Current society offers us heroes and glamorizes certain characters and traits so let’s take a closer look to couple of them.
“Brigada” is a movie about four friends who lived in a Russia in ”rough 90s” and managed to make it to the top of the criminal world. They are self-made, very charismatic, talk about friendship and “justice”. They enjoy the life, buy expensive stuff and live glamorously.
But if you look at other side, they are making other people’s lives miserable, take away money from businessmen, and for instance when one businessman refuses to pay, force him to stay at the office and swing an ax next to his face.
Throughout the movie main hero murders one person who almost killed him and his wife on their wedding day, endanger his son’s life when he needed to go to hospital and, almost got shot many times. Four friends use a lot of alcohol, drugs and live a dark world, importing drugs to Moscow and selling weapons to Chechnya from which Russian young kids get shot. In the end of the his friends die and the main hero revenges them all.
And all of this for what? The money they quickly attained, in the end sent them to a complete degradation. In one scene hero is so drunk, he puts a lot of money in casino and when loses it, gets mad that he loves a bird but the human’s life is nothing to him (I think he calls it a dirt), then he breaks the rules and in a heated argument almost kills another person in front of everyone else and walks away like it’s nothing to him.
What’s the point in getting to the top, if the values you push for, degrade you to the level of an animal?
Another example is the Hollywood movie “Wolf of Wall Street”, in which main hero also climbs to the top from nothing, mainly stealing money from other people’s life savings talking them into investing. He loses his loving girlfriend who asks if this is even ethical, dumps her to do uncontrolled sex and drugs with “not so” ethical woman, gets married to a woman by showering her with money, status and big yacht, and when things go south, she dumps him and he can’t even see his kids (not sure about this part though).
He treats his clients like shit, insults federal agents when they refuse to take his money, even treats women on the boat without a regard to their dignity, throwing money off the boat calling them coupons and throwing expensive food on the floor and screaming that he will enjoy these women licking expensive caviar off his balls.
And the part where he did drugs and completely crushed his car laying on the floor like a retarded bum begs a question – did all that money and status really bring him the happiness or did the exact opposite, and degraded him to a point of no return?
In the end of all these adventures, he ended up losing his friends, his house, his wife, his job, his reputation, his freedom, and yet for some reason it’s fascinating to see this work of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio who portrayed his life in a positive and entertaining way. But the question is this – should we be inspired, entertained and enjoy stories like these, which show us the story of a decay of the human soul. Money doesn’t buy a happiness, it doesn’t make you a better person, it poisons you and betrays the trust of all who are around you.
I think we are living in a society that praises the goal of being self-made and being successful, but completely ignores what this may do to the others. It doesn’t say it’s wrong, doesn’t ask us to make a lesson out of it, it just shoves this American Dream down our throat and expects us to never question it behind all the glamor and instead it celebrates and encourages everything that it brings. Even if it doesn’t look like a hell. Not at all.