This article rightfully praises the Ghibli movies for their non-Manichean stories, especially when compared to Disney or Hollywood blockbusters. Yet I'm surprised it missed an important example: in the first film entirely directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicäa is far from an angel. In my eyes, she is Miyazaki's most ambiguous character. Warning, spoiler ahead.
When her valley is invaded, the peaceful Nausicäa runs to the room of her ill and bedridden father. He's dead, surrounded by soldiers. She screams, seizes her father's sword, and enters a killing rage. Truly, even a young and sweet girl can feel hate and killing intent, and she may even act accordingly. Nobody's born an angel nor a demon, but we can all become insensitive or cruel. Just read Primo Levi or Herman Langbein to see how most people transform in a few weeks. Anyway, that sequence made me cry.
I'd also like to mention the opening of this movie, inspired from the medieval "tapisserie de Bayeux" that relates England's invasion in the XIth century. The ballet of robots along a burning city is incredibly beautiful and moving. How stunning that Miyazaki starts his first film with the artistic beauty of a war scene!
> Here in France everyone has a Nespresso machine or two (I have three).
I'm French, I live in France, and I have no such machine, and none of my friends has one. YMMV.
According to a 2014 report of the "Autorité de la Concurrence", 25% of French families have this kind of machine, with 85% of those being real Nestlé products.
Among my friends, some reject hard capsules for their cost. The cost of Nespresso coffee is within 60 to 90 €/kg, whereas classic arabica coffee is sold around 12 €/kg (I buy high-end ground on-demand coffee for around 30 €/kg). Others friends have ethical objections (against Nestlé, the captive market, the amount of waste, and so on).
Hannah Arendt is widely praised and its Jerusalem book is often quoted all around the world, yet this portrayal of a "mailman" is more than dubious. The historian Hermann Langbein, who survived Auschwitz and later wrote the authoritative "Men and women at Auschwitz", showed that her ideas didn't match the facts. Recently, the first integral study of Eichmann's papers completely broke this "mailman" picture: he was a typical intellectual, who read philosophy books and even poetry, and liked writing. This "personality of a mailman" is a nonsense, unless writing long commentaries of Hegel's philosophy is "banal" for any "mailman".
Taking the Nazis as a whole is another big mistake. Some were sorry, some tried to mitigate the violence, at different levels. Primo Levi (also very critical of Arendt) remembered a young woman that became a guardian: at first she was horrified, she couldn't stand the violence and felt ill the first days, she tried to resign. A few weeks later, she was accustomed and hit prisoners. It's a pity his "grey zone" concept is despised by our Manichean world.
Apart from this, I totally agree with the denial aspect. The Standford experiment was very probably a trauma for this former guard, and his denegating discourse seems strongly biased by this. His main claims are:
- This experiment is a fraud, it claims to prove that we, the guards, became "evil" (his term), but that's wrong.
- The experiment was biased because the main experimenter made some important decisions along the way.
- We, the guards, did not loose our humanity, the material settings were inhumane and made us behave like this. For instance, we were sleep deprived.
- If a guard became violent, it's not because he was violent, it's because he was an amateur actor that had endorsed a violent role just for fun.
- The experiment author manipulated the students into saying things they didn't thought, and he kept their identities secret to give him "more control of the narrative".
Sure, this experiment is morally questionable and it's hard to build strong conclusions upon it, but if it was a fraud, why wasn't it debunked long ago? Why didn't most of the students protest they were wronged? Why caricature it with notions of good/evil? And would actors play a "violent cop" role for many days just on an impulse, with graduating violence? And, most of all: if an inhumane setting made them behave with less empathy, less humanity, isn't that a very interesting experimental result?
When her valley is invaded, the peaceful Nausicäa runs to the room of her ill and bedridden father. He's dead, surrounded by soldiers. She screams, seizes her father's sword, and enters a killing rage. Truly, even a young and sweet girl can feel hate and killing intent, and she may even act accordingly. Nobody's born an angel nor a demon, but we can all become insensitive or cruel. Just read Primo Levi or Herman Langbein to see how most people transform in a few weeks. Anyway, that sequence made me cry.
I'd also like to mention the opening of this movie, inspired from the medieval "tapisserie de Bayeux" that relates England's invasion in the XIth century. The ballet of robots along a burning city is incredibly beautiful and moving. How stunning that Miyazaki starts his first film with the artistic beauty of a war scene!