Panique__1946

Behave and or think a little bit different from the regular mass and you become a minority. When the mass cannot figure you out - You become unpopular, unsociable, an outsider, a scapegoat and treated with contempt. 

 

You are judged by the outer layer of your existence. The mass becomes prejudiced and indulges in what they term as righteous violence. You are seen as eccentric, an outcast, an anti-social and a loner.  You are hounded. You are isolated.

Fit in or be lynched!

This prehistoric phenomenon has been going on for thousands of years and has been appropriately covered in the world of arts, literature and cinema.

  

Julien Duvivier’s attempt to portray a miserable existence of the human species in his 1946 work ‘Panique’  cannot be ignored, reminding one of Fritz Lang’s M {1931} and Fury {1936}.  It depicts mob mentality, mob violence and mob vigilantism.

In this era where we recently went through WW1 and WW2, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when everybody begins to accept that War and Nuclear confrontation will never happen again, one dares to think that nothing really has ever changed.

Meanwhile like the roller coaster endings in the Panique – Life goes on…………..as usual!