governments behaving badly
Jan. 20th, 2010 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intertribalI recently watched Right At Your Door and Blindness. The first is about dirty bombs going off in Los Angeles. The second is about people in some unnamed first-world city mysteriously going blind. They're both told from the bottom-up perspective of the civilian victims of these plagues, and they both involve issues of quarantine. That is, the government tells civilians what to do, civilians demand information, government tells civilians what to do louder. And "what to do" = stay in some confined space for God knows how long.
The actual Quarantine movie had a lot of this too. Quarantine and Right At Your Door are pretty similar, however. The governments are both identifiably American and they behave predictably, rationally - they sequester the infected area, send in people in HazMat suits to collect samples in order to figure out what's wrong, and try to keep communication as open as possible. Of course, people respond to this by screaming their heads off, but what the hell else is the government supposed to do? It's quarantine. I always side with the government in movies like this - I just want to tell the hysterical people to calm the fuck down and worry about the zombies/toxic dust, because the government is doing all it can outside and can't help you inside. The government in RAYD are actually pretty nice, considering a cloud of toxic dust is spreading over the entire American Southwest. They also turn out to be giving everybody kind of bad advice, but they're trying to act on the information they have. The government in Quarantine is a little meaner, and when infected people try to escape despite warnings, they're shot. IMO this is overkill, and it's more likely they'd be shot with tranquilizer darts. Still, not totally crazy considering these people are in and of themselves deadly weapons.
Right At Your Door is told entirely from the perspective of the hysterical civilians, so it's essentially a panic movie, except for brief moments of tenderness (like a woman dying in the toxic air listening to her voicemail full of concerned friends and family). There's a lot of terrible driving and people screaming at each other without listening to each other and conversations like, "I went to the hospital but I couldn't get in!" "Go round the back before they see you!" "There were so many people there!" "GO ROUND THE BACK NOW" "oh my God what is happening to us" "GOOO ROOOOUUND THE BAAACK" and so it's a pretty fatiguing movie that doesn't do anything we haven't seen a million times before.
The government in Blindness, however, behaves in a way that no first-world government would. They drop all the blind people in what's essentially a prison block, telling them to find themselves a ward and a bed (THEY ARE BLIND) and then randomly drop boxes of food in the yard, telling them that distribution is "your responsibility" (THEY ARE BLIND). There's no healthcare, no sanitary conditions (in other words, total quarantine fail), and no effort to examine these blind people because nobody wants to touch them (THERE ARE HAZMAT SUITS IN USE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE. WHERE HAVE THEY GONE?). So of course the prison block devolves into a Hobbesian horror show, and Gael Garcia Bernal hoards all the food because he's the only one with a gun. I'm not going to get into the incredibly pessimistic approach this movie takes toward the behavior of people in crisis situations, but I am going to say that I could not believe a first-world government would do this. It's about as likely as selling death-row inmates to a TV show that puts them on an island to kill each other for a live audience. Sorry, but no. I know you hate the government, but no. I would buy some overwhelmed third-world governments dumping everybody with a contagious disease in a prison block and not knowing what else to do - I still don't buy the existence of "wards" (why not single prison cells, and have someone shove food in through a slot?) or the air drops of food boxes (they're freakin' BLIND). I get that this is supposed to be an exaggeration, or even a black comedy (the music gives it a sort of nasty Clockwork Orange vibe - the movie that fucked me up for life), but in the context of a cosmopolitan ultra-city where even the hookers speed around in taxi cabs, this is just too ridiculous to be taken seriously. If the government truly did not know how blindness was spread or how to cure it, and had no prison cells or hospital rooms to spare, it's more likely that they would just shoot all the blind people and kill the infection dead.
You see? HAZMAT SUITS.
I also thought Garcia Bernal's evil deeds were a little too well-organized given the guy has just suddenly gone blind. They say it's a disease that defies bureaucracy (which is why the government is useless) and yet bureaucracy is exactly what takes place in prison. But that's just opening a whole big ass can of worms - the good doctor's wife can see, and she does freakin' nothing to take advantage of this once the food-hoarding and gang-rapes start. She's just like, yes, I will suffer with you. WTF. Too much female martyrdom and male cowardice/evil. Why is everybody in the evil Ward 3 male anyway? The fact that everybody in all the wards just agrees to Garcia Bernal's demands because he - A BLIND MAN - has a gun (how the hell'd he get that through security? for that matter, why were these people allowed to take their purses into quarantine?)... Ok, I said I wouldn't get into the behavior of people in crisis situations, so I'll stop.
If you want to watch a movie about people in the government being wicked in ways that have happened time and time again the world over, watch Death and The Maiden. If you want to watch a prison horror opera, watch Oz (man I miss Oz). Blindness is a red herring.
The actual Quarantine movie had a lot of this too. Quarantine and Right At Your Door are pretty similar, however. The governments are both identifiably American and they behave predictably, rationally - they sequester the infected area, send in people in HazMat suits to collect samples in order to figure out what's wrong, and try to keep communication as open as possible. Of course, people respond to this by screaming their heads off, but what the hell else is the government supposed to do? It's quarantine. I always side with the government in movies like this - I just want to tell the hysterical people to calm the fuck down and worry about the zombies/toxic dust, because the government is doing all it can outside and can't help you inside. The government in RAYD are actually pretty nice, considering a cloud of toxic dust is spreading over the entire American Southwest. They also turn out to be giving everybody kind of bad advice, but they're trying to act on the information they have. The government in Quarantine is a little meaner, and when infected people try to escape despite warnings, they're shot. IMO this is overkill, and it's more likely they'd be shot with tranquilizer darts. Still, not totally crazy considering these people are in and of themselves deadly weapons.
Right At Your Door is told entirely from the perspective of the hysterical civilians, so it's essentially a panic movie, except for brief moments of tenderness (like a woman dying in the toxic air listening to her voicemail full of concerned friends and family). There's a lot of terrible driving and people screaming at each other without listening to each other and conversations like, "I went to the hospital but I couldn't get in!" "Go round the back before they see you!" "There were so many people there!" "GO ROUND THE BACK NOW" "oh my God what is happening to us" "GOOO ROOOOUUND THE BAAACK" and so it's a pretty fatiguing movie that doesn't do anything we haven't seen a million times before.
The government in Blindness, however, behaves in a way that no first-world government would. They drop all the blind people in what's essentially a prison block, telling them to find themselves a ward and a bed (THEY ARE BLIND) and then randomly drop boxes of food in the yard, telling them that distribution is "your responsibility" (THEY ARE BLIND). There's no healthcare, no sanitary conditions (in other words, total quarantine fail), and no effort to examine these blind people because nobody wants to touch them (THERE ARE HAZMAT SUITS IN USE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE. WHERE HAVE THEY GONE?). So of course the prison block devolves into a Hobbesian horror show, and Gael Garcia Bernal hoards all the food because he's the only one with a gun. I'm not going to get into the incredibly pessimistic approach this movie takes toward the behavior of people in crisis situations, but I am going to say that I could not believe a first-world government would do this. It's about as likely as selling death-row inmates to a TV show that puts them on an island to kill each other for a live audience. Sorry, but no. I know you hate the government, but no. I would buy some overwhelmed third-world governments dumping everybody with a contagious disease in a prison block and not knowing what else to do - I still don't buy the existence of "wards" (why not single prison cells, and have someone shove food in through a slot?) or the air drops of food boxes (they're freakin' BLIND). I get that this is supposed to be an exaggeration, or even a black comedy (the music gives it a sort of nasty Clockwork Orange vibe - the movie that fucked me up for life), but in the context of a cosmopolitan ultra-city where even the hookers speed around in taxi cabs, this is just too ridiculous to be taken seriously. If the government truly did not know how blindness was spread or how to cure it, and had no prison cells or hospital rooms to spare, it's more likely that they would just shoot all the blind people and kill the infection dead.
You see? HAZMAT SUITS.
I also thought Garcia Bernal's evil deeds were a little too well-organized given the guy has just suddenly gone blind. They say it's a disease that defies bureaucracy (which is why the government is useless) and yet bureaucracy is exactly what takes place in prison. But that's just opening a whole big ass can of worms - the good doctor's wife can see, and she does freakin' nothing to take advantage of this once the food-hoarding and gang-rapes start. She's just like, yes, I will suffer with you. WTF. Too much female martyrdom and male cowardice/evil. Why is everybody in the evil Ward 3 male anyway? The fact that everybody in all the wards just agrees to Garcia Bernal's demands because he - A BLIND MAN - has a gun (how the hell'd he get that through security? for that matter, why were these people allowed to take their purses into quarantine?)... Ok, I said I wouldn't get into the behavior of people in crisis situations, so I'll stop.
If you want to watch a movie about people in the government being wicked in ways that have happened time and time again the world over, watch Death and The Maiden. If you want to watch a prison horror opera, watch Oz (man I miss Oz). Blindness is a red herring.
