Figure/Figureworm Creative
Violence breeds violence
Text/Yang Shiyang
This article was first published in China News Weekly, Issue 869
The title of "The Shepherd and the Butcher" is already the most direct title. After a lengthy court cross-examination, the defendant's lawyer said the words to the judge and to everyone in the audience, "You can't make a man both a shepherd and a butcher." "Yes, having a person emotionally involved with another group of people every day, watching them chat, eating, feeling their changing emotions, and then one day, having to execute them with their own hands – for a person, this tear is difficult to stitch and heal." The South African film Shepherd and the Butcher tells such a story.
On a rainy night in 1987, a 19-year-old man drove a car to meet a truck, chased each other for a while, and the boy forced the truck to stop and shot the whole truck one by one. The young man was arrested without suspense, awaiting a verdict, but his identity and the nature of his work caught the attention of the lawyer, who decided to use this as a breakthrough point to fight for the boy's possibility of being spared capital punishment.
The boy is a jailer who, from the age of 17, has served in a heavily guarded and ruthless prison, where his main job is to perform hangings in addition to daily care for prisoners — he plays both a shepherd and a butcher. In the lawyer's view, he killed out of control, not because of his innate tyranny, nor out of bloodthirsty desire, but more importantly, he was also a victim in addition to being a perpetrator.
The film explores the psychological effects of one's environment and where such pressure can push one. In a macroscopic sense, it is also exploring the existence and abolition of the death penalty, the justice of the death penalty, and the hidden wounds caused by such a special extreme punishment as the death penalty to the executioner.
The Shepherd and the Butcher is interspersed with court scenes and a large number of flashbacks in an attempt to reconstruct the connection between a boy's daily encounters and his future personality development. In a way, the prison is more like a slaughterhouse where the sun does not see the light of day, with filth and hopelessness hanging over everything, while at the same time, all the jailers under great pressure have subconsciously become lovers of violence, and they use bullying a new jailer as a fun and a channel to relieve their personal state of mind. Under double pressure, the boy has been on the verge of collapse. The lawyer tried to prove a conclusion — the sound of the door of the dilapidated van pulling open was the same as the sound of the rope falling sharply during the execution in prison, and on that rainy night, the metallic clatter became the trigger that pulled, triggering the pressure that had been backlogged for years.
At this point, everything became an unbreakable deadlock. It is undeniable that the boy's behavior must be more or less related to the psychological stress of being in an extreme environment for many years. The psychological trauma of his repeated executions is self-evident, and now, he himself has committed a felony and may face the death penalty, and his death penalty requires an executioner, all of which inexplicably become an endless chain and closed loop. This becomes one of the most ingenious and brutal dilemmas in the film.
The crowd outside the courtroom is agitated, the swords in the courtroom are raging, and people uphold the most simple sense of justice to demand the execution of the irrefutable murderer in front of them, and pay back the blood debt with eye for eye and tooth, but many problems after the retaliatory pleasure brought by the death penalty have been intentionally or unintentionally ignored.
The question of the death penalty ranges from the measure of civilization to the moral instincts of human beings. Some advocate abolishing the death penalty and replacing it with life imprisonment without parole, and most people who hold this view believe that it is a progression of civilization and mercy, but is life imprisonment really more benevolent than the death penalty? It is also said that all calls for the abolition of the death penalty are hypocritical, and that killing is a basic universal morality that can only have a deterrent effect, but there is no set of data that suggests that the existence of the death penalty will cause the felony rate to decline. More often than not, it simply satisfies some ancient desire for revenge. And those involved in the execution were cleverly and carefully hidden behind a thick curtain, without discussion, as if both the gun and the syringe could automatically complete a punishment without the need for human beings to mobilize their own will and feelings to participate. The Shepherd and the Butcher uses an extreme case to lift the curtain into a corner.
This grim story is based on real events, explores the impact of long-term witnessing and immersion in brutality on a person, and once again makes everyone think about the existence, value and meaning of capital punishment. But even with such brutal cases and torture, even if it is known that violence will breed new violence, the question of the existence of the death penalty is doomed to fail to reach a consensus. Like the film itself, it is rooted in everyone's ancient, instinctive inner lines, more like a dilemma.
Editor on duty: Zhang Ru