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Beasts Of No Nation

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The perspective from which a story is told is of infinite importance to how it is received by an audience. According to Harold Lasswell’s (cited in Hawkes, n.d) behaviourist theories, “if messages are not received as intended, this is deemed to be a failure of communication in a technical or behavioural sense”. Since, according to Lasswell, there is a direct correspondence between the meaning intended by a sender and how that meaning is interpreted by a recipient, the distinction between Beasts of No Nation, Cary Fukunaga’s film adaptation of Nigerian author Uzodinma Iweala’s novel about child soldiers fighting a war in an unnamed African country, and Invisible Children, a 2012 documentary about the Lord’s Resistance Army’s(LRA) use of child soldiers in Northern Uganda is definitely a testament to the importance of narrative to outcomes in …show more content…

The fact that the narrative comes from a child soldier during conflict allows the viewer see these wars as consequences of overlapping and unrelated events and this understanding leads them to believe that they would be powerless in the face of these conflicts. This is not quite the case with Invisible Children. From the onset, the narrative is centered around what the director can do to stop Joseph Kony (the leader of the LRA) and his abduction of children to turn them into soldiers and sex slaves. Because the narrative is so mission-oriented and his objective with this film is to raise awareness for his cause, the viewer comes away with the notion that wars in Africa are indeed stoppable. He/she will miss that appreciation for the complicated nature of these conflicts, many of which last for decades with no resolution in sight, because the narrative has presented it in a much simpler light and with much less detail - the LRA is doing bad things, we must find them and stop

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