The Pledge

Even though The Pledge (2001) is murder-mystery film, it is fundamentally a tragedy without regard to the murder. Jack Nicholson plays Jerry Black, a retired police investigator who loses everything because he is faithful to a pledge that he made to the parents of the young girl who had been raped and murdered by a serial killer. It is Jerry’s fidelity to the pledge that is highlighted throughout the film, and ultimately ends in his ruin. The film thus depicts what in Kant’s ethic is the ability of rational beings to be taken as promise-keepers bound by the promises we make as if they had the necessity of law.

Close to the opening of the film is Jerry’s surprise retirement-party given by his boss and police co-workers. He has been an excellent detective, and his co-workers have paid for him to go on a vacation to Mexico.  He has been well-liked. The party is interrupted, however, with news of a young girl having just been savagely murdered. Jerry accompanies the detective-in-charge to the scene, and later breaks the news to the girl’s parents. The mother, Margaret Larsen, played intensely by Patricia Clarkson, gets Jerry to pledge on the little cross that had been crafted by the murdered daughter that he would seek justice in the case and find the killer. Being an excellent detective, he sees right through the pathetic confession of a criminal achieved by detective Krolak and continues to look for the real killer. Jerry gives up his trip to Mexico in order to work on the case even though he is no longer employed by the police department. In fact, he buys a rural gas station and house, paying too much for them, just in order to live in the small town where the murder took place.

It is precisely the lengths to which Jerry goes to fulfil his pledge that the film highlights. In fact, he may even take in a young girl and her mother at least in part so he could use that girl as bate to attract the serial killer, though his tender feelings for both the daughter and the mother are genuine. He does use the girl as bate when he learns from her that the culprit has planned to meet the girl at a park, and news of this set-up, with police protection, nonetheless prompts the girl’s mother to immediately take her daughter and leave Jerry (the mother’s romantic feelings for Jerry could not have been very deep).

This presents us with the possibility that in the ethics of promise-keeping, an unethical act may be done in furtherance of the pledge. Does the fact that Jerry used the woman’s daughter as bate and kept this from the mother nullify the ethics of keeping the promise to the mother of the girl who had been murdered? Here we have film narrative being able to tease out an ethical nuance, and thus the medium of film being quite useful in the service of laying out ethical dilemmas. If as in Kant’s ethical theory, rational beings can take the moral law as binding with the necessity of law, then Jerry’s fidelity to the pledge depicts how rational beings should behave according to Kant. However, Kant’s theory also holds that other rational beings should not be used as mere means, but also regarded and treated as ends in themselves because reason has absolute value because it is by means of reason that we assign worth to things. Although Jerry does not lie to the girl’s mother by not informing her of the set-up in the park in which her daughter is the bate, using the daughter as bate treats her only as a means (to Jerry’s end of catching the serial killer). That this end is ethically praiseworthy does not justify using the little girl as bate unless, as I reckon, she is so protected by the police squad there in the park that she is in no danger. Even though Jerry, who is emotionally attached to the girl (and thus he would hardly put her in danger), complains to Krolak in the park about not having police shooters close enough to the girl when she is at the picnic table, we can take Krolak’s reassurance as sufficient evidence that the girl faces no danger. So, I think the girl’s mother over-reacts when she confronts and slaps Jerry just before she leaves him. This may be why he is speechless. In the end, he loses the mother, the girl, and even his gas station is defunct and he is drinking. He has lost credibility with the police because the killer is killed in an automobile accident on the way to the park and thus is a no-show. All this translates into the point that in keeping promises, people can tragically lose a lot. This hardly seems fair, but the possibility is what makes keeping promises so intrinsically valuable, ethically speaking.

A rational being can hold oneself to the strictures of what one ought to do even though doing so runs contrary to one’s self-interest. Those strictures can have the force or necessity of law, even though—and this is the incredible feature—holding to the ought is entirely voluntary! To value being faithful to a pledge (and disvaluing being unfaithful) can be so powerful in human nature that the faithfulness itself is treated as though it has the necessity that goes with obeying a law. Jerry’s faithfulness to his pledge runs throughout the entirety of the film, and he never loses faith in his belief that the killer is still at large (he doesn’t know about the automobile accident).

Of course, rational beings are fully capable of putting self-interest of the moment above being faithful to a pledge—of promise-keeping. Kant does not claim that rational beings are hardwired to necessarily do what they ought to do. In theological terms, as Al Pacino says as the Devil in the film, Devil’s Advocate, “Free will is a bitch.” Rational beings are fully capable of treating others as mere means rather than as ends in themselves. Put another way, evading ought rather than holding it as having a necessity is very easy for rational beings to rationalize doing. In terms of romantic relationships, one of the worst things that a person can say to the other is, “I’m afraid I will hurt your feelings by infidelity.” The person might as just as well say, “I don’t love you and I won’t love you.” In hearing such a line, the best choice is to immediately exit, stage left. Because Jerry in the film loses so much in the end because he refuses to be emotionally unfaithful to the mother of the slain girl by breaking the pledge that he has made to her, we can see just how much daylight exists within human nature and across respectable and sordid human character because the unfaithful sort is all too evident in the world in which we live. Reducing self-interest to what is momentarily convenient, such as in pursuing pleasure, and thereby treating one’s promises as optional rather than as having moral necessity (i.e., as a moral law), reduces rational beings to primitive, instinctual beings. 

That we are capable of loving the moral ought and thus treating it as an end in itself is what Kant was really trying to convey in his Critique of Practical Reason. When we treat the moral ought thusly and other rational beings not just as means to our ends, but also as ends in themselves, we are truly civilized and worthy of emotional intimacy. That a person such as Jerry can hold to fulfilling a promise (i.e., what ought itself essentially demands) and yet lose everything by doing so is indeed tragic.

 

Nuremberg

It is said that history is written by the victors. The film, Nuremberg (2025), bears that out. Even though Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi trial, compromises its integrity and thus breaches due process by pressuring Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist assigned to the Nazi prisoners (most notably Goring), to obtain and pass on the defense’s strategy to Jackson, which Kelley does, the trial is presented nonetheless as legitimate and the Nazi prisoners as even deserving an unfair trial. Nevertheless, nations governed by the rule of law are never justified in putting on corrupt trials, or skewing them to push a particular ideology. The film itself is skewed to highlight the Nazi crimes against the Jews at the expense of delving more into the distinctly war crimes even though those crimes were just as important in the charges in the actual trial.

Jackson’s questioning of Goring on whether the Treaty of Versailles justified Germany to take over Austria and the Sudetenland was brief, and the invasion of other occupied territories, such as France, was entirely omitted in the film. Instead, Jackson pushed Goring on what he knew about the concentration camps. Jackson’s reason, which he states in the film, is that what the Nazi SS did in those camps separates the Germans from the Americans. In other words, the holocaust singles out the Nazis in world history. But as of 2025, that statement could not stand, for the holocaustic genocide of the Palestinian “race” in Gaza meant that the Nazis’ crimes against humanity were no longer unique. If, as the psychiatrist says in the film, the Nazi holocaust is “the definition of evil,” then that definition could be extended beyond the scope of the Nazis in the twenty-first century to include, ironically, Israel.

What gave rise to World War II was not the concentration camps. Rather, Germany’s invasions of other sovereign countries in Europe, especially Poland, was the cause. Hitler’s militarism in taking over Europe should thus have received most of the screen-time of the film. If as Jackson argues, Germany could not blame the treaty that ended World War I as justifying occupying Austria, what of other countries, such as France, Denmark, and the Netherlands, which were not Germanic culturally? In short, the filmmakers could have drawn on more material on the war crimes to balance out the film. That would be consistent with the fact that the Jewish matter was only the third priority of the Nazis. The first priority—and why Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor—was to get rid of the Communist Party. The second priority was to create living space in Europe beyond Germany for the German people.

Also receiving too little attention in the film was Jackson’s questioning of Goring on why the Nazis got rid of political opposition, and thus democracy. Goring’s answer that democracy had produced weak leaders could have been explored, especially as the Nazis came into power in 1933 by democratic means. The party held enough of the Bundestag for Hitler to have a legitimate democratic claim as a possible chancellor. Such inconvenient facts are arguably more interesting than simply reminding the viewers of the holocaust. The irony is that emphasizing it so much in the film, viewers in 2025 could have thought of Netanyahu and his crime against humanity in Gaza. Using a film to push an ideological agenda can come back to bite filmmakers.

Furthermore, given the militaristic forays of Russia’s Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu, and America’s Trump in the mid 2020’s, more screentime devoted to why the democracy fell to the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, what was behind Hitler’s invasions of other countries, and why no other country’s government stopped the aggression in time to avert a global war could have addressed contemporary events facing the world as international law was no longer a viable means of restraint, internationally. The film could have had Goring explain Hitler’s rationale more for having instituted a dictatorship, and for why Hitler played other governments so his invasions could continue unabated. The susceptibility of democracy to slip into a dictatorship was a salient worry in the U.S. in the early and mid-2020s due to fears that President Trump was or would shirk democracy. Governments doing nothing to stop Hitler’s incremental advancements militarily could be compared with governments doing nothing to stop Israel’s genocide of the race in Gaza, and too little to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The film being used primarily to remind viewers of how the Nazis viewed and treated Jews is both redundant (e.g., Schindler’s List) and has a rather large opportunity cost in terms of what the film could have covered more adequately but did not due to the screentime devoted to the Jewish theme. To be sure, Goring admitting in court that he would have followed Hitler even knowing about the holocaust only from the trial (which is a lie) is a poignant moment in the film. Crimes against humanity, whether in Gaza or Germany, are indeed horrific, but it is a mistake to minimize distinctively war crimes just because they are more ordinary.

My Man Godfrey

If there is a time and context that shows dramatically how stark economic inequality can be, the years immediately following the Wall Street crash of 1929 cannot be beat. Wealthy men in the financial sector saw their wealth disappear overnight; the sudden move to the street from comfortable housing doubtless triggered many suicides. The 1936 film, My Man Godfrey, demonstrates the mental and reputational depravity of even once-wealthy investors (and stock brokers) relative to the still-rich, who look down with disdain such men as if they were no longer human beings. The stark change in the economic-determined normative stance is artificial and yet in terms of getting a job, it was very real.  In the film, Godfrey maintains good graces in using his low status even in the employment of a rich family as an opportunity to practice humility. He even saves the family, financially, and marries one of the daughters. Godfrey, she knows, is her man even in spite of his lowly station.

When the film opens, Godfrey is living at a city dump in a shanty-town. Before long, he is able to get himself hired as a butler because he had been willing to be the butt of a joke for five dollars. As if such treatment by the family were not bad enough, insults continue even as he is serving as the butler very well, and with the epitome of politeness. One of the daughters even tries to frame him so her father would terminate Godfrey’s employment. Faced with returning to the slum at the dump, Godfrey has a lot riding on avoiding being framed, which he does. He even maintains his politically-astute politeness to everyone in the family even so. It is as if he were a fiddler on a roof—poised in a way that he could fall at any moment.

Such precariousness being a function of economics is hardly novel, even if it is much more difficult to justify in a modern state that is capable of seeing to it that the poorest of the poor do not perish simply for lack of economic wherewithal. Even though Godfrey went to Harvard and is proficient enough to short the stock of the company in which Alexander Bullock, the head of the family, is too heavily invested, he could find himself, if fired, having to return to the city dump. That anyone would realistically fear having to live on the street is psychologically so ruinous that it could be said that any society without a safety-net capable of preempting such an existential fear could be considered not adequately civilized in the modern sense of the word.

In spite of my high educational pedigree, I have known such fear and have even experienced it being actualized in my case. I have witnessed the abject failure of even the spotty “safety-nets” of the U.S. member-states, including being the butt of passive-aggressive ethical lapses by employees in “social services” and even the medical profession. The fear being actualized can indeed have medical repercussions, especially for someone like Godfrey, who went to Harvard and worked in finance. I know Godfrey’s fear, and, intellectually, I understand furthermore that the existential fear of running out of money without a governmental safety-net to prolong life extends to every American whether one is conscious of it or not, and whether one is rich or poor. Even though this existential fear subtly saps “quality of life” throughout a person’s adult years, few Americans realize it and the enervating toll it takes on a person psychologically.

Underlying the insufficient safety-net in the American states, especially relative to the E.U. states, is the tolerance for having so much hinge on employment. For example, private health-insurance is typically contingent on remaining employed, as if the unemployed are necessarily healthy and thus do not need health insurance. The pegging of insurance to a job can be viewed as dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary, for the need for health-care does not have anything to do with whether a person has a job or not. Yet so many Americans seem to take the artificial link for granted. In the film, Godfrey insightfully laments, “I discovered that the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job.” Behind the public policies that hinge so much in terms of sustenance to whether a person is employed is the pejorative normative stance that an unemployed person is tantamount to being sub-human. In the film, the family’s insults lobbed at Godfrey even though he is employed suggest just how low an unemployed person is in the eyes of the rich; not even being a very polite and effective butler can completely remove the taint of having lived at a dump in order just to survive.

Context can ensconce and even perpetuate the stark economic divide that takes advantage of the normative negative connotations of being unemployed (i.e., a derelict). In the film, Godfrey points out the extreme inequality in there being luxury apartments even as the unemployed starve. Even though the former may seem to evinced a civilized society, it is actually the tremendous economic and psychological distance between the two poles that undermine any claims that a society is civilized. Godfrey attended Harvard, a university that seems to be the epitome of civilized society (i.e., of learning), but that he had no other choice after the Wall Street crash but live at a dump belies such claims of civilization. The irony is that Godfrey personifies civilization by being polite to the family and even saving it financially with help from his old Harvard classmate even though he has sufficient reason to harbor inner resentment of the rude family and the cruel society that is fine with unemployed people living on the street to survive. Perhaps Godfrey’s financial help, amazingly out of gratitude to the family for having hired him and thus saved him from the dump, can be turned around as the question: why isn’t the enormous wealth of a society willing help the poorest of the poor who must live in a Hobbesian state of nature? On such a question civilization itself hinges.

Young Adult

Can meaning be extracted merely from living out an ordinary life in an ordinary town? Must a person be among the literary, political, entertainment, or business elite to feel fulfilled? Are the popular kids in school the happiest? If so, why does a sense of over all contentment and ongoing enjoyment seem to come easily to some people while being arduously difficult for people leading ordinary lives to attain? Are people in the elites necessarily or even just usually happier than people who live out ordinary lives by earning enough to put bread on the table and simply enjoy friends and family. Would so many people be content to live such lives without any publicized accomplishment that will outlast them if ordinary life itself were not very satisfying? The 2011 film, Young Adult, is notable for how it deals with these questions in a non-formulaic way. Aside from contrasting ordinary living in a small town with being an accomplished, albeit flawed, writer (and person) in a way that puts accomplishment above a life centered on local events like high-school football games on Friday nights and family birthday parties, the film can be read as providing a statement on how not to write a novel. That the screenwriting is so good makes this dimension possible even though the medium is film.

The main character, Mavis Gary, is a woman who is aged 37 and has divorced a man whom her parents still like. She writes short novels in the young-adult category of fiction and, in an interesting parallel, is a young adult, psychologically. That she is a heavy drinker of alcohol likely has something to do with her maturation having been artificially arrested when had passed on from having been a hot, popular girl in high school who had no time for those students-dubbed-losers. In the film, seeking in vain to get her long-past high-school boyfriend (with whom she had a miscarriage back then) Buddy to leave his wife Beth and infant daughter to rekindle the high-school romance, Mavis finds it difficult to complete the last novel in the once-popular series for young adults. Mavis’s manipulative ploys reek of young adulthood. So too, unfortunately, does her writing.

Writing does not come easy for her even though Mavis is a serial-published author. The film hints of this in the scene in which she signs one of her ghost-written books tellingly without the bookstore employee having made the request or given permission, the film’s sound amplifies, and thus hones in on, the scratchy carving of her pen into the paper of a page. By the hard sounds of the tip of the pen on the paper, the audience can get the sense that writing is arduous. In filmmaking generally, the magnification of particular, ordinary sounds by literally turning up the volume of a mic up in volume can be useful in storytelling and developing a character. As a byproduct, an audience is made more aware of ordinary things in daily life—like how the closing of a door sounds when sitting in a new car, how hard shoes sound on bricks, and even how silence can punctuate a typical conversation with meaning. Life has been an up-hill struggle for Mavis in spite of her having been one of the cool kids in school, and the scraping sound of her pen writing her own name in a book that she wrote not only suggests how she approaches writing, but also, metaphorically speaking, how difficult it has been for her to feel fulfilled.

All the manipulation that goes into Mavis’s attempt to wrest Buddy from his new family and back into her arms shows just how desperate she is to feel inner fulfillment, and she allows this angst to spill into her writing. For example, when getting Buddy back proves difficult and she realizes that she will have to take an active role in breaking up Buddy’s marriage to do so, she subverts her novel by writing, “Sometimes in order to heal, a few people have to get hurt.” Her operating assumption is that manipulation can bring about happiness rather than isolation and loneliness. The film’s screenwriter could have had Mavis repeat the line to Bill, who was one of the geek high-school  students and during the film applies superego-conscience to Mavis's manipulative selfishness He could say, “So it is ok to tell young-adult readers of your book that it is ok to hurt people in order to feel whole?” The extent to which Mavis’s mentality and values are warped would be more transparent to the audience.

Mavis’s written line speaks volumes about what not to do in writing a novel, which should not serve as a mere direction-pointer of what happens to be going on in the writer’s life, bad or good, when the writing is underway. Such a flow of consciousness is called an autobiography, not a novel. It is no surprise when the employee at the bookstore reveals to Mavis that her series is on display not because the books are selling like pancakes, but, rather, because “that series is over.” That she is writing the last book of that series nonetheless is itself a harsh verdict on her books.

It is only after Sandra, Bill’s sister who looked up to the popular Mavis in high school, recalibrates Mavis’s perception of herself on the morning after Mavis has had unsatisfying sex with Bill after having been humiliated by Buddy at his daughter’s “non-religious naming ceremony” that Mavis recognizes that even her own mediocre accomplishment was at least an accomplishment. Sandra points out that no one else in that small town of bars and fast-food restaurants—Mercury, Minnesota—has or could do anything as noteworthy as writing a series of books. Mavis has had no clue on just how ordinary, banal, and unaccomplished, and therefore meaningless, the people are in the small town. They don’t really care if they die, Sandra explains, because they know it won’t matter whether or when they die because they haven’t accomplished anything noteworthy. The attitude expressed by the film itself depreciates this kind of mere existence. “This town blows,” an astonished and awakened Mavis exclaims to Sandra, who is satisfied that her message has been received. At the naming ceremony, Buddy gives his wife a drum-set, after all. Oh joy! Any push-back from this critique of people who live ordinary lives of putting bread on the table is utterly lacking in the film. Instead, Mavis is portrayed as a heroine when she stands up in Sandra’s (and Bill’s) kitchen and announces that it is time to go back to the big city in Minnesota. She even puts Sandra in her place as fitting well in the ordinariness of Mercury by refusing Sandra’s plea, “Take me with you!” The film does not consider that Sandra and Mavis may be wrong in viewing the people who have stayed in Mercury as useless losers whose ordinary lives amount to nothing. The message of the film is that making a noteworthy accomplishment makes living fulfilling, whereas selfish manipulation and living an ordinary life are recipes for unhappiness. Even though it is good to see Mavis wake up and be suddenly refreshed about life rather than commit suicide or die from driving drunk, I contend that meaning from ordinary living is inordinately dismissed in the film.

A certain sort of fulfilment can only come from an un-noticed and relatively unassuming life of lifelong friends and plenty of extended relatives nearby and therefore of get-togethers. To be sure, the day-in, day-out drudgery of banal work, however, is much more difficult to justify. If only more people would know and be matched with their passion, the world would be a happier place. Aside from the drudgery involved in having to put bread on the table, retain health insurance, and save for the kids’ college-education, ordinary life can be fulfilling. If brought out more in the film, such ubiquitous, long-standing and thus subtle comfort could contend with the alleged happiness (or value of living) that is known only to an accomplished member of a societal elite. Hypothetically, a person raised as a spoiled, immature, and discontented child from Rockford, Illinois, for example, could go on to be a rich partner of a Hollywood talent agency and live with utter disdain for the people still living in the sordid rust-belt city of high crime and unemployment that lies to the west of even the outer suburbs of Chicago (and thus civilization); such a person could easily look down on her relatives even if they were not all merely ordinary in terms of noteworthy accomplishment. Even all the wealth and the contact with popular film actors (many of whom may, it turns out, be utterly unhappy as fakes, even amid all their earthly possessions) that unnaturally comes with working at a high level in Hollywood, and all the pleasure that comes from feeling distain and thus superior generally may not be enough to erase the inner and outer isolation and reach the level of fulfilment that simply requires a certain maturation and friendly continence.  Such rare finds can arguably be found amid fame and famine, in big, accomplished cities as well as in small, uneventful towns. In cheering on Mavis’ return to the mini-apple and blowing off the ordinary people who reside in Mercury, the film does not proffer enough balance to support a dialectic of two very different ways of being fulfilled (instead, the film is ideologically prescriptive). Had the filmmakers constructed a balanced dialectic for the film, the screenplay could have been written in such a way that the narrative could arrive at identifying the underlying substratum that undergirds happiness itself, with Mavis realizing a sense of comfort in her own skin regardless of the context.

All of Me

The transmigration of souls is usually associated with reincarnation. In the film, All of Me (1984), at the moment of death, a person’s soul can be put “into” another person who is alive such that both people “co-exist” consciously and can control the same body. The comedy is at its best when Steve Martin, who plays Roger Cobb, into whose body the dying millionaire, Edwina Cutwater, is transferred, physically enacts an alternating struggle between Edwina’s feminine movements and Roger’s masculine movements. Martin’s physical talent is amazing. The tension within Roger’s (and Edwina’s) shared body is gradually resolved as the two “souls” become friends—attesting to the underlying goodness of Edwina in stark distinction to the sordid character of Terry Hoskins, who has falsely agreed to let Edwina share her body—two souls and one body—instead of Roger’s in exchange for $20 million. It is the goodness of Roger and the unfolding of Edwina’s goodness up against the absolute badness of Terry that underlies the film’s narrative. In the end, the good win out, and Terry’s soul is put into a horse when Edwina’s soul is transferred by a Hindu guru from Roger to Terry. With Terry’s body all to herself, Edwina is free to become romantically involved with Roger. The good souls win and the squalid one is put in a horse. The upshot is that justice does indeed apply to souls.

Terry’s arrangement to accept Edwina’s soul in exchange for $20 million is a rouse from Terry’s standpoint of disbelief in the transmigration of souls. When Terry realizes that Edwina’s soul has accidentally been transferred to Roger, Terry’s strategy is to send the Hindu guru back to India so Edwina’s soul could not be transferred from Roger; Terry could then enjoy Edwina’s fortune without paying the price by having Edwina as a “live-in,” permanent “roommate” of sorts. Roger, with Edwina in his body, Tyrone Wattell, a blind jazz-player, and Prahka Lasa, the Hindu guru, join forces to trap Terry into taking Edwina’s soul as per the stipulations in Edwina’s will. At one point, Terry resorts to a gun, which puts her in the position of wanting to make a deal: in exchange for not being turned into the police (for the third time), she would give her body to Edwina and have her own soul put into her father’s horse, in which Terry presumably could do no harm. The movie ends when this new agreement is exacted. The good people—Roger, Tyrone, Prahka, and even Edwina—are rid of the bad “apple,” Terry. Having led an unhappy life, Edwina is finally willing to enjoy life in her second body, which is much more beautiful than her first one.

The good/bad dichotomy that serves as the film’s leitmotif and basic framework is not as “black and white” as it may appear by the end of the film. During her first life, Edwina is nasty, especially to her lawyer, Roger. By the end if the film, Edwina seems to be another character completely. Both her very bad and good qualities belie a strict good/bad dichotomy regarding souls. This element of “grayness” fits the Roman Catholic notion of purgatory, a spiritual state after death in which a sinful soul can redeem itself by paying the price for having committed serious sins yet being repentant. The strict “heaven or hell” dichotomy is based on the false assumption that souls are either good or bad.

In actuality, most of us are probably in-between being saints or demons. Even so, a basic difference between people who are basically good and those who are nasty at the core level of their being cannot be ignored, and we may have an instinctual urge for justice as a means of placing a pathos of distance between us and the really bad guys. In the film, Terry will not repent; she will not change, whereas Edwina does. Even Roger becomes nicer to Edwina. Most of us are works in progress—some people seem to relax as they age whereas others become bitter. One of the few benefits of aging is having accrued enough observational experience of people to be able to intuit the difference and steer clear of the baddies.

In the film, Terry finds her place in a horse’s body, so perhaps in it she “turns over a new leaf” and becomes charitable at least to anyone who rides her. Perhaps rather than a “black and white” dichotomy, the entrenched bad souls just haven’t found their niche yet. Edwina finds her spot in Terry, and Terry finds hers in a horse. Roger finds his in being a musician rather than a lawyer. The afterlife dichotomy, which is arguably artificial, fails to incorporate this kind of trajectory of finding one’s own place. 

The Mephisto Waltz

In a retelling of the proverbial Faustian deal with the devil, The Mephisto Waltz (1971) plays out with the deal paying off, as Duncan Ely is able to live on in the body of Myles Clarkson. It doesn’t hurt that Ely is a master pianist and Clarkson has long, spry fingers (and that he has a beautiful wife, Paula). Even so, both Paula and the Clarkson’s daughter stand in the way of Duncan being able to get back to his own wife, and the film ends with Paula making her own deal with the devil so she can live on even though Duncan (and his wife) have already set about her demise. Because Duncan’s “after-life” transition is successful and even Paula, who has been opposing Duncan’s possession of Myles, ends up turning to the devil, the lesson of the film, Faust (1926) is effectively debunked. Besides The Mephisto Waltz, that God does not smite every case of injustice in the world—the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in the 2020s being a vivid and blatant example—may even further instigate interest in Faustian deals with the devil, even though that entity is known to be deceiver and thus not to be trusted. The allure of selfish gain can be worthwhile nonetheless for some people. For Duncan Ely, being able to go on living and gain even more fame as a performing pianist is worth the gamble, and it pays off. The medium of film is an excellent means of presenting the religious level, which is distinct yet interacts with the ordinary world that anchors the film.

As Duncan attempts to kill the Clarkson daughter and Paula, the latter’s dream-state shows the drama. After waking, Paula is horrified to find the blue dots that Duncan has put on both her daughter’s and her own forehead in the dreams. It really happened. Additionally, a bricolage of fleeting images highlighting symbols relevant to religion punctuate that part of the film. The duality or dichotomy of Paula’s dream- and waking-states is thereby set in a context in which the film itself has mythic qualities; it is not like a historical drama, for instance. At times, the audience may be overwhelmed visually by the quick succession of symbolic-oriented images, while missing the underlying point that the religious realm transcends the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion.

That idea comes from the 6^th century Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius. Such transcendence differentiates the domain of religion from all other domains of human experience. Even wondering how action in a dream could possibly “really have happened” as evinced in a person’s waking state—a phenomenon that is at least in part psychological in nature—does not go far enough in representing or inculcating the religious domain. In other words, religion does not reduce to the psychology of dreams and their relationship to a person’s waking state. I contend that the rapid series of symbolic images on the screen are meant to point to the limits of humans beyond which religious phenomena go and are based. A similar bricolage is used by Polanski in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) during the scene in which Satan rapes Rosemary. It is not just that we are seeing the effect of Rosemary being drugged, for she has not consumed much of the drug because she does not trust her next-door neighbors. Rather, the interaction between a mortal and a theological entity goes beyond our ability even to imagine because that entity is based in a realm unknown and inaccessible to us mere mortals. We only get a glimpse of Satan’s face as it is having sex with Rosemary. Similarly, we only get a glimpse of the face of the resulting baby when Rosemary finally accepts it as hers.

Perhaps film is best as a medium in capturing the liminal numen quality of transcendence when the normal “rules” of filmmaking are broken, or at least distorted. The viewers are not meant to grasp the bricolage of religious symbols that rapidly flicker on the screen when the transcendent and ordinary—the sacred and the profane—touch, or dance. Rationalistic questions of whether a person should make a Faustian deal with the devil seem superficial relative to the visualizations when an inherently transcendent entity or realm temporarily comes in contact with ordinary time and the world that we inhabit on a daily basis. Even if no other realm (or entity therein) exists ontologically, the experience of coming up against the inherent limits of our cognitive, perceptual, and emotional capacities as human beings may include elements such as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, given the numinosity of the transcendent, which Rudolf Otto associates with the holy in his book by that name. Visually, a rapid series of images containing religious-oriented symbols with discordant instrumentals is an effective way in which filmmakers can attempt to depict the heightened terrifying and fascinating emotions that the other-worldly, and thus numinous, mysterious power evokes. From such a vantage-point, in such an overwhelming experience, is anyone in a position to decide whether a Faustian deal is worthwhile?

Even narrative itself is transcended. Film can only go so far even in visually and auditorily pointing beyond the medium’s limits; but even in this respect the medium can effectively relativize the other domains of human experience from being conflated with the transcendent realm of religion. Efforts to comprehend the attributes of its innate entities, whether they are real or only posited, may be secondary to the yearning-experience for radical transcendence. Hence in the rape scene of Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary’s experience in being in close intercourse with an entity based in a transcendent, wholly theological realm, is given priority over images of that entity, and in The Mephisto Waltz, so much of Paula’s dream-waking-transcended experience of being manipulated by dynamics based in the religious realm is distorted visually. We may focus inordinately on the nature of the entities thereof rather than on the numinous nature of religious experience even though the entities are inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility.

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

Decades before dying while doing battle with the demon possessing Regan NacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), Rev. Lankester Merrin successfully extracts the same demon from a young man in Kenya. An African chief (or medicine man) tells Merrin at the end of Dominion: The Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) that he has made a rather bad enemy of the demon, which was not done with the priest. We know from The Exorcist that the demon will eventually kill the priest, but that is by no means the final word on a distinctively religious battle because in that domain, the human soul is eternal rather than necessarily tethered to a corporeal body. It is important, moreover, not to reduce religion to one of its aspects, or, even worse, to the stuff of any other domain, including the supernatural. Dominion reduces Christianity to one belief-claim and relies on supernaturalism to validate the religious phenomena in the film.

In the old church during at the film’s climatic event, Merrin incessantly repeats the identity of the Trinity to repulse and repel the demon from the young African man. Of itself, the very existence of the triune deity is abhorrent to the demon, likely because it, like Satan, is jealous of God’s pre-eminence and superiority. Even so, is repeating “Christ compels you” over and over sufficient for the demon to give up the possessed body? It seems realistic to assume that such an approach would reduce to a “No he doesn’t, yes he does, no he doesn’t” back-and-forth without a resolution. Adding potency, Merrin could preach the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels to the demon, which could be expected to reject in utter disgust the value of compassion as benevolentia universalis and especially to one’s detractors and even enemies. In addition to presenting the way into the kingdom of God to the demon, Merrin could try to convert the demon as a way of repulsing it enough to stop possessing the young man. Merrin could also point out that God is love, and what that means from a distinctly theological standpoint. For example, Merrin’s dialogue could include, “God is love—the sort that is self-emptying (i.e., agape) and this is superior to your puffed-up ego-pride by which you put yourself above Jesus’s voluntary sacrifice for us.” Besides being more distasteful than merely “Christ compels you” to the demon, the enhanced theological dialogue voiced by the priest would present the audience with a more substantive understanding of Jesus’s message in the Gospels than merely that he is the Son of God. Furthermore, that “Christ compels you” is coming from a “weak vessel” rather than from Christ himself means that the priest’s reliance on that line is not the best strategy for convincing the demon to give up the body. This is especially the case because Merrin had lost his faith and only recovered it because Rev. Francis had strongly asserted, “Satan is real.” If the basis of Francis’s declaration is not based in the religious domain—that is, is actually exogenous—then to the extent that Merrin follows suit, it is no surprise that the demon eventually—in The Exorcist—kills him.

Rev. Francis takes a long time to believe that the young African man is actually possessed. It is only when Francis sees the burn marks on the man’s forehead just after Francis has pressed a small crucifix on the man’s skin that that young priest believes that Satan is real. The religious faith of Rev. Merrin in God is in turn stimulated to return by Francis’s loud declaration, “Satan is real!” Whereas God as the Creator is like the condition for all that exists, and thus not an entity as we think of entities, Satan, and his demons are entities more easily recognized by the human mind. So it makes sense that faith in God could be derived from a declaration that Satan is real. The problem is that it is a supernatural empirical effect on young possessed man’s forehead that signifies and, even more troubling, validates the underlying religious phenomenon.

Even though such supernatural special-effects, including the fires that spontaneously start in the old church to provide lighting for Merrin and the demon, make for good cinema, the distinction between scientifically-valid empirical yet not-understood (and thus supernatural) happenings and religious phenomena is important. The supernatural is a subtype of natural science because the realm is empirical. Put another way, the supernatural can be thought of as being on the turf of science—just not (yet) explained. For the criteria and content of natural science to over-reach onto the domain of religion, even overriding the criteria innate to that domain, is to incur a category mistake. Basing the claim that Satan is real on burn-marks on a forehead treats empirical verification as determinative of the existence of a theological entity whose existence and basis transcends the empirical world rather than is based in it. This essence of religion renders it qualitatively different, and thus unique, from other, even closely related domains. Especially in a religion of the heart, such as Christianity, the validity of religious truth cannot rightfully come from seeing burn marks on someone’s forehead. Taking the latter as decisive gives a free hand to superstition.

Therefore, both Francis and Merrin depend on a non-religious marker to prove the existential reality of Satan, and, by extension, God. The meaning that God represents, which is theological love, which in turn is that which Satan rejects, is by implication not self-validating. This is deeply problematic from a religious standpoint. Depending on supernatural events or signs not only slights the distinctly theological meaning, but also remakes the theological into something else: the unexplained in natural science. The value of compassion being extending to rude people, for example, and even to detractors who disvalue rather than respect does not depend on unexplained observable phenomena. Either a person values agape love or not. Either such love is appreciated in one’s heart as being of great value, or as weakness. This judgment, rather than lines like, “Christ compels you,” captures what it means to internalize Jesus’s example and preachments in the Gospels. To a demon, those preachments may be more distasteful  than demands by a priest of Christ compelling obedience if the substance and essence of God is indeed love rather than domination to be served.