A study in how language misdescribes violence, war, and the use of force.
{ Monthly Archives }
A 90-year-old former German army commander was convicted of war crimes for ordering the killing of 14 civilians. He was sentenced to life in prison 65 years after the crime happened.
I wonder how long it will take the United States to start convicting its own war criminals who ordered the torture of thousands of prisoners and resulted in at least 100 deaths in US custody.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090811/wl_afp/germanyitalyhistorytrialwarcrimes
Go here to demand the Attorney General investigate those who approved this tortured logic:
This is the War Handwavium score for “The Fifth Element”, the 1997 movie staring Bruce Willis.
Total score: +201 points
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/
Note: !!!!!SPOILERS!!!!!
Times are approximate, based on DVR recording.
+5 points: entire movie: Inexplicable ball of evil shows up every few thousand years to destroy earth. If that isn’t “othering”, I don’t know what is.
-5 points: 15 minutes: Cocksure General shoots missiles at unexplainable ball of fire in space. Gets his ship blown up.
-2 points: 20 minutes: punk next door tries to rob Korben Dallas. Dallas disarms him without violence.
+10 points: 23 minutes: we meet the Mangalores, a race of trolls. Complete othering of bad guys for easier, guilt-free killing.
-9 points: 23 minutes: Mangalores shoot down the Mondoshawans ship. Three are killed.
+5 points: 29 minutes: General taunts Leeloo in glass chamber. pointless. But it allows Leeloo to punch through the chamber and punch the General.
+2 points: 36 minutes: cops crash into McDonalds truck.
+10 points: 47 minutes: We meet the bad guy, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. Zorg has half a shaven head, has a plastic thingy for a hat, weird clothes, a goatee, a funny accent, and walks with a limp. Outrageous othering.
+5 points: 47 minutes: Zorg fires 1 million employess when assistant says he only needed to fire half a million. Pointless display of evil.
+5 points: 48 minutes: Zorg’s minions are bald, have weird plastic hats, and wear tight leather pants. Othering.
+5 points: 1:05 minutes: Cops bag wrong bad guy. Bureaucracy fails.
+9 points: 1:05 minutes: Trolls kill 3 cops to capture bag from cops.
-2 points: 1:07 minutes: Father Vito Cornelius knocks Dallas on head with trophy, steals his tickets.
+12 points: 1:11 minutes: 2 trolls disquised as punks kill 4 cops and then hide in garbage at airport.
+5 points: 1:19 minutes: Zorg blows up his own minion by exploding cell phone for failing. Pointless display of evil.
+6 points: 1:30 minutes: Trolls go into Diva’s room and kill 2 entourage members.
+30 points: 1:31 minutes: Leeloo beats up 15 trolls.
-2 points: 1:33 minutes: Zorg shoots Leeloo in ventilator shaft
+9 points: 1:34 minutes: Trolls take over ships control room. Kill 3 sailors.
+9 points: 1:34 minutes: trolls attack theater. Kill 2 sailors and the Diva.
+2 points: 1:37 minutes: Dallas flips troll, takes his gun, and pins him.
+5 points: 1:38 minuts: Ruby Rohd kills troll by accident. Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine.
+27 points: 1:38 minutes: Dallas starts killing trolls. 9 killed.
+20 points: 1:39 minutes: Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine. Dallas jumps on lever, troll goes into ceiling. Head is stuck. His rifle fires and he kills 4 other trolls.
+18 points: 1:42 minutes: Dallas shoots 2 trolls behind tripod gun and kills 4 trolls with a grenade.
+21 points: 1:43 minutes: Dallas goes to control room. Kills 6 trolls in one sweep. Then walks in and shoots the leader in the head.
-12 points: 1:46 points: Zorg lands on cruise ship for second time, kills 4 sailors.
+10 points: 1:48 minutes: trolls set of their own self-destruct device. Kill Zorg, kill trolls. Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine.
+3 points: 1:59 minutes: Leeloo activates the weapon, destroys giant ball of evil.
Summary: “The Fifth Element” is a comedy, action, sci-fi story that is cartoonish in its portrayal of good and evil and its portrayal of violence. Evil is evil because it’s evil. And good (leeloo) exists just because evil exists. The battle lines are nice and clean. Then we meet the actual bad guys and discover that it’s an army of trolls hired by a weird, balding, funny accented, funny dressed, funny walking, guy with a weird hat, and a penchant for useless displays of evil. And the supreme being happens to be Leeloo, played by super-model Milla Jovovich, who spends a good chunk of the movie running around in tiny bandages, and has a tendancy to take off her top when men are looking.
It’s so, good=beauty, evil=ugly, that it’s silly.
The final war handwavium is moderately high, reflecting this ultra black-versus-white portrayal, and reflecting that the bad guys are othered to teh point that we don’t feel anything when they’re killed.
For me personally, I enjoyed “The Fifth Element”. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. But it’s a movie I enjoy not for the violence, but for the extremely well written script. It’s a damn funny movie. And the movie seems to focus more on being a comedy-action movie (like “Big Trouble in Little China”) than on trying to be an action-comedy (like “Beverly Hills Cop”). So I can personally overlook the high war handwavium score enough to like the movie and put it on my favorites list.
It is interesting that when you disect the movie it does land on a fairly high end of the scale. But then “The Fifth Element” was written and directed by Luc Besson. Some of Luc Besson’s other works include “La Femme Nikita” and “The Transporter”. “The Fifth Element” seems like a comedy cousin version of “La Femme Nikita”, and I’d probably not like “The Fifth Element” as much if it had tried to be serious like “La Femme Nikita”.
Basically, the cartoonish aspect of the movie allowed me to watch the war handwavium as not to be taken too seriously. And the fact that the movie is an extremely well written comedy meant that there was much to enjoy even ignoring the war handwavium violence. If “The Fifth Element” had tried to take itself too seriously, or if it hadn’t had an extremely funny script, then the violence would probably have been enough of a turn off that I wouldn’t like the movie overall.
As it is, it is in fact one of my favorites. Being an extremely well-quotable movie helps. I can’t not think “Chicken, good” anytime I pop something in the microwave.
This is the War Handwavium score for “Unforgiven”, the 1992 movie starring Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman.
Total War Handwavium Score: +7 points
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/
NOTE: !!!!SPOILERS!!!!
No times are given. Didn’t have a DVD. The amount of violence is small enough that it’s pretty easy to track.
+2 points: The movie starts with two men Quick Mike and Davey Bunting, in a brothel. Quick Mike starts cutting up a prostitute’s face, Delilah Fitzgerald, because she “gave a giggle” when she saw how small his penis is. Davey Bunting hears yelling, comes into the room, and tries to stop Quick Mike. The owner of the brothel, Skinny Dubois, comes in and puts an end to it by brandishing a pistol.
The Sheriff, Little Bill Daggett, gives the men a fine. They are to provide the owner of the brothel with 7 ponies next spring. The prostitutes want them hanged, or at least whipped. The prostitutes decide to come up with a thousand dollar reward to anyone who will kill Quick Mike and Davey Bunting.
The first to attempt to collect is English Bob. He comes into town. The sheriff knows him and he and his posse surround English Bob and force him to surrender his guns. Then Sheriff Little Bob Dagget beats English Bob bloody and unconscious.
+5 pointless display of evil. Sheriff’s beating of English Bob.
The Schofield Kid, William Munny, and Ned Logan show up in town to collect the reward. The Sheriff confronts William Munny in the bar, beats him up, and kicks him out of town.
-2 William gets beaten by Sheriff.
William, Ned, and the kid go after Davey. Ned shoots at him, but misses and hits horse. Davey’s leg is crushed. Ned can’t finish him off. William takes the rifle and shoots Davey.
+3 William shoots Davey.
Ned realizes he can’t go through with it and rides out of town. William and the kid stay to go after the second cowboy and collect the reward. Friends of Davey catch Ned and we are told they beat him up, and then they turn him over to the sheriff.
Sheriff Dagget whips Ned in jail. Tries to get information, such as the name of his two accomplices. Dagget shows that he is whipping Ned more out of sadism than anything else. Ned gives false information.
-10 realistic portrayal of torture.
William and the Kid keep an eye on where Quick Mike is hiding. They wait till he goes out to to go the outhouse. The kid shoots Quick Mike.
+3 the Kid shoots Quick Mike.
The Kid then tells William that it was the first time he ever killed anyone. The Kid had been talking trash the whole movie up to this point. Now that he’s actually killed a man, he’s got the shakes, and got a pile of regret.
William and the Kid collect the reward.
We’re told that the Sheriff heard that Quick Mike is dead, and that he tortured Ned to death, not because the information would have done any good, but out of vengeance. As William put it, the Sheriff killed Ned for what William and the Kid did.
-10 realistic portrayal of torture.
William rides back into town. Ned’s body is on display in a coffin in front of the brothel. William kills the owner of the brothel for using Ned’s body as decoration. William then kills Sheriff Little Bill and 4 other men.
+18 William kills 6 men
summary:
When “Unforgiven” came out, it was hailed as being a realistic portrayal of violence and killing. The score, in my opinion, essentially reflects that accuracy. It shows torture being used not for information, but for vengeance. It shows gunmen English Bob and Sheriff Little Bill Dagget as being legends in their own minds, both of them lie to the writer W.W. Beauchamp.
Of all the main characters, none are searching for justice. The prostitutes want vengeance. The sheriff wants peace through visciousness. And William gets that he’s just killing for money and that ‘we all got it coming’.
Clint Eastwood preaches a moral of the failings of violence with this movie. And he walks the walk, not just talks the talk. The movie doesn’t preach against violence while glorifying violence. The movie preaches against violence while showing violence without any handwavium to pretty it up. Torture is shown honestly, brutally. The movie has a total body count of less than 10.
While something like “Watchmen” tries to have a moral to the story of the pointlessness of violence, it tells that moral while showing us a world where torture repeatedly works, where Rorsharch never kills an innocent man, and where vigilantes get to beat up black hat paper targets in dark alleyways.
Contrast this to “Unforgiven” where the movie “tells” us that violence is pointless at the same time it “shows” us a world in which violence is not some guiltfree indulgence.
“Unforgiven” won Oscars for best picture, best director, best supporting actor, and best editing. It also had nominations for best actor, best cinematography, and best original screenplay.
The movie itself has some issues, mainly that it’s longer than it needs be. At 2 hours and 11 minutes, the movie suffered from needless characters, namely the whole thing with the writer Beauchamp wasn’t needed for the plot, and some scenes could have been shortened, and all together, that probably could have cut the movie down to an hour and a half.
I don’t think “Unforgiven” won all those awards and nominations strictly for being the best movie. I think “Unforgiven” won all those awards and nominations because people recognized on some level that “Unforgiven” was showing us and telling us an honest story about the realities of violence.
Whatever the reason for the awards, “Unforgiven” is one of the lowest scoring “War Handwavium” stories that centers around violence that I’ve done. And I think that score reflects that the movie not only talked the talk about violence, but walked the walked. It told us and it showed us violence for what it is.
For those interested, here’s a history of the approximate US troop levels in Afghanistan by year:
year: US troop levels
2001: 1,300
2002: ?
2003: 10,000
2004: 17,000
2005: 20,000
2007: 26,000
2008: 31,000
2009 (spring): +21,000 = 52,000 total (this is current figure as of August 2009)
2009 (projected): +68,000 = 120,000 total (Obama has approved an additional 68,000 troops by the end of 2009)
It looks like Obama is ready to Give War a Chance in the Graveyard of Empires known as Afghanistan. The Soviet Union failed to pacify Afghanistan in the 80’s. I’m not sure what Obama thinks makes the US any different.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6789142.ece
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/12/13/national/w125100S16.DTL
http://wbztv.com/national/Afghanistan.troop.increase.2.692014.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-12-20-us-troops_x.htm
The White House has started an Anti-Handwavium website to counter all the shrill right-wing madness coming out against health care reform. It has a right-wing myth, folowed by a quick reality check, followed by a video that explains the issue in more detail if you want. Here are the top entries:
Rationing? Insurance companies are rationing your care now. Reform would outlaw that rationing.
Euthanasia? Are you kidding me?
Veteran Care would suffer? Nope. They’re unrelated.
Burden for small businesses? Nope. Currently, big companies get better discounts on health insurance because they have more people in their program. Reform would level the playing field and actually HELP small businesses be more competitive.
Cut Medicare? Simply put, no.
Can’t keep my current insurance or current doctor? You can keep them if you want. Reform won’t force you to change your current situation, it will add a new choice for those who DO want to change.
Good stuff. Next time someone boggles some insane Rush Limbaugh Ditto Head talking point at you about health care reform, point them to the White House website and show them the reality.
The GOP over here quotes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton of supporting the idea of a government funded, single payer, health insurance system. And the Republican vice presidential candidate of 2008, Sarah Palin, just came out and said that Obama’s single payer health reform plan is “downright evil”, garsh darnit.
Apparently, the GOP thinks a government funded, single-payer, health insurance system is a very bad idea.
If a government funded, single payer system is so bad that the GOP has been doing everything in its power to stop Obama’s health care reform, why stop there? Why not get rid of the existing government funded, single payer, health insurance system?
Medicare is government funded, single-payer health insurance. It’s been around since 1965. In 2007, Medicare provided health care coverage for 43 million Americans. 43 million Americans that were covered by government funded, single payer, health coverage.
Come on, all you Republican politicians! Stand by your principles! If you think government funded, single-payer, health coverage is evil incarnate, then you should start a campaign to end Medicare. And let your constituents know where you stand, especially those over 65 years old.
Tell them you want to stop Obama’s health care reform and after that you want to end Medicare.
What we have here is the Domino Theory of GOP principles. And the American response to the Domino Theory is “containment”. What we need here is to “contain” the GOP principles against government funded, single-payer health care. If the domino of Obama’s health care reform bill falls, the next domino after that will be Medicare. Don’t let the GOP knock your dominoes down. Don’t let the GOP take your Medicare away!
Support Government Funded, Single Payer, health coverage. Protect the elderly from the right wing attempts to kill Medicare. Support Obama’s health care reform.
The headline says it all. We’re talking about industrial grade handwavium here. Pass it on.
CNN Anchor Rips Into Health Care CEO Who’s Funding Anti-Reform Effort
The feud between Georgia and Ossetia, with Ossetia backed by Russia and Georgia being pro-West, is still simmering.
Ossetia closed its border with Georgia, stating concerns about H1N1. But rumor has it the real reason is that they’re concerned about Georgia doing cross-border raids.
If this blows up into another reenactment of Georgia’s 2008 invasion of Ossetia, don’t be too surprised.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/08/200986182358922172.html
I wrote up a short history of the decades old conflict between Georgia and Ossetia here:
Hillary Clinton recently demanded that Kenya set up a special tribunal to bring to trial the perpetrators of political violence in that country that killed over a thousand civilians over its presidential elections.
Wait. Clinton wants Kenya to investigate its war crimes?
Maybe Kenya doesn’t want to look back but instead wants to focus on looking forward? Maybe the President of Kenya is reading from President Obama’s playbook: don’t investigate your own government’s past.
Clinton told Kenya that not investigating will result in perpetuationg the nation’s “culture of impunity”.
Well, duh. Isn’t that what the US is doing?
I think if I were a Kenyan politician, listening to Clinton berate me and my government about it’s lack of investigations into obvious war crimes, I’d probably stand up and shout, “Right back at you!”
Maybe Clinton should give a speech to Obama and demand that he investigate American war crimes, such as torturing prisoners against the Geneva Convention. Maybe Clinton should warn Obama about the “culture of impunity” that not investigating will perpetuate.
Otherwise, it’s hard to take seriously these sorts of demands by the US for other countries to investigate their war crimes.
I’m just sayin’.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/world/africa/06diplo.html?hp