Feeling bemused and cross both today, after last nights trip to Django Unchained with my husband. He is impressed at my new tough mindedness in not, as is my habit, burying my head in his shoulder at the visual onslaught of, surely, buckets of blood. "Oh it just became old hat after the first five exploding bodies " I assure him. " a side issue". And it did. I was engaged, intrigued by the movie until three quarters of the way through. The last twenty minutes rendered me incredulous. Firstly, I watched the heroine squeal, squawk , cower and simper for the entire time, despite showing promise of being quite something, in earlier descriptions. The other female on offer was (monstrously) of the simpering kind also, mostly at her brother Leo DiCaprio's character in some dodgy incestuous/ oedipal melange.. The Older Back Man was shown to be equally monstrous and in cahoots with the dark side. And I know, I know, its a fantastical visitation from present day African American MAN to the deep south to exact a fantastical revenge, but why oh why so clownishly one dimensional? . Its 2pac Unleashed. Real women, older men, are redundant in this fine scenario. Its laughable, adolescent, mysogenistic, self indulgent male fantasy..... unbound.
Basically, Django splattered. He splattered everyone; figuratively father and mother, literally all the bad white folk, watched admiringly by the enslaved, being themselves incapable. You might say the movie is an insult to the suffering of those people. It may even have managed, unwittingly, to be an indictment on a kind of gun toting macho black male culture, current in America . But I don't want to give it too much credit. Not for the grown ups then. Not for the men One for the boys.
On Monday, my husband asks the boy if he would like to learn how to shoot., in a proper shooting range. The boy is stunned to silence and then offers that he WOULD in breathless tones. He had been talking at length and most knowledgeably about tanks, weaponry, panzer divisions? in the Second World War with my quite as interested spouse. The spouse did a stint in the army when he was a young man, and is pretty positive about it. The outdoors, the courses, the discipline and sense of control it gave him. And he discovered that he was a crack shot.
The boy has recently joined Facebook and finds, I think, that his horizons expand on a daily basis. Well, you know, GIRLS, who I am not going to mention. But also touching base with new people, like , for instance a German youth, who told him about his older brothers having served in the Army when national service was obligatory, and how he may himself do likewise. "Oh and you know they (the Germans) have an army in reserve if they ever need one". Hmm My husband is interested in the idea of training, of learning to handle oneself , the acquisition of basic self control as a man. A sort of rite of passage, if you like. Me, I think of hours on the X Box, obesity, eternal boys who never leave home and assume a man's estate. The twin horrors of young male suicide and homicide. And I wonder.
Later the boy, six foot one in his stocking feet, roars into his sisters face as he snatches the Laptop from her. I ponder, as I gird my loins to squash him good, whether the Army visits schools on career/ future planning /day, these days? Now that would be a cunning plan, a brilliant wheeze. Yep, that might work. I'm guessing not.
OH I know that solders have a function, go to war. I know that. I am calculating enough to think this an unlikely outcome in Ireland just now, and see a limited learning curve only. But still I think of Francis Ledwidge the poet and nationalist, who fought and lost his life in the First World War, twenty nine years old, because, he said, he would not stay to enjoy freedoms that other men had fought and died for. Son of a labourer, he became a poet, and before he was blown to pieces and put in the ground at Passchendaele, wrote this;
JUNE.
Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
and plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair,
Tanned face of June, the nomad gypsy.
laughs
above her widespread wares, the while she
tells
the farmers fortunes in the fields,
and quaffs
the water from the spider peopled wells.
The hedges are all drowned in green grass
seas,
and bobbing poppies flare like elmo's light
while siren like the pollen-stained bees
drone in the clover depths. And up the
height
The cockoo's voice is hoarse and broke with
joy.
And on the lowland crops the crows make
raid.
Nor fear the clappers of the farmer's boy,
Who sleeps, like drunken Noah in the
shade.
And loop this red rose in that hazel ring
that snares your little ear, for June is short.
And we must joy in it and dance and sing
And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.
Ay, soon the swallows will be flying south
The wind wheel north to gather in the snow,
Even the roses split on youth's red mouth
will soon blow down the road all roses go.
Basically, Django splattered. He splattered everyone; figuratively father and mother, literally all the bad white folk, watched admiringly by the enslaved, being themselves incapable. You might say the movie is an insult to the suffering of those people. It may even have managed, unwittingly, to be an indictment on a kind of gun toting macho black male culture, current in America . But I don't want to give it too much credit. Not for the grown ups then. Not for the men One for the boys.
On Monday, my husband asks the boy if he would like to learn how to shoot., in a proper shooting range. The boy is stunned to silence and then offers that he WOULD in breathless tones. He had been talking at length and most knowledgeably about tanks, weaponry, panzer divisions? in the Second World War with my quite as interested spouse. The spouse did a stint in the army when he was a young man, and is pretty positive about it. The outdoors, the courses, the discipline and sense of control it gave him. And he discovered that he was a crack shot.
The boy has recently joined Facebook and finds, I think, that his horizons expand on a daily basis. Well, you know, GIRLS, who I am not going to mention. But also touching base with new people, like , for instance a German youth, who told him about his older brothers having served in the Army when national service was obligatory, and how he may himself do likewise. "Oh and you know they (the Germans) have an army in reserve if they ever need one". Hmm My husband is interested in the idea of training, of learning to handle oneself , the acquisition of basic self control as a man. A sort of rite of passage, if you like. Me, I think of hours on the X Box, obesity, eternal boys who never leave home and assume a man's estate. The twin horrors of young male suicide and homicide. And I wonder.
Later the boy, six foot one in his stocking feet, roars into his sisters face as he snatches the Laptop from her. I ponder, as I gird my loins to squash him good, whether the Army visits schools on career/ future planning /day, these days? Now that would be a cunning plan, a brilliant wheeze. Yep, that might work. I'm guessing not.
OH I know that solders have a function, go to war. I know that. I am calculating enough to think this an unlikely outcome in Ireland just now, and see a limited learning curve only. But still I think of Francis Ledwidge the poet and nationalist, who fought and lost his life in the First World War, twenty nine years old, because, he said, he would not stay to enjoy freedoms that other men had fought and died for. Son of a labourer, he became a poet, and before he was blown to pieces and put in the ground at Passchendaele, wrote this;
JUNE.
Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
and plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair,
Tanned face of June, the nomad gypsy.
laughs
above her widespread wares, the while she
tells
the farmers fortunes in the fields,
and quaffs
the water from the spider peopled wells.
The hedges are all drowned in green grass
seas,
and bobbing poppies flare like elmo's light
while siren like the pollen-stained bees
drone in the clover depths. And up the
height
The cockoo's voice is hoarse and broke with
joy.
And on the lowland crops the crows make
raid.
Nor fear the clappers of the farmer's boy,
Who sleeps, like drunken Noah in the
shade.
And loop this red rose in that hazel ring
that snares your little ear, for June is short.
And we must joy in it and dance and sing
And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.
Ay, soon the swallows will be flying south
The wind wheel north to gather in the snow,
Even the roses split on youth's red mouth
will soon blow down the road all roses go.
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