‘Blood Hero’: Has Humanity Evolved? – 07/17/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

Women are created very differently from men for better and for worse. For the bad, when they are hampered in their dreams, having their universe of accomplishments restricted to stereotypes of fragility, imperatives of beauty and intellectual disqualification.

For the good, when they are trained to be sensitive and to take care of themselves and others. After all, mutual care is the only true proof of civility for our species. Technological achievements celebrated as indexes of human evolution only turned out to be increasingly efficient forms of self-destruction.

One example among countless others is the return to the use of cluster munitions by the US. It is a weapon that has been abolished in more than one hundred countries because it leaves behind bombs that explode in the hands of children and civilians decades after the end of the conflicts for which they were acquired.

Brazil, which is one of the three largest producers of cluster bombs, obviously did not sign the treaty. It is estimated that 80 million of these artifacts are scattered around the world ready to explode. One of Joe Biden’s allegations for its use is the lack of prompt delivery of other weapons. Basically, the war market is very hot.

In “Blood Hero” (2022), by Mathieu Vadepied, we witness the human destruction machine and its colonizing core. The film takes place in the First World War, when Senegalese shepherds and villagers were torn from their families to fight for France, an invading country.

This is the logic of masculinity that only brings pain and devastation to the world. There, where young people kill themselves in the name of glory and recognition, a father fights for the life of his 17-year-old son.

The work has many layers: political, racial and historical, absolutely current. It exposes the oscillation between emancipating oneself from hegemonic male figures or alienating oneself to the limit of death itself (watch it at a street cinema near you).

The background figure, who rarely appears in war films, is the woman. It usually serves as an allusion to eroticism in the midst of death. She is the one whose body has yet to be revealed to the virgin boy or the one he misses.

The boy’s mother and sister in “Heroi de Sangue” are female figures so faded that, although they inhabit the base of the pyramid of violence, they become invisible. They are the ones who remain when their protectors and guardians go to war. Their world, supposedly idyllic for being out of the devastation, remains so silent it sounds like part of nature.

Genital mutilation, child marriage, domestic violence, femicide, in short, the female subjection that serves as the basis for the male world is there as something not to be alluded to, buried by the simple allegory of the family of shepherds. Women can and do fight whenever necessary, but the value of the feminine is not culturally associated with war. He finds himself referred to the sphere of care reproduction, exempt from any kind of glory.

If there were a “feminization” of society —my understanding goes against the grain of some psychoanalytical readings—, it would mean placing care for oneself, for the other and for one’s surroundings, as the maximum value of culture. It is not about incensing women or promoting an alleged feminine essence, on the contrary. It is about dismantling these stereotypes and assuming them as maximum values ​​of humanity regardless of gender.

The absolute disregard for care and for those who carry it out, and the overvaluation of territorial and technological achievements are clear proof that we have not evolved as we like to boast.

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