Hotel Rowanda
I want so much to say “go see this film,” but I can’t. No, instead with all my sincerity I would say do not see this film. Why not? Because it’s well done. Because it does what seems to an accurately appalling job of depicting the full immensity of humanity’s inhumanity. Don’t see it because it depicts the act of genocide and its effect. It shows families and homes and lives gunned down, ripped apart, and destroyed. It shows the agony of parents being separated from children, and it puts orphaned children’s fear right in front of you where you can’t avoid seeing it. You can’t avoid seeing the hatred and the violence and brutality and the gore and the pain and the suffering. But what’s worse, you can’t help seeing the stupidity of it– of neighbors murdering neighbors over some imaginary ethnic separation invented by Belgian colonialists. You can’t help but to see the utter indifference of France and Britain and the United States and every other Western nation as an entire race is systematically hunted down and murdered.
It’s all so damning– to see this, and to feel some small portion of the terror and confusion and pain– and to be indifferent or impotent. It’s like watching the news over dinner– one says “oh, how terrible” and keeps on eating. Or one says “dear god, how terrible” and one’s heart breaks as you wish desperately that there was something–anything you could to help just one of displaced and distraught and you fully realize that there is nothing in your power or ability to do that could possibly lessen the suffering. It’s damning to walk out of the movie theatre, and climb into my nice Toyota Corolla and listen to Howie Day while being amused at the drunks staggering down the street, being so fully aware of how …
I hate it. I hate the apathy and the powerlessness. I am less happy because I saw this film. Maybe I don’t deserve to be happy, while thousands are daily dying of famine and malnutrition and provincial civil wars… but even if I don’t deserve to be happy, what good does it for me to be wretchedly unhappy?
