--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> bottom remain opaque to the audience. If Wojtek
> wants to make a
> contrast between "individuals who make decisions"
> and "those who act
> like a herd" among the characters in Paradise Now,
> he would have to
> make it by contrasting the three main characters
> (Said, Khaled, and
> Suha) on one hand and Jamal and his associates (who
> are not portrayed
> as individuals with their own unique personalities
> and histories and
> make up their own minds -- in fact, we don't even
> get a glimpse of
> their individual minds -- the director simply has
> them represent
> "types") on the other hand.
Obviously, you interpret the film differently and that is fine. De gustibus non est disputandum.
However, I do believe that the above oversimplifies what I actually said. I argued that the same person can follow a herd at one time and make his/her choice at another time. It is difficult to miss that if you read what I wrote a bit more carefully.
I clearly said that the protagonists followed the her when they were "drafted" to the point of crossing the fence and started making choices thereafter (in fact i think it was a clever narrative device to distinguish her following from a choice that have similar consequences). As to what you said about Said before being "drafted" his "relationship" with Suha, etc. I fully agree with it, but it only further proves my point.
I may add that dividing people into choice makes and herd followers (as Miles also seems to suggest in his posting) is not only simplistic but defying what we know from social science, especially symbolic interactionism. This is not simply a question between choice and determinism, individual decision and following a herd, but a dynamic relationship between a person and his/her environment in which the person shapes the environment and vice versa through a cycle of positive feedbacks. Jack Katz (_Seductions of Crime_ a truly great book that I recommed to everyone on this list) puts it this way:
"The challenge fo exaplanation is to specify the steps of the dialectic process through which a person empowers the world to seduce him to criminality. On the one hand, we must explain how the individual himself conjures up the spirit. On the other hand, we must accept the attraction of compulsion as authentic. it is not a simple matter to raise these spirits. One cannot be blindly enraged, cooly sadistic, or secretly thrilled at will, simply by conscious choice to be evil, no more than one can transport himself to erotic heights simply and instantly by opting for pleasure. For a person to experience being influenced or determined, he must lose a reflective awareness of the abiding, constructive workings of his subjectivity. Thus, part of the challenge is to recognize steps in raising a spirit of determinism that are suffciently subtle that thier contingencies go unnoticed. Typically, the person will not be able to help us with the analysis because he is taken in by his efforts to construct the dynamics. If we ask, 'Why did you do it?' he is likely to respond with self-justifying rhetoric. But he can help us with a detailed account of the processual developmment of his experience. If we ask 'How did you dothat? And then what did you you do?' we are likely to discover some poignant moments. and becaouse the person constructs his definition of the situation through bodily comprehension, we may catch the conditions of his involvement in exceptional circumstances when it is undermined by an incrogruent sensuality. Thus, the interrogator's victim may defecate, triggering a life-saving perception by her torturer that *he* is the shit. Or to offer an erotic example, the lovers' child may suddenly walk in and prove that what they had sensed as an abandoned involvement was not."
I think that this great passage puts us beyond the simplistic dichotomy of individual choice vs. determinism and herd mentality. It is both, dynamically and dialectically related. with this passage in mind you will probably see the protagonists' behavior as that dialectics - interrupted by cricumstances (patrol driving by, child getting on a bus) - and then continuing with a different dynamics.
I think the same warped dynamics explains the suicide bombing, especially in the light of Bryan's comment that much of it is dictated by rivalries among various Palestinian groups. To quote Jack Katz again "this inquiry will best serve those who wish to address evil - not as judged by moral philosophy or imputed by political ideology but as lived in the veryday realities of contemporrary society." Much of it involves a construction and projection of certain self-image ("badass" "tough" "heroic") for the consumption of others, especially rival gang members, rather than accomplishing any utilitarian objectives.
Of course, symbolic interactionism is an acquired taste - it does not divide the world into two neatly separated classes of good and evil of morality plays. It is much more messy, as the same person can be both, depending on his interaction with his environment. This makes it a poor propaganda tool, but it is social science at its best.
Wojtek
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