9.13.2007
Just Say NO To Diamonds
Blood Diamond. A movie nominated for 5 Academy Awards. So what.
This movie proves how Hollywood can trivialize an important social issue. Blood Diamond is set during the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1999. At that time there was talk about "blood diamonds," diamonds sold to finance the bloodshed. If you wanted to be politically correct/socially aware, you had to ask your jeweler if he dealt in conflict or blood diamonds. (As if that made any real difference.)
The entire diamond industry is tainted, not just by the civil war that occurred in Sierra Leone. Right from the beginning of the diamond trade black Africans were forced to work under inhuman conditions to enrich a few white capitalists. How would you like to sleep on a concrete bed after a long day in the mines? And to end up with a pittance of what De Beers and other such companies were raking in?
Blood Diamond does raise a few issues, for example, how the major diamond companies buy up all the stones and hoard them, creating an artificial scarcity to keep the prices so high. Or how a man is told that he should spend at least three months of his salary on a diamond engagement ring.
But such issues are lost among all the action and violence during Blood Diamond. After a while the rapid pace of gunfire and last minute escapes becomes boring. Our heroes somehow serpentine their way through mass destruction and deadly chaos, but while everyone around them is injured or killed, they come through to face more danger. This movie could have been easily changed into Indiana Jones And The Blood Diamond.
Of course, this is how Hollywood tackles social issues. Keep the real issues in the background and dazzle everyone with a video-game plot.
At the end of the movie a statement is shown that buyers should make sure that they only buy diamonds of the non-blood type. If the viewer had been paying attention, he would remember how it was mentioned in the movie that blood diamonds were easily mixed in with "good" ones as they're sold along the way. But like I said, it doesn't matter, the entire diamond industry is tainted with blood.
Last Xmas season one of the big diamond companies ran a TeeVee ad featuring an upper middle class black couple at a posh restaurant, a heart-touching scene of a man giving his wife a diamond. I wonder if those black actors were aware of the history of the diamond trade.
And if they were - for shame.
(C) 2007 Stan Spire
# posted by Stan Spire @ 4:35 PM 
