Hearts and Minds

I rented Hearts and Minds and I've watched about an hour of it so far. I thought it might be better for me to have a first run through on my own so I can start to think more critically about it when we all watch it together Monday night.

1:02 hrs into the movie there's this scene showing some footage of the Viet Cong viciously rounding up Vietnamese civilians in Saigon. The frame shifts to one of the soldiers holding a Vietnamese man at gun point and effortlessly without any hesitation he pulls the trigger. The body plops to the floor like a marionette gone lax and in an almost Quentin Tarantino-esque moment blood is shooting out of this dead man's head like a science experiment. I watched this brief scene at least 4 times. I was in awe. Honestly, I thought the squirting action from a fatal wound was just, a Hollywood thing. The exaggeration of constant gore and blood in Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction with severed limbs and squirting artery's that make you feel like it's almost funny, only affirmed my view that this there's no way this kind of gore truly happens in real life. But then I see this man shot in the head who falls dead to the ground and so perfectly on cue, his life gushes through his head hole, all of it unscripted and caught on tape and assembled in this documentry. All I could think and feel was, damn this shit is for real.

I'm beginning to understand this notion of "what is it we DON'T see". Up until now, I've NEVER in my life seen that happen to any human being- on the news, on the internet, on tv, much less in real life. People would flip the fuck out if they saw that. They'd complain and probably start a hissy fit over all the in appropriate gore on a public T.V. station. But when it's in a movie and it's fake and not real, oh that's FINE, it's a-okay . It's okay because in the back of your head you have that tiny bit of comfort knowing that it's not real, that it was just some actor with kool-aide jetting out of his head who's pretending to be dead for the sake of dramatic moment.

I think if people SAW some real carnage, if we saw severed limbs, real gushing head wounds, if we even saw body bags of dead men fighting in Iraq or a ticker on the bottom right corner with the death count on it, maybe we'd wake up and realize how much we aren't getting. Maybe we'd realize that a lot of what's going on is in conflict with what we value. Maybe we'd see that ignorance is not bliss. But who is to blame? Is it us the people watching TV, or the people who provide or prevent the availability of the images we see. If we could see some of these things, maybe we'd realize why we should give a damn about war and about politics and about the media that seems to have an agenda and rhetoric of its own.

Where are the body bags? Where are the faces of everyone that's died in the war we are fighting now? Why can't we see the gore, the death, the blood, the anguish? Where is the cold hard reality and why can't we see it?