The Year of Living Dangerously - Vision Can Be a Model for Knowledge - Essay Example

The Year of Living Dangerously: Vision can be a model for knowledge Peter Weir directs The Year of Living Dangerously by Mel Gibson with the setting in Indonesia. The focus is on the 1965 coup in Indonesia against the incumbent, President Sukarno. The film is gripping, ambitious, and stylish as the director puts in effort to it a thriller, develop romance, and trace political happenings. Although, Weir succeeds partly in his efforts, the movie is excellent because people learn from the film that vision can be a model for knowledge.

Partial success appears in efforts to link different themes symbolised with images of the shadow puppetry of Indonesia and the advice from Billy for the audience (characters) to look at the shadows and not puppets. The film covers the downfall of Sukarno in a fascinating way by creating humid hot and seedy ambiance in the film. Other reviewers such as Gibson hold that Weir’s work is, “essentially a love story of two attractive winners tacked onto a backdrop of human suffering (Gibson 14).

" It depicts ethnocentrism as, “making false assumptions about others ways based on our own limited experience.” The film by Peter Weir is in many ways apolitical as it attempts to cover unconventional romantic myths. According to others, the film is not clear on whether it focuses on the gushy plot of two people in love or circumvent through heroic stories of adventure. The argument in this story is that the story in the film is folklore a hero as well as few functions not in the plot in entirety.

However, it includes a series of motifs applied by the director in setting an attack on Western ideology. The film reinforces and supports the concentration on the visual features of Western hierarchy of senses as a form of art. Weir applies the important requirement medium to investigate and critically review the influences of using vision as a framework for knowledge. For instance, a situation where Billy offers support to Guy by saying, ‘I can be your eyes (Gibson 16)’ projects Guy, the spectator, as playing the role of a blind man itself provides vision for knowledge.

In this case, Billy offers to educate the West and Guy essential lessons. The symbol comes through Billy helping Guy to see. Guy internalizes traditions of the west as a way of objectifying and distancing the virtue of knowledge when he says, "I gave her to you, and now Im taking her back (Gibson 16)". By defining self in the opposition context, Guy develops a primary demeanour and attitude of disagreement. Guy makes it clear from the start that there is no way he will involve himself in ensuing affairs.

However, Billy takes the initiative of going parallel in a connective and paradoxical manner in exploring the function of vision. Billy associates vision with empathy, commitment, and contact. Billy replaces communion in likeness Guy’s opposition via difference. In his view, Billy wants the verb ‘to see’ remain synonymous with ‘feeling’ as a verb (Gibson 17). This is different from other parts of the world as “Algonquian Indian languages do not have tenses (not that they cannot express time if they wish), but rather have "animate" and "inanimate" verb forms, so they automatically think in terms of whether things around them have a life essence or not.

” Billy makes effort to visualize the real Djakarta that covers thousands of people living in poor conditions because of humble backgrounds. Therefore, they die from multiple diseases and starvation. Conclusively, the film in celebration of the medium as a movie highlights pessimistic statements concerning possible opportunities. Weir, the director, encounters inherent features met by the visual image when it tries entering the human conscience. Works Cited Gibson, Mel. In "Margaret Smith’s interview with Mel Gibson" in Cinema Papers p.

13-17 Mar 1983, 1993. Print.