Are you man enough?

Straw Dog 1971

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Nature has made the male species biologically different from their counterpart. Nature's constant need to improve the quality of their offspring to survive the competition with other species has made the male species fight it out to qualify to sow their seeds. 

Their robust physical attributes made it handy when hunter-gatherers settled down in communities. The male gender is assigned to protect the weaker segment of the community. So, a male is expected to play his role as virile, aggressive and fierce. 

With time, power is no longer at the tip of a sword or a fist's knuckle. Culture made people less volatile and able to reason out things. To ease this, the rule of law was rolled in. The need for women's empowerment also arose. Power is a zero-sum game. The women's gain must be indeed a loss to men. Increasingly, men are said to be domiciled. That is at a macro level. 

At a micro, things may be different. A man is still expected to protect his wife and family. He is expected to defend them tooth and nail. A cultured man is supposed to be less combative and give everyone their space and due respect. But when caring for his family, he is supposed to man up, rise as the man of yesteryears, and use his physical attributes to defend the pride and dignity of the people under his care. He is expected to use his primitive defences to make them feel the females feel important.

At one time, the women felt fed up with the chivalrous gestures showered up. They thought they were treated condescendingly. They wanted to prove to the world that they were in no way inferior to their male counterparts. Hence, it started the spree of the female gender to outdo the male. Liberation went on so far that the women took a 360° turn. Now, they reminisce about the times when they were treated as princesses.

So, being a man in the modern world is challenging. On one end, he is expected to be mild-mannered, able to articulate and express his concerns and not resort to violence to air his opinion. Protecting one's safety has been outsourced for this exact reason. Everyone is expected to work within the ambit of the law. Being violent is, they say, low-brow.

To complicate things, women, with their newfound freedom, flaunt the very thing that used to be taboo all those years. They know very well that men have to restrain, failing which the mighty weight of the law may befall them. In the immediate future, they have their men at the beck and call for protection, like a guard dog. 

In its time, this movie created a lot of controversies for its gruesome depiction of rape and glorifying violence. There is even a scene where the rape victim is apparently seen to enjoy the act. It is debatable whether, as the perpetrator is her ex-boyfriend, she longs for the good old carefree sex-filled days. She has sexual tensions with her husband.

It is a story of a couple trying to spend a short stint in the English countryside of Cornwall. The husband, David Sumner (played by Dustin Hoffman), is an American maths professor doing sabbatical research. The wife, Amy (Susan George), who is less academically inclined than her husband, used to grow up in Cornwall. Her sojourn is like a chicken coming back to roost. All her contemporaries, with whom she shared a common past, are still there, albeit stuck with their low-brow ideas and behaviours, doing menial jobs. They are hired to do some home repairs. 

The peace in the couple's home is shattered as the workers lust on the flirtatious wife. The pacifist husband tries to deal with the situation in a cultured way, but it is futile. Things turn sour when the mentally challenged man accused of molesting a teenager is harboured in the Professor's house. The incensed townsfolk are out for his blood, but the Professor is adamant that it is his duty to protect the accused. Thus started a blood bath. The Professor is finally able to show his true grit and prowess. Through quick planning and execution, he manages to defeat the aggressors. 

On the one hand, the modern man is pussified and domesticated to fit into a non-combative world where the duty of law and order is outsourced to the nation. Culture teaches him non-aggression, but he is still expected to rise occasionally as society deems it necessary. The thing is, man has to choose his battles carefully. He needs the wisdom to wage unnecessary wars and how to avoid being suckered into it. 

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When it all ends...

Leave the World Behind (2023)

Director: Sam Esmail

(based on the novel by Rumaan Alam)

A Tamil proverb goes like this. 'Never live in a town without a temple'. 

The main structure of a Hindu temple, specifically those from Southern India, which is placed above the central area, the sanctum santorum, is a gopuram. On top of the gopuram is a golden vessel containing nine types of grain. 

Besides being a lightning conductor, the gopuram is a storage area for various grains for use as a starter pack in the event of a major catastrophe, like massive flooding when seeds are destroyed or even a nuclear meltdown. These reserves are said to be good to use for 12 years, after which they have to be replaced. In temple nomenclature, the act of replenishing new seeds is a kumbabishegam.

With everyone in their comfort zone, having the illusion of being in control of it all, they built certain biases around them. They confirm their biases by reading materials reinforcing these preconceptions and hanging around people in an echo chamber who trumpet their sentiments. They say they are kind, care about the world and the poor, and recycle trash. Deep inside, are they really the same people they want others to be?

Others believe charity begins at home. Takers keepers, they say. And they have no qualms, showing a lack of social etiquette to get their agenda off into orbit. Life is a race, and they do not want to lose.

Then there are the doomsday prophets. They 'cry wolf' so many that crying had lost its sting. These are the conspiracy theorists.

Now, when the end of days really comes to our doorsteps, which by each day appears more and more inevitable, how would we react? Would we shed off our prejudices and go out to save mankind? Would we still be immersed in our bigotry and eyeball at our fellow brother with scorn? Will we still act so high and mighty and look down upon those beneath us?

Or would we be only interested in satisfying our simple pleasures rather than worrying about what tomorrow may bring? Like the youngest character in the film who is only interested in knowing what happens in the last episode of 'Friends'.

When the end becomes a reality, how will our fellow dwellers of Earth, i.e., animals, treat us? Will we be a threat to them? Will they depend on us for protection? Or, as per the Law of the Jungle, they would push the idea of the survival of the fittest? Even the docile of animals, e.g. deer, would turn against us with their alpha male turning up with daunting antlers. 

Life is so dear that species fight tooth and nail to stay alive.

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Be a man!

Kiss of the Spider Women (1985)

Director: Héctor Babenco

Against the backdrop of a despotic Latin American regime and people's uprising, this story looks not at the cruelty of man against a fellow man but at the question of what makes a man a man. 

Two men of opposing characters are confined in the same cell. The characters reflect what society defines men then and now, biologically or psychologically, or in modern terms, assumed gender! Is a man judged by his character or words based on a handshake? 

 

Valentin is the epitome of machoism as defined by society. He is a tanned, hirsute, testosterone-driven hot-blooded member of the revolutionary resistance who is caught for subversive activities against the military dictatorship. The authorities are trying very hard to infiltrate his movement but in vain. 

His cellmate is Luis Molina, an effeminate man, an unabashed homosexual, and a window dresser, who was arrested for corrupting an underage youth. 

In the beginning, Valentin cannot stand the sight of Luis being pushed over, not being assertive, having no self-respect as a man and being quite apathetic about politics. He thinks Luis is a hopeless romantic living in a make-believe world of celluloid characters, as they frequently converse about movies he has watched. 

Meanwhile, Valentin is slowly being poisoned by the authorities to help Lios build a bond and retrieve valuable information about Valentin's underground movement. And Luis has cut a deal with the jailers for freedom in exchange for information about Valentin's movement's next action plan. 

As the story progresses, both men slowly understand each other's situation. Being a man is not all about being macho but is a composite of many things. One must be man enough to do what is right, stand up for his beliefs, and fight against atrocities. Being a man is about something other than being gung ho with action-packed manoeuvres; he can also do it on the sly without much fanfare.

P.S. "Kiss of the Spider Woman" has nothing to do with the Spider-Man franchise. It is not only about the changing nature of the relationship between two very different, totally opposite men in every way who have been locked together in the same cell. Day-to-day experiences open their perspective of the other and develop a common bond.

P.S.S. Thanks to @Tutu Dutta for the introduction to this movie.

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Fight till the last man standing!

1917 (2019)
Director: Sam Mendes

The story is written by Sam Mendes based on what his grandfather told him. Mendes' grandfather was a soldier in the Trench War, and this offering is in his honour for his heroic act of treading through the dangers of the enemy-line and the perils of Nature to pass over a piece of vital information to the advancing army. His deed indeed saved the day and many fellow comrades.

I am a little perplexed. On the one hand, I am taught that violence is the primitive way of settling an issue. Violence can never solve any problems but instead, create new ones. An eye for an eye leaves the whole blind, they say. Yet in the same breath, the same people proclaim that turning the other cheek is stupidity.

All through our civilisation, war has been part and parcel of our evolution. With each significant catastrophe that we go through, the human race seems to go up one notch in terms of scientific achievement. War propels the world forward. War stimulates the economy, and the desire to dominate is one thing that gives pride. We form tribes and fall in line under a piece of cloth to provide us with a sense of pride to uphold. 

In a war, we say, everyone loses but yet, we are ever ready to justify the mother of all battles to end wars. We know where it led us.

The promise of wealth and power is good enough reason for us to get up in the morning and plunge ourselves into the conveyer belt that would send us all to the hole of destruction. We repeatedly justify our resort to extinction as a means to settle scores by putting the blame on Nature. Even our Universe is rough in its actions. Scorching expulsions of magma, destructive clash of meteorites, earth-shattering movements of tectonic plates and extremes of temperatures proves that the world is no pleasure cruise.

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You are so gullible!

Derren Brown: Netflix special (2018)
Push, Sacrifice

Darren Brown calls himself a psychological illusionist. He devises elaborate scams with his team of actors, engineers, stuntmen and others to influence his subjects to willingly perform heinous crimes or sometimes unthinkable sacrifices. He does all these with just suggestions as if the subjects are doing it at their own free will. 

In an episode named 'Push', four people are shortlisted from a pool of applicants to help out in a charity event. He used the famous test where applicants stand up at the ring of a bell without any rhyme or reason to pick his choice. This is a classical experiment done by psychologists to illustrate that humans are mere unthinking conformists. To cut the long story short, three out of the four candidates that Brown selected could be coaxed to push a man off the edge of the roof at the order of a person in authority. This result is comparable to the Milgram Experiment in 1963 to illustrate our utter obedience to people in authority. This experiment followed the Eichmann trial in 1961. The world could not fathom how a simple looking civil servant could systemically send prisoners into the gas chamber as if it was a banal thing to do.

In the "Sacrifice' episode, an American man with very fixed negative views on the rise of immigrants in the USA is manipulated, in an elaborate scam that spanned both sides of the Atlantic, to make him take a bullet to protect an illegal Mexican immigrant.

It just goes to illustrate how Man can be manipulated for better or worse. The lessons learnt from these shows are nothing new but may give a new perspective to younger viewers.

The thing often not considered in this type of shows is what happens to the participants after the show. Is knowing that they have dark evil tendencies lurking within them, like pushing a person from the edge of a building going to leave an indelible mark on their future prospect of employment or mental state? Is meddling with the participants' inner crypts of their psyche going to unleash the inner dark thoughts or scar them forever? 

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We will survive!

The human race must be a resilient lot. Nothing will annihilate them except if they decide to self-destruct. We have been through tragedies in many forms, natural calamities to man-made ones, but we keep coming back strong, shaken but not stirred. All they need is time and space to prosper.

This, I realised when I attended a wedding in Karak, a small town along the Titiwangsa Range which forms the spine of the peninsula, in the state of Pahang. Even though it is located only about an hour's drive from the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, these two towns seem worlds apart. Away from the hustle and bustle of the concrete jungle, Karak is nicely tucked between hills covered with lush greenery of the tropical forest and its fresh air.

The wedding reception held in the modest premises of a Chinese temple, it covered all the bare necessities. Forget the razzmatazz of the city lights and unnecessary blatant display of bling-bling, the function was never deficient in any other department.
The hall set the mood for a colourful Indian wedding. Draped in contrasting bright red, black and white backdrop, the dais displayed a shining wrought-iron seat fit for the royalties which seated two, naturally for the King and Queen for the day.

Being Malaysians, furthermore from a laid-back Eastern coast town, people were just sauntering jauntily at their own pace, way past the time specified on the invitation card. But what the heck, it is a party, not a scheduled flight.

It is incredible how the people of a small town can sustain their day to day living and fulfil their social obligations even being away from the glaring lights of the city. Somehow, people manage to satisfy their need as they go on their lives. Like in that wedding, the local bakery provided a 3-tier wedding cake, and the town's electrician provided the 'state-of-the-art' sound system to set the pace for merrymaking. The neighbourhood shutterbug immortalised the memorable night digitally in pixels and cine forms. Gustatory needs were met by caterers form the town itself. They were quick to serve a mouth-watering spread that tickled all taste buds and satisfied all palatal cravings.

Give people peace and give them space to express. They will be self-sufficient and establish a prototype for future generations to follow. When their path meets a hurdle, they could initially falter but then quickly recoup, regain strength, and soon they would be sailing again in no time. That is the undying spirit of the human endeavour.

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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