Citizenfour, Edward Snowden and Exposing the All-Seeing Eye

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 28, 2014                                   #100

“I did not reveal any US operations against 

legitimate military targets.  I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous.”  

- Edward Snowden

Scientia est Potentia

Citizenfour is a feverishly absorbing documentary film, based on actual events as they occurred, about the bravery of one man and the secrecy of the intelligence surveilling apparatus of the United States government.  The film tells the story of deceit from the highest levels and the risks for revealing to the public these lies from within.  Citizenfour plays out with the chills and the 70's air of paranoia of All the President’s Men and the thrilling conspiracy ride that can be found in The Bourne Ultimatum, adding the looming ambiance and color palette from the Michael Mann palpable film, The Insider.  The exciting and simultaneously scary thing about Citizenfour is the events of this film just happened and are still happening.  The science in this film is not fiction; it is real and in the world, thus making this film quite daunting. 

The film’s director, Laura Poitas, was in the process of putting together a third documentary film on her 9/11 trilogy.  The film, that she has been working on for years, was to be on the topic of domestic surveillance for which she had interviewed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, William Binney and Jacob Appelbaum.  In January 2013, Poitas was contacted by a stranger via a series of encrypted emails under the codename - Citizenfour.  Citizenfour was trying to contact investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald but wasn’t able to, so he contacted Poitas resulting from her resent communications with Greenwald.

Over several emails, Citizenfour offered Poitas inside information about illegal wire-tapping by the National Security Agency (NSA), believing they are serving the national interest, and other intelligence agencies.  In June 2013, she flew to Hong Kong to meet up with the man behind the email correspondences.  She brought her camera and met up with the stranger in a hotel room where the man identified himself as Edward Snowden, who was an infrastructure analyst for the NSA and senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  Poitas was met there by journalist Glenn Greenwald and Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill.  The meetings they have with Snowden are what make up the bulk of the film.  

What’s revealed by Snowden is that the NSA domestically gathers information on the population, it targets the communications of everyone, ingesting this information by default and then filters them, measures them and analyses them.  It then stores all this data for the purposes of efficiency and for retroactive data searches.  Normally this meta-data would be used against someone who was found communicating clandestinely with a foreign government or potentially involved in terrorist activity.   Here they are subverting the power of government for their own means, whether it’s for political or business reasons; they have extended their reach to non-targeted, non-threatening members of society.

The NSA, abandoning the 4^th amendment of the constitution, and other members of the surveillance community, are granting themselves unilateral powers without disclosing their mission to the people of the United States.  This transnational surveillance apparatus is growing bigger with a great storage ability to capture emails, Facebook information, Google searches, and cell phone communication and then use this information if ever the need to discredit or incriminate an individual, that might oppose the questionable political tactics of the United States government or who’s business ideas might threaten the oil-based economy or military operations of America.

Edward Snowden’s motivation here was never to harm anyone, but rather allow a level of transparency to exist between the people of the United States and the government that they the people elected into office.  Disclosing the thousands of documents that confirm that surveillance on citizens is part of their daily data, collecting protocol, clearly was unacceptable to the government because it was supposed to be a secret; these intelligence agencies essentially are stealing individual privacy under the pretense of national security.  This unlawful interception of their communications is something all citizens, that are no threat to the security of the United States, should be made aware of.  Snowden simply wanted to make transparency available to the public and also accountability for those congressionally and constitutionally bypassing the rights and laws of the United States of America.

  

  

The rapacious managers of civilizations have always spied on their own population.  This is not a new concept, the Egyptians and the Greeks did it, controlling people started at the cradle of civilization itself, ancient Mesopotamia.  Poor Socrates was killed as a result of standing up against a corrupt system of government in Greece.  Had Socrates been alive in the sixties and just as well known, he surely would have been on J. Edgar Hoover’s watch list.  Even though clandestine operations existed for centuries, the major difference from now and then is now it is done more covertly.  Communism was tried but failed horribly in the Lenin-Stalin bloodbaths.

There have been moments in history where anti-Christianity forced a controlled civilization to rethink the fractal architecture of their belief systems.  Whether it was Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa shattering conventional portrait painting and defying the hierarchy, or William Shakespeare’s Hamlet questioning death as a real existential reality, new ways of thinking, and thus new ways of descent, was breaking the binding hold the church had over the population.  When dialectical thinking was introduced by philosopher Georg Hegel, the mind-changing totality of truth was made more possible.  Through a triadic structure, Hegel begins with the thesis or idea, which proves itself to be incomplete and unsatisfactory so he carries the idea into antithesis step, which is set to disprove the qualification of the thesis and thus this qualification must be resolved by the emergence of a newer, richer notion; the synthesis step, which forms a more larger and encompassing idea.  This triadic process then is repeated until the original idea has been, through logic, realized as an arrangement of knowledge in its total form.  This revolutionary logic coupled with Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God and Marx's breakdown of the superstructure, proved to be a massive evolutionary leap for how we think about reality.

In today’s world this omnipresent dialectical process becomes a far more subtle but effective way to dull the minds of the masses.  Through the steady stream of the media’s suggestive images and pervasive propaganda, the controlling class has come to perfect their brainwashing hold over their population.  Shaping this dialectic has given these people the power to do pretty well forecast anything they want.  We are among the most technologically advanced hypnotized humans to even live on this planet.  Instead of a ruling class overtly forcing their population into submission they have discovered in the developed countries, violence would fail so instead they wrote an alternative plan for a silent revolution.  Here they would win their right to power through deception, manipulation and covert infiltration.  They would place themselves in positions of influence such as academia, government, communities and the media.  They would study the canon of philosophy, psychology, sociology and history as a method of understanding their targets…… us.

They would employ a high level of fear to keep the population scared of change and afraid of foreigners.  This would keep these delusional people in their homes and hard working at their jobs.  The brazen power structure would convince their population to shop for an infinite amount of products that would fulfill their meek lives.  They would build cities to control the flow of production while the people blinded themselves at night in front of their televisions.

While most of the world sleeps at the wheel the courage of a man like Edward Snowden is its own revolution.  Snowden offered transparency across the board, realizing that his family, friends and colleagues would suffer as a result.  Snowden came forward because as a citizen himself, he saw that the people of the United States were having their own personal agency taken from them.  For coming forward, Snowden has been charged by the United States for espionage, he’s had his US passport decommissioned without any formal charges for exposing his government for cheating the people of America.

The problem here is these agencies are moving forward and escalating their surveillance and storage capabilities without public debate, and without public consent.  This is a violation not only of a person’s individual privacy but what has been promised to them in a free society.  Here the public loses their seat at the table of government, they are told to sit back and trust these intelligence agencies because it’s not in the public interest to know about these spying programs.

Citizenfour, in a quite interesting way, explores a massive problem facing the population of the developed countries.  The film sets out to inform the viewer that their liberties have been forcibly devolved resulting from the events of September 11, 2001.  This attack on New York City provided the intelligence community along with the White House, the excuse they needed to suspend the rights of the population under the precept of nation security.

Citizenfour is a brave film and one deserving of as much attention as possible.  This film is a tribute to meticulous reporting from the world of journalism rarely ever seen these days.  Most all journalism has been captured and is now under the control of the elite.  That makes this a refreshing look into journalism in its honest reporting form.

Why all the spying?  Some of the reason is to have access to go into any email or listen to any conversation, or read any text message.  It’s for the purposes of analyzing and monitoring credit card and debit spending habits, so multinational corporations can use prediction methods and financial strategies of selling more products to citizens, and capturing people into a maze of debt that locks them in forever.  This film shows that these methods of manipulation is not a conduct befitting of a so-called free-society.  The film is asking for a revolution against these secret men in the shadows that continue to spy on everyone.

This system is designed in a form of a Panopticon, where citizens are unaware when they are being watched but are aware that they are being watched.  This trains the human being into a form of compliance so they don’t get in any trouble from the ruling class.  This system functions the way it does because we can’t see it clearly, because there are many secrets kept from us all.  Our attention is constantly diverted from real problems to more trivialized ones found on TV screens, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift videos or at movie theatres.  We have become so dumb-downed that we can no longer see the system walls themselves.  Instead we are in a haze of shallow interests like shopping and Facebook surfing.

What Snowden feared was that we were all losing our identities because of being watched by those at the center of the Panopticon.  Sadly this has led us all to fear, which leads to emptiness and discomfort which as a result leads to a form of greed.  Greed leads us to getting what we want which leads to putting acquisition and production above all.  This leads to frustration when our level of greed isn’t met, which this leads to aggression and the willingness to ignore another person’s feelings leading to apathy.

Aggression itself leads to paranoia because of the fear that others might be as aggressive as you so you push yourself even further.  The problem here is this leads to obsession with control and power over others and maintaining a security to protect yourself from potential threats that might as well only exist in your mind.  This paranoia is a form of misplaced guilt that you harbor while protecting yourself from others.  This as a weapon is bureaucracy which means the limitation of feelings, ambivalence and anything else that might interfere with production.  Here in lies the core of this spy issue is production.  A democracy is production based so therefore anything that intercepts that process is the enemy, is a terrorist, is a virus, is a foreign entity, is fear.  We’ve redefined our society around production and anyone that has a problem with this is a terrorist, is an enemy and as a result must be removed.  Period.

The Imitation Game and Cracking the Code of the Human Mind

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 28, 2014

“….are you paying attention?”

There are some spoilers ahead.

The Imitation Game is a fascinating, thrilling film about of group of mathematicians and logicians that are brought together by the British Government to crack the Nazi’s Enigma code machine during World War II.  This, nail-biting race against time, film is about Englishman Alan Turing, an eccentric genius, whose love of puzzles and code-breaking essentially certified him to devise a machine, which can compute the solution to any solvable algorithm and could eventually decode Enigma messages.  As a result of this mountainous task, Alan Turing, the legendary cryptanalyst, built the first computer that functioned using a form of universality rather than specific programs that independently performed computational tasks.  At first, a hypothetical device, that Turing had been thinking about for years, which could follow instructions and was meant as a thought experiment to investigate the limits of mathematical systems.  The device became known to the world as The Turning Machine.

The brilliant team of code-breakers was brought together by the military and MI6 to Britain’s top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park.  Alan Turing, a wildly misunderstood thinker, was brought on board and told that the Nazi German Enigma machine is causing them to lose the war.  Dr. Turing, a man that doesn’t play well with others, wanted to work alone so he can build a machine that is able to crack Enigma, an electro-mechanical rotor cipher machine that was able to encipher and decipher secret messages sent to and from Nazi Military Forces.  The rest of the team and military involved in the top-secret operation thought Turing and his methods a bit bizarre.  People were not an important feature for the most part in the adult life of Alan Turing.

Turing took control of the operation thanks to the confidence of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who realized that intelligence wins wars and that Turing was undeniably intelligent.  Turing added Joan Clarke, a math genius in her own right, to help with ‘Christopher’.  That was the nickname Turing gave his machine he was building, named after his first love at age 16, Christopher Morcom back when he was in public school.  Joan Clarke’s function other than helping Turing flesh out the mathematical complexity and computation data created by Christopher, was to help this socially inept man work with others.  Joan Clarke, because she was a woman and at the time wasn’t allowed to work directly with the men, helped him out of his shell, and to realize that more heads were better than one.

While Turing struggled to complete his work on his machine with the ticking clock of the British military at his ear, the film cut back to his early childhood.  Here we got to see the awkward young Turing witness firsthand how much human beings love violence because it makes them feel good.  He also realized that if you eliminate what they are feeling good about, the suffering of others, then it is no longer fun for them.  The film also cuts to the future after the war where Turing has his apartment broken into, launching a police investigation ending with the arrest of Alan Turing, a secret war hero that no one ever heard of, for homosexual activity.

The film was surprisingly funny and equally if not more, heartbreaking.  The tragedy here is Turing killed himself because of depression at age 41, in all likelihood because the unenlightened courts charged him with gross indecency and forced him to take hormonal estrogen drugs to ‘cure’ his homosexual illness or go to jail for two years.  What happened here was an overwhelming amount of ignorance and fear essentially extinguishing the genius of Alan Turing.  The man could have gone on and accomplished who knows what had he lived into his eighties.  He added universality which gave birth to the modern computer while his law-enforcing contemporaries remained close-minded.

Hitler’s Nazi forces were beaten as a result of one man’s mind.  To repay this man for saving millions upon millions of lives, they chemically castrated him which led to his own death, by poisoning an apple and eating it.  Turing was always wary of lesser men than him.  Their ignorance certainly annoyed him because it’s likely he saw himself as the potential that could have been.  This is likely why he held such contempt for dumb people, not for any major egotistical reason, but because of the waste of the capacity of their own minds.

Like the Civil Rights Movement, homosexuality has become more acceptable in society but it still has a long way to go.  This is because of the dumb people that Turing feared and held contempt for in his time.  They don’t know why they have a problem with it.  From a ratiocinative standpoint, sexual identity isn’t anyone’s business.  Like racism, homosexuality only negatively affects dumb people.  Smart people never sit around plotting ways to rid the world of gay people.  Why, because they have better things to think about and do.  It’s really that simple, the hindrance here is the people who have a problem with homosexuality don’t really know why they do, they just do.  No one is born a bigot, a racist, or a homophobe, they are taught to hate people that are not like they are.  They do this out of fear because as stable as they like to think they are, they really have no idea about how they arrived at what it is they look at in a mirror every morning, and that terrifies the hell out of them.  This results in a system shut down, no more new information is allowed in their braincase.  They maintain their ignorance and stick to their group of bigots, racists, and homophobes for security. 

The film dealt with Alan Turing’s homosexuality and his punishment quite respectfully but more importantly, they didn’t allow the issue of homophobia to dominate the man’s true genius and contribution to computer sciences and society.  This discussion could come off as deliberately downplaying Turing’s homosexuality so homophobes aren’t dissuaded from attending the film.  The filmmakers acknowledged what had happened to him because it’s the most tragic part of his life, but out of respect for the work, they didn’t dwell on it.  Something as idiotic as homophobia, although a real problem for many in society, doesn’t deserve the platform that Alan Turing’s magnificent machine does.  

The filmmakers know as well that these issues of equality have been dealt with many times over.  The problem of sexual discrimination cannot be tackled from the top of a mountain, for that reform must come from the base.  People that go see movies like this know how they feel about homosexuality one way or another.  The problem is parents, ignorant parents, religious parents, are teaching their children to hate people that are not like them.  They are teaching their children that homosexuality is a disease that only God, medication, or violence can cure. 

Sadly, we live in a society filled with stupid people that think like this.  It’s unfortunate that so many of us are not nurtured to open our minds and see beyond our own fear-based ignorance.  If we want to shift the tide toward equality for all, we are going to have to cut the tether of religion and other Iron Age beliefs.  We are going to have to teach people that they can’t control the sexual preferences or lifestyles of other people.  Sadly we want to control so much, this is something we are going to have to get over in order to nurture this human project into a color-blind and sexually-oriented blind future.

One of the other major ethical dilemmas in the film was code-named ULTRA.  This was when Turing and his team broke Enigma’s code; they came to realize that they couldn’t use this newfound information to alert British and Allied forces of impending attacks by the Nazis.  Doing so would let the German military know that their Enigma machine was cracked.  Instead Turing with the help of MI6 would leak various planned Nazi attacks and attribute that discovery from some other intelligence source, or they would accredit the intelligence based on reconnaissance missions to disguise the source of ULTRA information.  They would also have to allow attacks that they are aware of happen, regardless of the deaths involved.

This is where the logic of utilitarianism was pushed to its ethical limits.  The greater good here had to prevail in order to win the war.   By doing this many lives were lost but hundreds of thousands ended up being saved as a result.  It is believed that because of Dr. Turing’s contribution, the war was shortened by at least two years.  After the war Turing assisted the British government with the early stages of computer programming.   Along with his Turing test, these contributions would later lead to massive computers, the internet, and cell phone technology.

The Turing Test is an imitation game that would place a human interrogator and two unseen entities in other rooms, where one is a human and the other is a computer.  If the interrogator was unable to tell which one is the human, then the computer was deemed to possess artificial intelligence.  Turing thought it didn't matter how intelligence was arrived at, merely how clever it was at its arrival. 

"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human."  

- Alan Turing 

Alan Turing was an iconoclastic man that lived more in his head rather than in the social settings of city life.  He was a man, looking at the world of the mind from a skewed unorthodox perspective, that most would have sooner looked the other way because of this eccentricity.  But as a result of his inability or lack of interest, to be what was socially expected of him, he quite literally thought outside of the box.  True genius it appears is founded in solitude, where a man like Turing never really participated in what most people think of as ‘daily living’.  The one thing that this form of individualized thinking tells us is how diluted the average person’s thinking is because of environmental, educational, and sociological influences. 

The Imitation Game is a film about the endless capacity of the human mind.  It’s also about secrets, both personal and public, where knowledge of a man’s sexual orientation becomes the reason that inevitably ends in his death.  The film starts with Turing being interrogated by a police officer that at one point suspected he was a Russian spy.  He would later find out that what Turing was hiding, and not really well, was his homosexuality.  Turing wanted to know if the officer knew what he is, a war hero, a man, a homosexual.  Turing is pointing out how we are so behind when it comes to the potential of the human mind.  He feels, and rightly so, that we are all still caught up on titles and beliefs that never actually originated in our own minds, but were rather taught to us by scared, uninspired adults, devastated at the prospect of change.   

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can

see plenty there that needs to be done.” 

- Alan Turing

The Usual Suspects: Narrative and Discerning the Differences in the Illusion

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 27, 2014

“I’ll get right to the point.  I’m smarter than you.  I’ll find out what I want to know and I’ll get it from you whether you like it or not.”

- Detective Kujan to Verbal

“Who is Keyser Soze?”

The Usual Suspects is one of the last great masterful thrillers in American cinema, resulting from one of the greatest scripts ever written for the screen.  Bryan Singer, of X-Men fame, directed his second film from the blueprint of screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie.

The film eerily opens with out-of-frame pier lights, scintillating beams across the bay water with ominous music playing.  A mystery man casually walks up to Dean Keaton, who has been shot moments prior, and lights his cigarette as Keaton looks up at him, knowing what’s going to happen next, Keaton looks up at the shaded figure as he his shot.

The next day while police investigate, it becomes clear that something big was going down.  There are multiple dead bodies, some burned, and a ship on fire.  The only two survivors is a Hungarian criminal named Arkosh Kovash, who has been hospitalized with severe burns all over his body and a small-time con man named Verbal Kint, a man with cerebral palsy, which causes the left side of his body to be mostly non-responsive.

The five men that the film focuses on are brought into the police station for some trumped-up charge, stealing a truck full of guns.  One by one they are picked up and brought down to the station and interrogated after a quite amusing police line-up scene.

“Hand me the keys you fucking cocksucker!”

McManus, a professional thief and top-notch entry man, his partner in crime Fenster, who speaks in mangled English, and Hockney, explosives expert, all are asked about the stolen truck.  Then Dean Keaton is up and he knows just as the other guys knew, them being brought in there was a joke, some excuse for something else.

McManus decided to use their little unfortunate get together at the police station as an opportunity to recruit for a new job.  Keaton didn’t want anything to do with it.  He just wanted the simple life, above book, legal and away from his previous life of crime.  But he did realize, even though the cops had nothing on him, they weren’t going to leave him alone, so he decided to go along with McManus’ job proposal.

The job was to hit on the NYPD taxi service, an illegal police operation where they would pick up a criminal from the airport, in their police cruiser, and then drive them where ever they need to go in the city, for big bucks of course.  Verbal tells this story, in a series of flashbacks, to Agent Kujan in a messy office at the police station.  Verbal is being ‘interviewed’ by Kujan as he waits for his bail, giving him near-total immunity, to process so he can go.

“Back when I was picking beans in Guatemala, we used to make fresh coffee, right off the trees I mean.  That was good.  This is shit but, hey, I’m in a police station.” 

- Verbal Kint

Kujan wants to know what was going on that led up to so many people dying.  He wants to know if it was a drug deal gone wrong, where is the 91 million dollars in cocaine?  He thinks Verbal knows something and he thinks that Keaton is still alive.  He tells Verbal that Keaton was a bad cop and has faked his death before.

Verbal, now scared a little of Kujan, tells him about a lawyer, Kobayashi, who set up a deal with a man named Redfoot in Los Angeles, the city the group went to sell the jewels they stole from the NYPD taxi service.  They get there and do a job gone wrong and insist on meeting with Kobayashi.

“Keaton fought it as best he could, but a man can’t change what he is, he can convince anyone that he’s someone else, but never himself.” 

- Verbal Kint

Kujan is pulled out of the office and told that the severely burnt Hungarian at the hospital is saying a Turkish criminal mastermind named Keyser Soze is behind the events that happened at the harbor. 

Kobayashi tells Keaton along with the other men by a pool table that he works for Keyser Soze.  He tells them that they have all unintentionally stolen from Soze in their past and as a result, he is ordering them to repay their debt to him.  He wants to break up a cocaine deal at the San Pedro Harbor between the Argentinians and Hungarians, rival groups that Soze wants done away with.  Keaton and the group need to get the drugs and money at the exchange, they get to keep the money, and Soze’s people get the cocaine.

During the present, in the messy office, Verbal tells Kujan about the ‘myth’ of Keyser Soze and how the stories are legendary.  He tells him of how Soze killed his own wife and children in front of the Hungarian mob sent to kill him.  He tells him how Soze then killed all their families and burned down their homes, killed people they knew, or owed them money, and then he disappeared.

The ‘will’ that Soze showed them Hungarians, to kill his family, the only group of people on this planet that most would protect above all.  Like Vlad the Impaler, an ancestor rival of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Soze demonstrated a form of evil that even bad men couldn’t understand.  He recognized that his family would forever be held over his head.  This makes him completely insane, simply because he chose his cocaine business over his family, some would argue that it was pride in the end that did it.  How dare the Hungarian mob threaten his family so he would give them his growing drug territory?

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Fenster decided to bail on their deal with Soze and is killed.  Kobayashi notifies Keaton of the whereabouts of his body, clearly laying the law: If you leave, you die.  The group goes to the beach and buries Fenster in the sand.  As a form of retaliation, or just letting Soze know that they can’t be controlled, the group infiltrates an office building to kill Kobayashi.  Their attempt fails when Kobayashi informs them that Soze’s people are prepared to kill a family member of each of them if they try to back out.  Keaton badly wants to kill him but the group complies and stakes out the harbor and prepares for the job.

Verbal stays behind while Hockney sets a distraction bomb, McManus perches himself on a roof with a sniper rifle and Keaton takes point, entering the harbor.  Soon Hockney’s bomb goes off and gunfire begins, and he is killed in front of wooden boxes of money.  McManus and Keaton check the ship for money or cocaine as they kill Hungarians along the way.  They soon discover that there is no money and that they were tricked.  McManus is killed with a knife in the back of the neck and then Keaton.

“Keaton always said, “I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him.”  Well, I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.” 

- Verbal Kint

Kujan is still confused about the situation when Verbal leaves the police station.  Then in one of the greatest moments in the history of cinema, Kujan notices that the names that Verbal gave him were actually suspects on the wall behind him and then he drops his coffee cup.  The cup smashes on the floor revealing the name Kobayashi printed on the bottom.  Kujan scrambles to get Verbal back as the cripple stumbles out of the police station and suddenly corrects his left limp and hand as he lights himself a cigarette, climbing into Kobayashi’s (clearly not his real name),  Jaguar and drives off into the distance.

The Usual Suspects is a film about chess, it’s a film about strategy, and it’s a film about manipulation and deceit.  It’s a film that explains why choices matter in our lives and that consequences to those choices can be devastating if ill-managed.  The film is a psychological journey into the maze of the mind.  A place we think we know well be we don’t.  The mind tricks us into believing in the world outside our windows as a real place.  The mind tricks us into thinking that what we see is a representation of reality when in actuality, it's diluted and edited to fit into our own comfort bias.
 

The Usual Suspects reminds us that there is a world happening outside of our purview of it.  It lets us know that if we don’t understand that fact, well…the strong have always eaten the weak.  For that, the film is very existential in nature; it’s up Nietzsche’s ally with its harsh reality, even though in the end, it’s still hard to know what really happened.  Our sensory data limits our perception of reality which is why this film leaves us with so many blanks, we change and alter our reality as it happens.  We do this unconsciously, as we invent scenarios in our minds to make life easier to comprehend, we then believe in them scenarios, this becomes the narrative, the story we tell ourselves.  We are agent Kujan, we think we know when we actually don’t know, we think we read people better than they read us; in the end, hilariously, we think we’re right.

"...and like that, poof, he was gone."

WILD and Traveling the Path toward a more Enlightened You

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 27, 2014

“Make no mistake about it – enlightenment is a destructive process.  It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.  Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth.  It’s seeing through the façade of pretense.  It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.” 

- Adyashanti

“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.” 

- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

There are some Spoilers ahead.

Wild is a beautiful, brutally honest film, based on a book written by Cheryl Strayed, about a troubled woman who takes a long hike to essentially find her way back home within herself.  It’s about struggle and realization, it’s about death, loss, and life, failing and growing.  The film starts out in the Mojave desert, a perfect location for a pilgrimage toward a form of enlightenment to begin, which provides the young woman with knowledge about herself in order to live her life while moving toward the middle way, a way where a person can live with themselves.

The film follows Cheryl Strayed as she embarks on a journey to find the girl her mother raised.  After her mother’s death, Cheryl takes a destructive path as she grieves her passing, because as Cheryl later says; her mother was the love of her life.  Cheryl, unable to emotionally handle the overwhelming sense of loss, begins to take heroin and destroys her marriage as she sleeps with pretty well every guy she meets.  In a rash decision, Cheryl, desperately searching for change, sets out for a long hike on the Pacific Crest Trail with no experience and no company.

“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.” 

- Cheryl Strayed

The film has a series of flashbacks, part of her subconscious and conscious mind, that tell her story as she walks for over a thousand miles in the scorching heat, the snowy foothills of the Rockies, and the thick rain of an Oregon forest, on her journey toward self-discovery.  While she combats weather, she suffers from head to blistering toe as she carries a massive bag that weighs almost as heavy as she does, this bag becomes the symbolic mental weight she has been carrying around since her mother died.  The poor girl’s feet probably suffers the most with toenails ripping off and blood soaking through her socks.

Along the way, she runs into a variety of people, ranging from the most polite and helpful to the potentially dangerous, from the disgusting to the adorably sweet.  Cheryl’s main obstacle is herself, which is where the heart of the film lies.  She needs to learn to accept herself for who she is and at the same time, she needs detoxification.  In order for her to straighten her life up, she realizes that the heroin and alcohol must go.  This pilgrimage is just the right cleansing she needs.  This level of solitude is important to rid yourself of the poison of modern-day society.  A society that is sick with alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs, a society bored of itself, and desiring any form of manufactured escape that is made available. 

Emilio Estevez directed a transcendent film in 2010 called The Way, about a father who travels to Europe to recover the body of his estranged son.  While there the father, played by Estevez’s real father Martin Sheen, decides the travel the El Camino de Santiago.  This pilgrimage is where his son died so it becomes important for him to travel it.  Here he was able to experience why his son made his own lifestyle change to a more healthy body and mind.  Like Cheryl, the father learns here that he needs to let go of the structure and restraints of society in order to be free within himself.

“No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.” 

- Freud

Wild is a thoughtful, cathartic, refreshingly genuine portrayal of one woman’s path at finding a form of inner peace.  She pares down her heavy bag of stuff to the bare essentials physically while mentally shedding away her undesirable former self.  She ends her journey with no man in her life, no job to go back to, no money in her pocket and no prospects for the future.  But in the end we see that she’s just fine because she broke her destructive-self down and rebuilt a young woman, who wants to live because she has come to terms with herself, she finally understands what her mother was singing about in their kitchen so many years ago.

Cheryl was able to recognize a disturbance within herself before she decided to travel the Pacific Crest Trail.  Through spontaneity and pretty well no help from anyone in her life, with the exception of her ex-husband who still misses her, she did it.  She finally was able to see that her environment was a toxic one.  Where people drink too much, watch too much TV, shop too much for stuff that doesn’t actually define anything.  She could see the zombies and finally decided that she didn’t want any part of it, she had to be alone so she would no longer feel lonely.  That is the journey we all must face if we desire a healthy mind in a toxic world.  We must break through all the rituals, all the beliefs, and all the other bullshit that's expected of us, and that defines most societies.  We need to do this so we can live with ourselves as we travel a better path toward a meaningful future.

“What if I forgave myself?  I thought.  What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?  What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do?  What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done?  What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men?  What if heroin taught me something?  What if yes was the right answer instead of no?  What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed?  What if I already was?” 

- Cheryl Strayed