Equals

The film, Equals (2015), presents a fictional story in which people in “the collective” are deemed healthy by the health and safety “police-state” as long as emotions are not detected. Being healthy is predicated on the assumption that emotion just gets in the way, not only of work, but in life more generally. To be sure, they can indeed be difficult for people who have suffered severe psychological and/or physical abuse, or have lost a loved one whether by a death or outright rejection. In the film, Silas voluntarily submits to a cure to the illness of having emotions coming through consciousness because he has been told that Nia, the woman whom he has fallen in love with, has just died. In a modification of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Silas does not commit suicide; instead, he gets the injection because the emotional pain of having lost his loved one is simply too much. Anyone who has fallen in love only to be rejected would be tempted to have emotion itself blocked rather than to go on feeling. As a testament to just how deep love is as an emotion, Silas still feels something for Nia even after the injection as the couple travel on a train to escape from the totalitarian collective. He reaches out to put one of his hands on one of hers. Deep inside, he is fighting the “cure.” In actuality, the cure is the disease, foisted by an authoritarian collective on individuals.

Silas and Nia both work in the educational-books department of the collective. At first, he pays her no more attention than he does to the other coworkers, but such equality is based on no one having access to emotion. Rather than being healthy, as the collective claims, such an equality is artificial because emotion is innately part of human nature. A person who refuses to feel emotion due to past emotional/physical abuse actually suffers from severe psychological problems because “stuffing” natural emotions is actually repression. The quip, “emotions have never worked out for me,” is a cop-out that actually makes matters worse, psychologically. Rather than making a person fit for a romantic relationship, such wholesale repression actually inhibits any genuine relationship. A retired psychiatrist once told me that if a person has reached the point of refusing to feel emotion, that person has severe emotional issues that need to be addressed in therapy. In the film, such pathology is considered to be healthy, but Silas and Nia rightly reject the collective’s version of reality, which, by the way, is said to be found by investigating outer rather than inner space. Hence the book department's writers write on astronomy, whether as nonfiction or fiction. 

The assumption that the answer to the question of ultimate reality is to be found far away in outer space is itself problematic because astronomy and ontology are two different fields of knowledge. Put another way, perception and empirical study are bounded and thus cannot capture raw reality itself.

To be sure, astronomical science can be used as an analogy for human dynamics, through neither one gets us to an answer concerning ultimate reality. Even as deeply meaningful as loving another person is, the emotional intensity cannot reach reality in the sense of Kant’s “things in themselves.” 

The emotionless equality of humans that is espoused by the collective as a sort of dogma can be understood as artificial by looking at the cosmic background radiation “photo,” which shows areas of greater and lesser heat—the outer edge of the Big Bang’s blast is not internally equal. Similarly, Silas begins to look at Mia more than he looks at his other coworkers. He even stares at times, which she notices. She in turn begins to look at him more. The quality of increasing inequality can be discerned from the film in the gradual process of falling in love.

First, Silas’s eyes are increasingly drawn to Mia. He notices her facial and eye expressions, which take on greater meaning and significant for him emotionally, whereas the nonverbal expressions of his other coworkers are no more significant, and so a new inequality is evident, which is entirely natural, just as the cosmic background radiation of the universe shows unequal temperatures.

Second, certain statements made by Mia take on added significance emotionally for Silas. Whereas he could easily forget something that another coworker may say to him, Mia’s ideas are as though etched or engraved in Silas’ mind.

Third is touch. When Silas and Mia touch hands, the significance emotionally is greater than were either to touch a hand of another coworker. Inequality thus emerges in terms of touch, and this inequality expands as the coupling process moves toward and includes sex, which with emotional intimacy can seem utterly superficial as not being close enough.

Fourth is a subtle feature that comes about when the process of falling in love is a fait accompli. Silas gets to the point of telling Mia that he does not want her to leave. The continued presence of the other person is being earnestly sought. She complies because she is falling for him. In fact, when he gets his transfer to work in a garden because seeing her everyday and yet not being able to be with her for fear of being taken to a mental hospital for electric shock “treatments” to block emotion and thus “restore” him to “health, she desperately comes to his apartment because she wants to be with him.

As long as presence is maintained, emotion is not a problem in a mutual coupling, but if the love is unrequited or  two who have naturally coupled are separated, emotional hurt can be unrelenting—so much so, that it may in fact be a mental illness.  If so, the autocacy in the filmcauses rather than treats mental illness by trying to detect and separate the couple.  The fact that Silas prefers to feel nothing permanently once he is misinformed that Mia has committed suicide in the mental hospital may suggest that he would agree. With respect to falling in love, emotion can be a boon or a bust in terms of quality of life. The sheer intensity of emotion either way suggests a heaven or hell dichotomy. The collective’s claim that “social bonds help to alleviate anxiety” and thus are not of value in their own right is based on the erroneous assumption that interpersonally-related emotion can only make life a living hell. A person who blocks one’s emotions especially interpersonally operates under the same assumption, and is accordingly severely impacted by the decision psychologically because not only because repression can cause or worsen mental illness, according to Freud and Nietzsche, but also because positive emotions are given up. Therefore, people who have been the victim of abuse when young should see a psychologist to face the emotional hurt so it can naturally dissipate rather than refuse to feel emotion and thus miss out on falling in love while feeling lived by the other person.

The message of the film is that emotion is innate in human nature, so efforts to block emotion in a human psyche are unhealthy and thus counter-productive, especially in terms of interpersonal relations. I read that China considers a particular religion to be a case of mental illness. In the film, the collective authority considers S.O.S., Switched On Syndrome, to be a “debilitating disease.” When emotions are “switched on” in a person’s consciousness, the collective views that person as sick, and even as a threat.  The “treatments” are based on inhibitors that dampen the onset of emotion. If allowed to manifest unfettered, emotion is assumed by the authorities to lead to chaos, so the prime value of the collective is order. Emotion itself results in chaos, and chaotic individuals mean a chaotic, destabilized collective. Even two people falling in love is situated in a political theory as a political threat. That Mia becomes pregnant is therefore a red flag that gets her dragged to the mental hospital for an abortion and electric shock treatment.  

Jonas, a friend to Silas who helps him by arranging for Mia’s escape from the Den (i.e., the mental hospital), observes, “You two were in love; that’s clear. According to the collective, coupling makes the disease worse. But the inhibitors keep people from being “who they really are.”  Referring to falling in love, Silas tells Mia, “The truth is right here,” rather than in outer space as the collective claims. This statement is not far from Augustine’s claim that God is love. That deity can manifest as unconditional love and as wrath; so too, emotion can be a boon or bust depending on how the coupling process goes. To extract emotion itself from a person’s consciousness is one-sided and deeply problematic, given how we humans are “hard-wired” by nature. To “switch off” emotion wholesale in one’s psyche is itself very unhealthy.

In terms of political theory, the autocratic collective’s authority is totalitarian in a way that goes beyond George Orwell’s novel, 1984, if ridding people of emotion is more invasive than controlling what people think. Preventing group-think, such as is evinced in the film when Silas and Mia agree that the collective is backward-wrong in what the authority considers to be health and disease, is one thing; severing emotion so people can’t even feel is arguably more severe. Silas and Mia would doubtlessly consent to considering coupling to be harmful medically but they would (and do) refuse not to feel the love they feel for each other. “Love is like oxygen,” Christian tells his new friends in the film, Moulin Rouge! A government regarding falling in love as making a disease more severe and then that same government going further by preempting the process of falling in love by forcing ardous separations is therefore incredibly invasive; it is like ridding an inhabited room of oxygen. Furthermore, viewing coupling as a threat that would lead to political instability makes Hobbes’ Leviathan look like an instance of limited sovereignty, as if Hobbes did not go far enough in devising his totalitarian political theory to stave off civil war. A totalitarian, autocratic government delving into psychology—politicalizing disease and mental health—is much more of a danger to humanity than is people falling in love.  

Enemy

Villeneuve’s film, Enemy (2013), is ostensibly about two men who look alike (they are played by the same actor). Jake Gyllenhaal plays both Adam and Anthony. That both characters have the same frontal scar in the same bodily location signals that the identity goes beyond the possibility that they are identical twins. The identity topic in philosophy of mind is thus salient in the film, and this has invited several commentators to delve deeply into psychological analysis to suggest that Adam is a figment of Anthony’s subconscious, or vice versa. The film does not make clear what exactly is real and what may be a character’s mental construction. Suffice it to say that the film is very difficult to comprehend. Even when Anthony’s wife appears to Adam/Anthony as a giant spider at the very end of the film, it is only conjecture to assume that the spider represents the heaviness of constraint in being in a relationship of commitment rather than anything goes—the latter being inconsistent with a real relationship. The film presents the viewers with intimations of philosophy of mind and more directly of relationship ethics; these two domains play off each other.

Anthony is a movie actor who has trouble being faithful sexually to his wife, Helen, who is pregnant. Having discovered that he and Adam look alike even down to the same scar, Anthony angrily demands that Adam turn over the clothes he is wearing and the keys of his car so Anthony can pick up Mary, Adam’s girlfriend, for a “romantic getaway,” meaning sex; this cherade is a way to have yet another affair. Adam hands over his suit and the car keys, and heads over to Anthony’s apartment and to Helen, who realizes that Adam rather than Anthony has turned up. She is happy to have Adam sexually and even to stay, which he can do because Anthony and Mary have just been killed in a car accident while fighting because Mary has discovered that the man she is with cannot possibly be Adam. Whereas Adam is meek and caring, Anthony is a sexual predator and, not coincidentally, emotionally disturbed in an aggressive way. Both women easily catch on to the switch a roo, and whereas Helen welcomes the substitution, Mary does not. 

It is the stark difference in the men’s psychology that keeps them from being identical as understood in the philosophy of mind sub-discipline, and that has invited commentators to propose that one of the two men is actually a mental projection of the other. The film may not provide enough fodder from which a definite conclusion regarding whether only one of the two men exist beyond being a projection, the sexual ethics of the two men are more straightforward, and yet even in this respect, some blurring is evident.

Neither Adam nor Anthony is very close emotionally to their significant other in spite of living together. Adam would rather grade papers than have sex with Mary one night even though she is drunk and horny, and Anthony almost ignores Helen, and, as mentioned above, he is oriented to the pursuit of other women, to the adrenaline of the chase as well as the sex. Men who are addicted to the high from the conquest for sex, and from sex itself tend to treat romantic relationships as if they were possible without ethical commitment even though the latter is essential for emotional trust and intimacy. Even responding to a plea of, “I need you now, emotionally,” with “I’m going to a bar to meet some friends” eviscerates emotional trust even though sex is not involved. Such selfishness and callousness render a person utterly unfit for a genuine relationship unless the person wants to change, because emotional commitment is requisite to any romantic relationship. A relationship without at least emotional trust is a contradiction in terms. Even so, I believe that such a person as Anthony can change, and from within; asking for help is not necessary, and, besides, love provides help without having to be asked.

When outside sex is added to the mix, the toxicity of the callousness is magnified in emotional terms. A person’s de facto, unstated priorities reflect whether commitment itself is valued or rejected. Take for instance a woman whose “sugar daddy” finances her high rent and trips to Miami Beach and Mexico in exchange for her always “coming back to him.” Prioritizing such a “trophy with sex” arrangement means deprioritizing possible love that is authentic in the sense of involving commitment and thus real love. Helen instantly senses that Adam is a man with which she can have these.

Wanting to have it both ways, such as Anthony plays out in staying with Helen while cheating on her—he would even misuse “I’m poly” as if that meant separate sex as an excuse for cheating—is easily detected by potential suitors who instinctively know when they have been deprioritized below even a lower good. The combination of an allowance and an open policy on outside sex is too tempting to a weak, avaricious psyche that is addicted to sex, but this does not mean that even a weak person cannot gradually gather will-power from within and leave the void of what is actually empty space. Faced with such an arrangement as befits a sexual addiction, using people, and an aversion to commitment and thus emotional intimacy, a real suitor has no choice but to walk away unless or until the “Anthony” turns himself around. 

Emotional intimacy does not necessarily mean instituting monogamy and thus a social conservative ideology. An "open relationship" sexually may be preferred, if, for instance, a significant age difference exists such that sexual drives differ in intensity, as long as no separate romantic connections go along with the separate sex and neither person is lying or feeling emotional pain.

In the film, it is clear that Helen has given up on Anthony, and yet she is pregnant with a baby with him. Were Adam not to have slipped in due to Anthony’s insistence on going off for the weekend to have sex with Mary, Helen would be in the living hell of being with a serial liar who is emotionally absent.

Can someone like Anthony turn around? Were he not killed in the crash with Mary near the end of the film, would he eventually get tired of the recurrent empty sex with other women and come to value and even crave Helen’s emotional/sexual affection? Do people who are trophies of “sugar daddies” eventually tire even in spite of the money and seek out a real relationship—meaning one that includes emotional commitment rather than lies? In the film, even Adam decides to cheat on Helen by taking the key that he has discovered to a stripper club that evening. Even Adam, who presumably has been faithful to his girlfriend, Mary, has absorbed a bit of Anthony.

Whether one of the two men is actually the alter-ego of the other—a mere figment in a divided psyche—the message of the film may be that emotional commitment requires maturity and the desire and will to take oneself as a being a promise-keeper rather than an exploiter and serial liar. The sheer divergence mentally between Adam and Anthony, even though neither is perfect nor could be expected to be, demonstrates the difference between sexual ethics as a challenge and alternatively as disvalued in favor of utter selfish disregard even in the face of another’s love. To say that the Adams of the world are pure whereas the Anthony’s are lost causes is too strict and thus not realistic. To say Adam is “good” and Anthony is “bad” is oversimplistic, and thus inaccurate. We are all human, all too human. In Anthony, there is something worthy of being loved, and in Adam, something that diminishes emotional intimacy. Adams may occasionally lapse (and be forgiven for being human), and a few Anthony’s may decide to shift from one world to another, especially if a soul-mate happens to be met. The fates of both Adam and Anthony are not written, and outside help is not required, should either or both men (or the same person) actively opt for emotional intimacy in a genuine relationship. Besides hinting at the identity problem in philosophy of mind, the medium of film is capable of projecting two alternative routes in terms of sexual ethics in the context of a higher good of which everyone is capable of attainment.

 

The Children Act

I contend that religion and science are two distinct and unique domains, and thus qualitatively different. It follows that they have their own distinctive criteria, which are rightly hegemonic in their respective domain. In other words, the criteria of religion should not be extended onto the domain of natural science, especially if in doing so the native criteria of science are eclipsed or overridden. Likewise, the criteria of science should not be superimposed into the domain of religion, especially if at the expense of the sui generis criteria of religion. The film, The Children Act (2017), demonstrates the problems entailed in imposing religious criteria onto medical science. An interesting question from having seen the film is whether any such hypertrophy of one domain’s criteria onto another domain inevitably incurs a narrowing of perspective and a corresponding warping of judgment.

The film’s narrative centers around Fiona Maye, a judge in Britain, and Adam Henry, a 17-year-old who has leukemia. From the standpoint of medical ethics and religion, the first half of the film is salient, whereas the second half centers around Adam’s infatuation for Fiona and her efforts to distance herself from him. The infatuation is likely a result of the fact that he has lost his religious grounding due to Judge Maye’s order that him be given a blood transfusion in violation of the dogma of the Jehovah Witness sect of Christianity. It is precisely that transfusion that is the legal/moral/religious issue that is presented in the film. If as I contend the medium of film is an excellent means of bringing to people matters of ethics and theology (and philosophy generally), then delving into the complex issue before the court in the film is warranted.

Adam’s parents have asked the court to stop the hospital from giving Adam a potentially life-saving blood-infusion, without which he would die (as the film’s end demonstrates). The parents’ lawyer presents the theological position of Jehovah’s Witnesses against blood transfusions. Genesis, Leviticus, and even Acts are cited as scriptural support, but no passages are cited before the court. The theological potential of the film would be strengthened were even a bit of exegesis presented to the judge (or she could be shown studying the matter at home, especially as her husband is away having an affair). The lawyer for the hospital points out in court that blood transfusions did not exist in ancient times, so we can infer that the relevant scriptural passages are at best indirect, being on blood itself as necessary for life. The hospital lawyer points out that if blood is tantamount to life itself, then the sect should be heartily in favor of blood transfusions to continue life.

Even though no reference to blood transfusion itself is in the Bible, the Jehovah Witness religious organization denounces the medical treatment as if God prohibits it. In court, Adam’s father says that he knows this, but in matters of religious, belief, and thus faith, rather than knowledge sans doubt applies. The notion that blood is or carries a person’s soul, which is implied in the sect’s position, conflates the material and spiritual, and in terms of domains, the biological and the religious. Conflating different domains can indeed lead to such astonishing claims that a person’s soul is in one’s blood. Typically, people dismiss such a claim without realizing that the underlying problem is a category mistake in terms of conflating two different domains or hyperextending one onto another.

Even were scripture to proscribe blood transfusions in particular and explicitly, rather than by an assumed inference from a passage on blood, such a prohibition would be of minor importance given the leitmotif of the gospels. In them, Jesus does not mention transfusions of blood; nor does he mention abortion or gay marriage, yet that hasn’t stopped some Christians from treating such ethical issues as foremost and as religious in nature. This is not to say that transfusions, abortions, and gay people marrying are ethical or unethical. Instead, my point is that from a religious standpoint generally and from the perspective of the New Testament, those issues are not particularly salient. Before the judge’s ruling, Adam is worried that his Church would disenfranchise him were he to get an infusion even if against his will! Even just to distance a member on the basis of an ethical issue that carries little or no distinctly religious importance, especially given the salient feature in the gospels of compassion where it is least convenient (i.e., to detractors, outsiders, and even enemies), incurs a bias in terms of perspective and judgment. Treating a minor factor as though everything hinges on it is to judge erroneously. To violate the theological principle of caritas seu benevolentia universalis (love as universal benevolence) under the rubric of Christianity and especially on a theologically minor issue incurs hypocrisy. The sick are to be cared for—this is very evident from the gospels. Magnifying some passages on blood (rather than more specifically on transfusions as if that practice were proscribed) such that the prohibition eclipses the main theological thrust of the gospels demonstrates a lack of good judgment (and common sense).

Because the transfusion would likely forestall Adam’s eventual death from the cancer means that, as Judge Maye declares from the bench, the Jehovah’s Witness organization was acting against rather than in line with Adam’s welfare. Something had gone very wrong in the governance of that organization. Adam’s welfare includes the happiness that continuing to live can make possible; a religious institution that is in favor of precluding a person’s future is likely making a category mistake underneath—in this case, extending religious criteria onto medical science at the expense of that domain’s own criteria.

As Fiona realizes when she visits Adam in hospital before her verdict, he is a lively, precious young man full of a lively spirit, which is shown in his sarcastic grin even more than in his blood. A person’s soul—isn’t it through a person’s eyes anyway? A person’s entire being is the “form” of one’s soul, as evinced especially in tone of voice and facial expressions as well as the language that one uses. The role of blood is biological, and thus of science, in human life, whereas the spiritual transcends the limits of human thought, perception, and emotion. The religious domain can thus be understood to be distinct from that of natural science.

Murder on the Orient Express

If viewers can get past Hercule Poirot’s extraordinarily long (and awful) mustache in the 2017 film, Murder on the Orient Express, listening closely to some of the detective’s choice observations on human nature and ethics can deliver philosophical dividends. Indeed, Poirot admits to being able to see the world only as it should be, which enables him to detect even small physical (and psychological) aberrations, even concerning eggs for breakfast, and so he has become, as he unabashedly states, the world’s best detective. After having solved the case on the stopped train, however, he realizes that even his “gift” at detection is not fully in line with how things should be, and so he compromises with his austere ethical standards because he finds himself in a “gray area,” ethically speaking.

At the end of the film, Poirot asks the man who is waiting for the detective to arrive, “Would you please straighten your tie?” The man does so. It is an odd, fastidious request that subtly confirms Poirot’s own admission early in the film that his sensitivity to even tiny deviations from how things should be is pathological, and yet very useful in detective work. So it is extraordinary as far as he is concerned that he says to the group of people on the train, “There are no killers here” even though he has figured out that all of them jointly savagely stabbed Rachett, who had kidnapped and killed (even after having received the ransom!) Daisy, the Armstrong young girl. Sometimes the scales of justice should not be in balance, Poirot tells the group. At the beginning of the film, he says, “There is right and wrong and nothing in between.” So, when Rachett sits at Poirot’s table in the dining car on the train, the detective instantly detects that the kidnapper/killer of the Armstrong child is not in line with how the world should be. Because, as Poirot says at one point, “Human nature is perverse in its complexity,” it is no surprise that he admits, “I am at my happiest when I am alone.” Applied ethics would be an alternative vocation for Poirot, and he would doubtless prefer to be alone than in the company of business practitioners, given their orientation to their self-interest and gain. To be sure, criminal justice is no small matter, given the heinous nature of murder. As the man who invites Poirot to travel on the train tells him just after both men discover that Rachett has been murdered in bed, “You are the only person who can bring justice.” Otherwise, the Black physician would likely be hanged “just because of the color of his skin,” which would be a grave injustice. So the detective agrees to take the case even though he is on vacation.

Rachett has not only gotten away with his horrible crimes against the Armstrong family, which ruined it, but has also caused 12 other people, who were either in that family or in various degrees of affiliation to it, to have their lives, according to Poirot, “wounded, deformed, ended.” This too “demands justice,” and so may justify the joint stabbing by the twelve of Rachett in his berth. In other words, Poirot sees the ethics of the vengeful act as being a gray area, rather than either right or wrong, because Rachett’s original crimes led to the additional crimes of having ruined twelve other lives. Hence, Poirot tells the group that sometimes the scales of justice should be unbalanced. The twelve seek revenge—vengeance—“for the life of an innocent,” Poirot says, “a life for a life.” But it is more than a life for a life, for Rachett has ruined the lives of the 12 emotionally aggrieved people on the train who stab Rachett; it is Rachett’s life for many more, and the criminal justice system has failed to bring Rachett to justice. In fact, the son of the prosecutor who wrongly prosecuted an innocent woman for Daisy’s murder is one of the twelve on the train!

To be sure, the twelve people, whom Poirot admits are not killers at heart, lie to him. “It appears that there is no end to the lies manufactured just for me,” Poirot observes after having spoken with them all. Even though lies violate Kant’s ethic (i.e., the Categorical Imperative), Poirot’s reflection that the joint stabbing may be justified ethically raises the question for us as to whether the end justifies the means (i.e., the lying). As for Poirot himself, he tells the group, “I cannot lie.” That he holds firm on the ethic of honest even as he considers the act of vengeance as possibly justified ethically—“I cannot just this,” he admits—directly contradicts his general perspective that there is right and wrong and nothing in between. His sensitivity to abnormalities from how things should be is clear from his discomfort looking at a man whose tie is not straight, hearing the conductor walking quickly to Rachett’s berth, and seeing the cracked glass of the picture frame of his beloved Catherine who has presumably died. Because, as he puts it, “crime is an anomaly” because it takes “a fracture of the soul” to murder another human being, he cannot resist man with the crocked tie who accosts the detective as he is finally leaving the train and states, “There has been a murder on the Nile.” Human nature is indeed perverse to a man who cannot help but see the world as it should be, and the motive to remove defects must indeed be strong in such a person. That he is confronted with a case in which the scales of justice should not be in balance is itself an aberration that must be intolerable to him, and to such an extent that he does lie to the police as to his theory on the murder on the Orient Express.

“There are no killers here,” the famed detective has said to the twelve when he announces to them that he has discovered their joint, premeditated crime. Linda Arden, aka Caroline Hubbard, the mother of Sonia Armstrong and Helena Andrenyi, and the grandmother of Daisy Armstrong, tells Poirot, of the eleven others on the train who participated in her masterminded plot to kill Rachett, “these are good people.” Poirot does not dispute that. They are not like the murderers whom he has known; they are not like Rachett. In Poirot’s extreme sensitivity to defects from how the world should be, none of the twelve are defects; rather, they are innocent victims of Rachett’s original crime. The sheer anger and emotional suffering in their “wounded, deformed” lives since the kidnapping cry out for justice; that it takes an act of vengeance to bring about such justice, and thus closure, even though the act is indeed murder, defies Poirot’s normative world-view. “I cannot judge this,” he tells the murderers. Perhaps moralists the world over could take a lesson from such humility.

The film raises the question of whether the vice of vengeance, or revenge, may be ethical in some cases. If so, should the biblical passage, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” be qualified? To be sure, that that very passage was so obviously disregarded in Israel in the mid-2020s in so exceeding what could conceivably be regarded as ethical revenge by committing a genocide in decimating Gaza and even intentionally killing even children (and for fun!) so the Arab people would not go on there does not justify qualifying the divine decree that vengeance belongs to Israel’s deity alone, rather than to the Israelis themselves. But Nietzsche’s claim that vesting the deity with vengeance discredits the very concept of Yahweh because it also contains omnibenevolence (i.e., perfect goodness, which Nietzsche claims is antithetical to any vice) may need to be reconsidered if Poirot is right that the murder on the Orient Express may be ethical even though it counts as vengeance. For if some cases of human vengeance are ethical in being just, then divine vengeance may not necessarily be inconsistent with perfect goodness. If so, then the attempt behind the biblical passage to get the Israelis to cease being so revenge-oriented may not be as problematic as Nietzsche thought, even though the attempt has been in vain. 

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment, is not a documentary of the experiment on power aggrandizement that took place in 1971; actors play the supervising professor s well as the 24 students who were the subjects—12 randomly being assigned as guards and the other 12 as prisoners. The film can be characterized as a psychological drama on human nature, and in particular, on the salience therein of the will to power, especially when a power differential exists. Had Nietzsche been alive to watch the film, he would have been engrossed, finding much to confirm his theory that not only the will to power is the basic human motive, but also the weak too easily resort to cruelty (and pettiness) to feel any pleasure they can out of the exercise of whatever power they can muster, given their innate weakness.

In the film, professor Philip Zimbardo, who lets the experiment run on too long, given the violence being committed by the students who are playing prison guards, initially tells all of the students that touching (let alone hitting others) is against the rules of the experiment. Due to just the potentialpower differential in the experiment's scenerio, it isn’t long before one guard, and then another, presumptuously break that rule, and the guards’ violence only gets worse. To be sure, Zimbardo does not intervene to give a disincentive to the guards who have violated the rule because the professor wants to see how the psychological dynamic of power naturally unfolds. That the subjects are actually students who know that the “prison” space is actually on campus, and thus is not a real prison and they are not really guards and prisoners renders the increasingly guards' increasingly encroaching power aggrandizement by the guards on the prisoners and the natural resistance of some of the prisoners, due to their will to power, all the more amazing. By increasingly encroaching, I mean that human beings naturally seek to pick at at least some differential in power in order to increase the gradiant. Like picking at a scab, the urge is hard to resist. The film accurately depicts this vital finding.

The implications are huge, especially in terms of the value in having formidable institutional checks on prison guards and municipal (and university) police employees. Their tendency to “take liberties” even in easily turning to unjustified violence to impose whatever power they presume is justified psychologically should be assumed, rather than merely hypothesized, by government officials and city (or university) residents in a position to design, pass, and implement checks on the aggrandizement. The case of university police in the United States, the federal constitution of which reserves  police power to the state and federal governments exclusively, is especially dangerous, given the tenuous link of accountability from the standpoint of representative democracy. In fact, university police managers are subject institutionally to a conflict of interest in that their bosses in university administration may be one party to a dispute, such as in the case of student protests. At Yale, for example, during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the university’s police arrested 46 students—the remaining protesters went immediately to sit in a street intersection so they would be under the jurisdiction of the municipal police department, which in turn is accountable to a local government rather than a private, non-profit corporation.

As the case of Israel in Gaza dramatically shows, even a democratically elected government can perpetuate crimes against humanity, so it is incorrect to claim that such crimes are committed only by dictators. In the case of the Putin administration in Russia and its multi-year invasion of Ukraine, the Stanford prison experiment is very relevant in explaining the “widespread, systematic torture and ill-treatment of both Ukrainian civilian detainees and prisoners of war, including cases of sexual violence,” according to Claudia Julio, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, who spoke at an informal session of the UN’s Security Council on August 11, 2026.[1] “More than 95% of the Ukrainian prisoners of war and 85% of the civilian detainees reported being tortured or ill-treated, often repeatedly. They also reported being subjected to sexual abuse and food deprivation while being held in inhumane conditions and not being provided adequate medical services.”[2] After watching The Stanford Prison Experiment, anyone could readily grasp how such horrendous treatment can come about in conditions in which such a stark power-differential exists. Even just the natural human reaction to being unjustly subject to abuses of power can be expected to result in more violence as if to retaliate in enforcing the presumed entitlement to the unjustified power. Rules or laws against such violence are easily obviated mentally, and even more violence is inflicted as if to say, how dare you resist my over-reaching! You will pay dearly! Countering externally the sheer presumption to exercise such power is two degrees of separation from the squalid mentality. In the film, were the professor to directly confront the guards in real time for having unilaterally violated the rule against even touching the prisoners, let alone hitting him merely for resisting the unjustified violence, the guards would have been shocked in realizing just how out of line they allowed themselves to go. The human mind can go on and on in taking liberties without checking itself by thinking, Have I gone too far? In other words, the human brain short-circuits itself in terms of is presumption to power-aggrandizement. This is the idea from the film that has been so overlooked.

Whether examining the conduct of the Russian prison-guards or the Israelis soldiers in Gaza with regard to people they view as sub-human, a sordid perspective that also can be gleamed from the sheer violent presumptuousness of the student-guards in the film, the conduct and its psychological underpinnings are no accident. The innate tendency to go too far in terms of power is not limited to cases of mental illness, but is in human nature itself, so rather than treat violent over-reaches even in violation of law as aberrations, they should be expected and thus fortified against, institutionally.

In terms of local and private police departments, an implication is that those departments’ internal affairs offices should not be relied upon as sufficient to ensure accountability on abuse police employees. In terms of governments committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, an implication is that a global order treats national sovereignty as absolute is insufficient; international adjudication and enforcement of international law is necessary. Treating abuses of power, whether by prison guards or police employees, or by government officials, as exceptions to human nature rather than as very likely ignores the vital lesson that the film can provide to humanity. In other words, human nature is very susceptible to getting carried away with power even to the extent of unilaterally resorting to violence to enforce on other people the power that one presumes the right to inflict on others. The sheer presumption of power that is dubious and the use of vocal and even physical violence to enforce the presumption reveal just how pathetic human nature is with respect to wielding power over other people. Were more people to take the real message of the film seriously—and it is astonishing that the film has not had more impact—much more would presumably be done legislatively to hold police and even governments accountable. The assumption would change from treating abuses of power as exceptions to being the rule, and thus as being in more need of being checked institutionally and legislatively. Even taking national sovereignty as absolute could be subject to amendment so as to allow for the enforcement of international law.

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1. Jerry Fisayo-Bambi, “Over 16,000 Ukrainian Civilians Remain Detained and Tortured by Russia, UN Says,” Euronews.com, 12 August, 2026.
2. Ibid.

Angels & Demons

Although a sequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006) and also directed by Ron Howard and written in part by Dan Brown, Angels & Demons (2009) stands on its own as a narrative and thus as a film in its own right. Although the relationship between science and religion undergirds the film’s dramatic tension, the more fundamental leitmotif running throughout the film is the sheer ambiguity involved in whether a given character is more like an angel or a demon. An implication is that we mere mortals should not presume to judge the religiosity of other mortals; that’s God’s job, for we so lack the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence.

The film’s plot centers on the protagonist, Robert Langdon, a professor of religious studies at Harvard. Although an avowed academic atheist, he immediately heeds the plea of the Vatican police to come to Rome to help the Church.[1] A hired assassin seemingly of the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood that historically consisted of Catholic scientists including Galileo, has kidnapped four Cardinals, known as the preferati, for they are the favorites to be elected the next pope during the conclave soon to be underway. The kidnapping is only outdone in significance by assassin’s theft of a case of highly explosive anti-matter, which is somewhere in the Vatican and set to touch matter and therefore violently explode at midnight; the Vatican would be consumed in light. The irony of such evil as light is also in the film, The Ninth Gate (1999), in which bright light accompanies the presence of Satan as Dean Corso approaches the castle in which the demonic being is waiting, for Corso has figuratively and literally unlocked to door to being able to see Satan as it is, whereas Boris Balkan, an evil man, has ironically failed. Such irony and its associated ambiguity also apply to some of the principal characters in Angels & Demons, for it is not so easy for mortal viewers of the film to assess how angelic or demonic those characters actually are in the film.

To begin with a rather minor example, Vittoria Vetra, a physicist who is instrumental in the successful “creation” of a small but significant amount of anti-matter made in the CERN lab in Europe, is also seeking to discover the “God” particle, which gives mass its mass. The film was obvious made prior to the actual scientific discovery of the Higgs particle. In the film, the Caerlengo, the priest Patrick McKenna, scoffs at the scientific pursuit of something called the God particle—how audacious of humans to discover God in physics! Of course, the nomenclature itself is erroneous, for a particle that makes a bit of energy have mass can hardly be said to be God. A photon might as well be called the God particle, given that Jesus Christ is said to be the Light of the World (Phos tou kósmou) in the Gospel of John. Vittoria does not do herself any favors with respect to the Vatican when she rips off a page in a small booklet written by Galileo when she and Langdon are examining the page in the Vatican archives. Just as her scientific efforts to “create” anti-matter cannot be said to be “creation” and thus usurpation of God’s prerogative as the Creator, for the anti-matter is made rather than created in a religious sense, she rips the page from the pamphlet so she and Langdon can hurry to stop the assassin from killing the next Cardinal, for the page contains vital clues as to the location. As in all of the Dan Brown films, a veritable “treasure hunt” based on clues is in Angels & Demons. Vittoria is no demon, even though she has seriously breached Vatican rules in ripping out a page in a rare book.[2] In fact, she steadfastly stays with Langdon as both of them rush from church to church to stop the assassin from killing the kidnapped Cardinals ostensibly in retaliation for the Catholic Church having literally branded four Catholic scientists with hot-iron crosses and killing them for having violated religion by their scientific pursuits in the seventeenth century.

Another irony involving the Vatican archives is that Langdon has tried six times to get the Vatican’s permission for access so he could finish his book on the historical Illuminati by examining Galileo’s third pamphlet—the very one that he and Vittoria examine to find clues as to the probably locations of the upcoming murders. In his office, Commander Richter, whom Inspector Olivetti describes as “a deeply spiritual man,” rubs the six rejections in Langdon’s face as the professor, who is there to help the Vatican, requests permission this time not for his private benefit, but, rather, in order to find clues by which he can anticipate and thwart the murders of the four kidnapped Cardinals. Richter knows that Langdon, an atheist, is trying to help the Church, but rather than having compassion for his “enemy,” he makes fun of him! How “deeply spiritual,” not to mention Christian, is that? Later, speaking to Langdon, Richter brags that his Church helps the sick and hungry. “What does your Church do? Oh, that’s right. You don’t have one.” Ouch! That Langdon is there to help in spite of no being formally or officially Christian even amidst such vitriol renders him an anonymous Christian, whereas Richter’s conduct befits the Antagonist rather than the Paraclete.

Camerlengo McKenna is an immeasurably more interesting character than Richter. Officially the antagonist of the film, McKenna is behind the plot to kidnap the Cardinals and steal the anti-matter to make it seem like the Illuminati scientists are attacking religion. The payment to the assassin from the Isle of Man is an early, subtle clue that the Irish priest is behind it all. McKenna has poisoned the pope because the latter was reaching out to science to reconcile it to the Church, whereas McKenna saw science as needing to be held back—held in check—by the Church. McKenna makes it seem to everyone that he has literally saved the night for the Vatican by flying the ani-matter canister upward in a helicopter and then parachuting down to hopefully be unanimously pronounced the next pope by the Cardinals meeting in the Conclave. Richter has secretly had his altercation with McKenna recorded—with the latter admitting his central role in the criminal plot and then setting Richter up to be shot by Inspector Olivetti—and Langdon is able to find the video and share it with Cardinal Strauss, who is running the Conclave. Called to the Conclave thinking that he would be celebrated and asked to be the next pope. McKenna is instead greeted by the Cardinals as if he were an alien from another planet. True to Jesus’s teachings, they do not disparage or attack the new-found enemy from within, and Strauss even tells the Vatican police to be gentle in pursuing the fleeing McKenna before he burns himself up at Peter’s tomb.

As sordid, even evil as the demonic priest, the Camerlengo, is, a bit of the angelic is also revealed in the man as he questions Langdon before giving him permission to access the Vatican archives. “Christianity’s most sacred codices are in that archive.,” the priest tells the professor. “Given your recent entanglement with the Church, there is a question I’d like to ask you first, here, in the office of His Holiness.” He walks slowly but with determination to Langdon. “Do you believe in God, sir?” Langdon replies, “Father, I simply believe that religion—” The priest who is also behind the murderous plot counters, “I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believe in God.” The priest’s tone of voice conveys a sincerity and the high value he puts on the living God as transcending what people have said and written about the deity. McKenna’s distinction is valid, given Augustine’s likening of revelation coming to us as though through a smoky, stain-glass rather than lucid, transparent window. Even in terms of receiving divine revelation from the Source, it behooves us mere mortals to have some humility, rather than to presume to have knowledge rather than belief. That we are weak as judges of the souls of other mortals should go without saying, but the film makes precisely this point anyway.  

Even though McKenna is severely flawed in terms of his character and values and has clearly committed a mortal sin (that of murder), a respect for holiness that transcends us and our realm is also evident in the man; he is not abjectly evil, in spite of the horrendous nature of his crimes. McKenna’s piety is also palpable when Langdon returns to request access again to the archives. Langdon is wearing a lent black suit of a priest because the professor’s original short was bloodied when he and Vittoria were desperately trying to save the life of one of the Cardinals in Vatican Square. McKenna asks, “Professor, would it surprise you that those clothes suite you?”  Langdon answers honestly, given his atheism, while almost laughing at the thought of him as a Roman Catholic priest. “It would surprise the hell out of me,” he replies with a smile. The priest’s insight into the professor’s obvious benevolentia and related compassion in endeavoring unrelentingly to help the Vatican and its four kidnapped Cardinals is shared by Cardinal Strauss in the last scene of the film in which the Cardinal, Langdon, and Vittoria are watching the newly elected pope, the Cardinal whom Langdon has physically rescued underwater in a public fountain. That pope has selected the name Luke—the first pope to be so named—to symbolize the compatibility of science and religion. “The world needs both,” Strauss explains to Langdon and Vittoria, two intellectuals. McKenna has not succeeded in placing the Church as a skeptical check on the progress of science; ethical injunctions without express divine command are firmly in the ethical domain anyway, and the Church has more than enough on its plate theologically. Wisely, Strauss shifts the conversation from science to the theological matter of whether God has sent Langdon to help the Church. Putting a hand on one of Langdon’s shoulders, the Cardinal says, “Thanks be to God for sending someone to protect his Church.” Langdon demurs. “I don’t believe he sent me, Father.” Not missing a beat, Strauss says with a smile, “Oh, my son, of course he did.”  At that point, the new pope, now fully vested in liturgical garb, nods favorably to Langdon. Were the moment of being dressed to be presented to the world as the next successor of Peter not so august and hopefully even humbling, the new pope would doubtless be effusive rather than so reserved in thanking the atheist who had immediately jumped into the fountain to save that Cardinal’s life even though none of the other bystanders did so until it was almost too late.

The deluded paid-assassin and Commander Richter are portrayed in considerably less ambiguous terms than Langdon and even McKenna, yet even they are shown to evince some piety. Richter values the compassion expressed institutionally by his Church to the poor and sick, although such compassion is less important than that which is directed to a person’s detractors and enemies given the selflessness in such compassion. As for the utterly uncompassionate, callous, and even cruel assassin, at least he is aware that God will not be happy with what he is about to do—namely, brand and kill the four Cardinals. Even though McKenna is behind the squalid plot, at least the assassin does not have the hubris with which to commit his spirit to God after having branded and murdered three men. Just before setting himself on fire, McKenna prays to God, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” Good luck with that. That line doubtlessly works for Jesus in the Gospels, as his preached and demonstrated ethical compassion is rooted in theological agape, which is selfless love.

McKenna is not without piety, however, both in genuinely asking Langdon whether he believes in God and in valuing the role of the Church as a check on the hubris of Man; the priest’s delusion is in believing that his means justify this end. The reproachment of the dead pope, whom McKenna has poisoned, with scientists does not justify murdering that pope, and so it is fitting that the new pope selects the name of a physician (Luke). McKenna’s foiled plot to become the next pope in order to keep the Church as a check on, rather than an accomplice to scientific progress as if it were inherently at odds with the dignity of humanity—as if this were a religious rather than an ethical concept—is also unjustified both in religious and ethical terms (which are distinct).

McKenna is likely mistaken in assuming that God will accept his spirit, but such a matter is not for us mere mortals to know. Even though we can have more confidence that the assassin correctly anticipates rejection by God for what that man is about to do, we do not know how God would treat that man’s humble acceptance of being damned. The same attitude is expressed by one of the criminals being crucified alongside Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. We deserve our fate, the man says to the other guilty man being crucified, whereas Jesus has done nothing wrong. “We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” (Luke 23:41) In the film, the assassin is in the likeness of the penitent thief, whereas McKenna, a priest, is the main culprit behind the murderous plot and yet presumes that God will take his spirit. Meanwhile, Langdon is an atheist whose compassion to a religious organization is unrelenting while Commander Richter is a “deeply spiritual man” who repeatedly insults Langdon even when he is pleading to help. “Hey, fellas, you called me,” Langdon says in utter astonishment at Richter’s formidable pushback. The film, by the way, is in color rather than black and white, as is the human condition itself.

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1. My use here of the word, immediately, is no accident, kein Zufall, for I am subtly alluding to the meaning and significance of the word as used in the Gospel of Mark. Immediacy in responding to the call of Jesus bears religious significance in that Gospel. In the film, the Vatican policeman who comes to Harvard to fetch the professor at 5 a.m. tells him as he is apparently thinking over whether to go, “Let’s not pretend you have not already decided to come.” This is one of the best lines in the film. That Langdon had been in an “entanglement” with the Church and yet he responds to the plea immediately to help qualifies him as what the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984), a Jesuit priest and theologian, labels an “anonymous Christian.” In contrast, the head of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard, who is said to be “deeply spiritual,” resents rather than is compassionate to Langdon, and therefore hardly resembles a disciple, at least as far as a human such as myself can assess. That’s the idea.

2. While back at Yale for a semester in my capacity as an alumnus auditing a seminar on Jonathan Edwards in the Beineke Library (rare books), I was stunned at not just the presence of so many security guards, but also their unnecessarily (and uncalled for) hostile demeanor towards even Yale professors, not to mention students and others. To be sure, the library contained some very rare old books. In the seminar, the excellent professor treated us to an original book by Newton, given to Yale by its author, a letter written by George Washington to one of Edwards’ sons, and Edwards’ own original writing of his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Nonetheless, the guards subcontracted by Yale were “over the top” in regarding Yalies and visitors alike as if we were criminals bent on ripping out pages at any moment. Were someone like Vittoria, the character in the film, to rip out a page of a pamphlet in the Beineke library, there’s no telling how savage the guards would be to her vocally and even physically, taking liberties as if they were vested with the police power to make an arrest. Yale has even been referred to by students (and even faculty) as having its own private police state, wherein even subcontracted security guards presume to act as if municipal police; the toxicity alone belies or undercuts an otherwise academic atmosphere on the campus.

Awake

Although no overtly theological or religious material is in the film Awake (2007) because greed itself is the real antagonist, idolatry (self-idolatry actually) can be imputed, and in this sin the underlying sordid  foundation of the vice can be grasped. In in his letter to the Colossians, Paul ends his list of sins with greed, “which is idolatry.”[1] The easiest way to interpret this classification of greed being a case of idolatry is to assume that the idol is money (or wealth). The idolatry of wealth is enunciated and perhaps even personified by Gordon Gekko in the film, Wall Street (1987). No amount of personal wealth is enough. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” greed being the desire for more. Gekko delivers the line during his speech to Teldar Paper stockholders. Left unsaid in his speech is the tremendous toll that greed can take not only on other people, but also oneself, for a very circumscribed, as to benefits, selfishness goes along with greed and may even be its foundation. A greedy person would presumably think nothing of betraying a friend if doing so would increase the person’s wealth, especially if no future financial benefit is likely from the friend. To be sure, greed need not be oriented to more money; a selfish person addicted to sex (i.e., in the sense of being regularly driven to have more of it) would have no problem betraying a even a spouse, and even demand of him or her that the addict’s outside sex with others, even with a romantic connection, must and even should be accepted in order to stay. Such extreme, unrepentant callousness can apply to greed for money too, and this is evinced in Awake. The vice of greed as ultimately self-idolatry has an evil connotation, given how much pain and thus harm self-idolatry can easily inflict on other people. The virtue of self-sacrifice is farther than the farthest star from such greed, and the sheer pathos of distance between self-sacrifice out of love and self-idolatry as greedy selfishness is palpable in the film, which arguably intimates and may even stimulate religious sensibilities without being explicit or preachy.

The film’s plot centers on the billionaire young adult, Clay Beresford, and his girlfriend, Samantha Lockwood. She plays him like a fiddle under the subterfuge of love. Actually, she is conspiring with Jack Harper, a heart surgeon, and two other medical personnel because she knows that Clay has a weak heart and will need a transplant. She wants Clay to choose Jack to operate because Jack would kill Clay during the transplant operation and Samantha would inherit (and pay off the other culprits). Jack has been delaying a heart for Clay until he marries Samantha so she could inherit millions. Not by coincident, Clay marries her just hours before a heart is suddenly available. Jack is ready and waiting at the hospital; he assumes Samantha would follow through in sharing her inheritance with the other culprits if he kills Clay. Although greedy himself, he does not fully grasp the true nature of greed.

Fortunately, Lilith Beresford, Clay’s very insightful mother, discovers the plot, including Samantha’s complicity in it, during the operation. Lilith calls her friend, Jonathan Neyer, a famous heart surgeon whom she had been wanting to perform the operation anyway, and the good doctor shows up just in time to find Lilith dead in the hospital waiting room and then transplant her heart into Clay, who is being kept alive in the operating room artificially. Lilith leverages the requirement that her permission is necessary for the “plug” to be pulled on her son; she intentionally refuses to give her consent to play for time to give Neyer time to arrive and take charge. He does just that, and is able to save Clay’s life. Interestingly, Clay is awake during the operation and so he discovers the plot as it is unfolding in the operating room, but he is paralyzed by the anesthesia (but he can feel the pain from his chest being cut open; his inner dialogue and screams make that scene very skippable). Even though he has an out-of-body experience, it is his mother who is in a position to report the crime. In spite of that experience, and the dialogue in an august, dark living room between him and his mother when he is on artificial life-support and she is dead, no religious implications are in the film. Whether the metaphysics of the film allow for the afterlife is an open question. The main thrust of the film lies in contrasting virtue with vice, and differing relationships with selfishness that they have.

Clay lives due to the self-sacrifice of his mother, which is antipodal to the abject greed and selfishness of the culprits, who are arrested before they can leave the hospital. In the film, a second virtue besides self-sacrifice out of love is salient. A strong need for justice is implicit in the attention given to whether the culprits get away with their attempted murder for money. In watching the film, the human instinctual urge for greed almost can be expected to kick in. It is indeed a powerful urge in the human psyche, and the film presents the value for justice as being in direct conflict with greed, another powerful urge. In contrast to both of these urges, the intention to sacrifice oneself is hardly overwhelming and in fact may take considerable will-power. Justice that is actually vengeance is especially sordid; justice desired by third-parties who are unharmed can also go along with selfishness, but is less toxic, ethically speaking, due to the pathos of distance. In the film, Lilith reports the culprits not only as vengeance, but also because she does not want her son to die, but she is hardly a distant witness reporting a crime out of a sense of justice itself. Her self-sacrificial act in dying so Clay could have her heart ranks higher than her pursuit of justice, which, like greed, is consistent with selfishness.

Mercy can be interpreted as a higher, unselfish form of justice. How many husbands would urge a jury to be merciful to a rapist of one’s wife or daughter? In the film, were Neyer to be able to use the original transplant heart even after Sam (whose true identity is a nurse at that hospital) gave it a fatal shot, such that Lilith would not commit suicide, would Lilith be inclined to appeal for mercy for the culprits after having reported them? Perhaps mercy should replace justice in Aristotle’s four virtues, or at least be a fifth, which trumps justice. Under no circumstance should greed and vengeance be added.

Regarding the culprits in the film, Jack Harper is the least culpable because his conscience has considerable sway because he has gotten to like Clay even though the “friendship” was for Clay a means to convince Clay to choose Jack rather than another surgeon to perform the transplant operation. Even so, Jack took a liking for Clay, and so Jack came close to refusing to kill Clay on the operating table. Samantha, who is actually a nurse at that hospital, convinces Jack to go along; she grabs the needle and ruins the heart for Clay. After the operation, while police are searching through the hospital to arrest Jack, his assisting surgeon Puttnam, and nurse Carver, Samantha refuses to go with Jack. His reaction may suggest that he intends to marry her, and he exacts vengeance (not justice!) by showing her that he has kept the needle with her fingerprints on it. The police are then shown arresting her. Jack’s vengeance has been satisfied and we may even feel that she deserves it, for in her selfish greed, she has betrayed Jack romantically, and would almost certainly do so again by refusing to share her inheritance were he able to evade the police pursuing him. She severs ties with all of the other culprits as soon as she discovers that the police want to arrest them. To the extent that a greedy person can be trusted only by people who can still be used for more money, the close link between greed and selfishness is established. Samantha illustrates this link in how it can play out in promises being broken all too easily. How very distant her mentality is from that of Lilith’s self-sacrifice. 

To be sure, Lilith doubtlessly does not want to live in grief of her dead only son, but she gives her life, and this runs against the selfish urge of self-preservation, which Thomas Hobbes argues in Leviathan is fundamental to human beings. In fact, Christians may legitimately infer the leitmotif of the Gospels as being highlighted the film’s highest virtue of voluntarily laying down one’s life for another out of love, so indirectly, not just Clay’s out of body experience and the dialogue “somewhere” with his mother when he is unconscious and she is dead hint at a religious dimension in the film’s story-world. Subtilty can be more revealing than being preached at.

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[1] Col. 3:5 (NIV)