HOSTILES
Why would a man, whom loves life and is always happy and never watches horror out of fear of having nightmares, from which he suffers from tremendously, ever in his right mind go to see Hostiles, the new Western not out in IMAX? This is what I was asking myself before seeing it last night. I generally avoid horror because even a simple change of medication can yield terrible consequences for my dream self. This one time I forgot my pills and I survived a shotgun battle with my nemesis. This other time I took a double dose and well, I felt a bullet ricocheing from my back skull just before waking up. I am not sure what it is about pills and bad dreams but it's just how I am. Even though I am not a violent person my dreams are sometimes. Usually though, I dream of funny things, like turning into birds and stuff like that. I noticed that seeing a horror makes me wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing as if I was Andretti.
All that aside, after seeing the trailer for Hostiles I thought I would have the terriblest of nightmares. Very few Western flicks are lacking in gruesome violence. Very few cowboys lead lives of luxury. Have you ever seen a cowboy film with a plethora of lagoons, swimming pools, upscale coaches painted luxurious red colours, pinata parties, and dare I say oasii filled with jacuzzis? This thought made me realize perhaps I should see Hostiles from a different perspective. Not a craving for action, violence, nor those hard core cowboy romp sequences. But from a human perspective.
What do we as a modern society have today that we all achieved as a species since the wild west that makes life better? Have we solved the man chopping wood out front while his family plays happily within the dwelling he built with his own two hands while rapeful savage horde-like of bandits thunders at them both outgunning him and outnumbering him? Have we really oh constabulary of the blues? Or maybe the greenies have an answer? Or maybe the white doctors with their psychology and psychiatry believe we have solved this scenario in the second decade of the twenty-first century? I for one, do not, as I have recently read about a new crime hitting many cities known as "home invasions". Whereby bandits, rampage through other people's houses. Somehow, turns out, nobody realized in all these urban and suburban cities that while front doors are heavy, the backyard door is usually made of glass and a single rock gets a person into anyone's home. I don't know how we all missed that, eh?
But that isn't so important. Y'know why oh yee of the ol' faith? Because in Hostiles, it doesn't matter how your house is built. It doesn't matter where the door is located, where the windows are, nor does it matter where you chop wood and what your family is up to. It doesn't matter if you teach your kids West Martial Arts or East Martial Arts to your wife either. The homes were made of wood, and bandits had alcohol and matches. And worse of all, homesteads were made in the middle of empty fields with plenty of clear space and no cover. How do you defend that son? You gonna hide in the bathroom? Are you going to complain that the windows allowed the bandits in? The evil ones in Hostiles did not care one bit about what was inside the home, nor inside it's occupants hearts. They sought out the man, his family, and pulled triggers, thankfully, and not their zippers first. Or maybe not thankfully, for I do not know, thankfully, yeah. But the movie portrays it so realistically I cried two separate times and had to use both hands to wipe my face - and I'm a 200lb body building monster, kinda, of a man. Yes, this Western's opening made me cry at the age of forty.
There were pieces where I fell asleep, literally, and missed the point. There was a chunk where I daydreamed about a chick that passed me by on the escalator. And the theater was almost empty. But that is unrelated to the movie, and mostly to other life things such as being exhausted physically from jogging and such. The film demonstrates to all of us a problem that despite all of our modern technology, I believe nobody has really solved. How does a man protect his family from another jealous man? Or even worse, is there a solution? I may have missed it but I think that at the start this is what the conversation revealed. One man stole another's happiness or so he believed. It's a theme I can attest to being difficult to address internally as another man slept with the love of my life. But I harbor no hate nor have any disrespect nor did I even plan vengeance. Mostly because I understand love is never about what one person wants nor wishes. And this is what the bad guy did not understand. Hostiles shows that the woman chose another and you can not change that choice through force. You can eliminate other choices before the choice is made, certainly, but you can not change a heart once a choice is made. Hostiles though shows the real problem in our society. Jealousy, greed, and our architectual inability to design a safe dwelling, or rather safe from jealousy.
It did portray another key component of our modern culture that still is not resolved. The man had to appease his boss primarily to keep his pension to feed his family and not do as he wished in life. Now today this might sound pretentious and close minded and dare I say entitled. Waah, waah, I did not get to go to Jamaica three times this summer, just once last year. No! What the phrase means in the West is more akin to not having the right, the freedom, to say no to killing other men, literally. The man did not get to even once avoid killing as he explained twice in the movie at least. He killed many but never wanted to once. And he didn't want to take the chief to the spot as it would involve more killings, but his boss threatened to take his pension away if he did not and that would mean his family down the road would not be able to live, and then maybe he would not either, and he would have to kill later on just to have food. And that is what he was trying to avoid. I feel the man chose to take the chief and do the killings because at least then it was a military operation and not a criminal act should he have had to kill to survive without a pension. So at least in some twisted social sense the killings while keeping the pension were kinda sorta justified.
This is the modern world explained in the simplest of terms. Protect your family. Earn a salary. Spend eight hours a day doing something you do not enjoy fully or at all. Three concepts, presented as a Western. Three problems we still have yet to solve as a society. Or at least I have not solved them. If you have, please make a movie, and release it via Hollywood or The Pirate Bay and let me know so I can stop thinking about it.
Hostiles, I Love You! :)
All that aside, after seeing the trailer for Hostiles I thought I would have the terriblest of nightmares. Very few Western flicks are lacking in gruesome violence. Very few cowboys lead lives of luxury. Have you ever seen a cowboy film with a plethora of lagoons, swimming pools, upscale coaches painted luxurious red colours, pinata parties, and dare I say oasii filled with jacuzzis? This thought made me realize perhaps I should see Hostiles from a different perspective. Not a craving for action, violence, nor those hard core cowboy romp sequences. But from a human perspective.
What do we as a modern society have today that we all achieved as a species since the wild west that makes life better? Have we solved the man chopping wood out front while his family plays happily within the dwelling he built with his own two hands while rapeful savage horde-like of bandits thunders at them both outgunning him and outnumbering him? Have we really oh constabulary of the blues? Or maybe the greenies have an answer? Or maybe the white doctors with their psychology and psychiatry believe we have solved this scenario in the second decade of the twenty-first century? I for one, do not, as I have recently read about a new crime hitting many cities known as "home invasions". Whereby bandits, rampage through other people's houses. Somehow, turns out, nobody realized in all these urban and suburban cities that while front doors are heavy, the backyard door is usually made of glass and a single rock gets a person into anyone's home. I don't know how we all missed that, eh?
But that isn't so important. Y'know why oh yee of the ol' faith? Because in Hostiles, it doesn't matter how your house is built. It doesn't matter where the door is located, where the windows are, nor does it matter where you chop wood and what your family is up to. It doesn't matter if you teach your kids West Martial Arts or East Martial Arts to your wife either. The homes were made of wood, and bandits had alcohol and matches. And worse of all, homesteads were made in the middle of empty fields with plenty of clear space and no cover. How do you defend that son? You gonna hide in the bathroom? Are you going to complain that the windows allowed the bandits in? The evil ones in Hostiles did not care one bit about what was inside the home, nor inside it's occupants hearts. They sought out the man, his family, and pulled triggers, thankfully, and not their zippers first. Or maybe not thankfully, for I do not know, thankfully, yeah. But the movie portrays it so realistically I cried two separate times and had to use both hands to wipe my face - and I'm a 200lb body building monster, kinda, of a man. Yes, this Western's opening made me cry at the age of forty.
There were pieces where I fell asleep, literally, and missed the point. There was a chunk where I daydreamed about a chick that passed me by on the escalator. And the theater was almost empty. But that is unrelated to the movie, and mostly to other life things such as being exhausted physically from jogging and such. The film demonstrates to all of us a problem that despite all of our modern technology, I believe nobody has really solved. How does a man protect his family from another jealous man? Or even worse, is there a solution? I may have missed it but I think that at the start this is what the conversation revealed. One man stole another's happiness or so he believed. It's a theme I can attest to being difficult to address internally as another man slept with the love of my life. But I harbor no hate nor have any disrespect nor did I even plan vengeance. Mostly because I understand love is never about what one person wants nor wishes. And this is what the bad guy did not understand. Hostiles shows that the woman chose another and you can not change that choice through force. You can eliminate other choices before the choice is made, certainly, but you can not change a heart once a choice is made. Hostiles though shows the real problem in our society. Jealousy, greed, and our architectual inability to design a safe dwelling, or rather safe from jealousy.
It did portray another key component of our modern culture that still is not resolved. The man had to appease his boss primarily to keep his pension to feed his family and not do as he wished in life. Now today this might sound pretentious and close minded and dare I say entitled. Waah, waah, I did not get to go to Jamaica three times this summer, just once last year. No! What the phrase means in the West is more akin to not having the right, the freedom, to say no to killing other men, literally. The man did not get to even once avoid killing as he explained twice in the movie at least. He killed many but never wanted to once. And he didn't want to take the chief to the spot as it would involve more killings, but his boss threatened to take his pension away if he did not and that would mean his family down the road would not be able to live, and then maybe he would not either, and he would have to kill later on just to have food. And that is what he was trying to avoid. I feel the man chose to take the chief and do the killings because at least then it was a military operation and not a criminal act should he have had to kill to survive without a pension. So at least in some twisted social sense the killings while keeping the pension were kinda sorta justified.
This is the modern world explained in the simplest of terms. Protect your family. Earn a salary. Spend eight hours a day doing something you do not enjoy fully or at all. Three concepts, presented as a Western. Three problems we still have yet to solve as a society. Or at least I have not solved them. If you have, please make a movie, and release it via Hollywood or The Pirate Bay and let me know so I can stop thinking about it.
Hostiles, I Love You! :)
Comments
Post a Comment