Requiem For A Dream

Just a few days ago, I was watching the film, Requiem For A Dream,about addiction (to everything, from tvs to drugs). The underlying motif that run through the entire film is the fact that the characters in them have no hope, felt crushed, unwanted, alone, lonely, bored, self-hatred. They were mostly ordinary people, though one was initially a rich kid who finally had to prostitute herself to feed her habit. It is as much a critique of the American culture (the kind of food that leads to obesity, the repetitive and trancelike television shows, the holier-than-thou attitude, poverty, materialism and self-centredness). This darkly hints on the direction that Malaysia is spiralling into, with rising crime and psychotic people, that not stemming from a lack of morals (after all, they have all these moral and religious education rammed down the kids throats from an early age), but from lack of direction, goals, self-hatred, boredom, complacency, selfishness and everything that we see as happening in many first world countries. Seeing how the world has evolved, be they war-torn countries like many of the countries in the African continents and some in the Middle East, dictatorships in Latin American countries and most parts of Asia, or supposed democracy in the US, my belief in social Darwinism grows stronger everyday. We want and we need values, yes, but why aren't as practising it? Moralising aout all these things, as many institutionalised religions are apt to do, will not solve the issues, especially when many of their own people are the perpetrator of some of the most heinous conducts. It merely skims over things and dissolves us from the responsibilities of thinking further and to look beyond our mini-Pinochio noses. However, while I do not believe totally in the cold objectivity of social Darwinism, I believe that society will become self-destructive deal to its lack of altruism. This brings me to an article I read about anthropology in this magazine called 21st Century Science and Technology , which accuses this discipline of empiricising and othering non-White cultures. While my piece here is not going to go into the epistemological arguments in the article, a particular paragraph caught my attention. Since I do not have the magazine with me now (I am at work after all), I will paraphrase it for my readers. It says that when anthropologists go to certain 'primitive' cultures to study them, they make the empirical and ethnographer assumption that such there is uneven evolution within the human species, hence there are the very developed Aryan race (as the neo-Nazis would be proud to say) and the undeveloped, almost simian-like, Aborigines. What the anthropologists failed to address, the article claimed, is that these so called 'primitive' cultures could have been leftovers, or marginal groups, of a lost civilization, or one that is destroyed. I find this fascinating, as the level of knowledge of the average person of the great civilizations of the past is almost nil. Many can't even name the civilizations, let alone know why they fell. It seems that our education has failed in this regard, when we have postdocs and even some academics who do not know or understand what could have destroyed a supposedly sophisticated society. Perhaps we have doomed ourselves to repeat the mistakes of the past. When people like Darren Arofnosky and other non-mainstream publications (the fact that they are non-mainstream already marginalised them and hamper their ability to reach to the average Joe or Jane) try to rub some form of awareness into us via their art or creation, we often choose to ignore them. The people I know who have watched this film, which is the title of this post, agrees that showing impressionable kids the stuff in all their gory bits (even if it could be traumatic, but that is where the parents and more mature adults-note the use of the word 'mature'-is there to explain things to them) rather than moralising to them, serve as a stronger deterrent. Don't you agree?