Blood Diamond

Early this morning, I watched ‘Blood Diamond’. It’s only my second time watching. The first, I thought it was a good show. Now, it’s one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen. How do you capture that conflict, that life we see in the story…there’s blood and it stains, and we’re content to let it stay and seep.

Mr DiCaprio and Mr Hounsou give fine performances. It says much that we do not see characters on the screen – characters are walking and talking plot devices, providing exposition and driving the story. But these weren’t characters. These were people. They are the story. And we aren’t watching them, we’re rooting for them.

The diamonds aren’t diamonds. The diamonds are human greed, calcified. And of course, there’s blood on them. In the film they mentioned the red earth, coloured by the blood of the people fighting for it. No more red earth. Red stone. The country is not the country, but the diamonds are. Do we feed this trade? Every woman who wants one on her ring, every man who buys her one…does the cash leave our hands and reach those far-flung people as bullets? We’re told so.

The film is not great because it shines the light that reveals to us the stains. It’s great because now those stains matter. Can you look at a diamond the same way? Or oil. Or gold. They come from conflict, death – nowadays, they come from other things too.

I’m writing this at 2 in the morning. It will only be published after I wake from my sleep, so hard it is to come by at this time, these days. I can’t sleep because of jet lag. Somewhere else, people can’t sleep because sleeping is dying. Closing your eyes and letting go is just as well as asking for it to be permanent. There’s violence in Libya. Their people thought they started a revolution. But they started a civil war. Is it any different from Sierra Leone back then? Bad government, worse rebels. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Fair enough?

‘Blood Diamond’ moved me. I mean I pushed back on my chair after the film was over. Ha. Ha. But more than moving me it made me think. The worlds apart. I saw violence, shooting, blood, explosions – they fought, for that rough clear stone, pinkish in colour. Cut to a later scene, and you see the shiny stones nicely on display, the men in their suits and the people unknowing. The people unknowing…is that it? Have I learned that ignorance was the problem? That writing about it could solve it? But news becomes just that, news. Rapes, murders, suicides, statistics. Once in a while a tsunami comes to shake us up. Then it goes. Have I learned instead that people are people? There was once where they say that. People are people. It’s what they do, their actions, that is good or bad. Yet what action is bad here – the death, or the demand?

Films play so many roles. There’s the cheap popcorn flick, the filler we use to substitute sleep with. There are diamond movies, designed to appeal to our senses. Then there are blood movies, that makes us think. What makes a good film…

‘Blood Diamond’ will be one of my favourite films of all time. It forgoes the popcorn but still takes my sleep. It never sparkles but finds my senses nonetheless. And it makes me bleed, but thoughts and not blood. Red stone? No. Red earth…