A review of Once Were Warriors
The difference between a warrior and a thug is honour, and that strength without honour is pointless.
Cartoon by Crid.
Once Were Warriors is hard to watch. It refuses to allow you to be comfortable, to be content and I feel that too often films do not challenge us enough. Evil things should be confronted, lest we lose the ability to fight them, and if we cannot even handle fictional tragedy, how could we ever face up to the awful tragedy of reality?
Set in New Zealand, the film follows a Māori family – the father is a violent, abusive alcoholic. His violence and character is contrasted to the Māori warrior and the film itself tells a great truth with this comparison; that the difference between a warrior and a thug is honour, and that strength without honour is pointless.
One theme that particularly struck me was the consequences of losing one’s dignity. When one’s freedom is taken, when one are subject to awful, conflicting and dehumanising events that do far more than physical damage, it starts to kill one’s soul.
What is life without dignity? Mere existence is what we are reduced to when stripped of what animates us to continue to be. That is why domestic abuse is a particularly awful crime, it erodes and warps how and what people see and how and who they trust.
Domestic abuse takes one of the greatest goods that exists, love, and perverts it into a tool of a person's own oppression. To love and trust someone only to have them do such damage to you either on a whim or to control you is the fastest way to rip someone's spirit out of them. When we take someone's dignity away we often take away their reason to exist, and leave them a dead eyed shell. People need dignity, they need the sense that they a person and of intrinsic worth who has an active and animated role in life.
To accept any form of this kind of crime, this abuse, is to a form of spiritual suicide and sprital slaughter. We are more than just walking carcasses, and to ignore that is to commit a terrible crime not only against humanity but against consciousness itself.
