Last night I watched the movie ‘Lord of War.’ It’s got Nicholas Cage in it, whom I do so adore. I enjoyed the movie untill the end when it got overly political.
Spoiler Follows
Basically, Cage is a gun-runner. He sells guns to people in all these developing countries and makes a ton of money doing so. The movie ends when Cage’s character (Orvo or something? I’m bad with names) gets caught. His brother is killed (which I predicted after their first scene together, by the way), and his wife and son abandon him. When he gets caught, he tells the dude who has been pursuing him the whole time that he’s going to get away with it because the US Government needs him to sell guns to people they don’t want to get caugh selling guns to. I didn’t really care about the political message at the end of the movie, but I did take away from it two ideas to ponder.
The first idea is this: At the begining of the movie, Cage’s brother’s character has this sign up on the wall at his parent’s restaurant that says ‘Beware of the Dog.’ “You don’t have a dog; is that just to scare people?”Cage asks, to which his brother replies, “It’s to remind me to beware of the dog in myself. The dog that wants to fuck everything that moves; to fight and kill weaker dogs. To remind me to be a bit more human, I guess.” I dig that. Maybe I’ll get a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign for my room.
The second idea is this: Cage’s character made a bunch of money selling guns to poor people so that they could continue to kill each other. He also got his brother killed and destroyed his family. I would argue that the worse of the two crimes is the second; the damage he did to his family is far worse (in my book) than the damage he did to the all the people who killed each other with his guns.
Why do I feel this way? After having read a variety of different stories and historical accounts of famous figures, I came to the conclusion that there were too many people in the world who were ‘good’ to strangers and people they didn’t really know, while being terrible to the people in their lives. Suppose a man struggles to negotiate a peace settlement between two warring tribes, but he also cheats on his wife. In my book, the man is a failure. I don’t care what you do for a bunch of people halfway across the globe; I care about what you do for the people in your life.
It’s for this reason that (especially when I’m drunk around math/physics types) I bad-mouth Albert Einstein. The whole physics community seems to have this obsession with the man, and it bothers me. Was he intelligent ? Sure. Was he creative in his thought process ? Willling to challenge the academic estbalishment? You bet. Concerned about the future of peace in the world? Of course. Was he a good man? Absolutley not; he cheated on his wife, and when she got jealous, remarked that “such jealousy is typical of ugly women.”
The movie just reminded me of that line of thought of mine.