History repeats...

I came across something while flipping through the channels yesterday that has stuck in my mind. It was a movie that I remember watching as a kid and one that I haven’t thought about for ages but when I saw it now I viewed it in a totally different light and it really made me wonder what I might be watching ten or fifteen years from now. Seemingly at random, I started watching The Killing Fields.

(Yes, I watched this film when I was, I don’t know, ten or twelve years old. My parents didn’t shield me from reality and for that I thank them greatly.)

The Killing Fields is a film about journalists in Cambodia during Vietnam and what happened after the fall as well as how translator Dirth Pran was taken prisoner and spent four years being tortured before he escaped. While it is beautiful and breathtaking, it is not an easy film to watch. You know that the events are real and even when you know the ending the brutality of the situation still leaves you stunned.

As a kid when I watched it I thought about the brutality and randomness of war. I first became aware of news and history in the early eighties so for me Vietnam was something that I had no conscious memory of but was still pretty vibrant in the American psyche. It was a subject that a lot of people didn’t want to breach but it was there. Maybe it was brought up in The Deer Hunter or subtly in episodes of MASH but it was there. So when I first saw this film it was a clearer representation of an event that I knew happened but that I didn’t experience and didn’t truly understand.

And now I’m expecting in ten years time we will have similar films about Iraq. It’s been a three year war with most people anticipating it will take at least five before we are able to withdraw. It has been a brutal and nasty conflict with attacks that are seemingly random. But it’s also a conflict that I don’t know if anyone quite understands. I’ve seen news clips and have read stories but I still don’t have a grasp on the true story. That is where the next group of important films are going to arise. It might be sad to think that we need to look to Hollywood to not only understand our history but to interpret our current events but we are a storytelling people. You need a medium to express the emotion of the events.

I do wonder what history is going to say about these past couple of years. Some people are calling it a time when we lost our innocence. I disagree, mainly because I can’t believe that anyone who grew up in the Cold War would ever think the world was going to suddenly become filled with rainbows. But I do feel that we’ve entered a time when there is a sense of unease over what the future may hold. Of regress as opposed to progress. We can sense that the climate isn’t right and while we may trust our politicians there is doubt as to whether they can fix the problems. I read earlier this week that at even the darkest times in history there is at least one group of people who are joyously happy. Right now you can’t seem to find anyone with that release. And that’s what worries me.