Well, looking at the films Blue Velvet and Zero Dark Thirty, there are a few things which we can ponder upon. The notion of torture is common in both the films. But the contrast lies in the method being used. The torture in Blue Velvet through trauma and pain and is an example of modern torture according to Darius Rejali. It also involves sadomasochism. And in Zero Dark Thirty, it's a classic form of torture used on suspects to gather more information. Taking a look at the contrast between light and dark in the movies, the dark is considered to be evil or bad, where as the light is something assumed to be good and happy. In Zero Dark Thirty, there was an absolute separation between the dark and the good from the beginning. But in Blue Velvet, apart from the scenes, even the characters showed a variation of both dark and light. In this film they projected that good may turn evil and evil may turn good. Looking in depth at the characters of the film, there were a few things that they constantly longed for. Jeffery longed for a …show more content…
partner, Dorothy for a son and Frank for a mother. In fact Frank constantly was looking for things that are not there. This here might bring in a glimpse of oedipal structure. Oedipal structure basically revolves around the concept of a son having sexual relationship with his mother. Blue Velvet kind of brings out the same notion. Frank tries to find a mother in Dorothy by having a sexual intercourse with her. Actually torturing her by putting her under surveillance and subjecting her to sadomasochism. And Dorothy on the other hand, nurtures Frank as her own son by giving him the pleasure he desires. This is something which is not common in normal society. The threat in the film has been the seduction for feminism. Looking at Jeffery, he meets Dorothy always during the nights which are dark explaining that the evil has consumed him at that moment. But the scenes with his love interest are always shot during the day, which is an indication of good. There is also a conversation about a dream in which the girl sees the robins bringing happiness into their lives. Eventually when robins actually turn out, it turns out with a worm in its beak. This is kind of symbolic, to say that there is pain and sorrow involved in happiness. The later cannot be achieved without experiencing the former. And it is kind of true. One can never recognise or appreciate the light without looking at the dark. Zero Dark Thirty also has scenes shot in light and dark.
But it has an absolute separation between them unlike the Blue Velvet. All the things considered bad or evil are shot in the dark where as the good and happy parts are shot in the light. Classic torture has been used upon a body to find out about other greater damages. The victim is made to realise that he is helpless and has no other option but to answer the questions being asked. His body is subjected to torture in which the body speaks despite of his own will. The threat faced in this story is the lust to kill. The lead character Maya has been shown to have an urge to find or rather capture the terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, through a trail lead by another person named, Abu Ahmed. A geography of terror has been established by a particular name around which the whole story revolves. It also includes the concept of surveillance where the victims are under constant
observation.
Michael Levin’s essay “The Case for Torture” is trying to express many things but one of the most important is to show that sometimes torture is necessary. During the story, Levin resorts to lots of arguments, with the speculation that torture is only reasonable when saving lives, he demonstrates three situations in which torture may be okay. The author is basically saying that he agrees with torture if it means saving innocent lives. But we can’t always be too sure about that. Levin’s argument states many of theoretical cases like an atomic bomb, a terrorist on a plane and a newborn baby being kidnapped. He gives three scenarios for the reader to think about.
Bigelow 's film defines the pro-government style of Bush/Cheney era policies on the War on terror, which promote Dan’s torture of terrorist suspects as being effective in finding Bin Laden. Beatings, sexual humiliation, and other forms of torture define the militaristic style of information extraction, which Zero Dark Thirty promotes as being effective and ethical in the political culture of the 2000s and into the 2010s. In contrast to this pro-government view, Zwick presents a film as a cautionary tale about martial law and the increased militarism techniques of torture, which were deemed unacceptable in the late 1990s. This anti-government point of view illustrates the arrest of General Devereaux as a war criminal arrested by Agent Hubbard. However, both of these films project the War on Terrorism in American policy as being overtly militaristic in large-scale military operations and procedures to catch individuals in small terrorist cells. These are the similar and differing aspects of the pro-government and anti-government depictions of the War on Terror that have been examined in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) by Kathryn Bigelow and The Siege (1998) by Edward
The resistance of the Holocaust has claimed worldwide fame at a certain point in history, but the evidence that the evil-doers themselves left crush everything that verifies the fantasy of the Holocaust. For an example, in Poland, the total Jewish population of over thirty-three hundred thousand suddenly plummeted to three hundred thousand. Ten percent of the population survived the Holocaust in Poland. Almost every country that the Nazis have conquered has the same percent of survival as Poland. In Elie Wiesel Wiesel’s memoir Night, the activities in the concentration camps, the suffering of Jews, and the disbelief of the inhumane actions of the Nazis result in making people resist the truth.
In 2005, the Palestinian director and writer, Hany Abu-Assad, released his award winning motion picture, “Paradise Now.” The film follows two Palestinian friends, over a period of two days, who are chosen by an extremist terrorist group to carry out a suicide mission in Tel-Aviv during the 2004 Intifada. The mission: to detonate a bomb strapped to their stomachs in the city. Because the film industry seldom portrays terrorists as people capable of having any sort of humanity, you would think the director of “Paradise Now” would also depict the two main characters as heartless fiends. Instead he makes an attempt to humanize the protagonists, Khaled and Said, by providing us with a glimpse into their psyches from the time they discover they’ve been recruited for a suicide bombing operation to the very last moments before Said executes the mission. The film explores how resistance, to the Israeli occupation, has taken on an identity characterized by violence, bloodshed, and revenge in Palestinian territories. Khaled and Said buy into the widely taught belief that acts of brutality against the Israeli people is the only tactic left that Palestinians have to combat the occupation. In an effort to expose the falsity of this belief, Hany Abu-Assad introduces a westernized character named Suha who plays the voice of reason and opposition. As a pacifist, she suggests a more peaceful alternative to using violence as a means to an end. Through the film “Paradise Now,” Abu-Assad not only puts a face on suicide bombers but also shows how the struggle for justice and equality must be nonviolent in order to make any significant headway in ending the cycle of oppression between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Terrorists need everything to go their way, or they will kill or severely injure you if you don't obey. Although these extremist groups known as terrorist groups, are terrible they are happening, and many people are being abused because of it. The book I used in this essay is Under the Persimmon Tree, by Suzanne Fisher Staples. The book is about a family of four living in a small village. The mother is pregnant with a third child. The Taliban takes Baba-jan (father to the main character), and Nur (teenage boy, main character's brother) to fight, also they take all their remaining food, and supplies. Baba-jan is killed immediately after he was taken, along with all the other men in the village. Mada-jan (mother of the main character), and Habib
In his essay “The Case for Torture,” printed in The Norton Reader 13th Edition, Michael Levin argues that torture is justified and necessary under extreme circumstance. He believes that if a person accepts torture to be justified under extreme cases, then the person automatically accepts torture. Levin presents weak argument and he mostly relies on hypothetical scenarios. There is not concrete evidence that torture solves problems and stop crime but rather the contrary. Under international law, torture is illegal and all the United Nation members have to abide by those rules. The use of torture does not keep people safe, but rather the opposite. Torture has a profound effect on democracy. As the use of torture becomes normal in society, the right of the citizen will suffer greatly.
As revealed in Azar Nafisi's book Reading Lolita in Tehran, Iran's radical religious and political views are the driving force behind the domination and maltreatment of the country's people. Throughout the book there are many examples of this oppressive treatment which is enforced because of strict religious convictions. Nafisi compares the oppression happening during a tense period of revolution with various works of fiction that mirrors what is becoming life in Iran. The tyrannical treatment of Iranian people can be analyzed by uncovering themes found throughout Nafisi's book.
In dystopian literature there are many forms of torture that make life unbearable. One of the beliefs that contribute to this torture is hierarchy system. In the novel 1984 by George Orwell and the movie Brazil directed by Terry Gilliam, there are ambitious protagonists named Winston Smith and Sam Lowry who put forth a battle against their torturous world. A third reference "The Right to Information India's Struggle Against Grass Root Corruption" written by Roy Bunker, criticizes the Indian government and their corrupt practices leading to poverty and torture of the poor to maintain control over their societies. These three texts portray government of developing countries torturing their citizens with the help of hierarchical
Levin’s strategy of playing with the fears of people is genius, but, with more creditable details of the issue, the article would have sustained the scrutiny of more educated individuals. The addition of more concrete information, would have given people something to cling to, inherently improving the article's credibility. In Levin’s first instance, he depicts a scenario where a terrorist, who had placed an atomic bomb in the city, was captured. This atomic bomb is to explode in 2 hours if his demands are not met. Levin believes this is a situation in which torture is the only way of extracting the location of the bomb before it explodes.
He is able to capture the realness of the time and setting through his words, and write for a purpose. As a result, it can be said that he uses this work of historical fiction less as a theatrical stage and more as a platform to introduce the audience to the inhumaneness of Afghanistan. He not only incorporates the Taliban’s grueling “beard lookout men,” who patrol the roads in their fancy Toyota trucks in hopes of finding “a smooth-shaven face to bloody,” but he also displays the horrific and bloodcurdling abuse of women that exists at the hands’ of men and the feelings of great despair and pain that these women face as a result. Living in a state of unbearable fear of the next beating, the next detonating bomb, and the next brutal attempt of the Taliban, the lives of these characters feel almost too real to not be true. Resultantly, the reader is left to wonder whether or not this added literary dimension of realness is actually an introspective study of individuals that Hosseini has long
... torturer has a physical control over the tortured and targets his sovereignty to seek control over his decisions. However the tortured will survive and his will and autonomy is temporally broken but will eventually be restored because the torturing is limited in its humiliation however the autonomy of the victims of the terrorist act, if it happened, is damaged.
...ous and being there can raise concern. These political concerns relate closely with issues addressed in the film particularly with the war in Afghanistan and the threat of terrorism. The senior Taliban leader Ahamd Shah depicts an accurate image of what members of the Taliban are like, which means killing any American who comes into their country.
David Lynch's Blue Velvet is an exploration of things above and below the surface. This surface is really a borderline between not only idyllic suburban America and the dark, perverted corruption that lies underneath but also between good and evil, conscious and subconscious, dream and reality. Although this division seems quite rigid and clean-cut some of the most important implications of the film stem from the transgressions of these borderlines. In the initial scenes of the film Lynch introduces Lumberton, the typical small town in Middle America where the fireman waves at you, the children are well protected, the lawns are green and there is a smile on everybody's face. Naturally, the most important clich?
It never occurred to the interrogators that they were torturing a little boy. The only child of the most-wanted terrorist on the planet, he wasn’t a boy at all. He was an opportunity for promotion. His crime was being born outside the system, to a father whose legacy of violence and bloodshed permeated the lives of ordinary people. The people of Thalassinus turned to their respective governments for guidance and support, longing for an end to the bombings, liberation from the constant threat of death.
The relation of terrorism to film is an undeniable and unavoidable topic, brought to light for us by Slavoj Zizek's article, "Welcome To The Desert Of The Real." His article is an in-depth exploration into the sometimes confusing, most definitely complex topic of America as a fantasy.