55. Verdronken Vlinder &...

Lyrics

Zo te sterven op het water met je vleugels van papier

(To die like this, in the water, with your paper wings)
Zomaar drijven, na het vliegen in de wolken drijf je hier

(Just floating, after flying in the clouds, you float here)
Met je kleuren die vervagen

(With your fading colors)
Zonder zoeken zonder vragen

(Without seeking, without asking)
Eindelijk voor altijd rusten

(Finally resting forever)
En de bloemen die je kuste

(And the flowers that you kissed)
Geuren die je hebt geweten

(Odors that you have known)
Alles kan je nu vergeten

(You can forget all of it now)
Op het water wieg je heen en weer

(On the water, you lull back and forth)
Zo te sterven op het water met je vleugels van papier

(To die like this, in the water, with yout paper wings)

als een vlinder die toch vliegen kan tot in de blauwe lucht 

(Like a butterfly that kan stil fly into the blue sky)
als een vlinder altijd vrij en voor het leven op de vlucht 

(Always free, like a buterfly, and run away from life)
wil ik sterven op het water 

(I want to die in the water)
maar dat is een zorg van later

(But that's a concern for later)
ik wil nu als vlinder vliegen

(Now, I want to fly like a butterfly)
op de bloemen , blaren vliegen

(Fly myself to blisters on the flowers) 
maar zo hoog kan ik niet komen 

(But I can't come that high)
dus ik vlieg maar in mijn dromen 

(So I just fly in my dreams)
altijd ben ik voor het leven op de vlucht

(I always run away from life)
als een vlinder die toch vliegen kan tot in de blauwe lucht
(Like a butterfly that can fly into the blue sky)

Om te leven dacht ik je zou een vlinder moeten zijn

(To live, I thought, you need to be a butterfly)
Om te vliegen heel ver weg van alle leven alle pijn

(To fly far away from all the life and all the pain)
Maar ik heb niet langer hinder van jaloersheid op een vlinder

(But I am no more bothered by jealousy for a butterfly)
Als zelfs vlinders moeten sterven laat ik niet mijn vreugd bederven

(If even butterflies must die, I will not let my joy be spoiled)
Ik kan zonder vliegen leven

(I can live without flying)
Wat zou ik nog langer geven

(Why should I care any longer)
Om een vlinder die verdronken is in mij

(For a butterfly drowned in me)
Om te leven hoef ik echt geen vlinder meer te zijn

(I don't need to be a butterfly anymore, in order to live)

Had this video been made in 2013, it could have been seen as a perfect parody of Dutch hippie culture. Alas, it's made in 1966 and is a completely earnest object of the hippie culture in the Netherlands of the 1960's. That context is the reason for both the positive and the negative aspects of the song. On the whole, I like it though. The first couplet of the song could be interpreted as it being about Amelia Earhart. That would obviously be a wrong interpretation, but for the purpose of this blog much is allowed.

The Movie: Amelia (Mira Nair, 2009)

When I was young I was fascinated by the explores of the world, those people that you could call the pioneers of travel. I read much and even wrote some school project about them. And I liked them all From the early ones like Marco Polo and Christoffel Columbus, to others like Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott, who traveled even further to the edges of the world. And then in the 20th century, came those who experimented with flying. The Wright Brothers of course, and later on Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. And once they conquered the skies, it was time to go even further. That's of course what Yuri Gagarin and Neill Armstrong did. Chronologically, that's where my interest in them stopped. There have obviously been many people after Armstrong who achieved astonishing travelling feats, but I didn''t care much about them. I suppose I felt that after 'we' reached the moon, all other feats would be less interesting and heroic. Someone should go to Mars or something. It seems I wasn't the only one to feel this way. A major reason I was fascinated by all this explorers that came before Armstrong is the fact that the world was fascinated by them. They are presented as heroes in the books made about them, their feats are taught in schools and presented as great milestones in the history of the world. And this is exactly the spirit Amelia is made in. There isn't much drama or ambiguity in the movie. The movie posits that Earhart was a greatly heroic woman and that this is a fact about which no debate is much necessary. And I couldn't help but agree with that. The movie was much criticized when it came out. It has some (huge) problems, but I liked it quite a bit. It tries to be a slightly different biopic than most, and succeeds for better or worse.

The movie focuses mostly on Earhearts deeds and is not much interested in dramatic developments on the personal level. I liked this approach. Too many (even good to great) biopics focus a lot on the personal hardships their subject had to overcome in order to achieve their great deeds. Or they simply use the life of their subject to tell a sentimental drama/romance full of cliches, without focusing much on the things their subject did to warrant a biopic about him/her in the first place. This movie doesn't present such a view of Amelia Earhart. The movie shows us that Amelia loved to fly and did so. There wasn't much she had to overcome to do it. We are not presented with parents protesting her wish, nor with grapples with poverty. Amelia is also talented at flying, so there also aren't any scenes in which he has to overcome her failures in learning to fly. Except for some early scenes the movie doesn't even dwell much on the fact that she is a woman in a man's world. Her relationship with her husband/manager George Putnam also focuses mostly on the work they do together. He is a man of marketing and makes Amelia go to a lot of publicity events. Amelia is not always very happy about that, but that's no reason for great dramatic events in which she, for example, would leave him and than he would promise her to listen more to her wishes and than she would would come back to him. No, these are perfectly reasonable people who lare like most normal couples, except she is America's greatest pilot and he is one America's best marketing men. A nice bonus of the movie is that it shows good understanding of how the media is used to make somebody a national icon and how the icon is then used by the media and vice versa.

 It is also a pleasure to see Hilary Swank and Richard Gere as Amelia and George. They both enjoy their role and it was nice to see that Richard Gere could have done this role in his sleep but didn't. Since Boys Don't Cry Swank is often cast in roles in which she has to play some tortured soul or a as women who want to reject their feminine side. It was nice to see that here she wasn't forced to do any such things. Amelia obviously does enjoy doing (what was then seen as) manly stuff and she is a not very beautiful women with short hair. But she is presented as a woman who enjoys her life and enjoys sex with men.

Still the movie has two problems. The one small, the other pretty big. Despite the fact that the movie prefers presenting us with Amelia's working life over her personal life, it still does want to show something of her personal life. It wants to do this in a fast, efficient way. And in order to this, it ramps up the cliches and sentimentalism even more than the ordinary biopic I talked about earlier. It's good that this scenes take up such a short amount of time, because their are utterly generic and unexceptional. The second problem is bigger though. As I said the movie wants to focus much on Amelia's working life. Much of it obviously involves flying airplanes. So the movie shows us lots of scenes of Amelia flying an airplane or simply an airplane flying in the sky. This scenes are incredibly dull. We hear Amelia on the soundtrack talking about the joy and awe of flying, but Nair completely fails to convey this joy and awe. Every time we see an airplane on screen it is accompanied by the same dull and monotone piece of music. In the last scenes prior to her crash in the Pacific Ocean at least the movie does manage to bring some tension to the flight. At least for me. For some reason I was convinced that Amelia had died somewhere in the Bermuda triangle. So I expected that she would happily finish her solo flight around the world and didn't expect her to die.