The
film K-pax directed by Iain Softley
I have chosen this film to show cultural
identity because I think that it touches upon important issues and shows us how important it is having an identity and identification in this
western society where everyone is supposed to be somebody, and where everybody is measured against the same
criteria as to what is considered to be okay or not okay in our society. It also questions our cultural values such as what is right and what is wrong cannot be decided merely by society and the
rules that govern. What interests me is how society makes up rules for everyone to follow in and how, if you should choose to deviate from these rules would be considered unstable, and not mentally reliable.
The film questions why everybody needs to be sane by the same criteria and shows us the thin line between sane and insane, morals and ethnics from the views of one psychiatrist and one patient. The film also asks us who is to decide this, and why it is so important to us in our western culture that everyone should be moulded into the same shape, or against the same measure criteria. The Pathos of the film, is that it makes us feel that we need to take a step back and look at our world from his (the patient’s) perspective, which means that maybe not everybody who is thought of as different from the mainstream needs to be cured, that is if (and since) nobody gets hurt and since the man claiming to be from another planet is clearly happy as an
Alien (or as Mr Prot the K-Paxien).
The paradigm is that in some ways I even believe that you can draw similarities between Mr Prot the K-Paxien and Jesus, since if Jesus had been alive today dropping down from heaven (without an ID) to a transit hall in New York we would have probably thought of him as insane too and put him away into a mental institution as well.
I think this film can be seen as a time rate, like a text or a book in literature, since this film has the need to touch its viewers like everything else that is written down and just like anything that is to be sold.
It has its focus upon what feels as relevant today and how our society today is, (the pulse of our western society that is). The film begins when Prot is arrested at the airport of New York because he lacks proper, since he claims to be an alien from another planet, something that is totally unacceptable for a grown man to claim in our secularised money - depending and high prestige society. The film’s main focus is the power relation between the psychiatrist and the man believing to be an extraterrestrial.
In this society identity is the same as knowing who you are and where you belong. Everything we do can be traced back through Credit cards, Id’s and security numbers. Without these things that our society depends so much upon it is hard to be alive. This since our society depends on you knowing your place in line. Prot differs from all of this, by not having what is demanded from every traveller, namely a proper identification when the film begins. He also differs from the idea of proper conduct throughout the whole film, this is not to say that the man is running down the street naked or hurting other people by his odd behaviour. It simply means that our society says, that a grown man cannot run around town pretending to be an alien, looking at his own world as something strange and new, let alone eating bananas without out pealing the shell off before. It also means that the idea of him being an alien is not something that our society has (quite) accepted as a believable cause for his deviant behaviour. Since aliens have not yet been discovered through our world of science (which is the world of rules where we define what is acceptable and not) they can therefore not exist, let alone look like you and me. Someone like that must of course be considered as crazy and therefore by our western society appose a threat to us ordinary people!!!
The ethos and the question is then, whaat do we do with people like that, the ones who cannot clearly be defined by our norms, criteria and standards, the ones who fall outside of these walls or barriers that we have put up for our society to function. Should we let them run around freely or should we not at least try and cure them of their delusions?
Prot to me is a typically post-modern person since he found that the meaning with his life was to have another world to identify himself with. His meaning and identity became the escaping from a shattered cruel and broken world, when his world and dreams got shattered by something unpleasant he found himself escaping into an alternative world, a nicer and more peaceful such (That is if he is to be seen as a simple human being).
More summaries about the K-Pax