One time there were big riots in my home town. It had to do with a big EU top meeting gathering a lot of political active youths and a high ranked police officer who crushed the good relations the local police force has built up with these youths.
The TV showed how one of these kids were shot by the police (no, he didn’t die as many foreign news channels reported).
In the aftermaths Swedish reporters and media dehumanized the police force. They were not displayed as individual characters; frightened and in front of an angry mob. But the mob as showed in media consisted of individuals.
To not risk that we – the audience, the common people – will get feelings for the “wrong” cause, the enemy is dehumanized; one of the oldest tricks in history.
This counts for movies as well. So many movies have been made with a villain not really human; a villain that is just evil and who don’t get a chance to explain him/herself.
But that has changed.
I would say that the number of movies where we get a chance to understand and feel for the bad guy has increased over the last ten years.
This trend gives me hope for mankind.
I think it is by mutual understanding we can move forwards as humans. This does not mean accepting what an individual does, but respecting his right to his emotions and feelings, his right to be.
My hope is that my writings will follow this trend and in some little way will help us make a better world for us all.
4 comments:
I'm glad that we are opening up this discussion, and bringing awareness to this. Thanks for writing this blog :)
Thank you. Discussion is the key.
In the scripts I'm writing now, the hero and villain choose different paths early in their teen years but have
lives as adults that are close to being the same. Both have problems with their egos that make their lives hard. The hero lets love rule his life and villain chooses greed.
In my own life I have been seen as the villain and hero by people of the city of my birth. The rich elite see me as a villain and many of the working class see me as a hero but in truth I'm just man doing the best I can.
When I write I try to remember you can be both a hero and a villain.
Yes, we are simply humans, a mix of hero and villain.
I feel good when I watch a movie where the villian and the hero get to understand each other.
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