“To Conform or Be Cast Out: A Story on Finding True Happiness” by Lauren Cohen

People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.

---Unknown

What would have happened had our ancestors not chosen to progress forward and make life easier? Would we be more carefree, like the Bushmen in Jamie Uys’ 1980 film, The Gods Must Be Crazy? Unfortunately, there is no empirical way to answer the question. However, what can be answered is how the decision to progress forward has shaped the society that we have come to know. Our lives are very similar to the urbanites in Uys’ movie. While we have been walking the path of progress, fitting ourselves into a daily schedule and a select set of social norms, we have forgotten one of the most important things in life: happiness. Unlike the Bushmen, it is rare for a member of our society to feel joyous well-being. Should it happen to someone, that individual is often judged as selfish, their felicity in question. If the only thing we care about is conformity and keeping busy, we may lose sight of the gifts that contentedness and love can bring.

Uys expands on the difference between the Bushmen and Western society by depicting Kate Thompson following the same exact routine every. As the voice-over reminds us, Western society expects its citizens to “adapt and readapt himself to every day and every hour of the day to his self-created environment” (Uys 06:25). Because humankind chose to force their natural surroundings to adapt to their own needs, they now have to readapt their lives to fit into what they have made. Life consists of waking up, going to work or school, going back home, eating dinner, doing homework, and then going to sleep, with some other activities and chores plugged in here and there every now and then. This type of a life is the typical day-to-day circumstances that just about every person leads. It is how Kate Thompson lives, given that she has a conventional job as a journalist. The problem is that these individuals are not necessarily enjoying their quality of life, at least not like the Bushmen.

In the Kalahari Desert, the Bushmen have adapted their lives to nature, as opposed to making nature adapt to their lives like Western civilization. The Bushmen rely on the resources found within the natural surroundings around them for survival. Competition does not exist; there is no sense of ownership and no bitterness. As the narrator puts it, “they must be the most contented people in the world” (Uys 02:46). They feel blessed for everything they have, and believe that the gods have given them everything they will ever need. Their lives are peaceful. That is, however, until Xi finds an empty Coca-Cola bottle that “fell out” of the sky.

Because of their strong belief that the gods send them essential needs, the Bushmen take the Coke bottle as a gift. They, then, learn how to use it for many different tasks and adapt it into their everyday lives; it becomes a snake skin smoother, a pounder for food, “ a musical instrument, a patternmaker, a fire starter, a cooking utensil, and, most of all, an object of bitter controversy” (Ebert, par. 2). Despite never having felt anger, hatred, or jealousy before, the Coke bottle invokes these exact emotions. Tension builds, anger arises, the feeling of ownership develops, and, worst of all, violence breaks out. After the tribe realizes how the bottle has changed them, they unanimously decide that it is best to get rid of the so-called “evil” bottle. So, Xi takes a journey to the “end of the earth” to “throw it off” (Uys 15:03). Making this sort of decision is not necessarily an easy one; that is, to most Western people. However, the Bushmen value their love and happiness over having life made easier for them.

That the Bushmen came to the decision to rid themselves of the Coke bottle so quickly shows how vastly different, and in a sense wiser, they are than their Western society counterparts. Had those in the cities been faced with a similar issue, that of having a single object to share in order to make life easier, all hell would have broken loose. When one thinks of it, that event reflects exactly what happened hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago when Western civilization chose to make life “easier” while natives, like the Bushmen, chose to value love and true happiness amongst each other. “Xi understands that his people have two choices . . . progress or happiness. Our ancestors chose the former, and the world has expanded . . . Xi and his tribe make the opposite choice” (Kaston, par. 2). Our ancestors chose to make their lives “easier” by inventing things, creating governmental systems, and implementing different forms of employment. However, having all these elegant social structures have made life harder rather than easier. Competition was created, rich versus poor ideals formed, tension built over time, and life as we know it has gotten to the point of there being more hate and jealousy than love. This is not the case with the Bushmen; they care for each other, and make sure that every individual is safe and satisfied. So, where did we go wrong?

We failed to ensure that our emotional well-being was stable. We put so much pressure and care into making our physical lives better that we never considered the emotional repercussions. Modern society has become so fixated on the idea of improvement and conformity that we are more stressed and depressed than ever. Just like Kate in Uys’ movie, we are being put into normal jobs that will make us money but that also bring us despair. The only difference is that we are scared to do anything about it. Kate takes a leap of faith and decides to completely change her life by becoming a teacher for children in Botswana after learning about the position through her journalism job (Uys 25:58). Not many people in today’s society would even give that idea a second chance, let alone go through with it. Unfortunately, we have become programmed to adapt to the world around us. But Kate changed the programming when she realized that it was off course. The main issue with our society’s programming is that we are forcing a world to adapt to us, yet are never truly satisfied with the changes.

Competition exists in just about every area of life. From the social ladder to economic classes to the expensive items we buy on a daily basis, competition stems from the idea that there always needs to be a new advancement in technology. With this constant change, there is next to no room for us as a society to learn and adapt to our new surroundings. With each new iPhone or new version of Amazon’s Alexa or new autopilot car, like the Tesla, that comes out, society grows ever-desperate trying to get these new pieces of technology in their hands. The problem with this is that not everyone has the availability to get it. But we make it important to have these new toys and if one does not have it, they are automatically seen as less than. Our self-value is based around the items that we can or cannot have. We will consider ourselves to be less than those who can afford the next new and improved “magic power devices” (KP). This need to adapt and conform to societal standards has threatened us, yet we have not even noticed it. 

The main focus of society’s worries and fears is judgment and standing out. It is one of society’s (most specifically our generation’s) main illnesses (Picciano, par. 2). We are so scared of being different that we will conform to whatever society deems appropriate, regardless if we disagree with it or not. This is especially seen within teens. It has become common for “teenagers [to] conform to anything and everything to avoid standing out in the fear of being judged or exiled by their peers, even if they do not agree to the beliefs of the clique they have chosen to fit into” (Bhatia, par. 3). They will do anything in their power to fit in and not be seen as an outsider. This is the type of behavior that leads to the landing of “normal” jobs and living the typical daily lives seen within The Gods Must Be Crazy. We thrive on the idea that we need to be like everyone else and live a “full” life, which is filled with next to no downtime set aside for personal care or growth. The lives that we, and those “urbanites” in the movie, chose to live has turned into this “Normative Social Influence: the idea that we comply in order to fuel our need to be liked or belong” (Green 05:55). Psychologically speaking, we want nothing more than to be seen as normal and follow whatever the current trend is in society. This sort of behavior is nothing new, as psychologists have been experimenting with the idea of conformity for over 60 years.

Solomon Asch, a social psychologist, conducted an experiment about conformity back in the 1950s. The experiment consisted of putting a participant in the same room as seven other “participants” (men who worked with Asch on the experiment) and finding out whether or not the real participant would conform to the answer that the other seven already agreed on. The participants had to distinguish which comparison line matched that of the “target” line that Asch presented to them. What Asch found was that, “On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials” (McLeod, par. 11). Asch discovered through this experiment that “People conform for two main reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence)” (McLeod, par. 16). Despite knowing that the answer was wrong, the men did not want to be seen as the “outsider,” so they went along with the incorrect answer. It is this constant need and desire to be like everyone else that we have lost a very important aspect to living a decent life: happiness and love.

There is this so called “happiness famine” (Morrill, par. 5) in society and it has caused us to lack empathy and love for each other. Most importantly, it has caused us to lose happiness for not only others, but ourselves. We are constantly wanting new “toys” and crave getting the newest technological device. So, when we are unable to get them, we become unhappy with ourselves, and after a while, it leads to self-hatred. Along with this, we force ourselves to follow the “rules” that society has laid out for us: go to school, get a degree, get a 9-5 job that will pay good money, get married, have kids, buy a big house, be rich, and boom, we have the “perfect” life. The problem, however, is that there is no such thing as a perfect life and because of that, we will never be truly happy or satisfied with where we are in life. 

We have let this concept of a perfect life consume us. It has gotten to a point where “stress consumes the population as everyone scrabbles for that house with the picket fence which they never truly get to enjoy because work is always hanging over them” (Morrill, par. 5). Because this is what society says we should have, we feel horrible when we are unable to have it. Unlike the Bushmen, we stress ourselves out trying to get the “perfect” life that an imperfect society has carved out. What this has caused is a dramatic shift in emotional and mental health, and causes distance between us and our loved ones. We live believing that “modern society equals fullness with meaning so if schedules are always booked then life must be wonderful” (Morrill, par. 7). A majority of the time, we never have time for one another, so we tend to not know what it means to love or to be happy. It has gotten to a toxic point where because of this societal pressure to be like everyone else and to have a full schedule, our mental health has worsened as a whole. This is especially true within teenagers.

Teens are being crushed under the weight of needing good grades, having a perfect social life, getting enough personal time for themselves, and, worse of all, not being seen as an “outsider.” In Rush’s 1982 song, “Subdivisions,” Neil Peart wrote, “Subdivisions in the high school halls, in the shopping malls; conform or be cast out. Subdivisions in the basement bars, in the backs of cars; be cool or be cast out” (Rush). Peart was referencing how society has created these so-called subdivisions in every aspect of life. This is especially true for students in high school. There are numerous social groups that students get placed into, and if one is to be placed in the “wrong” one, they are automatically cast out and deemed unworthy. This is the experience that I had growing up, not only in high school, but throughout my entire school life.

I was not like the “typical” girl, nor did I fit in any mold that society (specifically the one I grew up in) had premade for the different types of teenagers. This “typical,” ideal girl is the popular, outgoing, kind, friendly, party girl with an ever so slight edge. I, on the other hand, was the shy, overly nice, nerd, who loved the “wrong” music, and was obsessed with theater. I was the outsider and people thought that made me really weird, and for some time, I thought the same thing. This, then, led to my mental health becoming severely worse than it already was, resulting in an extreme case of anxiety and a very mild case of depression. But I am not the only one who goes through this. Mental illness is being diagnosed more than ever and it all stems from the society we live in, most specifically, the lives we have forced ourselves to live.

Because we want the job that makes good money, we get ones that are not necessarily what we dreamed for and end up dreading going to work. We no longer pursue dreams and are scared to work outside of the limits that society has set for us. However, we can live a life that we want and desire. The only thing it takes is stepping outside of that social norm. Take Andrew Steyn, for instance. He has a job that requires him to analyze animal excrement, yet he is content and happy. He is a scientist, one who is proud of where he is in life. Another example is when Kate makes the move to the Kalahari. It is instantly recognized that she is more content being with her students than trapped in the cubicle she used to work within. If we were to follow in their footsteps, maybe we would learn true happiness again.

In order for our society to grow and help the growing mental health crisis, we need to come together again to break these societal norms. As a person who is doing her best to break those social norms, I know how scary it is. I went from wanting to be a physical therapist to a geneticist to being a filmmaker. I may have to struggle in order to live my dream life and will have to work my butt off to make money, but I am okay with that. I would rather be happy living a life doing something I love, something that may mean sacrificing a larger paycheck, as opposed to a life where I am unhappy, stressed, and despise my job.

If we are to have a society that loves and is filled with happiness again, like the Bushmen, we need first allow ourselves to open up and learn what we want in life. With this, we will find true happiness within ourselves. This will, then, spread to each other and we will have a society filled with love and respect and kindness. It is a hard thing to accept but, “until our culture can choose peace of mind over higher productivity, we will never self-actualize like the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert” (Kaston, par. 7). The moment we as a society prioritize ourselves and those around us is the moment that we will truly grow. But until that happens, we will be stuck in the harsh conditions of Western civilization. The real question is, who will be the one to step up first and break down the walls society has built around us?

Works Cited

Bhatia, Jill. “Teens struggle to combat conformity.” Daily Records, AsburyPark, 15 Feb. 2017 https://www.dailyrecord.com/story/opinion/letters/2017/02/15/teens-struggle-combat-conformity/97896120/ 

Ebert, Roger. “The Gods Must Be Crazy” RogerEbert.com, Roger Ebert,  1 Jan. 1981. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-gods-must-be-crazy-1981 

Gordon, Paul Kirpal. Various class Discussions

Green, Hank, director. Social Influence: Crash Course Psychology #38. YouTube, YouTube, 11 Nov. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=UGxGDdQnC1Y. 

Kaston, Brandan. “The Price of Happiness is Actually Free” Taking Giant Steps, 2 Nov. 2018, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-price-of-happiness-is-actually-free.html 

McLeod, Saul. “Solomon Asch - Conformity Experiment.” Simply Psychology, Simply Psychology, 28 Dec. 2018, www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html. 

Morrill, Morgan. “The Ironic Hospitality of the Kalahari Desert” Taking Giant Steps, 14 Mar. 2018, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-ironic-hospitality-of-kalahari.html 

Picciano, Kelsey. “Just Another Loose Brick in the Wall” Taking Giant Steps, 16 July. 2016, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/search?q=just+another+loose+brick+in+the+wall

Rush, “Subdivisions”, Signals, Terry Brown, Le Studio, Quebec, 1982

The Gods Must be Crazy. Directed by Jamie Uys, performances by N!xau, Marius Weyers, and Sandra Prinsloo. 20^th Century Fox., 13 July. 1984. 123Movies

Horribly Evocative, Grossly Inspiring: All Too “Swept Away” by Sofie Ramirez

Horribly evocative---these are the words I first used to describe Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away. Watching the film elicited a very harsh emotional reaction and evoked some painful memories that I would have rather avoided, but Swept Away was created for that very reason. What I once took as the romanticization of a horrible issue was actually the opposite; Wertmuller made this film so that people could no longer hide in the silence of issues such as sexual abuse and rape. It feels as though she had accessed all of these negative feelings for the sake of change so that, instead of staying trapped in fear, I felt a call to action. She showed such inhumanity in her film so that we could strive for humanity in our everyday lives.

I realize now that the film was an attempt “to force [the audience] to think critically on societal issues with an objective morality, without romanticism or hatred of different concepts in their entirety, and by union of the most beneficial aspects of each system to create an objectively better world” (Hoffman, par. 7). However, I have to admit that my original reaction was not so comprehensive. Upon first seeing the movie I was devastated; I sat there with tears streaming down my face wondering why I needed to watch such graphic things. Some memories that I had been denying, things that I pretended never happened, were fighting their way up to the surface, and I blamed the movie for causing me so much pain. Clouded by anger and disgust, I was willing to accept the film’s criticism as an insult to women everywhere, pushing the feminist movement back for years to come. But more importantly, I was ready to sit in silence once more, thinking I could go back into my bubble, to lie to myself and say that things as horrible as this did not really happen to people and that it never happened to me. But then I was faced with a question, “What are you going to do: stay shocked or use those emotions to empower yourself to make change through your writing?” (Gottwald). So now I look at Swept Away with the new lens of social reform. I want to be a part of the conversation that Wertmuller has started. I went from seeing Swept Away as horribly evocative to grossly inspiring.     

It was not an easy feat to go from being absolutely disgusted by this film to using it as a catalyst for both personal and societal change. This issue became especially apparent during class discussions as the only things I would ever discuss were the scenes of graphic violence and rape. The nuances of the film were not lost on me; I understood the hypocrisy and sanctimony of it all. It was “incredibly ironic that the communist, who ostensibly fights for a classless society, sets up a diminutive sexist hierarchy as soon as the reigns are his to snap” (Hoffman, par. 5). I understood that through throwing away the shackles of society Gennarino and Rafaella could give into more primitive desires and live with no restrictions. I saw this, I truly did, but no matter what angle the class presented, my mind was ever fixated on the rape---but more so than that, the denial that rape had ever occurred. After days of class discussion, I had heard many people say that the scene in which Rafaella was chased, beaten, stripped, pinned down and eventually has sex with Gennarino (while unfortunate) was consensual because she technically agreed to it (Wertmuller, 01:06:00). Some argued that Rafaella was given a choice and did not have to sleep with Gennarino, but she did so repeatedly so it could not be counted as rape. The illusion of free will makes it so easy for people to deny that rape has occurred, but there is a danger to taking the word yes at face value and refusing to see everything that was manipulated in order to elicit that response and this manipulation has a name. It is called sexual coercion and it “is unwanted sexual activity that happens when you are pressured, tricked, threatened, or forced in a non-physical way” (Office on Women’s Health, par. 1). Rafaella faced the threat of starvation, physical abuse and even murder (Wertmuller, 01:32:00). When thinking about her options and the freedom she possessed in her situation, she tells Gennarino, “I feel like that rabbit you killed” (Wertmuller, 01:15:00). She saw herself as nothing more than prey that was hunted down and slain by a predator, a pitiful creature with no autonomy whatsoever. “Swept Away is not portraying the love between a tamed woman and the dominant man who puts her in her place; rather, it is a story about a cold mockery of love born from fear and abuse meant as a means of survival, not affection” (Knight, par. 2). Someone who has sex under these conditions does not do so out of genuine consent but out of a feeling of helplessness.

Wertmuller succeeded in her task to spur a homeostatic upset which forced me to come to terms with the reality of my own situation as well as the injustice of the world. Her film was powerful not only due to the vivid portrayal of issues of domination and sexual abuse but because of the social climate that she drew upon as a model for her story. Wertmuller created this film during the cinematic movement of Commedia all’taliana, “the genre [that] came in response to political unrest (legalization of divorce, abortion, etc.), poverty after WWII and other social issues…  as a way to talk about serious topics without creating something that felt like a lecture” (Garber, par. 2). Even though Wertmuller’s work served as a criticism of Italy in the Seventies, it also serves as an accurate commentary on today’s society.

One issue plaguing society that not only allows but encourages violent actions like those committed by Gennarino is the mentality of toxic masculinity. This idea that “men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating — no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger — and definitely no fear; that men are in charge [and] women are not” (Porter 0:11)” is the reason sexual violence occurs. Toxic masculinity is not a natural mindset; it is a learned behavior, “a sturdy, poisonous branch on a tree built from social constructs” (Marking, par. 6) and it is constantly reinforced. While some men are taught to put masculinity “on the chopping block” as they know “its culture attempts to disguise dominance as benevolence… [that] has normalized values that debilitate not only men but women as well” (Gottwald, par. 9), these men are few and far between. The majority of “men are taught to… view [women] as property and the objects of men… an equation that equals violence against women” (Porter 09:20). This perception does not say that all men are doomed to commit such atrocities as the ones that were done to Rafaella or the ones that were done to me; it is to say that men are much more likely to commit these acts if society constantly encourages the mindset that men must dominate, regardless of the consequences. Toxic masculinity takes the blame off of men, as it is their right to control, and in some cases even shifts the blame onto women. When confronted with the horrifying reality of rape, some people will say things that echo the mentality that the woman “asked for it,” as “if these women [had] acted as society dictates a proper lady should, perhaps the men would not feel the need to break them down and build them back up again” (Rudegeair, par. 3). This “taming of the shrew” creates a vicious cycle of enablement, as men are encouraged to be sexually aggressive and submission, as women are taught to be meek and obedient.

Demanding social change and reformation is not enough when one does not have the complete knowledge of the systematic oppression that needs fixing. That is why, though it is shocking, it is important to “represent the decades of damage done by previous generations that lived in the shadow of ignorance all their lives. [So that] young people are forced to ask themselves the question: if it were up to me, how would I repair the broken heart of the world?” (Storms, par. 7). It is easy to stew in anger and point fingers at Wertmuller, to claim she is not a feminist and that her film is just an actualization of the male fantasy or a romanticization of rape (Ebert, par. 2). It is much harder to accept that Swept Away is something that we need to see in order to wake up and see how we have been socialized so that we may take back the narrative of sexual abuse. Wertmuller’s film is a testament of strength and shows that “victims have the ability to leave their abusers and regain their freedom, and that women do not have to be tethered down by men that wish to control them” (Knight, par. 8). Watching the film provides the audience a chance to shed light on the dark chasm of rape and to help pull people out of it; it is a chance to say “I am in pain and that’s okay; I need help and that’s okay. I don’t need to keep what happened to me a secret, and I don’t need to be ashamed. I was victimized but I refuse to be a victim, and I will not let this hold me back for the rest of my life” (Ramirez). This film gave me a realization that now is the time to take back my power and to live my life free from the fear of victimization. I will not be swept away by empty promises, but instead demand real change. Regardless of whether or not it is proper, I will be grossly inspired to find my voice and never let anyone take it away from me again.

Works Cited

Ebert, Roger. "Swept Away Movie Review (1976)". RogerEbert.com. Romano Cardarelli, 20

Feb. 1976. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

Garber, Cerena. Class Discussion. 29 March 2019

Gottwald, Benny. “Putting Masculinity on the Chopping Block”. 06 February 2018.

https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/02/putting-masculinity-on-chopping-block.htm

Gottwald, Benny. Personal Communication. 11 March 2019.

Hoffman, Isaac. “Interpreting WALKABOUT and SWEPT AWAY”. 05 March 2017.

https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2017/03/interpreting-walkabout-and-swept-away.html

Knight, Lindsay. “Swept Away: An Illusion of Affection Stretched Too Thin”. 18 October 2018.

            https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/10/swept-away-illusion-of-affection.html

Marking, Alexis. “‘Boys Will Be Boys’ Until They Turn into Abusive Men”. 04 February 2019.

https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2019/02/boys-will-be-boys-until-they-turn-into.html

Office on Women’s Health. “Sexual Coercion”.

https://www.womenshealth.gov/relationships-and-safety/other-types/sexual-coercion

Porter, Tony. "A Call to Men." TEDX. TedX Women 2010, Washington DC. 30 Mar. 2017.

Lecture.

Ramirez, Sofie. Journal Entry. 27 March 2019.

Rudegeair, Anna. “The Same Old Story: Tamed Women and Their Misogynistic Male

Counterparts”. 28 February 2017.

            https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-same-old-story-tamed-women-and.html

Storms, Samantha. "Passion’s Dark Side: Roeg’s Walkabout vs Wertmüller’s Swept Away.” 08

December 2016.

https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2016/12/passions-dark-side-roegs-walkabout-vs_6.html

Wertmüller, Lina (Dir.). Swept Away. Perf. Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. Romano

Cardarelli, 1974.

Traverse & Transcend: Notes from a Walkabout by Benjamin Kelley Gottwald

You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and now you inhabit a foreign land.

 Euripides, Medea

“Hey, so we were taking earlier,” one of the ladies from Milwaukee said to me, “and we decided: this is your rite of passage.”

“You think so?” I looked up and asked, having just crammed into my backpack 35 pounds of food, water, clothes, and other miscellaneous, life-saving supplies I have been carrying with me for the past four days.

“Yeah,” she replied in a verifying tone, “this is how you become a man.”

Despite having readied myself entirely—bootlaces fastidiously fastened, map carefully examined, bandana neatly folded and tied across my brow—I sat on a wooden bench in the shelter’s bunkroom for a few minutes, thinking eagerly about her words. I wondered just what the verb become really meant: what it had to do with the five days I had spent in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the 30 miles I had walked over roaring rivers and mountain tops, the manhood two Midwestern mothers had claimed I had achieved. That conversation put the last day of my hike in a curious mood, and with 13 miles to go and three more peaks to summit, I took to the trail with the usual hiker’s mentation: simultaneously in awe of the sublime landscapes and lost in thought inside of my head. I discussed my journey’s purpose with myself. I wasn’t running errands in the woods for status, nor was I looking to wave a flag of masculinity from the barren peaks of mountains. I was looking for myself and nothing else. Having graduated high school one day prior to setting out for the hills, I did have something to prove, but this time it was an internal demonstration. In a word, I was on a walkabout.

The term comes from Australian Aborigine culture and represents the six-month journey every Aboriginal young man must take as a rite of passage into manhood. In that time, he must survive with little more than his skills alone, proving to Mother Nature herself that he can withstand the unforgiving Outback wilderness (Gibbs, par. 2). This odyssey into adulthood was best captured by British New Wave film director Nicholas Roeg in 1971, when he created a film that bears the selfsame term as its title.

When the opening shots of Walkabout—glimpses of quotidian city life in Australia—subside, a dicey and hazardous narrative unfolds. An English family drives into the scorching Outback to have a picnic. Yet behind the innocent meal lurks some malice; the father, who Roeg depicts as tragically ignoring his young son and perversely aware of his teenage daughter, suddenly draws a pistol on both of his two children. While the young ones do manage to find cover behind nearby rocks and brush, the following frame ensures us that the father had a similar fate in store for himself: it shows the car, having been ignited in flames, and the father, having shot himself in the head (Roeg).

From that point on, the two children—played by actors Jenny Agutter and Lucien Roeg—are fatherless and abandoned. They are left to their own devices under the scorching sun with little more than their school uniforms, a battery-powered radio, and the contents of a picnic basket. What follows is their dramatic and desperate attempt at surviving the inhospitable. They seem to fair well for a day or two, even managing to find a desert oasis; that is, until they wake up the next morning to find their precious water source dried up entirely. At this point in the film, the viewer can easily assume that doom has found its mark. Luckily for them, however, a young Aboriginal boy, played by indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil, comes into frame. With his skills and knowledge of the land, the Aborigine teaches the two to drink water from the same ground they believed had dried up, and takes them under his wing as he journeys across the desert landscape (Roeg). It is clear, at this point, that the two children have a destination: the civilized world from which they came. Yet plenty of viewers ask the same question of the Aborigine. As the movie’s title suggests, he too is on a walkabout.

As I watched the Aborigine in his pointed and communal interactions with nature—his effortful and modest hunting with wooden spears, his use of animal blood as a remedy for the young boy’s sunburn, his sense of navigation that borders on second-nature—I felt the same inspiration that came to me during my own rite of passage through the woods of New England. I must concede that the Aborigine’s walkabout is of a more serious and urgent nature, and his terrain far more unforgiving than mine. Still, beyond the physical and procedural, a deeper idea lies in the subtext, further connecting him and me: both of our excursions were opportunities to traverse and transcend the realities we take for granted, to show us a side of humanity and its world that we had previously never acknowledged.

My journey into the mountains showed me more than the flipside of nature; it elucidated the flipside of humankind. The Midwesterners with whom I spoke on that Wednesday morning in June were just two of the dozens of people I met on the sides of trails, on the summits of mountains, and in the quiet of shelters. With each new person I met, with each new way of life they showed me, I was exposed to a new mode of human interaction. It was a new kind of friendship—immediately formed in that unlikely meeting place—that would reveal to me some aspect of what it means to be human so starkly, I automatically cast away the separation that civilized strangers unknowingly hide behind. The whirlwind nature of my interactions with these people made them unforgettable to me; after that night in the shelter had ended, or that water break on the cliff had grown too cold in the breeze, it was a near guarantee that I would never see them again.

Yet this iconoclastic awakening brings about so much more from the perspective of the Aborigine; his departure from his rite of passage was totally unlike my own. My jolt of enlightenment carried less of a shock than his. As their narrative progresses, the three protagonists each develop differently, and each get a jolt of their own. The Boy grows calm, and through his curiosity of the events, he attempts adaptation. The Girl, however, keeps her blinders set on her return to civilization. Still, Roeg’s depictions of her interaction with nature—her adjustment, her efforts to relax and find solace in her predicament—contrast with his depictions of the Aborigine.

As critic James Berardinelli so aptly put it, “Walkabout is about the never-ending conflict between civilization and nature, and how the two constantly work to destroy one another” (Berardinelli, par. 4). His observation shines through as the film nears its end. In directing the film, Roeg had an opportunity to reconcile the injurious relationship of civilization and nature via the interactions of the Aborigine and The Girl, but he resolves to do the opposite. The Aborigine slowly grows enamored of the teenage girl, and this attraction comes to a head when he dances for her. The raucous tone of the didgeridoo, an Australian instrument, underscores the situation: she becomes intimidated by his advances, ultimately rejecting him. And the morning after these hijinks, the two British children wake to find their native guide dead, having hung himself the night before (Roeg).

The Aborigine’s death is something to be mourned in every aspect; Roeg condemns the relationship between civilization and nature when he cast the native young man into the absurd. Overwhelmed and crestfallen by this view of the world, the Aborigine became yet another martyr. Watching that scene, I couldn’t help but realize my fortunate circumstances: my journey of self-discovery showed me a new part of myself and the world in which I live that gave me hope for the future. It showed me the exigencies of life, a world’s worth of competing forces, but revealed them to me in a luckily benevolent light.

Still, the Aborigine will not go unavenged in my mind; as he fell victim to the great conflict of society and nature, he revealed to the world, in 1971, the true situation. The civilized world is not deserving of an unmitigated conquest over nature. I learned this on my own terms too, when I saw just how capable nature is of retaliation. My walk in the woods forced me to come to terms with violent storms, unrelenting winds, and the crippling cold. It gave me the same feeling Walkabout should bestow upon any attentive viewer: a humble urge to approach nature in peace and only peace.

Works Cited

Berardinelli, James. "Review for Walkabout (1971)." IMDb. IMDb.com, 1997. Web. 01 Mar. 2017.

Ebert, Roger. "Walkabout Movie Review & Film Summary." RogerEbert.com. N.p., 13 Apr. 1997. Web. 02 Mar. 2017.

Euripides. "Medea." The Internet Classics Archive. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, n.d. Web. 03 Mar. 2017.

Gibbs, Patrick. "Walkabout, Original 1971 Review: 'beautiful'." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 08 Nov. 2014. Web. 04 Mar. 2017.

Walkabout. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Perf. Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil. Twentieth Century Fox, 1971. Online.

Looking into Roeg’s Walkabout: Eyes Wide Shut by Alexa Grabowski

“There are those special movies that change your life after you’ve seen them. Then there are the almost miraculous movies that stay inside you and then change your life again every time you return to them” (Murphy, par. 1). As a biology major,  I found it extremely unsettling that there was more than one answer to the question at hand: What was this film really trying to tell us? The possibilities were endless and my brain was on the verge of short circuiting  trying to make sense of it all. I can lie and say that I had some spontaneous epiphany where all in the world made sense, but it didn’t happen like that. All of my interpretations were merely puzzle pieces until I took a step back and saw the bigger picture. I wasn’t wrong for believing acceptance and loss of innocence were part of the movie, because they were. What I was missing was perspective. With this newly acquired view, I saw that all of my interpretations were components of one big idea: Society is the monster lurking underneath our beds, and maybe, just maybe, we should be sleeping with one eye open.

My first impression after passing through the not-so-pearly gates of the maze was, “Am I missing something here?” The buzzing noises in the background and the constant switching of frames had me believing that it was going to morph into a horror movie before my eyes, or at the very least, something out of the Twilight Zone. The school children were sitting in straight rows listening to their mundane teacher while soldiers were marching through the streets. People’s faces were not shown for the majority of the opening scene; they were cut off at waist level. The children even appeared to be panting like dogs while in class leading me to believe that Roeg wanted us to see them as a herd of animals rather than individuals. At that point I understood that there was going to be a hint of societal mockery throughout the film. In hindsight, I know that this was one of the methods he used to get his point across. He needed to make us see that society strips each and every one of us of our integrity and individuality, leaving an exoskeleton of a human in its place.

My first real interpretation was born when I noticed the sharp contrast between civilization and nature. One moment I saw a very structured society in which everything was in order, and the next moment a peaceful, empty desert appeared. When the father began shooting at his child and committed suicide, I assumed that he cracked under the pressure of work, a major component in civilization. When the aboriginal boy was hunting to survive, sport hunters came and left a trail of dead animals behind them. It was then that I made the connection. Director Nicholas Roeg wanted us to see that society is the root of all evil and destruction. In the city, everyone seemed liked miserable robots, but in nature, the tribe wandering the desert seemed to be extremely happy. People have been forcing themselves to act in a particular way for so long that they don’t even know the other option: freedom. Even after the girl and her brother escaped the desert, she still reminisced about the times she spent with the aboriginal boy. She longed to feel what it was like to be part of nature, because it’s where she was meant to be.

I thought I had it all figured out, but then I made the mistake of watching the movie again. This time, I came to the conclusion that this movie was about acceptance and the desire to mend the rift between two worlds. “After a time, these three youngsters cohere like a true family” (Muir, par. 4). The aboriginal boy was more than just a boy; he was playing the father figure of their pseudo-family. The first thing that came of the little brother’s mouth when he saw the aboriginal boy was “dad.” He hunted and cooked for them while they enjoyed themselves. He even took care of their wounds and offered to help them any chance he got. While the siblings were sleeping, he turned on their radio and listened to it for a while, almost as if it was an attempt to understand their language. The little brother even appeared to be painted in a tribal fashion when his sister was attempting to show the aboriginal boy that she wanted to go home. To parallel that, the aboriginal painted his face white while performing his mating dance. I don’t believe that he necessarily wanted to be white, just that he wanted to be part of the family.

Good things come in threes, so of course I changed my mind again after our class discussions. This film was about the loss of innocence. The father shooting at them and committing suicide was shockingly not what initiated this process. Shortly after the siblings found the water hole in the middle of the desert, the little brother, bottle in hand, asked his sister, “Does drinking give you a big, red, fat nose?” (Roeg, 0:28).The screen quickly flashed back to an image of their father. If their father had been an alcoholic, odds are that they lost their innocence a long time ago. They could no longer live in their bubble of a world after experiencing as much as they had. It’s a misconception that the loss of innocence is a bad thing; sometimes it simply the acquirement of knowledge. During the time they spent in the desert, the siblings were exposed to tons of new experiences that they wouldn’t have had if their dad hadn’t gone berserk. They now knew that there are different worlds out there and ways of doing things other than those they’ve been brought up to know. Maybe they’ll even appreciate things a little bit more and see that a dirty uniform shouldn’t be a priority. Whatever the case, they are now more in touch with reality than they were before. As Roger Ebert put it, “… all of us are the captives of environment and programming: That there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see” (par. 6).

I am here to tell you that there is, in fact, a solution to this web of imagery that Roeg spun. I’m confident that this film was intended to foreshadow the dangers of brushing off the primal instincts lurking in the shadows of our learned behaviors. He’s not necessarily telling us to sell our houses, quit our jobs, drop out of school, and set up camp in the outback as tempting as that may seem at this point of freshman year. He’s trying to reach out to us and tell us not to live with our eyes wide shut. What are our motives for doing the things that we do? Is it because it’s what we really want or is it because it’s what someone told us we should do? The parallels between the civilized world and the desert are unavoidable. We can live out the rest of our lives bound and held captive by society, or we can be free. It’s as simple as that.

Works Cited

Ebert, Roger. “Walkabout.” RogerEbert.com. 13 April 1997. 7 March 2016.

Muir, John Kenneth. “CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Walkabout (1971).” John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV. 15 February 2011. 7 March 2016.

Murphy, Sean. “’Walkabout’ Is The Rarest Of Films That Will Change Your Life Again Every Time You return To It.” Popmatters. 3 June 2010. 7 March 2016.

Walkabout. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Perf. Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, and Luc Roeg. 20^th Century Fox. 21 April 1998. Film.

Why Not Suicide? Reflections on Wenders’ Wings of Desire by Roger Orellana

Is humankind inherently bad? Even the most optimistic person cannot help but to build a melancholic attitude towards humankind, an almost tangible disappointment. Artists are exceptionally talented at evoking that question through art. Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout conveys the idea that some people are forever doomed to miscommunicate, consequently devastating any parties involved. Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away presents the tragedies that occur out of man’s incapability to love. What a shame, one must think, that this entire group which I belong to must be so destructive to itself. Jamie Uys’ The Gods Must Be Crazy, although it is executed as a light-hearted comedy, nevertheless conveys the sad truth of the monster that capitalist man becomes because of his implacable sense of ownership. No, no one must be blamed for being ashamed and severely disillusioned by what has become (and truly, what always has been) of humanity. After viewing humanity tearing itself apart in such monstrous ways, one is placed in the tricky position of hopelessness. Indeed, one may conclude, humanity is a base and filthy thing. But even such claims can be welcomed with cold skepticism. Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is the antithesis to this general disillusionment of humanity evoked by the previous films. Wings of Desire is a celebration of the condition of being alive anytime and anywhere.

Once the film is over, the credits commemorate the dead. Wenders dedicated Wings of Desire to three monumental film directors: Yasujiro Ozu, Francois Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky (Wenders 2:04:44). Ozu is one of those directors who teaches how to grow past imperfections and whose excellence is seen through making the simplest of stories into incredible cinematic masterpieces that celebrate life. Roger Ebert, in his film review of Tokyo Story, accurately describes the director: “Ozu is not only a great director but a great teacher, and after you know his films, a friend,” (Ebert, par. 4). Among the aforementioned directors is the great Truffaut, one of the titans of the French New Wave. He went from being a juvenile delinquent to one of the greatest directors in film history. His The Four-Hundred Blows (1959) rescued me from a time of tormenting pessimism by showing me that, although life can be especially hard even for a child, there is always hope for the future. Tarkovsky is a director who influenced so many and yet he refused to be influenced by previous filmmakers. Despite that, his films offer an incredible layer of complexity to life. Tarkovsky’s filmography is not the most cheerful, but it is undeniably beautiful and the images he creates are unforgettable. Andrei Rublev (1966) is an incredible example of Tarkovsky’s views, celebrating art in times of darkness and death. Wenders’ direct influence by those directors indicates a great deal about where his philosophies are oriented. There is a specific pattern in the conclusions of the films of Ozu, Truffaut, and Tarkovsky: they are generally optimistic and demonstrate hope for the future, despite also providing images tough to swallow. Wings of Desire follows that pattern. Wenders demonstrates the darkness that lurks in man’s life but concludes by choosing life over anything. Wenders’ dedication of Wings of Desire to the aforementioned directors indicates that he wishes to continue their legacy of celebrating life through motion pictures.

Wenders also celebrates life through the character of Damiel, the protagonist of Wings of Desire, who is an immortal angel who spends his time on tall skyscrapers observing the unfortunate heirs of the desolation of WWII, the poor Berliners. Damiel has the great luxury of living out of time, out of pain and consequently, out of suffering. Many men would give anything to possess such extraordinary privileges. Moreover, it is also evident that man is bound to the pattern of avoiding suffering and increasing his own happiness. What could be better than not having to worry about suffering? Damiel, the angel, the elevated creature that lives out of time, decides to shed his unique gifts to transform into a human. This would seem like a reversed metamorphosis, the superior creature becoming a lower version of itself, mortal and vulnerable. But Wenders states the opposite by demonstrating that life is worth living, and that it is not irrevocably lost to suffering. After Damiel falls in love, he is filled with an enormous longing for the small things in life. He longs to live as a mortal creature despite witnessing all the chaos and pain of life, because love is such a fulfilling and beautiful feeling, and man can love but an angel cannot. The ability to love, then, becomes man’s greatest gift and most extraordinary faculty, inciting the envy of creatures that are surcease of emotion. Thus, Damiel sheds his immortality to become mortal, feeble, but loving. Wenders concludes Wings of Desire by stating that the ability to love is the greatest gift of mankind, and that as long as there is love, there is nothing better than being alive.

Wenders celebrates life by telling the audience to become proactive and live. Cassiel and Damiel preserve and maintain reality by watching over Berlin before it was even Berlin. They are spectators, voyeurs that observe humans and their struggles. Cassiel and Damiel mimic the viewer of the film. Leigh Singer of the British Film Institute notes that “Ultimately, Wings of Desire is a visionary film about vision: the act of watching, with all its fascinations and limitations,” (Singer, par. 4). The angels, just as the movie-goer, are fascinated in many ways by human conflict, but at the same time are unable to intervene or do anything about the people they come to care about. This is why Cassiel is forever tormented by the man whose suicide he could not prevent. Damiel, however, breaks out of his state of spectatorship to have a place on earth and becomes a human. Damiel becomes proactive and as a consequence he learns to be amazed by the small yet incredible pleasures of everyday life. This transformation into proactiveness is Wenders’ way of calling the audience to action. Essentially, no matter how good cinema and books and our cellphones are, there is a world of life out there, and all the small things are worth experiencing. In this way, Wings of Desire becomes a celebration of life and all the joy that the small things can bring.

It is not uncommon to be severely disillusioned by life. But one can find solace in the fact that people like Wenders can celebrate the good side of life through art, thus persuading us that life is indeed worth living. After being spiritually broken by Walkabout, Swept Away, and The Gods Must Be Crazy, Wings of Desire is like molten gold that joins all the pieces together. Indeed, there are many films that end in an optimistic note, but it is an empty optimism. Wings of Desire ends beautifully by demonstrating that it is man’s capacity to love that make life worth living. I can think of only a handful of films that depict ideas as honest and beautiful as that. Much more can be said in praise of the film that would only repeat what other critics have already said. But this film is undeniably a gift.

Works Cited

Ebert, Roger. “Tokyo Story Movie Review & Film Summary (1953) | Roger Ebert.”         RogerEbert.com, 9 Nov. 2003, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-tokyo-story-             1953.

Singer, Leigh. “Five Visual Themes in Wings of Desire – Wim Wenders' Immortal Film about             Watching.” British Film Institute, www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/five-    visual-themes-wings-desire-immortal-film-about-watching.

Wings of Desire. Dir. Wim Wenders. Perf. Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander. MGM, 1987. Film.