The Decline and the Invasions of the Empire
Last week I saw the canadian movie
The Decline of the American Empire and yesterday I saw its continuation,
The Barbarian Invasions.
People usually don´t worry about the titles, which have little connection with the movies´s stories at first glance. Without understanding the reasons for the titles, people usually prefer the second movie, because it has more action, less lenghty dialogues, more drama... the first is subtler and more wordy; one cannot enjoy it as much as the second without trying to understand the title.
Both movies tell stories about a group of friends in a specific situation, but I think that one can only understand the titles by trying to have a broader sociological view. The two situations depict particular instances and examples, in order to illustrate the more general idea that the movies try to transmit.
In
The Decline of the American Empire, the story shows how the search for immediate individual satisfaction may hinder the formation of families, which constitute the basic structural units of the american civilization.
In
The Barbarian Invasions, the central point in discussion are the ideas of suicide and eutanasia, two barbarian invasions to the christian philosophy, in which only God may give or take life. Extraneous concepts are now invading the center of the empire´s way of thinking, as the "barbarians" now attack the center of the empire as happened in 11/09.
Besides this main topic of the empires´s collapse, the movies also discuss so many other interesting ideas and shows so many different and unusual ways of looking at life, that they are simply great!
