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?

Chwast, Seymor End Bad Breath 1968

reply/unintentional-essay

Yo yo yo, check it:
Uno: Easy, you just have to be me. Cool magazine covers though dontcha think?
Dos: You have my word, I will make it to your movie showing! You can't say no one showed up because Severin did and Severin is not "no one." As for the movie showing date/time, it would depend on when we need to have the next movie assignment watched by don't you think? Is there a movie that you want us to watch by next week and if so then I think this weekend would be fine. I could figure out times for the peeps from there. Of course this would all depend on when you get your DVD playa and if you'll even make all of this happen! You know Yoda once said "there is no try, there is only do." Mr. Piekarski don't just try making the movie night, Dooo It.
Dos "beh": I'm already on the well deserved nomination.
Tres (leches): I had nooo idea M.I.A. was to be playing here, in Austin, on campus! Flippin' fantastic! I'm soooo going! If you haven't figured out who you're going with, come with me!?! Jes var nice gypsy.
Cuatro: As for the pelicula, I thought it was pretty fabulous. I'm pretty sure the producer of this film/documentary-ish production did not think Vietnam was happy time and didn't want us to think so because of the emphasis on death and the individual. There was the image overlay in white lettering of the death count number including the date and the letter readings of young men predicting or hoping that they wouldn't die followed by the same white lettering confirming their death. I noticed at some point when the letter reading had briefly stopped, the camera zoomed in on the faces of at least 10 different men all looking either very hopeless or very stern. The close ups along with the reading of these letters, I suppose wanted to personalize and make real to us the death of these boys and in this way convince us that the Vietnam War sucked, especially when (as we discover through the letter readings) most of these soldiers didn't know what/why they were fighting.
Cinco: Yo soy la super guawo y la mejor "numba' one stunna."

Eva

Aiight. One: how'd you make your blog page so spiffy? Two: when the spaceship DVD player arrives, you bet I'd like to offer movie night again. But it's so lonely when no one shows up... If you'd like to do the figuring-out-of-what-date-and-time-works-best-for-everyone business, and then get back to me with what you find, I'll try to make it happen. Two B: If you wanna lend a hand in trying to recuperate some of the funds it took to rescue the spaceship DVD player from the captive aliens, via the avenue I mentioned to Cory, by all means, Eva, the glory and power are yours. Three: M.I.A. in concert on November 3rd! Four: What'd you think of the film we saw today?

both Tim O'Briens seem to think that surrealism is a hard and exact truth, so why can't we say that Apocolypse Now is a kind of truth? Just because its the truth as it seems to a particular person, can we say it is not real, ....real and true to them?! Can we not say that reality and truth is relative????

There is no such thing as "Truth," despite what the Main Building Tower tells us. To say that "surrealism" is a hard and exact truth is playing with language, not much more. The second part of what you wrote is much more sensible: reality and truth are relative, and so much depends on perspective. If there existed no one to perceive it, would the world still exist? All we have are our own perceptions, which are muddled and particular to our own experiences and expectations. That's why for O'Brien, it's essential that we explore the power of the imagination and what it can tell us about ourselves; which, according to him, is often much more than the "hard exact truth" can. Whatever that is.

Johny and Bob sure know how to write and sing a song, now don't they?

Connections

Okay so author of The-Things-They-Carried-Tim O'Brien says, (now check this out Mr. Piekarski obviously great minds think alike baahahha) "...The pictures get jumbled...afterwards, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represent the hard and exact truth as it seemed" (p.71). BAM! Yeah, yeah, intro to Apocalypse Now ring a bell?! Mista Piekarski, both Tim O'Briens seem to think that surrealism is a hard and exact truth, so why can't we say that Apocolypse Now is a kind of truth? Just because its the truth as it seems to a particular person, can we say it is not real, ....real and true to them?! Can we not say that reality and truth is relative???? Help me out here, I need feed back!