I've only watched the first disk of "When the Levees Broke", but I thought he did a great job of bringing in a wide varity of opinions and statements, without seeming to favor one point of view exclusively. I'm thinking in particular of the way he'd find some very sad stories, trump that story, trump it again, and then present someone so beat down that all they could think to say was the absolute extreme of "the government should have helped us [I agree], should still be helping us [I totally agree], should be giving us a hundred thousand dollars for pain and suffering [wait] and rebuilding my house twice as nice as before! [what.]"
I took a social science class in my long-ago undergrad years, and the professor specialized in disaster psychology. It's fascinating to see how people behave in the exact ways he said they would - there was a particular phase he focused on where people can't help themselves at all because they're too overwhelmed, and they get very angry with their rescuers because it's really the only emotion left that is safe to have. When the people in NOLA hit that phase (and they all seemed to hit it at the same time, and it has lasted a long time), the Right Wing used it as a wedge to prove that all of "those people" were ungrateful wretches who had things work out "quite well, overall" and who just couldn't appreciate the nice things they were being given.
Um, I'm not sure what the point of this is. I guess just that Spike Lee delivers a great movie yet again. I need to watch the rest.
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Date: 2007-02-19 09:08 pm (UTC)I took a social science class in my long-ago undergrad years, and the professor specialized in disaster psychology. It's fascinating to see how people behave in the exact ways he said they would - there was a particular phase he focused on where people can't help themselves at all because they're too overwhelmed, and they get very angry with their rescuers because it's really the only emotion left that is safe to have. When the people in NOLA hit that phase (and they all seemed to hit it at the same time, and it has lasted a long time), the Right Wing used it as a wedge to prove that all of "those people" were ungrateful wretches who had things work out "quite well, overall" and who just couldn't appreciate the nice things they were being given.
Um, I'm not sure what the point of this is. I guess just that Spike Lee delivers a great movie yet again. I need to watch the rest.