DIVERGENT and Deconstructing Touching

Last Dinner at Abnegation

This dinner and its setting is very like a present day Amish meal in the home. People eat quietly, saying just what they must. It is stifling for anyone who starves for intelligent conversation while eating with family and/or friends. Tris's anxiety about choosing is controlled. Caleb's secret is contained. And nothing really much is said. Just the allusion to Marcus's beating his son to cause his defection. Not true of course.

This is reality that conceals the REAL. The false contentment that replaces joy and spontaneity. Beatrice thinks there is something missing in her because she can't be selfless enough. 

One can see how feelings fester in this environment.

Perhaps some Ritalin!

This is what peace looks like. And it is monotonous and boring eh.

This is also the Happy Ending readers and movie goers want for Tris and Four. The happy family. No faction problems. Just quiet contentment. Children, a dog perhaps, etc. 

The Happy Ending. And all this is conveyed in a short dinner scene. This is a director and a screen writer who are seriously intelligent.

Awkward Embraces

The Lack of touch is so acute in this scene. The awkward embracing of people who are not used to showing affection to each other. And certainly not passion or desire.

The movie moves on to focus on every time Four touches Tris. She feels each one intensely. He is touching indifferently. Factually you might say until this scene.

Four Advising Tris on Fighting Peter

This time he grabs her arm roughly to make sure she remembers what he told her about fighting. That she must attack first and not go on the defensive. Of course her short lived initial success with Peter surprises him and infuriates him so that he hurts her even more. And Eric signals for him to put her away with a  kick at the end of it.

Lamb to the Slaughter Compliments of Eric

They all know he has arranged for this match to eliminate Tris for talking back to him at the knife throwing. This is the way it goes for truth-tellers, for parrhesiastes. 

Desire/Lack in Touching

Step back: the pattern in the tapestry

won’t tell itself till more of it is made.

Although it’s eighty-seven in the shade,

we have to work this hard making the hist-

ory we need till, trusting it, we’re free

to kiss each other better than when we

imagined kissing when we hadn’t kissed.

Marilyn Hacker in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons 

I would say the same is true on waiting to experience sex.

The Hunger Games and Katniss Everdeen - Foucault: Fearless Speech and Parrhesia

Katniss Shooting

This is not a review review.


In a pre-introduction before the games, just as an American Idol selection or other somesuch reality show, Katniss is to show her stuff to the audience who isn't paying attention - she has been advised to get their attention -  as she sinks arrows into flat human body targets. So she aims at them, or rather the apple in the pig's mouth at the banquet table, aces it just whizzing by the head of the Master of Ceremonies of The Games. I can't find this image of Katniss in her sexy black leathers and marvelous hair arrangement with a bow and arrow, but you get the idea. The above image is in the beginning of the movie, when she is aiming at a deer.

The Evil One is on the Far Right

There is silence as her arrow goes to the heart of the apple. Astonishment. Shock. And then she bows  forward, making an age old gesture with her arms stretched out to her sides. She might be holding a ball gown in her fingers, making obeisance to a king. This is her gesture of utter contempt, as she inclines her head and says, "Thank you for your consideration," contemptuously uttered, just before she turns and leaves the stage/platform.

She wows them and when they vote she gets an almost perfect score.

What has she done? She has performed an act of parrhesia. And her insolent words complete her performance of parrhesia. She has "spoken truth to power," which must, by definition, include risk. It is a Greek term, and it often involved death for the speaker. 

Foucault discusses this in his book Fearless Speech as he does a genealogy of parrhesia.  Ayn Rand in her defense of William Hickman said, "He was condemned to death, not for what he did, but for what he said." (Journal of Ayn Rand;Letters of Ayn Rand)

Katniss is condemned to death for her audacity and her courage, giving too much hope to those watching screens, from the fringes of this world.

My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth-telling as an activity....  who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power.... With the intention  of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the "critical"tradition of the West. - Michel Foucault