War within, war without...
This week, I watched Road No.1. It's a Korean drama. It's pretty different than the dramas I usually watch; this one is about war.
It's a subject I usually avoid. I'm the kind of person who is against the whole deal of having armies and wars; I always considered it the failure of intellectualism and blamed it mostly on lack of education and of knowing better. When you talk to milicians, they're such dogmatic people that somehow, that in itself scares me more than the thought of dying or suffering. Now, I don't mean any disrespect to these men who've been defending freedom and all, just that I wish freedom was not in need of being defended. I wish that deep down inside, each and every human being could cherish it enough not to feel compelled to take it away from other human beings...
But back to the drama, now! I started watching it because is it starring So Jisub as the leading man. I loved him in Sorry, I Love You and in Rough Cut. He always plays strong silent type guys and he manages to make me fall for them every time! Also, the other leading man, Yoon Kye Sang is also an handsome and able actor. The drama has this really heavy war atmosphere, heavier even, I'd say, than in Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (starring Kazunari Ninomiya who's totally brilliant in this role and Ken Watanabe).
Both these works display the hard on, dehumanizing realities that soldiers face in war; fear, loss of purpose, death, lack of proper nutrition and hunger, hydration, bitter cold, unhygienic conditions in which they have to try to survive from their wounds, the mental suffering, the competitive spirit, and all the crazy things they have to go through just to survive. It's impossible to watch these and not feel touched and transformed. You just can't feel neutral towards them. They shake you inside out. They make me get kind of "oversensitive"... I mean, I spent all week scolding Nick for not finishing his food while images of soldiers trying to eat mud to avoid going crazy under the burning sun or sharing the last meal they had for their whole "crew" (I'm sorry, I'm really ignorant when it comes to terms about dividing crowds into military units)...
I just feel so grateful living in Canada, with a roof over my head, food on my plate 3 meals a day and all that I get to enjoy that I know other people have sacrificed their lives over to make sure I would have. And I feel cheap. Like, really really cheap, towards the 80% of humanity that I know does not get any chance of ever enjoying these benefits that a lot of my contemporaries take for granted...
But the drama isn't all just gore and violence and dark, there's also a beautiful love story about two kids for fall in love and who go to great lengths to survive in order for their lover to have someone to come back to and something to believe in to drive them through. It's also about comradeship, brotherhood, and making negative feelings grow into fondness and caring...
-The finale of the drama was a bit WTF?! though, I don't think that guy, as die hard as he is, could have survived 60 years on a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!-
This makes me want to pledge to end all this warfare non-sense within my lifetime... But I have no clue how realistic that would be...
And I don't really understand why this growing fascination I have for warfare, lately... It's been haunting me in my dreams, making me question the nature of my relationships with my friends and loved one and the means and to what extent I would go to protect them... What about you?
It's a subject I usually avoid. I'm the kind of person who is against the whole deal of having armies and wars; I always considered it the failure of intellectualism and blamed it mostly on lack of education and of knowing better. When you talk to milicians, they're such dogmatic people that somehow, that in itself scares me more than the thought of dying or suffering. Now, I don't mean any disrespect to these men who've been defending freedom and all, just that I wish freedom was not in need of being defended. I wish that deep down inside, each and every human being could cherish it enough not to feel compelled to take it away from other human beings...
But back to the drama, now! I started watching it because is it starring So Jisub as the leading man. I loved him in Sorry, I Love You and in Rough Cut. He always plays strong silent type guys and he manages to make me fall for them every time! Also, the other leading man, Yoon Kye Sang is also an handsome and able actor. The drama has this really heavy war atmosphere, heavier even, I'd say, than in Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (starring Kazunari Ninomiya who's totally brilliant in this role and Ken Watanabe).
Both these works display the hard on, dehumanizing realities that soldiers face in war; fear, loss of purpose, death, lack of proper nutrition and hunger, hydration, bitter cold, unhygienic conditions in which they have to try to survive from their wounds, the mental suffering, the competitive spirit, and all the crazy things they have to go through just to survive. It's impossible to watch these and not feel touched and transformed. You just can't feel neutral towards them. They shake you inside out. They make me get kind of "oversensitive"... I mean, I spent all week scolding Nick for not finishing his food while images of soldiers trying to eat mud to avoid going crazy under the burning sun or sharing the last meal they had for their whole "crew" (I'm sorry, I'm really ignorant when it comes to terms about dividing crowds into military units)...
I just feel so grateful living in Canada, with a roof over my head, food on my plate 3 meals a day and all that I get to enjoy that I know other people have sacrificed their lives over to make sure I would have. And I feel cheap. Like, really really cheap, towards the 80% of humanity that I know does not get any chance of ever enjoying these benefits that a lot of my contemporaries take for granted...
But the drama isn't all just gore and violence and dark, there's also a beautiful love story about two kids for fall in love and who go to great lengths to survive in order for their lover to have someone to come back to and something to believe in to drive them through. It's also about comradeship, brotherhood, and making negative feelings grow into fondness and caring...
-The finale of the drama was a bit WTF?! though, I don't think that guy, as die hard as he is, could have survived 60 years on a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!-
This makes me want to pledge to end all this warfare non-sense within my lifetime... But I have no clue how realistic that would be...
And I don't really understand why this growing fascination I have for warfare, lately... It's been haunting me in my dreams, making me question the nature of my relationships with my friends and loved one and the means and to what extent I would go to protect them... What about you?