Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Flan: Why do you stay in South Africa?

Geoffrey: One has to stay there.

To educate the black workers. 

And we'll know we've been successful when they kill us.

Ouisa: Oh, goodness. 

Flan: Planning the revolution that will destroy you.

Ouisa: Putting your life on the line. 

Geoffrey: We don't think of it like that.

I wish you'd come and visit. 

Ouisa: Oh, would we visit you and sit in your gorgeous house, planning visits to the townships, demanding to see the poorest of the poor? "Oh, are you sure they're the worst off? I mean, we've come all this way. I mean, we don't want to see people just mildly victimized by apartheid. We demand shock." You know it doesn't seem right, sitting on the East Side, talking about revolution. 

Since I'm using this bit of dialogue to wish Sir Ian McKellen a happy 77th birthday today I was going to cut it off after he says the bit about knowing they'll have been successful when they get murdered, but I just love the dialogue in this scene, in this movie, way too much to edit it. It's too great. And I think about this scene every time I go abroad and find myself stumbling through a poor neighborhood, not knowing the language and eyeing the local sights, fetishizing the chipped-paint poverty of Other Cultures.

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