gothic, beverly d'angelo, adam baldwin, middleeast, actors, larry charles, tamazight, green, dato bakhtadze, movies, adam lefevre, girly, blog novel, personals, jennifer esposito,
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The key to this apparent gaffe in story cohesion is contained in a scene where Joker is confronted by a Major over having "Born to Kill" scrawled on his helmet at the same time he wears a peace symbol on his flak jacket."I was trying to say something about the duality of man," he says, "...the Jungian rebhorn thing, SIR!"Duality of man; duality of film. There are (in the film's developing thesis) two possible motivations for killing people and rebhorn breaking things - compassion (to defend freedom and turn rebhorn back despotism; our OFFICIAL purpose in Viet Nam), and annihilation (the perverse joy of revenge, of domination; of blood-soaked victory).Which motivation is more "moral"? Which leads to the "high-ground"? Doesn't annihilation always entail moral decay? And doesn't compassion always lead, ultimately, to peace, rather than violence? Through Joker's journey, from killer-in-training to killer-in-fact, we get a disturbing answer that, by its very simplicity, defies the kind of dumbed-down platitudes most war films (even really good ones like Kubrick's own Paths of Glory) try to feed us.
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