t know anyone who has), but be horrified like our pov character of the episode, Kira, who spent most of her youth fighting against said Cardassians.
Otoh: I bet many, many more people have watched Independence Day and applauded the demise of Evil Aliens ™ and their Evil Armies of Doom than have watched Duet and other ST episodes.
deborah_judge asked me for a bit of meta on what it feels like to be German and get presented with all of the literal or allegorical Nazis in fantasy and sci-fi. It really depends on the situation and on the presentation. At a B7/B5 Redemption conventions in England I attended, there was a costume competition for villains (not limited to villains of these universes) and when I dropped by with some English pals, Judith suddenly asked me whether I was insulted. It took me some seconds to understand why she asked – the guy on stage was dressed in black leather, stomping around, speaking in a strange accent and calling himself Fritz. Then it registered. He was supposed to be a Nazi, apparently. No, I didn’t feel insulted. I felt somewhat bemused. A bit similar to watching Harrison Ford, as Indiana Jones, declare: “Nazis! I hate those guys”, and outwitting and defeating them as soundly as Han Solo has ever defeated Stormtroopers. You can call these types “Operetta Nazis”. Safe, as hissworthy as you want, and completely unreal, especially if you live in a city where you can take the metro to visit the concentration camp in Dachau and feel sick at the very sight of the stones. When you live in a country where you’re aware that most of the old people you know/meet/see on the streets either actively believed in Hitler, or were too scared/complacent/lethargic/any or all of the above to do something. When you know that said old people are not any less human than the old people you meet in other countries.
Only in retrospect, when reflecting about, say, an episode like AtS’ Hero (never mind Doyle dying, I was completely okay with that and the way it was done – the reason why I don’t care to rewatch is one of the dumbest use of Operetta Nazis ever, the Scourge), or reading, say, a novel by Simon Green where the opposing forces consist of demons as unreasonable and ripe for the slaughter-by-hero as any Orc, the bemusement becomes extreme unease. Because then you wonder whether the apparent desperate need everywhere in the world for an easy enemy to hate, someone whose feelings and motivations you never ever have to wonder about because this enemy is utterly contemptible, and whose death you never have to regret, doesn’t directly connect to… well. Let me put it this way. I know a bookstore owner, retired now, who had one of the biggest collections of books burned and banned during the Third Reich in Germany. One of the reasons why he tirelessly did and does compaign to keep the memory of those writers alive is this: he was sixteen at the end of the war. A member of the Hitler Youth. He utterly believed. He told me that once, they came across a group of slave labourers working on a road. They were from a camp, they wore the uniforms, and they were visibly malnourished, haggard, dirty. He did not pity them. He thought they looked just as subhuman and contemptible as he was always taught Jews/Gypsies/Communists (Orcs?) were. It took the shock of being shown the films made during the liberation of the concentration camps after the war, and the conversation afterwards with several American soldiers who had been there, to get him out of his conditioning.
So. Ugly brutes slavering to kill nice people or soldiers in complete body armour without faces or evil insects from space or peope in black leather stomping around shouting in bad accents – sometimes I wonder whether the attraction isn’t similar to the attraction that ideology offered. The principle of saying, here is the enemy responsible for all your/the nice guys’ miseries. He can not be lived with, he can only be killed, because he only wants to do us harm and does not deserve to exist.
Maybe I’m overly touchy. But that really concerns me at times. Especially as a genre fan.
londonkds, and something deborah_judge said. It all comes down to this: Orcs, Uruk-hai, and assorted villains are uniformely, unambiguously evil. As are their goals. They can be slaughtered by the dozens and hundreds without the reader having to wonder about Mrs. Orc at home, and their kids – or does anyone do that when being amused by Legolas and Gimli competing in Orc killing and head counts? Nobody has ever to bother wondering whether one could negotiate with them, since they’re clearly only out to kill everyone else, and not to be reasoned with. (Yes, I know, there is the passage in which Sam reflects about the dead Easterling (or was it a what-are-they-called-again? ), reflections which in the film version are given to Faramir (in the extended edition of TTT). But that is one passage against more than a thousand pages.)
About the only big fantasy book saga which doesn’t follow Tolkien’s lead in this – providing armies of evil who can be killed without ever Our Heroes or the readers having to regret any of their deaths – is George R. Martin’s yet unfinished fantasy twist on the Wars of the Roses. Wherein we get the perspectives of both sides, and get characters from both sides to sympathize with. But it’s an exception. Now, I get the advantage of the concept. I’m not sure I’d want Legolas and Gimli to reflect on the Mrs. Orcs they’ve just widowed (before any Tolkien purist jumps on me, I’m aware that Orcs were once elves who got twisted and transformed and aren’t a natural race etc.) instead of celebrating the victory at Helm’s Deep. But I sometimes wonder whether said concept of Armies of Evil doesn’t lead, in some people, to a transference of this concept to Real Life.
Londonkds, when talking with me about the enduring popularity of Nazis as movie/tv show/book villains, said that one reason probably is that the Third Reich is as close as you can get in Real Life to the fantasy concept of the Evil Empire. Hence the seductiveness. Here, too, you have villains who are so unquestionably in the wrong that negotiations are never on the menu. Anyone opposing them is utterly and unquestionably in the right. The knowledge of genocide makes killing them not something the readers/audience has to reflect upon.
I remember Wolfgang Petersen, in an interview, describing how the first viewing of Das Boot (for anyone who hasn’t seen it in either its cinematic or TV incarnation – the story of a German submarine crew in WWII) in the US went. When the film started with the preamble saying how many U-Boats in WWII were sunk and how many crews died, there was wild applause. Petersen said he and those members of the film crew and cast who were present were completely shocked. (Also very relieved when by the end of the film, the audience reacted very differently and had come to like and sympathize with the characters.) Now, flawed as Petersen’s most recent oeuvre, Troy, might have been, it did make a point of presenting both Greeks and Trojans as equally deserving to live. And I do suspect that might have been one of the reasons why it wasn’t that popular. There were no Evil Empire or Armies of Evil around.
Sci-Fi does love its space Nazis, too, but in sci-fi, I recall, perhaps due to being imprinted with Star Trek as a teenager and adult, a lot more attempts to show their, for lack of a better term, humanity. (Let’s just overlook the embarassing TOS Pattern of Force, though.) Ever since TNG introduced the Cardassians in the episode The Wounded, and especially since DS9 promoted them to center stage and fleshed them out, they’ve been a favourite vehicle for the writers for tackling Third Reich related issues, and by and large, they did a good job. AN episode like Duet brings up the full horror of camps, slave labour and genocide, and investigates the different ways of guilt – from giving the order, to being silent and contributing through being a part of the bureaucracy, without prettifying and whitewashing them – but when, at the end, a Bajoran kills the Cardassian, we’re not meant to cheer and applaud (and I don’t know anyone who has), but be horrified like our pov character of the episode, Kira, who spent most of her youth fighting against said Cardassians.
Otoh: I bet many, many more people have watched Independence Day and applauded the demise of Evil Aliens ™ and their Evil Armies of Doom than have watched Duet and other ST episodes.
deborah_judge asked me for a bit of meta on what it feels like to be German and get presented with all of the literal or allegorical Nazis in fantasy and sci-fi. It really depends on the situation and on the presentation. At a B7/B5 Redemption conventions in England I attended, there was a costume competition for villains (not limited to villains of these universes) and when I dropped by with some English pals, Judith suddenly asked me whether I was insulted. It took me some seconds to understand why she asked – the guy on stage was dressed in black leather, stomping around, speaking in a strange accent and calling himself Fritz. Then it registered. He was supposed to be a Nazi, apparently. No, I didn’t feel insulted. I felt somewhat bemused. A bit similar to watching Harrison Ford, as Indiana Jones, declare: “Nazis! I hate those guys”, and outwitting and defeating them as soundly as Han Solo has ever defeated Stormtroopers. You can call these types “Operetta Nazis”. Safe, as hissworthy as you want, and completely unreal, especially if you live in a city where you can take the metro to visit the concentration camp in Dachau and feel sick at the very sight of the stones. When you live in a country where you’re aware that most of the old people you know/meet/see on the streets either actively believed in Hitler, or were too scared/complacent/lethargic/any or all of the above to do something. When you know that said old people are not any less human than the old people you meet in other countries. Only in retrospect, when reflecting about, say, an episode like AtS’ Hero (never mind Doyle dying, I was completely okay with that and the way it was done – the reason why I don’t care to rewatch is one of the dumbest use of Operetta Nazis ever, the Scourge), or reading, say, a novel by Simon Green where the opposing forces consist of demons as unreasonable and ripe for the slaughter-by-hero as any Orc, the bemusement becomes extreme unease. Because then you wonder whether the apparent desperate need everywhere in the world for an easy enemy to hate, someone whose feelings and motivations you never ever have to wonder about because this enemy is utterly contemptible, and whose death you never have to regret, doesn’t directly connect to… well. Let me put it this way. I know a bookstore owner, retired now, who had one of the biggest collections of books burned and banned during the Third Reich in Germany. One of the reasons why he tirelessly did and does compaign to keep the memory of those writers alive is this: he was sixteen at the end of the war. A member of the Hitler Youth. He utterly believed. He told me that once, they came across a group of slave labourers working on a road. They were from a camp, they wore the uniforms, and they were visibly malnourished, haggard, dirty. He did not pity them. He thought they looked just as subhuman and contemptible as he was always taught Jews/Gypsies/Communists (Orcs?) were. It took the shock of being shown the films made during the liberation of the concentration camps after the war, and the conversation afterwards with several American soldiers who had been there, to get him out of his conditioning.
So. Ugly brutes slavering to kill nice people or soldiers in complete body armour without faces or evil insects from space or peope in black leather stomping around shouting in bad accents – sometimes I wonder whether the attraction isn’t similar to the attraction that ideology offered. The principle of saying, here is the enemy responsible for all your/the nice guys’ miseries. He can not be lived with, he can only be killed, because he only wants to do us harm and does not deserve to exist.
Maybe I’m overly touchy. But that really concerns me at times. Especially as a genre fan.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 01:45 am (UTC)Your comments on negotiation remind me of this line of Gandalf's, to the Mouth of Sauron: "...what surety have we that Sauron the Base Master of Treachery, will keep his part?"
Peter Jackson, on the commentary over the Moria battle in FotR, talks about the troll, and how he felt sorry for it, and conjectured that there was a Mama Troll back at home, waiting with the bed cover turned down and a cup of warm milk for a son that never returned. He says it in jest, but he's a bit too smart not to mean it seriously, I think.
I think (someone else will know better) that Tolkien agonizes about the Orcs in ancillary material. I do think that the Orcs are in some way humanized through their dialogue in LotR in a way that someone like Aragorn is not (save me from all that lofty speech!). We hear a lot of the orcs' talk, and their squabbles, their desires and plans. I don't know how much we're meant to like it, but I find myself warming to them. This is something we don't see at all with the Haradrim and the Easterlings, IIRC (beyond Sam's reverie, as you describe).
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 02:08 am (UTC)Cardassia... well, you know, I actually found that good storytelling. Like Londo Mollari and Centauri Prime, Garak, Damar and Cardassia can't have a happy ending in terms of overall narration. Too much blood. At the same time, there should be hope for a future. And there is, in both cases. Garak will make a difference to a new Cardassia which he will help rebuilding. Londo did save Centauri Prime, and will, in the end, even save it from the Drakh.
Haradrim! That was the term I was looking for. Yes, I know Tolkien agonized, but regarding the impact on the readers and his descendants in the fantasy realm, what left the huger expression was the Armies of Evil concept.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 03:53 am (UTC)Hmm. I'm undoubtedly missing something here, having yet to see much of S6&7, but individuals like Garak and Dukat seem pretty successful at complexifying the stereotype presented by the overall species look, and there are tonnes of minor characters who linger in the mind.
We hear a lot of the orcs' talk, and their squabbles, their desires and plans. I don't know how much we're meant to like it, but I find myself warming to them.
It's interesting how some of this has been treated in fanfiction -- if the [censored] submissions are anything to go by, there's been a trend towards fiction about orcs or the Haradrim.
(no subject)
From:Totally agree
Date: 2004-12-16 02:15 am (UTC)Unfortunately in fictional work it's easier and more profitable to create Superevil power than to create profound psycological portrails of characters.
Re: Totally agree
Date: 2004-12-16 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 02:45 am (UTC)I certainly take your point and agree with it. I just found a quote from Tolkien that shows that he was aware of what he was doing even if some of his successors may not be. This is from a letter to his son Christopher quoted in Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth - I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in "realistic" fiction, only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For "romance" has grown out of "allegory", and its wars are still derived from the "inner war" of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels."
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 05:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2004-12-16 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 03:25 am (UTC)The Third Reich was not solely about genocide. The ideology was much more encompassing. Strength through unity, feelings of superiority, murder treated as a logistical problem, rather than a moral transgression etc.
I was actually quite impressed with DS9 for tackling that dark chapter in history with such a great amount of intelligence.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 05:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 03:21 am (UTC)I used to feel a great deal of annoyance at the use of cardboard Nazis in British and American productions, but like you I have come to realize that they sate a desire for clear-cut villains.
I am a fantasy role-gamer. Attempts in our rounds to make orcs more human failed. Sometimes we were just itching for enemies we could squash without conscience ever coming into it. The knowledge of doing the right thing is seductive, even if it's just during a pen and paper roleplaying game.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 03:38 am (UTC)My recollection is that he was actually playing Herr Flick, a character from a long-running TV comedy series about the French Resistance called 'Allo 'Allo. I never saw very much of it, but I gathered it was very broad farce in which the Nazis never really had time to be very evil because everyone's primary motivation was to steal a priceless artwork called The Madonna with the Big Boobies, which seemed to be the equivalent of Aunt Constance's diamond necklace in the Blandings novels. Don't know whether that actually makes any difference, but it means he was part of the Comic Nazi tradition (see The Producers, occasional episodes of Dad's Army).
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 04:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 05:43 am (UTC)Nazis aside...
Date: 2004-12-16 04:04 am (UTC)The thing is, I'm trying to think of other major High Fantasy-type books that a) aren't tied in to RPG industry brand names and b) present vast armies of darkness. It's a little early in the day for me, so I'm drawing a blank. May I ask which ones you were thinking of?
When the film started with the preamble saying how many U-Boats in WWII were sunk and how many crews died, there was wild applause.
Gyah! That's weird and creepy.
Re: Nazis aside...
Date: 2004-12-16 05:51 am (UTC)Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorne trilogy, for example. Williams' Ineluki is actually the anti-Sauron because he's a very tragic character, but his armies of darkness (read: Norns) were unequovical bad news and there to be decimated. (After they were properly scary first and decimated the good guys, of course.) Barbara Hambly's quadrology (I think) which made her famous - lots of demons around there. Even Robin Hobb's Assassin trilogy has its soulless zombies, though they're also tragic because they were unsouled against their will, and they're not the chief villain, either, but they do have to be killed en masse. Simon Green's "Blue Moon Rising" (not sure about the exact title, it's been a while).
Gyah! That's weird and creepy.
I thought so, too.
Re: Nazis aside...
From:Re: Nazis aside...
From:Re: Nazis aside...
From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 05:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 04:58 am (UTC)I sometimes wonder if human beings can ever grow beyond the need/desire to dehumanize The Other. On Star Trek, as soon as one "enemy" was complexified/humanized/made sympathetic, another "unambiguously evil enemy" was created.
I don't think you're being overly touchy at all. I think this is the root of human evil and the capacity for atrocity that lies in all of us "nice, decent" people.
The actual evil it leads to is different in every situation.
But the pleasure of in-group solidarity that demonizing The Other brings to us; the satisfaction of having Nazis/terrorists/Orcs/Jews/aliens etc. to blame for the human condition; the sense of meaning and purpose that we get from being part something greater than ourselves, part of an Epic Battle Against the Forces of Evil, no longer limited to our humdrum lives and the daily grind -
- the feelings are the same.
The consequences, obviously, of people in Nazi Germany versus people sitting in a theater cheering Luke Skywalker as he blows up the Death Star - the consequences have little in common. But the roots are the same, the feelings are the same, and the potential is the same.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 06:07 am (UTC)Me too. It seems to be a red thread throughout human history, in all kind of societies, not just oppressive ones...
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Date: 2004-12-16 05:16 am (UTC)There was a blog entry to which
Selfish lunacy (http://www.livejournal.com/users/ide_cyan/581072.html) dictating policy... But you need people to stop thinking of other people as people if you want them to go out and destroy your enemies. So you brainwash your soldiers and feed propaganda to your population. You encourage shallowness by controlling information and selfishness by playing on their fears.
sometimes I wonder whether the attraction isn’t similar to the attraction that ideology offered.
Both make life much simpler, don't they?
I don't think you're overly touchy.
Joanna Russ wrote this about Star Wars, back in 1978:-- 'SF and Technology as Mystification', reprinted in _To Write Like A Woman_, page 31
This same pursuit of "fun" has seen the same means used in many media endeavours since then, but they also serve political ends in other contexts. (Russ talked about Star Trek in that essay too, by the way -- and she praised it for being more thoughtful.)
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 06:15 am (UTC)I don't think so, no. I read the post by
It's one of the reasons why I flinch every time I hear a politician use terms like "axis of evil" or "evil empire"...
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Date: 2004-12-16 06:27 am (UTC)It seems to be a natural tendency of soldiers in a war to dehumanise the enemy, to make them lesser, without rights or validity, to make them just so much meat. The source of this psychological impulse is obvious. If your job is to kill these people, it is far better for your own state of mind if you can see them as sub-human. But of course to avoid events like the prison abuse we've recently seen in Iraq and far, far worse, this tendency needs to be fought.
Looking at LotR as a story-teller, it could be argued that it is necessary to use a (mainly) non-human, animal-like enemy, not only because they can be slaughtered wholesale without that being sickening, but also in order to replicate that dehumanising process that many soldiers have gone through in the trenches, or the jungles of Vietnam, or in just about any other war. This would allow the viewer/reader to symbolically view the enemy through the protagonist's eyes.
Life isn't clear-cut and easy, much though many people -- including certain presidents -- would like it to be. Fantasy, like religion, has always provided an internal certainty and definition, which is deeply attractive to the average confused and frightened soul. The presentation of an obvious and unambiguous enemy is a form of wish fulfillment, just as much as the hero who always comes through or the resurrection of Gandalf.
I think it's up to a country's education system to ensure that people are able to enjoy the relaxing certainty of fantasy, but never transfer that either/or mentality to the complexity of real life. In strongly religious, idealistic or nationalistic countries, such education of objectivity tends to be lacking.
I'm in danger of going off on a tangent of a tangent now, so I'll shut up.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 08:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 08:56 am (UTC)Like I said in the other discussion, I think the constant use of Holocaust imagery is a cowardly way for Americans to avoid facing their own potential for evil. When the One Really Bad Thing That Matters happened, we were on the right side, fighting against it. Never mind extermination of native peoples, slavery, etc. They weren't True Evil, only Nazism is that.
I think that's actually one of the reasons some people find it so satisfying to write a True Evil character. Then you can project evil outside yourself, which leaves you as purely good. And when you kill the evil, it's gone. You don't have to look inside yourself to find more.
Now I'll tell you a film story. When I first moved to Berkeley, I went to a film screening by Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers. The Israeli film was about people who live in a certain part of Jerusalem that is being bombed. It wasn't apologetic for Israeli policies, more showed how everyone is suffering because of the conflict. The movie was jeered by the audience for daring to try to create sympathy for the 'wrong side'. During the question period someone said "Sympathy for oppressors perpetrates oppression." That's a slogan I'll never forget. If only because it seems so ragingly and perniciously contrary to common sense, decency and morality. But it's very easy to quote.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 12:09 pm (UTC)And yes also to the lure of projecting evil outside where it has nothing to do with oneself and can be ended.
Thank you for co-inspiring me to finally put my thoughts down on the matter.
(no subject)
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Date: 2004-12-16 12:56 pm (UTC)I don't really have anything new to add to the comments except that your post reminded me of one of my favourite quotes from Terry Pratchett's Jingo:
"It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things."
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-17 06:28 pm (UTC)My God, it seems, I have found an adherent! When I have looked this movie, I'm was in a shock. Frank barefaced racism! It was possible to allow to make such movies of twenty years ago, but not now.
I love serials like B5 or DS9 b/c they show us the most interesting and intense subject in a space fantasy, a theme of the first contact. It is my liked subject, I admit. An establishment of mutual understanding between races... it is very rich subject.
And to transform all this into such pity propagation and a cliche... poverty, alas.
There was written many books about the first contact, but really good movies it is possible to count on fingers.
I can recollect (that rendered on me strong impression) only the Enemy of mine.
Propagation too... and the plot is slightly trivial... But... It was great movie.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-17 07:14 pm (UTC)