Oliver Stone Commencement Address; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 4 of 4

The Struggle for Consciousness

I sometimes think that the media have dreamed our history up. They dreamed Watergate, the revelations of Watergate, of which we saw the surface. There so much missing tape, there's 400 hours of tape, that we, the naive ones, saw just a few hours of -- the surface events. There may have been a reason for Watergate, which I'm not going to discuss here, but I urge you to read a book such as Silent Coup. I urge you as students to look through Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. It goes through American history upside down. It reexamines Columbus, the genocide against the Indians. It reexamines all the stories I grew up with; the Indian wars, the origins of the American Revolution, what George Washington was really doing. The origins of the Civil War. Was slavery really the issue it was supposed to be? Was it really such a noble conflict? How did World War I get started? There are some fascinating economic reasons behind World War I. What about that most sacred cow of all, the origins of World War II? I'm not saying that Hitler was a nice guy by any means, but I am saying that the origins of that war were thicker and more dense than is the simplistic version of the "good war" against Germany. The Korean War is a puzzle to most of us. Vietnam eludes many people. I honestly have reached a point, cynical as it may sound, where I do believe that history is written by those who win. They won. They killed Kennedy, they rewrote it to match what they wanted you to believe, and if Hitler had won World War II, believe me, today we'd be reading a different history about the United States to justify Hitler. Winner takes all. Never underestimate the power of corruption to change history.

I guess I sound pessimistic, but in my heart, being a filmmaker and taking dramatic license, I am most optimistic. I do feel the media can be used for good purpose in the 21st century. I do feel that a golden age could be upon us. A higher consciousness, so to speak, through computers and communication. In a sort of Buckminster Fuller paradigm, people would be smarter because they have to be, in order to make the earth system work. Fuller would say no matter how greedy and selfish people could get, politicians, businessmen, lawyers, leaders, at some point it becomes naturally unproductive to be so selfish. They've got to start to clean up the atmosphere because it becomes economically profitable to do so. Profit motivates. Survival is profitable. Technology and soul.

We must, in our daily lives, struggle to keep our consciousness growing. I sometimes feel like my children, young people, are only getting film sequels, robots, sound-bites, created by cynical people. I feel that the minds of my children will perish in a sleepwalk through their adult years from the suburbs to the car to the golf course to the office. Devoid of a sensibility to look beyond their own lives to reach out to others. To trip over a homeless person in the street without noticing because they will be unable to deal with the reality of suffering. Nothing wrong with suffering, suffering is good. The Indians say "walk with the pain of the world." It is good to be exposed to suffering, not to run from it, not to keep it at arm's length through some expensive government program that we can ignore. It is good to make it part of your everyday life, like the Indians do in Calcutta.

I think with movies we can begin to strengthen people's immune systems, because people go into the movies with their defenses down. It's not real, therefore not threatening. When they least expect it, that might be the best time for the guerrillas of art to get in there and move the head and the heart. One hopes that people will leave the theater renewed, sacred. In a system that has rendered man more and more insignificant, where artists and all people are packaged and trivialized by the media, where their dreams are categorized and destroyed, I really want to believe in the greatness of the spirit of man. And I think so do our movies, that's why we all like happy endings. I think it's something fundamental to all people.

I choose to believe, in the back-burner of my mind, in some old movie hero besieged on all sides by enemy swordsmen, who by some inner force and greater love conquers his adversaries against all odds. What is a movie but this parade of faces across the screen? Greta Garbo to Julia Roberts, they're faces that, for the most part, you love. Most of the power of movies is the close-up of the face. People, I think, want to see faces because that face of sorrow, suffering, pain, resurrection makes the audience, once again, believe in being human. In traversing the odds, in getting up in the morning and making it through the day.

I think man wants to believe in man, woman wants to believe in women, people in people. And in a world where the systems are crushing us, where many of our leaders are shadow-puppets, mouthing hypocrisies on the media stage, where centralization, big business, big government, is constantly, fascistically, gaining each day on the individual and has wiped out so much of the human spirit in this century, I think that people are the one recurrent hope we have. Day by day in the Calcuttas and Manhattans of the world, you get up and you get through the day, inch by inch, and by making it, you win. If adversity is big, and it is, then I choose to believe that man is bigger than his adversity. In the words of Andre Malraux, "The 21st century will either be spiritual or it will not be."

Thank you.

© Copyright 1997, Regents of the University of California

See also the interview with Oliver Stone (1997), "History and the Movies"