Yesterday I did something unusual; I found myself very irritated with the american “hollywood movies” with heroes explosions and perfect endings, and so I decided to watch a chinese film - the original version of Mulan, rather than the american-Disney-happy-ending version.
I was surprised to find how different the original story is. Mulan was one of the best soldiers in her army, both in skill and in intelligence. She was a general along with Wentai - not “Shang” as in the Disney version - and was in war for 12 years. She saw friends die, her emotional attachment caused the death of many men, and she actually did love the general - but there is no happy ending to the story.
Turns out general Wentai, who knows her identity as a woman, but still respects her and does all he can to make her stronger and into a better warrior hands himself in to the enemy army in exchange for their survival because he is a prince. Mulan is able to rescue him, but they find that the princess of the enemy people wants to marry one of the Wei - Mulan’s people - for war to cease. Therefore, Wentai would have to marry this princess instead of Mulan. Towards the end of the movie, he says he wants to flee to be with Mulan “It is easy to give up my life for the war to cease, but it is much harder to give up the woman I love”. Mulan tells him she will always love him, but that his marriage is the only way for there to be no more war, no more death, no more hatred. They must sacrifice love for there to be peace.
The last part of the film says:
“Someone once said: Travel too far from home, and you will lose your roots; if you kill too many people, you will lose yourself; if you die in the battle, your life will sing into the ground like rain and vanish without a trace. If at that time you fall in love with someone, hope will blossom again from the earth and passionately embrace life.”
This made me very thoughtful of our western culture nowadays. In a sense, love and ‘being in love’ is very important - even the american movies put this idea - but the western culture puts it above all other feelings and circumstances; they say that you have to be happy, you have to be with the one you love. You. No one else. In a sense, it’s rather ironic that love should be praised in such a selfish - and therefore unloving - way.
We have learnt to see 'love' as a way of self satisfaction, and a way to make ourselves feel happy: we must be with people who make us happy, and love excuses so many things that otherwise would be inexcusable. I wonder how many of us nowadays, in our self-centred culture would have been willing to do what was done for honour and peace in the film. Are those even concepts we value and understand?
As I observe social interaction, and as I am questioned as to why I am not one to be in parties and be involved in one night stands or short term relationships without any real commitment, I am having to think through consciously what these things look to be for myself and why I’d rather pull myself apart from them. Most of these ‘relationships’ - if we can call them that - objectify the other person so they are mostly a tool, a means to ‘have a good time’, detaching the other person from their human image of a person with an origin, history, opinion, feelings. Someones have become somethings.
I believe this is happening for mainly two reasons. I may be wrong, but comparing nowadays to human history, we are in a sense living better times: wars are not as common as they once were, slavery is now fought against, and human rights exist and we try to apply them. ‘Problems’ are being reduced. We are, now, focusing more on ourselves and our wants, simply because we can. We have no more reason to need one another, because we are used to having no needs that are not satisfied. The only aspects in which we need one another have become very emotionally detached, and people have become as disposable as our plastic cups at the end of a party. The capitalist way of thinking has made everything about our own satisfaction, having more to be happier, and substituting one ‘product’ for another whenever the first ceases to satisfy us.
When we ‘are in love’, but still live selfishly, we are loving ourselves more than anyone else. When one cheats on another because they ‘loved someone else’, they are using a desire to follow one’s own desire - and therefore self satisfaction and self love - to justify an unjustifiable action. Ultimately, although we idolise the idea of loving and being in love, we idolise it for the benefits it has for us to have a witness to our lives and the fact it makes us happy, rather than to make someone else happy. We are seldom carried beyond ourselves. We love for our own sake, rather than for others.
Oswald Chambers said:
“If human love does not carry a man beyond himself, it is not love. If love is always discrete, always wise, always sensible and calculating, never carried beyond itself, it is not love at all. It may be affection, it may be warmth of feeling, but it has not the true nature of love in it.”
And this, from my humble - and very possibly wrong - perception of the world and my generation is what seems to be happening. We love love more than we actually do love people, we love ourselves and our happiness, dreams and desires more than anything else - because we have reached a technological and economical point in which we don’t really need anyone so close, do we? So why bother with the complications of proximity?
This brings me to the second point: apart from being so self centred, we seem to be afraid of emotional entanglement, because loving means that we are vulnerable. It is easier to objectify others, to see them as someone so far apart from us they are not of the same kind. With our technology and so many solutions to our problems we have become accustomed to have control over all things, and needing someone else that cannot be controlled and that has power to hurt is is a major fear factor.
We have learnt - and I definitely include myself in this group - to wrap our hearts carefully in other things that are within our control. Facts, theories, knowledge, labels, books, having ‘a good time’, music, drink, entertainment, work, take your pick of things you are attached to more than people. These are the things we ultimately live for. These are the things that occupy most of our time, and human profound and real relationships are just too complicated and hurtful to keep on a long term basis. A computer, a social network, a fictional character are so much simpler, ideal, are they not? They are results of our imagination and skill and we can build them to be what we want them to be - people, not so much.
So as I come to the end of my considerations, I wonder if nowadays we really are better off than the days we had more ‘problems’, because I believe in a sense our ‘problems’ have just changed to be much more disguised and much more deeply woven into ourselves and our souls, in our very beings and the way we view our own kind. Pain united us when love failed to do so, whereas now we love the idea of love more than we actually do love anyone but ourselves. We have become the centre of our own small universes, and therefore, when we perish ‘in the battle field’, we leave no hope to blossom and embrace life - we search so much for our own pleasure and our own emotional well being away from pain, we seep into the ground like rain and vanish without a trace, because the only ones capable of caring for us are ourselves.
Maybe it is because of this - because of this search for meaning - that we see the ‘being in love’ as being so ideal, it is our attempt to be more than a shadow quickly fading. But while we do not learn not to have control, while we do not learn to be vulnerable, we will be nothing but dried up flowers who lost our beauty to the harshness and coldness of those surrounding us - with all the beauty we could share being drained out, frozen and shattered just because coldness is the way the world works, and it's so damn hard to be anything different from the rest.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from the perturbations of love is Hell.”C.S.Lewis, The Four Loves
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