The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else - whether they're gay, Mexican, Jewish, black - and saying, 'They are different than you. They're the reason you're in the shape you're in. You're not responsible.' And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.
Interpretation
The quote discusses how leaders manipulate populations by creating scapegoats.
Guillermo Del Toro highlights a psychological tactic used by those in power to divert responsibility from the majority by vilifying minority groups. This manipulation not only fosters division and hatred among different social groups but also helps maintain control over the populous by aligning their unity against a common enemy rather than addressing the true issues at hand.
In practice
During a political rally, a speaker could quote Del Toro to emphasize the dangers of scapegoating.
I don't try to sanction other people's joy in monsters. I mean, I think the fact is, humor, fantasy - you know, like fear, desire or laughter - create genres of their own: comedy, melodrama, or erotic films or horror films... The boundaries cannot be defined. It's to each his own.
As a director, I design every movie to be true to itself, and damn it if they like it, and damn it if they don't.
If you ask me, I alternate between truly bizarre, what you would call 'Hollywood' movies and truly bizarre, what you would call 'arthouse' movies.
But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.
When you start with Super 8, you are everything. You're the DP, the sound man, the effects guy. And what I started understanding, by working for other people, is that the best type of director is someone who rose through the ranks.
Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational.
The universe is then one, infinite, immobile. ... It is not capable of comprehension and therefore is endless and limitless, and to that extent infinite and indeterminable, and consequently immobile.
Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.