Just a Little Bit of History Repeating

PERSEPOLIS

Whether the history will be Tehran in 1979 or Beijing in 1989 is still up in the air, however.

I have to confess, I haven't been following the recent events in Iran all that closely. I haven't really followed the news in general that much since moving to DC, since I haven't had a daily paper handy, and I've never been in the habit of poring over news or news-aggregating websites. Honestly, my main source of news is the "In the news" section of Wikipedia (my homepage), so I generally stay abreast of major events, but don't necessarily know every detail as it appears on CNN.com or The Huffington Post.

(The exception to this is when I'm in the news myself . . . or almost in the news, as was the case Monday with the DC train wreck. I was on my way home when it happened, only a couple stops away; I was heading the opposite direction, so luckily there was never any danger of my being on one of the trains that crashed. But I did have to sit on my train between stations for forty minutes or so, while they periodically told us there was an "electrical problem" up ahead. They finally took us back to the last station we passed and let us off, and I took a (very crowded) bus home. It wasn't a pleasant evening for sure, but I'm still counting my blessings considering what happened to a lot of other people.)

I have seen Persepolis (as you can see by perusing my Honorable Mentions of 2008), and I think it did a wonderful job of giving one person's ground-level view of major historical events. I also liked how the focus was almost solely on Marjane's life, of which the revolution was only one part; that ensured its human perspective rather than making it just an historical pageant. And I too loved the animation; while Pixar's been firing on all cylinders both artistically and narratively for almost fifteen years straight, it's nice to see some films buck the CG bandwagon, especially when they do so in a particularly abstracted and expressionistic (i.e., non-Disneyfied) way. I too have seen Waltz with Bashir and Linklater's Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, all of them very good. (And if you like that style of animation, I'll make sure to show you some Frisky Dingo when you move here.) Also, on my Netflix queque (though currently in slot 85, so don't expect a review any time soon) is Azur and Asmar (trailer), a French CG children's film with such a distinctive and intriguing visual style that I have to check it out.

To add my two historical cents (as opposed to cinematic), frankly I'm astounded by how this revolution seems to parallel the one thirty years ago. In particular, the fact that the military seems to be largely sitting by the sidelines while the regime and the protesters vie for power. In 1979, the fact that the military didn't come to the Shah's defense spelt the end for his regime. But another lesson we should take from 1979 is that once a power vacuum is created, it isn't always filled by the people who did the leg work of removing the old regime (i.e., the liberals who'd been demonstrating against the Shah throughout the late '70s; similarly, it wasn't the Bolsheviks who brought the tsarist regime down in 1917, though they ended up being the beneficiaries).

I would say that I hope that things in Iran turn out well in the end, but I remember the line from Watchmen (in both the comic book and the film): "Nothing ends. Nothing ever ends."