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)

A Ghost Story

As if the macabre specter of a ghost, albeit in a white sheet with two black eye-holes, were not enough for a spooky film, David Lowery endeavored to shoot and edit his 2017 film, A Ghost Story, using a relatively fast 33 frames per second in shooting the ghost moving, and editing without music so the story-world’s supernatural element would be subtly apparent. Although a prognosticator delivers a long philosophical monologue at a party somewhere in the middle of the film, Lowery does not characterize the meaning of the film in terms of that monologue’s point that the universe will eventually end so a person should live each day as if it were the last day of one’s life. Of course, none of us need worry about the universe burning up any time soon, so from that standpoint we can expect to live full lives without being nihilist on a daily basis. Fortunately, the meaning of the film, Lowery states in an interview, is not to live each day as if it is your last day. A more interesting question is whether the film is an exponent of nihilism as the real, ontological state of existence, or whether human fulfillment can fill human hollowness with the fullness of experienced life. Moreover, does a supernatural dimension, such as a heaven, exist such that human souls can depart from the human condition and even loved ones while still existing (after death). In other words, does holiness transcend hollowness? The latter may pertain more to the phenomenal realm of lived human existence than to the noumenal realm of things as they are in themselves, and thus what each of us really is.

The film’s plot centers around a young married couple, unnamed, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. The husband dies early on in the film in a car-crash in front of the couple’s house in the country.  He bypasses going to heaven and instead returns to their house as a ghost. His widow does not lose time in moving out, however, and it is clear from his anger (as a ghost!) that he is not at all happy about her leaving. Eventually, he gets the message, literally and figuratively, that she will never return. Not showing the crash—only smoke from his car leading the camera-shot slowly to his head resting on the steering wheel—or the funeral singles Lowery out as a film-maker who thinks outside the box in movie-making rather doing things the usual, formulaic way; there have certainly been too many of those movies. Relatedly, the philosophical dimension that he brought to the film goes beyond even what he consciously intended, and is in sync with his efforts to subtly convey the atmosphere of the film.

For example, in subtly elongating camera shots at the end of a few scenes and thus holding the viewers to a fixed picture within which nothing is happening, Lowery makes us uncomfortable because he breaks the “rule” on camera-shot length, which on average had been getting shorter perhaps to appease the proclivity of audiences from the mid-1970s for titillating, quick-action disaster flicks as if they were displays of fireworks in constant finale. Lowery challenges audiences to “sit still,” which, if it triggers psychological discomfort, is the fault of the viewers rather than the filmmaker. This was not Lowery’s intent, however. Rather, holding a camera-shot at the end of a scene long enough for the holding itself to become transparent to viewers allows them to feel the emptiness and lonely isolation of Rooney Mara’s character in the house. Perhaps that her husband, while alive, is emotionally stunted or unavailable contributes to her day-to-day dreariness. The stationary shots also point a spotlight on time itself, not only as it is perceived by the bored wife, but also that time is different for a ghost than for us. Both the young wife’s loneliness and the ghost’s expansive sense of time can be thought of as nihilist. Her boredom itself can be expected to feel like emptiness. Regarding the ghost, from our standpoint, the length of time that the ghost stays in the house, even far into the future and going into the past, would be intolerable. Although the ghost may experience the long expanse of time spent in the house, especially when it is empty, as fleeting, from our standpoint so much time without any action would be intolerable. Likewise, movie-viewers looking at a very long, non-moving camera shot of a scene in which nothing is moving may feel a sense of suspended animation, as if becoming were necessary for being and so just being without becoming is merely nihilist nothingness. A narrative must have a strong sense of becoming or people will lose interest in following the story and move on to do something else. We are doers even if our very being is not based in functionalism.

To the ghosts in the film, time not only is perceived differently, but also is fundamentally different in that time-travel is possible. Even in filming the husband-ghost at a different film-speed so to show a supernatural quality to what otherwise looks like a child’s Halloween ghost-costume, Lowerly didn’t fully grasp the implication that time itself is different to a ghost. This idea, Lowery said, “plays into the thematic parts of the movie so thoroughly, I should have realized that on set. I’m always surprised at how many of these things are just completely—there are amazing details in every movie that you would expect to be conscious decision, but are purely happy accidents and unconscious inspiration.”[1] Such inspiration applies here to a director’s own thinking on philosophy—in the case, of time—applied to his film. Philosophically, a different metaphysic has implications for time itself as well as how it is perceived. Accordingly, a philosophical analysis of a film can and should go beyond a filmmaker’s own intentions and even thinking on philosophy as it bears on the film. Because the story-world of a film, whether in a director’s head or on the screen, is wholistic in supporting a narrative, everything that contributes to philosophy in a film may not be consciously thought out by a film’s filmmakers and yet be valid.

By philosophy, I do not have in mind mere (i.e., unphilosophical) psychology, such as applies to characters in a film. For example, the husband-ghost in the film is only rarely a doer; he periodically “plays” with the lights, pounds on a piano when he goes back in time by falling off a skyscraper in the future, and throws dishes on the floor of the kitchen to scare off the new family that moves in after his widow moves out. Even though he is in a supernatural dimension that is separate from our mundane dimension, the ghost can have physical, or empirical impact in terms of physics. We can thus go beyond the fact that ghosts can apparently feel emotion in the film to grasp the metaphysical relationship between the realm of ghosts and of living people.

Going further, perhaps the rareness of the ghost’s functionality empirically is related to why time is different for the ghost. Doing, or function, hardly captures what it is for a ghost in the film to exist. Functionalism falls short in capturing existentialism. The very human notion of living so to work rather than working so to live is refuted, or simply does not apply to ghosts in this film because they spend so much time “standing” around even if the passage of so much time eludes their notice because time passes differently for ghosts. Time may pass quickly when we are having fun (or are busy at work), but for ghosts in the film, the speed of time may be different, as well as the ability to change time-frames (i.e., jump far into the future instantly and then go back in the past). That we easily get bored, even when a camera-shot is held longer than usually to end a scene, does not necessarily mean that the husband-ghost was bored in the empty house because of the sheer amount of time involved. Yet from our standpoint, we posit boredom onto the ghost because it is difficult for us to get beyond our vantage point to grasp the otherness of another. Feeling like life is empty—that it is really nothingness—may be partly why the wife/widow perceives days going by so slowly; such a sense of nihilism may even result in suicide, which, absent any heaven or hell, can be thought of as a fast track to nihilism sans even one’s own being, or existence. Suicide obviously does not apply to ghosts as they are already dead (yet they seem to feel emotions, have intentions, and can even throw dishes!). Existence after death may be an oxymoron.

In addition to existentialism (ontology), however, philosophy of religion and even a bit of theology makes its way into the film, for we (and the ghost) get a glimpse of heaven, or at least its gateway. This has major implications for the nihilist, dank atmosphere that runs throughout the film and thus seems absolute but is actually not foundational to human existence. A few minutes after getting up from the physical body in the hospital’s morgue, the ghost walks down a hall and pauses upon seeing a brief opening to heaven, a portal that is represented as a very bright, home-film-screen-sized square of light that opens momentarily on a wall. The ghost passes on heaven, and instead heads to the house, presumably to be with his widow. Although not explicitly or even implicitly linked, that heaven exists relativizes the isolation of the wife/widow, whose nihilism may not have the last word in her existence. That the portal opens as if “on cue” suggests furthermore that some “intelligence” or being having intention and thus a will exists as a common denominator with respect to the realms of ghosts and living persons. Already in the film, the widow, whose desire to move is clear at the film’s beginning, hires movers, packs up, and drives away, with her satisfied facial expression being shown in the translucent sunlight. She is headed to a brighter future and will not miss that house, and maybe not even her dead husband for long as he had evinced the emotional absence of a ghost even during the marriage. The husband’s ghost is not happy about her decision to move away, but it is only when he finally opens a note that she has sealed in wood paneling in the house that he “gives up the ghost,” and the sheet collapses. The ghost next door had just done the same thing when that ghost finally realized that the person being waiting for would never return, for the house had just been torn down. Therefore, the note left by the widow was probably one of closure—of saying farewell to the house, and thus to the ghost in it. Indeed, she would never be back; we know this because the ghost remains in the house far into the future, beyond even the time when the house is torn down and is replaced by a skyrise office building. We can conclude that the continued existence of ghosts here among the living, rather than being in heaven, is predicated on the hope of continuing on with a loved one. But lest it be forgotten, wedding vows include the words, till death do us part. The husband-ghost is suddenly faced with having to accept the finality of the end of a relationship, and thus he “gives up the ghost” and presumably takes heaven up on its offer. In reading the note, he lets go of the hope he has had in seeing her again, but the resulting nihilism may be replaced with the fullness of heaven. The ghost presumably finds peace in finally accepting the finality of the end of his relationship with his wife (now widow). If so, then nihilism does not have the last word not only for his widow, who may remarry but has at least moved on from the emotional isolation that she has known in that old house with her husband, but also for the ghost, who has finally given up the ghost by accepting the finality of a relationship that wasn’t very intimate anyway.

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1. Tasha Robinson, “A Ghost Story Director David Lowery on How Technology Fixed His Lonely Ghost,” The Verge (theverge.com), July 14, 2017 (accessed July 22, 2026).

Valkyrie

Claus von Stauffenberg was a Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008 film, Valkyrie, chronicles the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly. Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of religion is ill-suited to the political drama.

Lest it be concluded that God is against political dictatorship itself, and thus divine favor rests instead with democracy, efforts to apply religion to politics evaluatively come rife with pitfalls because the two domains are distinct; I would even say that the religious domain is unique, given the nature of distinctly religious transcendence. In reference to democracies, lest they be supposed to represent the Kingdom of God on Earth, it is notable that the U.S. dropped the first two atomic bombs on inhabited cities, and Israel committed a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and in 2026 its sitting prime minister even announced that he would run for re-election! The human condition is indeed far removed from the gods and their Valkyrie.

In the scene in which Stauffenberg presents his revised Valkyrie plan to Hitler for his signature at Hitler’s mountain retreat, Hitler asks him, “You know your Wagner, Colonel? The Valkyrie: handmaidens of the gods, choosing who will live and who will die, sparing the most heroic from an agonizing death. One cannot understand National Socialism without knowing Wagner.” Perhaps the implication is that the Valkyrie save Nazi heroes on the battlefield from agonizing deaths, and, moreover, that the Nazi Party is geared to esteeming heroes as they were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as strong, courageous conquerors, and, perhaps also by implication, riding society of the weak, whose very existence brings down the strong, if the statements by Joseph Goebbels and Hitler at the dinner table in the bunker in the film, Downfall (2004), accurately reflect Nazi ideology concerning strength and weakness: most notably, the eradication of the weak is necessary for the strong to be strong. Although seemingly drawing on Nietzsche, his philosophy merely counsels that a pathos of distance be maintained between the self-confident strong and the resentful weak who seek to beguile the strong. Nietzsche does not advocate that the weak be eradicated. Furthermore, unlike Hitler in Valkyrie, Nietzsche does not posit divine help via handmaidens for the strong; neither does Nietzsche claim that divine wrath is directed against the resentful weak who seek nonetheless to dominate even the strong. As for Hitler’s reference to heroes, it is not clear that Wagner’s Valkyrie would help Nazi “heroes” escape agonizing deaths because such a claim assumes that those heroes really were heroes rather than villains. The appropriation of religion is thus fraught with difficulties, given self-interest, ideology, and the limits of our ability to know the wills of the gods, especially as pertaining to political events. It is best to leave the gods out of our human internecine conflicts rather than conveniently assume that the Valkyrie favor one side or the other.

Given the horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, the Christian motif of redemption is more difficult to avoid even in the political context. Speaking in a bathroom to General Erich Fellgiebel to enlist his help in the plot, Staffenberg reminds his compatriot, “You were involved in a crime against your country long before you met me. There may still be time to redeem yourself. Only God can judge us now.” Redemption would come by helping rid Germany of Hitler’s rule. Although redemption by killing Hitler seems obvious enough, is religious redemption—and the ensuing sentence regarding God as judge means that the redemption being referred to here is indeed religious in nature—really fitting with respect to a person having been unpatriotic? What about the unpatriotic protests in America when the U.S. was bombing Cambodia in the Vietnam conflict in the late 1960s through 1974? Because that conflict was premised on a lie involving the Gulf of Tonkin, unblinking patriotism may have been cause for redemption. In actuality, God may think little or nothing either way of our notions of patriotism and our political protests. Again, God may be quite distant from our notions of political good and bad, even if the Nazi and Israeli atrocities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, seem pretty cut and dry as state-sponsored evil against people conveniently deemed “subhuman.” Perhaps from God’s perspective, we are all subhuman, or, in Nietzsche’s phraseology, human, all too human. Hence the political domain can be distanced from that of religion, in that the former reeks of human pride and thus presumptuousness, whereas the latter goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion and is thus not centered on us.

Ben-Hur

By 2026, the world hardly needed any convincing regarding the strident zeal for endless vengeance in the Middle East, given the genocide still occurring in Gaza against the Palestinian people. In 1945, the world had needed no convincing on just how severe, and at what tremendous scale, state-sponsored (and engineered) hatred against a people deemed “subhuman” could be. The 1959 film-version of Ben-Hur is saturated with the desire for vengeance, with the antipodal motive of forgiveness only being shown as a more powerful, and thus stronger, phenomenon at the end of the film when Judah Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are spontaneously cured of leprosy at the very moment in which Jesus dies on the Cross. Only in aiding Jesus with water on his arduous way to the Cross does the Jewish man, Judah, realize the value of the suffering man’s righteous, unmerited suffering, especially relative to the value of even satisfied vengeance. At the moment of his death, Jesus, freed of a mortal body, cures the two women as a result of Judah’s change of heart. The message is that forgiveness wins over resentment and vengeance from a spiritual standpoint.

Prior to the period shown in the film, the wealthy Ben-Hur family took in and raised the Roman boy, Messala. So, it is with a sense of utter ungratefulness that as an adult and a Roman official that Messala turns on Judah for refusing to divulge the names of dissidents by banishing him to work in as a rower in the Roman navy for five years and sending Judah’s mother and sister to prison and then to a leper’s colony. Fortunately, Judah saves a Roman general from drowning in a battle-at-sea and is rewarded by being adopted by the general and given Roman citizenship. Judah has the wherewithal to return to Jerusalem to challenge and vanquish Messala in a chariot race. Even after Messala dies from being injured by Judah’s chariot during the race, Judah is still not satisfied—still not free of his resentment. He walks by as people are gathering to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which causes Balthasar to remark, “You are choosing death.” This intriguing line can be unpacked.

Even vengeance satisfied, albeit with Judah’s mother and sister still suffering from leprosy, is death—of the spirit—whereas the qualities valued by Jesus in his sermon represent a freed up spiritual life. Interestingly, were Balthasar to deliver the line to Judah as Jesus is dying on the Cross, the allusion to death could be taken literally, given the soteriological meaning of the Passion Story. Specifically, the salvific meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection is that the vicarious, voluntary sacrifice pays off original sin and thus reconciles humans with God. Literally walking past Jesus on the Cross would connote the choice of death rather than eternal life. It is interesting that Balthasar remarks that Judah is choosing death in refusing to stay to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. The death is figurative, in that Judah is still buried in resentment because his mother and sister are still ill as a result of Messala’s punishments. As for Messala, in turning on, in utter betrayal, the generous family that had raised him, he can be reckoned as spiritually dead, and his literal death occurs before he can let go of his chackles. Judah takes considerable time, but, unlike his adopted-brother, Jesus’s example of selfless agape-love even amidst severe suffering sinks in and softens Judah’s harden heart.

Before Messala’s death at the hands of Judah in the famed race, Judah is rebuffed in his zeal for vengeance by Ester, who, having heard Jesus preach, tells Judah that a young rabbi has said that “forgiveness is greater, and love is more powerful than hatred.” Later, just before the horse race in which Judah intends to kill M, Judah prays, “God forgive me for seeking vengeance, but my path is set. Into your hands I commit my life. Do with me as you will.” The request to be forgiven is a lie because Judah himself has decided that his path towards exacting retribution is set. Judah is not committing his life to God in any sense, and is again lying when he says God can do with him what God will. In actuality, Judah is very much in the driver’s (or chariot’s) seat concerning what he will do during the upcoming race.

Judah goes on to win the race and, in the process, he has killed his nemesis who has so unfairly subjected Judah to years of severe hardship and suffering simply because Judah would not betray his fellow Jews. The presiding Roman official remarks at the end of the race that the spectators have made Judah the victor their god, albeit just for the time being. Drunk with having exacted revenge, Judah is still of a hardened heart when he leaves the track and walks past Jesus, who is shown atop a hill in the distance—and not shown frontally in a close-up—just as he is just about to give his famed Sermon on the Mount. Judah is still hardened, nevertheless, because his mother and sister still have leprosy as a result of having been in a dank prison-cell for five years. As his dying nemesis says to Judah just before dying after the race, “The race continues.”

In witnessing Jesus struggling physically and mentally as he is being prodded and whipped by Roman guards no the way to be crucified, Judah is taken back. “What did this man do to deserve this?” Judah asks out-loud. That is the man who helped Judah with water when Judah was under extreme duress. It is not suffering itself that is given positive significance, but, rather, the willingness to take on the sins of others by suffering what they should by all rights suffer. The silent strength evinced by the suffering man who seems so weak suddenly is clear to Judah, who can now free himself from the chains of his own resentment. Ironically, letting go of resentment owing to the ongoing suffering of his mother and sister ends their suffering. He lets go of his resentment prior to the miracle healing that removes the ongoing reason for the resentment.

The miracle itself is important because it shows that in the story-world of the film, as in that of the Gospels, Jesus is the Son of God. Esoterically (i.e., the following is optional reading), the noetic significance of the religious title is dwarfed by the ontic significance of spiritual freedom over spiritual captivity, as evinced by Judah Ben-Her in the film as he offers Jesus water on the way to the Cross over having felt himself internally compelled to pass by Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.

Whereas the sort of explicit power evinced by Messala and the ship-galley task-masters, and, moreover, the Romans in Jerusalem even against Jesus on the way to the Cross, is quite visible, the power of letting go of vengeance and even offering compassion to detractors and even enemies is silent yet paradoxically stronger. The litmus test for Judah has finally to do with which of the two types of power he values more in the sense of which is stronger, and thus has more worth in itself. The relevant death is not physical, but, rather, spiritual, as per the human instinct for freedom, which Nietzsche ironically calls the will to life, or will to power, as ultimately felt best in overcoming (i.e., mastering, not repressing!) one’s most intractable instinctual urge, such as that of vengeance.  

Civil War

In the film, Civil War (2024), Texas and California have “tecaexited” the U.S., to use the European recondite ideological parlance for secession that began with “Brexit” in order to evade “seceding from the Union.” The U.S. president in the film repeatedly lies to the public that the secessionists are on the run; in actuality, as the film progresses, the three journalists, Lee, Joel, and Sammy, along with their young protégé, Jessie, eventually witness up-close the rebel military conquering the White House in order to shoot the president in the Oval Office. The film provides only scant clues as to the reason for the secession; the rebel who shots Tony, a friend of the three journalists, obviously detests foreigners and delights in “real Americans,” such as are from Colorado and Missouri. This could be a reference to Trump’s “MAGA” movement, so the film is possibly playing out Trump’s followers revolting; historically, on January 6, 2021, some of them rioted, though admittedly did not as a revolt so to topple the U.S. Government, but rather to make a statement by temporarily stopping Congress from counting the States’ respective electoral ballots for president. Even so, it is too great an inferential leap to conclude that the two States seeking to exit the U.S. in the film are MAGA, even though MAGA ideology and the “woke” ideology clashed in early (and mid) 2020s when the film was being put together. Rather than being about contending, violently clashing ideologies, the film is about how violent our species is when not suppressed by an overarching police presence that can act as a deterrent.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century European political philosopher, argues that in order to stave off a short, nasty and brutish life filled with recurrent threats of theft and violence, a person, together with the others, must cede all political (and even theological interpretive) sovereignty to a governing authority, whether a king or an assembly. The only right retained even against such a power is that of self-preservation, though the sovereign has the right to put a rebel to death. Similarly, Machiavelli wrote The Prince to give rulers strategic “Machiavellian” advice in the context of political fighting so those rulers could survive in power even ruthlessly. That philosopher’s History of Florence left out such advice because the context in the book was stable rather than violent. The message of these two philosophers is that left to our own devices in a state of political nature, we can regress to our ruthless savage nature, which is always there but latent in a societal context in which a sovereign power acts as a suppressant and deterrent.

In the film, as the three journalists and the girl drive west then south from New York, ending up in Washington, D.C. to witness the secessionist army shooting its way into the White House to kill the president, indications of small-scale violence are very evident. At a gas station, a man holding a machine gun shows Jessie where two “looters,” too bloodied to be recognizable, are hanging, while still alive, out back. The man even agrees to be photographed by Lee showing him standing between the two hanging men. The subtle message is that he has nothing to fear in being held accountable for shooting the two victims as Jesse and Lee are still there to witness. Man’s savagery goes beyond just killing other humans; not even severe cruelty is sufficiently resisted if there is no fear of having to pay a price in terms of lost freedom or pain.

After Jessie foolishly switches cars through open windows as both are being driven fast and is taken prisoner by two rebels who are operating independently in having killed a truck-load of people, one of those two men shoots Tony and Bohai because they are not “real Americans.” The sheer arbitrariness of the acts to Joel causes him to momentary react angrily before suddenly realizing that the shooter is so irrational that anyone could be shot next, even Joel. Fortunately, Sammy comes to the rescue by driving the journalists’ car into the shooter, but at a cost, for the other shooter kills Sammy as he is driving away with the other journalists.

Relative to these isolated cases of wanton, unjustified violence by individuals, the coordinated military attack on the White House by the rebel army looks civilized. In fact, it is astonishing just how embedded Joel, Lee, and Jessie are with the soldiers as they are shooting at U.S. soldiers and the Secret Service agents. That the soldiers who are about to shoot the president in the Oval Office pause so Joel can get a last quote from the president suggests that the cause is political rather than just for the sake of getting to be violent and kill. In other words, the indications and instances of isolated killings in the countryside en route reveal our species violent, unimpeded nature more so than do the scenes of army units fighting against opposing units.

By implication, political movements in the early 2020s to “defund” local police departments in some of the American States seem wrongheaded, for even if police-power is too much for human nature to wield properly, human nature itself, as depicted in the film, attests that having a police department is a necessary evil that a society cannot (and should not) do without, and, furthermore, that the strictures that only being in a society can provide are also necessary, for in the proverbial state of nature, which can exist even within a society (e.g., neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago), human nature is too prone not only to violence, but also to cruelty—even to the point of enjoying it. Nietzsche argues that the origins historically of punishment lie in the debtor-creditor relationship, wherein creditors found pleasure in taking “a pound of flesh” strangely as if that pleasure from inflicting pain were equivalent and thus sufficiently compensating. Nietzsche states that the rendering of such an equivalence is “strange,” but he may simply be discounting or ignoring the savage nature of our species underneath the patina of civilized Man.

It should not be lost on the viewers, however, that glimpses of the finer qualities of human nature are included in the film. In the camp in the stadium, for example, camera shots showing people being docile, even kind to each other, are likely meant to show this contrast to the film’s leitmotif. Lee’s self-sacrifice at the end of the film in saving Jessie’s life by taking the bullet herself when Jessie is in the line of fire in a hallway in the White House attests to the sheer normative distance that exists within human nature, for, building on a famous line that is in the book, The Killer Angels, which is about the U.S. Civil War, if we are angels, then we are surely killer angels, though this does not mean that violence and cruelty exhaust human nature for we are capable of self-sacrificial love for other human beings. Though even if we are “made” to be creatures of love, still we have not managed to shake our innate penchant for violence and even cruelty. The true civil war is perhaps that which exists within each of us. 

Eichmann

There comes a point in the film, Eichmann (2007), which is based on Avner Less’s series of interviews with Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli jail, when the man who was in charge of transport to the Nazi death camps realizes that he will lose the upcoming trial and be hanged; the hitherto unemotional Eichmann instantly tears up in front of Avner Less in the small, windowless room and laments never being able to see his children again. Less points out that Eichmann has sent many children to their deaths, “but they were Jews,” Eichmann counters. The inroads into the psyche that Nazi propaganda reached was suddenly obvious, even odd. Ideology with the machinery of state as a proponent and enforcer can short-circuit the human mind without the mind being aware of its own cognitive distortions. Eichmann states, “but they were Jews” as if anyone would understand because he takes the validity of the statement as a given. Translation: Jews were not only enemies of the state; they were also subhuman. In an earlier interview, Eichmann disclaimed being antisemitic with a tone that conveys to the audience that he really believes his statement. At the very least, the mental pathology of disassociation seems to have been caused by the earlier Nazi propaganda. State ideology can indeed be mentally invasive, and this may say as much about the vulnerabilities of the human brain as the danger latent in political power than can manifest in massive states as not only war crimes, but also the more severe crimes against humanity.

Ironically, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Israelis would adopt the same subhuman stance (the stance itself being subhuman as well as regarding people deemed to be subhuman) towards the Palestinian people living in Gaza especially, but also in the West Bank (and Lebanon). Can the infliction of one holocaust be understood as an instinctual aggressive reaction on an intergenerational collective basis to an earlier one that has been inflicted on ancestors? The misfiring is obvious because the Palestinians and Germans are two different peoples, so the adage, two wrongs don’t make a right applies. Another adage reads, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” The biblical intent is to keep vengeance out of the hands of (God’s?) children. But whose Lord is that?  

Eichmann was evidently an atheist; the Nazi party was officially so. Had Eichmann regarded himself as a Christian, the man’s cognitive dissidence would have been too much even for him to ignore and manage, though admittedly the Crusades were committed by “Christians” in the name of Christ without enough dissidence for them to turn back and go home. Ironically, Eichmann had studied Hebrew, which is why, according to Avner Less in the film, Eichmann was selected to head his department that was oriented to the Jewish problem in transportation. Even though Eichmann repeatedly insists in the interviews that he was just a cog in the massive Nazi state machine, and therefore wielded no significant power of his own for which he should be held morally responsible, being the head of all the transportation to the death camps came with too much power to be labeled merely as bureaucratic.

In fact, the narrative’s pivot, or inflection point, is on Eichmann’s own abuse of power, which is to say, an abuse that he cannot claim to have been merely following orders on pain of death. He was sufficiently high in the Nazi hierarchy to have wielded power of his own and thus to be held responsible for any consequent suffering and death. Whether the latter two can become so massive and severe that even just following orders even on pain of death cannot obviate being morally responsible is an interesting ethical question without an easy answer—perhaps answering the related question of whether self-sacrifice is not only a virtue, but also a duty if many people would suffer severely and unjustly die otherwise is prerequisite. In suggesting that Indians stand up to invading Nazis were they to invade India, Gandhi advocated such a duty and even claimed that it has much moral power in resisting evil.

Although Eichmann strangely volunteers to sacrifice his life as a lesson to anti-Semites, Avner Less dismisses the offer as disingenuous. As a policeman, he is savvy. Crucially, anticipating the film’s pivot, it is clear that he is clever in detecting the nuance in Eichmann’s pattern of minimizing the fact that he took orders directly from Himmler rather than from Hitler himself. Eichmann is hiding something, and Avner Less senses this, so he immediately has his staff focus exclusively on pulling all of the written correspondence between Eichmann and Himmler that the department has. Avner Less’s abrupt shift in his investigative strategy is in line with having realized the utter futility in getting a confession from the devoted, high-ranking Nazi. Having been in the SS, Eichmann too is savvy to say something self-incriminating. Avner Less too is savvy; he notices that Eichmann covered his tracks well by having retained written documentation of the orders he was obeying. No one is perfect, however, and in giving the order that over 70,000 Hungarian Jews walk from Budapest to a death camp in Poland, Eichmann actually defied Himmler’s order that such a march not take place! Visually precise for viewers, Avner Less places the papers of both orders side by side on the desk in front of Eichmann. The two orders contradict each other—crucially with Himmler’s order having an earlier date. Eichmann, being a firm believer in the value of written documentation, can only slump silently in his chair, knowing that he had not sufficiently covered his tracks as an SS man, and therefore he would be convicted and put to death. Given the historical accuracy of the film, this means that during the entire trial, which is not depicted in the film, Eichmann knew he would be convicted and die.

The film ends with Avner Less mailing the letter than Eichmann had begged be mailed to his family. That Avner’s own father died in a Nazi camp makes the generous nature of the gesture all the more astonishing, especially given the violent protests by Israelis of the interviews happening at all, and thus of Avner Less’s involvement, on the grounds that Eichmann does not deserve even a trial, given the monstrosity of the crimes against humanity—a label that was coined at the famous Nuremburg trial.

In the film, and perhaps in the historical record too, Avner Less does not ask Eichmann why he violated Himmler’s order and gave the order to proceed with the march anyway. Perhaps Eichmann was more realistic than Himmler and Hitler that time was limited for the Nazis in November 1944, given the military progress of the Allies, so desperate means were needed to quickly kill as many Hungarian Jews as possible.  Perhaps Himmler (or Hitler) was worried so late in the war that the evidence of thousands of bodies left along the way could be used by the Allied victors after the war to prosecute the Nazis. Eichmann was likely frustrated with the slow pace with which his superiors were ridding Europe of Jewry. This is precisely why it is so strange that he repeatedly resists the label of anti-Semite in the interviews with Avner Less. Impatience with ridding Europe of the subhuman “race” is of course highly anti-Semitic, but, strangely, and here the nefarious, dangerous power of a state-sponsored ideology should be flagged for future reference, Eichmann does not appear to “connect the dots” in his (brainwashed?) mind. “But they were Jews.”

In The Reader, released in 2008—a year after Eichmann—Hanna Schmitz, a former death-camp guard on trial in Germany, astonishes the chief judge with just such a line. To the judge, Hanna’s rationale is astonishing to the point of utter disbelief that anyone could use such a warped justification for standing by while other people needlessly die. Meanwhile, to her, the justification is something that presumably anyone would simply take for granted as being entirely reasonable. The pathos of distance is incredible. To paraphrase her rationale: Of course, we let the Jewish prisoners burn in the locked church; they were our prisoners; we were responsible for them; we couldn’t just open the doors and let them escape. This line, plus Eichmann’s, reveal the visceral depth with which the propaganda of a state can insidiously damage the human mind without it having a clue as to its own warped condition. Therefore, it behooves each human being to routinely self-check for having gone too far in one’s own ideological commitments, as well as to critique the ideology itself with the understanding that no human ideology is or can be perfect, for we are human, all too human.