Elle (film)

-

Elle directed by a Dutch director, Paul Verhoeven, is one of the most classy and subtle satires to have come out in decades. It’s a story about a female CEO Isabelle: she is elegant, aloof and has a knife-sharp tongue. She speaks her mind and that makes her unlikeable to many other people. She is great at her job and has complete authority over her staff. This Isabelle gets attacked at her own home by a masked stranger: an event that has a puzzling impact on Elle.

What follows is a weird symbolism of empowerment and denigration of the physical body. I think what the film is trying to say is there are many other ways to violate a person’s sense of self and sometimes humiliation, faith or psychological abuse has far greater consequence than something like a rape incident. For Isabelle, rape and physical violence do not rank highly in what is most damaging to a person. In fact, most of the time she doesn’t seem to get upset, which makes her seem almost in-human.

The film explores various other ways a person can be violated. Some obvious and some not so: financial abuse, verbal abuse, stalking, cyber bullying, infidelity, grave desecration and so on. It also suggests that acts of extreme violence, such at what Elle endured as a child, can harden one to the point that violence of any sort is normalised: this idea is the essence of trauma-based mind control. 

I’m not sure if I’d call this a feminist film because while the main character is a woman and it is about empowerment I wouldn’t say it’s about female empowerment. The final message of the film is essentially that: power-over-self can manifest in many ways and can be maintained even when power-over-body has been violated. I think the fact that Isabelle’s personality appears so unusual is a testament to the flaw in the film’s message. It may not be such a gross violation for an unusual person like Isabelle but to most of us I think it is in-human to separate power-over-self and power-over-body so completely.

Nevertheless, I really appreciate the topic that the film explores and it does it in a way that is interesting, shocking and at times quite sweet.

Popular posts from this blog

The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (book)

-
Image
History rhymes: it moves in cycles of growth, destruction and then further growth; we see intense conflict followed by loving peace, leading to complacency and the withering of what brought the beauty and success to begin with, only to give birth to something greater. Another common historical rhyme is that each age has a wealthy establishment which attempts to suppress information or people that threatens its control: Emperors, Tsars and tycoons. Any serious student of world history, mythology and ideas knows these things to be true.                                                                                                               The Nag Hammadi Scriptures have captured the imagination of seekers around the world because their story and content exemplify the points raised above. In brief, they represent a type of Christianity that flourished between approximately 70 AD to 400 AD but ceased to exist thereafter. They are called gnostic which generally means a direct knowledg
Read more

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (book)

-
Image
Humanity tends to scapegoat individuals or groups to water the thirst for collective violence or to resolve tensions and angst. The scapegoating mechanism is at the heart of the Western canon: both Socrates and Jesus were put to death to appease the inflamed crowd. According to French American thinker Ren é  Girard, these are extreme, archetypal versions of a phenomena that plays out in lesser forms throughout human life. Girard sits at the crossroads of various traditions but is uniquely brilliant when discussing the role collective violence has in human communities. At the heart of Girard’s work is the notion of mimetic decision-making. By this he means that humans by nature imitate what they see, hear, and read, including in what they desire. The imitators inevitably begin to go after the same things in a world of scarce resources, which increases tensions in the community. Eventually, the tension becomes too great, and the individual or group is selected for scapegoating, whereby t
Read more

The Secret of Light (book)

-
Image
One of the most beautifully written and accessible mystical texts of our time is The Secret of Light by Walter Russell. It captures the truths of esoteric Christianity (such as that found in the sermons of Meister Eckhart), and the Hindu Upanishads, without getting bogged down in unapproachable terminology or culturally-specific mythology.                                                                                                                                                                                                    The essence of Russell’s text is that each human is an eternal consciousness that both experiences and is the manifestation of a single, eternal God-Mind. A human being is a conscious mind that experiences separate physical forms via waves and pulses of light which create the electrical charges governing her body and thoughts. As Russell puts it, “Electricity expresses the desire in the God-Mind for creative expression by seemingly dividing the One still ligh
Read more