Three
Films as Violence Exegetes
Introduction
Many films offer penetrating
insight into macro-economic and political trends as they relate to violence, as
in the 2005 documentary Why We Fight,
for example. Therein, the chilling words of Dwight Eisenhower are recalled,
coinciding with Girard’s latest book: that the containment of war has grown out
of governmental, presidential control. While such macro analysis is
illuminating, there are other factors to consider in examining violence today,
especially in light of the recent shifts in the types of violence: since the
end of the Cold War, there has been a marked decline in international conflict,
replaced by smaller-scale, protracted, intra-national conflict.[1]
Though Eisenhower’s warnings about world-war styled military build-up are still
valid, we might also consider the micro-dynamics of conflict that would lie at
the roots of intra-national conflicts: civil unrest, community strife, local
justice, the personalities and habits of conflict, and, in Girardian terms, the
cultural dissolution sacrificial safeguards. In this sense, I will here discuss
three films that display the more interpersonal psychological, mimetic dynamics
of violence.[2]
With such a focus, these movies lead the viewer toward a sort of personal conversion or repentance—particularly in the way Girard has referred to conversion as “recognizing that we are persecutors without knowing it.”[3] One comes to see how much imitation has a grip on our social dynamics—often to detrimental effect. At the same time, parts of these films can also illuminate ways one can be a healing peacemaker against the odds of the crowd. In sum, they turn attention closely to the social anarchy of perpetrators—be they a wife-beater, a crowd stoning a woman, a mass murdering paramilitary “gangster”—or the ways a victim transcends their victimage with positive action.
The Stoning of Soraya M.
This 2008 dramatization of the 1990
book, La Femme Lapidée,[4]
is set in a small village in Iran. It depicts the events surrounding the stoning
of a woman named Soraya. Her violent and antagonistic husband had harbored
festering desire for a young 14-year-old girl. Seeking to rid himself of his
wife, he polarized villagers toward him and against Soraya, compelling an ad
hoc sharia court to sentence her to
death for adultery.
The most prescient
mimetic analysis here is in the psychology of the mob, the powerful lure this
process had on the bystanders: besides village gossips and betrayers caving
before the force of accusation, and the villagers fearing that they too must
accuse lest they be accused, even Soraya’s young sons and father were drawn
into throwing the first stones. At the forefront here is an illustration of
how, being puppets of accusation and mimetic dynamics, Christ might say of us, “forgive
them, they know not what we do.”
The film
corresponds with almost breathtaking precision to Girard’s notions of mimesis
and the “surrogate victim mechanism.” The
Stoning’s director, stated that, “most of all, I wanted to capture the
whole ritual design of [the stoning and its causes] and how it affects the
crowd.”[5]
For example, the antagonist’s object of desire (to marry the young girl)
“disappears” over time as obsession with ridding himself of Soraya (his
stumbling block) and gaining supporters takes over.[6]
Or also, the antagonist spurs attention and fascination toward himself by
flaunting his exotic and conspicuous car around town. In the passenger seat is
his young crush with some foreign (blonde) wig, adorning their unisex
coquettetry. Later, as the accusations against Soraya snowball, the verdict is
“unanimous” by the village leaders, and people begin to believe she has
“defiled” our village. They say that with each stone, honor will return. The
townspeople afterward are all celebrating, having been united by their
polarization. And yet, it is just Soraya’s aunt and a few silent, women who
grieve at the margin, which are made the center of truth—the truth of the
victim.
Even criticism of
this film coheres with Girard’s notion of modern anti-ethnocentrism.[7]
One critic at the The Telegraph (UK)
calls the movie “boring racism” for its cartoonishly evil antagonist and unwelcome
depiction of Muslims; “Christian extremists will love it,” she writes.[8]
But while the antagonist was indeed almost unbelievably sinister, this misses
the fact that, in accord with the journalist’s real life account, this man was
actually mentally deranged. The film’s lesson is not, as this critic
facetiously agreed—that we should not stone women to death—but that law is
often driven by paternalism and the arbitrary tides of the crowd. To whip up a
stoning may indeed only take a deranged man with a few others who are
vulnerable, fearful, or mimetically piqued.[9]
And, it is true, many religious figures are depicted here as fiends, as they
use piety as a cover.[10]
And yet the protagonist of The Stoning of
Soraya M is Soraya’s aunt, an outspoken and pious Muslim who resisted the
mob and championed the truth of the victim, even if it endangered her life.[11]
Overall, the film sets
before the viewer a conflict: between
the dangers and lies of the crowd and the innocence of a crowd’s victim. And
this is not necessarily a conflict that is ebbing with the march of modern
progress: the film mentions how Iran used to be more humane decades earlier,
and has since developed pockets of Sharia law. The film is not about Sharia per
se, and one need not praise all of Western society as pacific to note that the major
advances of ISIS in Iraq this summer uncomfortably suggest that mob justice and
mimetic accusation are not quite going extinct.
The Act of Killing
This second film, released in 2012,
is quite unique in its raw exposure of the personalities of a few mass-murderers.
In 196x, a military coup overthrew the Indonesian government; and in subsequent
years some few million “communists” were “purged” in supposed prevention of any
counter-revolution. These now-aged purgers were asked to recount those events,
and they chose to awkwardly act them out in a sort of B-movie style—the scenes
of which make up only a portion of this documentary.
What is lost in cultural
translation here is revelatory: we are cast into a culture that, by Western standards
and taboos, completely fails to hide its atrocities. Far from hiding what they
have done, these men often brag about how many people they have killed and how
they did it. Even more, they seem without shame in how their atrocities were
done in imitation of U.S. gangster- and western-cowboy films, which were so
popular in the wake of the pro-capitalist coup and inspired them to dress
fashionably and strangle people with wire. A rich newspaper manager states
without shame the corruption his paper served during the purge: “my job was to
make the public hate [the Communists]”; they would trump up charges against
detainees just so they could kill them. Another man brags of how he would stab
any Chinese person he met, given their stereotypical association with
communism; he even stabbed to death his girl friend’s father, recounted without
remorse. Another gangster laments of how “he was more free” in the time of his
mass killing work. Even the vice president of Indonesia himself, before a large
crowd, boisterously lauds how gangsters “work outside the system,” keeping
governance light and free of bureaucracy.[12]
These old gangsters threaten shopkeepers to give them money, with apparently no
shame of their intimidation and graft being caught on film. Another proudly
brags how he would rape any woman, particularly young girls, “especially back
when we were the law.” Another gangster, running for office, describes how he plans
to extort building owners for bribes when he gets into office.
Even amidst
bombastic U.S. nationalism, known for its staunch gun rights, Confederate
flags, and so on, it is still generally taboo to brag about massacres. In the U.S. debate surrounding the
Iraq-Afghanistan wars, supporters make sure the civilian death counts are as
subdued as possible; any gloating over the bodies of detainees (as in the case
of Abu Gharib) is shunned. But, we find in this film that the manners of covering
over guilt (or guilty consciences) is apparently culturally conditioned—and gloating
is simply an alternative way to hide guilt. The viewer is left, if they consent
to the introspection, wondering in what ways we hide our society’s murders
under other methods.
One most obvious
and superficial lesson from this film is that the stereotypical demonization of
communists qua communists—who so uniquely repressed and killed millions—in
contrast to more sane and humane capitalists, is proven an untenable prejudice.
One comes to see that some of the henchmen in the battle between capitalism and
communism have no concern whatsoever about Smith’s Wealth of Nations or Marx’s proletariat. They are living upon whims
of fashion, drugs, and the lure of the crowd.
But the more
important lesson comes late in the film, as the focal gangster, Anwar, begins
to open up to the perspective of the victim. As he was re-enacting a scene of
the purge’s torture, he played the role of a torturee. And while he was being faux-strangled
with wire, he anxiously called off the scene. He later reflects: “Did the people
I tortured feel the way I do here? I can feel what the people I tortured
felt….All the terror suddenly possessed my body.” The director responds behind
the camera, “Actually, the people you tortured felt far worse because you know
it’s a film. And they knew they were being killed.” And a spark of both revelation
and confusion comes upon his face. “But I can feel it Josh. Really, I feel it.
Or have I sinned?” And he begins to cry. “I did this to so many people, Josh,”
crying more intensely. “Is it all coming back to me? I really hope it won’t.” The
final scene of the movie is unbearably awkward, as he cannot stand the
memories, and involuntarily dry vomits for several minutes. One is reminded of
the intense bodily shocks, or “blinding light,” that the apostle Paul
experienced as he came to see that his violence was violence against God’s
innocent One.
Very few films so
effectively demonstrate with such clarity people truly not knowing what they
are doing, even while they apparently want to and know what they are doing. The
film displays the utter incomprehensibility of the torturer, his personality,
while also humanizing him—and, most eerily, inviting us to not disassociate
ourselves from them through demonization. One is left feeling all of human
culture exposed to its darkest, most arbitrary forces of mimetic violence.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
This third film is surely the most
constructive and hopeful among the three, but not through a rosier picture of
our penchant for chaotic violence. Indeed, similar to the Indonesian gangsters,
we see children and adult soldiers mimicking Rambo on their way to committing
unspeakable acts. And the directors don’t fail to note the bitter irony that
the LURD’s Army leaders regularly attended mosque, while Charles Taylor was an
observant Chrisitan. But in a more constructive manner than merely depicting
certain evils, this film briefly accounts the women’s movement of Liberia (Women’s
Peace Coordinating Network) as they sought to put an end to the civil war of
the late 90’s-early 2000’s. Led in part by (the now Nobel Laureat) Lehmah
Gbowee, this movement is usually best known for its “sex strike,” wherein all
women refused any sex until the war ended. While this made some difference, a most
pivotal event was in Lehmah Gbowee and her fellow activists closely monitoring
the stalled peace talks and then acting with passionate abandonment to block all
entrances to the building. She then stripped naked before them in severe
violation of cultural taboo. This effectively set talks back into motion,
leading to a cessation of conflict and the election of the first woman
president in Africa.
While
perhaps lacking what the other films have in production value and complexity,
this film makes up in offering a clear and resolute model from which we can be
inspired. The notion of a “forgiving victim” that has stemmed from Alison’s
extension of mimetic theory is vibrantly visible in these women. Many of these
women have suffered rape and awful displacement, even while caring for or
bearing children. Few people would be more “justified” in seething with
vengeance. And yet they nonviolently act with impressively little vitriol. In
Yoderian terms they display a “revolutionary subordination,” toward the
political actors they are influencing, as they don’t seek to overthrow,
despise, or depose them. The movement ecumenically drew together Christian and
Muslim women, breaking some cultural-religious barriers. Their forgiveness is
even further present when these women describe the painful, yet necessary, way
that they sought to reintegrate former soldiers into their communities. One can
think of few more difficult tasks than to love and work with soldiers who have
been, perhaps, abusing drugs, guns, and people in the most heinous ways since
they were children.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I hasten to note
that all three of these films dangerously direct attention outward, toward
foreign, perhaps too exotic theaters of action. The Stoning critic still has a point that some films, especially like
my fist two, can dangerously incite revulsion at how other cultures are caught in violence. Viewed this way, these films
would entirely loose their pedagogical value. If we are to value their foreignness,
it is in viewing another culture’s violence that we are invited to see our own,
which is often hidden in plain sight by our over familiarity. True, stonings
and mass gangster purges are foreign to most of us: but what about torture,
waterboarding, distant drone bombing, mass military intervention, latent
cultural racism, an immense and baroque penal-imprisonment complex, and so
forth. When we see that others, too, can be blind to their cultural corruptions,
attention must turn to the mote in our own eye.
With
attention ultimately drawn toward our own susceptibility in becoming
persecutors, these films are among the cultural material that helps prepare us
for the stage of human culture that is coming, and has already arrived. And
that is a world where we have not only proven capable of mass scale,
intercultural and international warfare, but we have tripled world population
in a century, making the world quite cramped, and conflict has become more
haphazard, more omni-directional. What can help us proceed with caution in a
growing media culture of constantly being scandalized by the other evil people, of being polarized
against others? Scholars of mimetic theory can and must produce erudite
reflection on how to disarm vengeance and inspire the type of love that women
like Ms. Gbowee demonstrate. But it is cultural, artistic works like these
films that can compellingly and contagiously spread concepts (or events) like
the forgiving victim.
[1] E.g. “Armed
Conflicts, 1946−2011,” Lotta Themnér and Peter
Wallensteen, Journal of Peace Research 2012 49: 565-575.
[2] Naturally,
there are countless other films that could rightly be reviewed here, and this
paper modestly highlights only a few. One might consider an entirely different
genre, like the very plain and conflictless documentaries, like Into the Silence or Étre et Avoir, as weighty meditations on the quieting of desire.
[5] See
interview at http://www.allinoneboat.org/2011/01/07/the-stoning-of-soraya-m-a-film/#sthash.93PAs6bx.dpuf
[6] When in
the last scene the wedding is called off, the anti-climax is expected and
obvious; it was never ultimately about her.
[7] Western
culture is quite obviously ethnocentric. But it is no more ethnocentric than
any other, even if its ethnocentrism has been more cruelly effective on account
of its power…Unlike all other cultures, which have always been unashamedly
ethnocentric, we in the West have always been simultaneously ourselves and our
own enemy. (Girard [2014], x; 2001, 165, 169; 2007a, 145; 2011, 3; [1977], 232;
214, 226).
[8] "The
Stoning of Soraya M is little more than boring racism. Christian extremists
will love it." Telegraph Online 20 Oct. 2010. Business
Insights: Essentials. Web. 5 June 2014.
[9] What did
gain dramatic gravity by perhaps smoke and mirrors was the depiction of the
town: an entirely dusty, mud-hut, impoverished type town in which, somehow,
magically, the very near countryside is breathtakingly verdant. The town as
corrupt, nature as heavenly, serves a backdrop
[10] for
example, the mayor, just having sealed Soraya’s fate, says his prayers toward
Mecca; the mullah gets his beard trimmed as he prepares for the stoning; the
townswomen, peppered with the gossips who abetted the crisis, are rolling their
prayer beads.
[11] The above
critic has a point to balk at this film’s association with Mel Gibson’s The Passion, given the gruesomeness of
the stoning scene. (Besides James Caviziel, playing the journalist in this film
and Jesus in The Passion, a producer
and composer is also shared between the two films). “The stimulation of blood lust in the guise of moral
righteousness has its appeal” (Stephen Holden, New
York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/movies/26stoning.html?_r=0). But this
film is unlike The Passion in that Gibson spent so little
time portraying the mimetic psychology of Christ’s pseudo-legal, mob driven
lynching. Christ’s suffering was there unfortunately quite decontextualized,
lending itself too easily to penal substitutionary interpretation. In The Stoning, however, there is no jungle
of atonement theory to chop through: the wrongness of the lynching and the
importance of the truth being told takes center stage.
[12] The
largest “gangster” grouping in Indonesia is Pancasila Youth: 3 million members.
Its leader appears in the film as a virtual madman, under the hypnosis of
imitating Americans as he plays golf, and bragging of the pleasures of the
wealthy: “relax and Rolex” is his motto. To this day a culture of
“gangsters”—paramilitaries, in effect—permeates parts of Indonesian culture in
which gangs are given free reign to extend the hand of coercion and policing
where the state leaves off.
