An experience, not a story

Rating: 10/10 (5 January 2005)

I agree with Ann Medina from the Canadian History channel when she says 'it's not a story, it's an experience'. In my opinion, using the Vietnam war is just a convenient medium to actualize concepts about living everyday life, since our lifestyles can be rife with conflict as well.
Others have argued the opposite; that the movie is too extreme, too evil; that it's trying to imply that we must keep depravity close at hand to keep things real and define our lives. I, however, see the movie as a balancing act between religion and inhibitions with individuality, courage, and convictions. Otherwise known as the eternal struggle of man. Concepts of evil are to some degree, culturally based; to kill a cow in India is considered a crime, while in the western world, we eat hamburgers quite regularly. We have already accepted several things in our lives that others would consider sick and depraved. Just ask PETA. Just ask Ret'd UN Commander Romeo Dallaire. But I digress at this point.
William Golding's book titled 'The Lord of The Flies' stipulates that evil is simply a nervous and irrational reflex to our fear of the Unknown, in whatever guise that may truly be. For instance, I'm afraid to be thin, because I might be afraid that my excuse for not being sexually appealing will disappear with the extra ugly flab. It could be that I'm just not sexy. *G*
Walter Kurtz, as played by Marlon Brando, got a glimpse of that knee-jerk hysterical evil after witnessing the slaughter of innocents; arms that were injected with a polio vaccine had been hacked off. His mistake was in growing to admire the finality of such an action when in fact, it was a chronic lack of understanding of modern medico logy compounded by a preternatural paranoia of a better developed force. But, Walter Kurtz, in turn, had misunderstood the origins of such evil and reacted blindly to it by losing his mind. He merely proves again that reactions from too little knowledge are dangerous and that again, evil has been begotten by past evils. And Benjamin Willard (aka Martin Sheen) perpetuates the downward spiral of human society by executing his own order of justice. But he was afforded the luxury however grotesque, of not having to think overmuch about his task, he merely had to make sure it got done. So who is right or ultimately wrong?
Evil exists on various levels. A concept of evil is governed by early childhood experiences, educational, and parental support systems. Evil defined at the most fundamental level is when an entity causes or compels a deeply changed state upon another entity. One type of evil is when genocide is deemed acceptable because people have been deeply compelled to believe that some other types of people are not entirely sentient. Obviously, this is a circular type of evil that perpetuates over many generations. If you have been led to believe that an entity does not enjoy your supposedly higher level of sentience, you will not know that you have committed evil against the entity.
A fundamental definition such as this may not be realistically applied since we usually define evil subjectively. For example, an entity is not necessarily committing evil when an entity causes another entity to exist or be born. So should the definition be altered or are we already subjectively moving the definition to our own preference? Is evil an entity causing or compelling a permanently changed state upon another entity rather than an extreme temporary change? We are then saying that drastic changes upon an entity are not evil when they are only finite. The birth of a entity is not evil because the life of the entity is never permanent, the child is never immortal.
Murder, rape, and physical or emotional abuse are still evil under this revised definition but for two of those instances it has to be acknowledged, known, or believed that entities can possess souls that live forever beyond physical death. But it also has to be true that the birth of an entity does not mean that the soul is beginning its own existence too. If a soul were not to be evil, the body could only be the temporary host for a soul that had already existed for all of infinity; an entity that had no beginning or no end of being alive. And, in another thought, if heaven was created--which is supposed to last forever--did God Himself commit evil...or did heaven also always existed with an undefined beginning or end?
We could do a third improvisation and exclude 'entities' from the definition and instead cite 'organisms' to subjectively skirt Godly issues. We now say that evil is when organisms cause or compel a permanent change upon another organism. What about books like 'Mein Kampf' which sometimes causes a person to permanently alter his or her way of thinking to become anti-government and anti-semitic? Or do we claim that it was the the fault of the reader since the alteration does not occur for everybody? What if written words such as these in this ditsy review of a movie permanently alters one's opinion of evil? D'oh.
The definition of what constitutes an organism could be too subjective, inconstant, or contextual. It might be proved one day that man-made electricity is evil. The bumping of electrons from molecule to molecule might be permanently disrupting thousands of unseen galaxies containing countless sentient beings too small for human technology to readily perceive for empirical proof of their existence. But don't let that permanently compel you to turn off your computer, just run away screaming; that's a temporary state.