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Tuesday, May. 03, 2005 - 1:16 p.m.

End in sight-paper 3

My last big assignments are over. The paper and the video are finished. One small and 2 big tests left. Plus my first portfolio to hand in. The video lesson went well. I took Lamchop to help m, altho he thinks he is grown up now and wants to be called LC. m was totally caught up with him, and even tho the video shows clearly I am the one doing the talking, she only focuses on LC when he is 'talking'. She is so cute and I am such a fool. I guess that is what it takes to be a storyteller. 2d's cat even got in on the act. When she heard LC 'talking' she got up on the piano behind me then climbed over on my shoulder to see what was going on. I'm sure my teacher will be impressed.

The film and lit paper was the hardest. I had only a vague idea of what this whole last section was about and only one topic really made any sense to me in connection with hegemony, hierarchy and all that gobbledegook. So I just hit my thesis statement hard, and tried to set up examples for each criteria. Actually, examining social contracts was interesting to me and I could have done a very long paper on another aspect of those contracts, just not adversity and its effects on them. I even did some very deep and sometimes theological thinking about social contracts.
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`Adversity�s Effects on the Hegemony and Hierarchy of Social Order and Contracts


Adversity is a supreme social leveler, especially the adversity of war. It can take our comfortable social order away and leave the players naked of all they ever depended on. At that point, man must reach into the depths of his being to survive. When all social roles have been destroyed, only the desire for survival remains, and as Nietzsche stated, �Those who do battle with monsters should take care lest they become monsters themselves.� As we look at two films, Red Dawn and The Pianist, striking similarities begin to emerge and Nietzsche�s statement becomes fearfully possible. The hegemony of adversity demands we answer the questions of where the characters fit hierarchically into society in adversity, what are their motives, who wants power, and who wants survival.

These two films, on the surface, do not seem to be related closely, except for the theme of invasion, but one iron core runs through both. When adversity strikes, survival creates new beings with one passionate desire, to reclaim what was lost. While The Pianist is the true story of a Warsaw musician�s desperate effort to remain alive in a war-torn city, underlying that account is the world-shaking story of the Jewish partisans in the same city, who through their act of defiance against the German Army, gave courage to a whole city of Poles, who raise their own defiance, crumbling the control of that same army and opening the gates of Warsaw to Russian liberators.

The hegemony of adversity changes the expected hierarchy. Those holding control or imposing control in the adversity of war are often overthrown by new role players who were not seeking power, but survival. This is especially true in the second film, Red Dawn, where half a world away, many years in the future and out of the pages of fiction, another unlikely group, school children, mount their own defense against an invader, giving new determination to the rest of their beleaguered nation, and a fresh vigor to successfully overthrow the enemy.

In the process, the same pattern of societal rules and contracts overthrown emerges. Throughout the film battles, both bands must face the challenge of Nietzsche�s monster within as the power struggle changes the victims into copies of their oppressors. Gramschii�s conclusion that the predominant influence cannot survive by using force is proven by the revolt of the passive ghetto Jews and the powerless teens in an American town, but in the proving the new players fall prey to the same ruthlessness of the old.

In Red Dawn, a communist invasion of America places enemy troops far inside the boundaries of the country to subdue and conquer from within. The first social structures to fall are the vital ones, home, school, local authorities that provide the framework that has supported the lives of a group of teens who are thrust into the mountains with weapons and supplies to live or die. The parents of the group know what is ahead for the town and are desperate to ensure the survival of their children at any cost. With the tearing down of all they ever knew of familiar social contracts, this band of youngsters must form new ones. Loyalty to blood family must be replaced by loyalty to the group. A new family forms with a new community, new rules and new authority. In a scenario from every child�s horror story, isolated and hunted by menacing forces, they fight back only to find a horror story of their own creation, a chilling resemblance in their own hearts to the enemy that has destroyed their world.

As The Pianist and Red Dawn are set side by side, the obvious differences fade away. While Roman Polanski�s film about Wadislav Szpilman is true and Red Dawn is a figment of John Melius and Kevin Reynold�s imaginations, likenesses begin to emerge. Adversity, especially the adversity of war, has a pattern of social destruction that holds true in many arenas. Rules and social orders deteriorate in much the same sequence, regardless of the speed in which events happen. Polish Warsaw fell to German domination over weeks and months, and Red Dawn�s Colorado town falls in a few hours on an autumn morning, but the unspoken contracts that provide the glue for a working culture dissolve alike. As a foreign army gains control, local business life stops, whether quietly as banks in Warsaw close, or with the swift shedding of blood as invading paratroopers in America set up machine guns and use them. The curtain of civilization is ripped back in both films and reveals the bodies of a town�s slain citizens abandoned in the streets while the living turn their whole beings to survival. Both cities� sidewalks are no longer safe pathways to community life and daily routine, but are the boulevards of strutting bullies of the invasion forces as power rearranges hierarchy. Wise citizens can only walk circumspectly and humbly whether in a European metropolis or a small Western town, hoping against hope to remain unnoticed.

Family structures are the next to go. Fathers and mothers can no longer protect their children and that most basic of all social contracts is broken. The collapsing family group must remain hidden behind apartment doors in Warsaw, or in basement hideouts in Colorado as fathers seek to shield their children from the coming storm. The brutality of the conquerors in both places brings another social change to characters in the films, and responses change from the expected norms of a sane society to the apathetic reactions of numbed animals. At this time, humanity allows acts of inhumanity to take place that would have roused violent reprisals only a short time ago, and the aggressor becomes ever more unreasonable and murderous.

How does life go on? It does, as revealed in the caf� scenes in both films. The sorting and resorting of social roles continues in adversity, just as in any other time. It may be physical power that is being exerted in the adversity of war, but the hegemony of desire takes place just as inevitably whether the power is fueled intellectually, morally or politically. When the desires of the powerful come into conflict with the placid continuity of society, society never wins. While knowing what havoc is taking place in other parts of the community, most citizens of Poland and Colorado are gathering in old familiar haunts to share a meal, listen to music and pretend all is as usual for a few spirit-restoring moments. Like lost children, even the most responsible of adults seek for the traces of the roles that are now destroyed.

Another stock response to adversity is the betrayal of the social community by ones trusted to guide it smoothly. The fight to retain the hegemony they have known causes some to sink to lows they never imagined. As the mayor in future America and the Jewish policeman in embattled Warsaw align themselves with the enemy for their own well-being, many of their comrades view them with disgust and disrespect. Adversity raises up new allegiances and tramples the ones of former days. The hierarchy is constantly shifting, and survival takes many guises and tactics.

In both films, other responses to adversity spring to life. The selflessness of fathers who have had their family leadership roles torn from them can be seen in Father Szpilman�s calm dividing of the caramel bought with the last of the family money shortly before the embarking on railroad cars to the death camps. These fathers whose societal roles have been ripped away think little of their own safety, but care only that a remnant of the family lives on. Szpilman�s father goes silently to his death, even as Szpilman himself has an opportunity to escape from that same journey. Mr. Eckart in a Colorado concentration camp selflessly puts himself in danger to warn off his young sons, and pleads with them to leave him to his fate, but to survive at any cost. Maybe the family contract is not one of the first to go in adversity, but only changes its face. The same adversity that brings some to base acts of shame raises others to heights of heroism as human beings dig deep into their own souls.

While some are so battered by the onslaughts of the enemy in adversity that they allow themselves to be herded quietly to their deaths, others find courage they never knew they had and leap into a new hierarchy of hegemony, seizing their own brand of power and resisting the same enemy their comrades bowed under. Plainly there is no set pattern of the destruction of roles and contracts in adversity, only the certain change of pattern.
Does the destruction of social order always result in such a dichotomy among the suffering? It must, for history, storybooks and films are replete with the same patterns of behavior. The adversity of war as depicted in Red Dawn and The Pianist begins with such acts of violence that the common man is stunned, but as that violence escalates, a phoenix of the free spirit rises from the ashes of the community. A new community comes into being, often with no blood ties, but always with a common enemy. The group of American teenagers is no different than the few Jewish workers within the Warsaw ghetto. There finally comes a point in adversity�s advance where death and pain are no longer fearsome foes for some of the sufferers. When everything that made up a satisfactory society has been stripped away, the one remaining weapon for some is anger. While many in the path of adversity�s juggernaut have had all emotion crushed out of them, a few remain whose anger begins to kindle, is fanned by the continuing ferociousness of the antagonist and bursts into its own vicious retaliation. Desire for revenge has birthed its own hegemony.

In the midst of adversity, aggressors are often as disturbed as their victims by the shifting societal roles The Nicaraguan commander is touched by the bravery of the Colorado school boys and recognizes his own past, while the German captain realizes the enormity of all that has been destroyed as a starving Szpilman plays a beautiful piece from a life long past on a battered piano in a bombed out house.

The fighting guerillas of Warsaw and Colorado fulfill Nietzsche�s prophecy as their anger leads them to increasingly violent forays. Polanski�s chilling scene of the shooting of a nurse whose kneeling body remains in the city streets for days repeats itself in Red Dawn�s snow-covered mountain meadow where a traitorous boy is mercilessly shot and left. Who is the brute now and how can the difference be told? As the rules that provided us a sane framework in which to live are scattered to the winds of history in these two films, a larger rule emerges and is just as much a part of the pattern of adversity. When adversity reaches its apex, survival at any price creates an army of the spirit that gives a new life and renewed sense of purpose to all who are engaged thereby. From this crucible of war, a sword of reclamation is forged and a new social order is created with new roles and new contracts. Now longer are the Warsaw Poles a weak and defeated people as they rise against the Nazi soldiers. They are made bold by the sacrifice of the despised Jews. No more is America shamed by the easy takeover by invaders. A group of teenagers has shown the nation the meaning of courage. Adversity reveals one true thing; the new order is built and nourished on the bloody remains of the old. Nowhere is this seen more clearly that in the films Red Dawn and The Pianist.

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