Thank you for having me. I had a tough time preparing these remarks because I don’t want to bore you. I’ve been through enough of these types of speeches when I was young that frankly I don't remember anything anybody ever said. I remember the face of the speaker, the mood, the attitude, but I don't remember what was said, and what I can say today that can give you the necessary courage you will need. Nor am I sure I’d like to be on the other side of this podium right now. They say you’re facing a pretty bad job market, economic devastation, climate change, two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a serious health cost crisis. And, of course the greatest war of all -- the one that George Bush declared and called the War on Terror.
It is clear this is being pictured to us as a time of great fear. We have all looked inside ourselves, and tried to remember when we felt similar feelings. When I was your age there was Vietnam. There was the Kennedy assassinations, and there was Martin Luther King, turbulence, riots in cities -- and yes there were also no jobs in 1971 in film and certainly not in the television business. The government felt like it was losing control. There were all these kids walkin’ around smokin’ dope and looking weird and making all kinds of dissident music with strange new lyrics. So people were really scared and most, as a result voted for the law and order candidate. The tyrant, Richard Nixon. The rest followed as does the night the day. As did Reagan. As did Bush. Each the father to the son. Each of the three an angry backlash to a perceived violation -- or one could call it fear.
declared and called the War on Terror.
Fear is a distorting and powerful emotion. Young or old we’ve all experienced it. It's a beast -- the 600 pound gorilla we face in the room everyday. Telling us you can’t, you musn’t, Stop! This beast gets right in front of you and it’s a loud beast, it doesn’t actually touch us, but it yells and turns red and makes faces until we get crazy in our heads. Some of us, get scared, back down and run. But, the truth is, fear cannot actually make you do what it wants. You can do what it tells you, or you can say, “hey fear I appreciate what you’re trying to tell me and I understand there’s danger here, but now you’ve said what you have to say. So please now leave me alone and -- go away. Come back tomorrow. And I’ll listen again to what you’ve gotta say.” Then watch the look on fears’ face -- hold that look. Breathe through it. And you know what -- the beast may just stop yelling and back down, because he sees that you’re not gonna change and you’re not going to do what he wants you to do. And he gets tired of yelling. And tomorrow when he comes back, he just might be a little bit smaller. And the next day. And the next. Shrink the bastard. Eventually you might make fear, if not a close buddy, maybe an ally. As Alexander said to his troops on the eve of battle, “Conquer your fear and you will conquer death”.
declared and called the War on Terror.
Our media generally tries to create a common denominator of thought that straightjackets us. This is this, that’s that, and it’s because of this and because of that. Sometimes in the middle of all of that there are some facts, and that’s why we read the media, because we try to see through the smoke to the fire. But, generally they’re saying stuff that’s pessimist. They’re selling bad news. After all their reasoning goes, they gotta make a buck and if I don’t, the other guy’s going to do it. On television it’s murder, disease, deaths, crises, and failure every minute. Whether you’ve realized it or not, and maybe some of you have not traveled outside the country, they frame most every argument like its America against the world and we have enemies everywhere. Whether it be tiny Cuba, bristling Venezuela, or the biggies like Russian and China, or tomorrow India, or tomorrow Pakistan, or tomorrow Africa, or tomorrow Canada, or tomorrow Mexico, or tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Creeps out this petty pace from year to year until the end of recorded time. What emerges from this daily persuasion is unfortunately an ethnocentric, egocentric American point of view in our lifetime. And the resulting calls for reaction. And, unfortunately many of us pay that price as we get swept up in the waves of history created and enforced by media, and common misperception. As you get older some of you may realize that life is always filled with problems, but when we act or react childishly to them, as if they’re bigger than they are, which is the media’s way it’s generally because we believe that we are the only ones who are having this problem, when we are not.
Not too long ago around 1900 all these great Western empires were congratulating themselves about the greatness of Western civilization, partly because they controlled, through their colonies, almost the entire world’s surface and it’s resources. Though an incredible 10 to 12 million natives were killed in the Belgian Congo, they told us the world was civilized -- electricity, industry, money, federal reserve boards, free trade, tariffs, British Empire, maritime duties, and then they all marched as one into one of the most brutal and ugliest wars of all-time, World War I -- fought with gas, chemical agents, horrifying bombs. And it marked the end of the European Empires.
Chaos resulted, the West rescrambled the territories and within twenty years was at war again, a yet even bloodier war called World War II. From that grew more and more mythologies, and deceptions that I grew up with. Lies, lies, lies, that’s what you’re going to get as you get older. In my lifetime I’ve been through fighting communism from the 1940s to the 1990s. We killed so many. We subverted so many countries in the name of freedom and democracy, and we bloated ourselves in numerous wars throughout the planet. America became the new empire, and more importantly became a war making and war loving country. In the very same way we, hone the art of money, as another weapon of mass destruction.
And by 2000, 100 years after 1900 if some of you remember correctly not too long ago --you were 12, 13 -- there was an amazing arrogance in the American establishment and media about our dominant role in the world, and how everyone now was going to follow the American model. There was going to be neo-liberal economics and globalization. With the Soviet empire now collapsed, it was American triumphalism at it’s worst. And George Bush, to me, historically will represent the overweening pride, and shallowness, and stupidity of that moment in 2000, when he callously stole this election. Well, anybody who knows history could see this coming and the last 8 years have certainly lived up to it. A nightmare beyond most conceivable proportions to a person who grew up in the 60s and 70s, whose damage will be known in the coming years to you. We have lost our image as a country that believes in immigration, in change, and idealisms and one that has come to oppress those who seek change in their own countries.
But, is it the worst of times? I don’t know. I think it’s always been tough. Maybe a few years here and there of relative peace, but peace is not an easy thing to achieve. Peace is truly the result of struggle. And war is the result of the failure of a struggling peace.
Most importantly it is the struggle inside yourself that will make your peace, and it is up to you. I’m not the first one to say that peace can only begin once you have come to grips with your own aggressiveness, but I do believe it. We cannot do anything unless we change ourselves. And that is often the hardest of all. When they ask you, “Are you having a good day? It’s okay. Are you having a bad day? That’s okay too.” Good day, bad day. Same thing “I’m ok”. That’s the point, take the good, the bad, the neutral, stir, mix and live in equanimity and balance. For this you got an education. Believe it or not that is probably the most important thing you can get her -- a process by which you can develop and discipline your mind. The challenge of growing up is learning to live with setbacks and challenges. You’ve learned about film. You’ve learned about the history of it, its traditions, but the real point of film is to shape your mind in the same way that history, sociology, economics, and mathematics, and the sciences shape your mind -- teach you how to think. To shape your mind so that you can take the same world that exists for all these sciences and arts, and any can give back to it, contribute to it, nurture it, create civilization with film. Fight everything that’s toxic in this civilization. Read, especially film students. I urge you read history and remember the past, because without memory there is only the dictatorship of now. The panic of now. The panic of an immature president like George Bush, overreacting to the terrorist acts of 9/11, and saying we’ve got to fight back. It’s us against them. We’re the deciders and the world is a free fire zone and our phones/our privacy/our rights are all subject to the rules of the state. This is the beast of fear yelling in your face -- “What are you gonna do! You gotta do something! Revenge! Bomb! Kill! Don’t be a softy! Act Tough!” That is always going to happen to you. Your whole life is going to be these vigilante mobs with this desire for revenge and blood. There’s even Hollywood filmmakers doing very well, getting Pentagon cooperation, making movies promoting technology. Military technology that is awesome and makes you want to kill, makes you want to fight, makes you want to use it! This is not what you came to school for.
And there’s always another terrorist, there’s always another Dick Cheney around the corner with another version of a nightmare. It will never go away. Terror is your having this fear of depression, communism, drugs, homosexuality, poverty, and generally anything. But neither terror, nor drugs, nor poverty, nor communism, nor social change, nor equality, nor abortion, nor homosexuality, nor any of these demands for change and freedom will ever cease. That’s the reality of the world. And there will always be those who along with change, and there are those who resist change. It seems it always breaks down to those two categories at the end of the day. And here history, strewn with corpses can attest to that. They yell their soundless warnings, and yet we never hear, watching a younger generation march off to new wars with approving smiles. Renders an old man sad. What power do we really have to alter any landscape but our own?
Your responsibility here as graduating students is, I repeat, to civilization, to read history, to know humanity, and above all to remember the past. I repeat again, because “repetition works” -- but without memory there is only the dictatorship of now.
The knowledge of history will teach you that empires cannot succeed with physical or economic force alone. But only in the realm of the spirit. Your mind is the asset which you have appreciated while you were here. And if it is open it will continue to grow through your life. It is your concentration that has to hold up in the face of adversity. Water your mind like a garden -- a little sun, a little rain, a little fertilizer, some insects, some adversity, a little of this, a little of that, but never damage your garden with too much of this or too much of that. Your mind is a beautiful thing. Strong and not fragile, it can take excess and abuse, but only so much. Fear, at first, might be your taskmaster, but in the end it may well be your friend. And your friends in life may betray you, and your enemies may become your best teachers. Accept the paradox. Don’t judge, until you know. And then when you know, you know. Try everything. And don’t forget to read history, as much of it as you can get.
Jim Morrison of The Doors may not have made it out of UCLA Film School, but don’t be discouraged. He died too young, but he lived life like a flower with his head in the breeze. Stay open.
And my best advice for those of you going out into the crazy, exciting world -- don’t fall in love right away. Don’t get married. Get a backpack. A ticket to nowhere. Take a year off. Travel your ass off. Learn everything you can. Listen to the wind. It may cost you money not to work. But that year off is money. Time and experience is what will make your life rich. It’s not going to make much difference in the end if you take your first job at 21 or 24, as long as you grow, grow well.
So goodbye, good luck, and go out there no matter what happens -- good day okay, bad day okay. Feel good about your effort and try to keep that smile on your face.
Oliver Stone
It is clear this is being pictured to us as a time of great fear. We have all looked inside ourselves, and tried to remember when we felt similar feelings. When I was your age there was Vietnam. There was the Kennedy assassinations, and there was Martin Luther King, turbulence, riots in cities -- and yes there were also no jobs in 1971 in film and certainly not in the television business. The government felt like it was losing control. There were all these kids walkin’ around smokin’ dope and looking weird and making all kinds of dissident music with strange new lyrics. So people were really scared and most, as a result voted for the law and order candidate. The tyrant, Richard Nixon. The rest followed as does the night the day. As did Reagan. As did Bush. Each the father to the son. Each of the three an angry backlash to a perceived violation -- or one could call it fear. declared and called the War on Terror.
Fear is a distorting and powerful emotion. Young or old we’ve all experienced it. It's a beast -- the 600 pound gorilla we face in the room everyday. Telling us you can’t, you musn’t, Stop! This beast gets right in front of you and it’s a loud beast, it doesn’t actually touch us, but it yells and turns red and makes faces until we get crazy in our heads. Some of us, get scared, back down and run. But, the truth is, fear cannot actually make you do what it wants. You can do what it tells you, or you can say, “hey fear I appreciate what you’re trying to tell me and I understand there’s danger here, but now you’ve said what you have to say. So please now leave me alone and -- go away. Come back tomorrow. And I’ll listen again to what you’ve gotta say.” Then watch the look on fears’ face -- hold that look. Breathe through it. And you know what -- the beast may just stop yelling and back down, because he sees that you’re not gonna change and you’re not going to do what he wants you to do. And he gets tired of yelling. And tomorrow when he comes back, he just might be a little bit smaller. And the next day. And the next. Shrink the bastard. Eventually you might make fear, if not a close buddy, maybe an ally. As Alexander said to his troops on the eve of battle, “Conquer your fear and you will conquer death”. declared and called the War on Terror.
Our media generally tries to create a common denominator of thought that straightjackets us. This is this, that’s that, and it’s because of this and because of that. Sometimes in the middle of all of that there are some facts, and that’s why we read the media, because we try to see through the smoke to the fire. But, generally they’re saying stuff that’s pessimist. They’re selling bad news. After all their reasoning goes, they gotta make a buck and if I don’t, the other guy’s going to do it. On television it’s murder, disease, deaths, crises, and failure every minute. Whether you’ve realized it or not, and maybe some of you have not traveled outside the country, they frame most every argument like its America against the world and we have enemies everywhere. Whether it be tiny Cuba, bristling Venezuela, or the biggies like Russian and China, or tomorrow India, or tomorrow Pakistan, or tomorrow Africa, or tomorrow Canada, or tomorrow Mexico, or tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Creeps out this petty pace from year to year until the end of recorded time. What emerges from this daily persuasion is unfortunately an ethnocentric, egocentric American point of view in our lifetime. And the resulting calls for reaction. And, unfortunately many of us pay that price as we get swept up in the waves of history created and enforced by media, and common misperception. As you get older some of you may realize that life is always filled with problems, but when we act or react childishly to them, as if they’re bigger than they are, which is the media’s way it’s generally because we believe that we are the only ones who are having this problem, when we are not.
Not too long ago around 1900 all these great Western empires were congratulating themselves about the greatness of Western civilization, partly because they controlled, through their colonies, almost the entire world’s surface and it’s resources. Though an incredible 10 to 12 million natives were killed in the Belgian Congo, they told us the world was civilized -- electricity, industry, money, federal reserve boards, free trade, tariffs, British Empire, maritime duties, and then they all marched as one into one of the most brutal and ugliest wars of all-time, World War I -- fought with gas, chemical agents, horrifying bombs. And it marked the end of the European Empires.
Chaos resulted, the West rescrambled the territories and within twenty years was at war again, a yet even bloodier war called World War II. From that grew more and more mythologies, and deceptions that I grew up with. Lies, lies, lies, that’s what you’re going to get as you get older. In my lifetime I’ve been through fighting communism from the 1940s to the 1990s. We killed so many. We subverted so many countries in the name of freedom and democracy, and we bloated ourselves in numerous wars throughout the planet. America became the new empire, and more importantly became a war making and war loving country. In the very same way we, hone the art of money, as another weapon of mass destruction.
And by 2000, 100 years after 1900 if some of you remember correctly not too long ago --you were 12, 13 -- there was an amazing arrogance in the American establishment and media about our dominant role in the world, and how everyone now was going to follow the American model. There was going to be neo-liberal economics and globalization. With the Soviet empire now collapsed, it was American triumphalism at it’s worst. And George Bush, to me, historically will represent the overweening pride, and shallowness, and stupidity of that moment in 2000, when he callously stole this election. Well, anybody who knows history could see this coming and the last 8 years have certainly lived up to it. A nightmare beyond most conceivable proportions to a person who grew up in the 60s and 70s, whose damage will be known in the coming years to you. We have lost our image as a country that believes in immigration, in change, and idealisms and one that has come to oppress those who seek change in their own countries. But, is it the worst of times? I don’t know. I think it’s always been tough. Maybe a few years here and there of relative peace, but peace is not an easy thing to achieve. Peace is truly the result of struggle. And war is the result of the failure of a struggling peace.
Most importantly it is the struggle inside yourself that will make your peace, and it is up to you. I’m not the first one to say that peace can only begin once you have come to grips with your own aggressiveness, but I do believe it. We cannot do anything unless we change ourselves. And that is often the hardest of all. When they ask you, “Are you having a good day? It’s okay. Are you having a bad day? That’s okay too.” Good day, bad day. Same thing “I’m ok”. That’s the point, take the good, the bad, the neutral, stir, mix and live in equanimity and balance. For this you got an education. Believe it or not that is probably the most important thing you can get her -- a process by which you can develop and discipline your mind. The challenge of growing up is learning to live with setbacks and challenges. You’ve learned about film. You’ve learned about the history of it, its traditions, but the real point of film is to shape your mind in the same way that history, sociology, economics, and mathematics, and the sciences shape your mind -- teach you how to think. To shape your mind so that you can take the same world that exists for all these sciences and arts, and any can give back to it, contribute to it, nurture it, create civilization with film. Fight everything that’s toxic in this civilization. Read, especially film students. I urge you read history and remember the past, because without memory there is only the dictatorship of now. The panic of now. The panic of an immature president like George Bush, overreacting to the terrorist acts of 9/11, and saying we’ve got to fight back. It’s us against them. We’re the deciders and the world is a free fire zone and our phones/our privacy/our rights are all subject to the rules of the state. This is the beast of fear yelling in your face -- “What are you gonna do! You gotta do something! Revenge! Bomb! Kill! Don’t be a softy! Act Tough!” That is always going to happen to you. Your whole life is going to be these vigilante mobs with this desire for revenge and blood. There’s even Hollywood filmmakers doing very well, getting Pentagon cooperation, making movies promoting technology. Military technology that is awesome and makes you want to kill, makes you want to fight, makes you want to use it! This is not what you came to school for.
And there’s always another terrorist, there’s always another Dick Cheney around the corner with another version of a nightmare. It will never go away. Terror is your having this fear of depression, communism, drugs, homosexuality, poverty, and generally anything. But neither terror, nor drugs, nor poverty, nor communism, nor social change, nor equality, nor abortion, nor homosexuality, nor any of these demands for change and freedom will ever cease. That’s the reality of the world. And there will always be those who along with change, and there are those who resist change. It seems it always breaks down to those two categories at the end of the day. And here history, strewn with corpses can attest to that. They yell their soundless warnings, and yet we never hear, watching a younger generation march off to new wars with approving smiles. Renders an old man sad. What power do we really have to alter any landscape but our own?
Your responsibility here as graduating students is, I repeat, to civilization, to read history, to know humanity, and above all to remember the past. I repeat again, because “repetition works” -- but without memory there is only the dictatorship of now.
The knowledge of history will teach you that empires cannot succeed with physical or economic force alone. But only in the realm of the spirit. Your mind is the asset which you have appreciated while you were here. And if it is open it will continue to grow through your life. It is your concentration that has to hold up in the face of adversity. Water your mind like a garden -- a little sun, a little rain, a little fertilizer, some insects, some adversity, a little of this, a little of that, but never damage your garden with too much of this or too much of that. Your mind is a beautiful thing. Strong and not fragile, it can take excess and abuse, but only so much. Fear, at first, might be your taskmaster, but in the end it may well be your friend. And your friends in life may betray you, and your enemies may become your best teachers. Accept the paradox. Don’t judge, until you know. And then when you know, you know. Try everything. And don’t forget to read history, as much of it as you can get.
Jim Morrison of The Doors may not have made it out of UCLA Film School, but don’t be discouraged. He died too young, but he lived life like a flower with his head in the breeze. Stay open.
And my best advice for those of you going out into the crazy, exciting world -- don’t fall in love right away. Don’t get married. Get a backpack. A ticket to nowhere. Take a year off. Travel your ass off. Learn everything you can. Listen to the wind. It may cost you money not to work. But that year off is money. Time and experience is what will make your life rich. It’s not going to make much difference in the end if you take your first job at 21 or 24, as long as you grow, grow well.
So goodbye, good luck, and go out there no matter what happens -- good day okay, bad day okay. Feel good about your effort and try to keep that smile on your face.
Thank you.