Exploring the ongoing shift in our cultural narrative illustrated through film

How a man refuses violence to protect his son in Susanne Bier’s In a Better World

How does a father raise a son to grow within our tangled conception of manhood?  What part of  how to be a man has altogether to do with violence?  The use of it.  Being familiar with its force and workings?  Linknote

The story of Anton, the father in Susanne Bier’s In a Better World, begins in Africa; a land where acts of homicide and mutilation by rogue bullymen are given reason by our insatiable desire for the raw materials and sparkling stones still to be found there.  Everyone’s culpable in this endless play of centrifugal nihilism. Beast us.  Mostly I let myself tune out those stories because, well, I must keep my hope.

But Bier does not tune out.  Nor does she leave us to wallow but riffs off the bold outline of an African manifestation tracing the bully pattern from its stark exposition there to dig at its more disguised and familiar roots in the resource consuming landscape of Denmark.  Here, with two fathers who must engage with an evil that threatens to incarnate in their own young sons, Bier goes at the heart of troubling questions about our bully selves: how to exhume and release the ancient hold of violence on us?  How to counter the monster bullies that are groomed and given life by violence without giving birth to that malignancy in ourselves?  More fundamentally, if our emotional mechanisms default to the use of force, especially when we are wounded, in doubt or under stress, could these be reframed as only one of many innate propensities in us to be given encouragement, or not, by our structures, familial and institutional?  Continue reading →