DionysianismIf you look hard enough, you can see Dionysianism in a lot of places. This is a state of mind where a person does all sorts of wild things. They are very free willed and adventurous. This is the very opposite of the more conservative Apolianistic life style lived by others. In the movie Gimme Shelter we see a lot of this. We see people doing all sorts of free spirited events.
Gimme Shelter is a great example of Dionysianism. In this movie they document a concert in San Francisco that is headlined the Rolling Stones. The people at this concert often striped in open site of everyone, and did other acts of craziness. The big controversy about this festival was that there were huge riots at the end of the show, when the Rolling Stones came on. Looking at the film, there didn’t appear to be any Apolonion people at the show. This lifestyle isn’t just seen in this film.
It can also be seen in the works of Nietzsche. If he could have seen this video, he would have flipped. There is way too much worshiping of Dionysis for him. He believed that every person has these two ways of thinking, that of Apollo and Dionysis, and we all need to find the right balance of these to succeed. He would have thought the two producers of this movie were crazy too because they put such a thing together. There are some things we have talked about in class that have agreed with the movie.
For instance, the Bacchae by Euripdes is a play featuring Dionysis as one of the lead characters. This play speaks highly of wild and crazy behavior, and killing, just like the movie. I can only imagine what it must have been like at beat one of these concerts in the 1960’s. It must have been a great feeling knowing that you were part of such a huge group of people and everyone had the same feelings as you did. O course, these were Dionysis-like feelings.
I have been to a few concerts, but none of them were as crazy as the one we watched in the movie. I strongly believe that music also helps with the craziness. From just watching the movie and listening to the songs, I felt the energy that was at that concert. It was incredible.
Euripides would have agreed with a lot of the things that went on at that concert in 1969. Nietzsche would defiantly have opposed it though, just because it was way too unbalanced for normal human beings. The Directors of the movie lived in a time where dionystic things happened all the time. This is just another example of Dionysianism.
