Anatomy of a Fall

The medium of film literally consists of “talking” pictures in succession; that is to say, sound and image. Amidst astounding technological improvements, audiences in the twenty-first century could not be blamed for losing sight of what the medium actually is. It is easy to get lost in the “bells and whistles” and miss the power simply in relating sound and visual images. It is perhaps less forgivable when directors allow themselves to get lost in the rarified computerized air at the expense of realizing the potential in relating sound and image. A strong narrative is of course also essential, and it is easy to find examples in which an orientation to creating visually astonishing eye-candy comes at the expense of creating a deeply engaging narrative. Nevertheless, here I want to focus on the power that lies in relating sound and image, both of which “move” in a motion picture (after the silent era, of course). In the film, Anatomy of a Fall (2023), the theory that sound should extenuate image to form a more wholistic unity in service to narrative meets with a counter-example. At one point in the film, the loss of an accompanied visual that goes with the sound (to be replaced by another visual) renders the continuing sound more powerful in triggering raw emotions. The point being made by the film at that point regards the viability of close-contact, long-term human relationships, given our species’ innate instinctual urges to be aggressive. After all, our closest relative is the chimp. It is possible that the “civilized” conception of marriage that became the norm presumably only after the long hunter-gatherer phase in which the vast majority of natural selection has occurred is not as congruent with how our species is “hard-wired” than we might think.

In Anatomy of a Fall, the word fall refers to not only a physical fall—that of a husband from either a balcony or an attic window (i.e., suicide or murder)—but also the decline of a marriage. As the multilevel meanings of fall hint, the film is deep both intellectually (as a mystery) and emotionally. Beyond the superficial yet gripping question of whether the wife kills her husband or whether he commits suicide lies the larger human matter of whether our species’ instinctual aggressive urges are compatible with long-term relationships in which two people are in prolonged close contact.

Having never been married myself, I have been astounded from time to time in hearing about married couples who do everything together, including in their work lives. My mother had a law practice with her second husband, and of course they lived and socialized together. When they married and announced that they would be partners of a law firm (with one poor guy as the third partner, or “wheel”), I thought even as teenager that it would involve too much “together time.” As the years passed, long after I had left home for college, I noticed my mother increasingly wanting to take solo daytrips to a nearby large city to “get away.” It was clear from her tone of voice that too much “togetherness” had taken its toll on her. He likely felt the same way, especially if I am correct that our species is not “hard-wired” to spend so much time with one person over a long period of time. On one visit, I got a glimpse of the real condition of the marriage. Nearly constant contact had seemed to extenuate arguments. After I showed the couple the long version of Cinema Paradiso (1988), in which the budding romance receives more emphasis, my mother thanked me, saying in a revealing tone, “We really needed that.” Her husband was silent, but they were sitting close together on a sofa.

It is no secret that romance, being “in love” with someone, is typically short-lived; fewer people investigate whether the residue of the desire for constant contact is consistent with human nature. Too much contact with another human being may be incompatible with our more unsavory instincts that can sometimes overwhelm us. Doing everything together is a romantic notion for people who have just fallen in love, but the reality of so much contact with the same person is quite another thing. Of course, some married couples doubtlessly really love each other, and perhaps some of these remain in love for decades. I am not contending that the instinctual aggressive urge in our biology overwhelms the instinct for emotional intimacy in every case. Constant contact, though, can try even cases in which a couple were in love at some point.

The wife in the film may never have been in love with her husband. She tells her lawyer that she married her husband because she believed he understood her by what he told her. She admits to the court that she has cheated on him, and, interestingly, she shows little empathy when asked if he was hurt when she told him. The lack of empathy is perhaps a hint as to whether she is guilty. The film highlights her lies instead.

Now we get to the crux of the matter concerning the film and human nature in the context of close relationships. In the trial, an audio-tape is played of an argument that the couple had not long before the husband’s death. A visual flashback back to the argument accompanies the tape until—and this is important—the violence begins, or, rather, the talking leaps to shouting. The sudden shift back to the courtroom matches this leap as well as that from the shouting to—just as abruptly—violence. Not being able to see it renders the incident more vivid and even real to the audience. Although less wholistic for the viewers, the effect on emotions, including fear, is greater. Hearing violence without being able to see it may trigger the primitive (reptilian) part of the brain of “fight or flight.” Seeing the source of violence may give us a greater sense of being in control of the violence; it is out there rather than possibly so near to be a threat.

At that point of the film, I noticed that the 250 people in the theatre were completely silent as we heard enraged shouts, glass breaking and a series of hard punches. Once the couple becomes violent, they are silent. Persuasion has given way to might, as if force itself could persuade. Hearing the deep thuds of the punches and claps of the slaps left me emotionally raw. It was as if the microphone were placed very near the points of contact. Seeing the violence as well as hearing it would have allowed the audience to situate the violence in space, thus eliminating the fear that the violence is indeed as up-close as it seems and therefore could encompass the viewer. Matching the visual images with the sound of the violence within a scene would normalize the violence in the context of watching any scene of a movie in which there is action and diegetic sound. The violence would be seen to be at a distance, even in spite of the up-close deep sounds of the slapping and punching.

The abrupt cessation of the visual of the argument as the sounds continue and then the coordinated end of the shouting with the beginning of the violence as if on cue demonstrates that the management sound and image is a powerful device by which raw emotions of an audience can be engaged at a deep level. Perhaps too often directors become consumed with the calls for more “eye candy” afforded by computer graphics and in so doing overlook the possibilities from cleverly relating audio to image. In other words, the basic level of the medium of “talking” pictures warrants attention.

The scene of the couple’s argument plays an important role in the narrative too, and is thus powerful intellectually. When the wife tells the judge that her husband was hitting a wall (rather than her hitting him), I was surprised that the prosecutor does not point out that the audio itself of muffled thuds hitting flesh is inconsistent with a human fist hitting a hard surface. The wife’s convenient claim is yet another hint that she is guilty, as is her lie that bruises on her arm are from brushing against a counter’s edge in the kitchen. If her husband was not hitting a wall during the argument (and hitting a wall during a violent fight seems implausible or odd even for someone considering suicide) and the counter cannot account for the bruises, then the evidence of prior violence could be taken as such by the jury.

Relatedly, I was also surprised that the prosecutor does not point out to the court that the son’s sudden realization that his father’s comments about making do once the family’s dog has died are actually made to prepare the boy for his father’s suicide. I could not find in the audio and visuals of the flashback of the boy riding in a car with his father anything that could be taken definitively to point to an intention to commit suicide. The prosecutor lapses, therefore, in failing to flag the son’s conflict of interest in wanting to protect his mother from going to jail—an event that would presumably throw the son into foster care or a group home.

Also subtly revealing is the fact that the wife is happy rather than in mourning while eating and especially drinking with her attorney at dinner after the non-guilty verdict. In fact, the two nearly kiss at one point. Back when she walks outside and sees her husband’s dead body in the snow near the house, she does not wail; in fact, she seems rather self-composed.  

The film does not reveal at the end whether the wife has murdered her husband. Nor does the audience get any indication of whether the husband repeatedly hit a wall during the argument. These “loose ends” are disconcerting, as is the chaotic music that the husband plays in the attic while his wife is attempting to be interviewed on the house’s second floor. The harsh, chaotic diegetic (sourced in the scene) sound is consistent with the out-of-control quality of human violence, and may even excite the wife enough to a physically attack her husband. This music is also consistent with the speechless audio of the violent stage of the argument. The emotional discomfort from the music pales in comparison with the emotional shock from listening to the savage violence.

That even a husband and wife can inflict on each other such violence as surpasses verbalizing a disagreement raises questions about marriage, given human nature, and, moreover, whether a person can really know another. How can a person be sure that something really is as it appears? In the New Testament, Jesus says of a couple to be married, “the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh.”[1] Does unity imply being of one nature, and, if not, can two natures who don’t really know each other be one flesh? The Council of Nicea (325 CE) decided that Jesus has one essence (ousia) and two natures (hypostasis). Those natures are distinct, yet of the same essence. Can spouses be of the same essence if they can’t really know the other’s underlying nature?

Anthropologically, we can ask whether our notion of marriage is an artificial social-construction that is not fully compatible with human nature. If we cannot completely know another human being, perhaps an all-inclusive (i.e., constant) long-term relationship that monopolizes a person’s interpersonal relations is dangerous. Even if one person could truly know another, perhaps the strictures of social convention result in pent-up emotion that at some point explodes. A couple is suddenly in the “state of nature,” where the repressed aggressive instincts can be expressed. Perhaps they can be over-expressed from all of the pent-up pressure that has built up.

The film seems to marvel at the depths to which a marriage can fall, or deconstruct. This is not to say that the film is an indictment on marriage itself. Couples who fell in love and are still in love decades later can be differentiated from couples whose loveless marriage never knew love and continues “for the children.” Even so, it might be useful to investigate the extent to which the modern social-construction of marriage is consistent with marriage during our species’ formative “hunter-gatherer” period. Has marriage become too totalitarian for our nature? By this I mean both in terms on monogamy and spending so much time together, especially if this is at the expense of doing things with other people.

So it can be asked whether monogamy was pre-historical convention. Is monogamy over decades natural, given human instincts and even reason? In their argument, the couple in the film argue over sex—one person is depriving the other of sex. As Freud pointed out, repressed eros can suddenly explode in violence. Perhaps early humans in such a situation did not have a moral or legal inhibition against getting sex from a third party, as marriage certificates and churches did not yet exist. Furthermore, perhaps the hunter-gatherer couples did not spend so much time together. The lack of modern conveniences meant that more time was taken up with work. So it can be asked: Did couples spend so much time together, especially if exclusively, during the hunter-gatherer period?

To the extent that constant, long-term contact up close with a particular person is artificial, and thus contrived as an ideal or as normal, the social construction of the modern marriage may go too far. Why do so much together? Is it wrong to take breaks by doing things with other people? Are friendships naturally (assuming that married couples are friends) so monopolistic? These are questions that the film’s example of a marriage gone so badly wrong can raise. If sound and image are managed with sufficient foresight by a screenwriter, director, and actors, then the message as regards the human condition can be felt on a deep level in addition to be reflected on. The modern conception (and praxis) of marriage in the West may be ahistoric and ill-conforming to the human being. Perhaps we do not pay sufficient regard to the social distance that our human instincts require at times. Our closest relative, after all, is the chimp. We are animals, and though social, were are more than rational beings.

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1. The Gospel of Mark 10:7-8.

The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) hinges on the root meaning of passion, which is suffering. In fact, Jesus’ body is reduced to a bloody pulp after being brutally tortured by the Roman soldiers going beyond Pontius Pilate’s order to teach Jesus a lesson but keep him alive. At least there is an order to whip Jesus; the Jewish Temple’s guards earlier took it upon themselves to repeatedly hit Jesus with fists and even with chains, and almost strangle him with a rope while arresting him. That guards, or police, especially of a religious institution, are actually garden-variety thugs might resonate with viewers who need only recall the latest news story about police brutality. The implication is that such police employees who are actually thugs are delusional if they consider themselves to be Christians. In fact, such official thugs can be understood through the prism of the film as beating Christ himself, for what you do to the least of these, you do to me. In the Gospel story, Jesus is an innocent victim, and so too are even criminals who do not warrant being attacked. As in the film, police brutality tends to occur before the victims of the abuse are convicted, and thus presumed guilty before the law. For a human being to make oneself the law incarnate or to presume oneself above the law is nothing short of impious and self-idolatrous. In short, the human nature that is on display in attacking Jesus in the story is the same as contemporary innocent victims are forced to confront in corrupt, pathological employees of police departments.

The film brutally dramatizes the price that Jesus pays in the Gospels to make up for the sins of humanity so that the chasm between God the Father and mankind can be narrowed, or even eliminated at least when the son of man (i.e., Jesus) comes on clouds to redeem the living and the dead of the faithful. I include the possibility of narrowed because even if a person’s accumulated debt has been paid off by someone else, it is possible to take on new debt as time goes by. That a Christian is to ask God for forgiveness suggests that on-going sin can widen the gap between a Christian and God. As Paul writes, faith is for naught if there is not love. Sin is the absence and antithesis of love, and thus renders faith for naught. Justification and sanctification are both necessary, according to Christian theology. In the film, the question of whether one man can pay for everyone’s sins is made explicit, and the implicit answer is that this is possible provided that the one voluntarily submits to a lot of severe suffering. Gibson brings the lofty soteriological (i.e., salvific) story in the Gospels down to earth in perhaps even overdoing the violence that is inflicted on Jesus from his arrest to his death. In so doing, Gibson makes it possible for us to relate the violence in the film to that which occurs all too often, as reported in the news. I have in mind the parallel between the aggressiveness of the Jewish and Roman “police” against Jesus in the film and the problem of police brutality even in the twenty-first century, which is supposed to be so modern and advanced in large part though due to technological advances rather than any change in human nature. Primal urges are still with us, so the need still exists to hold them accountable when they lash out against other people. In short, the film is more about human nature than Jesus’ identity as the Messiah and Son of the living God, which in turn, however, is salient enough that Gibson largely omits Jesus’ teachings altogether, and thus how a person can minimize incurring new debt by getting closer to the Kingdom of God by forgiving and even helping rude people detractors (i.e., “enemies”) on a daily basis by taking on the perspective of God in viewing even such people as creatures wholly dependent existentially on God. In other words, Gibson’s focus on the most important event in the Gospel (Passion) story comes with a cost even though highlighting the violence against Jesus by the Temple guards and the Roman soldiers can give us a template by which to perceive the unjustified violence in the world in a new light. 

In the film, the Temple guards manhandle Jesus in arresting him even though he clearly shows no indication of resistance. In fact, he has just healed a soldier’s ear, which Peter had sliced off with a knife. Jesus tells Peter to drop his knife with the adage that all who live by the sword also die by it. Just after Peter drops his knife, a Temple guard hits Peter on his face. The guard slugs like a thug in a one-sided street fight, rather than being ordered by superiors to do hit the “culprit”; thus, the guard’s act cannot be justified by appealing to his official duties. Then he joins two other guards in roughly approaching Jesus as if he were resisting arrest. He is stationary, yet the guards grab him as if he were a violent criminal trying to evade capture or even attack them after healing another guard! One of the guards even puts a rope around Jesus’ neck and yanks back severely on the rope in an aggressive fit that can only stem from personal, unsanctioned anger. On the way to the Temple, besides punching Jesus, the guards even throw Jesus off a bridge on the way to the Temple. Jesus is literally hanging by a rope when he sees Judas who is near the small bridge. I submit that Gibson goes overboard with the violence here, for throwing someone off a bridge is quite a leap from violently subduing and hitting a person under arrest. Yet considering how aggressive contemporary police at least in the U.S. can be in arresting people still presumed innocent, we should not minimize by imposing our normal sense of normalcy on the pathologically violent.

On July 4, 2023, a police patrol employee in Ohio released a K-9 dog on a driver who was standing with his hands up. The man had been pulled over after an admittedly too-long chase because of a missing “dirt tag” on his truck on a highway. The employee ignored another police employee who shouted for the dog not to be released. According to NBC News, Rose, the Black truckdriver, “can be seen on video . . . standing in front of troopers with his hands in the air. A Circleville police officer who has a dog can be heard telling Rose to ‘go on the ground or you’re gonna get bit.’”[1] This sounds more like punishment than anything practically necessary in making an arrest. The police employee primped himself up as judge and jury, as well as executioner. It is then that a trooper can be heard yelling multiple times to the trooper with the dog, “Do not release the dog with his hands up!” The trooper with the dog let it go after Rose anyway.

It is interesting, therefore, that the police employee who felt the need to punish Rose for not complying on a minor point did not feel the need to comply. Clearly, releasing the dog could not be legitimated by procedure, but, rather, pointed to a psychologically pathological intolerance for being disobeyed. Anyone who is or has been a parent knows that losing one’s temper just because a child does not immediately comply is pathological. Perhaps Rose was afraid out of his mind precisely because of the sordid, well-deserved reputation that too many police departments in America have of a thirst for inflicting violence and a lack of accountability in a sort of “brotherhood” of what are actually city employees.

Also in 2023, an off-duty Chicago policeman in Illinois violently subdued and put a knee into the back of a child whom the aggressive “adult” assumed had stolen his son’s bicycle. The kid was innocent, and the policeman’s personal anger clearly motivated the attack. It is ironic that such a man would assume so infallibly that a kid walking by a bike had stolen it. God-like powers of omniscience would hardly be deposited in a thug.

In the film, once Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin (i.e., the religious council of the Jews), a Temple guard takes it upon himself to judge Jesus as arrogant and disrespectful towards the high priest, Caiaphas, and, furthermore, the guard takes it upon himself to punish Jesus by hitting him in the face. Jesus asks why the Temple policeman hit him even though Jesus had not done or said anything evil in suggesting that the council members ask people what Jesus had taught rather than ask Jesus himself. Tightening fingers into a fist to hit a person in the face is typically done in “street fighting” by thugs and bullies, rather than being indicative of any police policy that would justify the tactic, so Jesus asks the guard why he hit Jesus. Earlier, when a Temple guard tied Jesus’ hands behind his back in arresting him, Jesus did not ask why precisely because tying hands together is procedure (both in the story and in our world). Jesus could have asked why another guard almost strangled Jesus with another rope, as such an action is not procedure and thus points to personal anger and perhaps even sadism.

Back to 2023 in the U.S., a sheriff deputy angered because an elderly black woman was recording another deputy being rough in arresting her husband for stealing a cake from a grocery store was not following procedures when he slapped the woman’s phone out of her outstretched hand, put an arm around her neck to throw her down to the pavement, and then asked her if she wanted to be hit in the face. She was not resisting the attack; she was merely telling him not to hurt her because she had cancer. His official badge and position should not blind us to the man’s motive: In first reaching to slap the phone out of the woman’s outstretched hand, it is clear that he was angry at the woman for recording the other policeman, who was also being violent in arresting a non-violent man.

At the very least, the man who threw the elderly woman to the pavement just for recording clearly had a pathological anger problem (and thus should never have been hired). He also presumably believed that he was above being held accountable, especially by the wife of a shoplifter recording the arrest of her husband.  

The woman was smart, and justified in recording the arrest of her husband. Lest it be assumed that the cameras that police in the U.S. must wear on their chests are sufficient to keep the holders from taking advantage of their weaponized position, such footage can conveniently go missing, or be blocked by other police at a scene. In 2023, for example, a police employee's camera was conveniently blocked from showing another employee hitting a Black woman in her face while she was holding her three-weeks-old baby. Her crime? She had been a passenger in a car that had a tail-light out. The police unreasonably demanded that she give her baby to them. Given the aggressiveness of those police employees, the woman's maternal instinct was appropriate. 

The arrogance of the police is evident even in the attempt to hide their own bully from view as he hits a defenseless mother because she would not give up her baby to people shouting at her. If the bully, or the two deputies who took down the elderly Black couple, thought of themselves as Christians, such a fanciful delusion itself would be enough to furnish a glaring example of cognitive distortion and dissidence and thus psychological pathology.

The police can be viewed through the prism of Gibson’s movie as attacking Jesus because of how similar the attacks by the police are to those of the Temple guards in the film in attacking Jesus who is has, as Pontius Pilate tells the Sanhedrin, has done nothing to deserve the brutality. It is not necessary to the similitude between the actual world and the story-world of the film that only in the latter is the innocent victim the Son of God. Such an equivalence is not necessary for the point that I’m making.  The dynamic of the respective brutalities is the same, crossing between screen and the world in which we live. 

The sadism of the Roman soldiers who are to whip Jesus yet do much more is on display in the film, as is the sadism of the members of the Sanhedrin who are watching. The extreme lengths to which the centurions go and the presence of supposedly pious clerics raises the question of how much punishment should be met out to someone judged by fallible human beings to be a blasphemer.

In his pontificate, Pope Francis said to journalists, “Who am I to judge” regarding gay couples. This infuriated more conservative Roman Catholic bishops and priests. Even a vicar of Christ is a human being, so any claim of infallibility can only be impious and presumptuous; the Holy Spirit works through not apart from human nature, even in the selection of a pope. Similarly, police employees are human beings, and thus not infallible in judging guilt, so doing so and then pronouncing a punishment and executing it themselves is toxic, given human nature. Such employees are not divine, and thus omniscient and omnipotent. In the film, Jesus tells Pilate that he has no power over Jesus that has not been given from above. Jesus then says that the real sinners are the members of the Sanhedrin, who sent Jesus to Pilate. These two sentences constitute an interesting idea: that the Jewish clerics went too far out in personal anger whereas Pilate is acting within a governing authority, which God establishes according to Jewish theology. It took me quite a while to understand how the two lines go together.

Caiaphas, the chief Jewish priest, is visibly enraged by Jesus’ admission that he is the Messiah and Son of the living God. Even in viewing Jesus as arrogant and impious—a perspective that assumes infallibility in knowing whether Jesus’s identity-statement is true or false—Caiaphas considers the Roman brutality in ripping Jesus’ skin to the point of him being covered with his own blood to be justified. Both the infallibility and judgement of the high priest belie any presumption he might have that he is worthy of being cleric, let alone the high priest. It is ironic that the sanctimonious, presumably divine chief priest is so angry at Jesus for claiming a divine nature along with human nature; perhaps Caiaphas is so angry at Jesus’ claim in part because he knows deep down that his own presumption is not only arrogant, but also impious, given that he is sordid, manipulative, and angry, blocks him even from asking Jesus what he means when he says he is the Son of God.

In the Gospels, the Pharisees similarly have a petty perspective in which they are fixated on quibbling over Jewish laws while missing the salience of the sort of love that is (in) God. People were not made for the laws; rather, the latter were instituted for us, Jesus says. Is helping someone, especially someone who is weak or an enemy, so bad just because the action is done on the Sabbath? In fact, such helping even on the Sabbath brings one closer to God, (by metaphor to the Kingdom of God). Similarly, does the law against blasphemy, assuming Jesus is blasphemous in claiming to be the Son of God as Caiaphas (omnisciently) concludes, justify such cruelty as is depicted in the film? In not believing that Jesus is divine, Caiaphas may think that Jesus is delusional in thinking he is the Son of God, will come on clouds to judge the living and the dead, and will sit at the right hand of the Father. Watching, and perhaps even getting satisfaction out of someone with delusions (even religious ones) being tortured can be deemed to be not only petty and vengeful, but also sadistic.

In the film, Pilate does not consider Jesus to be a threat even as a king, for the Kingdom about which Jesus preaches is not of this world. Perhaps Pilate views Jesus as a harmless dreamer, and maybe even delusional. Pilate is displeased that his soldiers have tortured Jesus so much, and pleads with the Jews that Jesus has not deserved to suffer so much. Caiaphas’ attempt to manipulate Pilate by presenting Jesus’ offense as a claim to being a king (rather than the Son of God) not having worked, the hardened heart the chief priest insists that Pilate have Jesus crucified anyway; Jesus’ suffering has not been enough!

So too, witnesses to the savage beatings of black men by police in the U.S. might say, how much suffering is enough to satisfy your lust for blood? How many bullets are needed in the body of a man who did not resist arrest? Such beatings demonstrate the endurance of primitive human nature, which, I submit, is inconsistent and incompatible with the legal power that governments at least in the U.S. give to their police employees. Only a delusional city executive or legislator would rely on Internal Affair offices in police departments, as can be seen by how flagrant the abuses are and likely were before the advent of phone cameras. Viewing the primal acts of aggression through the prism of The Passion of the Christ demonstrates just how contrary to Jesus’ example and preaching such “modern” police employees are who take advantage of their positions and society’s indifference and even enabling. The arrogant bullies will be surprised to learn that repentant innates still in prison are closer to the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately, as Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film, it “is superficial in terms of the surrounding message . . . we get only a few passing references to the teachings of Jesus.”[2] To be sure, a focus on the “central event in the Christian religion”[3] has benefits, including in being able to see police even in the twenty-first century as vicariously attacking Jesus. Actually entering the Kingdom of Jesus’ Father requires more, as another Christian film, Mary Magdalene (2018), makes clear in making that kingdom, rather than an event, the focus. Police who take advantage of societal slippages of accountability and the enabling pro-police ideology to inflict pain on others for petty, ego-bruising “insults” and yet are certain of being saved by having faith in Jesus should ponder Paul’s point that faith without love is for naught. Furthermore, faith with aggression can only be hypocrisy. Blindness might excuse such bullies, but they see and so their sin remains.

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[1] Mirna Alsharif and Ava Kelley, “’Do Not Release the Dog With His Hands Up!’ Black Man Mauled By Police Canine After Ohio Pursuit,” NBCNews.com, July 23. 2023 (accessed July 24, 2023)
[2] Roger Ebert, “The Passion of the Christ,” RogerEbert.com, February 24, 2004 (accessed July 24, 2023).
[3] Ibid.

I Am Cuba

The film, I Am Cuba (1964), consists of four vignettes that depict what Cuba was in its pre-revolutionary day beyond the wealthy gloss of the American-owned casinos. Sugarcane is sweet, but it is also of tears.  Furthermore, the film explains the revolutionary ground-swell in the individual lives of Cubans whom the American tourists didn’t see from their luxurious perches near the beaches. The film proffers a glimpse of the extreme poverty and oppression so raw that it could (and did) foment a revolutionary change of regime through amassed violence against the police-state. The abstract message ripe for political theory is that once regime-change is on the front burner at the macro, or societal level, strong interpersonally-directed emotions that stem from particular cases of injustice will have had a lot of time to build up. Indeed, the latter is the trigger for the former. Abstract political principles on governance and macroeconomic policy on the distribution and redistribution of wealth, and even principles of distributive justice are not divorced from the interpersonal level, especially as between citizens and individual police or military employees of the state. Indeed, those philosophical abstractions gain traction in a revolutionary context through the sweat and tears of individual people.

In the first short story, the exploitation of a Cuban prostitute is evinced not only in the act itself, but also, and more so, in the fact that the businessman takes the woman’s cherished crucifix for a few dollars without her consent as she is watching. The man’s disorientation as he leaves her hut to discover in daylight the squalid living conditions of the Black, poor Cubans suggests that exploitation of labor is likely endemic and hidden from the view of Cuba as the land of nice, Americanized hotels.

In the story of the sugarcane farmer, the utter precariousness of economic position is most salient. The line that there are so many tears in sugar cane even as it is so sweet reflects the arduous labor that goes into cutting the stalks. That the landowner could refuse to pay the farmer who is harvesting a crop because the landowner has presumably just made a lot of money selling the land to United Fruit company demonstrates just how unfair economic laws can be. The sheer unfairness translates into radical, emotion-laden reactions, such as the farmer immediately ceasing his work and instead burning the crop so the land owner won’t profit from the farmer’s work. The depth of the unfairness, more abstractly, is capable of triggering radical (rather than “reform”) economic and political actions, including armed revolution. That the farmer dies of smoke inhalation gives the viewer an understanding that it is possible that both interpersonal and structural or systemic power and economic dynamics may be so unbalanced, and thus unfair, that a person on the losing end may choose to end one’s life rather than go on in such a condition. Abject humiliation alone can give prompt oppressed people to risk everything to “just say no” or hit back. The attacks from Hamas against Israel on October 8, 2023 can be understood, for instance, as a people pushed against a proverbial wall with nowhere to go to the point that they were willing to take rash steps to upend the status quo. This is not to say that violence is excusable; only that it is explainable.

The indiscriminate arial bombing of another farmer’s mountainous dwelling is unfair to him and his family, especially since one of the bombs kills one of his sons. The sheer unfairness, I submit, completely changes his political position from that of non-involvement with the revolutionary army near his hut to joining up to fight. He is not fighting to improve his economic lot; he dismissed such a motive when he talks with a soldier before the bombing. He is also not fighting to avenge the loss of his son, for the tone he adopts in telling his wife that he has to go has more of a sense of duty than anger to it.

The next story naturally transitions the viewer to the macro, political level of what is based on the economic struggles and hardship of individuals such as the people living near the prostitute, the sugar-cane farmer, and the subsistence-living mountain farmer. Out of the dire economic conditions of such people, who are also part of Cuba, emanates the political conflict between a regime and a revolutionary army. By this time, as the man sings, “It’s taken you too long; I can’t forgive.” The revolutionaries will not turn back; the ferment has gone past compromise and reconciliation. The injustices have been too harsh and have been allowed to go on too long for any signs of contrition to be credible. Slaves, once having made the determination to be stars, cannot put the new wine into the old bottles. The revolutionaries are firing at the past; not to kill. But is this really so when economic injustice is so harsh that strong emotions flash quite naturally in human beings?

Enrico on the left is furious at the policeman on the right for having murdered Enrico's friend and compatriot handcuffed in police custody. The intense emotions naturally triggered by witnessing an aggressor abuse his authority are the root cause of regime change by armed rebellion. 

Enrico, a young revolutionary from university, is clearly furious at the policeman who murders a friend who is already handcuffed and in custody. The agent of the state cannot tolerate even a prisoner making political statements in public. Enrico had resisted pulling the trigger on the chief of police because the man was with his wife and kids at the time; unlike the police, Enrico has a conscience and is flexible. Although Enrico understands that the struggle is against the system, which in turn can be viewed as the past, his rage is  against a particular agent, the policeman, of the unjust and violent regime that protects the exploitation by the rich of the poor. When the policeman who shot Enrico’s compatriot shots Enrico himself, he continues on as a walking wounded not because “to die for your homeland is to live,” but, rather, out of sheer rage against the unrepentant bully-policeman. It is personal. The source of a revolution is personal.  Abstract revolutionary slogans are too abstract to motivate a person in exacting retribution, or vengeance. Enrico is finally raw rage as he walks towards the armed policeman with only a block of concrete held up in the air. Enrico's pent-up anger has finally surpassed his conscience. The audience is surely rooting for him and against the policeman. Even viewers such as myself who oppose Socialism and Communism are rooting for him, for empathy naturally sides with the victims and their allies rather than with the bullies and predators. 

In summary, I Am Cuba is not just propaganda for Socialism and Communism. All that on a human level goes on before an armed revolutionary army is formed is visualized in four short stories. So much emotional pain built up over such a long time is packed into a radical political movement that seeks to completely up-end the status quo that once such a movement has begun on the macro level, the partisan movement is very difficult to reverse. The lesson for government officials is perhaps that there is time to stave off such movements because they do not pop up overnight. Moreover, preventing agents of the state or wealthy land- or company-owners from abusing their authority and holding those who do accountable is very much in the interest of a regime, lest it eventually fall all of a sudden by armed unrest. The lesson for revolutionaries is that the shift from the particular economic/power injustices that are interpersonal to a revolutionary party or army includes adopting a broader, more abstract perspective beyond the killing to fighting against the past as represented in the ongoing status quo.

Human nature is of course an indelible part of political and economic paradigm shifts via revolutionary movements, and the abstract political platforms are rooted in interpersonal emotions from particular cases of injustice. Revolutionary politics, including abstract slogans in the film’s dialogue, such as slaves and stars, firing at the past, struggle against the system, and To die for your homeland is to live, function along with an extant revolutionary army as landing pads for individuals who, had they not been the victims of particular agents of the state or the wealthy, would have resisted joining any army and not felt the slogans, being content instead to live life as it comes in poverty.