i’ve been sick and stuck on my couch for the last 24 hours, so i’ve been stuffing myself with passive activities that mostly involve tv-watching. yesterday, i loaded Lord of the Rings – Return of the King into the dvd player and and dropped my head on my pillow for the next three and a half hours .

the LOTR movies are  up there on my all-time favorite list. why? i love the battles. i love watching Legolas surf down stairs on a shield while shooting his arrows at ugly things; Aragorn storm majestically through a crowd of orcs; and Gandolf spin with his wizard grace, taking out enemies with his staff in one hand and his sword in the others.

in fact, i love war-ish movies in general. Gladiator. The Patriot.

but it sort of goes against who i am. in real life, i find violence not only repugnant, but completely unnecessary. to me, violence is insecurity in its basest form, a desperate need to be right at all costs.

so why my attraction to such bloody movies? easy: one dimensional portrayals of good versus evil. in LOTR, orcs are bred by an inherently evil, destructive leader, so no one cares how many of them die; while Aragorn is the epitome of goodness and humility, so he’s an easy hero. in Gladiator, Maximus kills because he is forced to but he really just wants to be with his family (who was brutally murdered); while Emperor Commodus has a perverted love for his sister and basically holds his nephew hostage, all for the sake of holding onto power. in The Patriot, Benjamin Martin is also forced to kill because the ruthless English Colonel Tavington killed his innocent son on a whim.

all of these movies operate in a black/white, wrong/right universe; clear-cut choices for an audience hungry for escapism.

the problem is, though, that we carry this simplistic, dualistic view back into real life, carelessly assigning “good” and “evil” via rules we write and rewrite to suit whatever our needs are at the time.

in reality, though, people are people. people with weaknesses, people clinging to whatever stability they might have, people covering up their helplessness with brute strength and absolute truths. but they’re all people, nonetheless. not “good” people or “evil” people, simply people whose experiences have carried them to a certain place in life and created a particular perspective of the world.

but these days it’s more important to be right than to compassionately consider another person’s experience of the world. it’s more important to cling to an idea of “good” (Christianity, Islam, democracy, communism, heterosexuality) than it is to love someone simply because they are another human being.

i am always amazed that we, individually, religiously and nationally, are somehow able to kill–to violate what might be the only universally accepted idea that life is paramount–simply to “protect” some abstract idea of what is “right.” doesn’t life itself–as the one thing we all hold in common, in all its miraculous beauty–supersede all other ideas?

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my very favorite movie is The Thin Red Line. it’s a war movie, set during Vietnam. the shots are lush, gorgeous–green life everywhere despite the bullets flying past. eye-to-eye contact between an American serviceman and the Vietnamese soldier. the brashness of impulse killing and the slow consideration of mercy, even forgiveness.

eventually, The Thin Red Line discards of grand, self-righteous ideas and settles simply for life. no dialog or drama announces it; life is simply there or it’s over, beautiful and devastating.

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