Eyes without a Face

The film, Eyes without a Face (original title: Les Yeux sans Visage) (1960), can be taken as a demonstration of the validity of Kant’s ethical theory. Whether or not viewers have studied Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the film is a good representation that it is unethical to treat other people only as a means. Kant claims that people should always be treated also as ends in themselves. In the film, physician Génessier literally goes into innocent young women with his scalpel, using them as means in his obsession to provide his daughter, Christiane, with skin on her face. She has no skin on her face because of an automobile accident in which her father was at fault. For our purposes, the film's message is relevant. Companies literally have  human resource departments and so many states use human beings as expendable soldiers. The very notion of a soldier can be viewed as an oxymoron to the extent that beings having a rational nature are sent out to be killed. It's not like having a flee killed. The film provides us with a great service in bringing Kant’s ethic to us, if only in that we don’t to read the philosopher's recondite ethical treatise (though Hegel's books are even more difficult).

Génessier tells Christiane that everything that he is doing, all the (as he later admits) terrible things, he is doing for her good. He also says that if he succeeds, the benefit would be “beyond a price.” Whereas for Kant, reason, or beings having a rational nature (such as us), has absolute value because we use reason to assign value to other things, the devious physician treats his daughter’s good as being absolute. This difference is crucial in terms of ethics. For Kant, rational beings deserve to be treated not just as means to someone’s goal (or interest), but also as ends in themselves precisely because being rational is of absolute value. What about when we don’t think (or behave) rationally? Kant would say that we still have a rational nature, and thus are worthy of being respected by other rational beings not just as means to another’s desire.

Does Génessier use reason—does he think rationally—in removing skin from two young women’s faces and grafting the skin on his daughter’s skinless face? I contend that the father does so because he has a strategy by which to achieve the good, which for him his daughter having a pleasant life. At one point in the film, it looks like the latest skin transplant will work. He tells his daughter that he would pay for her to take a vacation so she could enjoy life after having lived so isolated for so long. He uses the young women and potentially a vacation as means to his daughter’s good, and in this way he is using reason. It is quite another question whether he is being ethical. It is easy to see that he is not an ethical man.

In short, he uses people. Besides the two young women whom he kidnaps and operates on to give their skin to his daughter, he is using Gabrielle as an accomplice and nurse; he had fixed her face, so she feels obligated to do unethical things for him. Interestingly, the police also use someone in the film. Specifically, the police inspector uses a shoplifter as bait to catch Génessier. The inspector is not very concerned about treating the woman as an end in herself, hence he puts her at risk, as if the misdemeanor justifies doing so.

Christiane is the protagonist, and even the heroine, in the film, in resisting her father’s strategy. Whereas he admits that he has done terrible things but they are justified because they serve his daughter’s good, Christiane feels guilty in her new skin during the weeks when it lasts. Génessier remarks that her face looks angelic, but she disagrees. Interestingly, she says that it seems like the experience seems from the beyond. This allusion to religion seems at first out of place, especially given her father’s horrors. But her true, internal angelic nature comes through at the end when she kills the nurse to free the shoplifter. In fact, she goes on to free the dogs and white birds. Like them, she has felt as if she were in a cage. Her father hadn’t bothered to ask her whether she consented to his sordid strategy of abducting young women for their facial skin. In the end, she walks outside, past her dead father whom the dogs have attacked. One of the white birds sits comfortably on one of her arms. She is as though an angel come to liberate the oppressed, which includes herself, and in so doing see that the wicked are punished. Divine retribution. Indeed, Kant’s formulation of his categorical imperative in which the means/ends dichotomy is salient resembles the neighbor-love of Christianity. In other words, the Golden Rule involves treating other people not just as means to one’s own designs, but, rather, how one would want to be treated. Presumably no one wants to be treated only as someone else’s means to their goals. Of course, the difference between Kant’s imperative in this formulation and the Golden Rule is that rational nature is the grounding of the former whereas the soul, and ultimately God, is the basis of the latter. Benevolentia universalis, which Augustine imparts as he emphasizes having a good will (benevolentia), is essentially love, which transcends ethics. The bad doctor Génessier does not love the young women whose skin he flays as a means to providing his daughter with a face. His love suffers for want of universalis.

In Kantian language, which relates to the Golden Rule but is not itself religious, we might say that those who have a rational nature but do not treat others of the same nature as ends in themselves, but only as means, do not themselves deserve to inhabit a rational nature. We could even suppose that it is not rational enough to devise unethical (i.e., means only) means involving beings having a rational nature, so  Génessier can be seen as not reasoning well—not partaking sufficiently in his innate rational nature—in devising his strategy; even his notion of the good fall short in being confined to his daughter’s happiness. To evoke another of Kant’s formulations of his ethical imperative, a person’s maxim or policy for action should be universalized without falling apart in absurdity. The (theory of the) good that the ethic serves should also be universal, as in the good of humanity, or, more precisely, beings having a rational nature.

But such abstractions are not necessary for film to be an excellent medium for conveying ethical dilemmas and even relating them to religious themes that transcend ethics. It is enough that the viewer sees Génessier use other human beings so atrociously and then sees Christiane reject her father’s unethical conduct even though she herself stood (potentially) to gain from it. In the rejection and the demise both of Génessier and his assistant, we see the value in Kant’s ethical dictum that we should respect other people as ends in themselves even while we are using them for our own purposes.

Even if a person stands to benefit, such as a stockholder benefitting from a higher dividend, as managers use employees without taking into account that they have lives outside of work, the ethical obligation is to oppose such unethical business conduct and favor lower dividends. I refused a doctorate in business ethics because there were no ethics courses in philosophy in the program. At the very least, a seminar on Kant should be required of anyone who claims to be a scholar of business ethics. Bentham’s utilitarianism and Rawls' theory of justice also warrant coursework. I stood to benefit from that doctorate, but I could not regard myself as a scholar of business ethics (i.e., business, government, and society). Fortunately, I switched to the humanities—to historical moral, political, and ethical thought—but I did so in their own right—treating such thought as an end in itself rather than as means to understanding business (even though I still have a BS and MBA).

The value in going beyond rational nature to treat things as having value in themselves rather than merely functionally or in line with one’s self-interest goes beyond Kant’s theory of ethics, and yet the dynamic is consistent with Kant’s theory in broad outlines. Christiane kills the nurse and thereby consciously ends any chance of getting skin because like Luther at the Imperial Diet of Worms, she finally says, in effect, Here I stand; I can do no other. I submit that even a principle can be treated as an end in itself, as partaking in absolute value, relative to egoist desire. But is it reason that assigns such value, or might feeling also be involved? Luther was probably acting on feeling, and Christiane has clearly had enough. Kant’s theory relies solely on reason; Hume’s ethic and even Adam’s Smith’s economic theory do not. 

The Private Life of Henry VIII

The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) is on the surface a partial chronicle of the marriages of King Henry VIII of England, but, underneath, the film is on the human instinctual urge of aggression. With unchecked power, such as in the case of an absolute ruler or in the international arena, the instinct can be quite dangerous. In other words, the film demonstrates just how unsuited human nature is to the political type of absolute ruler and a world of sovereign states sans something like what Kant refers to as a world federation that could provide some check and balance to wayward, aggressive states, which in turn are really just human beings.

As Henry VIII, Charles Laughton acts out the foibles that absolute power can render particularly pernicious. When Henry’s privy council informs the king that Katherine Howard, his fifth wife, has been unfaithful in having an ongoing affair with Thomas Culpeper, Henry physically attacks the messenger. At another point in the film, Henry wrestles one of the two wrestlers performing at a banquet just because his wife has just told Henry that one of the wrestlers is the strongest man in England. The cinematography provides a link to the aggression that is the stuff of war, as the shadows of Henry and one of the wrestlers are shown on a wall tapestry of an army.

The attitude of the film toward Henry is one of sympathy, for he is portrayed as a lonely man who feels that he has never had a wife who has really loved him. He says at one point that he would rather live the life of a man above a carriage house with a wife who loves him than that of a king who must remarry for reasons of state. Unlike most accounts of the king, this film portrays him as a victim of a political system in which the ruler must give up so much of a personal life for the state. Although on a constitutional rather than an absolute monarch, the series, The Crown, on Queen Elizabeth II emphasizes how she must sacrifice so much in putting the interests of the Crown above what she wants. Is even a limited monarchy fair to the inhabitants of the role, given how subservient their personal lives must be to the interests of the office?

In The Private Life of Henry VIII, a title which if taken literally is an absurdity, for an absolute ruler, in this case, a king of 3 million subjects, can have no private life, Henry laments there being so many “cooks” in his court who treat him as a breeder. “Refinement is a thing of the past,” Henry tells members of his court at one point. “I’m either a king or a breeding bull.” He asks Cromwell, “Would you make me a false marriage?” Although Cromwell’s reply, “we need more heirs” so as to reduce the change of a power-struggle (i.e., aggression) when Henry dies, Henry’s planned marriage to Anne of Cleves, a German, is to keep the warring Germany and France from involving England in war. Later in the film, Henry remarks that both Germany and France have offered new lands to England in exchange for siding with the one or the other in their ongoing wars. “What’s the use of new territories if it means war, war, war.” Henry wants peace in Europe, and fears that the fighting between Germany and France would someday leave the continent in ruins, but there is no one to help him to stop the aggression.

From the shadows wrestling on the cloth tapestry of an army to having to marry an ugly foreigner to stave off war from spreading to England, to having to keep marrying to get a male heir, the prominence of aggression is highlighted in the film. For much of the film is either showing angry fits of an absolute ruler or what he must give up for England to avoid aggression in the political domain—both in the matter of succession and in international relations. It is no wonder that Henry says to his infant son, “The crown is no smiling matter.”

It is ironic that the film skips over, in ellipses, the (aggressive) beheadings of two of Henry’s wives. Perhaps the narrative’s extension to cover even Henry’s last wife in a reasonable playing time is the reason, but the audience is left only with the sharpening of the sword to intimate the missed state-sponsored acts of aggression against two women (though one of whom was not innocent).  Even in the twenty-first century, executions under state auspices occur. How much more so that must have been the case when absolute rulership was common. Even in the time of Queen Victoria, when British sovereigns were no longer absolute monarchs, Lord Acton famously wrote to an Anglican bishop, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  By 1887, Parliament could act as a check on a monarch, but the titans of industry could still operate as absolute rulers over their workers in demanding very long hours and refusing to improve harsh working conditions. 

We moderns look back at stories of ancient and early-modern kings like Henry VIII as if the problem of abuses of power has since been solved, yet we watch citizen-videos of horrendous police brutality against unarmed innocent people. Human nature has not changed even as political theory has made some progress. It is still true that if we are angels, then surely we must be killer angels. This line comes from Gettysburg (1985), an epic film about the bloody battles at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1863 as the Confederate States of America warred against the United States of America in what is more commonly known as the U.S. Civil War. More than seven thousand men died at Gettysburg and 33,000 were wounded. A total of 1.5 million casualties were reported in that war.  This is nothing compared to the casualties in World War II during the “modern” twentieth century, and many more people died from Hitler and Stalin outside of battle.  So I put to the reader, how significant really is the development in political theory since the time of Henry VIII? Have our great minds really come to terms with the salience of the aggressive instinctual urge in human nature in developing types and processes of political organization that take account of our intractable penchant for aggression? 

The Private Life of Henry VIII would have us believe that much of what obligated that king was the need to forestall or obviate fighting. This points both to the salience of aggression in our “social” species and whether ethical obligation (i.e., a duty to the state being put above personal desires) should be relied on as a corrective or constraint.