16 November 2007
Look at what we can do - Part I (The Brave One)
)Published on November 16th, 2007 @ 06:22:57 am, using 1463 words, 178 views
Jodie Foster makes me like being short. Lack of stature is instantly translated to ‘posing no threat’ in most people’s understanding. You’re quite simply incapable of causing another human being to feel intimidated. Because you look so fragile and easily hurt yourself. That can be the proverbial card up your sleeve. That can be your element of surprise. That’s her element of surprise. How someone so little can fend for herself so beautifully and require no help in the process. Someone so little who, if push came to shove, you’d trust to fend for you over anyone.
She’s done it unforgettably and to perfection in The Silence of the Lambs, at the center of a conventionally heroic final act, bathed in the green of night vision, built around a heroine who’s anything but conventional. A diminutive woman going with the instincts and the smarts that highlight her vertically challenged, inexperienced and yet formidable self. Forging her way independently… making fools of a team of 6-foot-tall armed men in bulletproof vests and their superiors. Always surrounded by people who make it necessary for her to strain her neck and always coming out on top. She’s done variations of it in Panic Room and Flight Plan. Variations on that same aloneness that is either the source of all fears or the consequence of a deep seated one.
Now she does it in The Brave One, with a spin. That of flirting with and actually taking justice into her own hands. In it, she’s Erica Bain, a New York radio show host who has her safe and comfortable existence turned on its head in the aftermath of a vicious attack in Central Park which results in the death of her beloved fiancé and leaves her in a 3-week coma.
Anytime you see a movie where a brutally violent sequence plays the catalyst that sets the plot in motion, that sequence simply has to pack a punch. It has to get under your skin, to make you feel and claim the pain on the screen as your own. To lead you to adopt it, so to speak, and not by way of detached indignation. Not by way of the fleeting, peripherally felt outrage or pity one feels upon witnessing from a safe distance. Instead, the kind of outrage that gets a parallel movie going in your head where you are the central character. The kind that gets you to consider things from a ‘what if that were me’ perspective.
That sequence of unwarranted violence and the one that followed succeeded in transporting me from that safe distance into the eye of the storm of victimization… inexplicable brutality followed by an inspired, heart rending montage of body parts, portrayed both at the heart of tender love-making - lithe and glowing - and at the systematic hands of ER doctors - bloodied and ravaged.
It suceeded in making me seethe with rage. Seethe for the rise of the vigilante character the movie proposes to follow.
I would love to have been able to see my own face as I watched that scene. The visual equivalent of feeling my facial muscles contract, my teeth grind, my hands turn to fists. I wonder if that mask of rage would reflect the ugliness on the screen as faithfully as I imagine it would. I wonder if under optimum circumstances, away from that dark room and its isolation from the world at hand, I could’ve turned into a vigilante myself.
It seems to me none of us are allowed a clear look at the subject of violence and its ramifications from an angle that would ensure objectivity. Most of us are either too close or too far from ground zero.
The in between is no man’s land. It is the place meant for objectivity where none can be had, since most of us are doomed to cope with either excess or absence of experience. And both of those can be distorting. The absence allows a flame in the back of your mind to whisper repeatedly, hypnotically: ‘This didn’t really happen.’ A persistent afterimage, an optical illusion reminiscent of a light bulb filament that asserts its brightness even behind closed eyelids. While the excess pushes you over the edge to dive head first and against your will into the abyss of unwelcome metamorphosis.
Hearing details of a monstrous act on the news amounts to no more than a prickle. It is news and yet it is not news. It’s quick to make us callous through repetition. Desensitized. It trains our eyes to remain undisturbed in the face of monstrosities, it shields our hearts through a mechanism of self-preservation against a possible and dreaded overdose of sadness. On the flip side, being turned into someone you don’t recognize by violence and fear amounts to the deepest of stab wounds… changes you molecularly - turns you into the stranger you never knew you had it in you to become. The stranger willing to cross boundaries out of sheer (if imposed) necessity (for it is a long way towards peace of mind…) The stranger outside the box, outside predetermined boundaries. It makes sense… if the limits you respected are crossed to your detriment, it’s only natural to feel entitled to do some crossing yourself. Getting things to be on a even keel is something we can’t help but feel entitled to.
We often hear there’s a fine line between right and wrong, between opposites in general, between bookends of any spectrum. I understand the rationale behind that statement. That it’s something you need to beware of. That transformation can happen all too easily. But I have trouble with the image that conjures up. I just can’t picture a small step transporting you from one end to the other. All it takes to cross a fine line is a small step. I believe there’s a vast territory between extremes, that can be occupied by one or the other or most likely, a slice from the endless bulk of in between - one of the subtly diverse shades of gray, something ambiguous, everything that threatens to go one way or the other, that volunteers no certitude. A moment from the stretch between dusk and dawn, deep and shallow, heaven and hell, good and evil. The transformation from one to the other is slow, subtle and complex, it happens step by step and it requires vastness to be played out.
After all, how far a distance between black and white? How many shades of gray from black to white? And between heaven and hell? How many and what variety of requisite sins? Of crimes and misdemeanors between freedom and incarceration? How many steps from getting your feet wet to being fully submerged. How many steps from starting out as a docile newborn to becoming an adult who gets a thrill out of hurting or in the best case scenario, an adult whose hands do not shake when pulling a trigger. The in between is vast and blurry at every step - morphing by nature, unlike the clearly defined steps of a staircase. There are merely degrees to right and wrong. As they mix and melt in midfield, they exert influence over one another until whatever example is on hand is at once both and neither, and cannot from then on be encapsulated by either definition.
To every action, a reason is attached. Reasons are the mitigating factors that add a measure of wrong to right and right to wrong, destabilizing standards, pulling the cozy carpet of definitive truths from under us. Any one reason dulls the lectern that houses preaching, instead of polishing it. Reneges on the promise of simplicity. It tells us ‘Things are not quite that black and white.’ Everything is what it is among other things. Revenge can be shocking, reprehensible, understandable and laudable. The law can be a moral guide, a reliable brake and also a roadblock on the way to justice. A weapon can represent unleashed evil as well as self-preservation. Contexts knock down the pillars we’d like to be able to lean on for respite and guidance. Not all circumstances are created equal. And neither are the people involved in them.
Amid its flaws, The Brave One, makes us face that vast territory, acknowledge its existence and ponder the stability of who we are as people. It makes us wonder how we’d act under adverse, more demanding circumstances and reflect on some of the principles we wave like flags and flash like badges while taking for granted their fragility.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Jodie Foster, Brave One, review, critique, small, stature, heroine, vigilante, revenge, overcome, overcoming, fear, visceral, reaction, challenge, violence, brutality, vengeance
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