Nothing but the truth

"Nothing but the truth" is a political thriller that upsets your normative assumption on American democracy and civil liberty. It is based on a real event about the prosecution of a journalist for releasing intelligence information with regard to national security. The balance of "First Amendment" against "national security" is clearly tipped towards the latter. National security and cultural treason trump freedom of information and civil autonomy.

What is ridiculous in this fictional story is that the perceived national threat is actually a little girl, the daughter of the CIA agent, who later got killed by a hyper-nationalist right-wing idiot. The journalist who reported the case has to bear the unintended consequences of her acts. Besides the issue of the encroachment of civil liberty, it also delivers the message that sometimes the scope of consequences of our choices is not within our control and that it is best not to be over-confident on certain risky choices that we are not certain of. It is true that the magnitude of risk is proportional to that of consequence (good or bad). But as one of the commentators wrote on thelastpsychiatrist's blog,

"All of our actions have a blast radius, and other human beings are in it. Other human beings, not just long, repetitive strings of common organic molecules."

Well said indeed, and well filmed in this movie. Rachel Armstrong is every way as righteous a journalist as she is a good mother. She believes in telling the truth, in confronting the bullies, and has every bit of faith in the democratic legal system of her country. She is admirable but too ignorant of the consequences of her choice. Not only did she spend a year in jail, she also sacrificed her personal life on top of another 2 years sentence in prison. But the personal cost is not as gigantuan as the cost of the little girl who could not have borne the fact the her innocent act of tattletale indirectly is the cause of her mother. Perhaps the Chinese proverb says it better than anything: 我不殺伯仁，伯仁卻因我而死。

This reminds of the scene in "Good Will Hunting" where the genius protagonist Will Hunting was offered a government job for some oil companies and he declined after a prognostic imagination of the complexity of the job position. As the saying goes, "caution is the parent of safety".

Hiroshima Mon Armour

I never quite get the sense of what happened to poor Hiroshima in the WWII. I mean, I read about how the pearl harbor attack led to the decision of dropping bombs by Truman and hard facts like that, but Hiroshima is too distant a piece of historical memory to me. I wish there were more near-distanced, perceptible experiences available to me, whether visual or cognitive kinds like this one. Sometimes I daydreamed about landing on Hiroshima one day, with a suitcase and my laptop, ready to bitch about how my footprint matters to no one in and out of Hiroshima except the ego in my mind.

It was against this estranged backdrop that Hiroshima Mon Armor stands out from the ocean of foreign movies on romantic affairs. It bestows this tragic place a romanticized flavor to sustain your interest in the heavy discussion of technology-assisted world conflicts. This is delicately achieved by adept fornication: the fleshy display of epidermic communication as you can see in the poster. While lighting and hand gesture made the posture quite questionable, the bodily contact was smoothly shot in the motion picture, simply natural and aesthetic. It was shot in the black and white era so the sex portrayal was filmed in a more non-explicit way, compared to the level of acceptance nowadays: no disclosure of any testicles for example. Yet the element of intimacy is not undermined by the cinematographic obscurity; in fact the subtlety allows more room for imagination: you can picture how the union of the two spirits are conjoined in the union of their body parts, and the soft play of human affairs is interjected with the heavy part of world politics, all in your mind. What replace the flavorless type of licentious, hard-core porno stuff is an unlimited internal capsule.

All movies are romanticized representations of an insipid snapshot one way or another, or they are not movies. True, but Hiroshima Mon Armour is a “romanticized” account in the literal sense: a trans-continental hiccup of a love affair between trans-racial, trans-cultural couple. A married French actress hooked up with a married Japanese ambassador in post-war Hiroshima. As the woman revealed her past in Nevers, France and what she saw around social spaces in Hiroshima, the filmroll slowly took us to a new territory where Nevers met Hiroshima as their bodies were enmeshed in each other. The distant history of the two places became relevant and interesting now as the public dossier is entangled with the private union of two individuals. The intersection between private and public facets is sprinkled with mind-boggling but lovely philosophical lines like this one

"just as the illusion exists in love, the illusion you can never forget, so I was under the illusion I would never forget Hiroshima, just like with love."

Hiroshima Mon Armou is an embodiment of pure aesthetics, delusion, and disillusion. Ironically, or better say, superbly, it is through the deconstruction of the delusion of love that comes that disillusion of war history and love affairs.

The End of Man

It is a hotly debated topic these days, the one about the reversed feminist regime of our age–“The End of Man.”The Atlantic has a special column on this disputed topic that seemingly disrupted if not disturbed your normative perception of gender dynamics and its societal implications.

“The End of Man” draws social indicators from a variety of sources from the increased desirability of baby girls, more effective managerial styles and skills of female managers, and disproportionate over-achievement of female college graduates to support her argument that men is in a crisis of becoming underdogs.

Wells, seems to me this assessment is pretty biased. The coming of age of female inroad into education and professional career does not necessarily imply a decline of men, not unless you assume gender segregation as the only stratifying unit. Race and nationality complicates the picture. Women as a group fare better than men, but women is not a unitary, undifferentiated group. What about the 18-year-old single mum waiting in line for welfare service? Does she fare better than the 35-year-old bachelor with a professional career? Is it meaningful and fair to use gender as a watershed marker?

Perhaps there are reasons to take this over-generalized pattern more seriously as a social warning, as my friend who sent me the article insisted. Well I am not so sure about this caveat. I am skeptical because gendered symbols of our time cannot be rigorously ascertained without comparison with the past. It is easy to assume that everything that happen right in front of us at this moment as we see it is unique and unparalleled, while it is actually our ignorance of the cosmic vastness and our over-celebrated dignity that we are seeing.

So I checked some sources on the changing gender wrestling in the US and it appears that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote an essay titled "The Crisis of American Masculinity" in 1958, describing a parallel sign of emasculation that he observed in the postwar America where "women are marching toward expanding their domestic forces and seizing domains likes a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive, are hardly able to hold their own and gratefully accept assignments from their new rulers." The military narrative in the late 50s is astonishing but not quite alien to a non-resident alien in the 21st century. The fear of emasculation, the presumption of male supremacy, the heroic virility in the inscription of manhood are familiarized by the present generations.

So back to the original proposition, I guess I'm not sure if the effeminate symptom of our time does not carry any remnants from the past, if it was ever such an ubiquitous, trans-sectorial issue occurring at all social fronts.

You know you are too lazy when...

You know you are too lazy and ineffective when...

• your computer warns you that you haven't backed up in 70 days;

• your reading lists of field inquiries are basically blank and formats of examination undecided

• your informants and research buddies asks your whereabouts on FB

• your presentation papers and proposals and trip planners are unfilled

&

• you couldn't keep your fingers away from emails and social networking sites longing to communicate

Time for bootstrapping.

The Mist

先說電影本身，很震撼，發人深省。Mrs Carmody 有我以前認識的某美國隊伍軍人的影子：宣揚宗教的人，除非本身可以超越人類自私，貪婪，恐懼的個性，否則和獨裁者差不了多少。豆瓣上的評論很好，討論也很有意思。超市的人大概可以分為信自己和信他人的人。信他人的人，就是那個沒用的超市技工，一開始逞英雄，遇到考驗時第一時間垮了，然後他不斷尋找可靠的領袖作為自己的精神寄託，先是男主角，後來是Mrs. Carmody （我不同意稱呼她為瘋婆子，因為我覺得她由始至終不是在發瘋，她是有意迷惑大眾從而鞏固自己的權力）。信奉他人的人看上去很可悲，但是人類往往就是這麼可悲的動物。世態炎涼，變幻無常，存活下去需要力量，需要理想，而在絕處時刻，人的心靈更顯脆弱；信自己的人，靠理性思考，靠行動去對抗現實的無奈，但是理性的終極是狂妄。就像美國前總統Woodrow Wilson在一戰時宣揚美國會以“理性“（reason) 去處理國際政治那樣偽善，不切實際。

如果說，男主角最後開槍射殺自己的孩子是兌現對孩子的承諾（Billy在超市要求爸爸保護自己不讓怪物吃掉），那為甚麼其他人也甘願 “自殺”呢？槍本來就是屬於女主角的，她臨死時臉露懼色，為甚麼她不選擇自行了斷？為甚麼寧願把自己的命和自己的武器交到別人手上呢？也許人在極度恐慌的情況下無法顧及那麼多；也許經過了那麼多恐怖的場面後，車上的人都把精神和信任寄託在唯一的英雄身上；也許這是電影情節需要；我想在某程度上，當時車上的人並不是原意被男主角“行刑”，而是原意被 “理性”行刑。車上的老人說 “我們至少嘗試了”––嘗試勇敢地闖入迷霧當人，嘗試用自己的雙手主宰自己的命運，嘗試以理性判斷下一步的行動，甚至到無計可施了，寧可以理性來推算未來（電影尾端的一片荒涼，龐大的怪獸等等是在製造環境證據讓車上那些以‘理性’自居的人相信已到了窮途末路）也不原意相信未來的不可預測性。觀眾可以用事後的目光輕鬆的說句‘為甚麼不等一下呢？等一下說不定就有救了.’但是從當時的情況推斷，從車上的人的觀點出發，真的有必要等救援嗎？經過 Mrs. Carmody的荒誕鬧劇，你想他們仍然相信會有救星嗎？

5個人4顆子彈是導演刻意安排，但是理性的極限是結局的重點，也是整套電影最有感染力的地方：在超市時面對觸鬚，各種自然界的怪物，人類當中的敗類，理性顯然是較好的選擇；David也一次又一次地向同胞們證明理性的效用；但是到了對目標毫無頭緒時，理性拜倒了。在迷霧中，在無法掌握可靠數據的情況下（沒有電話，沒有雷達，沒有任何通訊儀器），相信理性有其代價（他們所有人都付出了那沈重的代價），但要放下一直深信不疑的理性是很難的。這大概是導演想傳達的訊息吧：相信絕對的理性等於不理性，但是美國一直以來依靠科學和理性思維帶來的斐然功績把美國人困在一輛沒有燃油的車上，無法前行，這時要人們反思具首位的科學理性價值觀是很難的。一直以來男主角的判斷都很合理，不然他不會有一群忠實的支持者，所以他才會不顧一切堅持理性。沒有科學帶來的成就，沒有其他意識形態的襯托，沒有其他國家衰亡的比較，美國人甚至乎所有現代人類不會如此崇拜科學精神，理性主義。突然說要反省，談何容易？

理性的悲劇，象徵著人類文明的極限。科學曾經照亮人類的社會，在迷霧中為人們開路，但是迷霧是無窮無盡的，為科學留下一點空間，為下一代積一點福吧。