[If anyone's wondering why I chose an OBEY poster for this reaction/blog post about 11th Hour, it's simply because thesis work tends to creep everywhere nowadays (yes, my thesis involves looking at OBEY posters, jealous yet?).]
So, the 11th Hour. When I was checking the class syllabus to look at what the what I was going to get for my GLOBDEV class this morning and I saw we were going to watch this movie I was very 'meh' about things. I remember for a certain period HBO was showing all these global warming/climate change/environmental awareness films. It was probably an Earth Day or something stint. I never bothered to watch of those films though despite the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio was narrating this movie in particular. Leo DiCaprio is an amusing and talented man but I'm not that gaga over him to want to watch an environment movie on HBO over bumming on the internet. So prior to 16 February 2012 I have not seen the 11th Hour.
How did I find it? Well to answer that question let's ask myself a bunch of other questions!
Did I fall asleep while watching?
Surprisingly, no. I was awake for the entire class period despite the fact I slept at 4am and woke up four hours later. In fact, the moment I got into class and the movie was playing I pulled out my handy dandy notebook and started taking down notes/taking down the cool quotes.
Did the movie get my full and undivided attention?
It had my attention up until the half-hour mark upon which I started doodling on my notebook and checking my phone to see if my friends were free for some happy lunch fun times. Still quite surprised I didn't end up sleeping though.
How often did I step out to "use the restroom"?
Once. I really did use the restroom, too.
Did I have any sarcastic remark in my brain whilst watching? Did I eyeroll at any of the things mentioned? Did I let out the bored 'yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this shit' sigh?
No, no, annnnnnd no.
Would I watch this movie again?
As much as I found the insights from the movie very intriguing, and as much as I loved it whenever the hippie-esque and nature-y experts (who were these awesome patterned jumpers/outfits) spoke, I would not watch this movie again without someone's else's initiative.
As far as movies that attempt to educate people and make people more environmentally aware and conscious of nature and climate change, this video jellyfishes/floats between your usual run-of-the-mill types of movies like that and something that's really going to hit you home. I personally could have done without the lady voice-over during certain scenes where she describes the images flashing in the movie, Leo DiCaprio was enough thankyouverymuch. I really liked what a lot of the experts had to say. I honestly thought most of them would just ramble jargon about things I already knew. Their points on how vital nature was, how undermined and abused it got during and after the Industrial Revolution, and how important it is for people to realize and understand that shit's going to hit the fan and probably already has and that something should be done encompass how the movie was able to hit me home. Right now I'm going to explain in three segments how this movie hit me home and why I believe people should start giving a bit of a fuck towards environmentalism or at least goddamn Nature.
BY THE WAY, I apologize right now for all and any run-on sentences that appear on this blog post but do bear in mind that this is an indicator as to how much this movie stirred my brain and turned its usual soupy-ness to flowing juices. (See that? It's another run-on.) And now without further ado, I give you my two-cents opening each with a quote I got from the film itself.
"A septillion number of things are happening in your body right now and that is what you call Life."
I am a selfish person. I don't normally subscribe to the realist pool of thinking but I am very adamant when I say that I am a selfish person. When I think about it I do a lot of things in relation to me and my interests. I also like to believe that my generation and future generations are selfish or at least self-absorbed. We care about our "individuality" and our "uniqueness" to the point that we normally wouldn't give a fuck about campaigns, lectures, or discussions unless it put you somewhere at least off-center. Why am I mentioning this? I'm mentioning it because 11th Hour was clever by devoting a good amount of the first half of the movie talking about people and how amazing and spectacular we are. By doing this, by discussing and reminding the viewers how awesome the human race was, we become more drawn and enticed to paying attention for the remainder of the movie.
In addition to that, the experts also give much emphasis to how amazing our planet is. Earth is extraordinary because it is the only planet in our solar system that can sustain life. We are part of that life and thus we should thank our lucky stars (pun not intended) every day that we can live because our Earth is awesome. This was how the first half of the movie made me feel. It reminded me that 1. I am a lucky and special person because 2. my planet is special and lucky to be situated perfectly in the solar system to sustain life. These notions in my brain re-establish my sentiments towards the planet Earth and thus I am more inclined to care so to what's happening to it.
"The industrial system had to be reinvented."
Furthermore into the movie the experts and DiCaprio mention the changes that has happened over the years. In the beginning Humankind has been gracious. We have depended on Nature to support us in our endeavors from feeding us, sheltering us, giving us more resources, basically for survival. And this was alright up until the industrial revolution wherein we stopped treating Nature as an equal or someone we respected and thanked but we started abusing her. As one expert said, we turned Nature into a resource which we believed was endless. This notion is was stupid and is still stupid for all those who believe it. Nature is not endless. It is not like bottomless iced tea in ChicBoy wherein you can just ask a waiter or go up to the counter for a refill.
As early as primary education I was told that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be transferred and transfigured from one entity to another. We needed Nature for energy. We needed this energy to progress. We needed progress to survive, to stay alive. My world today is pretty sweet in terms of how easy things are. I do a lot of research online and spare hours on end sitting in a library. I don't carry around a bulky CD player and a stack of CDs to listen to music because my compact iPod stores thousands of good tunes. I don't have to phone up my friends or write letters to stay in touch because I got Facebook, Yahoo Messenger Chat, and emails. My life is wired and don't even get me started on how much globalization has affect my life. And d'you wanna know what I think about it?
It fucking sucks to a certain extent.
I'm not a huge fan of F. Sionil Jose. I frankly hated his two-cents on the CCP "Blasphemous" Exhibit Debacle but I won't get into that here. I agree though when he said that we have grown quite shallow over the years. I swear I probably came into this life an ocean and slowly digressed into a river, to a lake, and perhaps I am currently just a deep-looking puddle. I enjoyed living in the library. I enjoyed owning a CD player and actually going to record bars to buy CDs. I loved calling my friends and writing letters and exerting an effort to stay in touch. Things have become way too easy and it'll only get easier and I shudder to imagine how my half-brother will be when he grows up knowing that he's about to become four and he knows how to use apple products. I figure that I could always choose not to be so engrossed by the technology today but it's become hard because over the years the industrial revolution has become integrated to our lives that we can't do a lot without its fruits.
The industrial revolution has done the following negatives:
1. It has made us too dependent on technology
2. It has made Nature an abused resource
3. It has made us shallow in relation to #4
4. It has turned out mindset into putting our economic needs and comforts first before our care for our surroundings and other people.
5. Fossil fuels.
You can look back at your old high school papers to figure out why fossil fuels are a negative. Seriously. You probably did a high school paper or an early college paper on climate change/global warming and read up on wiki or some quick links as to why fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, and the ozone should be taken note of. Long story short, humankind has changed its dependency on nature to dependency on fossil fuels which hurt Nature and in relation the Earth and by extension, us. We are committing slow suicide with his new dependent relationship and it should be changed. It has come to a point where we should understand we cannot do away with our need for fossil fuels but we should figure out how to become less clingy and dependent on it. We should turn that seemingly exclusive relationship to something polyamorous. We should learn to seek back Nature in our lives. We should learn to court her again. We should remind ourselves that we need her, and that we are her.
"We are not separate from Nature. We are Nature."
It is part of our culture to pride ourselves as human beings and consequently we tend to take things that are not immediately related to us in this moment and time for granted. Nature is one of them. We do not see Nature as something directly linked to us anymore but rather we see it as something we use, a commodity, we see her like we see a toaster. We only need the toaster when we want to toast things and we only need Nature when we need raw materials to make shit that makes our lives "better" and "easier". I would just like to say there is something genuinely eff'd up about that.
I may not be the most environmentally aware person in the world but I am aware that I shouldn't just waste resources all willy-nilly. I may not advocate for people to start recycling and go green but I do support the endeavors of those who do and make it a point to not go overboard in the polluting. Watching the 11th Hour doesn't want me to drastically make a change my lifestyle for the greener, but it has given me enough food for thought to know what to instill and value whenever I am independent, on my own, and perhaps raising a family. If there's one thing I really got from the movie was that it reminded me that I should get off my high horse thinking that mankind is all that. We're not. Just because we know how to make tools and we communicate on a level more intricate than others does not give us the right to fuck with Mother Earth. We're the ones who are making the mess, we should be the ones cleaning it up, that sort of deal. Humility. That's what the 11th Hour has fully embarked onto me. By the fact that I actually got something out of watching such a movie already makes it something worth watching at least once, thus making it not another pointless educational video.
ALTHOUGH, if you ask em what would make an epic environmental awareness video/instant Oscar for Leonardo DiCaprio? An animated film with Leo voicing the main character which is a polar bear dealing with global warming. Now that'd be hilarious. That or extremely stupid. I ought to stop doing blog posts early in the morning/stop.
It's dangerous for to read your blog posts so late at night, I won't be able to sleep from all the mental stimuli. *-*
ReplyDeleteAwwwww, Eri. <3
DeleteIt's okay, imagine the late nights I spent just coming up with all that here. @___@