Humans Explained?

On The Beach, Lost Horizon, and Lord of the Flies

Much time had passed before sheer boredom and a lack of interest in any of the new releases of December 2009 compelled me to recall some memorable old movies that seemed worth watching again. I tried to watch the Hunt for Red October, but I had watched it many times before. So though I enjoyed the scenes of Red October, I found that I remembered them too well to be motivated to endure 134 minutes of it. I finally tried The beach, a movie I had watched several times before just as I had read Lost Horizon so many times before.

There are several issues the movie touches on: 1) the disappointment of modern explorers who wish there were more regions to explore in the world, but who must accept the fact that there are few truly unknown places left on Earth—the age of exploration is over and every square inch of the planet is observable using satellites; 2) humanity’s ever growing population, referred to unkindly though not inaccurately as parasites, albeit only the tourists are focused on by Richard who are overcrowding tourist spots and creating the drabness and cheapness of cities just by their sheer numbers in the very place one wishes not to experience the madness of the city; 3) and finally the topic is human selfishness and how the fantasy and euphoria of Paradise is watered down as the reality of human selfishness tragically dawns on both the movie’s characters and the movie’s viewers.

William Golding had made the point well in his novel Lord of the Flies which deals with the complex mixture of fear, selfishness and savagery that can be amplified and ignited in the minds of men so easily as to drive them to reject all the wisdom and humanity that civilization has to offer. Golding showed how vulnerable civilization was as can be inferred from the following statement of the officer that finally rescues the boys: "We saw your smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?” In the end the boys are saved, but there is irony and fatalism mixed in the closing chapter of Lord of the Flies, even though the boys are saved the British captain is already part of a war that is costing human lives. He admonishes the boys ,telling them that being British they should have “put up a better show than that”. But it is a fact that humanity has never really managed a better show than the boys had been involved in: we have fought and killed; adopted superstition; and we generally are poor at saving the more precious stuff when the need arises. We have been lucky, it may be said. And therein lie the fatalism and irony related to humanity's existence and future. It is this point that the movie illustrates. All people have their own particular brand of darkness of their souls which doesn’t horrify them, but once observed in others it is horrifying and abhorrent.