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.

The Exception

The medium of film is capable of bringing nuances of power to audiences, even when the story-world is steeped in autocracy and totalitarianism. The Exception (2016) is such a film, for in terms of power the film shows the relationship between the Nazi government of Germany and (retired) Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Netherlands, which has just been occupied by Germany. The Nazi officials represent the state, whereas Wilhelm’s “soft” power stems from royalty. As Wilhelm’s attendant, Col. Sigurd von Ilsemann, observes, no one is safe from Nazi reprisals, not even Wilhelm and his high-brow wife. So he is not the exception alluded to in the title in the sense of being exempt from raw Nazi power; the night of the long knives demonstrated that no one is safe, even though the former king still means a lot to the German people. The exception refers instead to Capt. Stefan Brandt, and in particular to his moral scruples concerning the Nazi mass murders in eastern Europe. As the story unfolds with a visit by Himmler, Wilhelm becomes an exception in this sense too. Even in a totalitarian autocracy, a surprising amount of soft power can exist in opposition. Taking a moral stand can manifest "soft" power even though an ethic is semi-permeable by power-aggrandizement.

The captain has been sent by General Falkenberg to Wilhelm’s country house in Holland to guard the former Kaiser. Stefan and Mieke, a Dutch Jew who is a maid in the house and is secretly funneling intel to the British via a clergyman in town, fall in love. Mieke discovers that Stefan too has reservations about the Nazis’ brutality, and he goes so far as to keep her outlawed ethnicity a secret and then to help her escape. Even Wilhelm helps her by feigning a heart attack and thus a rationale to be driven seemingly to a hospital. As the story unfolds, Stefan and Wilhelm both turn vehemently though of course secretly against the Nazis, having learned of their utter moral depravity by listening to Himmler at a dinner for him at the house.

That visit highlights the real power dynamics between the Nazi state and the former king. Wilhelm and his wife appease Himmler outwardly because the Nazis have all of the official power; they give the household a financial allowance and allow the former king and his wife to continue living. In exchange, the couple put up a public display of loyalty to the state. Yet even in this regard, the pedigree “soft” power of being royalty allows the couple to refuse to say, “Heil Hitler” back to Himmler in his arrival. Even though Himmler could order the couple to be shot, he does not use his power to force the royals to speak the two words. The film thus illustrates that oppositional “soft” power can exist even in a totalitarian dictatorship; power dynamics are complex rather than linear.

Before sitting down to the dinner, Himmler holds what he calls “a private audience” with Wilhelm to offer the former king the choice of whether to return to Berlin to once again wear his ceremonial crown. Of course Hitler would never tolerate even a ceremonially-based potential rival or threat to his authority as the Leader (Fuhrer), and Himmler reveals to Stefen and Dietrich that the offer is really a ploy to uncover pro-monarchists in order to have them killed. Even though Stefen uses his soft power to inform Col. Ilsemann of the trick, Wilhelm choses not to return to Berlin to take up his crown again before being informed that the offer is a plot. Instead, Wilhelm acts on moral principle to use the soft power in Himmler having given Wilhelm the choice. Taking advantage of being given a choice is another example of soft power even in the context of a totalitarian regime.

Wilhelm makes his decision based on what he learns about Himmler and the Nazis from Himmler himself at the dinner table. To be sure, both men are in perfect agreement on the dangers posed by international Jewry. In 2026, after years of the Israeli holocaustic genocide in Gaza and Israeli blatant theft and outright, unprovoked violence in the West Bank against lawful Palestinian homeowners, someone in the U.S. casually informed me, “more people are going back to Hitler’s writings.” This information at first shocked me, as I would never have believed such a statement in the twentieth century, but then I understood why people—especially young people—would do so. In the film, that Himmer and Wilhelm, a Christian who would exercise restraint on the Nazi state were he to re-assume his crown in Berlin, agree on the dangers poised in terms of power (and money, as, for example, AIPAC represents in the U.S.) lends credibility to the stand. Himmler’s observation that the danger posed only became widely known in the 1920s harkens back to the refusal of rich German Jews to extend their charity to other Germans (as if they constituted another people) during the years when Germany had to pay harsh post-World War I war reparations. 

The two men deviate, however, when Himmler pivots to discuss the need to remove people in eastern Europe to make room for Germans—“other means” would be needed if removal is not sufficient—and to kill retarded and crippled children on a scale beyond the capabilities of injecting poison into the heart because not enough of them would be killed fast enough that way. If allowed to reach adulthood, those people would only continue to be a drain on the resources of state. The revelation of Himmler’s thinking and values leaves Wilhelm and his wife, as well as Capt. Stefan and Col. Ilsemann speechless in dombfoundness; none of them had keine Anung of just how sordid the Nazis are. Mieke too, being Jewish, looks on in a harsh facial demeanor; she knew, for her parents were killed by Himmler’s SS. At the end of the dinner, as Stefan walks past her, she sternly tells him, “They are the rule; you are the exception.” She knows of what his reaction to Himmler’s statements must have been. She would hardly have fallen in love with him had he been “the rule,” though it is admittedly possible to fall in love with someone with dreadful, mendacious values.

Even when Wilhelm and Stefan know that Mieke is an enemy agent, the two men help her to escape. The willingness of both men to help can be interpreted not only as indicative of their admiration for her, but also of their utter rejection of the Nazi party and its horrendous tactics. At the University of Wisconsin in the 2000s, I sat in on a course on Nazi Cinema (in contrast to Stalin’s blatantly patriotic Soviet cinema). The eighty-year-old German professor, who flew to Wisconsin every autumn to teach, had been forced to go to a Hitler youth camp, and he had seen Hitler in person. Even though the professor told me that Hitler was not behaving like the angry, sullen man typically pictured in the footage selected by the Allies to air over decades, that the Nazis murdered 19 million Slavs in eastern Europe—in a myriad of non-combative villages and towns rather than in battle—is a relatively unknown fact that best attests to the Nazi mentality.

In the film, Wilhelm leaves the dinner is silence to chop wood so he can reconsider whether to accept Hitler’s “offer” of resumed kingship, now that Wilhelm knows how horrendously different the Nazis are. Even though Stefan has informed Col. Ilsemann that the offer is a ploy—a “deception” in Himmler’s own words—word has not yet reached Wilhelm by the time he decides to stay at his country house with his wife for the rest of his life rather than be in any way associated with the government. Because Wilhelm wants nothing more than to resume his kingship, his decision illustrates just how much sway ethical principles can have against other motives. To be sure, such principles are semi-permeable, in that they can be broken through in the quest for power or money, for instance, but that they have this quality renders Wilhelm’s stance all the more worthy of human nature. Just as power-aggrandizing and economizing (e.g., greed) can break through ecologizing (semi-permeable) constraints (e.g. the equilibrium state of an ecosystem in nature), so too power-seeking and greed can act as rockets shooting through the higher net of ethical values.

As Al Pacino says at the Devil in The Devil’s Advocate (1997), “Free-will, it’s a bitch!” In The Exception, Stefan uses his free-will to risk asking Col. Ilsemann whether a solder can have a loyalty higher than to one’s country; Ilsemann points out that Germany may not be their country any longer, as it belongs to the Nazis with whom both men reject, albeit in the silence of their own hearts. Wilhelm is able to use the “soft” power of royalty to reject Himmler’s offer, as Wilhelm is given a choice, even though Himmler then having Wilhelm killed is easily imaginable.

Finally, Mieke uses her free-will to marry Stefan, if he survives the war; she is, after all, pregnant with his child. She has been willing to open herself up to his seed in part because he is the exception rather than the rule in Nazi Germany. Being the exception is all about values and free-will. To be willing to fully open up to, and take hold of romantic love without too much emotional harm, a person must sense congruent values and therefore trust in another’s free-will so as not to be constantly looking over one’s shoulder for the roof to suddenly fall in from a searing, heedless, and utterly selfish betrayal. It comes as no surprise in the film to see Himmler in a bedroom in the country house with a half-naked woman, who, as Wilhelm’s wife coyly observes in greeting Himmler when he arrives, is not Himmler’s wife; Himmler just looks on, wholly unperturbed in his visage, and then says he is tired from the journey and wants to go to the bedroom that has been prepared for him. The ecologizing, semi-permeable quality of ethical stances—whether the ethical is to be valued or not—is  a matter of character mixed with free-will. It is a fool’s errand in college (e.g., in vocational business schools) to suppose that ethical conduct can be imposed through teaching.

The Omen (2006)

Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains, rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water” in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive, rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.

Robert Thorn remembers and repeats the poem—which as a cinematic device subtly tells the viewers that the poem is important in the film. The poem goes as follows: “When the Jews return to Zion, when the comet fills the sky, when the holy Roman empire rises, then you and I must die. From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore, turning man against his brother, till man exists no more.” It is the Antichrist, Damien, who will set man against man until everyone is dead, and presumably in hell for having fought rather than loved one’s enemies. The poem goes from religion to astronomy to the political domain (the Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in history), and thus runs the risk of conflating qualitatively different, albeit related, domains of human phenomena. This risk is a bit like treating different genres of film—fiction, nonfiction, westerns, sci-fi, and horror—as interchangeable. Closer to my point, the risk is like assuming that genres of literature—religious myth, historical accounts, novels, nonfiction, and academic treatises—are interchangeable, such that a myth could legitimately be taken to be a historical account. That which is distinct about myth would be lost, even though the writers of myths did not view themselves as historians and thus subject to that genre’s criteria.

In what follows, I subject the first few subordinate clauses of the poem to critique in line with my thesis. By the way, my intent is to support my thesis with arguments, rather than to convey or prescribe my own religious beliefs; this holds for the books I’ve written too. Applying Hume in the concluding chapter   of Godliness and Greed, which is on the history of Christian thought on greed in relation to profit-seeking and wealth, and then altering that interpretation by incorporating the divine Logos in the final chapter of God’s Gold do not reflect my own religious beliefs. Hence scholarship can be distinguished from opinion pieces.

The phrase, “when the Jews return to Zion” raises the question of whether Zionism is primarily religious or political; if both, then the concept can be regarded as messy. The risk is that a portion of a myth could be misconstrued as translating directly into the political domain. Exactly twenty years after the remake’s release, weaponized Israeli settlers in the West Bank presumed the political right to walk into the houses of Palestinian homeowners, declare that God gave the house to the Hebrews, and kick out the residents. One video shown on social media shows a settler removing a refrigerator from a house owned by a Palestinian family in the West Bank, as if the Jews’ deity declares in the Bible that God has given the refrigerator to that particular settler. The genocide then still going on in Gaza illustrates how atrocious misconstruing the genre of myth as valid in the political domain can be.  Life can give art added significance and clarity, and art can inform how geopolitical events are interpreted and situated paradigmatically.

The association of the return of Jews to Zion with the apocalypse can be interpreted in religious terms as ushering in the Antichrist’s role in turning man against man. That is to say, theologically the return (and stay) would be a bad rather than a good thing. In 2026, the International Court of Justice declared Israel to be illegitimate because that state’s government had refused to exit Gaza and the West Bank. A UN commission had determined that Israel was guilty of committing a genocide in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants. Any of these determinations would have been out of line had they been based on the theological interpretation that the Jews returning to Zion is a bad thing in religious terms. Jurisprudential and political judgment is properly made on political grounds even if personal religious belief is related.

Turning to the poem’s second phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” jumps from myth to astronomy, and thus science, as if these domains were continuous rather than discrete. In the Nativity Story in the gospels, efforts by scientists to find a comet misconstrue myth as a distinct genre. The inconsistency of a star being in that myth and a comet being associated with the birth of the Antichrist is not a problem in the genre of myth because the point is not astronomical or historical, but rather in signaling heightened religious meaning. Put another way, even if no star could be found to have occurred over the Middle East, this would not detract from the meaning that the star plays in the Nativity story. A star determined empirically to be over a particular town and thus serving to locate the town from a distance is not possible, but this is not a problem as long as myth is construed as myth rather than as astronomy or history). The phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” risks being taken as empirical astronomy rather than as in the religious genre. To be sure, myth can incorporate empirical events, natural as well as human, but changing those events to make religious points is totally acceptable in the religious genre, which thus cannot be assumed to contain historical accounts.

In the film, the next phrase, “when the holy Roman empire rises,” is erroneously interpreted, which can be expected when geopolitics is conflated with religious myth. Historically, the Holy Roman Empire was primarily geopolitical rather than ecclesiastical; it was not a religious organization. In the film, the European Union is assumed to be the new holy Roman empire because of the Treaty of Rome, but the Maastricht Treaty is arguably more significant to that political union, and the E.U. state of Italy can hardly be said to dominate at the federal level; the state of Germany has arguably been the state with disproportionate influence, especially during the debt crisis in which the Commission sided with German creditors over the E.U. states of Greece and Spain. So to refer to the E.U. as Roman—not to mention holy!—is ludicrous. The adjectives holy and Roman may alternatively lead to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church instantiates the Roman Empire in a new guise. Such an interpretation would resituate the phrase properly within the religious domain. The Crusades, selling indulgences, the Inquisition, prosecuting Galileo as if the criteria of religion were hegemonic over scientific criteria in the domain of science, making a treaty with Hitler, and covering up rapes committed by pedophile priests on children, and social prejudice within the Vatican against Blacks, gays, and even women, and even the obsession of the identity of Christ over preaching and practicing humane compassion especially when doing so is least convenient (e.g. to detractors and enemies as well as to people who have been rude, arrogant, or subject to one’s prejudices—we all have them) have at the very least compromised the legitimacy of that religious institution even though the religious and ethical domains are distinct. This is not to minimize the actual worship of the divine in the Mass, or the faith of the faithful who yearn to transcend the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion to the beyond, whether personified and thus anthropomorphic or not.

Self-idolatry on a collective scale—rather than an astronomical event or the formation of a political empire such as the E.U. or U.S.—and the tremendous harm unleased by such selfishness at the expense of other people can be regarded as the Antichrist personified in us. In the film, Wonder Woman (2017), Mars, the Greek god of war, tells Diana (Wonder Woman) that he doesn’t have to do much to facilitate man turning against man in war; aggression is very much in the nature of the beast, according to that god. Diana, on the other hand, refuses to view humans as beasts, for she has come to love the species (and Steve Trevor in particular). She sees our better nature, whereas her nemesis sees no positive worth in our species existing at all. The complexity in human nature itself is personified by deities in that film; in general, polytheism reflects our non-simplistic nature that can be analyzed into parts.

In both versions of The Omen, Damien survives being murdered physically and spiritually by Robert Thorn, so evil ends up with the upper hand. The god of war would be pleased, but human nature is more complex and thus may forestall the final verdict of extinction, even though climate-change, Russia invading Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran (and Lebanon) evince a troubling trajectory. In the economic and political domains, however, selfishness (stemming from self-interest) rather than self-idolatry (a sin) is pertinent even though the two concepts can be related to each other. For example, Adam Smith’s economic theory of the competitive market is premised on economic self-interest. Even though the latter can be related to self-love, and thus self-idolatry, the claim that Smith’s theory of capitalism is based on self-love would be based on a category mistake even though self-interest is arguably sourced in self-love taken as a sin. In terms of navigating in a certain domain of human experience, it is important not to drift or swerve into another lane as if in driving on a road no lanes can be discerned. The poem that undergirds The Omen (2006) swerves between lanes as if none exist, and thus invites erroneous category mistakes and thus flawed interpretations.