- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Languages:
- Length:
- 132 minutes (Uncut)
- Review Format:
- DVD
- Year:
- 2014
- Countries:
- Predominant Genre:
- Thriller
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- A disgraced member of the military police investigates a series of child murders.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Atheism | Compassion | Communism | Courage | Curative | Destiny | Emotional repression | Empathy | Family | Free Speech | Friendship | Grieving | Guilt | Identity | Individualism | Justice | Loneliness | Love | Loyalty | Materialism | Narcissism | Personal | Personal change | Political | Political Correctness | Propaganda | Rationality | Redemption | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Science | Self-Esteem | Solipsism | The State | Stereotyping | Totalitarianism
- Similar to:
The Are No Political Friendships
Fascinating analogy for all modern fascist political systems (eg, Communism, National Socialism, religious fundamentalism & White supremacy) where the crucial center-of-power is the destruction of Personal relationships in favor of an affective marriage with a state that punishes people for doing otherwise.
When speaking your mind is a crime, you can trust no-one, yet the state here relies on the self-same emotional connections between family and friends for blackmail purposes that it ultimately intends to destroy. This self-contradiction at the heart of such systems explains both the creation of such societies (the friendless thinking those they resent possess an Achilles’ heel: Friendship as a hostage-to-fortune) and the eventual downfall of such states (the economic decline brought about by those who do as little work as possible to avoid serving a polity that is intent on their destruction). It also explains the existence of the unhappy monsters allowed to run riot in the inevitable internecine-carnage that political-correctness always creates.
Citizens become effective wards of the state, as well as unpaid civil servants, whose sole job in life becomes perpetuating a society that does them nothing but harm; while providing them with limited means of escape, since the acceptance of political dogma means the automatic denial-of-reality. The paranoid schizophrenia so bred makes adequate social-planning impossible so that the reality denied must then be replaced - at least in one’s own mind - with falsifications and delusions like “two plus two equals five”. Public and private behavior becomes equivalent, as one must be on one’s best behavior at all times; pretending to agree with whatever others believe; while never being completely sure just what it is one is actually expected to believe - and when one is expected to pretend to believe it.
The state of a permanent fear of being denounced by people who can only pretend to be friends is palpable here, especially since friendship becomes, in effect, treason to the state because it presupposes a higher loyalty than that owed by citizens to the state. All that remains for the inhabitants of such polities is existential emptiness supported by blind obedience. Within such a system, Personal identities become hard or impossible to forge; leaving the citizens affective zombies - walking the Earth without internally-directed purpose or the ability to express Personal pride or pleasure in privately-initiated activities, because the latter are rigidly-suppressed.
As with all such political systems, sexuality must be as rigidly-controlled as all other emotions and thoughts. Desire can so easily lead to the Personal relationships the state must, necessarily, attack for fear of producing citizens with divided loyalties who may then work against the state. Heterosexual marriages based on fear, expediency & pretense; secretive homosexual liaisons, out of fear of homophobic laws: One goes to bed with Politics, not one’s partner(s), because there are few viable alternatives.
Superbly-acted - albeit with characters a little too individualistic to be believable in the highly-conformist culture depicted - but without any profound understanding of how such systems work, in detail, and of how common they are in both the East and the West. The movie entertains and deftly avoids numerous Hollywood romantic clichés, but lacks the courage of its convictions to point out how similar Western fascism is to that of the East.
Notes:
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