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Urban Chat: Some salacious 'Soekarno' saga
âSome people find it hard to believe that Madiba didnât just fall from the sky
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'Some people find it hard to believe that Madiba didn't just fall from the sky.'
One of Nelson Mandela's estranged daughters reportedly uttered that line to a foreign journalist several years ago. Family feud notwithstanding, I understood where she was coming from.
Public figures, great leaders particularly, have served as beacons of respect, loyalty, even awe, for millennia. From cave drawings, monument carvings, scroll writings to the days of 24/7 TV and social media, these figures are painted and glossed over repeatedly, often mixed with burning desires from family or diehard supporters to protect and preserve a certain image. As such they easily become larger than life, looming so large that the public easily forgets these figures aren't perfect, they ' as are all of us ' humanly imperfect.
This explains why whenever a biopic of a public leader varies from the established image or accounts and uproar, justified or not, ensues.
There will always be petty gossip, unfounded rumors and blatant slander surrounding any public figure, like February's darkest cloud, which is in direct proportion to the public scale of the figure. It's the tough job of any biographer or filmmaker to sort through this jumbled mess and pull out an accurate portrayal of a the individual's character, unbecoming or not, and account of events, unsavory or not. The longer the time retraced and the fewer the sources available, the more interpretations kick in. And the less the project is intended to be documentary, the more fiction or dramatization is thrown in. Whether the completed biography clear up or add more to the aforementioned February's darkest cloud often, again, depends on viewers' interpretations. At the very least for the new biography to make a meaningful remark it needs to bring forth a private side to public.
Mandela's daughter's comment is the perfect example of how wide that gap between public and private persona remains, even for someone as well-documented as her father. Various historical accounts have long suggested Mandela to be a distant father and philandering husband, as the recent award-winning Hollywood movie Invictus subtly pointed. And the daughter's comment illustrates the family's view of a man to be unsaintly and non-angelic, a stark contrast to his public persona we've come to respect or adore.
The same hot issue surrounds the newly-released biopic Soekarno. The difference is the filmmaker has managed to bring to light some different sides of Sukarno's while it's his daughter that insists otherwise ' holding on to what I can only describe as the well-curated, long-preserved image of strong statesman, nationalistic hero and all-around sinless sage, used mostly as a tool for his politically-charged descendants. With the 2014 elections coming up, after consecutive losses in previous elections, no wonder the family is flabbergasted.
I'm not a movie critic by any definition ' there are professionals who can wonderfully dissect the Soekarno biopic ' as a whole, the movie was just okay for me. I did particularly love how they managed to show Soekarno as capable of hesitation, to get afraid, to compromise, to be culpably human at times.
Because to me that's how real life is: The more responsibilities you have at work or in society, the harder the options are ' it's usually between a bad choice and a worse one, each with its own, often damning, consequences. A great leader is someone who can ponder those options and finally choose one, ready to bear the brunt of his or her decision. Those controversies involving Japanese colonialists seemed callous, but the other options often meant more or longer suffering for the people, so I understood and respected him for his eventual decisions.
As for often hesitating and being uncertain, wasn't it Mandela himself (or maybe John Wayne) who once said a brave man wasn't someone who had no fear, but rather someone who would charge ahead, because they needed to act, in spite of fear? I personally think that someone with limitless valor is delusional, disturbed or desperate ' definitely not leader material.
Or was it the unapologetically salacious romances shown that subconsciously got the family riled up? Was it an unknown state secret? The only thing the movie did was to show that despite the politically-correct statements of family members issued throughout the years, his roving eye painfully wounded everyone involved. Heck, it only captured the drama between Inggit Ganarsih and Fatmawati, imagine if all the love tales were told? All hell would break loose.
Against all the odds, despite of the shortcomings, Sukarno in the movie rose above and beyond. That portrayal was more colorful, relatable and current than the almost beatific, obsolete persona his family and political party have peddled over the years. How ironically myopic that they failed to see how this more realistic image might work for future generation, including first-time voters in 2014.
Madiba didn't fall from the sky. Neither did Sukarno. And thank God for that, because it means humans aren't precariously dependent on godsend angels. On our own we still hold a chance to rise above and beyond, as they have.
