The Foreigner

The human urge to exact vengeance as if the resulting pain suffered by the culprit(s) were equivalent to that (or whom) is lost being restored—an equivalence that Friedrich Nietzsche characterizes as strange—is perhaps integral to human nature; the instinct may even be in our DNA and activated in the reptilian area of the human brain. Compassion to enemies flies in the face of that facet of our nature, yet it is arguably only from justice as love as universal (rather than convenient) benevolence, rather than from justice through vengeance, that full restorative satisfaction after having suffered a loss caused by another person is possible. We find this instinct to exact vengeance idealized in the film, The Foreigner (2017). Rarely is vengeance so perfectly fulfilled as it is in that fictional story. Yet the idyllic ending is deceiving, for even such fulfilment as the protagonist feels after having exacted revenge is not wholly restorative. More realistically, people tend to go overboard in refusing to delimit vengeful acts to fit the respective crimes/losses. Hence the Biblical attempt to assign vengeance to God, which is also problematic.

The phrase, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord,” comes from Paul’s letter to the Romans (12:19), where the apostle quotes  from Deuteronomy 32:35: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them” (NIV). Friedrich Nietzsche took a look at that verse and concluded that it discredits the Hebrews’ (and Paul’s) conception of God because vengeance and omnibenevolence are contradictory. To say that God is both vengeful and perfect goodness (as in universal benevolence) is untenable, so Nietzsche’s point is that internal contradiction within a concept renders it invalid; to say that God itself does not exist is another matter.

The God of love and universal benevolence found in the Gospels represents an internally-consistent conception of the divinity because love (especially agape) and benevolentia universalis do not contradict each other. In the Gospels, Jesus preaches and provides examples of mercy and forgiveness even to enemies.  In criticizing logical contradiction in holding that it is sufficient to discredit the validity of a concept by rendering it nonsensical, Nietzsche almost seems Kantian. The first formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative mandates that if a maxim for action yields an absurdity when universalized, that maxim is inherently unethical, even if applied by an individual rather than by everyone (e.g., lying, for instance).

Admittedly, assigning vengeance exclusively to a deity may have been motivated by a constructive intention—that of keeping retribution out of the hands of us mere mortals, who rarely even recognize that vengeance is best served cold rather than inflamed by passion, and thus likely to be carried to an extreme rather than circumscribed by self-discipline. The Israeli genocide in Gaza demonstrates just how flawed human judgment can be with regard to assessing when enough vengeance has been committed. In retrospect, assigning vengeance to Yahweh so the Hebrews would not carry out vengeance themselves seems not to have worked. The human instinct for retaliation—to force an aggressor to pay, even if only by mental anguish—remains remarkably powerful. Nietzsche posits in The Genealogy of Morals that the assumption of equivalence of pain and the thing (or person) lost originated in the earliest debtor-creditor relationships—an equivalence that Shakespeare made famous by the proverbial line, “a pound of flesh,” in The Merchant of Venice. Both Nietzsche and Shakespeare were skeptical regarding the efficacy of another’s pain in making up for a loss of property, money, and even a loved one. Not only that equivalence, but also the version of justice that is presumably satisfied by vengeance can be critiqued, and an alternative, now-extinct theory of justice proposed.

Unfortunately, The Foreigner presents viewers with an idealized depiction of revenge accomplished, albeit with much effort by the protagonist in satisfying his urge so well literally without overkill. Jackie Chan plays Quan Nogoc Minh, a former special-forces operative whose teenage daughter is killed in a London bombing by a rogue group called the “Authentic IRA.” Quan targets Liam Hennessy, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, correctly suspecting that Hennessy’s past IRA ties can give him access to the bombers’ identities. Quan is relentless in pressuring Hennessy, even with violence unleashed especially on Hennessy’s henchmen, so Hennessy himself would be motivated enough to find out the identities of the bombers. Quan even suffers an injury in an exchange of gun fire. The film’s message at this point is that justice by vengeance can require a lot of effort and even harm to oneself. To be sure, as a former special-ops military man, Quan is formidable against the henchmen, and Hennessy is eventually sufficiently motivated to seek out the names of the bombers from a current IRA-contact. Pretending to be a repairman, Quan gains access to the small apartment where the bombers are planning their next caper. Spraying the apartment with machine-gun fire, Quan kills all but one of the terrorists, and severely wounds the woman. Quan slips away, down the elevator and back to his residence. Even though police know that Quan is responsible for the carnage, they choose not to arrest him, and even shoot the woman themselves! The film’s message at that point is that Quan’s vengeance is fitting and justified. When he returns home, where he is a local restaurateur, he is visibly fulfilled emotionally because he has succeeded in his vengeance without falling sort or overreaching.  

Watching the film after 2023, Quan’s precisely and appropriately carried out retaliation in vengeance for the loss of his daughter can be contrasted with Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, which went much beyond the number of Israelis killed and kidnapped by Hamas in October of 2023. In the film, Quan limits his quest to the actual bombers, rather than going on to kill everyone who has ever been associated with the IRA, such as Hennessey. For example, Quan makes a kind of bomb that would not kill Hennessey when it goes off in the building in which Hennessey’s office is located; Quan merely wants to motivate Hennessey so Quan can apply vengeance to the murderers of his daughter. Such an approach to vengeance differs from Israeli government statements that everyone in Gaza, even babies, were guilty and therefore should be killed. Unlike the movie, the “real-world” case shows just how warped self-serving human judgment can be concerning “pay back.”  John Locke, a political theorist, posits as a primary rationale for the existence of government the tendency of human beings to unleash excessive punishment in avenging crimes committed against themselves, their families, or their property. Without an impartial authority capable of restraining retaliatory violence, excesses such as a genocide can occur even by a government supported by such a significant percentage of voters that a nation itself can be said to be culpable in committing crimes against humanity out of sheer vengeance.

The fact that Quan stops and returns home the moment he achieves a strictly proportional vengeance can be viewed as idyllic with respect to self-imposed restraint in human nature. Vengeance in the real world is almost never as perfectly calibrated as depicted in the film, although the physical and mental stamina required of Quan even just to get the names of the bombers is hardly ideal. Vengeance is not easy even when it is held to justifiable proportionality. Even though the film brings closure to Quan’s quest and he can resume living and even grieve his daughter’s death, Locke’s point is nonetheless valid. As the case of Israel in Gaza and even the West Bank demonstrates, state actors wielding military and police raw force to enact retribution can be extremely dangerous.

Furthermore, public legal justice rarely feels as emotionally satisfying to victims as Quan’s accomplished vengeance feels to him once he is back home. Examining the film’s closure more closely, however, can lead us to conclude that Quan’s satisfaction is not complete; he is not made whole as he had been prior to the loss of his daughter by having accomplished his objective of violently killing the bombers.

Back home, Quan does not get his daughter back. Nietzsche points out that the vicarious satisfaction of creditors by the infliction of pain on non-paying debtors represents a strange equivalence because real satisfaction in terms of getting the loaned money back has not been achieved. Just because a debtor suffers from a creditor’s demand of “a pound of flesh” does not mean that the creditor’s bank account is restored with money that can be spent to feel pleasure in the future. The sadistic pleasure even in knowing that someone else is suffering (e.g., in a debtor-prison) substitutes for such pleasure. The value of money lies ultimately in pleasure, whether money is spent or the absence of money is used to cause the suffering of another person (and thus pleasure to oneself). Such an equivalence of another’s pain for money can nonetheless be questioned, as Nietzsche does, and thus the sort of justice waged by Quan in the film can be viewed as something less than restorative and thus making an aggrieved person whole once again. Because Quan’s daughter is not restored to him, he is not made whole in spite of the pleasure he feels in having made the bombers pay by suffering pain and losing their futures. Quan’s satisfaction upon returning home can therefore only be partial; vengeance cannot be perfect because that which (or who) has been lost is still gone. Even if a person believes that God will execute vengeance on our behalf, the stolen property or destroyed lives are not restored. Praying for divine vengeance turns out to be human, all too human, rather than making a person whole once again.

An alternative, by-now extinct theory of justice rooted in love and benevolence, wherein even enemies are treated with compassion rather than retaliated against, is available. Unlike the sort of justice evinced in the film, justice as love and benevolence can restore a victim to wholeness even though the lost thing or person of value is not returned.  Of compassion being due even to enemies, a person subscribing to this theory of justice could say, Gladly I give this unto you, not because you deserve it, but because God is love and to the extent that you partake in being, you are of God, which is perfect being, and thus you are owed benevolence. This line reflects Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s formulation of justice as caritas sapientis seu benevolentia universalis: wise love, that is, universal benevolence. Perhaps the wisdom of such love is due in part to the inherently incomplete restoration that is possible from justice as vengeance.

A story in which Quan serves the bombers by taking care of their children, even raising one or two if one of the bombers is subsequently killed, would present us with a radically different narrative—one so alien and thus unbelievable that such a film would likely never be produced. A formidable exception is the film Gandhi (1982), which arguably showcases justice as compassion for one’s adversaries, as when Gandhi, barely conscious during one of his hunger strikes meant to stop the Hindu-Muslim violence, tells Nahari, a Hindu man who has just confessed that he has killed a Muslim child in revenge for his own son’s death by a Muslim man, “I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed and raise him as your own. Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.” Such a mission would restore Nahari to spiritual wholeness and thus enable him to live once again rather than be spiritually dead in guilt and still-unrequited resentment. For even though Nahari has killed a Muslim boy, that act cannot restore Nahari’s own son to him. Without justice as compassion to his enemies, Nahari is left only with the partial satisfaction that vengeance can give. Even though The Foreigner ends with Quan back home visibly relieved from having accomplished his objective against all probability, his satisfaction cannot be whole because he is not fully restored psychologically or spiritually. His daughter, if in heaven, would have cause to mourn him, whereas if he were to have extended compassion rather than pain to his enemies, she would have reason to rejoice.  

Contact

In the fall of 2026, Chris Graney, an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, argued that the universe of at least 2 trillion galaxies (according to a study in 2016 using the orbital Hubble Space Telescope) probably contains few, if any, planets capable of supporting intelligent life. This claim may come as a surprise, given the gargantuan number of possibly habitable exoplanets in the universe and the associated likelihood of alien life out there. The overlay of theology onto science, as if the latter’s criteria were nugatory and thus dismissible relative to religious doctrine, is problematic because the two domains are arguably distinct and even unique, even though they are related. Such a category mistake is highlighted in the film, Contact (1997), in which religious figures (who have related political roles in the White House) impose monotheist criteria in the selection of an astronaut for space travel, which is primarily a scientific enterprise.

To put Graney’s scientific claim in context, scientifically, consider the estimate that a typical galaxy contains between 100 billion and 400 billion suns. Multiplying 400 billion by 2 trillion equals 800 quintillion. Now, multiplying this number by 8—based on science’s estimate that a typical solar system has between eight and ten planets—brings us to 6.4 nonillion! To be sure, simulations had shown that a solar system can support up to six planets in the habitable zone; multiplying 800 quintillion suns by a conservative 3 habitable planets gives us 2.4 sextillion planets where intelligent life could potentially exist.

Such an astronomically large number as 2.4 sextillion could support lots of sex, of whatever fashion or stripe, though the odds of whips being involved outside of Earth (especially beyond San Francisco’s sordid Dore Alley and Folsom Days “festivals”) are probably very low. But I digress. Graney’s claim may be too circumscribed, given the probabilities going along with there being up to 2.4 sextillion possibly life-supporting exoplanets, and this number does not include the planets of suns that may be in galaxies that in 2026 remained undetected by empirical science. Graney’s scientific claim pales as arbitrary, or at least as dogmatically circumscribed. That he was working at the Vatican at the time—the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church—may explain why he made the statement: his claim aligns with the theological doctrine that, being made in God’s image, our species holds a special, singular place in Creation. Unfortunately, moving from a religious concept to a scientific conclusion is deeply problematic because religion and science are two distinct domains, each with its own criteria that ought not be supervened by the foisting of exogenous criteria from any other domain.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church opposed the heliocentric theory, which posits that the Sun rather than the Earth is at the center of our solar system. In conflating theology with science, top ecclesiastical officials considered that astronomical theory to conflict with the theological doctrine of the primacy of our species in Creation. Heliocentrism was first suggested by Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-230 BCE) and later revived by Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 350-370 CE), who was flayed alive by Bishop Cyril’s military guard because she was a pagan who had influence on government officials in Alexandria and would not convert to Christianity (Cyril was later canonized). Centuries later, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) ran afoul of the Roman Inquisition because his scientific work supported the heliocentric theory. 

Putting scientists to death for advancing a scientific theory as if doing so were heretical (a distinctly religious concept) conflates science and theology by hyperextending religious criteria into the scientific domain as though the latter were merely really part of the religious domain. Furthermore, for a person to foist one domain’s criteria onto another domain, which has its own native or innate criteria and principles, is not only logically fraught, but also presumptuous and thus unethical as well. Science and theology are best approached as distinct domains, with their own hegemonic criteria not to be submerged by that of the other domain. It follows that religious truth and scientific truth can be considered to be qualitatively different (i.e., different in kind rather than degree or extent). 

In fact, the word “truth” may be best reserved for the religious domain, with “facts” residing in the scientific domain. Religious meaning and empirical facts are two very different things. The qualitative difference is missed in conflating the “Big Bang” with Creation, which can be thought of as meaning that even existence itself, or being, is inherently dependent. In other words, to say that our existence is precarious scientifically, as in, for instance, an asteroid being able to hit our planet and exterminate us, is very different than saying that Creation is dependent on its Creator so we are existentially precarious in our creatureliness. Religious meaning can legitimately be supported by myth, whereas science is the stuff of theory and empirical findings. 

Psychology, history, and politics are still other domains with their own distinct criteria and thus not to be conflated. Religious myth and historical accounts, for example, are qualitatively different, and are written with intent based on the respective sets of criteria. Josephus, a historian, and Paul, an evangelist, could have passed each other on a road and wished each other well without viewing each other as colleagues even though both men wrote because they wrote for different purposes and according to different criteria.

To grasp the harmful effects of superimposing religious criteria on scientific study, watching and analyzing the film, Contact (1997), is advisable and instructive. For example, the most iconic lines of the film, which was made just before the turn of the millennium, is illustrative. S. R. Hadden (wonderfully played by John Hurt) is talking with Ellie, the scientist who has discovered the radio signals sent from Vega. “The powers that be have been very busy lately, falling over each other to position themselves for the game of the millennium. Maybe I can help deal you back in,” Hadden tells her. She responds, “I didn’t realize I was out,” to which he pauses and says, “Well, maybe not out . . . but certainly being handed your hat.” That even Ellie’s boss, David Drumlin, a scientist who serves as the White House Scientific Advisor, appeals to religious criteria to marginalize Ellie behind the other candidates, including Drumlin himself, for the space trip to meet the aliens at Vega shows just how out of place such criteria are in a scientific venture.

That the selection process would be political is to be expected, but that religious criteria would be primary over scientific criteria is not. The film, which was written by Carl Sagan and his wife based on one of his books, castigates the interlarding of religious criteria as artificial and contrived—basically out of place—in the selection of an astronaut to travel through worm holes in space to visit an alien species that has, as Ellie points out in defending her candidacy, sent a distinctly scientific message to Earth on how to construct the space-transit vehicle and its supporting launching infrastructure. Sagan’s attitude can be gleamed as being hostile to the unethical encroachment of religion on astronomy, and space travel in particular. The dramatic tension in the film is as much about what criteria should be used to select a human to go on the trip as about what the aliens will say about themselves and even ourselves as a species. Interestingly, the alien who speaks with Ellie once she has arrived at Vega does not ask her about the religious beliefs of humans, so the concern of religionists that the astronaut should be able to discuss God turns out to be misplaced, and thus irrelevant.

Before analyzing the film in depth, it is useful to remember that in NASA’s space programs, the religion or atheism of astronaut candidates has officially never been among the criteria used in the selection process. Beyond the risk of prejudice, the inclusion of religion would be widely considered, especially within NASA, as entirely irrelevant. Health, physical stamina, and technical ability in space travel and spacewalking have been the primary considerations. In selecting Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher, for the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle in 1986, even though the primary criterion was not aerospace expertise, the key criterion being the ability to communicate to the public what it is like being in space was relevant to the functions of teacher in space, and thus the criterion is entirely appropriate. Because this skill—conveying different or complex matters in simple terms—is important in teaching, the ability to teach was indirectly involved, along of course with physical stamina and health. Asking candidates for the teacher slot on the shuttle, however, whether the experience in orbit would affect their respective relationships with Jesus Christ (or might increase their willingness to convert to Christianity) would have been  generally flagged inside and outside of NASA as irrelevant and even invasive. Furthermore, NASA administrators would hardly be in a position to decide whom God would want to go into the heavens. Such a question would make no sense to a Buddhist, and a Hindu might ask: Which deity? An avatar of Vishnu might prefer one person, while Shiva would prefer another.

In the film, the primary religious criterion used to select the astronaut who will travel to the aliens at Vega is based on the assumption that humanity is overwhelmingly (and properly) monotheist—believing that there is just one deity. This is problematic because a candidate could be a Buddhist or Hindu. Nonetheless, a member of a selection committee claims that 95% of the world’s population believe in a supreme being—a dubious factoid because neither Buddhists nor Hindus believe in a supreme being in the monotheistic sense. 

Buddhism teaches that neither a soul nor a deity exists, though Pure Land Buddhism in Japan includes the veneration of several “Buddhas” as de facto deities. In Hinduism, Brahman, which is infinite being, is not an entity, and therefore, is not a deity; infinite being is considered to be supreme, hence even more fundamental than the gods and goddesses, which are created out of Brahman, primal, everlasting infinite being. To be sure, a passage in the Gita has Lord Krishna claiming that he created Brahman, but as that is being itself, how could Krishna exist prior to Brahman? Presumably a deity doing something must exist while doing it, so something existing that brings about infinite being would appear to be an oxymoron. So in Hinduism, Brahman, rather than any of the deities—even Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu that in the Gita is supreme over the other gods and goddesses—is fundamental, and even in the Gita, Hinduism is not represented as being monotheist, as Krishna alludes to the other gods and thus their existence. So, in Hinduism, Brahman, which is not a deity, is arguably (to Shankara at least) most fundamental. Even in the Gita, Krishna is not the only deity. So monotheism does not apply to Hinduism. In the film, therefore, the claim that the astronaut selected should be able to represent monotheism because humanity is overwhelmingly monotheist can be rejected on religious terms; that the claim would be primary in the selection of an astronaut for space travel, which is primarily scientific, is thus especially problematic.

The film’s plot, in brief, unfolds as follows: Ellie, an astrophysicist heading a remote radio-wave detection station oriented to detecting signals from beyond Earth, discovers a strong signal originating at Vega. Her superior, David Drumlin, quickly takes credit and assumes control of the program from the White House. Figures including Robert Novak, a political commentator (playing himself), and then Richard Rank (likely a surrogate for evangelical politicos such as Ralph Reed during the Reagan years), and Palmer Joss, a presidential religious advisor and a nonaffiliated minister, all insist on the crucial relevance of religion to the matter of communicating with space aliens. Both Rank and Joss want the candidate who is selected to travel to the aliens to believe in the Abrahamic deity so as to be able to convey the nature of that deity to the aliens.

Astutely political, David Drumlin tells the selection committee that the candidate selected should indeed believe in God; he is trying to exclude Ellie, who would otherwise be selected but for her Atheism. Drumlin insists even after he has been selected that he will gleefully represent his “country, planet, and God,” as if God would ever be in need of being represented by a human being, especially one such as Drumlin who has manipulated the selection committee with a clean conscience because, as he later explains to Ellie, “life isn’t fair.” There is some divine justice, I think, in him being killed indirectly by a religious zealot who, in considering science as a threat to religion (which means he commits the category mistake of conflating the two domains), sets off a body-bomb inside launching superstructure during a dress-rehearsal of the launch when Drumlin is present (playing to the cameras for publicity).

Palmer Joss, who is romantically interested in Ellie, also personifies the hypocrisy that can exist in religion. He is on the selection committee, and he votes against her ostensibly because he feels strongly that a person who believes in his God should go, but as he later admits to her, he didn’t want to risk losing her. Like Drumlin, Joss is selfish, and is hardly in a position to assess the religious suitability of the candidates. The film’s message is that religion should not have entered the picture at all.

Ellie is the runner up, and so following Drumlin’s death, she gets to go to Vega. Even though the time-travel element means that the 18-hour trip looks like a failed launch to everyone here on Earth. The 18 hours of the scrambled video inside her cube-shaped space vehicle validates her account, but this information is kept secret by the few politicos who realize the significance of the find. During a Congressional hearing, Ellie is lambasted as not being credible in her testimony that she travelled to Vega and spoke with an alien. That the aliens might be capable of time travel is utterly missed by everyone. What is not possible for us is deemed impossible. This assumption is just as flawed as the assumption, it turns out, that the aliens would ask about, or even be interested in, the religious beliefs of humans.

During Ellie’s conversation with the alien, religion does not come up. Instead, the matter of discussion, set by the alien, is about how and when aliens might make contact with our species again. Given the relatively primitive condition of humans, the alien tells Ellie that contact will be made in what could be said to be baby steps—meaning very gradually. We are not alone in the universe, and by this both Ellie and the alien know that the reference is not to a deity, but, rather, to there being more than one alien civilization. The primary criterion of the search committee, it turns out, is entirely irrelevant. This does not nullify theistic belief in religion. Instead, Ellie has pointed out to the selection committee, the message sent by the aliens is scientific rather than religious. Conflating the two types, and more specifically, superimposing the criteria innate to one type onto the other type at the expense of its own criteria, can be flagged without invalidating religious truth within the confines of its own domain. Drumlin and Joss can both be viewed as religious hypocrites (using distinctly religious criteria) and Ellie can be viewed as an excellent scientist and astronaut (using criteria of science and space travel).

Apocalypse Now

Imagine being an American soldier sent to Vietnam to fight the militarized Marxist Communists there. The Vietnam War provides many examples of such a plight. Now consider how much worse it would be to be sent into a seemingly constantly rainy, hot and humid jungle deep in Cambodia to assassinate an American colonel because he is a renegade Special Forces military officer who has gone insane. Just in case this is not dire enough, simply add in that he has the local village protecting their god with weapons. Surely safer secret military missions exist than to assassinate an insane former special-ops man with a small army of devotees. This is the central plot of the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who had directed The Godfather earlier that decade. Behind the plot of Apocalypse Now is a dichotomy wherein human nature itself is bifurcated into a dichotomy of good and bad. This is interesting because some of the characters may fall in between, suggesting that human nature has a gray zone in which most of us live.

Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando are in both films. All of the characters played by both actors in those films have both laudable and sordid qualities. In The Godfather, Dulvall’s Tom Hagen delivers the Godfather’s threats to innocent people on pain of death and yet evinces steadfast loyalty to the crime family that had adopted him when he was a boy. In Apocalypse Now, the actor’s Lt. Col. Kilgore loves the smell of toxic napalm gas in the morning and is loyal to the United States and brave rather than cowardly. Similarly, in The Godfather, Brando’s Don Vito Corleone gives orders to his henchmen to murder people and yet he strives for peace between the families in the wake of the murder by one of those families of his son, Sonny. In Apocalypse Now, Brando’s Col. Kurtz tortures and brainwashes people, including Capt. Willard, whom the U.S. Army has sent to assassinate the insane Kurtz, and yet Kurtz politely asks Willard to urge Kurtz’s son back in the U.S. not to judge Kurtz too harshly. Kurtz is as sensitive as he is insane and cruel; he even has a copy of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which traces historical shifts from cruel customs to moral and religious values. Interestingly, when Willard hacks Kurtz to death with a machete, the villagers are shown hacking a cow to death as a religious sacrifice; editing shows a back and forth between the two killings, and the villages then drop their guns and kneel to Willard, treating him as if he were a god for having killed another god, Kurtz.

The relationship between ethics and theology in the Abrahamic religions that is analyzed in Kierkegaard’s short text, Fear and Trembling, comes to mind in the interlaced camera shots of Willard murdering Kurtz and the villagers sacrificing a bull. To Kierkegaard, Abraham is guilty of being unethical in attempting to murder Isaac even though Abraham is faithful to Yahweh’s divine command to sacrifice Isaac, with a knife! The ethical verdict against attempted murder and the approbation of Abraham’s religious faithfulness to a divine command at great personal cost to Abraham are both valid. The co-extant validity of two different, albeit related, domains of human experience point back to the complexity of human nature itself. And yet, in the film, the depiction of humanity’s higher nature and brute cruelty, as well as its susceptibility to mental illness, in the Col. Kurtz character is set within a larger dichotomous framework in which people are either good or bad, and no one is in between. The complexity of Kurtz’s character itself suggests that the film’s dichotomous paradigm of human nature may be artificial, perhaps even imposed by the structure of the human mind along the lines of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

During what can be characterized in terms of Joseph Campbell’s notion of a hero’s journey, Willard (the film’s protagonist) is hosted for dinner and an overnight stay by a French family in Cambodia. The daughter, who treats Willard to opium and sex in her bed as if both activities were routine, tells him, “There are two of you. You kill and you love. You are a god and an animal.” We are indeed a species in the animal kingdom, but it is doubtful that we constitute gods, although generals on a battlefield may come close. In the film, Gettysburg (1993), Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who holds the line against charging confederate soldiers by flanking them while having to resort to bayonets, says, “Generals can do anything. There’s nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.” That film is based on Michael Shaara’s book, The Killer Angels,” the title of which comes from Chamberlain’s recollection of his father’s reaction to a speech that Joshua made as a student in which he quoted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man.” Joshua’s father, as later recollected by Joshua, had remarked at the time, “Well, boy, if [man is] an angel, he’s sure a murderin’ angel.” In the film, Pvt. Buster Kirain replies to Col. Chamberlain of man, “Well, if he’s an angel, alright then. But he damn well must be a killer angel.” This line went on to become iconic. If we are angels, then surly we are killer angels. This line fits the overall paradigm of Apocolypse Now.

A line by the photo journalist, played by Dennis Hopper, to Willard also contributes to the dichotomous paradigm. “There is only love and hate. You either love a person or hate a person.” Even so, the fact that the demented photographer idolizes Kurtz as “a genius” and a “poet-warrior” even though Kurtz has threatened to kill the photographer if he takes another picture of Kurtz suggests that something in interpersonal relations exists between love and hate, or maybe both can exist together, besides like and dislike as gray areas. Similarly, Col. Kurtz tells Willard, “horror and ethical atrocities are your friends; if not, they are your enemies.” There is apparently no in between. Interestingly, the film ends with Willard’s voice-over, “the horror, the horror” in a tone of astonishment at the sheer extent of it that he has witnessed in human nature. Behind the gloss of assassination lies sordid murder, of which he is guilty. Even Willard is difficult to assess in terms of good and bad.

We mere mortals are quick to judge one another as either “good” or “bad.” The distinction between ethics and religion confounds such an easy categorization of people under the blanket labels of “good” and “bad.”  Apocalypse Now presents the dichotomy as artificial—even perhaps insane—ironically because Kurtz, and even perhaps Willard, are presented as having both laudable and not so praiseworthy qualities. Even in Kurtz’s insanity, are there not credible nuggets of insight of which he is capable? Willard does not dismiss Kurtz’s philosophizing outright; at least Kurtz can reason through his philosophical claims. The philosophizing of the photojournalist is so insane that no line of reasoning whatsoever can be detected. People are not always so bad that a person must vacate to Aruba to collect oneself before getting married (such a marriage may not be wise), and yet people are not so exclusively good that a prudent person would let down one’s guard. In assessing other people, a wise person takes into consideration the distortive mental impact of the dichotomous mental paradigm of the human mind that may go back to the brain’s dichotomous left-brain/right-brain physical structure.

His Girl Friday

In Intro to Film courses, Citizen Kane (1941) and His Girl Friday (1940) typically play major roles in the teaching of film-analysis. Hidden gems include novel camera angles in Citizen Kane and the use of dialogue and editing to quicken the pace of certain scenes in His Girl Friday. In the latter film, Cary Grant, who plays the newspaper editor, Walter Burns, hurriedly mentions Grant’s real name, Archibald Leach, in referring to another character during a phone call! Such a nugget points back to a director or screenwriter who knows his or her craft well enough that the finished product has multiple levels without breaking the viewers' suspension of disbelief (i.e., being engrossed in a film's story-world). Typically, films have both “task” and “romance” elements, which should in some way be connected, such by involving a protagonist’s “love-interest” somehow involves in the protagonist’s task-objective. His Girl Friday is both a crime drama and a romance film. This distinction is similar to Donelson Forsyth’s model of leadership in which behaviors of a given leader can be classified as either performance maintenance or relationship maintenance.[1] The crime-element of the film includes not only a man who did not mean to shoot someone due to be executed anyway, but also the mayor and police chief of New York City being utterly corrupt so as to stay in office by having the criminal executed even in the knowledge that the governor has cancelled the execution. The romance-element is perhaps just as harsh even though (and even because) it is centered on the phenomenon of falling in love.

The expression, all is fair in love and war, applies to His Girl Friday. That electoral politics are a “constrained” channeling of the instinct for war is well known. Less well known, perhaps, is the nature of the phenomenon of falling in love. It may or may not come as a surprise that the ancient poet, Ovid, classified lovesickness as an illness. In Phaedrus, Socrates describes love as “madness” (mania), owing to the overwhelming quality of the intensity that hits once a person has fallen in love with another person. Although beauty may serve as an initial attractor, falling in love is really of another person’s personality.

In His Girl Friday, Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson are already divorced, and she is engaged to Bruce Baldwin. Burns, the editor of the newspaper where Hildy still works, repeatedly manipulates both Hildy and Bruce so she will dump the mild-mannered man from Albany, who lives with his mother, and return to the conniving editor and ex-husband, Walter. For instance, Walter directs Louie, an employee, to give Bruce counterfeit money so that Bruce will be arrested (again), and thus kept away from Hildy long enough for Walter to seduce her to stay at the paper rather than move to Albany to marry Bruce. Watching Hildy working with Walter on the execution story, Bruce finally says to her, “You don’t love me; you are just like him.” She keeps working in indifference to what her fiancé is saying. Even though Hildy has figured out that Walter has been tricking Bruce, she loves Walter in spite of his sordid character. In fact, at the end of the film, when she admits to Walter that she is still in love with him, she even gleefully recounts to him the time when they had stolen someone in the process of pursuing a story. Furthermore, she is in love with Walter even though when she is crying, Walter barely even touches one of her shoulders. Walter even admits that Bruce can give her a better life. Even though Walter is a lying, manipulative person, Hildy is still in love with him, and ends up remarrying him. She is utterly indifferent to Bruce even though she agreed to marry him. Bruce comes to realize both Hildy’s indifference to him and that she is just like Walter. Left unsaid, however, is whether, as I suspect, Bruce has realized that Hildy is still in love with Walter. Bruce makes a wise decision nonetheless not to compete with Walter; competing for a woman who is in love with another man is bound to result in humiliating failure. Even though Walter seems to be incapable of physical and even emotional intimacy, the fact that Hildy is in love with him is enough for her to be fine with Bruce returning to Albany so she can remarry Walter. Such is the depth of falling in love with another person that prospective suitors are wise to walk away rather than fight the gravitational pull that exists when a person falls in love with another person.

In The Godfather, Part III (1990), Kate admits to Michael Corleone, the head of the Corleone crime family, that she still loves him even after decades since their divorce and even though he is at bottom a murderous thug. She says to him, “I guess, if it’s any consolation, Michael . . . I want you to know that I’ve always loved you, and I always will.” She admits to this even though she knows that he is and has been a ruthless murderer as the head of, and then head of, a crime syndicate. Falling in love with someone transcends ethics—whether the beloved is ethical or unethical—and thus can be considered to be deeper, or more fundamental, to human nature than is the ethical dimension. Kay is too smart to remarry Michael. Similarly, Bruce wisely leaves Hildy to Walter because she is still in love with the latter, even though Bruce is arguably a better person. In fact, Bruce realizes where Hildy's heart is directed before she does. In fact, the quickness with which Hildy realizes this about herself in the last scene of the film may be unrealistic and thus trite. So too is the saying that good people can fall for bad people. 

His Girl Friday is arguably about the extraordinary depth that falling in love reaches in the human psyche and heart. Even so, Plato’s dictum that reason should have the upper hand over emotions, or passions, is powerful too, and a person who has fallen in love with a manipulative, self-centered liar can draw on inner fortitude in spite of being in love to walk away so as to obviate years of suffering in being betrayed. Although Hildy has divorced Walter, she agrees to remarry him, perhaps because she is just like him, ultimately in being just as comfortable as he is in distancing emotional and physical intimacy.  That falling in love can exist even in such a condition goes to show just how deep, or fundamental, the phenomenon is.

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1. Donelson R. Forsyth, Group Dynamics, 5^th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 253.

NAZA

While a student at Yale, I took Charlie Musser’s seminar on documentary films on a whim, after having taken two courses oriented to film narrative (not screenwriting). Because my studies were mainly in philosophy of religion, historical theology, and history at Yale, I think neither Charlie nor I knew quite why I was taking his course. At the time, I would not have thought that I would be writing on the genre thirty years later. The film, NAZA (2026), makes my earlier endeavor entirely worthwhile, and integrated into my main academic areas of study and research, which include ethics and political theory. The documentary “examines ‘the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians’” in Gaza, and as of October, the theatrical release was being extended due to so many sold-out showings.[1] The Venice Film Festival awarded the film with the Special Jury Prize, and the two filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, “received a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation at the festival.”[2] The film can be interpreted as documenting the magnified harsh effects that unchecked power over other people can have when those others are dehumanized. It is interesting how close “NAZA” is to another infamous word, NAZI.

Another film, The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), is based on the actual psychology experiment in which a group of college students were randomly divided into prisoners and guards. In the simulation, the guards presumptuously violated the rule against the use of violence because their power went to their heads like strong drink effects a sailor. The experiment dramatized in the film showed just how dangerous unchecked power can be in the hands of the human brain. I contend that the same phenomenon was playing out in the ministers of Israel’s government for three years as of September, 2026, for the holocaustic genocide that those human beings unleashed on the Palestinian people, in extreme disproportion to the harm and deaths inflicted by Hamas in one attack in October, 2023,  has involved even the pathological dehumanization of another people. It is interesting, therefore, that Naza and Nazi are so much alike even just as words, for the Nazis readily dehumanized Jews, which goes beyond merely declaring them to be enemies of the state.

The documentary NAZA “features interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers, soldiers and whistleblowers.”[3] In the film, those people “describe how Palestinians are being targeted and how strikes are carried out using AI and automated surveillance in military targeting systems—despite Israel being away that civilians are present in targeted areas.”[4] Targeting civilian dwellings was something that Russia’s President Putin was also doing as part of his military invasion of Ukraine, so such targeting does not in itself distinguish the Israeli government ministers. More insidious is the Israeli leveling of entire cities in Gaza, and thus relegating over a million inhabitants to live in tents for years in de facto concentration camps in Gaza.

That the entire population was intentionally made homeless conveys the fittingness of the accusation by the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity and the conclusion of the UN that Israel was committing a genocide. The ICC also found sufficient evidence for a genocide taking place to be highly probable. Relatedly, Abraham and Szor have said, “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible.”[5] If mass killing is not sufficient to signify a contention that Netanyahu and his ministers were conducting a genocide, then the underlining dehumanization of the Palestinians not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, and thus as a people, surely is sufficient for the label of genocide to be fitting and appropriate, and thus entirely valid. Implicitly relating Naza to Nazi, the filmmakers went on to say, “While filming over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20^th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like?”[6] In Nazi Germany, they looked like Adolf Eichmann efficiently coordinating the trains coming and going from the concentration camps. In Naza Israel, the inner workings included U.S.-made bombs leveling entire neighborhoods in Gaza, shooting Palestinian children for fun, and outright stealing (in the West Bank).

The fact that Nazi Germany was not a “one off” by 2023 suggests that what had been assumed to be an extreme aberration of absolute power was actually a manifestation of what the prison experiment in California found—that the human brain and absolute power over other people are dangerous together. In other words, the fallible human brain cannot be trusted to be vested with such power as can incur even the assumption of dehumanization. By implication, a coalition of the willing—of militaries from around the world—should have mobilized to Ukraine as soon as the Russian invasion began and to Gaza as soon as entire apartment buildings were being bombed. Absolute, unchecked military power should be resisted by counter-power because of the human brain’s inherent vulnerability to a warping of cognition and perception, as well as to denial and rationalization, from having a lot of violent power over other people or even a people. Large nation-states did not exist during the long hunter-gatherer period in which natural selection formed our species; not even large organizations, whether governments or corporations, existed. So, it should be no surprise that our brains are ill-equipped for the massive power made possible by large organization of people, money, and destructive equipment. Nazi Germany was not an isolated case; Israel proved this to the world in the mid 2020’s, and the documentary NAZA documents this point if viewers step back to see the big picture behind the film.

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1, David Mouriquand, “Gaza Documentary ‘NAZA’ Beating ‘Avengers Endgame” Encore’ at Box Office,” Euronews.com, 1 October 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Forbidden

The early film, Forbidden (1932), asks the viewers to sympathize with a married politician and his mistress, who together have a “love child,” even though the politician, as a governor, finally follows his conscience and admits to the decades-long affair. Lulu, the mistress, selflessly remains alone and hidden from public view so Bob can climb the political ladder without scandal. At one point, Bob offers to leave his wife, Helen, and leave with Lulu for a shared life somewhere else, but Lulu refuses for the sake of Bob’s career in politics. She places his interests above her own. The film’s attitude toward the “cheater” and his mistress ethically is complex, as is human nature itself. The film presents the complexity that can go with some, but certainly not all, ethical controversies.

Because Lulu acts so selflessly in putting Bob’s interests ahead of her own, the affair comes off as ethical even though Bob’s wife is harmed by her husband’s infidelity. But is she? Bob and Lulu are successful in keeping their affair a secret, so it can be said that what Helen doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her. On the other hand, that Bob is cheating sexually on her is in itself unethical, as it involves infidelity both sexually and in lying to her.

Next to the affair, Lulu’s contrived marriage to Holland, a newspaper editor as ambitious as Hildy Johnson the later film, His Girl Friday (1940), so Holland will not publish a front-page article on Bob’s affair and love-child with Lulu, seems unethical on Lulu’s part. As in the character Ralph Bellamy plays in His Girl Friday, Holland is duped by a woman who loves someone else. In His Girl Friday, Hildy still loves Walter Burns, played by Cary Grant; in Forbidden, Lulu still loves Bob. Holland discovers the truth not only about the decades-long affair, but also why Lulu has just married him. To stop him from exposing Bob, who is by then the governor, Lulu shoots Holland. She is eventually pardoned by Bob, who “comes clean” to his conscience by writing on his deathbed that he has loved Lulu and has a daughter by her. Again selflessly, Lulu throws away the letter just after Bob’s death. She is again acting on his behalf. She really does love him, which makes the affair seem ethical, especially because Helen never learns of the affair, but Lulu’s reason for using Holland by marrying him without loving him is clearly shown to be unethical because she has hurt him greatly. Of course, murdering him is unethical too. Lulu’s role as a mistress and even Bob’s cheating on his wife come out as relatively ethical even though both Bob and Lulu are behaving unethically in their affair.

Typically, characters in a film who are having an affair are portrayed as bad people. Not only is the act portrayed as unethical; the adulterer and the accomplice are viewed as not being virtuous in character. Forbidden presents its audiences with a different take. To be sure, the affair itself is not portrayed as ethical in itself; rather, Bob and Lulu are presented as worthy of sympathy even though they go decades without paying heed to conscience. Were cheating itself, whether on a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or a wife, approached in the film as not being unethical, the film would (hopefully) suffer from not be credible, for infidelity (i.e., lying) in an emotionally intimate relationship is indeed very unethical, even if the lies hold up and thus are not revealed. Lying itself takes a toll on the victim nonetheless, as the person lying can only be so intimate emotionally, and a significant other deserves more.

Therefore, it is interesting that Lulu’s selflessness is portrayed as virtuous even though she is enabling Bob to cheat on his wife. Even Bob comes off as virtuous on his deathbed as he finally bows to his conscience and writes to make public not only the affair, but the existence of his daughter with Lulu. It would be quite different were Bob and Helen to have agreed to have a sexually open relationship, assuming mutual consent rather than Bob claiming to be “polyamorous” as an excuse to have sex separately with emotional attachment or connection with other people outside of the relationship. The film’s complex attitude toward Bob and Lulu ethically does not excuse infidelity itself, which makes the film’s sympathetic portrayal of Lulu and even the affair interesting; it is as if Helen were not hurt at all because she never discovers Bob’s infidelity—though I suspect that on some level she intuits it and so the marriage is harmed nonetheless in terms of emotional intimacy.

A cheater cannot really “have his or her cake and eat it too.” At Bob’s deathbed, Lulu and Bod realize the toll that their ongoing arrangement has taken on both of them—that they were not able to have it both ways—Bob remaining married while he and Lulu continue their relationship on the side. Lulu finally realizes that she had been stubborn in refusing Bob’s offer to leave his wife, and Bob admits that he has been unhappy acting contrary to his conscience. In the end, both characters come off as ethical even though what they did for decades is itself highly unethical. Good people can act unethically.

Love, especially theological love but also falling in love, is neither a virtue nor an ethical principle. The slogan, “All is fair in love and war,” wherein the opposite of love is actually indifference rather than anger, gets at this point. The sort of deep, even profound love that is sourced in an existential connection between two people, or a person and the divine, is not in the domain of ethics. In Forbidden, Bob and Lulu have such a strong connection that they cheat on Helen so not to have to part ways. Holland loves Lulu, though his connection to her is not as strong as Bob’s is; even so, Bob, in feeling betrayed by Lulu because she has married him not out of love, but, rather, so Holland, an ambitious journalist, would not ruin Bob’s governorship by exposing the decades’ long affair, intends to hurt Lulu by running the story on the newspaper’s front page. Generally speaking, if a person is unfortunate enough to fall in love with a person who is in love with another person more, it is better to walk away from the person (and the connection) than to constantly fight against the gravitational force of the beloved’s other, deeper relationship. Being the person “settled for” when the beloved is in love with someone else can result in unethical conduct out of resentment, jealousy, and sheer emotional hurt. Ironically, love can cause good people to act unethically because love is on a deeper level than are ethics, which are oriented to conduct, which in turn is relatively superficial (i.e., on the surface). 

I suppose the bottom line is that human nature craves the sort of existential connection that occurs naturally rather than by will or intention. Magnifying the value of such love, the automatic or natural bonding can be quite rare. Ethical judgment can thus be subject to the strong gravitational pull of what may seem like a black hole at the center of a person who is in love; not even light can escape from such a hole. To face severing such a connection must surely seem like sheer hell; behaving unethically to keep from losing an existential connection or because the connection is unrequited by the other person can seem like a small price to pay in knowingly violating conscience. The medium of film can indeed bring the human condition to light. 

Life

The musical group, R.E.M.’s most popular song is arguably “Losing My Religion.” The first two lines of the lyrics are, “Life, it’s bigger; It’s bigger than you.” It’s bigger me too. It's bigger than our species, and in all probability bigger than all of the life that is on Earth. I sing that song periodically in karaoke, though as too many people in charge of karaoke are corrupt in that they slide in their friends, new arrivals, and even regulars into rather than at the end of the line, I go less and less often. To an ethicist, corruption even on that small level is intolerable; indeed, the mentality of such a DJ is truly culpable. It is easy to commit the fallacy of anthropomorphizing such an unethical, sordid intent as that of a dishonest karaoke host onto other species, even in regard to their biological need to feed in order to survive. In the film, Life (2017), astronauts, a physician, and a scientist on board a space-station orbiting Earth wisely avoid precisely that fallacy even though a species from Mars being cultivated by Hugh Derry, the scientist, feeds on all but one of the six humans on board.

At one point, Hugh tells the others regarding the animal, “Calvin doesn’t hate us, but he has to kill us to survive.” That is to say, the organism’s apparently aggressive actions against the humans are sourced in biological necessity rather than hatred. Like Krishna’s line in the Hindu myth, The Bhagavad-Gita, “I am time; I am the destroyer of worlds,” so there’s no need to have ethical scruples about fighting against relatives and former teachers in a civil war because from the deity’s perspective those who are fated to die are already dead, destruction is part of the essence of life, at least in the animal kingdom.

The Martian organism is very unusual from the standpoint of biology as we know it. As he is cultivating the nascent, very small organism, Hugh is astonished because every cell is muscle and “eye.” What he does not yet realize is that every cell contains high intelligence. Not that each cell is “a brain,” for even though the organism is highly intelligent, it does not have cellular complexity, as in having specialized organs. Being an “advanced” organism and yet with basically undifferentiated cells goes against biological principles here on Earth. The rapid increase in the organism’s size each time it feeds on first a rat and then the crew is also something unexplainable to the crew on board. That the creature is a danger not only to the humans on board, but also to our species should it land on our planet is, however, something that the crew grasps early on when the creature crushes one of Hugh’s hands/forearms. Even so, Hugh emphasizes that the creature is not maliciously trying to destroy the crew; the intent is merely to survive, biologically. This lesson has implications in how we interpret attacks by animals such as grizzly bears and sharks.

Since the film, Jaws (1975), it has been easy to assume that great white sharks are violent, aggressive animals that attack humans with malicious intent. After all, the shark attacks Quint’s boat. “We’re going to need a bigger boat” is one of the most iconic lines in movie history. The shark even “climbs” onto the tilting boat to kill Quint as if the two were antagonists. In the end, Brody, Amityville’s sheriff who is on board, blows the shark to smithereens. The enemy is finally defeated. But in real life, sharks do not view us enemies; rather, shark bites, which are rare, are the result of sharks mistaking us for something like seals, which are in a shark’s diet. This is part of the oceanic food-chain, rather than an instance of two antagonists facing off in a dual, or an aggressor maliciously trying to kill humans.

In June, 2024, the first fatal shark attack off the island of Oahu in Hawaii in two decades took the life of a popular lifeguard. More typically, tiger sharks attack off Maui. On December 30, 2023, for instance, Jason Carter was surfing when a tiger shark “suddenly attacked. The shark just started biting him and pull him down . . .,” a witness said.[1] This description, especially the use of the words, “suddenly,” “just started,” and “pull him down” may connote a malicious intent rather than the shark simply beginning to eat what it took to be food. Whereas implying unethical intent may make for titillating news reporting for marketing purposes, the unintended byproduct may be that people blame sharks as if that species were out to exterminate our species.

So it is notable that in the film, even as the Martian animal is seeking out humans on board to feed, and thus to survive biologically, the crew does not lapse into assuming that the organism is trying to exterminate the crew out of sheer aggressiveness. If anything, it is our species that kills out of spite, and for other sordid reasons; we even hunt for sport, as if killing were fun. No shark bites off a human arm or leg because doing so is fun. On August 14, 2013, “20-year-old Jana Lutteropp was snorkling at White Rock Beach in Makena when a shark bit off her arm . . . 50 yards off shore. Pat Briney, 57, was in a kayak fishing between Maui and Molokini on Dec. 2, 2013, when a shark bit his right leg as it dangled over the edge. . . . Briney died as a tour boat operator brought him to shore.”[2] Those sharks were no doubt hungry, rather than biting human limbs for sport or out of a sense that we are a danger to sharks.

Life has a habit of instinctually going on living, and thus doing what is necessary to survive. Life will find a way, and the Martian animal in the film is so intelligent that it not only survives, but quite intelligently gets to Earth by overcoming the physician, David Jordon, who gets the creature into a rescue vehicle in order to take the organism deep into space rather than to Earth. In the film at least, we are not the wisest species.

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1. “Fatal Shark Attack Is the First Off Oahu In More Than Two Decades,” Hawaii News Now, June 24, 2024.
2. Ibid.