The Wall...
Abraham Maslow, in the Farther Reaches of Human Nature, discusses a graphic in psychological circles that features a picture of a group of babies on one side of a page and a picture of a group of adults in a subway car, looking alienated and blank-faced on another side of the page, and the question printed below:
"What happened?"
It's a great question that adults often begin to lose track of, I think...
And Pink Floyd's The Wall, which Melissa rented for us recently, really begins to answer that question...
Pink Floyd's The Wall on Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd_The_Wall
The alientation that people begin to feel as they build emotional defenses to protect themselves from the ways that they're vulnerabilities are exploited and as we are treated badly by the outside world...
It is the self-fulfilling prophecy that humanity faces as we grow up and face our responsibility in the dysfunctional, hurtful and controlling ways with one another...
Clockwork Orange is a very similarly dark analysis of this process of control and alienation well worth a viewing...
The only way out is to face up to our responsibility in this process and to give up the legacies of alienation, defensiveness, cynicism, control, and hurt that keep the self-fulfilling prophecy in place...
There is no real progress without facing this legacy...everything else is illusion...and powerful illusion, at that...
And The Wall is a brilliant commentary on that fantasy of trying to make the pain go away only to keep it in place...
I've watched so many friends do this that I can hardly keep count, any more...drug abuse and drug control are both a function of this kind of alienation and control...as are, much more dangerously, I think, the more paranoid elements of the gun culture as well as the more paranoid elements of the gun control culture...
We can change this...and as simple as it seems...it involves treating one another better...
And tearing down the wall...
The DVD retrospective, in particular, is a must see for educators...
Have a great week, everyone:):)...
Love,
Ben
2 comments:
re: clockwork orange. did you know burgess' original novel has an additional chapter in which alex is truly cured and a productive citizen, etc. how is that for some horrorshow worth viddying?
Wow:):)...
That seems to change the story just a tad:)...
I wonder how that squares with the portrayal of Alex as pseudo-cured psychological mess...
I like the message in the way the movie does it that maybe sometimes the cure is worse than the problem...that, in this case, psychological methods that don't respect free will demean peoples' dignity...
But that ending you allude to, Carson, does begin to get the question of decent people asking, "Well wouldn't you prefer a little indignity to letting a dangerous guy like Alex run rampant?"...and that's the good faith question that starts the whole mess, I think:)...
What I like about the Wall and Clockwork Orange is that in their own very dark ways they illustrate just how untenable that idea is...how it reinforces all of the dark impulses that lead someone to so dehumanize another to do the ugly stuff that Alex does...
Listening to Roger Waters talk about the fan encounter -- where he spit on a fan at a concert -- that inspired much of The Wall is a really interesting opportunity for a rock fan to look inside the mind and heart of a rock star...and for a rock star to do this really great, deep introspection into his own mind and heart...it's pretty powerful stuff, I think:):)...
Hope you had a good vacation, dude:):)...it's good to see you back:):)...
Ben
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