david_jinkins

The worst part of pain, is that it stops one from doing what one wants to do. Someone in pain can't focus, can't sleep, etc. Do animals feel pain the same way, when they don't have language to express, even to themselves, long term goals?

I've been thinking about that question lately. Flow tells a story of animals cooperating, fighting, and ultimately overcoming adversity by working together. The story is told via the use of the animals behavior, sounds, and of course tropes by which the audience infers what the animals are after. There are limits to this method, though. Except for the desire to satisfy hunger, find shelter, and avoid injury, I wasn't really sure what the animals were ultimately after in the film. The last quarter of the film, which I won't spoil, was confusing as the animals were never able to really articulate what they were after. Did they get what they wanted at the end? Hard to say.

The film was technically very good, and I was impressed at how much story could be told without any dialogue. The world the film builds upon is beautiful. It could be based on a real post-apocalyptic future, but there is also magic in the world. Even though the animals are detailed, they are stylized enough to avoid the uncanny valley. Not Cat's humans with tails here.

Flow is a technically impressive and ambitious film. Kudos to the film makers for pushing this idea so far, but I get more feelings from films where the story can be told as well as shown.

Early in Poor Things, the main character Bella discovers that she can give herself sexual pleasure. Delighted, offers to show a maid and her tutor. 'No, Bella, you musn't do that!' objects the tutor. But why not, when it feels good?

Jean Paul Sartre wrote that ''Man is condemned to be free''. We might now add woman too. Ultimately no one is forced to do anything. There are no excuses. Even if someone holds a gun to my head and tells me to hand over my money, I can choose whether to pass my wallet or to die.

Choices are constrained, of course. I cannot choose to float up into the sky and touch a cloud. Here in Denmark, I cannot talk to strangers on a bus without making everyone on the bus uncomfortable. It takes years of education, upbringing, punishment, and praise to drill such social mores into children.

Bella of Poor Things has not had time to internalize social customs, in particular what is expected of a woman. At some point, a character means to insult Bella by calling her a whore. But to Bella, it is no insult at all. She does not understand that it is considered shameful for a woman to sell sex.

Because Bella has no concept of what is shameful for a woman, she is free to follow her desires. She lives from whim to whim, and has not time for boredom. If food tastes bad, she spits it back onto her plate. If her conversation partner is dull, she brings up something more rude. If it is interesting or feels good, she does it.

Bella's absolute freedom threatens many of the male leads in the film. They each want to own her, to prevent her from talking to someone she finds more attractive or more interesting. Several of them literally lock her away. But she will not be a prisoner, and she finds her way out of each predicament to the chagrin of her would be captors.

The reactions of these men are compelling. Bella's freedom reflects how constrained real women are by the standards for their behavior ingrained in us through the culture we have inherited. Most of the time, this culture is as invisible as the air surrounding us. Poor Things is wonderful feminist art, in that it briefly makes those bonds visible.

Before watching Gandhi yesterday, it had been twenty or thirty years since I last saw it. Even so, I could still remember scenes and lines: "An eye for an eye and the whole world is blind." Gandhi shocked to be kicked out of first class in South Africa. Gandhi advises a Hindu rioter to raise an orphan as a Muslim. As an impressionable young man, I loved both the message of non-violence and the depiction of a saintly Gandhi.

Watching it again as a more jaded middle-aged man, I see more clearly how the controversy in Gandhi's life is glossed over. Without jumping into many particulars, Gandhi's fight to create an Indian nation comes right out of 19th century European ideas about national sovereignty. While he was dressed in "home-spun" and lived as the poor of India, he was also just as thoroughly steeped in the ideas of national determination which would have been floating around UCL when he studied there in the 1880's.

There were other aspects of the story which made me uncomfortable. The film portrays Gandhi's great power to shape the direction of Indian politics. When Gandhi asks Nehru to step down from the leadership of the new Indian state, Nehru agrees. When Gandhi fasts to stop rioting, rioting stops. When Gandhi marches to the sea, everywhere he goes, people chant his name. The film portrays this power as good and deserved, but in his time Gandhi was a controversial figure. Some residents of India would have been less happy with his having so much power over their lives. He was, after all, assassinated.

A second set of scenes which made me uncomfortable involve Gandhi's wife, Ba. In the first, middle-aged Gandhi and Ba perform what I take to be a traditional marriage ceremony. The film plays this ceremony as a sweet declaration of love between the two. During the ceremony, Ba declares that Gandhi will be both her best friend and her sovereign lord. Aren't those two roles incompatible? Later in the film, and elderly Ba tells a group of women that Gandhi tried to stop having sex with her four times and failed, but then finally made a solemn vow and succeeded -- so far. The last line is played for laughs, but why is Ba's sex life governed by how Gandhi feels?

The non-violent method of protest championed by Gandhi works well in a world where we believe every human to have dignity. This is a common belief of our time, and I was happy to watch a film which champions the value of non-violence with my impressionable teenage son. As a more mature film-viewer, however, I now prefer more nuanced art.