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In this reflection, I chose this short film as it means a lot to me. “Two And Two” is a short film written and directed by Babak Anvari, which was released in 2009. It was nominated for BAFTA awards in 2012. The filming was done in England in the year 2009. It is about a young boy’s school which was ruled under the construction of society. At the beginning of the film, people tend to believe that it is a real setting but quickly realize that it has a certain level of surrealism to it. The movie takes place in an Iranian school and has an elapsed time of 8 minutes. Although it took place in the Middle East, this film is not bound to any country because, as the director Babak Anvari puts it, “I believe that Two and Two has a universal message which is not bound to any specific region or country. We still witness a variety of vehement forms of diabolic powers in the eastern and western parts of the globe, which constrict people from making headway to solving crucial problems.” The message is clear of what “that” should represent to us. It’s more like an allegorical story.
This short film explains how society builds itself. Naturally, society does relate to culture. These past few years, and in a more social science context, the word has been used to refer to what appears to be distinctive about the way of life of a people, community, nation or social group. It also describes the connection in sharing the values of a group or of society. And thus culture assists the members in making sense of what is happening around them, the interpretation of the phenomena, and the world, in broader aspects. Then, now let’s peel carefully what is culturally constructed behind this short movie.
The teacher begins by proposing his theory of ‘two plus two is five’ by writing it down on the chalkboard. He propagates his idea to each and every student in his class. When a particular student disagrees with the notion and claims that two plus two is four and not five, the teacher in turn acts aggressively. He responds by asking the student ‘Do not speak of that.’ They are not at liberty to communicate. He tries to force the student to stop talking and to go with him, but the student stubbornly continues to claim that two plus two equals five is incorrect. The teacher goes out of the class and comes back with three elderly students dressed in standard uniforms with a red armband on the left side. The teacher inquires those students what is two and two, and the three boys maintain the view that the answer is emphatically five. In addition, one defiant student is still resolved. He is instructed to stand in front of the class. The teacher allows him to erase the board and replace with his answer, but is obviously annoyed. He tells the student that what he is about to reply with is the answer and nothing else.
The three senior students point their imaginary rifles at the boy standing against the board as if preparing for an execution. The boy wears a confused expression on his face and after a long thought session, writes “4”. The teacher looks disappointed. We hear the gunshot and blood starts to ooze from the cracks of the board. The boy’s body is motionless on the ground, and slowly we see him collapse. The rest of the class is unnaturally quiet, shock-filled at the event they had just seen unfold. The senior students walk out of the classroom, taking the corpse of the boy who was shot dead. The teacher starts to explain something and the lesson goes on. The teacher proceeds to instruct the class to record in their notebooks. Now at the beginning of the story, there is 1 student at the back, who is very clearly erasing “5” and switching it out for “4”. The plot stands out just as much as the classroom setting where we witness pure savage and ruthless fundamentalism. It highlights the struggles of people living in such scenarios, and it made me wonder just how I would act in such a case.
The focus is education and so there are a few symbols that come up with their particular uses. To start with, the classroom the place where learning is taking place is the setting chosen. It depicts this in the background as showing that we live in a place where we are able to generate or value for itself. Such as the compliant students and the teachers who passively mold a portion of their values in pupils through the manner in which they teach. Next, the teachers as people who are capable, intelligent and what we deem as having the more extensive scope of knowledge. Then, They become the creator to a particular thing that in due course comes to be regarded in a belief of a society. Thirdly, the students as group of people represent the residents as the subjects of society. The fact that the majority of children go through schools and classrooms gives the impression that whatever happens to you as a child more or less stays with you. Even if you do not remember most of the things it will always be part of you somewhere deep down. And all of us have at one time or the other been a child, this short movie actually serves as our reflection in society. In addition, the students in this short movie are grouped into a few categories.
They are the pro, neutral and contrary to the values that spread around the society. For the students who pro, they are known as a group of people that have the best quality, they have their own sign to represent about their community as in here we could see through the red fabric which in here we could see its symbol through the red fabric circling their left arm. The color red becomes the symbols of power and dominance and in reality it is a sign of reminiscence of Nazi armbands. Students who are brave enough to show their disagreement would have the bad luck at the end and for the rest, the neutral, just play around on their save zone. It in our society, is similar and tries to reject for particular things that the community has chosen to believe mark them as troublemakers. That’s why some choose the neutral to save there life. Fourthly, all the participants are men. Of course, this is related with the gender issue about how men have power in our society.
In the beginning, a teacher walks into a classroom, greets his students, and proceeds to teach them something new. He is still focused on teaching the students math, so he begins teaching the students the basic concepts of math. A new complete equation appears on the board, He explains this concept to the class and asks his students to try doing it also. At first, every single one of the students is doing it to some extent. Here, I found that some things that created us stem from certain objects. It appears that the teacher in this case as the actor constructed what he thought to be a commodity in his society. Ethnographer, sociologist, and philosopher Durkheim (1952) have studied the constraining structures of social life patterns and cultures existing beyond a single given individual. He discovers that there is an element of consciousness which binds social fact and experience, contrary to knowledge gained from the first-hand experience. The example that corresponds directly to this idea is faith. Does it connect with Marx (1961) who said that habits generates the framework into which people prioritize. For example, people cultivate crops, manufacture garments, and ornate utensils to suit their surroundings and in turn, build a civilization.
Additionally, we understand those labors as well as forms of social organizations into which a society is divided as the primary constituents of Marxism. A particular mode of production organization is not only a system for coordinating an object. It is also bound up with the relations between people, just like in the role of teacher and pupils in this particular film. This movie conveys the message about how the people in power perpetuate their control over the rest of us by ensuring that everyone accepts the same perspectives on how things ought to be. The traditional Marxist impression is what the film leaves us with. Moving beyond that, when we address the practices of signification that provide meaning as an outcome of structures or any other definable set of causations that exist outside a particular individual, that is understood as the structure. In this sense structuralism takes meaning-making, and signification in general, to be an effect of deep structures of language at work in a particular culture.
But what most interesting about this short film is when one of the students interrupts the teacher and argues that the concept is wrong. A rather shocking example is the claim. Here, we can see how the language gives the meaning and creates the change. This is from what structuralism is concerned most about, how cultural meaning is produced and how culture itself is understood structurally like language. So, as we already know that the answer is not five but four, we also cannot accept what an important person tells us, if what they say is not a reality. Saussure (1960) argued that meaning lies in the fact that it raises the value of a word, which is taken from a system of a structured difference on a language. It is annouced in a socity in an outcome of a set of rules and conventions. What is meant by this is that the organization of language (langue) has more important having greater priority than other utterances which people make on a day-to-day basis (parole). In addition, It is also all related to the culture as like a language concept that with all of us inescapably.
Leach (1974) observed that a structuralist principle at work can be described when we define the relationship system as, “like a language.” It implies that there were organized patterns that governed the relationship. The example from this short movie comes from the argument of the students. Two students are talking, and what is shown through the words is actually a mark of the overarching culture. The cultural conventions that dictate what the equal of two plus two is four do not consider having any circumstances that are attached to them. The edible and the inedible are marked not by the questions of formula but by the cultural meaning. If we believe that the result of two plus two is five from the outset, then of course the disagreement could not happen. Looking backwards to the theory of sign that was proposed by Saussure, where the signifier (medium) and signified (meaning) constituted the sign, we will turn our attention to exploring this phenomenon through semiotics. As a consequence, language gives a model of how culture and representation operate including the well-known semiotic approach. The focus shifts to the meaning of every single thing which is produced by the relations between signs.
Something that we could uncover from here is what came about following the process of structuralism. Intertextuality as a notion enables us to shift our focus from analyzing a singular word, sentence, or text to studying the relationship between these texts in a broader sense. There is the section where out of three other children one is shot which stands out to be the most disturbing scene in this short film. The invisible guns are brandished with the “guard” as the title given to the three students who shot the child. To the onlookers, the idea of the guards pointing their weapons at the boy is ludicrous and then it becomes even more shocking when he is fired at. So, some questions come up, how is that able to happen? What kind of motivations exist to venture forth? I think, looking at the theory of Wittgenstein (1980), we learn language as part of everyday activities that are worth doing, for example, their fearless act of shooting the child.
Words or language is neither something we can philosophize of nor is it a complete system. It is a tool made to coordinate actions and relationships within a social framework. For example, when he writes the number “4”, it influences the actions of the three senior students who choose to follow it. Giddens (1979) also further explains this argument by saying that language is about what has to be done. Many constructs of social life as ongoing practices cannot be disentangled from the constitution of language as meaningful.
Moving ahead to section four, all participants are male. Why? As we know, men are more socially prominent than women. Culturally, the idea of male dominance validates the existence of men, and that is why feminism arose. These men in the story represent the powerful ones who have the freedom to command others. This is greatly influenced by the idea of “masculinity”. The concept of hegemonic masculinity emerged two decades ago. It has focused on the interactions between men, gender, and stratification (Connell & Messerschmitt, 2005). The absence of women suggests that a man is regarded before a woman. From the viewpoint of patriarchy, it can be argued that most societies have a patriarchal structure that reveals a clear dominance of women over men. It shows that Social Power can and is used almost exclusively by the male gender. This can be witnessed as evident in patriarchy, which has always served and protected men.
This movie has a strong message about the injustice that conformity, and the need for everyone to comply within a society, does engender. The motivation that surfaces in the short film “Two and Two” is how people are intrigued by defiance toward authority in a completely oppressive context. Here, the desire speaks of the truth that lies in every person. The claim of the director gives evidence of this. He, Babak Anvary, the director tends to elaborate on the point that grown-ups are uncomfortable asking questions in his words: “It is a precondition of democracy. The freedom to question is a precondition of democracy. It is like saying I can do whatever I want. As grown-ups we must have the right, as soon as we are faced with a problem, to begin to intervene within it, to manage it, to impose ways of resolving it.” Furthermore, Hegemony may have shaped the film too within the concept of the elite students and the teachers controlling and shooting at the students as an act of power.
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