To fully, ahem, digest this post, you need to start with an understanding of what a "useful idiot" is, because I will be using the term, ahem, ad nauseum.
A useful idiot is someone who supports one side of an ideological debate, but who is manipulated and held in contempt by the leaders of their faction or is unaware of the ultimate agenda driving the ideology to which they subscribe.
-RationalWiki.org
So I finally got the courage together to see The Green Inferno, and I have to say...my first reaction was that it was pure exploitation, but on reflection, I've concluded that it's actually very well-thought out social criticism.
More specifically, I believe this film is actually Eli Roth's reaction to the BDS (Boycott-Divest-Sanction [Israel]) movement.
The film depicts a bunch of useful idiots who are manipulated into fighting a cause they absolutely do not understand by intellectually dishonest forces willing to do anything to manufacture a particular narrative.
Here are just a few of the analogues (spoilers ahead):
1. Jewish roommate of main character doesn't buy into the "cause" and even says "activism is so *beep* gay" (exactly how I feel about BDS activists).
2. Machiavellian leader of the activists is not honest about his motives, who is actually funding the expedition, and why (the BDS movement receives most of its funding from totalitarian Arab regimes looking to deflect public attention from the human rights abuses and other horrific societal inequities at home).
3. The useful idiots tie themselves to trees and place themselves in the way of bulldozers to prevent the destruction of indigenous Amazonian tribe (Rachel Corrie).
4. Organizers are fully prepared to allow one of their members--whose father happens to be a lawyer in the UN--to die--for political expediency (Hamas' strategy of deliberately provoking Israel and using human shields to manufacture a narrative of Israeli oppression).
5. The Amazonian tribe the useful idiots are trying to protect turn out to be brutal cannibals--not exactly the peaceful, innocent savages the useful idiots thought they were "protecting" from evil corporate and colonial forces (ahem, I think you get it).
6. The cannibals utilize the practice of female circumcision/female genital mutilation (FGM is still in practice in many Muslim-majority countries, including the UAE and other Arab states).
7. After returning home safe due to the intervention of the very loggers she set out to stop, and having witnessed all of her naive useful idiot friends tortured and eaten by cannibals, the main character lies about what she saw, all for the sake of the false narrative she went down there to manufacture.
I could go on and on. In conclusion, I'd have to say this is a grossly underrated film with a real message. And when I think of the victims as BDS activists who do so much more harm than good, the film becomes more, ahem, palatable.
None of the above is intended as a complete exoneration of Israel, a justification for indignities visited upon the Palestinian people, or as an indictment of all Muslims. Both sides have, ahem, blood on their hands.
But if you are only about hating Jews or Israel, here's my cock. Suck it good, you useful idiot, you.
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