Is Your Consciousness & Imagination Being Assimilated?

Laura and I watched Detachment which is a remarkable movie starring Adrien Brody and Christina Hendricks. Adrien plays Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher roaming from school to school arriving at a particular school where his emotions are awakened fueling him to awaken the emotions in his students.

Here is an excerpt from a scene that is emotionally moving and brilliant at the same time.

Scene: Barthes (Brody) is watching another teacher and his class through a window while standing in the hall; the class is watching a video of Adolf Hitler speaking and whipping his audience into a frenzy.

Scene: Barthes (Brody) is in his English class teaching his students.

Barthes (Brody): “What does assimilate mean?”

Student: “To take something in.”

Barthes (Brody): “Excellent.”

Barthes (Brody): “To absorb. What does ubiquitous mean?”

Student: “Everywhere all the time.”

Barthes (Brody): “What is ubiquitous assimilation?”

Student: “Always absorbing everything everywhere all the time.”

Barthes (Brody): “How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you. Who here read 1984 last year?” Two students put up their hands.

Barthes (Brody): “What does doublethink mean?”

Student: “Having two opposing beliefs it once, believing that both are true.”

Barthes (Brody): “Excellent.”

Barthes (Brody): “To deliberately believe in lies while knowing they are false. Examples of this in everyday life are: I need to be pretty to be happy, I need surgery to be pretty, I need to be thin, famous, fashionable. Our young men today are being told that women are whores, bitches, things to be screwed, beaten, shit on, shamed. This is a marketing Holocaust 24 hours a day for the rest of our lives. The powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death. So to defend ourselves and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes we must learn to read to stimulate our own imaginations to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need these skills to defend and to preserve our own minds.”

 

“Detachment is a chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of a substitute teacher named Henry Barthes. Henry roams from school to school, imparting modes of knowledge, but never staying long enough to form any semblance of sentient attachment. A perfect profession for one seeking to hide out in the open. One day Henry arrives at his next assignment. Upon his entry into this particular school, a secret world of emotion is awakened within him by three women: a girl named Meredith in his first period, a fellow teacher Ms. Madison, and a street hooker named Erica, whom Henry has personally granted brief shelter from the streets. Each one of these women, like Henry, are in a life and death struggle to find beauty in a seemingly vicious and loveless world.” Written by Anonymous