David Lean lecture
Already I’ve seen so much evidence of our own history being re-written. What’s more, I’ve come to accept what I could never have accepted as a young man: that history itself belongs to the victor, and that we can never underestimate the power of corruption to change history.
As a society, I’ve come to find out, it’s still very much the third grade – and we behave like a lynch mob. We pile on. I’ve seen this again and again – whether it’s in a combat platoon in the grip of fear and wild rumour, or a student revolution without rules, where the strongest rule is through intimidation, or Wall Street stock madness, or 2001 hysteria and an immature president who divided an unsettled citizenry for political advantage. Nor should we forget that many liberals in America – John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and respected magazines such as The New Yorker – also felt stampeded, as a result of that fear and terror of 9/11, to grant Bush his war powers. That too was a conformist mob.
In the name of not being hated for our dissent, we the American people signed off, through our legislators, on our essential liberties without knowing it. I would say to you we don’t even have these rights anymore. They’re gone. Because every American I know, of any sensitivity, has some innate understanding and fear that each and every one of us can be listened upon, our email and bank accounts, our medical records, our sexual priorities known, and that at the end of the day we can be destroyed financially, reputationally or physically by our own government and media, if they so wanted. The right to any privacy at all has been sacrificed on the altar of our “national security.”
And it has happened, as so much does in evolution, unseen, quietly, in the middle of the night. It comes not as a coup d’état but as a fait accompli. And we find ourselves now in a perilous and dark time, darker than anything I’ve known in my 60 years. What are we to do? Are we to acquiesce? Do we have a choice? Are we to die terrified as individual slaves? Is it possible, like Spartacus, to resist? To join others in an assembly of honesty and goodness and find ways to restore decency to this terrifying world?
What are we to do? Can we heal, not only ourselves, but in the process can we heal our planet? Can we legislate clearly and collectively an end to carbon emissions into the atmosphere? We know only too well we can but it takes a collective will and we all, like lost children, look to the leader who will take us to that will. We want it, and yet we don’t seem to need it enough. And it’s need, through the sweat and toil of needing it, that we will get it.
We know our movies, our dreams, can help a little, a lot to point out this will. In the movies we can, almost subversively, approach the individual in the dark and revive the memory of how things can be. Sometimes, though rarely, these films can create a collective action. But as my experience of making Vietnam movies, or Salvador movies, or JFK movies has taught me, we must accept our limitations with humility and with even deeper understanding. To paraphrase Carlos Castaneda of Don Juan fame: “We must undertake every one of our actions with all the ardour we have and, at the same time, must be able to walk away from the result of our action with detachment.” I won’t give up believing that movies can help in some way by expressing the best in us to help others to connect, to light a candle in the darkness to our memory and to our imagination.
I wish, in my daily life, to struggle to keep my consciousness growing and not to fall asleep, which I’ve done many times in my life. I want to teach my children by broadening their minds as best I can, by travelling them to other experiences in the world, by teaching them where I can my own tolerances and appreciation of what freedom is, and reminding them by example the price at which it comes, by which I mean not only silver.
I hope then that people will leave our movie theatres renewed and made sacred again, that movies can heal the tribe and not tear it apart. I really want to believe there is something beyond the physical, that there is within us a great metaphysical, a reaching to the stars to survive, an ability to overcome all obstacles, even the greatest of them all: the warming of our planet.
Theodore Roethke wrote: “In a dark time the eye begins to see.” In that vein, we must remember we all drink the same water, we all struggle under that same sun, we all sleep, eat, love, hate with a similar passion and hurt. As stupid as we often are, we all understand that it is in our interest and to our profit to survive together as a species.
-Oliver Stone, BAFTA David Lean Lecture, September 6 2006 [x]
