Posted by Meg on: 10.26.2007 /
Downfall is an intense movie about Hitler’s last ten days in his Berlin Führerbunker. It is a powerful movie, in that he is depicted not as evil and hideous, but as a human being. Broken, defeated, hopeless, he treats his cook, his German Shepherd Blondi, his secretary Traudl Junge with kindness and sensitivity. On the eve of the film’s release, the German newspaper Bild posed the question: “Are we allowed to show the monster as a human being?” This is very thought provoking. If we allow ourselves to answer this question ‘yes’, we can’t continue residing in our safe, defined little world with Hitler and Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and everybody we dislike in the ‘bad’ category, and ourselves and those we like in the ‘good’. And that leads to some awful realizations about myself. By ordering my world in this black and white way, I am not allowing myself to see the goodness and loveliness God has infused throughout the world. As Halloween approaches and witches soar through the air on their brooms, I’ve been pondering the fact that two of the kindest, most loving people I know in all the world are witches. My simplistic dividing of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ had witches in the latter category. But does it really help my relating, my loving, my connecting, to be doing so much judging all the time?
How could the idea that every human being is made in God’s image and reflects God’s beauty impact your thinking about the world and your life?
I want to stress the importance in this discussion of NOT JUDGING others and the ideas they share. Thanks!!
I’m looking very forward to spending time with some of you at the BLOGGERS’ DINNER in just one week!
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Comment by: Benjamin
1 10/28/07 10:14 PM | Comment Link |Megsie,
thankyou for writing the movie review. You rock.
I do that good/bad categorization thing to. I do it mostly with George Bush, and Conservative Christians, and my extended family. I guess when it comes down to it, I mostly do it by putting people in the bad category. Although there are a select few who are also in the good category.
You’re right, it’s not a super helpful categorization. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with information. Too much. so I have to do these broad categorizations to cope with all that info. But maybe I don’t have to. Maybe it’s just easier, so I do it cause I’m lazy.
This is perhaps part of what JC was talking about with his whole “you gotta be like a child to get in”. Like children are still developing their categories, and there is a lot more malleability with the names and extend and structure of the categories. Like children are more able to interact with the *real* world, sans categorization. or something like that. I want to work on that. A relatively new paradigm that has come into psychology in the last few decades, from Buddhims, mostly, is something called mindfulness. one big component of mindfulness is “Awareness without judgment”. This is an especially unamerican way of being, methinks. to just observe, describe, and sit with, without having to judge. Mindfulness, by the way, has been shown to be of high efficacy in the treatment of a few things, with more in the pipeline.
On the other hand, some things just *are* bad. I think the way to get in touch with what is *really* bad, and what has simply been *characterized* as bad, is to enter the world of the victims, and then learn, in trying to help them, what exactly has caused/is causing their situation. doing this can, methinks, help us address the injustice without, hopefully, creating yet more injustice.
This is always a mystery. what hitler and co did was really evil. America took a big part in addressing that evil, and somehow it led to us becoming a lot more like Hitler than we were before. How do we overcome this paradoxtrap? In one sense, because we are human beings, we can’t. But we can continue to work on creating metaspace from which we can, hopefully, honestly assess our own actions as well as those of “the other”.
sorry–it’s late at night, and I’m blathering on a bit.