Filed under: History, Uncategorized, World War II | Tags: Enemy at the Gates, History, Movie, Reflection, World War II
I’m afraid I had more trouble coming up with scenes true to history than ones not, being rather unfortunately bombarded by glaring inaccuracies in Jean-Jacque Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates (2001). First, the bad news: the depiction of the style of fighting by the Red Army at Stalingrad is virtually the opposite of the truth, the sniper duels between Zaitsev and König and the happy ending are pure Hollywood, and the given impression that Khrushchev led the Soviet army at Stalingrad is false, among other smaller and more-debated issues (such as the characters of Danilov and König and, inevitably, the whole Tania situation).
Jude Law's portrayal of Vaseli Zaitsev
The real Vasily Zaytsev
In the very beginning of the film, “zagradotryads” (barrier soldiers) are depicted being forced to face Nazi machine guns, half of them rifleless in a weak imitation of the opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan. The men are herded towards the Nazis by sadistic whistle-blowing, machine gun-wielding Soviet officers in an extremely foolish attempt at stalling the Nazis. None of this ever occurred at Stalingrad, the Soviets would never have wasted so many men in such a pointless fashion. This was purely for cinematic purposes to grab attention at the beginning and pull people in with an excess of blood—something that seemed to work well for Saving Private Ryan.
Snipers do not duel. It’s just a fact. They can’t. Once a sniper shoots, he or she must get away as fast as they can for Shock troops are on the way. Enemy at the Gates portrayed snipers like amateur detectives: stalking each other around and hiding, taking a shot every now and then. Sure, that bit with the mirror was cool, but it was pure Hollywood—completely historically inaccurate.
And a happy ending for the Vasseli/Tania romance? A likely story. In reality, Zaitsev received a letter notifying him of Tania’s death and he never questioned it. He married another woman after the war and had a family. Tania did not know what had become of him until 1969. They never saw each other again. But of course Hollywood couldn’t give the public this, oh no. They cooked up some impractical and improbable letter romance which eventually leads Vasseli to Tania’s hospital bed where she has amazingly recovered. And they lived happily ever after. *Closing music, roll credits*
What happened to Zhukov, Vasilevsky, and Chuikov, the real commanders of the Red Army at Stalingrad? Oh, we’re sorry, they have ceased to exist for the ease of the filmmakers. Instead, Khrushchev runs everything from right there. Of course.
Nikita Khrushchev
The love triangle. The most inanely Hollywood bit of the story. What is it but Twilight forced on the heros of the war? There is no way that Danilov could ever have met Tania. His contact with Zaitsev was limited and he would never have known of anything between the sniper and Tania. The love triangle could not be for that simplest of reasons.
Onto the rather few and far between accuracies. My favorite one: Khrushchev’s filthy mouth: “The Nazis are beginning to shit their pants!” We know he did talk like this, if not with the cockney accent of Bob Hoskins. Another accuracy: Danilov making Zaitsev (really Zaytsev, but that’s hardly the film’s most egregious error) a national propaganda hero. This did happen, thank goodness. Though whether or not a German Major König was sent to kill him is unknown, though highly doubted.
Note: This was a homework assignment for my WWII history class which I posted for fun.
Filed under: English I, Reflection | Tags: Anton Checkhov, Article, Bernard Shaw, Books, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Clementi, E. M. Forster, English, Henry James, Love, Oscar Wilde, Poverty, Reflection, Selfishness, Selflessness, The Happy Prince, The Importance of Being Ernest
When Selfless Turns Selfish: Or Does Selfless Even Exist?
About two days ago, I was listlessly sitting at the piano in my living room, banging at the keys occasionally to make it sound like I wasn’t doing precisely what I was, and staring at the bookshelf to my left. I must have stared at those same thirty or so books for half an hour before I actually got around to reading their titles and then finally, their authors. Brushing past various tomes of Henry James, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Anton Checkhov, E. M. Forster, and even Charles Kingsley (who are all great men in their way, but did not write the kind of thing you just randomly decide to open in order to entertain yourself while supposedly practicing Clementi), I lighted on a name which ever since fifth grade and my first encounter with The Importance Of Being Ernest has been synonymous with a sharp wit and a good laugh: Oscar Wilde.
All too often have I professed myself to be a great fan of Wilde, but really in all fairness, I was a fan of The Importance of Being Ernest, not of Wilde for I had not read enough of his work (having only read the aforementioned play and Lady Windermere’s Fan). With this in mind (as well as the promise of a laugh that would free me from the constraints of a long-dead composer’s legacy which I had been forced to stare at on and off since the ripe old age of seven) I pulled The Happy Prince and Other Tales down from the shelf.
The moment I read ‘High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince” (Wilde, 1), I remembered a conversation with my mum about this very story in which she had told me that every time she read it, she cried. “Wonderful,” I thought sarcastically, “and just when I was looking for a laugh.” But for some reason, I can’t say what, I decided to read it anyway.
For those who don’t know, Oscar Wilde was not only a playwright, but also a writer of fairytales (and even one novel). The Happy Prince (a sadly ironic title) was one of his fairytales, as was made quite clear by the language and style it was written in. However, half a page in I started to notice that Wilde’s use of Anderson-esque speech was not in all seriousness, but rather a parody of the traditional method. This became more and more apparent as I continued and the story conveyed fewer and fewer traditional fairytale themes in that flowery but simple language and more and more of Wilde’s political, social, and in general world views.
In a daze I completed the mere fifteen pages of intense love and sadness and then turned back to page one and began again. I read it three times before I stopped and really gave my brain a chance to catch up with everything I had just read. A funny thing about the ‘aftermath’ of having read Wilde’s short story was that I couldn’t marshal my thoughts. Not that I normally am able to file them away in neatly color-coded files marked by subject and then arranged perfectly in file-cabinets or drawers—no, that I leave for people like my English teacher—but normally I could give a person the basic idea of what I thought. Not that I thought. For really after reading that story all that I knew was that it made me think. About what? I couldn’t say.
Now I’m sitting at this computer, staring at what I’ve written, and realizing that I still haven’t made any type of point about this story that so deeply affected me. And again I ask myself why it affected me. But it’s not enough to just answer “It did”. I could turn the entire thing around and tell you, my dear readers whoever you are, that sometimes things just affect you very deeply and you can’t say or know why, and pretend that was my point all along. But I won’t because I still have some faith in my ability to sort through the heaps of thought rattling around in my brain.
The Happy Prince deals with a statue of a prince who sits high atop a column and must stare out across his city day after day, witnessing the miseries of its people, but having no power to alter any of it. A swallow, late in migrating to Egypt, alights one day on his shoulder and speaks to the prince who tells the little bird of the sufferings of the people. The swallow then agrees to delay his journey to Egypt and help the impoverished seamstress mother of a sick child by taking the ruby from the prince’s sword hilt and delivering it to her. Once this is done, the prince convinces the swallow to stay longer and complete two more such missions, using the sapphires that are the Prince’s eyes. After this, the swallow stays with the prince out of love and loyalty, performing one more task to help the people of his city before the harsh winter kills him. As his little friend breathes his last breath, the prince’s leaden heart cracks and the next day he is taken away and melted for he is no longer beautiful having given his jewels and gold leaf to the poor.
Perhaps the most obvious point Wilde makes in this story is that about the deplorable position of the impoverished in the world at his time, and indeed the point holds true into this year, 2010, a little over 120 years later. However, I think such a point should be canvassed in quite a different way than I have begun here, when I have not already exceeded the suggested number of words by 800 (or so), and have not already written a preamble about nothing much.
Therefore I will examine the selflessness portrayed in the story by both the prince and the swallow. The prince sees the suffering of others and does not hesitate to give what he has to aid them in their plight, even at risk of his own ‘life’. The swallow remained in the cold, bitter winter to at first aid the prince and thereby the people and later out of his love for the prince. This seems about as selfless as it gets, right? That’s what I thought too, and even, I guess, still think on some level. but when I really began to examine the motives of both the prince and the swallow, I began to question (as it is my nature to question anything and everything) whether either of them were really ll that selfless.
According to Merriam-Webster, selfless is and adjective meaning a person ”concerned more with the needs and wishes of others than with [their] own”. Okay, sounds about right. But is that truly what either the swallow or the prince were? First I shall attack the poor little swallow’s supposed ‘selflessness’. The swallow at first refused to aid the prince in his—what shall I call it?—charity work, in the first case aiding a poor mother care for her sick son. The swallow tells the prince that he will not aid him, saying “I don’t think I like boys” (Wilde, 7). This is obviously very selfish; he is not by any definition putting other’s wishes before his own. Now one might argue that “Oh, he had a change of heart, he saw what good he could do in the world.” I don’t think so. He actually only ever agrees to aid the prince because he sees that he has made the prince sad. He goes out of his way to help someone he claims not even to like for the prince. Later on, we see that indeed the little bird loves the prince, that being his motivation for staying in the first place. And is not love an entirely selfish emotion? The swallow, it seems, had no real thought for the people, but only for the prince. If he had really cared about ending the sufferings of the poor, he would not have protested at the prince’s decision to give his eyes and skin to the cause. But he did. So doesn’t it seem fair to argue that the noble little bird was in fact guilty of the most selfish crime of love?
Now I can see people reading this and picturing me as the meanest, coldest, most uncaring misanthrope there ever was. And if you know me, I hope you realize that I didn’t get brainwashed this weekend. I merely am questioning the swallow’s motives, not his acts. His acts are as noble and unquestionably true as they could possibly be and I appreciate him and love him for it. Nor am I suggesting that love is a bad thing. Not in the slightest! Love makes the world go round, after all (and I really do like my seasons!). I really just want to question whether love is, by nature, selfish and whether, indeed, then such a thing as selflessness truly exists. For aren’t we humans a self-obsessed lot by nature as well?
The whole thing is most complicated and deserves more thought and discussion than I can give it here. But I hope, what small confusion I have given voice to here can express part of the turmoil I felt during the reading of The Happy Prince.
A/N: I know that this is long and rambling and I probably should have just deleted paragraphs 3, 4, 5, 6, and perhaps 8 upon their completion, but I felt that they were an important part of the process I went through to figure out what on earth I felt about The Happy Prince and should therefore be spared.
Filed under: English I, Genesis, Reflection, The Bible | Tags: Article, Bible, English, Genesis, God, Megalomania, Reflection
Divine Megalomania: God’s Self-Obsession
God is generous. God is forgiving. God is loving. And God should be worshipped unequivocally. Every two-year-old knows it. But what if every two-year-old knew the definition of megalomania? If every Christian two-year-old in the world knew that a megalomaniac is someone obsessed with their own power, might they not question whether God wasn’t one of these egoists? I do, and I’m not two years old. Just the fact alone that God “created humankind in His image” (Gen. 1.27) proves that He enjoys self-glorification. The idea that mankind is modeled after God is even stressed in the Bible—appearing four times in just two verses in most translations—underlining God’s tendency toward self-exaltation.
And this is not the only example. Throughout the Bible, there is talk of the glory of God, various people glorifying God, and essentially how wonderful God thinks He is. A prime example of this is the hymn “Gloria In Excelsis Deo” (Latin for “Glory to God in the Highest”) from the lines “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” (Luke 2.14). Again, we are asked to glorify Him, to lift Him up (as if He needs to be any higher!), and to revere Him—along with no one else. It is unquestionable that God has power; in fact He has quite a lot of it. But such obligatory adoration is quite unnecessary and only serves to make God look power-obsessed.
The way in which Creation is presented in Genesis suggests that God created the universe in order that He might be worshipped completely by His creations. This is particularly prominent in the Genesis Chapter 3 during which Eve explains that God has told her that “you shall no eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die” (Gen. 3.3). To this the serpent replies, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3.4-5). Of course the Bible presents this in such a way that it seems that the serpent is twisting God’s words only to trick Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, but it cannot be denied that the end result is precisely what the serpent predicted. Adam and Eve gain the ‘divine knowledge’ of good and evil and God subsequently drives them out of Eden.
Why, though, would God see the need to throw His own creations out? I see three possibilities. First, that He intended to anyway, and was merely playing with Adam and Eve. Second, that it was merely because they flouted his decree regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And third, that He really was afraid that they would become His equals (or that they already were). All three of these evidence God’s sublime megalomania. In the first case, God demonstrates that He enjoys having power over others (or really everything). In the second, that He is so obsessed with his power that He cannot stand to have anyone cross Him in any way. And in the third, that because of His love for His own power, God fears the idea of another becoming his equal as Adam and Eve might’ve done if they had been allowed to remain in Eden. Based off of the serpent’s comment that Adam and Eve would “be like God” if they ate of the fruit of the forbidden tree, the last seems the most likely to me, though any really could be possible.
Really, throughout the Bible, God doesn’t give people a choice. There isn’t a “worship God, or don’t worship God” message, instead it proclaims: “worship God or burn in Hell”. And though there may be an ‘or’ in there, I really don’t consider that much of a choice. If God weren’t self-obsessed and afraid of losing His power, then He wouldn’t feel the need to require people to worship Him. But as He does, I feel justified in dubbing Him a megalomaniac. But then, what god isn’t?
