I was re-watching Sicario (2015) the other day, and it got me thinking of the forces we give control of our lives over. Gods come in many forms, and us moderns are as guilty of idol worship as any other pagan tribe.
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Now, if you haven't seen the movie Sicario, I don't know what you're doing with your life.
It's one of the best movies that's come out in the past few years.
And this video, I'm going to be talking about themes from the movie, but the movie is the theme, so it's essentially spoilers.
I would really recommend you go and book a couple of hours to go watch that excellent film, then come back to this video.
So I'm going to assume that you've all seen it.
That you understand the themes, the organizations, and I can just jump into this without wasting too much time introducing all the concepts.
You know, the one thing that strikes me about the movie is the whole layout of the modern security infrastructure.
You know, if you think medieval times, you think stone walls and iron bars.
Whereas this modern world, it's all about glass walls and chain-link fences.
Floodlights, night vision technology, accounting, spying on people, tracking people.
It's more than ever this game of chess where you just align all the forces against whatever your target is.
But the question, and the question being posed, being asked by Sicario, is under what circumstances, for what reasons do we align all these forces?
In Mexico, they still worship the gods of death, the Incan gods, the gods of torture and mutilation and brutality.
Those gods are still very, very alive in that country.
And while the gods of Africa are pretty dark and horrific, the Aztec gods are just so much more organized, not psychopathic in their brutality.
Not at all.
Far too passionate.
They enjoy it too much.
They enjoy the sadism doesn't even do it justice.
what they get up to down there.
And so this is what the Americans, the CIA and Sicari were going up against.
But what are the CIA?
Well, what God do they follow?
It's the god Leviathan, the god of order.
But it's order for order's sake.
The violence in Mexico is so chaotic, unrestrained, unpredictable.
Anywhere and everywhere.
You don't know who's on which side.
Half the police are corrupt.
The violence north of the border.
Chain link fences, glass windows, conference rooms, and control points.
But why control points?
Control points for the sake of control points.
One of the things that really stands out from the visuals in Sicario that has really communicated very well is how America is being turned into an open-air prison.
You know, you have those really cold shots where the helicopters going above all the housing divisions, you know, laid out like a prison complex with the eye in the sky like a panopticon.
And then you have that sudden tonal shift where they go to the bar.
And the bar is this, allegedly, down-to-earth, relaxed, normal place.
Except it's not, is it?
That's where she meets her assassin.
And there's just as many eyes on the bar as there are flying through the sky over suburbia.
Eyes absolutely everywhere.
The bar is where you go to vent it out.
Vegas is where you go to pretend that you're free for a little while, while it's also one of the most monitored cities in the world.
Open air prison.
Open air prison that you have to make sure nobody's getting out of line.
You know, just tight controls.
Not tight, sorry, specific controls.
Loose controls, but very specific.
Choke points.
Here, here, here.
You don't know what sort of chaos is going on right in here because you can't track everybody in there, but you've got the choke points where you keep track of which visas are flowing through them.
And when somebody steps out of line, they don't even don't even know what's coming.
all the force of the state just comes down on them like a hammer.
So you've got order fighting death, the gods of order and death in this movie.
But then at the very end, when the coyote, when the Sicario confronts the drug lord, what does the drug lord say?
It wasn't personal.
And where do you think we learned these methods?
We learned them from the Americans.
Now, this is not completely true.
The Americans didn't invent the Aztec gods of death.
But they did introduce these systems of organized, orderly violence being applied in Mexico to maintain the cartels.
And the Americans themselves have learned a little bit from the Mexicans about worshipping death, haven't they?
They've learned how cheap human life is by trying to impose the God of Order on the God of death.
And now all of this, especially with the Trump presidency, this brings up the God of Chaos.
Keck, Pepe, the god of order is fallen to this god of chaos right now.
Question is, is the god of death also going to fall?
And here's the, this is the danger of descending into the abyss, of descending into chaos.
And you need to descend into chaos to come back into the light, to grow as a person.
You can't remain stagnant and orderly.
This is what was killing America.
This panopticon, this open-air prison was choking the life out of America.
And chaos was necessary, maybe not inevitable, but certainly necessary.
