A Take on Courage

Climate change sees a global rise in extreme wildfires

The news of deadly wildfires sweeping through Turkey has seen the azure sky turn blood red from the unprecedented devastation. There is no way to describe how I feel about the destruction of so many trees, wildlife and animals; the sheer volume suffocates the literary breath. There is an emotional overload that causes the brain to cease in thought and submit to action. You find yourself thinking of ways to drop everything and just get out to help.

It reminded me, too, of a post I wrote back in 2007. As I watched the footage from Turkey of tourists fleeing by boat, and read about the lost lives of civilians and brave firefighters, it took me back to Greece's horrific forest fires almost fourteen years ago to the day. It was a week or so after Swedish director Ingmar Bergman had died, and both incidents had seemed to me to be a commentary that life is a powerful pastiche of fairy tales.

We know fairy tales as stories often intended for children, and important because they spark the imagination. They give us an outlet for experiencing things in our minds before we experience them in the real world. It is where the troubles of the real world can meet the supernatural and mix things up. In a fairy tale anything can happen and any kind of creature can exist, and when anything can happen, we can find solutions to things in our real lives. Through imagination, we learn about our world. We can explore outcomes and possibilities.

We learn about hubris in these stories. We learn about fear. We learn about the limits and the limitlessness of ourselves. Watching the global drive to help Turkey, and the actions of its own people as they fight the fires, I see - as in those fantastical tales of heroism - a resolution, spirit and tenacity that implies firmness of mind and will in the face of danger. We call it courage. Against it, fear, somehow, goes into lockdown because you realise there is something of greater importance than your inherent instinct to survive in extreme difficulty.

But while the fantasy tales we retell our children as lessons in life are all well and good, our own lives are a fantastic fable in themselves - filled with lessons that the adults continue to ignore. For instance, Professor Vivi Vajda tells us that modern wildfire destructions are comparable to the catastrophic global wildfires you get from an asteroid impact. It means, like millions of years previously, the impact from the dust and soot will have long term catastrophic consequences to an already embattled ecosystem. Our human activities have had the impact of an asteroid hitting the planet, and yet, when the devastation occurs, we are shocked that it can happen to us.

The Danger of Dramatic Purposes

Because while fairy tales are great entertainment, and hold important folk wisdom for sure, they miss out certain things. Original fairy tales rarely tell you the courage it takes to be courageous. Or that heroes can often be villains. And that villains often see themselves as heroes. Take Bergman. It doesn't take a great man to make a great film. Even though his films are spellbinding, the rumours of his manipulative relationship with his actresses concerned me to a point where I couldn't really enjoy his films anymore.

The shrewd way Bergman uses female characters to exalt his own narcissism and male anxiety didn't sit too well with me, even as a teen. I was bought up on different fairy tales, yet the danger of entertainment is that you can dress up manipulation and feed it to your audience. The poisonous ingredient in the mix doesn't change, but if you coat it in enough sugar, you can hide the bitter taste it would leave in the mouth of a more rational mind.

It also doesn't change the fact that Bergman was a genius; he created some of the greatest roles for women in cinema history. Still, they were from a male perspective that not only misunderstood women, but manipulated them into his own fairy tale version of them. No one did more to popularise Bergman for English-speaking audiences than Woody Allen, and like his Swedish idol, Allen adored and fetishised women - but even more than Bergman, Allen has always made me uncomfortable with his fixatious fairy tales on the screen.

Two decades before the #MeToo movement, I was asking myself where Bergman and Allen's women were in real life. And I didn't mean their physicality; I meant as people. You'll never meet any of their women characters in your life, because they weren't written as real people. They were reflections of the male gaze that made them dysfunctional images if they refused sex, or somehow morally culpable if a man forced himself on to her.

I mean, you can't pretend to be this tour de force for actors and natural performance, and then lie on the screen as though it were truth. That is the real manipulation. Allen and Bergman want you to believe their women exist. I'm more comfortable with directors who are more honest about the work they do. I can distance the man (or woman) from the work if I enjoy it, but if that work has too much of the man in it, and what I watch makes me uncomfortable, I switch off.

I often think such directors as Robert Altman and Ernst Lubitsch are at least honest about their craft, in that they have stated time and again they are manipulating audiences for entertainment in hyper or alternative realities. Altman utilises natural performance as a style, the Lubitsch touch creates a fairy tale setting of sexual protocol, but neither has grandiose illusions to bringing some great truth on to the screen. For the truth is, the minute the camera is turned on, truth goes out the window. You can replace it with realism, but it doesn't change the fact the stories are there to make you think about life; they don't assert that film is life.

The Courage it Takes to Be Courageous

Life is a pastiche of fairy tales that never make the screen, because our real stories are too chaotic, and rarely pretty. If the devastating wildfires in Turkey were put on screen, the very nature of the story would change. It would have to, because narration immediately fictionalises in order to tell the tale.

Living through an event is something else entirely, but living through it is what holds the real lessons. Today, I tell my sons if they want to know about women, they must know themselves. What makes a human tick? Does anyone really know? If women are dysfunctional, they will be because they are people, not because of their gender. I also tell them not to accept or discount an idea simply because of the majority's opinion. That takes courage - great courage to stand alone against a mob - and how is one to be courageous when the opinions of others matter so much to us?

There are fairy tales about courage I have read to my children; there are stories I have written for them. How courage is the hunter that sees the lion charging towards him and stands his ground, working out a way to swing on to its mane and ride out on its back. But they only make you think about courage, because if you think you know what courage is because of some depiction - think again.

Reading about courage doesn't make you courageous. Because if the truth be told, none of us know if we have courage, until the time calls for it. None of us know what form that will take. You won't know how courageous you are until that wildfire reaches your own doorstep and you react to the situation. Then all of Bergman's films won't be of any help to you. The fact of the matter is you just have to get up and do to learn about courage, not sit down and watch. And that the more courage you show, the more courageous you become.

It is only then you understand that courage isn't just a roar in the jungle. Sometimes it is the politeness of patience. Sometimes it is the stillness of silence. But often it is to take a stand alone when everyone else seems to be baying for your blood, and yet you realise you wish to be no where else than where you are. Because you have the courage to be you, and in a world where we are often told to be something else, that takes the greatest courage of all.

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