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Justice in Romero Essay - 1239 Words

Justice in Romero The influential and gripping film, Romero, directed by John Duigan, portrays the life and death of Archbishop Oscar Romero. The movie shows the world through the eyes of the El Salvadorian people during the 1980s, when poverty and military rule flourished over the people. The country of El Salvador was run by an elite group of few who controlled most of the power and money, leaving the majority of the people deprived and powerless. This imbalance in the social system left much of the people under oppression, constantly controlled by the corrupt government and even sometimes persecuted when they tried to speak out. The church was a witness to the violations of human rights and this ruthless behavior by the El†¦show more content†¦At first this is what Romero did, he preached to be peacemakers and not to revolt. But after the government shot their weapons into crowds indiscriminately at a worship ceremony held outside, killing a few people including a prie st who was also Romeros close friend, was when Romero begins to rebuke the government and lead the struggle for justice and human rights in the country. Romero develops into a man who rocks the boat. In that, meaning he organized rallies and masses that brought the people together causing anger upon the government. He leads a peasant march into a church that is occupied by soldiers in order to perform mass, and also offends and defies the El Salvadorian president. Throughout the movie, Romero is faced with challenge after challenge from the military and government, but through it all he continued to speak to his people and praising the word of god. The film came to a tragic ending as Archbishop Romero was shot by a hired assassin during mass. Although martyred for his beliefs, his spirit lived on in the Salvadorian people. Father Romero was a very influential figure. Inclined himself by the masses of poverty stricken individuals harmed by the government, Romero was a man who was cle arly in pursuit of social justice. The first step he took towards the situation was assessing the real life poverty and oppression that was at hand. Romero along with the church examined what wasShow MoreRelatedIgnatian Leaders: Oscar Arnulfo y Galdamez1766 Words   |  7 PagesIgnatian Leader Oscar Romero is one of the most popular and unique Archbishops in Latin America due to his devotion and relationship with the poor. Romero was one of the first to speak out on behalf of the poor and fought for human rights and for the victims during El Salvadors bloody civil war. Romeros birth name is Oscar Arnulfo y Galdamez and he was born on August 15, 1917 in Ciudad Barrios, a small mountain village in El Salvador. He is the son of Guadalupe de Jesus and Santos Romero. As a result ofRead MoreOscar Romero s Religious Beliefs Affected His Work For Social Change1347 Words   |  6 Pagesviolence, social injustice, the exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression,† Oscar Romero said in his sermon on the 23rd September 1979. Six months later, Romero was shot and killed. During the 1970’s and 80’s the El Salvadorian public experienced a brutal campaign of repression by the military government, which claimed thousands of lives. The leader of the church, Oscar Romero began to speak out on behalf of the victims and on the 23rd of March 1980, he made a direct appeal toRead MoreOscar Romero Stood Up for the Poor and Troubled Nation of El Salvador551 Words   |  3 PagesÓscar Romero was a Roman Catholic priest that stood up for the poor and injustice in the troubled nation of El Salvador. In the early stages of his life, Romero had entered a boarding school for priests at the age of thirteen. 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It is clear traditional and liberation theologyRead More Romero Essay882 Words   |  4 Pages In the movie Romero, Archbishop Romero changes very much in his understanding of love and in his understanding of true conscience. At first Romero is just a priest who isn’t really concerned about the poor and how they are being oppressed, but when Romero is chosen to be the new Archbishop his friend, who is assassinated, I think has a slight impact on him. But I think when his friend is assassinated is when he really starts to realize what is happening to the country of El Salvador and how theRead MoreEngaging The Theology Of Oscar Romero1739 Words   |  7 PagesEngaging the theology of Oscar Romero: Oscar Romero was a Christian who eventually became part of a community, the priesthood. As he was gradually was promoted to higher position within the Catholic Church, his theological views began to change. 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His death served as a catalyst which incited a previously dormant, yet powerful force against the Salvadoran government: Oscar Romero. Grande and Romero were both members of the Society of Jesus, however, they held very different views when it came to politics and the state of the church (Brackley). Grande favored more progressive, left-wing political ideas and radical church restructuring, whereas Romero was decidedly conservative andRead MoreHow Similar Were the Dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and Franco?1373 Words   |  6 Pagesmilitary in their regime and the roles of women in their society. Firstly, it was argued by authors such as Raymond Carr and Francisco J. Romero Salvadà ³ that Primo only intended to rule Spain for a short amount of time in order to find quick solutions to deal with Spain’s illnesses such as social disorder, economic recession and the Colonial War in Morroco (Romero Salvadà ³,1960, pg 52). 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Farewell My Concubine Self-Identification in Context Free Essays

Directed by Chen Kaige, a highly acclaimed fifth-generation Chinese film director, Farewell My Concubine has received many international film awards and nominations; among them are the Best Foreign Film and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. In the film, Cheng Dieyi, a Peking Opera actor playing the leading female characters, becomes obsessed with his role as the concubine of the King of Chu and blurs his stage role with the real life he leads. The circumstances in which one grows up in are critical factors in shaping his or her sense of self-identity. We will write a custom essay sample on Farewell My Concubine: Self-Identification in Context or any similar topic only for you Order Now This paper attempts to explore the gender identity troubles that Cheng Dieyi has undergone in his self-identification and sexuality in the context of the environment of his upbringing. The story begins when Cheng’s mother takes her son to Master Guan and begs him to take Dieyi (whose nickname was Douzi at the time) into his opera troupe. In order to be a performer in the Peking opera, one must not have any features that are abnormal or that may frighten the audience. Unfortunately, Douzi fails this test because he was born with a sixth finger on one of his hands.His mother was desperate to sell him off and thus cuts off her son’s finger with a cleaver. At this point, Master Guan agrees to accept Douzi as a disciple in his opera troupe. Master Guan notices that Douzi’s â€Å"features were surprisingly delicate; he was almost pretty† , which are perfect for playing female roles. Thus, Douzi is chosen as a dan , or the female lead of the opera troupe. He will play the female roles alongside his best friend, Xiaolou who was chosen to be his sheng, or male lead. Starting from even the earliest scenes of the film, Dieyi’s self-identity has been slowly ripped away from him.Dieyi’s abrupt transition from living in a brothel as a prostitute’s son to becoming a well-disciplined opera singer in the troupe is marked by his mother’s brutal amputation of his sixth finger. This symbolic castration implies that one must abandon his inherited past in order to seek a new social identity. â€Å"The root of biological determinism has been severed and the subject freed to pursue a place in a symbolic world of gender fluidity† Dieyi’s finger is not the only thing that has been emasculated, but his self-identity has been castrated as well. The film hints at this in the beginning by including the character of Master Ni, a unuch who was p hysically castrated, losing his male reproductive organs. While Master Ni was physically castrated of his male reproductive organs, Dieyi becomes mentally and emotionally castrated through his harsh upbringing in the opera troupe. Whereas the symbolic castration signifies the possibility of Dieyi’s transition from a biological male to a stereotypical female, the harsh corporal punishment he receives during his training in the opera troupe enforces that transition. Corporal punishment is often used in schools to reinforce the relation between master and student.It instills in students a sense of the power of the social hierarchy and their place within it. Dieyi’s designated â€Å"place† on that hierarchy, sadly, requires that he learns to abandon his male identity. While corporal punishment remakes Dieyi mentally, costume and make up remakes Dieyi physically. As he performs in the long dresses and fancy headdresses, he sees himself capable of reflecting signs of beauty and femininity. He is forced to sing â€Å"I am by nature a girl, not a boy† , and his full transition to femininity went into full motion the moment he mastered this line and accepted it as the truth, that he is by nature a girl, not a boy.Like most of the male dans in the Peking Opera theatre, Cheng Dieyi must be able to create the illusion of a real female that appeals to the male audience, but Cheng’s femininity is apparent not only on stage, but off stage as well. Clearly, Cheng has fully adapted his female roles into his life off stage. He speaks in a low soft voice, his movements are graceful, maintains the delicate hand pose of the Lan huazhi (the artificial feminine hand pose of the male dan), and wears a seductive look that would often be considered a feminine gaze.Most male dans merely imitate these feminine acts on stage, but Cheng Dieyi gradually transforms these â€Å"acts† into an unconscious habit of his. â€Å"The repetition of the stylized female acts embedde d in female impersonation and the rigid and violent regulation of these acts eventually bring about Cheng Dieyi’s unconscious identification with Yuji, concubine of the Chu King, constructing in him a feminine sexuality and identity. † Opera performers at the time were expected to play their stage roles for ife. Dieyi’s most notable performance is an epic opera named Farewell My Concubine; it tells the story of the King of Chu (Xiang Yu) and his faithful concubine Yuji. Xiang Yu knows that he has lost to his enemy and drinks with Yuji on the last night. Yuji performs a sword dance for him and then cuts her own throat with his sword to express her faithfulness to him. As Dieyi continues to play the role of Yuji into this professional career, he begins to blur the life of Yuji’s character and his own.This becomes very obvious when Dieyi begins to show signs of affection towards his stage partner, Xiaolou, who plays the King of Chu. In multiple times throughout the movie, Dieyi can be seen looking at Xiaolou with a tender, almost romantic gaze and is especially gentle when he helps Xiaolou apply makeup and dress in costume. His romantic feelings for his â€Å"stage brother† are translucent to the audience as he is overcome by jealousy at the news that Xiaolou was getting m arried to Juxian. He believes that Juxian is robbing him of what was rightfully his.As in the opera when Yu Ji and Xiang Yu swear their love to each other, what Dieyi sees is actually he and his stage brother declaring their loyalty to one another. While Cheng Dieyi wholly embodies the female roles he impersonates, the Peking opera stage is essentially the world in which he bases his identity on. As he enters his professional career and makes a name for himself, he thinks that he will always be able to hide behind his feminine charms, and that art will always transcend any situation.For a while, he is proven right. On one occasion, he sings for a Japanese official to help Xiaolou out of jail; in another, he sings for a Chinese official to bail himself out of jail. Duan Xiaolou reminds Dieyi again and again that life is not the stage and he must learn to adjust to the values of the changing times. The film covers a story that spans across 50 years of Chinese history: the rise and fall of the Nationalist Party, the Sino-Japanese War, the rise of the Communist Party, and the Cultural Revolution.As the nation goes through a turbulent historical period, Cheng simply views it as a backdrop that would never affect his performances. He was never concerned about any of the political upheavals that occurred or the change in regimes. He felt that as long as his art is being appreciated, it does not matter who the political leaders are. When he was put on trial for being a traitor when the Communist Party was in power, he exclaims, â€Å"If the Japanese were still here, Peking Opera would have spread into Japan already,† with no regard to the consequences.The art of Peking opera has always been Cheng’s way of escaping reality, and it is this illusion that he identifies with. However, when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, the identity he has found for himself has be en robbed from him once again. The Cultural Revolution is one that advocates extreme reality, and thus traditional art becomes a target of exploitation for distracting people from reality. When Dieyi and Xiaolou are taken out onto the streets to be reprimanded, his previous illusion that he and Xiaolou would never betray one another, just as Yu Ji and Xiang Yu would never do so, is shattered.Under the humiliation and physical abuse of the Red Guards, Xiaolou calls Dieyi a traitor to the Chinese and a homosexual. Cheng and Duan then turn on each other and expose incriminating details about each other’s past to the Red Guards. This political movement is in a sense, a rude awakening for Cheng. For the first time, it forces him to abandon the identity that he forged for himself on the opera stage, and accept that he lives in a world where loyalty is not always indestructible. It is because of this revolution that causes Dieyi’s blurred lines between opera and reality to slowly reappear. These lines, however, did not have a lasting effect. When Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou reunite on the stage many years after the Cultural Revolution, they make their final Farewell My Concubine performance. At the last scene, Dieyi, playing Yuji, takes the sword and slits his throat. Dieyi wanted so desperately to be Yuji his entire life, and he finally fulfilled that wish, or so he thinks, by boldly committing suicide just as Yuji has done so: for his love, and in a dramatic manner, like a stage opera should be.Cheng Dieyi had grown up with violence and abuse, in a society with constant political turmoil and turbulent changes. As a boy who was already an introvert to begin with, the unsettling changes that revolved around him became too overwhelming. He had no choice but to retreat into a world that he knows best: the opera stage. Though the opera stage is but a fictional world, it is the only place in which he is always the hero(ine).Works Cited Cui, Shuqin. â€Å"Engendering Identity: Female Impersonation in Farewell My Concubine . From Poetic Realm to Fictional World: Chinese Theory of Fictional Ontology (1999) Farewell My Concubine. Dir. Chen Kaige. 1993. DVD. Miramax Films, 1999. Goldstein, Joshua (1999). â€Å"Mei Lanfang and the Nationalization of Peking Opera, 1912–1930† East Asian Cultures Critique 7 (2): 377–420. He, Chengzhou. â€Å"Gaze, Performativity and Gender Trouble in Farewell My Concubine. † Nanjing University (2004): n. pag. Web. Poquette, Ryan D. , Critical Essay on Farewell My Concubine, in Novels for Students, Gale, 2004. How to cite Farewell My Concubine: Self-Identification in Context, Papers