Leo D.M.J. Aurini - January 23, 2017


Gods of Death, Order, and Chaos in Sicario


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

90.82353

Word count

965

Sentence count

114

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sicario is one of the best movies of the past few years, and I'm here to talk about the themes of the movie, and how they apply to the Mexican drug cartels and their relationship with the United States government.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Welcome
00:00:30.000 Now, if you haven't seen the movie Sicario, I don't know what you're doing with your life.
00:00:35.860 It's one of the best movies that's come out in the past few years.
00:00:42.760 And this video, I'm going to be talking about themes from the movie, but the movie is the theme, so it's essentially spoilers.
00:00:50.660 I would really recommend you go and book a couple of hours to go watch that excellent film, then come back to this video.
00:01:00.000 So I'm going to assume that you've all seen it, that you understand the themes, the organizations, and I can just jump into this without wasting too much time introducing all the concepts.
00:01:19.240 You know, the one thing that strikes me about the movie is the whole layout of the modern security infrastructure.
00:01:26.280 You know, if you think medieval times, you think stone walls and iron bars.
00:01:35.940 Whereas this modern world, it's all about glass walls and chain-link fences.
00:01:46.540 Flood lights, night vision technology, accounting, spying on people, tracking people.
00:02:01.240 It's more than ever this game of chess where you just align all the forces against whatever your target is.
00:02:09.660 But the question, and the question being posed, being asked by Sicario, is under what circumstances, for what reasons, do we align all these forces?
00:02:24.480 In Mexico, they still worship the gods of death, the Incan gods, the gods of torture and mutilation and brutality. 0.98
00:02:41.860 Those gods are still very, very alive in that country.
00:02:50.180 And while the gods of Africa are pretty dark and horrific, the Aztec gods are just so much more organized.
00:03:00.440 Not psychopathic in their brutality. 0.85
00:03:02.240 Not at all.
00:03:06.840 Far too passionate.
00:03:08.500 They enjoy it too much.
00:03:10.360 They enjoy the...
00:03:13.880 Sadism doesn't even do it justice.
00:03:17.580 What they get up to down there.
00:03:25.060 And so this is what the Americans, the CIA in Sicario, are going up against.
00:03:30.420 But what are the CIA?
00:03:36.280 Well, what does God debate follow?
00:03:38.620 It's the God Leviathan.
00:03:41.520 The God of order.
00:03:44.400 But it's order for order's sake.
00:03:46.680 The violence in Mexico is so chaotic, unrestrained, unpredictable, anywhere and everywhere.
00:04:01.320 You don't know who's on which side. 0.89
00:04:03.120 Half the police are corrupt.
00:04:04.420 The violence north of the border.
00:04:12.220 Chainlink fences.
00:04:14.880 Glass windows.
00:04:16.540 Conference rooms.
00:04:19.960 And control points.
00:04:23.940 But why control points?
00:04:25.380 Control points for the sake of control points.
00:04:27.300 One of the things that really stands out from the visuals in Sicario, that is really communicated
00:04:35.880 very well, is how America is being turned into an open-air prison.
00:04:44.640 You know, you have those really cold shots, where the helicopter's going above all the housing
00:04:53.420 divisions, you know, laid out like a prison complex, with the eye in the sky like a panopticon.
00:05:00.760 And then you have that sudden tonal shift, where they go to the bar.
00:05:12.180 And the bar is this, allegedly, down-to-earth, relaxed, normal place.
00:05:23.140 Except it's not, is it?
00:05:24.400 That's where she meets her assassin. 0.99
00:05:25.620 And there's just as many eyes on the bar as there are flying through the sky over suburbia.
00:05:38.120 Eyes absolutely everywhere.
00:05:41.200 The bar is where you go to vent it out.
00:05:43.100 Vegas is where you go to pretend that you're free for a little while.
00:05:46.300 While it's also one of the most monitored cities in the world.
00:05:55.620 Open-air prison.
00:06:00.040 Open-air prison that you have to make sure nobody's getting out of line.
00:06:03.640 You know, just tight controls.
00:06:05.500 Not tight, sorry.
00:06:07.000 Specific controls.
00:06:09.600 Loose controls, but very specific.
00:06:12.200 Choke points.
00:06:13.300 Here, here, here.
00:06:14.460 You don't know what sort of chaos is going on right in here, because you can't track everybody there.
00:06:20.200 But, you've got the choke points where you keep track of which visas are flowing through them.
00:06:28.660 And when somebody steps out of line, they don't even know it's coming.
00:06:35.420 All the force of the state just comes down on them like a hammer.
00:06:39.340 So, you've got order fighting death.
00:06:47.560 The gods of order and death in this movie.
00:06:51.220 But then, at the very end, when the coyote, when the sicario confronts the drug lord,
00:07:01.200 what does the drug lord say?
00:07:08.120 It wasn't personal.
00:07:10.120 And where do you think we learned these methods?
00:07:17.000 We learned them from the Americans.
00:07:23.140 Now, this is not completely true.
00:07:26.680 The Americans didn't invent the Aztec gods of death.
00:07:29.700 But they did introduce these systems of organized, orderly violence being applied in Mexico to maintain the cartels.
00:07:41.180 And the Americans themselves have learned a little bit from the Mexicans about worshipping death, haven't they? 1.00
00:07:51.960 They've learned how cheap human life is by trying to impose the god of order on the god of death.
00:08:01.340 And now, all of this, especially with the Trump presidency,
00:08:10.320 this brings up the god of chaos.
00:08:17.840 Keck.
00:08:18.760 Pepe.
00:08:19.160 The god of order is fallen to this god of chaos right now.
00:08:32.600 The question is, is the god of death also going to fall?
00:08:41.500 And here's the danger of descending into the abyss, of descending into chaos.
00:08:54.020 And you need to descend into chaos to come back into the light, to grow as a person.
00:09:02.340 You can't remain stagnant and orderly.
00:09:05.460 This is what was killing America.
00:09:07.900 This panopticon, this open-air prison, was choking the life out of America.
00:09:16.500 And chaos was necessary.
00:09:20.460 Maybe not inevitable, but certainly necessary.
00:09:24.680 The question is, now what?
00:09:27.720 What god are you going to start worshipping now?
00:09:35.340 Order's dead.
00:09:37.900 Death?
00:09:40.840 I hope you don't want to worship that one.
00:09:44.280 Chaos?
00:09:46.460 Chaos is just an interregnum.
00:09:50.280 That's my question for you, America.
00:09:52.960 Which god are you going to worship now?
00:09:58.000 Deus Volt.
00:09:59.800 Verrini out.
00:10:07.900 Deuswd.
00:10:10.300 Amo.
00:10:10.360 Dios faktor.
00:10:18.440 Dhaka.
00:10:19.740 Amo.
00:10:20.180 Ironarian. 0.74
00:10:20.520 Ha! 0.89
00:10:21.000 descobrir.
00:10:21.220 Polga acaba ha! 1.00
00:10:21.780 помplante.
00:10:22.180 Totten.
00:10:22.220 Amo.
00:10:22.280 Amo.
00:10:23.120 Amo.
00:10:24.440 Going on.
00:10:25.060 Amo.
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