The String

The original title of the 2009 film, The String, is Le Fil, which actually translates as thread rather than string. These two English words have different connotations and this bears on the film’s leitmotif. Whereas a person can string another person along, a thread has a connotation of linking people emotionally. The thread that ultimately succeeds in the film is that of caring, which is antipodal to hurting, emotionally speaking. In this sense, the film is like The Holiday (2006), another romantic drama in which the good guys (and gals) wind up on top. In terms of the theme of caring and not hurting other people, that The String centers on two gay men who fall in love whereas The Holiday is about two heterosexual couples matters little, though the resistance to homosexuality in The String is an additional hurdle. I contend that like The Holiday, The String can provide audiences with how falling in love can proceed naturally without exploding because one person hurts the other. In other words, the ethical wins out in both films in regard to emotionally intimate romantic relationships, and in this respect the medium of film has value in terms of ethics.

In The String, Malik returns to Tunisia from France to live in his mother’s house because his dad is dying. Malik has been unwilling to tell his mother Sara that he is gay, and she is unaware of his sexual prowess with local guys, including one of his cousins (who gets “turned on” not only having sex with a cousin, but also paying anonymous guys for sex). It is no accident that Malik and his cousin sniff a “substance” as they are kissing in a bathroom, for there is no emotional connection between the two men that would bring the sex to a higher intensity naturally. Meanwhile, Malik is gradually falling for his mother’s houseboy, Bilal, who, crucially, is falling for Malik. “One-sided love” simply does not work; it is too unstable an element not to explode at some point. Once Malik and Bilal mutually realize that they are falling for each other—perhaps the most beautiful thing of which two human beings are capable—and neither is afraid of the emotional intimacy, two things happen.

Explicitly, Sara discovers her son and her servant intertwined on Malik’s bed the next morning while the two are still asleep. It is not as if Malik has drawn an invisible line down the middle of his bed as a way of rudely informing Bilal that bodily touching is off-limits while Malik is asleep. Sara, a Catholic, immediately goes to her cancer-stricken husband Abdelaziz, who is a Muslim, to inform him that their son is gay. Interestingly, he defends his son’s sexuality, pushing back on Sara’s disapproval. This is ironic because Abdelaziz’s family did not approve of Abdelaziz marrying a Catholic woman. Both from that experience and her husband’s opinion on Malik being gay, Sara relents and accepts her son’s homosexuality, and the fact that her son is in love with one of her servants.

The second thing that happens once Malik and Bilal have consummated their deep romantic (not just sexual attraction) affection for each other is very subtle but very, very important. Malik stops “sleeping around.” It is not that Bilal has insisted on monogamy; rather, Malik no longer is motivated to have sex with other men.  I suspect that this is due to the natural willowing of focus that happens when someone falls in love with another person. It could also be that physiological sex alone pales experientially relative to sex with a beloved. There is one scene in which Malik is running his fingers down the backside of Bilal’s naked body in bed. Relative to the intimacy—even love—shown in that scene, anal (or virginal) sex can seem superficial and even contrived. This is not to say that people who fall in love should necessarily be monogamous; rather, the implication is that even an “open” relationship of (a reasonable amount of) separate physical sex with others pales in comparison to the depth of emotional intimacy that can manifest sexually for two people who are in love. It could be that were a sequel to have been made of Malik and Bilal years later, their love would be solid enough even though the sex has become stale that they would be fine with either or both of them having non-emotional, physical sex with others from time to time, assuming that neither would impose this on (or hide this from) the other. Separate sex with romantic connection or feelings for another person is another story, however, and the emotional hurt that either Malik or Bilal would feel is so engrained in (normal) human nature that such an imposition would be unethical, even before marriage.

Malik and Bilal do not marry, as it is presumably illegal in the Muslim country. Because Malik has promised before falling for Bilal to enter into a contractual marriage with his cousin and friend, Syrine, in order that her baby, when born, would legally have a father even though Malik is not the biological father, and her unmarried pregnancy would not be discovered in that conservative society, Malik and Bilal have difficulty deciding whether Malik should follow through with the marriage. Bilal is against it for obvious reasons, but Malik wants to help Syrine. It is not as though Malik would be living with Syrine, so with the help of Sara helping her son and Bilal on this emotionally difficult matter, Bilal agrees and even stands as Malik’s best man. After the civil (i.e., non-religious) wedding ceremony, Sara has Malik, Bilal, Syrine, and her bridesmaid repeat, “The marriage is only for the good of the child.” Everyone is on the same page, and no one his hurt emotionally. Even though the expanded arrangement is unconventional, it is arguably ethical precisely because everyone’s feelings are taken into account. Malik’s benevolence to Syrine (and her baby in standing in as his father) and the love of Malik and Bilal for each other (for they are living together as a couple) are compatible.

In both Augustine and Leibniz, justice is love as universal benevolence. That the benevolence is universal, we are all due benevolence from others, which means that none of us deserve to be hurt emotionally. This is why it is significant, albeit subtle, that Malik puts Bilal first, rather than imposing emotional hurt on Bilal by dismissing his hurt feelings regarding Malik technically marrying Syrine. The marriage goes forward because Bilal’s misgivings have been adequately addressed not only by Malik, but also by Sara, who has essentially adopted Bilal. As she says at one point, he is now a guest, not a servant. This is why I believe it can be concluded that, hypothetically, were Bilal to object to Malik continuing to have anonymous sex after he and Bilal have bonded (which Malik does not do in the film), Malik would stop having sex with others so Bilal would not be hurt emotionally. By implication, were Bilal fine emotionally with Malik having non-emotional, physical sex sometimes with other men, Malik’s doing so would not be unethical or detrimental to his relationship with Bilal.

Hence my conclusion that the ethical, good guys (and gals) come out on top in the film. Caring is the thread that runs throughout the story. Sara has come around on Malik being gay and she even helps her son and Bilal on whether Malik should help Syrine by marrying her and helping her raise her baby, whose father is another man.  Abdelaziz, having overruled his parents’ objections to him marrying Sara, a Christian, pushes back against Sara’s prejudice against gays and even urges Malik to tell him the truth regarding his cancer. Last but not least, Bilal and Malik have such a bond of connection, affection, and even love that neither treats the other’s emotions as an externality that can or should be disregarded or indifferently run over. The film thus presents a moving picture of family and romantic relationships as they should be, ethically speaking, even if they are not conventional.

The Imitation Game

Films in which philosophy of mind is salient may, like films in which metaphysics is reconfigured, run the risk of not being understood. The Matrix (1999), however, depicts solipsism (or, “mind in a vat”) in a way that viewers could grasp the philosophy without much difficulty. Dialogue, image, and narrative all contribute to give audiences a coherent sense with which they can go on to look at their daily lives as if they were illusory rather than real. Sixteen years later, The Imitation Game (2015) brought to audiences a salient question that would become more pressing during the AI revolution: How does the human brain’s thinking differ from a computer’s thinking?

In the film, whose story takes place during World War II in Britain, Alan Turing dismisses the suggestion that the brain is a machine, and yet more often than not, he behaves like an emotionless machine in his relations with other people. In repressing emotion so much, it may be that the actual man was autistic. In such a case of utter indifference to the feelings of others and pushing down on one’s own feelings, it may be more difficult to distinguish human from machine thinking, if indeed computers (which compute) can be said to think at all. I once met a person best described as relating to me as if I were a remote acquaintance. Her utter refusal to feel and cold indifference to my feelings reminds me of Turing in the film. Humans may be able to resemble thinking machines too closely for comfort. In such cases, using what is known as the imitation game to assess whether the entity supplying answers to questions is human or a machine may be more difficult. Fortunately, Turing is not a completely emotionless thinking-machine in the film (and presumably in real life too), so regarding the inventor of the computer, it cannot be said that it takes one to invent one.

The film is centered on Alan Turing’s invention of a computer to decode the Nazi coding-machine known as enigma, and he cleverly resists the temptation once his computer breaks the code to prevent every Nazi attack because that would tip the Germans off that their enigma was no longer an enigma to the enemy. Letting 80% of the secret German attacks go through while preempting the remaining 20% strategically enabled the de-coding to remain a secret for the remaining two years of the war. In short, Alan Turing is accurately depicted in the film as an excellent thinker who invents the first computer, which in turn presumably can think.

Can it be said, however, that Turing’s computer thinks? AI, which may complicate the answer, is not relevant in the historically-based film. Does computing 1’s and 0’s constitute thinking? If so, because computing is mathematical-logical in nature, computer “thinking” would be a subset of thinking in general. Spinoza’s thinking substance has an infinite intellect that contains an infinity of ideas, some of which that God thinks into being in the world. Spinoza’s pantheistic “God” generates the world by thinking. This notion of thinking is similar to the role of Logos, God’s rational principle, or Word, in the biblical Book of Genesis. Does such thinking bear any resemblance to the that of a human brain or a machine whose “thinking” is not subject to the warping effects of subjectivity? If so, then God’s wholly-other quality would be diminished in the anthropomorphic projection of the human attribute.

Can it be that machine “thinking” differs from human thinking because only the latter is affected by subjectivity and emotions? Nietzsche claims that the content of an idea in the human mind is an instinctual urge; thoughts are simply one form in which passions can manifest—only the most powerful urges among others being able to break through into consciousness. In The Imitation Game, Turing’s desire to solve enigma so the Allies could defeat the Axis powers fuel his tireless work in inventing a machine that, like Einstein’s theories of relativity, is totally new rather than merely a modification of an existing machine. This sets up the dramatic tension of the film.

As can be expected from reading Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, such a leap as Turing makes triggers resistance. The idiocy of the knee-jerk efforts to thwart Turing in his work is only outdone by that of the official resistance to him personally. Moreover, the pathetic quality of the resistances is so far removed from the brilliance of Turing’s mind that the sheer complexity of and the resulting variability in the human brain are hard to grasp even from having seen the film. This is no fault of the medium of film, or the screenwriter and director of this film, for it is astounding that the man whose brain invents the computer is given the choice of two years in prison or hormone treatment because he has been found guilty of violating the law against indecency because he is a homosexual. Put another way, a man with a brain capable of inventing a computing machine that could outdo human thinking in breaking the very difficult enigma code of the Nazis in months rather than millions of years has to be subject to a judge and even presumably men of medical “science” who are so mistaken even on what constitutes a disease (or illness) and is appropriate medical treatment. The sheer distance between these poles of this dichotomy is mind-blowing, and yet both genius and prejudiced idiocy are housed in the human brain.

Now, taking a step even further, the question of how human thinking differs from machine thinking begs the wider question that is not explicitly asked in the film: how are is human nature different from a machine? Turing calls his computer Christopher. Turing himself is so arrogant and demeaning to the other members of his code-breaking group and even to Commander Denniston that it is surprising that none of them chide Turing for sticking with Christopher throughout the film rather than turn to the more informal Chris among friends. To be sure, my youngest brother’s middle name is Christopher, and it fits in his complete name much better than Chris would.  But I digress. What I am getting at is this: Is Turing more like Christopher than he (or we) would like to admit?

His fiancée, Joan Clarke, is wrong, however, in calling Turing a monster because he is being so heartless in breaking up with her; in breaking off their engagement, he lies that he has been using her for the project all along. He cares for her too much emotionally to use her as his wife as a cover for his illegal homosexuality while she goes without sex in a marital relationship. His apparent coldness is a manifestation of immense care for her, which he masks.

During a flashback in the film to a scene in which the headmaster of his boyhood school informs the sensitive lad that the boy whom he loves has just died of Tuberculosis, Alan stuffs his emotion as he denies having been at all close to his friend. It is ironic that this very sensitivity that would otherwise give him such deep emotional intimacy with another man is why he represses emotion because it had never worked out well for him. The tragedy in the film is precisely that in being so sensitive, Turing is made for emotional intimacy (unlike a machine!), and yet he bars intimacy by walling off his emotions so nobody, not even Joan, is privy to them.

In contrast, Christopher is a computing machine that is utterly incapable of emotion because a machine cannot feel. A machine may think, and even learn, as in AI, but even were a machine to represent itself as if it had emotions, it could not feel them and thus really have them. Christopher is capable of being a monster because a computer is indifferent emotionally to whether people are harmed as a result of an algorithm. In the film, Ex Machina (2014), made just a year before The Imitation Game, two androids without any emotion whatsoever stick a knife into Nathan in spite of the fact that he is their “creator”; he is an obstacle to Ava, the android whose goal it is to leave the building. Christopher is capable of being a monster precisely because, unlike Turing, it cannot feel and act on the basis of human emotions. So too, however, a human being who represses even the emotion of caring (or conscience) can be a monster.

Whether pertaining to a computer (especially with AI) or a person who blocks internal emotion, thinking itself is no panacea. Recall Descartes’ cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. What about: I feel, therefore I am? Do people such as young Turing who repress emotions even well into adulthood because they have never really worked out well exist as fully as a person in love who is saturated with feeling? To be sure, being open to such feeling is risky, and can result in excruciating pain, especially if the beloved is like Turing. But his no to Joan is not because he is repressing (and thus afraid of) emotion. Joan is willing to sacrifice a marriage of sex and children because she loves Alan, and he will not let her do that because he loves her.

Even though Turing tells Detective Robert Nock, whose questioning leads to Turing being convicted of indecency and thus to being ordered by a judge to take incapacitating hormones to cure homosexuality, that machines think differently than the human mind, the latter is capable of behaving as if it were a computer from the standpoint of being devoid of emotion. The human mind can, unfortunately, resemble a thinking machine. Fortunately for Turing, his caring for his fiancée enables him to pass the imitation game even though he could do with letting other people in, emotionally speaking, including the other code-breakers and even his boss, and especially Joan. The death of his boyhood friend whom he loved is perhaps an emotional hurt that the brilliant inventor never gets past, at least in the film. That his homosexuality is a crime both in the film and in his real life, such that he had to take debilitating hormones, is enough for audiences to come away from the film with the sad conclusion that as significant as Turing’s achievement is, he never realizes what he was made for. It is precisely in the word never that true tragedy hits like a club. I wish all those truly beautiful sensitive souls who suffer as Turing does in the film all the strength to overcome their instinctual fear of being emotionally hurt so as to will to feel with other people intimately rather than relate to them in indifference as though a human being were like a machine.

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.