Catharsis

I watched 4 movies in the last 2 days.That's a bit extreme for me, as I usually watch 1 movie in about a month or so.Two of them were totally run of the mill stuff, so I'm not going to talk about them. The other 2 were,however, really good and rather educational. These were 'Rashomon' by Akira Kurosawa and one of hollywood's latest , 'Crash'.I won't try to give away too much about the movies, for the privilege of those who might have not have seen them yet.
The first one has been famous for over half a century now. It is about the moral degradation of mankind (actually, the Rashomon gate was used as a metaphor for the degradation of Japanese civilization, which once set much emphasis on its code of honour, but in the present context it can be generalized to the sorry state of mankind).It may be seen as a murder mystery, where a man is killed and contradictory accounts of the event are given by the people involved in the affair, including the ghost of the dead man himself.But when the movie was over,it took me a moment to realize that the movie was not about the murder really.It was about people.And so the final resolution of the movie doesn't occur when the mystery of 'what really happened' is solved; but it comes of an act of kindness in the end, completely unrelated to the murder.That was the moment of catharsis.
Had I seen this movie earlier than this semester,I wouldn't have been able to make much sense of what the storyteller wanted to say, as I would have been too engrossed with the inconsequential question of 'why did these people lie ?' to miss the bigger point. The bigger point was that this whole murder mystery was nothing but just an illustration of how completely immoral can people be. It was a deliberate attempt to incite feelings of misery, loathing, fear and anger from the audience; and to gradually build it to a peak ... an intense moment, when even the monk who believes in the inherent goodness of mankind is disillusioned, only to have his faith restored by an act of kindness from a man who had earlier proved himself to be as weak and selfish as everyone else. This makes the audience feel purged. We feel that there is hope for mankind yet.
It is a traditional technique of storytelling, used successfully over the centuries. I am doing a humanities course called "Introduction to Drama" where so far we have studied tragic plays like Oedipus Rex and Macbeth. According to the classical greek structure of a tragedy, there must be catharsis at the end of the play to make sense of the suffering of the tragic hero. So, in Oedipus Rex, if you just pay attention to the murder mystery, you soon realize there isn't much mystery left after a certain point. You wouldn't see much sense in the story unless you pay attention to what happens at the very end of the tragedy, when everything bad that can happen has happened. But after that; some event, some act, makes us gain some novel insight that makes everything worth it. Watch out for that moment of truth. 'That' was what the play was all about. And sometimes, the truth is so generic, that we don't see its connection to the earlier events, unless we consciously apply our mind to it. That's why this movie is so good ... it makes you feel good and then you are compelled to think why it was so good. It may sound circular , but you have to see it to believe it.

The other movie, Crash, was about racism in the US of A. Being an Indian - a coloured man, so to say - I have always been very opinionated about racists. I had always pictured them as good-for-nothing villains. Of course, that is not always true. I am beginning to appreciate that. The whole movie revolves in an atmosphere of mistrust, anger, fear, and politics. There is cathrsis in this movie too, in a different manner. There are a lot of characters, no single hero as such. Some of them reach a moment of truth in their lives, others don't. It's balanced enough to convey the message " There are only 'people' in this world. They may not understand it and treat each other with suspicion and hatred and fear; or they may understand it and behave accordingly. But ultimately, the world goes on. Life goes on. It's really your choice how to live it. "

I am rather pleased to see 2 such sensible movies after a long time. Well, not so long probably, I saw Amelie and Black last year. I am going to watch out for more movies from Kurosawa. I heard that he made a movie of Macbeth. I'd really like to see that.