Fixed Cross wrote:
"If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly."
tentative wrote:About 8 minutes of lines, but unforgettable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH4p9BQ3V9o
iambiguous wrote:tentative wrote:About 8 minutes of lines, but unforgettable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH4p9BQ3V9o
Still, everything is context here. Suppose instead of dropping a balloon filled with paint on a car, George Willis Jr. and the boys had burned down a campus building or been involved in a sexual assault or murdered someone? What would constitute integrity on the part of Charlie Simms then?
Should he rat them out or not? Would that be the couragous thing to do?
Movies often manipulate us emotionally. Everything is always more black and white than the shades of gray world we live in.
tentative wrote:We always know the right thing to do in the black and white world, it's the grey areas that do us damage, and that was pretty much what his speech was about. Integrity is in the small things, not the obvious should-shouldn't.
Monooq wrote:Lawrence of Arabia...
PavlovianModel146 wrote:If I may ask, would you take issue with me moving this to Arts, Music & Entertainment?
trevor wrote:"The only good bug, is a dead bug."
tentative wrote:From the same movie: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."
iambiguous wrote:Fixed Cross wrote:
"If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly."
I always had my own misgivings about that line. It doesn't really address the fact that one can use those ten divisions to further the aims of any particular Kingdom of Ends. On the other hand, I always liked it because it didn't attempt to argue that any one particular Kingdom of Ends is necessarily preferrable to any other.
Faust wrote:Richard Crenna's speech in First Blood. To Brian Dennehy. Maybe the best ever.
PavlovianModel146 wrote:Alec Baldwin did a pretty good job on his closing argument in Nuremburg.
Kevin Spacey's speech to his wife in American Beauty ending in, "I rule," was pretty hilarious.
iambiguous wrote:tentative wrote:About 8 minutes of lines, but unforgettable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH4p9BQ3V9o
Still, everything is context here. Suppose instead of dropping a balloon filled with paint on a car, George Willis Jr. and the boys had burned down a campus building or been involved in a sexual assault or murdered someone? What would constitute integrity on the part of Charlie Simms then?
Should he rat them out or not? Would that be the couragous thing to do?
Movies often manipulate us emotionally. Everything is always more black and white than the shades of gray world we live in.
Monooq wrote:Lawrence of Arabia...
iambiguous wrote:
I always had my own misgivings about that line. It doesn't really address the fact that one can use those ten divisions to further the aims of any particular Kingdom of Ends. On the other hand, I always liked it because it didn't attempt to argue that any one particular Kingdom of Ends is necessarily preferrable to any other.
Fixed Cross wrote:No, Coronel Kurtz is beyond any such value judgments. I think the film makes a very strong turn in introducing Kurtz after first having made it clear that Vietnam is no place for morality, as described in the line abut speeding tickets you quoted. Before we see him, the viewer is led to think that it cannot possible be worse or less moral than the arbitrary death we are treated to at every juncture. But then it is. "It smelled like slow death in there".
iambiguous wrote:I always had my own misgivings about that line. It doesn't really address the fact that one can use those ten divisions to further the aims of any particular Kingdom of Ends. On the other hand, I always liked it because it didn't attempt to argue that any one particular Kingdom of Ends is necessarily preferrable to any other.
Fixed Cross wrote:It was never really established in the film that Colonel Kurtz was even sane. To wit:
Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.
There are always value judgments. It is only a question of jamming all the conflicting ones together and coming up with the least dysfunctional behaviors. But this can never be more than a point of view. Kurtz's own included folks dangling from trees and decapitated heads strewn about everywhere.
The moral narrative I impose on Vietnam revolves around political economy and the assumption that those who prosecuted the conflict were less interested in democracy and human rights for the South Vietnamese and more concerned with preventing the falling Commie dominos from taking more and more cheap labor, natural resources and markets from the folks who owned and operated Wall Street and Washington D.C.
Morality "out in the world" has far more to do with the whims and the wherewithal of wealth and power than with the carefully calibrated philosophical propositions we get from folks like Aristotle and Kant.
Virtue? That's always been for sale. It's just that some folks want to rationalize things bought and sold as Virtue.
Faust wrote:Yes, FC, I am serious. The movie is a very good but not great action/thriller type. Crenna just eats this speech for lunch, though. A little bit comic-book character, but that what i like about it.
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