While watching \u201cThe Cow\u201d I began seriously pondering to what extent we can assign any intangible qualities to modernity. If the cow is indeed a metaphor for Iran\u2019s oil, and the storyline intended to mirror the crisis Iran experienced under Shah Pahlavi in the 1970\u2019s, then the films seems to carry a message of continuity rather than one of disjointed eras or irreconcilable contrasts. Modernity is, after all, not a scientific construct; rather it is whatever society construes it to be at any given flashpoint. As historians and sociologists were first grappling with the concept of modernity, they would have doubtless viewed oil as a definitively modern resource; the \u201cblack gold\u201d made valuable by the legacy of the Industrial Revolution and used to power most of the world\u2019s most \u201cadvanced\u201d technologies. The cow, meanwhile, would have been seen as a rather archaic economic resource, intrinsically linked to the sustenance farming that Rostow saw as defining the \u201ctraditional society\u201d which was lowest on his five-staged pyramid of development. However, it can be said that the cow was viewed and treated by its owner in the exact same fashion as Pahlavi and his cronies viewed and treated their resource of oil . Both became a singular obsession; both led their owners into inhabiting a distorted reality that led to their ultimate downfall.
\nThus to me \u201cThe Cow\u201d illustrates an argument by which the concept of modernity works best and most cohesively when applied solely to the material realm. It is easy to say the cow is a \u201cpre-modern\u201d resource and oil is a \u201cmodern\u201d resource; that said, it is much more difficult to find differences in the human flaws that governed the management of both the cow and oil. The allegory of the cow points to characteristics such as greed, pride, and tunnel vision that have transcended eras and cultures to define the human condition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While watching \u201cThe Cow\u201d I began seriously pondering to what extent we can assign any intangible qualities to modernity. If the cow is indeed a metaphor for Iran\u2019s oil, and the storyline intended to mirror the crisis Iran experienced under … Continue reading