"The Fifth Element" at Twenty Five Love (and Fashion) Still Conquers All (original) (raw)

2022, Hollywood Progressive

In the final scenes of Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, when called upon to save the world from its imminent destruction by the force supernatural, transcendental chaos and evil, Leeloo, the incarnation of the titular Fifth Element-a human manifestation of the perfect being of divine life-poses the question: "What's the use in saving life when you see what you do with it?" She is prompted to ask this question after ruminating over a crash course on human history when nearing the end of an alphabetic tour of entries on an online encyclopedia (and no, it wasn't Wikipedia as that platform wasn't launched until 2001) upon encountering the entry for "War." In so doing, Leeloo, with a style provided by Jean Paul Gaultier that defined a generation, is faced with the enormity of the known litany of destructiveness, horrors, suffering and cruelty that we humans have inflicted on each other, ourselves, throughout recorded history. A wreckage, as Walter Benjamin famously called it, that has only grown larger in scale and lethality, just as the evil force depicted in the film, with each new advance in technology and the so-called march of human progress. Now, just twenty-five years after film's release on May 9 , 1997, it's a question that has grown only more pointed and ironic. That the film's ultimate hero and savior of humankind, Leeloo, is played by Ukrainianborn, Milla Jovovich, makes this question all the more relevant and urgent as the world continues to watch through the panoptical gaze of digital surveillance in all its forms and 24-hours news as the city of her birth, Kyiv (Kiev), as well as Bucha, Mariupol and other cities in Eastern Ukraine, are relentlessly and brutally attacked by invading Russian forces in a renewed military offensive that began on February 24, 2022. Speaking out again these acts of inhumanity, Jovovich stated, "I am heartbroken and dumbstruck trying to process the events of this week in my birthplace of Ukraine. My country and people being bombed. Friends and family in hiding. My blood and my roots come from both Russia and Ukraine. I am torn in two as I watch the horror unfolding, the country being destroyed, families being displaced, their whole life lying in charred fragments around them." To place all of our focus just upon these recent examples of the horrors of modern warfare would be to minimize the enormous suffering and loss of life due to a myriad of different forms of human violence that societies have been subjected to over the 25 years since Leeloo posed her question.