The newest edition of Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover and Mia Wasikowski, impresses with its technological wizardry and fine acting cast. My children were appropriately manipulated through a flood of emotions, and I found myself watching carefully to see if the creation of Wonderland could be protected from what seemed to be certain doom.
Despite my involvement in a white and sudden resolution, that could get back the earth to its peaceful right, I noticed running through the movie a sure sense of misgiving about resolving the conflict violently.
Alice is depicted as a rebellious child of aristocratic origins, who questions the propriety of the culture around her. Inspired by her deceased father, when she is asked why she continually wastes her time pondering impossible things, she remarks that her mother was known to reckon up six impossible things before breakfast. This foolishness is presumed to be the grounds for her fathers financial successes, and so the significance is that it is not madness at all, but imagination and vision. Thus, her fathers ghost compels her to doubt the motivation to follow with the social mores that are the primary business of her house and friends. At one point, she asks her mother, what if what was right was wearing a codfish on your mind? Later, in Wonderland, after adjusting to her unusual surroundings, she declares her independence from the demands of her (imaginary?) friends: Ever since I got here, I have been told what I must do, and who I must be. No longer, she implies.
Alices character struggles throughout with the portion which the range of Wonderland characters says is written into the future: to hit the Jabberwocky and, in so doing, depose the wicked Red Queen, who rules her subjects without emotion, egocentrically violating the deserving of all in her sight. When Alice first hears that the fates have stated the use of her second visit to Wonderland to be regicide, Alice says, I couldnt if I wanted to. As an educational psychologist, I am always sensible to the messages that media send to our children. I wondered, with all these misgivings, might this film do the inconceivable and answer a difference without violence?
We get all seen movie after movie, story after story, repeat the same pattern: There is a good guy, who might take some bad habits, but he is deep down all good. And so there is a bad guy, who might give a just feel of humor, but he is deep down pure evil. The right guy tries to break the bad guy, but the bad guy repeatedly gets away. Our frustration level builds. Not simply do we know the form of dreaded evil he intends to impose on humankind, but we too do this ending to stopping it before it gets dangerous. But we must bear our climax. The right guy and bad guy lastly meet for a final battle. The 1st half of the battle is somewhat even, but so the bad guy gets the upper hand. He seems to have won. The right guy is seconds away from being killed, when all of a sudden, something miraculous happens. The right guy is resuscitated (resurrected?), surprising the bad guy, and with a gleeful blow, the bad guy is destroyed. The earth is safe again, brought to peace through vengeful violent struggle.
This rite has been labeled redemptive violence by the philosopher and urge of nonviolent resistance, Walter Wink. Redemptive violence describes our cultures adamant belief in the righting of the public order through violent death of any and all who would endanger our peace/status quo. Wink warns us about becoming what we hate, and these stories are prime examples of the delight we get from giving evil people a sample of their own medicine. The ferocity of the bad guy is deplored, thus necessitating his death through the vehemence he intended for us all.
This picture of consummate goodness and pure evil is what we psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. This construct describes our propensity to supply our own moral failings with exceptions and justifications, and our simultaneous inability to go this forgiveness to others who practice the same moral failings. For example, if we accidentally cut someone off in traffic, we assure ourselves that we were distracted, or we made a mistake. No more than 5 transactions later, someone else cuts off and we name the driver names. Because we are trapped within our own heads, we go to gain that we can only love our own extenuating circumstances for moral failings. No one else is tending the same benefit of the doubt.
We all recognize that in actual life, no one is pure good or pure evil. Given this is true, then we must conclude that all persons get the power to hear about their complicity or responsibility for evil or wrongdoing, and to shift gears upon this realization. The purpose of the "awake" person, who recognizes injustice or evil when it happens, is to blow the oppressor out of his/her blindness. Winks answer to the oppressed is the doctrine of nonviolent resistance. This is not passivity with our own oppression, but rather, an active refusal to, as Gandhi advised, allow anyone to humble us.
The end of opposition to wickedness is not to demolish the evildoer, especially not by using the like way as those victimized by the sinner himself, but instead to give the eyes of the evildoer to his/her role in the prolongation of evil. Since the rite is to generate violence with violence, then violent solutions are destitute of this shock value. The oppressor only sees the expected next step in hostilities, which in turn confirms for the oppressor the inferiority of the victim (who is not seen as a victim, but quite as an obstruction or threat). Therefore, the wheel is never broken.
What is required is for the alert to act in a way that is completely off-script. To improvise a nonviolent means for refusing to admit anyone to do acts of humiliation against self or others is the sole way history has found efficacious in calling into doubt the "way things are." Anyone who loves this Jesus guy ought to be wild and offended at the way the Christian myth has been co-opted to justify violence against anyone we resolve to name evil.
Back to Alice: The film makes some hints throughout that Alice wishes to clear the place without violence. She finds the thought of killing deplorable. The White Queen, whom the Red Queen has unjustly deposed, has herself taken vows that forbid her to hurt any living creature. The Red Queen reveals to us her bid for bed and friends. When Crispin asks her: Is it not best to be feared than loved? she replies, Not certain anymore. So you can guess my excitement when I thinking I was to be hardened to a narrative of right and evil, in which the iniquity is transformed into good, rather than merely eradicated. And you can guess my disappointment when, in the end, Alice is positive she must recur to violence, and she predictably wins peace for all the land through the execution of the villains evil beast, the Jabberwocky. I was still more disappointed when Alice, fully taken over by the heat of battle, prefaces her murderous act with the Red Queens refrain, Off with your head! She has become what we hate. To me, the film, while a visual pleasure and an acting extravaganza, is, as a recent survey of this movie declared, a moral failure. The film led me to think that my children would hear of other methods to resolving conflict than murder, and then squandered the chance that the dialog itself suggested.
As if in an effort to further disgust me more, Alice is granted a choice after battlethe blood of the Jabberwocky. Alice asks the White Queen, Will it get me home? And the King replies, If that is what you choose. Then, SHE DRINKS IT! What year is this? 1200? I didnt know we actually believed in drinking the line of our enemies anymore, but obviously we do.
At the end of the film, the Mad Hatter dances a dance he has not felt move in him since the Red Queen took power. All is joy and peace again, thanks to war. We are conditioned to find this formula satisfying, but how can it be, when it makes so little smell? When might we determine that what our culture finds reasonable is foolish, and what seems foolish is much the most reasonable thing we can do? Tomorrow, when you heat up, make it a guide to conceive of 6 impossible things before you eat breakfast. This film wants to reckon up something impossible, but rather it chooses the same old violence.
Dedicated to the great philosophical humanitarian, Walter Wink.
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