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

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

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

Enzo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange River

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

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

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

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

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

Downtown

Like the coronavirus in the early 2020s, HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s and for at least a decade after then paid little or no attention to national borders or even to nationalities. Even though coronavirus freely walked through the boundaries of our various group-identities with the implication being that they are actually artificial demarcated constructions, AIDS showed us that sub-societal cultural differences do exist. In fact, within a given sub-culture and thus group-identity, one set of values may be ethically and psychologically better than another set, so broad-strokes can be understood as over-simplifications. Even within the same group culture within a given society, drastic differences can exist to the extent that some people embrace and others reject cultural norms that are salient for the group. This is salient in the European film, Downtown (2026), which is about three gay men both when they are young adults in 1986 and old men in 2021. Even though the screenwriter and two producers emphasized in their respective remarks at a film festival in 2026 that that the filmmaking and the narrative of the film are both heavily Dutch, the lessons conveyed by the film transcend nationality and geography and thus betray the over-the-top states’ rights ideology in the E.U. that would claim that the E.U. state of the Netherlands is unique among the several states.

The film is saturated with death and yet the three men have survived. Lennart, immune-compromised from having had AIDS (not just HIV), refers to “Covid” as a “toy virus” relative to AIDS even though his father has died of “Covid” just two weeks before the dinner at Ronnie’s house in 2021. Lennart has paid a high price medically for having carelessly contracted AIDS in 1987 either from his own sexual forays or that of Bas, whom the film shows as living with Lennart for a time back then. In contrast, Ronnie, Lennart’s platonic friend from the mid-1980s on, is careful then and does not test positive for the virus in the film. Even though Lennart chastises Ronnie in 1987 for being too careful by “sitting on the sidelines” sexually and even for putting so much effort into helping men who are dying from the virus, it is Lennart rather than Ronnie who deserves the criticism, and not just sexually. The film demonstrates that gay men who are like Ronnie should confront gays who are like Lennart other on what boils down to fear and avoidance of emotional intimacy and the role of sex in distancing people where it counts. In fact, the difference between the characters of those two men renders efforts to generalize the gay “community” with a single stroke, as the Roman Catholic Church has done, as highly inaccurate and unhelpful, for the Lennarts should be “fair game” for ethical and even psychological critique while the Ronnies should be lauded.

Throughout his adult life, Lennart is uncomfortable with emotional intimacy being expressed physically, so he is drawn, at least as a young adult, to impersonal sex with guys whose names he does not even know, or care to know. This discomfort is dramatized in the early scene in which Ronnie tries repeatedly to put his arm around Lennart while the two are sleeping in the same bed (non-sexually). Besides being so self-centered that he does not notice that Ronnie is in love with him, Lennart is astonishingly rude when Ronnie invites him to go to a beach and then to a restaurant. In both cases, Lennart leaves with other men for impersonal sex; Ronnie can be seen to be visually stunned at the sheer rudeness of his new “friend.” Without doubt, Lennart is a narcissist who has emotional problems related to emotional intimacy likely stemming from his relationship with his emotionally-distant and harsh father (whose funeral attracts only six people).

Lennart’s distancing himself from any sort of emotional intimacy is once again on display in Lennart’s “relationship” with Bas, who moves in with Lennart. Bas confides to Ronnie that Lennart wants it “both ways” in being able to go out separately to have impersonal sex with other men and yet still wanting “a cozy domestic life.” The film’s message is that the two desires are incompatible, especially when “open” relationships include “poly,” which is when the outside sex includes romantic feelings. Frank Houtappels, the film’s screenwriter, arguably should have gone further by including in the dialogue between Bas and Ronnie, something to the effect that Lennart has a psychological problem that is impairing his ability to form and have genuine romantic relationships, and that he is acting like a child in wanting to have it both ways—anonymous sex separately while keeping Bas to himself. At one point, Lennart says to a worried Ronnie, “Why would Bas even look at other men? He just needs to look at me.” The asymmetry is not lost on Bas, which I suspect is why he moves out without leaving his new address as soon as he is diagnosed HIV positive. Such convenient (to Lennart) asymmetry belies trust, which in turn is requisite to an emotionally intimate relationship. Confronted with these points, had they been in the script, Lennart could have been made, as per the script, to have a temper tantrum befitting his abject immaturity and his related refusal to confront himself and make difficult choices. The stunted condition of his character would really have been made transparent.

Once at the beach, Bas quietly scurries away from lying with Lennart on the sand to have anonymous sex with a man, which is likely how Bas (and perhaps then Lennart, though he is being careful sexually) contracts HIV. Lennart has refused Bas’s preference that the two men be monogamous. Such a request is very reasonable, not only so the “couple” could build up enough exclusive intimacy to have a genuine romantic relationship, but also because so many other men around them are dropping like flies from having contacted HIV and then AIDS. Incredibly, Lennart even dismisses Ronnie’s question: “Do you trust Bas to be careful?” Ronnie, more so than Lennart, is looking out for Lennart’s best interest in terms of staying alive. Something is clearly wrong with Lennart, and his sexual promiscuity and avoidance of commitment evince something more serious than just a “lifestyle.”

In 2021, when Ronnie has both Lennart and Bas over for dinner, dramatic tension is palpable because Lennart and Bas have not been in contact since Bas left Lennart without even saying good-bye in 1987. At the dinner, Bas explains that he had been very angry at Lennart, and rightly so, for Lennart had not been fair at all with Bas sexually. Even at the dinner, while Lennart is upstairs talking with Ronnie, Bas leaves unannounced, which means that Bas is not interested in any contact with his former “boyfriend.” It is then that Lennart realizes not only that he has been needlessly lonely throughout his life—he tells Ronnie and Bas that they have been the only people who have really known him—but also that Ronnie has been and still is in love with Lennart. Finally, and therein lies the tragedy of it all, Lennart is able to embrace Ronnie both emotionally and physically and Lennart invites Ronnie to embrace him physically. Had enough gay men confronted Lennart in the 1980’s on his severe problem with emotional intimacy stemming from an emotionally-distant and very critical father, and on how Lennart was using anonymous sex to distance the men closest to him, perhaps he would not have been able to deny his psychological condition by assuming that he was behaving in line with a popular non-monogamous “lifestyle” that is admittedly so popular in the gay “community,” and had even become normative, and thus imposed, in the Castro gay district in San Francisco by 2026.

The film can thus serve an important role in its message that any “lifestyle” which uses promiscuity to foil emotional intimacy can legitimately be criticized rather than taken as valid in an “anything goes” relativism in which the feelings of other people don’t matter. The pathetic Don’t Judge excuse can finally be exculpated and replaced with valid criticism. Just because a lot of gay men use anonymous (and even “poly” so-called loves) sex to obviate emotional intimacy does not mean that validity follows. It may be that so many gay men are clinically compromised and thus weak in refusing to end their slavish addiction to momentary pleasure because “coming out” (i.e., admitting being gay to other people, especially close friends and family, especially to parents) has been emotionally traumatizing. Addressing the resultant scars goes completely under the radar under the subterfuge of the norm of gay promiscuity as “cool.”

Because not even the very real danger of AIDS motivated such men as Lennart in the 1980s to curtail anonymous, unprotected sex especially if there is a devoted man at home, the underlying emotional fragility and fear of the weak who are so prone to betray close romantic relations and even put life itself at risk can be assessed as severe.  Ronnie and even Bas, whose “infidelity” is understandable given Lennart’s passive aggression using sex with other men, can be viewed as healthy standards from which the sheer distance to Lennart’s can be perceived. Implied in the film is the value in making such distance transparent within the gay “community,” such that gay men like Ronnie and Bas can finally gain enough momentum to hold up a mirror by which the Lennarts in the gay world may finally see themselves for what they represent and instantiate. Even so, the sweet honey of momentary pleasure could forestall sufficient motivation to change even if the result of continued denial is a life of loneliness, such as Lennart has suffered until he and Ronnie “find” each other at the dinner in 2021 in the midst of another pandemic. Watching Lennart when he is a young man, it would be difficult to visualize him as a shrunken shell in some hospital bed, or, as is the case, as a bitter, lonely old man whose health has been ravaged by AIDS. That he somhehow defies the death sentence in the late 1980s may seem unjust, given how passive aggressive he is to both Ronnie and Bas as a young adult, until the depth of emotional pain is revealed on Lennart’s face at Ronnie’s house in 2021, when the former beauty of his youth can no longer mask his inner condition.

In discussing the film live to an audience in 2026, Houtappels, the screenwriter, said that at least the “covid” virus did not discriminate, whereas AIDS spread largely (though not completely) between gay men. The film can be interpreted as making the point that sordid values and bad behavioral choices (i.e., bad character) and even mental illness played a role in why the virus spread so, though admittedly the extent to which sexual promiscuity has been valued in the gay “community” even as normative (rather than sordid) can also be blamed. In The Normal Heart (2014), for example, Julia Roberts as Dr. Emma Brookner strongly advises gay activists to wear condoms during anal sex because how the virus is transmitted is not yet known. “You don’t know what you are asking of us!” one of the gay men in the room objects as if she is asking them to live like monks. Crucially, she stares the men down and is unrelenting: You need to wear condoms whether you like it or not. She is stunned that grown men would prioritize moments of momentary pleasure so highly that even wearing condoms to stay alive asking to much. In Downtown, Ronnie asks Lennart if he trusts Bas to be careful sexually. It is a pity that physician Brookner is not in the film to sit Lennart down for a reality-adjustment. I certainly am judging you for being so stupidly careless and even risking Bas’s life.

Lest it be concluded that every young gay man is like Lennart, it is important to note that Ronnie and Bas are also major gay characters in the film. Ronnie is out promoting societal awareness of the pandemic afflicting mostly gay men, and he is even caring for dying men in hospital beds. Religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention gloss homosexuality as if every gay men were a Lennart, and thus miss the saintliness of gays like Ronnie even while hypocritically preaching on separating the wheat from the chaff! To castigate what Lennart represents from the pulpit is hardly anti-gay, and lauding the Ronnies and the Bas’s for compassion for the sick and courage for a committed romantic relationship, respectively, would prove that exposing the Lennarts is hardly “homophobic” (which is a convenient misnomer). The film provides a clear template from which preachers can separate the wheat from the chaff because Lennart and Ronnie are so very antithetical, even in their own relationship. 

I Want Your Sex

The 2026 film, I Want Your Sex, is ostensibly about sex, for the film is saturated with that leitmotif, but the narrative is actually a critique of California culture, with European culture playing a minor role to provide a contrast. Generally, comedy can be used by screenwriters as a means by which audiences can accept, or at least acknowledge criticism that would otherwise be met with ferocious denial befitting a drug addiction. In 2026, the sheer dogmatism of ideologically-soaked imposing at will, as if with facts of reason rather than the gloss of merely subjective opinion, was the mentality of the day afflicting (young) adults under 40 years-old in California. Film can expose such banality to the light of day and thus serve as a self-correcting agent for a societal or sub-societal culture, for the human brain, standing on its own as arrogance on stilts, may be woefilly and unretrievably vulnerable to purblindness when beliefs and values are in the grip of ideological idolatry.

The film’s plot centers around Elliot being hired by Erika Tracy, a commercial artist. Her art’s theme is sexual in nature, and it is not long before she enlists all-too-willing Elliot in sadistic-masochistic sexual fantasies, for Elliot’s girlfriend, Minerva, is cold as ice in bed—even going so far as to fake enjoying sex with Elliot. As the film’s narrative unfolds, Erika and her pretentious (and violent) assistant, Vikktor, temporarily frame Elliot for murder (of Tracy!) in order to raise the asking prices for the art. The two come to a working-agreement wherein both profit from business dealings with the other, and the film ends with Elliot and Erika separately having the same dream in which they get married and she finally reveals herself as a self-imploding demon, which may refer to the true nature of the culture being critiqued by the film.

Erika, Vikktor, and the film’s gay trope/slut, Zap, another of Erika’s employees, are so intensely narcissistic that even their external mannerisms come off as pretentious. Erika even tells Elliot, “People think only about themselves.” She also tells him that most people are idiots and cowards, so don’t worry about what they think. Arrogant self-vaulting, as if on stilts during a flood, looks down on the pathetic losers below. According to M. Scott Peck’s book, People of the Lie, however, a sense of inner emptiness lies behind such pretention and narrow, selfishness along with a callous indifference to whether other people are suffering. Erika’s inner emptiness can be grasped in Erika’s statement to Elliot, “Sex is everything and nothing.”  She even makes fun of her European acquaintance for having told Elliot that sex is a dance and a language of touch, and thus of even emotional intimacy. “That’s why I hate Europeans,” Erika says when Elliot recounts what the European woman told him in her hotel room. But in reducing sex to impersonal S & M, which highlights pleasure from the inflicting of pain, Erika can be critiqued on her judgment on the European’s interpretation of sex. For according to Erika, “Sex is a drug, like every other addiction,” so a person has to “learn how to control it or it will control you.” Because sex is Erika’s life in terms not only of her art, but also relationships that might otherwise be romantic, the implication is that her life, and even her sense of self, is actually empty, encased in an addiction to inflicting pain through impersonal, and mechanical sex. Her admission to Elliot, “We’re both emotionally stunted and suck at communicating” actually applies only to herself, for Elliot is the proverbial adult in the room.

Erika’s superficial toughness does, however, have a benefit, in that she is able to criticize the young-adult generation that has been so coddled by parents that ideological discomfort itself is a trigger. Anything uncomfortable is attacked even though discomfort can spur psychological development—something the “woke” generation sorely lacks. Erika recounts to Elliot that a young adult using social media (Tic-Tok) complained in a comment because the person had not given consent to see a photo of two people holding hands!  The sheer presumptuousness evinces a puerile stage of psychological development and thus a proclivity to throw a temper-tantrum when “accosted” by the discomfort of a hated ideological stance held by another person as if such a stance were unlawful and incorrect. It is no wonder, Erika says, that 30 percent of that generation play video games rather than have sex.

The film’s director and writer, Gregg Araki, told an audience in person in 2026 that the 30 percent line is important to the film. What he did not make explicit is that a generation of emotionally-stunted and isolated judgmental people is not of benefit to a society. The sheer ideological intolerance and presumption exclusively to truth, which in the 1980s had been associated with evangelical Christians, had come to characterize “politically-correct” children-adults in California by 2026. To such enraged intolerance, the rest of us can be said to have a duty to reply to such primped arrogance on stilts, Deal with it. But as “woke” as the “politically correct” were in 2026, they were actually asleep in their presumption and abject, narrow selfishness, which pathetically defines truth itself from such a standpoint and regards differing people as capable only of mere opinion. How convenient. A person can be addicted to an ideology too.

 

Iván & Hadoum

As the protagonists in the film, Iván & Hadoum (2026), neither Iván nor Hadoum, who fall in love, are heterosexuals even though by all appearances, save the long surgical scares under Iván’s former breasts, the couple is a man and a woman, and indeed Iván psychologically identifies himself as a man and Hadoum is a woman both biologically and in how she sees herself. To claim that Hadoum is heterosexual simply because Iván views himself as being a man, even though Hadoum is sexually attracted to Iván’s vagina, would be utter ideological nonsense. Besides being gay or bisexual, and thus easy targets for discrimination by agriculturalists in southern Spain, the two people are of different national origins, for Iván was born in Spain whereas Hadoum’s family hails from Morocco. Additionally, Iván is Caucasian whereas Hadoum is an Arab, and Iván is Christian whereas Hadoum is Islamic. Even in terms of labor-management relations, the couple is ripe for division by other people, for Iván is on a management tract—the warehouse being still owned by his uncle Manuel—whereas Hadoum is a greenhouse/warehouse worker, and a disgruntled one at that. It would seem that Ian de la Rosa has written and directed a film in which many ethical tropes are in play; which one is subject to the most unethical harm goes unanswered. Even so, by including unethical conduct on all of them, the film takes a step in the direction wherein audiences can think philosophically in weighing the ethical harms relative to each other.

Iván is a fork-lift driver in the warehouse when the film begins, and Manuel promotes him to being a line supervisor with an eye to possibly making him the warehouse manager. Iván wants the position because he needs it in order to get a loan. Meanwhile, Hadoum sorts vegetables on a line alongside other non-supervisory employees. Manuel’s attitude and labor practices incur resentment, and even resistance, from the line-employees, including Hadoum even after she has fallen in love with Iván. Perceiving that the two are “thick as thieves,” Manuel becomes suspicious of Iván and even uses him to manipulate Hadoum into stopping the workers from undermining Manuel’s efforts to sell the warehouse to an interested buyer. Iván reluctantly agrees, on condition that Manuel not fire Hadoum, but Manuel does not keep his side of the bargain and Iván confronts Manuel in front of the buyer at the warehouse. Hadoum, already fired by that point, learns of Iván’s valiant act in defense of her and the trust requisite for genuine emotional intimacy is achieved in spite of the efforts of other people to separate the pair.

Besides being on opposite sides of a tense labor-management situation, Iván is a “female-to-male” transsexual who has been taking estrogen and is breastless, though still a woman in having retained the reproductive organs. Regardless, Hadoum and Iván have a lesbian sexual relationship because both have vaginas, even if the denial ensuing from a contemporary ideological agenda fights like hell against such a claim, even labeling it as incorrect. Even though a person’s psychological stance towards one’s gender need not be in sync with one’s genitalia, two people who are sexually attracted to the other’s vagina are not heterosexuals. That the homosexual relationship (or Iván being a transsexual) faces prejudice in the film is evident when Iván’s mother says that that Hadoum’s parents would never accept Iván. Also, Manuel’s son threatens Iván with violence if Iván were “a real man.”

The film also contains allusions to the fact that Hadoum’s family is Moroccan rather than European. Again, Manuel’s son is an antagonist, referring to Hadoum’s family as “different,” rather than one of us here in Spain. To be sure, Hadoum feels no emotional attachment at least to the region, for she wants to move on even though she has fallen for Iván by the end of the film. She is indeed a nomad, and in this regard she may reflect the indigenous culture of her native land in Northern Africa.

Over all, the most ethical deed in the film is Iván’s standing up to Manuel for having fired Hadoum. Even if the firing were justified, for she had deliberately removed the required cap while the interested buyer was present with Manuel, Iván’s self-sacrificial act out of love for Hadoum is laudable. Another worker informs Hadoum of Iván’s unexpected heroic act, and Hadoum goes from only having fallen in love to something even deeper.

As for the most unethical act (or comment) by any of the many antagonists in the film, this question is much more difficult to answer, and arguably the film does not go far enough in this regard even though providing an answer as a fait accompli would be counter-productive to fostering philosophical thinking in viewers during and after viewing. Of course, the particular controversies—labor-management, nationality, sexual orientation (which is tied to genital-attraction even if “gender”-“identity” is not), and transsexuality—were in the West so steeped in ideology in the West by 2026 that ideological hubris could also be expected to be triggered by the film. So perhaps in addition to going a step further in providing some stepping stones to comparative ethical analysis, Rosa could have included dialogue wherein ideological prejudices or biases are made transparent so viewers could exculpate them from thinking philosophically in assessing which unethical statement is “worst” ethically speaking. A character, whether a protagonist or antagonist, could be made to state an opinion and then insist that it is a fact, and thus that anyone who disagrees is incorrect rather than just wrong. “How arrogant! My opinion is just as valid as yours!” The spreading category mistake wherein some ideologically-soaked opinions are misconstrued (and misproclaimed) as fact could thus be taken on, head-on.

As for comparing the unethical, prejudiced “slaps in the face” waged by antagonists in the film, one argument, for example, could be in favor of the anti-transexual statements being the most unethical. It could be argued, for example, that whereas nationality and union-sympathy are de-personalized, Iván’s breast-removal operation and treatment of female hormone is intensely personal as both pertain to Iván’s body. In other words, being said not to be a whole man could hurt Iván more deeply than Manuel’s anti-labor comments to Hadoum and other comments that she is a foreigner (which is only vaguely hinted at in the film). Generalizing, even disparate unethical statements can be compared along the axis of how deep the resulting emotional hurt is felt. Perhaps a utilitarian argument would come to the opposite conclusion, with aspersions against a nationality doing the most harm to the most people, even if only as generalized to a population from comments made to one person such as Hadoum. Manuel’s firing her could be found to be most unethical from Kant’s principle wherein rational beings should be treated not just as means, but also as ends in themselves. Manuel is far from treating his workers as ends in themselves, which is why Iván is advised to remember as a line supervisor that the workers on the line are human beings. At a well-managed workplace, such a reminder would not be necessary. In short, different ethical theories or principles can lead to different answers. So it is important that a filmmaker not impose one, for that would be dogmatic in the sense of arbitrariness. The objective should instead be to prompt audiences to think. To the extent that ideology has tended to override rational thought in the world, stimuli to rational, philosophical thinking are of particularly great value.

Call Me by Your Name

The medium of film has the potential to not only to move audiences emotionally, but to speak to fundamentals in the human condition so that we may know ourselves (and each other) better on the subterranean level of essences. The 2017 film, Call Me by Your Name, is not “gay cinema” even though 17-year-old Elio falls in love with Oliver, a 24-year-old beginning doctoral student when the latter is staying with Elio and his parents at their villa in Italy during the summer of 1983. Falling-in-love, so unmistakable once it has hit, is so utterly human at the gut-level that the twists and turns in a narrative are but superficial in comparison, and even the gender of the beloved may come to matter less than would typically be assumed. In fact, both Elio and Oliver are attracted to women, and after his summer stay Oliver calls the Perlmans during a winter Jewish festival to announce that he is engaged; for even though Elio fell for Oliver, Oliver is not in love with Elio. Elio must take the unrequited love as a given, as about as hard as reality can be felt, and so Elio has the choice of whether to suffer the loss or "stuff it" emotionally by burning emotion itself from his very being.  Precisely this decision is the subject of a father-son talk that he has with his dad after Oliver has left. It is the substance of that talk that anchors the film firmly in the human condition, such that even the narrative, not to mention the fact that Elio has fallen for a man, is transcended. It is just such a transcendence that renders the medium of film so substantial, even meaningful, even if mostly just potentially. Parsing the father-son dialogue will lay bare this thesis.

At the commencement of the talk, it seems as if Elio’s dad does not grasp that his son has fallen for Oliver. “You two had a nice friendship,” his father says. “Yeah,” Elio wantonly replies. But his father is coy: “You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special what you two had was.” Falling in love with another person, unlike friendship—interiorizing another’s personality rather than merely liking it—is indeed rare, especially if such love is not overlaid by sexual attraction. Nor is falling in love just or primarily a matter of two intellects bonding. Accordingly, Elio’s dad says, “Oliver may be intelligent, but he was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. It was good. You’re both lucky to have found each other because you too are good.” Everything and nothing to do with intelligence—intriguing! It is the goodness of the two men, rather than their respective intelligences, that is so important in terms of achieving emotional intimacy without being eclipsed by fear (e.g., of infidelity or, even deeper, emotional betrayal as in abandonment). For trust is destined to be lacking between two bad people as well as between a good and a bad person, whereas emotional trust is naturally extant between two good people. Are people really so dichotomous, however, as being either “good” and “bad”? Has not humanity gotten beyond the stark division between heaven and hell, with nothing (but purgatory) in between? Would it not be more accurate to speak of a spectrum on which we all lie? Nietzsche would say definitely not.  

In regard to sexual “cheating,” for example, and lying in general, dichotomous categorization fits, according to Nietzsche, who asserts: “it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie. ‘We truthful ones’—thus the nobility of ancient Greece referred to itself.”[1] Regarding the “most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank,” the designation of “good” included a character trait: “They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’; this is so above all of the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phrase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of ‘noble,’ as distinct from the lying common man, which is what Theognis takes him to be and how he describes him . . .”[2] It is “above all the liars” whom the strong regard as bad. “While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself (gennaios ‘of noble descent’ underlines the nuance ‘upright’ and probably also ‘naïve’), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment.”[3] In terms of being in—and even beginning—a romantic relationship, the weak person who is a slave to momentary desire, who is not constitutionally strong enough to master whichever instinctual urge happens to be most powerful internally at a given moment, lacks being in being so expediently mendacious, so the weakness is more fundamental than merely being loosely tethered to truth. Behind the problem of achieving emotional intimacy with such a sordid creature is the fact that he or she is not fully there, hence not really with. To step closer to a person, look him or her directly in the eyes, and speak directly, meaning spontaneously and therefore honestly, is rarely achieved with such a person as one who lies as a matter of course. Such a weak, slavish person may even wonder aloud to a prospective romantic partner, I’m afraid I will be unfaithful and hurt whomever I am with. With? No trust, and thus no genuine emotional intimacy can be had with such a person, hence, no with. Accordingly, an abyss of pathos of distance ought to separate good people, such as Elio and Oliver, from such a sordid creature whose nature it is to hide in dark recesses of the soul rather than stand boldly, eye to eye, with another person.

Neither Elio nor Oliver would get involved with a trophy whore, for instance, who imposes his slave-holder’s openness to the trophy having separate sex even with romantic attachment onto a prospective real relationship characterized by genuine emotional intimacy. Such a promiscuous, narcissistic bad person is actually in dire need of therapy. A societal norm that eschews commitment and thus responsibility by imposing such a demand for one-sided promiscuity onto what would otherwise be a genuine relationship, even if such a norm is collectively proclaimed by the neurotic narcissists as legitimate and even “good,” and thus rightly to be imposed, actually violates human nature and is thus highly unethical. Yeah, I would feel uncomfortable if my partner told me he would be having sex with someone he has feelings for but knew before he knew me so I am supposed to accept it, a healthy, well-adjusted human being even in an open relationship would reluctantly admit, if only to oneself. Slaves to momentary instinctual urges simply cannot be trusted, and are thus incapable of emotional intimacy with a romantic partner. They cut themselves off from good people, and thus ultimately detest themselves, for even amid lots of sex, people who thwart commitment are alone. Even if they are formally in a romantic relationship, even if merely in being deluded so by their respective trophy-holders, they are alone. For only genuine emotional intimacy can bring relief from that plight, and refusing to master seemingly intractable momentary instinctual urges eclipses real connection and genuine emotion intimacy. Faced with life without these things, a person might as well pray for the end of time. 

Even though Nietzsche emphasizes that weakness and strength are inherently antipodal, a roadmap can be discerned or extrapolated from his writing even if he did not believe that the weak could become strong. For any weak-willed people who are interested in, or already in a romantic relationship with a good person whose will’s dominant instinctual urge is sustained rather than episodic promise-keeping even in the midst of momentary temptations, the following passage can offer clues on how a will can be strengthened from within.

To have “an active desire not to rid oneself [of an impression], a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will: so that between the original ‘I will’, ‘I shall do this’ and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will,” a person “must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance events, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute. [The person] must first of all have become calculatable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!”[4] The impression not to be rid of is that of a promise made, and the continuance of something is precisely that promise being kept by an extension of will even through tempting forests. In other words, a promise-kept is retained in the memory of the will rather than forgotten as soon as a sensual temptation walks by and winks—as such a tempting fruit is a strange new thing that is fleeting, whereas a promise well-kept can indeed be long-standing in a human will and thus of great value. Parsing the quote further, a necessary event is one that sustains a promise-made whereas a chance event is like meeting an enticing stranger at a bar. To think causally is applicable in realizing that going home with a seductive temptress would cause a promise not to be kept, and thus to no longer be able to feel self-confident strength of will and be taken as such. To see the distant eventuality of one’s promise-breaking being discovered as if it were being found out in the present, and for such a disappointment to have more instinctual force in one’s will than does the pleasure of momentary pleasure, a person must be clear on how means are related to their goals (i.e., such as being taken by others and oneself as capable and actually reliable in promise-keeping), and in this way to be taken as regular, even calculatable in one’s conduct by others and oneself! In other words, rather than be engulfed by the present in a bar, a person whose will can support promise-keeping must be sober enough—serious enough—to keep in mind the distant eventuality of being dumped for having had momentary sex that counts as promise-breaking. The causation in this is clear.  By implication, cheaters (and promise-breakers more generally) need to practice thinking out causation practically. To be regular, even calculatable by others and oneself is to sustain a long-chain of will such that promises once made are kept. Practice being regular, and calculate out what effects can be expected to be caused by certain actions that are relevant to promises-made. If getting drunk or high put such regularity at risk, and give momentary pleasure with whomever more power than the instinctual urge of promise-keeping, for example, a person can practice limiting one’s intake. This is why active alcoholics and drug addicts cannot be trusted to be promise-keepers, for they are very susceptible to going with the flow in having a “moment” in preference for momentary pleasure in the present as itself being absolute. This is precisely what scares people whose feelings of endearment are oriented to a questionable promise-keeper, who too easily and conveniently loses sight of distant eventualities in the present.  

The typical constraint imposed on such a person is moral in nature, but Nietzsche does not advocate such a remedy. Societal cages are not compatible with self-confident strength (of will). Instead, his ideal is paradoxically the sovereign-willed individual who is not constrained by external ethical norms; instead, the constraint lies within a strong, independent will. The “ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral (for ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ are mutually exclusive), in short, the man who has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises—and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion. The emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man—how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he ‘deserves’ all three, and how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures?”[5] To be able to credit oneself rather than any external moral scaffolding in keeping one’s promises is to interiorize even as an instinct a sustained urge to keep promises that is more powerful than the desire to act on some momentary pleasure that would cause a promise not to be kept. The consciousness of self-confident inner strength, which I contend can result from practicing being regular, even calculable, is more powerful than the constraining power of external morality and even the resisting temptation. After all, it is the weak who seek to dominate who try to beguile the strong into voluntarily renouncing their innate strength by saying, “Thou shalt not!”

Ironically, a sovereign, self-confident will wherein the instinctual urge to keep one’s promises dominates urges to break one’s promises in slavish attraction to momentary pleasure can voluntarily bind itself to a beloved through promises that the beloved can trust. Although Nietzsche characterizes such a will as the completion of mankind, I contend that along with such a will, love that can be trusted represents and instantiates us at our highest. Hence Augustine wrote that God is love. Love that is not feared (e.g., as being betrayed) is sacrosanct. Figuratively, such love can bend even the time-space fabric, at least in the very perception of a person who is in love with a promise-keeper, given the density of unafraid love and thus unshakable faith in a beloved. Rather than being idyllic utopian dribble, such an ideal can indeed be actualized as the completion of humanity.

The reality of an authentic, close emotional connection between two people gives rise to the tragedy that is in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, both of whom can be viewed as being sovereign individuals putting their respective promises of love above their petty feuding families that are at odds. Like Elio and Oliver, Romeo and Juliet are good people. How dearly such a connection lost is mourned, as if life itself were no longer deemed worth living without the very presence of the beloved. Indeed, such presence itself can be saturated with meaning. Relative to such a connection of unafraid presence, or being, mourning the loss of a bad, promise-breaking person is actually a blessing in disguise, and can come to be recognized as such in utter relief, as in, I actually dodged a bullet, with the ungenerous help of the beloved, whose heart is nonetheless as cold and unbendable as a hard rock in winter. A pathos of distance, as if over the dark oceans of time in the Book of Genesis, naturally separates such a cold, dispassionate person, who so easily severs oneself off emotionally even in the face of another's suffering, from Elio and Oliver, whose mutual warmth doubtlessly deserves the refreshment that swimming outside can provide on those long, meandering sunny days that summer in northern Italy.

So, I think Elio’s dad is on firm ground in highlighting how special it is that his son, a good person, has fallen for another good person. The goodness is evinced not only in that trust was a given for the two, but also by Elio saying of Oliver, “I think he was better than me,” to which his father replies, “I’m sure he’d say the same thing about you.” Elio in turn replies, “Yeah. He’d say the same thing.” With his assertion of mutual goodness demonstrated, his father observes, “It flatters you both.” How rare—how very special—a romantic relationship is between two good, emotionally well-adjusted people.

But unlike Romeo and Juliet, whose love is mutual (hence the tragedy!), Oliver does not fall in love with Elio during the summer, so even though the two young men are good, no lasting romantic relationship can, or even should, ensue. Ultimately, this asymmetry undermines emotional trust, and the movie ends with Elio suffering the consequences after Oliver phones to announce his engagement to a woman. Even between two good people, genuine emotional intimacy, and the trust that is requisite, require that each person loves the other; otherwise, the relationship is doomed in terms of intimacy and trust. Most likely, the person who is not in love will leave the person for another. The person left standing can either stuff emotion itself, which Elio’s father wisely warns his son against, or grieve the loss (for even love that is not reciprocated is real and the loss of the beloved must be grieved in emotional pain that, as shown in the final scene, is longstanding rather than episodic).

Therefore, we can say, how very rare, and how very, very special a relationship of mutual love between two good (promise-keeping) people surely is! Holding such a rarified gem between them, two people who are in love should move mountains to be and stay together. No job is worth separation. I would flip burgers, one person might say to the other in following him or her to another city. That Elio and Oliver could have been together permanently were they both in love with each other is implied in the film by the fact that an older gay couple comes to visit the Perlmans. The sad fact is, Oliver has not fallen for Elio, and Elio must intellectually and emotionally accept this reality. With respect to Elio, Oliver cannot be relied upon as a promise-keeper. Recognizing this, Elio’s father observes, “And when you least expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember, I am here.” Falling in unrequited love exposes us to human nature such that it is felt at its weakest, perhaps most painful, spot.

Here again, Elio’s father again brings up the dichotomy of good and bad people in how a person in Elio’s position choses to deal with the emotional pain—and it is the sort of pain that comes back unrelentingly every morning rather than quickly dissipates as soon as the wind changes. “Right now, you may not wanna feel anything, maybe you never wanted to feel anything,” Elio’s father says. “And maybe it’s not to me you’d want to speak about these things, but feel something you obviously did. Look, you had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. . . . We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster, that we go bankrupt by the age of 30, and have less to offer, each time we start with someone new, but to make yourself feel nothing, so as not to feel anything. What a waste.” 

Indeed, what a waste, for a sensitive heart that has not rashly eviscerated emotion itself due to past emotional pain is among the most precious gems that can be loved. Elio is sensitive, so his dad is worried that his son may flee from emotion altogether and thus be emotionally unavailable for future relationships; after all, Elio is only 17 years-old. Elio's father acknowledges something emotionally more than a friendship has gripped his son, and that that something is of such emotional depth that sensitive person could rashly decide to rip out emotion from one’s very being in order not to feel such pain. The dichotomy between good (meaning healthy) and bad (meaning weak) lies in the choice that the person makes: caste out emotion itself or accept the feeling of emotional pain as part of being fully human. I think it is at this point that the film becomes significant. Elio, being good, allows himself to feel the pain, and in fact the last scene of the film depicts him in a sustained camera shot looking into the fireplace utterly hurt because Oliver has just called to inform the Perlman’s of his engagement. That the camera-shot is very long is ingenious, for such is the nature of that hurt. A dull soreness can even come to be felt from the emotional grooves that form from ongoing hurt before time can act as a thickener, or, as Nietzsche would say, until forgetfulness can set in. Indeed, he states that forgetting is key even to be able to love one’s enemies, and is not rejection an enemy?

One implication from the film’s last scene in which teary-eyed Elio stares into the fire in a fireplace is that he will be able to be fully emotionally available when he falls in love again (he is just 17 years-old), for he has not severed his emotional life as if feeling emotion were somehow toxic and thus to be expunged. He deserves to fall for a person who is also good in the sense of being willing to take hard choices in not conveniently forgetting promises made in favor of momentary urges. Drug addicts and sex addicts need not apply, for they are slaves to momentary desire and thus do not mature. Elio can offer genuine emotional intimacy wherein emotional trust is a given rather than felt as a vulnerability as is the case when the other person is weak. Beyond the last scene being able to serve as a lesson, or guide, on how to deal emotionally with the loss of a beloved, the father-son talk plus Elio’s decision not to repress emotion itself gets at a fundamental in what it means to experience being human. It isn’t all roses, for sometimes we feel even excruciating emotional hurt from unrequited love—the point being that it is a very good decision to be willing to feel rather than repress the feeling even though it comes back day after day until finally time, acting as a thickener, allows for moving on naturally.  

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Sect. 260 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 395.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sect. 5 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), pp. 465-66. Theognis of Megara lived in the sixth century, BCE. Nietzsche’s first journal article, written while he was still a doctoral student at Leipzig, was on the collection of Theognis’s maxims.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sect. 10 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 474.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 1 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 494.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 2 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), pp. 495-96.