Zha Scapegoat - Assignment Example

Download file to see previous pages... René Girard’s theory of scapegoat is a theory based on the origins of sacrifice. The theory advocates that historical collective murders arise at the commencement of primitive ritual sacrifice. Rituals and myths memorize and disguise these distressing, violent origins (Girard 92).
A fundamental concept in the thought of Girard is that of contagion. Markedly, both the mythic falsification of collective murder and contagious transfer are well illustrated in Girard’s scrutiny of the symbol of Oedipus. According to René Girard, the attribution of evil and crime to an innocent individual is neither motiveless nor arbitrary, but is a reaction to the actual social risk. However, in the collective murder, the instantaneous cause is the breakdown of the social order. The breakage is provoked by famine, war, plague, or any other major social disaster. During this situation, every person turn out to be the enemy of all: the rich against the poor, neighbour against neighbour, brother against brother. According to René Girard the scapegoat comes in as a safety value in the condition of spiralling violence whereby every person resorts to retribution so as to attain what is rightfully theirs. The conflict of all against all, the violence that looms to pouch the community, is revolutionized to a war against one person. René Girard denotes that with the death of the scapegoat, the violence cycle ends.
The title of the film ‘The Wrong Man’ recognizes one of the main persistent themes in Hitchcock’s work that is the theme of the innocent man or the mistakenly accused. The film tells a story of the erratic arrest and incarceration of Balestrero. This occurred after he was wrongly identified as the thief of an insurance company office aside from other several stores. The basis of the film is on a true story, the factual life case of Christopher Balestrero. As evident ...Download file to see next pagesRead More