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| Hey folks, this requested video comes from Alex from Australia, who asked me to review the 1997 film The Thief. | |
| And just let me tell you that this film is absolutely amazing. | |
| If you like this channel, if you read Blogs in the Manosphere, it's probably right up your alley. | |
| You're probably going to really enjoy it. | |
| It was very well put together and it tells a very poignant story of being a boy growing up in the post-World War II Soviet Russia era. | |
| Absolutely amazing. | |
| This video won't have any spoilers, but parts two and three will. | |
| So I strongly recommend that you, after listening to this video, go check it out for yourselves. | |
| You'd be hurting yourselves to not watch this movie. | |
| It's brilliant. | |
| Now in this film, I'm going to try and give you the background for what you need to really understand this movie, some useful information to inform your perspective. | |
| And I'll be covering, first of all, the nature of Russian cinema and Russian literature in general, because it is a bit different from what we're used to here in the West. | |
| Next, we're going to talk about political allegory. | |
| And finally, the low trust society. | |
| And if you're thinking this might be related to my last video, it very much is, but we'll get to that when it comes up. | |
| So first of all, the nature of Russian writing of Russian cinema. | |
| You see, the Russians, the whole nature of their storytelling is very, it's very, it assumes that you understand the experience, that you have some information about what it's like to be a human being, what it's like to live in these circumstances. | |
| See, with the Western storytelling, we tend to be more didactic. | |
| We describe the sequence of events. | |
| We're very linear, we're very explanatory. | |
| Whereas with the Russian style, it's more about the overall experience of the entire thing. | |
| For instance, right now I'm reading Roadside Picnic, a Russian sci-fi novelette. | |
| And at one point, the protagonist, he had a bad day, so he's getting hammered in the bar. | |
| And as he gets drunker, people appear and disappear without saying where they are. | |
| You know, suddenly Joe is somewhere else. | |
| It becomes increasingly chaotic. | |
| And it's not a clear sequence of events lined up to explain why all of this craziness happens. | |
| He eventually throws an alien artifact into the middle of the bar that causes everybody to have an emotional freak out and escapes through the window in the bathroom. | |
| It doesn't explain how all of this comes about, because the protagonist doesn't remember. | |
| He's drunk. | |
| He's being a lunatic, drinking way too much, everybody's screaming, there's loud music, etc. | |
| And it's written in that manner. | |
| So with Russian cinema, it's very much pulling you into this experience, pulling you into understanding the perspective of a character, rather than telling you what happened to them to give them this perspective. | |
| I wouldn't say it's better or worse than more Western styles of writing, but it is something that you need to be prepared for. | |
| It's not going to be all laid out for you. | |
| You know, we like things being all laid out, very explained. | |
| Now, don't get me wrong, Russian literature is not like that hack Margaret Atwood. | |
| Russian literature has a point. | |
| It has a story that it's telling, that it's getting across, but it uses slightly different methodology of doing it. | |
| So you kind of have to let yourself go and just experience it. | |
| The next point I want to talk about is political allegory. | |
| Now, some books are absolutely transparent political allegories. | |
| If you take Animal Farm as the most obvious, but even 1984, it's very much, it's a directly political book. | |
| Unfortunately, there's this tendency in people to try and push an allegory on something, or try and say there's an allegory where there isn't. | |
| Now, I'm somewhat of a believer in death of the author. | |
| Death of the author is a concept that the author doesn't always know what they're writing. | |
| That you need the critic to interpret what the author is writing. | |
| True literature, good literature with real humans in it, with real characters, requires interpretation. | |
| And I do support that notion. | |
| But oftentimes what you'll find with the 101-level English student is trying to push some sort of narrative on it, trying to say that it's about Jesus in purgatory, or about how this is really about Barack Obama, or whatever nonsense. | |
| Now that said, The Thief does have an underlying political narrative to it. | |
| Well, it's set in the post-war Russia years, and that's what it's about. | |
| It's about the disappointment of the Russian people with those years. | |
| You know, the protagonist is a young boy who does an amazing acting job, by the way, especially for a child. | |
| And so the young boy kind of represents the Russian people. | |
| And this is this film made in 1997, Looking Back 50 Years, looking back upon childhood, looking at the USSR under Stalin, and being disappointed with all of it. | |
| So there is a political allegory there, but it's very subtle. | |
| And in fact, I really feel that this movie really speaks to us right now, because at the end of the day, the whole issue with Soviet Russia, the issue illustrated by this movie, wasn't necessarily one of economics. | |
| It wasn't one of richness or poverty so much as it was the issue of living in a very low-trust society, which is where we live today. | |
| And this movie really illustrates the fact, and this is kind of the contradictory nature, the paradox of living in a low-trust society. | |
| In a low-trust society, trustworthy people are frowned upon. | |
| Trustworthy people are held in suspicion. | |
| Whereas people that are untrustworthy tend to do quite well for themselves. | |
| You know, I mentioned in another video that right now, one of the few growth industries is multi-level marketing schemes. | |
| It's pyramid schemes. | |
| And the irony being that what this economy needs desperately is real production, real value being added, as opposed to value transference. | |
| And yet it's the people in the value transference industries, in the multi-level marketing scams, or in the banking sector. | |
| These are the ones that can make a lot of money. | |
| That they have a really good credit rating, so they get to drive a brand new car. | |
| I mean, realistically, most of these people are, like, technically speaking, they're poorer than your average waitress because at least she owns her own car. | |
| These people don't own anything, and yet they're living the high life. | |
| Similarly, in the dating market, if you play the scam artist, you are going to get more, you're going to get more success with women than if you play the honest guy. | |
| And we're not talking like beta, needy, pathetic. | |
| We're talking about if you try and genuinely talk to women and get to know them, you are going to be less successful than the guy that's just out there just trying to get them into bed. | |
| And this goes for everything really nowadays. | |
| You know, for job interviews, if you learn manipulation techniques, if you learn NLP, if you learn this stuff, you will do better than the guy that actually has a degree and can actually do something productive for them. | |
| And so this whole movie, even though it's about Soviet Russia, part of it really feels like it's about the modern day. | |
| So I strongly recommend this. | |
| It has themes of boyhood, manhood, what is it that makes a man? | |
| How are we supposed to survive in a low-trust society? | |
| And about how people that do get scammed on some level ultimately want to get scammed. | |
| They make themselves into the victims before the scam artist even arrives. | |
| So with that, please check out this movie. | |
| It's bloody excellent. | |
| I am DB linked down there below. | |
| And next time we're going to talk about the movie itself and a character analysis of everybody that appears. |