Valkyrie

Claus von Stauffenberg was a Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008 film, Valkyrie, chronicles the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly. Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of religion is ill-suited to the political drama.

Lest it be concluded that God is against political dictatorship itself, and thus divine favor rests instead with democracy, efforts to apply religion to politics evaluatively come rife with pitfalls because the two domains are distinct; I would even say that the religious domain is unique, given the nature of distinctly religious transcendence. In reference to democracies, lest they be supposed to represent the Kingdom of God on Earth, it is notable that the U.S. dropped the first two atomic bombs on inhabited cities, and Israel committed a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and in 2026 its sitting prime minister even announced that he would run for re-election! The human condition is indeed far removed from the gods and their Valkyrie.

In the scene in which Stauffenberg presents his revised Valkyrie plan to Hitler for his signature at Hitler’s mountain retreat, Hitler asks him, “You know your Wagner, Colonel? The Valkyrie. Handmaidens of the gods, choosing who will live and who will die, sparing the most heroic from an agonizing death. One cannot understand National Socialism without knowing Wagner.” Perhaps the implication is that the Valkyrie save Nazi heroes on the battlefield from agonizing deaths, and, moreover, that the Nazi Party is geared to esteeming heroes as they were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as strong, courageous conquerors, and, perhaps also by implication, riding society of the weak, whose very existence brings down the strong, if the statements by Joseph Goebbels and Hitler at the dinner table in the bunker in the film, Downfall (2004), accurately reflect Nazi ideology concerning strength and weakness: most notably, the eradication of the weak is necessary for the strong to be strong. Although seemingly drawing on Nietzsche, his philosophy merely counsels that a pathos of distance be maintained between the self-confident strong and the resentful weak who seek to beguile the strong. Nietzsche does not advocate that the weak be eradicated. Furthermore, unlike Hitler in Valkyrie, Nietzsche does not posit divine help via handmaidens for the strong; neither does Nietzsche claim that divine wrath is directed against the resentful weak who seek nonetheless to dominate even the strong. As for Hitler’s reference to heroes, it is not clear that Wagner’s Valkyrie would help Nazi “heroes” escape agonizing deaths because such a claim assumes that those heroes really were heroes rather than villains. The appropriation of religion is thus fraught with difficulties, given self-interest, ideology, and the limits of our ability to know the wills of the gods, especially as pertaining to political events. It is best to leave the gods out of our human internecine conflicts rather than conveniently assume that the Valkyrie favor one side or the other.

Given the horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, the Christian motif of redemption is more difficult to avoid even in the political context. Speaking in a bathroom to General Erich Fellgiebel to enlist his help in the plot, Staffenberg reminds his compatriot, “You were involved in a crime against your country long before you met me. There may still be time to redeem yourself. Only God can judge us now.” Redemption would come by helping rid Germany of Hitler’s rule. Although redemption by killing Hitler seems obvious enough, is religious redemption—and the ensuing sentence regarding God as judge means that the redemption being referred to here is indeed religious in nature—really fitting with respect to a person having been unpatriotic? What about the unpatriotic protests in America when the U.S. was bombing Cambodia in the Vietnam conflict in the late 1960s through 1974? Because that conflict was premised on a lie involving the Gulf of Tonkin, unblinking patriotism may have been cause for redemption. In actuality, God may think little or nothing either way of our notions of patriotism and our political protests. Again, God may be quite distant from our notions of political good and bad, even if the Nazi and Israeli atrocities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, seem pretty cut and dry as state-sponsored evil against people conveniently deemed “subhuman.” Perhaps from God’s perspective, we are all subhuman, or, in Nietzsche’s phraseology, human, all too human. Hence the political domain can be distanced from that of religion, in that the former reeks of human pride and thus presumptuousness, whereas the latter goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion and is thus not centered on us.

Ben-Hur

By 2026, the world hardly needed any convincing regarding the strident zeal for endless vengeance in the Middle East, given the genocide still occurring in Gaza against the Palestinian people. In 1945, the world had needed no convincing on just how severe, and at what tremendous scale, state-sponsored (and engineered) hatred against a people deemed “subhuman” could be. The 1959 film-version of Ben-Hur is saturated with the desire for vengeance, with the antipodal motive of forgiveness only being shown as a more powerful, and thus stronger, phenomenon at the end of the film when Judah Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are spontaneously cured of leprosy at the very moment in which Jesus dies on the Cross. Only in aiding Jesus with water on his arduous way to the Cross does the Jewish man, Judah, realize the value of the suffering man’s righteous, unmerited suffering, especially relative to the value of even satisfied vengeance. At the moment of his death, Jesus, freed of a mortal body, cures the two women as a result of Judah’s change of heart. The message is that forgiveness wins over resentment and vengeance from a spiritual standpoint.

Prior to the period shown in the film, the wealthy Ben-Hur family took in and raised the Roman boy, Messala. So, it is with a sense of utter ungratefulness that as an adult and a Roman official that Messala turns on Judah for refusing to divulge the names of dissidents by banishing him to work in as a rower in the Roman navy for five years and sending Judah’s mother and sister to prison and then to a leper’s colony. Fortunately, Judah saves a Roman general from drowning in a battle-at-sea and is rewarded by being adopted by the general and given Roman citizenship. Judah has the wherewithal to return to Jerusalem to challenge and vanquish Messala in a chariot race. Even after Messala dies from being injured by Judah’s chariot during the race, Judah is still not satisfied—still not free of his resentment. He walks by as people are gathering to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which causes Balthasar to remark, “You are choosing death.” This intriguing line can be unpacked.

Even vengeance satisfied, albeit with Judah’s mother and sister still suffering from leprosy, is death—of the spirit—whereas the qualities valued by Jesus in his sermon represent a freed up spiritual life. Interestingly, were Balthasar to deliver the line to Judah as Jesus is dying on the Cross, the allusion to death could be taken literally, given the soteriological meaning of the Passion Story. Specifically, the salvific meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection is that the vicarious, voluntary sacrifice pays off original sin and thus reconciles humans with God. Literally walking past Jesus on the Cross would connote the choice of death rather than eternal life. It is interesting that Balthasar remarks that Judah is choosing death in refusing to stay to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. The death is figurative, in that Judah is still buried in resentment because his mother and sister are still ill as a result of Messala’s punishments. As for Messala, in turning on, in utter betrayal, the generous family that had raised him, he can be reckoned as spiritually dead, and his literal death occurs before he can let go of his chackles. Judah takes considerable time, but, unlike his adopted-brother, Jesus’s example of selfless agape-love even amidst severe suffering sinks in and softens Judah’s harden heart.

Before Messala’s death at the hands of Judah in the famed race, Judah is rebuffed in his zeal for vengeance by Ester, who, having heard Jesus preach, tells Judah that a young rabbi has said that “forgiveness is greater, and love is more powerful than hatred.” Later, just before the horse race in which Judah intends to kill M, Judah prays, “God forgive me for seeking vengeance, but my path is set. Into your hands I commit my life. Do with me as you will.” The request to be forgiven is a lie because Judah himself has decided that his path towards exacting retribution is set. Judah is not committing his life to God in any sense, and is again lying when he says God can do with him what God will. In actuality, Judah is very much in the driver’s (or chariot’s) seat concerning what he will do during the upcoming race.

Judah goes on to win the race and, in the process, he has killed his nemesis who has so unfairly subjected Judah to years of severe hardship and suffering simply because Judah would not betray his fellow Jews. The presiding Roman official remarks at the end of the race that the spectators have made Judah the victor their god, albeit just for the time being. Drunk with having exacted revenge, Judah is still of a hardened heart when he leaves the track and walks past Jesus, who is shown atop a hill in the distance—and not shown frontally in a close-up—just as he is just about to give his famed Sermon on the Mount. Judah is still hardened, nevertheless, because his mother and sister still have leprosy as a result of having been in a dank prison-cell for five years. As his dying nemesis says to Judah just before dying after the race, “The race continues.”

In witnessing Jesus struggling physically and mentally as he is being prodded and whipped by Roman guards no the way to be crucified, Judah is taken back. “What did this man do to deserve this?” Judah asks out-loud. That is the man who helped Judah with water when Judah was under extreme duress. It is not suffering itself that is given positive significance, but, rather, the willingness to take on the sins of others by suffering what they should by all rights suffer. The silent strength evinced by the suffering man who seems so weak suddenly is clear to Judah, who can now free himself from the chains of his own resentment. Ironically, letting go of resentment owing to the ongoing suffering of his mother and sister ends their suffering. He lets go of his resentment prior to the miracle healing that removes the ongoing reason for the resentment.

The miracle itself is important because it shows that in the story-world of the film, as in that of the Gospels, Jesus is the Son of God. Esoterically (i.e., the following is optional reading), the noetic significance of the religious title is dwarfed by the ontic significance of spiritual freedom over spiritual captivity, as evinced by Judah Ben-Her in the film as he offers Jesus water on the way to the Cross over having felt himself internally compelled to pass by Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.

Whereas the sort of explicit power evinced by Messala and the ship-galley task-masters, and, moreover, the Romans in Jerusalem even against Jesus on the way to the Cross, is quite visible, the power of letting go of vengeance and even offering compassion to detractors and even enemies is silent yet paradoxically stronger. The litmus test for Judah has finally to do with which of the two types of power he values more in the sense of which is stronger, and thus has more worth in itself. The relevant death is not physical, but, rather, spiritual, as per the human instinct for freedom, which Nietzsche ironically calls the will to life, or will to power, as ultimately felt best in overcoming (i.e., mastering, not repressing!) one’s most intractable instinctual urge, such as that of vengeance.  

Civil War

In the film, Civil War (2024), Texas and California have “tecaexited” the U.S., to use the European recondite ideological parlance for secession that began with “Brexit” in order to evade “seceding from the Union.” The U.S. president in the film repeatedly lies to the public that the secessionists are on the run; in actuality, as the film progresses, the three journalists, Lee, Joel, and Sammy, along with their young protégé, Jessie, eventually witness up-close the rebel military conquering the White House in order to shoot the president in the Oval Office. The film provides only scant clues as to the reason for the secession; the rebel who shots Tony, a friend of the three journalists, obviously detests foreigners and delights in “real Americans,” such as are from Colorado and Missouri. This could be a reference to Trump’s “MAGA” movement, so the film is possibly playing out Trump’s followers revolting; historically, on January 6, 2021, some of them rioted, though admittedly did not as a revolt so to topple the U.S. Government, but rather to make a statement by temporarily stopping Congress from counting the States’ respective electoral ballots for president. Even so, it is too great an inferential leap to conclude that the two States seeking to exit the U.S. in the film are MAGA, even though MAGA ideology and the “woke” ideology clashed in early (and mid) 2020s when the film was being put together. Rather than being about contending, violently clashing ideologies, the film is about how violent our species is when not suppressed by an overarching police presence that can act as a deterrent.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century European political philosopher, argues that in order to stave off a short, nasty and brutish life filled with recurrent threats of theft and violence, a person, together with the others, must cede all political (and even theological interpretive) sovereignty to a governing authority, whether a king or an assembly. The only right retained even against such a power is that of self-preservation, though the sovereign has the right to put a rebel to death. Similarly, Machiavelli wrote The Prince to give rulers strategic “Machiavellian” advice in the context of political fighting so those rulers could survive in power even ruthlessly. That philosopher’s History of Florence left out such advice because the context in the book was stable rather than violent. The message of these two philosophers is that left to our own devices in a state of political nature, we can regress to our ruthless savage nature, which is always there but latent in a societal context in which a sovereign power acts as a suppressant and deterrent.

In the film, as the three journalists and the girl drive west then south from New York, ending up in Washington, D.C. to witness the secessionist army shooting its way into the White House to kill the president, indications of small-scale violence are very evident. At a gas station, a man holding a machine gun shows Jessie where two “looters,” too bloodied to be recognizable, are hanging, while still alive, out back. The man even agrees to be photographed by Lee showing him standing between the two hanging men. The subtle message is that he has nothing to fear in being held accountable for shooting the two victims as Jesse and Lee are still there to witness. Man’s savagery goes beyond just killing other humans; not even severe cruelty is sufficiently resisted if there is no fear of having to pay a price in terms of lost freedom or pain.

After Jessie foolishly switches cars through open windows as both are being driven fast and is taken prisoner by two rebels who are operating independently in having killed a truck-load of people, one of those two men shoots Tony and Bohai because they are not “real Americans.” The sheer arbitrariness of the acts to Joel causes him to momentary react angrily before suddenly realizing that the shooter is so irrational that anyone could be shot next, even Joel. Fortunately, Sammy comes to the rescue by driving the journalists’ car into the shooter, but at a cost, for the other shooter kills Sammy as he is driving away with the other journalists.

Relative to these isolated cases of wanton, unjustified violence by individuals, the coordinated military attack on the White House by the rebel army looks civilized. In fact, it is astonishing just how embedded Joel, Lee, and Jessie are with the soldiers as they are shooting at U.S. soldiers and the Secret Service agents. That the soldiers who are about to shoot the president in the Oval Office pause so Joel can get a last quote from the president suggests that the cause is political rather than just for the sake of getting to be violent and kill. In other words, the indications and instances of isolated killings in the countryside en route reveal our species violent, unimpeded nature more so than do the scenes of army units fighting against opposing units.

By implication, political movements in the early 2020s to “defund” local police departments in some of the American States seem wrongheaded, for even if police-power is too much for human nature to wield properly, human nature itself, as depicted in the film, attests that having a police department is a necessary evil that a society cannot (and should not) do without, and, furthermore, that the strictures that only being in a society can provide are also necessary, for in the proverbial state of nature, which can exist even within a society (e.g., neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago), human nature is too prone not only to violence, but also to cruelty—even to the point of enjoying it. Nietzsche argues that the origins historically of punishment lie in the debtor-creditor relationship, wherein creditors found pleasure in taking “a pound of flesh” strangely as if that pleasure from inflicting pain were equivalent and thus sufficiently compensating. Nietzsche states that the rendering of such an equivalence is “strange,” but he may simply be discounting or ignoring the savage nature of our species underneath the patina of civilized Man.

It should not be lost on the viewers, however, that glimpses of the finer qualities of human nature are included in the film. In the camp in the stadium, for example, camera shots showing people being docile, even kind to each other, are likely meant to show this contrast to the film’s leitmotif. Lee’s self-sacrifice at the end of the film in saving Jessie’s life by taking the bullet herself when Jessie is in the line of fire in a hallway in the White House attests to the sheer normative distance that exists within human nature, for, building on a famous line that is in the book, The Killer Angels, which is about the U.S. Civil War, if we are angels, then we are surely killer angels, though this does not mean that violence and cruelty exhaust human nature for we are capable of self-sacrificial love for other human beings. Though even if we are “made” to be creatures of love, still we have not managed to shake our innate penchant for violence and even cruelty. The true civil war is perhaps that which exists within each of us. 

Eichmann

There comes a point in the film, Eichmann (2007), which is based on Avner Less’s series of interviews with Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli jail, when the man who was in charge of transport to the Nazi death camps realizes that he will lose the upcoming trial and be hanged; the hitherto unemotional Eichmann instantly tears up in front of Avner Less in the small, windowless room and laments never being able to see his children again. Less points out that Eichmann has sent many children to their deaths, “but they were Jews,” Eichmann counters. The inroads into the psyche that Nazi propaganda reached was suddenly obvious, even odd. Ideology with the machinery of state as a proponent and enforcer can short-circuit the human mind without the mind being aware of its own cognitive distortions. Eichmann states, “but they were Jews” as if anyone would understand because he takes the validity of the statement as a given. Translation: Jews were not only enemies of the state; they were also subhuman. In an earlier interview, Eichmann disclaimed being antisemitic with a tone that conveys to the audience that he really believes his statement. At the very least, the mental pathology of disassociation seems to have been caused by the earlier Nazi propaganda. State ideology can indeed be mentally invasive, and this may say as much about the vulnerabilities of the human brain as the danger latent in political power than can manifest in massive states as not only war crimes, but also the more severe crimes against humanity.

Ironically, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Israelis would adopt the same subhuman stance (the stance itself being subhuman as well as regarding people deemed to be subhuman) towards the Palestinian people living in Gaza especially, but also in the West Bank (and Lebanon). Can the infliction of one holocaust be understood as an instinctual aggressive reaction on an intergenerational collective basis to an earlier one that has been inflicted on ancestors? The misfiring is obvious because the Palestinians and Germans are two different peoples, so the adage, two wrongs don’t make a right applies. Another adage reads, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” The biblical intent is to keep vengeance out of the hands of (God’s?) children. But whose Lord is that?  

Eichmann was evidently an atheist; the Nazi party was officially so. Had Eichmann regarded himself as a Christian, the man’s cognitive dissidence would have been too much even for him to ignore and manage, though admittedly the Crusades were committed by “Christians” in the name of Christ without enough dissidence for them to turn back and go home. Ironically, Eichmann had studied Hebrew, which is why, according to Avner Less in the film, Eichmann was selected to head his department that was oriented to the Jewish problem in transportation. Even though Eichmann repeatedly insists in the interviews that he was just a cog in the massive Nazi state machine, and therefore wielded no significant power of his own for which he should be held morally responsible, being the head of all the transportation to the death camps came with too much power to be labeled merely as bureaucratic.

In fact, the narrative’s pivot, or inflection point, is on Eichmann’s own abuse of power, which is to say, an abuse that he cannot claim to have been merely following orders on pain of death. He was sufficiently high in the Nazi hierarchy to have wielded power of his own and thus to be held responsible for any consequent suffering and death. Whether the latter two can become so massive and severe that even just following orders even on pain of death cannot obviate being morally responsible is an interesting ethical question without an easy answer—perhaps answering the related question of whether self-sacrifice is not only a virtue, but also a duty if many people would suffer severely and unjustly die otherwise is prerequisite. In suggesting that Indians stand up to invading Nazis were they to invade India, Gandhi advocated such a duty and even claimed that it has much moral power in resisting evil.

Although Eichmann strangely volunteers to sacrifice his life as a lesson to anti-Semites, Avner Less dismisses the offer as disingenuous. As a policeman, he is savvy. Crucially, anticipating the film’s pivot, it is clear that he is clever in detecting the nuance in Eichmann’s pattern of minimizing the fact that he took orders directly from Himmler rather than from Hitler himself. Eichmann is hiding something, and Avner Less senses this, so he immediately has his staff focus exclusively on pulling all of the written correspondence between Eichmann and Himmler that the department has. Avner Less’s abrupt shift in his investigative strategy is in line with having realized the utter futility in getting a confession from the devoted, high-ranking Nazi. Having been in the SS, Eichmann too is savvy to say something self-incriminating. Avner Less too is savvy; he notices that Eichmann covered his tracks well by having retained written documentation of the orders he was obeying. No one is perfect, however, and in giving the order that over 70,000 Hungarian Jews walk from Budapest to a death camp in Poland, Eichmann actually defied Himmler’s order that such a march not take place! Visually precise for viewers, Avner Less places the papers of both orders side by side on the desk in front of Eichmann. The two orders contradict each other—crucially with Himmler’s order having an earlier date. Eichmann, being a firm believer in the value of written documentation, can only slump silently in his chair, knowing that he had not sufficiently covered his tracks as an SS man, and therefore he would be convicted and put to death. Given the historical accuracy of the film, this means that during the entire trial, which is not depicted in the film, Eichmann knew he would be convicted and die.

The film ends with Avner Less mailing the letter than Eichmann had begged be mailed to his family. That Avner’s own father died in a Nazi camp makes the generous nature of the gesture all the more astonishing, especially given the violent protests by Israelis of the interviews happening at all, and thus of Avner Less’s involvement, on the grounds that Eichmann does not deserve even a trial, given the monstrosity of the crimes against humanity—a label that was coined at the famous Nuremburg trial.

In the film, and perhaps in the historical record too, Avner Less does not ask Eichmann why he violated Himmler’s order and gave the order to proceed with the march anyway. Perhaps Eichmann was more realistic than Himmler and Hitler that time was limited for the Nazis in November 1944, given the military progress of the Allies, so desperate means were needed to quickly kill as many Hungarian Jews as possible.  Perhaps Himmler (or Hitler) was worried so late in the war that the evidence of thousands of bodies left along the way could be used by the Allied victors after the war to prosecute the Nazis. Eichmann was likely frustrated with the slow pace with which his superiors were ridding Europe of Jewry. This is precisely why it is so strange that he repeatedly resists the label of anti-Semite in the interviews with Avner Less. Impatience with ridding Europe of the subhuman “race” is of course highly anti-Semitic, but, strangely, and here the nefarious, dangerous power of a state-sponsored ideology should be flagged for future reference, Eichmann does not appear to “connect the dots” in his (brainwashed?) mind. “But they were Jews.”

In The Reader, released in 2008—a year after Eichmann—Hanna Schmitz, a former death-camp guard on trial in Germany, astonishes the chief judge with just such a line. To the judge, Hanna’s rationale is astonishing to the point of utter disbelief that anyone could use such a warped justification for standing by while other people needlessly die. Meanwhile, to her, the justification is something that presumably anyone would simply take for granted as being entirely reasonable. The pathos of distance is incredible. To paraphrase her rationale: Of course, we let the Jewish prisoners burn in the locked church; they were our prisoners; we were responsible for them; we couldn’t just open the doors and let them escape. This line, plus Eichmann’s, reveal the visceral depth with which the propaganda of a state can insidiously damage the human mind without it having a clue as to its own warped condition. Therefore, it behooves each human being to routinely self-check for having gone too far in one’s own ideological commitments, as well as to critique the ideology itself with the understanding that no human ideology is or can be perfect, for we are human, all too human.

San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

The full essay is at "San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival."

Enzo

In 2025, when the film, Enzo, was released, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine was still in progress before being overshadowed in the media by fresh American and Israeli military attacks in Iran. The film distinguishes the respective attitudes of two Ukrainian construction workers in the E.U. state of France regarding whether to return to Ukraine to join the army. This contrast implies that patriotism, and, moreover, duty, is a weak force in human nature, even when a citizen’s country is in serious, existential trouble in being invaded by an empire-scale military aggressor.

In the film, the Ukrainians’ dilemma is overshadowed by the salient class distinction between Enzo’s upper middle-class family and a vocation of manual labor, including construction work. Enzo’s father, Paolo, may even take Enzo’s desire to continue as a construction-apprentice as a personal betrayal. Even though Enzo is only 16 years-old, he is able to “hit” back during a family dinner at home by characterizing his father’s academic profession as utterly fake (for what use is “book” knowledge?), especially relative to construction because, Enzo says, walls continue to stand even when the human beings who dwell within them have died. That Enzo’s own natural proclivity to draw would, as a profession, which Paulo is urging Enzo to adopt, be one of manual labor goes unsaid in the film. By implication nonetheless, the intricate use of fingers is of higher social class than the sore, blunt use of hands. To be sure, getting rich by selling art is heard of, whereas how many construction workers get rich by overlaying brick and mortar?

Enzo is, as a typical teenager, lost, and therefore needs time to find himself. His crush on Vlad, one of the Ukrainian construction workers, attests to the boy’s jejune state. Even his claim at the end of the film, on the phone to Vlad who has called in the midst of a battle in Ukraine, of having “fallen in love” with Vlad cannot be taken seriously. The film’s political and economic ethical elements are so salient that Enzo cannot be labeled as gay cinema.

Even though the ethic of socio-economic class is more salient than is the political leitmotif, the stark contrast in an early conversation between Miroslav and Vlad, the two Ukrainian guest-workers in the E.U., is riveting and thus worthy of notice and elaboration. Whereas Miroslav strongly feels a sense of duty to return to Ukraine to take up arms against the Russian invaders because “I might not have a country to come back to,” Vlad recognizes no such duty. Of course, the Ukrainian government is not going to forcibly grab Vlad and return him to his native country, and Vlad undoubtedly knows this, so his disavowal of a basic duty in citizenship can stand. Both men know that Miroslav’s intent to return to Ukraine is entirely voluntary, and it is precisely in this regard that duty can be understood as being a weak force in human nature. For all that deontologically-oriented ethicists make a big deal out of duty per se (e.g., Kant), the force, like gravity, is actually weak. The fullness of emotion that people in the rapture of fulfilling a duty belies the fact that duty must be willed, and slavish attachment to momentary pleasure is actually a stronger force as an instinctual urge.

So it is interesting, as well as perplexing, that both of the Ukrainians tell their construction boss that they would be returning to Ukraine (implication: to fight) in two weeks without anything in the screenplay as to how or why Vlad changed his mind. The oversight, or leap, can be construed as an understatement concerning how much mental effort is involved in a change of will. It is not as if Vlad suddenly grew an internal sense of duty. Presumably Miroslav had said something that convinced Vlad to return to fight. It is precisely because duty is so voluntary, unless mandated by a government at gun-point or threat of imprisonment, that Miroslav’s rationale is so crucial to Miroslav’s change of heart—or is the rationale more practical in appealing to Vlad’s self-interest? In not furnishing an answer, the film falls short in terms of political theory, whereas the socio-economic ethical tension is more fully depicted and resolved as Enzo capitulates to his parents’ world after having tried to commit suicide at the construction site, for going to New York to learn English can be construed as being on track to eventually joining his parents’ echelon vocationally, even as an international artist whose art sales could benefit from connections made in New York. Such a world is miles way from that of a construction worker. 

In contrast, Vlad being scared to death by bombs exploding nearby in Ukraine—how he got to that point—is unexplained and thus unaccounted for. Next to such fear, and even the anticipation of such fear, the emotive sense of duty is weak. Even in Hobbes’ Leviathan, the instinct for self-preservation can legitimately be acted upon even against a sovereign power. Whether a “right” or not, self-preservation is an inalienable feature of human nature even after an alleged social-contract by a group of people to give up power (even to interpret scripture!) to a sovereign power, whether a king or legislative assembly.  

Strange River

Not every film has an implicit Thoreau signature reflective of the nineteenth-century Romantic turn from the age of Reason. Not every film brings to mind the Romantic painter, Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whose painting of nature’s green growing over classic Roman pillars as if to say, nature has the last word. The European film, Strange River (2025), is such a film. The key to making these connections lies not in the film’s dialogue, but, rather, in Jaume Muxart’s consistent choice to direct the film by ending several scenes with elongated camera-shots of nature. This leitmotif has Thoreau’s Walden Pond written all over it and is an implicit critique of rationality and the related artificial societies that mankind has constructed at the expense of being natural.

The film centers on Didac, a sixteen year-old boy who, as a typical teenager, is engulfed in the growing pains of self-discovery. This takes place on a family biking and camping trip along the Danube river. The film opens while the parents and three boys are biking near the mouth of the river, and ends with the family angst gone where the river is much larger; life has been more fully experienced, with the parents having reunited from being emotionally fraught, and Didac having had a brief fling (not including gay sex) on a small boat overnight with another boy. Boys will be boys; nothing definite should be extrapolated. Early on, Lena, the mother, tells Didac, “This might be the last summer that the family is together.” Two arguments between the parents bear out the mother’s prognosis that the couple might get a divorce, and her sexual fling with a young man one night during the trip bears out her desire to wander.

Meanwhile, Didac is initially aggrieved that Gerard, a boy from school on whom Didac has a crush, has been ignoring him. Didac speaks with his father, Albert, on “the frustration of not being desired.” Albert urges his teenage son to share how he feels with Gerard. Both parents support Didac’s romantic interest in Gerard. “You guys kissed,” both parents separately remind their son with winks. For something much deeper than an infatuation, frustration is an understatement, so Didac’s crushes on boys are clearly not very serious, and he may eventually be sexually interested in women. Put somewhat bluntly, the importance of the role that water plays in how Muxart depicts nature in the film, especially with shots of Didac in particular swimming naked, brings to mind the problem in nature wherein heterosexual sexual intercourse is naturally well-lubricated (if not rushed) whereas anal penetration is not, but Didac’s instinctual urges for boys sexually are natural too. Also problematically, the two elongated camera close-ups of Didac’s butt while he is swimming on two occasions almost creep out the wide shots of a boy swimming naked, which prima facie can be construed as showing a human being fully in nature, and thus natural (whereas wearing gray suits in bland offices in artificial skyscrapers is not). If the film can be characterized as a love story, it is that of a family, rather than two boys, and, moreover, a love story with nature. To be sure, Didac takes after his mother in that both engage in “extracurricular” flings during the trip. In fact, Didac sees Lena kissing a younger man one night at a camp-grounds. “Don’t look at me that way,” Lena tells her eldest son the next day; she goes on to tell him that she had had a romantic night with a stranger on the same route twenty years before the present trip. That foray took place on a small boat and the young man disappeared, and Didac has the same experience with a boy on the current trip. With that boy, Alexander, disappearing in the morning before Didac wakes up, the film lapses in skipping ahead to Didac being with his family on a large boat without accounting for how the 16 year-old boy gets from the small boat anchored in the large river back to his parents. If Didac’s brief, free-spirit, foray with Alexander is supposed to feel magical, Alexander leaving Didac alone on the boat is too much reality. In fact, rather than viewing the film as falling within the “gay cinema” genre, if there is such a type (try “romance films,” as falling in love is falling in love), I contend that Muxart situates the film as a family dynamic couched within nature, in and as a part of nature. Rather than being apart from nature, and thus other animals, our species, homo sapiens, is in the animal kingdom, and this is evinced both sexually and in how we raise our offspring.

During the trip, while at an empty school that Albert attended as a boy, he gives his wife and three boys, who are less than attentive, a lecture on the building’s architecture. Albert claims that the rationalistic style is relaxing, but this is undercut as an argument ensues. Significantly, that scene ends with the camera staying on a tree whose fine branches and leaves are swaying in the wind. Nature is relaxing. In fact, Muxart has the 16-mm lens changed as the trip goes on because the river is larger as the family progresses on the route along the river, and shots of the water are salient in the film and to its very meaning. In fact, the film ends with a wide, sustained shot of the wide river, as if to say that nature has the last word as image. That the family, or at least Didac, swims nude can be taken as saying that his teenage growing pains are natural—that he is part of nature. When he is masturbating on the bank of the river after swimming nude alone, the greenery around him is as natural as his facial expressions, especially his eyes, as he is stroking his penis. As he approaches orgasm, a long camera shot of the river water sparkling in the sunlight with emotive instrumental music makes the connection with nature clear. What he is doing is entirely natural, and thus good. Even after Didac and his dad have a father-son talk on Didac having kissed a boy at school, a homosexual encounter that Didac initially denies as he tells his father, “You are too old to understand,” a long camera-shot of the river, which is wider than at the beginning of the film, ensues as if to say, nature has the last word; Didac should go on his natural instincts rather than try to rationalize or justify his attraction to other boys. My point is that Didac’s homosexual urges are not the point of the film; rather, such urges serve as props for Muxart’s leitmotif that we as a species are a part of nature, rather than cast apart, as Albert says in the film, “When no one lives in a building, it dies.” We may design and build buildings, but we are corporeal, organic beings and thus a part of nature.

We can move figuratively to a larger “camera shot” by changing our lens to the nineteenth century, when Romanticism evinced both by the painter Joseph Turner and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau eclipsed the Age of Reason. To be sure, it had been during the eighteenth century that the Earl of Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith wrote on ethics by stressing the sentiment of disapprobation as being ethical judgment that some conduct has been unethical. There is no hint of Kant’s ethical categorical imperative wherein a logical contradiction in universalizing a maxim can be taken as evidence that the maxim is unethical. Instead, the viewer of the film is looking out on the river perhaps as Thoreau looked out on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Even Aristotle looked to nature, and so too does Muxart in making Strange River; we just need to look at how several important scenes end. Just as Albert and Lena do not move forward with divorce, so too, the family does not divorce itself from nature.