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| Sunday, 2 October 2005 |
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Nirvana as suicide : Mystery of anti-war film Solemn Thoughts by Wendell Solomons Sulanga Enu Pinisa is the Sinhala title of the film. The title created an association in my mind with the US-composed song "Blowing in the Wind," so famous in the anti-Vietnam war era. Newspapers, including government ones, had used their column space for printing hand-outs on the film. In consequence, a lady invited me to see the film in the immaculately maintained venue of a past 70-plus nation Non-Aligned Conference. We were also to visit a large adjoining book exhibition there. When we got to our venue, we found the film had been shut down due to representations by the neighbouring association of book dealers. We were disappointed but could proceed to the large book exhibition. I later accompanied the woman friend to Sulanga Enu Pinisa of an evening at a city cinema theatre. After seeing the film, my companion claimed that for her the exemplary role in the film was played by a middle-aged woman who had climbed onto the branch of a tree to commit suicide by necklacing herself with a rope she had taken up. You can imagine my consternation when I now reveal that I had agreed to keep my woman friend company because she is suicidal. What did the film producers intend doing? They seem to have been thinking they had created the ultimate philosophy. The film, displayed before a mostly Buddhist audience, replaces the laborious path of self-development towards Nirvana, the overcoming or extinguishing of self, with a faster event - suicide - no matter that the taking of life, including one's own is anathema to Buddhism. The ultimate trump card is supposed to be in your hand. You are lured with a vanity trap - "You are in charge." Rene Girard makes a statement that helps identify the link of Buddhism to other ethical heritages of the world. Girard, a professor in his native France and readable on the Internet said - "The only authentic epoch^ is ... victory over desire, victory over Promethean pride." Programming us to a tune "You are in charge" serves a large purpose for global network media and behaviour control. The vanity trap creates an illusion of the ultimate lever being in the individual citizen's hands (instead of the individual being piped in Pavlovian sensations by TV networks that are money-magnate controlled through front men such as Rupert Murdoch.) Network media tunes audiences into the belief that an individual is "Free to Choose" (outside the domination of transnationals such as Unilever, Anglo-Dutch Shell, or Exxon and their heavy- budget advertising.) To that end the past three decades instilled conceit and self-worship that was intended to rupture solidarity in society. We can express in the words of the chief priestess (since the 1930s in the USA) of the cult of selfishness, Ayn Rand. Of society, she could declare - "I am done with the monster of 'We,' the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame." Megalomania In the film created in Sri Lanka, the viewer is supplied the idea that suicide is a victory over society. It is an extension of the logic of chain-smoking Ayn Rand who when dying of lung cancer boasted to her own disciples - "It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end." Did she take her disciples with her? 'Mega' meaning 'big' in Greek, 'megalomania' is an ailment that derives from swollen-headedness. The world is mortal and wicked and Ayn Rand is glad to achieve immortality through sacrificing the world. In the film created in Sri Lanka, Ayn Rand's unwitting followers supply the debased 'wicked other' as our world - you and I. Would you be surprised that practically every person is scripted in the film for debasing? Anti-human 1. To provide affront to traditional Asian respect for elders, a grey-haired man takes a midnight bath in a river so that the script can present him to the audience with frontal nudity (no matter that Sri Lanka's rural folk for safety, customarily bathe in rivers during daylight hours.) 2. The lead male actor ends up depicted as a buffoon duped by both his friend and a nearby army detachment. 3. A woman drawn into the film to be ravished for sensation before the audience on the low bough of a tree, is visibly with child - some 6 months pregnant. 4. A younger main actress, in her early twenties, is also ravished against a tree. Though applying a woman's body to such a rough surface is an illogical choice, such portrayal makes for sensation both at home and abroad (it isn't what a 15-year old youth could peek at on the Internet.) This younger main actress ends up sold to the audience as an adulteress. 5. The more elderly actress in her 30s, who commits suicide at the end of the film, is painted as a frustrated woman aroused by a male body pressing against her in a bus. 6. The tiniest person shown in the film, a girl of 8 years or so, no taller than your shoulder, provides relief to the audience until she is herself debased in front of the audience through unwittingly savouring semen below wall graffiti. 7. The nearby army detachment receives portrayal as a drunken party from which emerge cannabis-use, adultery and torture. However, you have been so jolted by the script that the story registers not as the vaunted anti-war "Blowing in the Wind" but as a mostly anti-human film. With that said, it should not be our task merely to target director Vimukthi Jayewardena for the denunciation of his conversion of Nirvana into suicide. Likewise, we cannot merely examine his producer's role in the X-group sometimes sensationalised in media. There's more to do than sacrifice the director and producer. We must look to today's media and hope that its gatekeepers in Sri Lanka will spare a post-Tsunami audience the nihilist ("nothing matters") trivialising of the elderly, of womanhood and of children. Such trivialising does happen at times and it rends Sri Lanka's social fabric to the tune of its external pawnbrokers, global finance capital, with their 1976 slogan of 'Free to Choose' that parrots Ayn Rand for economic managers. Do we have space for an ending quote? Gene Sharp writes in his book 'The Politics of Non-Violent Action' - "The subjects usually do not realise that they are the source of the ruler's power and that by joint action they could dissolve that power. Failure to realise the role they play may have its roots either in innocent ignorance or in deliberate deception by the rule. If they were to look at their ruler's power both backward and forward in time, however, and note its origins and growth, its variations and fragility, they would begin to see their role in the genesis, continuance and development of that power. This realisation would reveal that they possess the capacity to destroy that power." Lee Kwan Yew gathered together his countrymen for development and reduced the influence of global TV on small Singapore by tough censorship. India was too large for global media to sway from industrial development and it could follow the policy of Swadeshi. |
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