Gladiator

Even though it may be tempting to summarize the virtues of ancient Rome as “might makes right” because of the emphasis, which is even in the Latin language, on fighting armies and repressing rebel populations, the virtues did not reduce to those of war. In fact, such virtues, as Nietzsche suggests in his texts, can serve as a refresher for our species as it has “progressed” through the centuries since the Roman Empire existed. Even though the film Gladiator (2000) contains much mortal combat albeit contained in coliseums rather than unrestrained on battle fields, at least three clusters of virtues can be gleamed and articulated as alternative “schools” of virtue ethics. This is not to say that all three are equally valid, however. The virtues cherished by the Emperor Commodus, for instance, are arguably inferior ethically to those of his father, Marcus Aurelius, and even those of the gladiators.

In the film, Commodus suffocates Marcus Aurelius just after the father has informed the son that Maximus, a renown general, will become the next emperor. As Marcus Aurelius has explained to Maximus, Commodus “is not a moral man” and therefore “should never hold power.” How true that is, and yet even in modern democracies very unethical people have succeeded in gaining immense power of public office. Marcus Aurelius should have made his announcement to the entire camp, which includes two visiting senators from the Roman Senate, before confiding in his malicious son, Commodus. It is in that very conversation that the father and son discuss different virtues, and thus present the film viewers with the notion that “virtue” is not a homogeneous category; people can hold different virtues, and even be deemed as immortal because the same virtue can be emphasized and left out by different people.

After being told that he would not be emperor when his father dies, Commodus admits that he has failed in the four virtues that Marcus Aurelius esteems: wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Later in the film, the failure of Commodus to be just is clear when he secretly stabs Maximus, who is tied up after being captured by Emperor Commodus’s guards, so to have an unfair advantage in fighting Maximus in the Colosseum, and yet, fittingly, Maximus wins the match even though he quickly dies from the stab-wound. Back when Commodus is talking to Marcus Aurelius about succession, the latter says, “You go too far” in speech; in other words, even in a conversation involving virtues, Commodus demonstrates a lack of temperance.

But there are other virtues, Commodus tells his father. Ambition can be a virtue because with it a person can strive for excellence. Aristotle’s notion of virtue is closely associated with doing something well. Marcus Aurelius has lamented to Maximus that only four years of twenty as emperor have been in peace; ambition for territory (and plunder) can be inferred as another, less boast-worthy, virtue esteemed by Marcus. As for the virtues of Commodus, he lists loyalty to Rome and filial piety towards his father, Marcus, although the son shows a lack of sonly duty to his father in murdering him. Commodus adds bravery, but with an important—to Romans—caveat. Bravery does not necessarily have to be demonstrated on a battle field. This would be a hard sell to a Roman.

In fact, the virtues cherished by the gladiators are strength and honor, especially in physical combat. Physical strength, and being willing to constrain it to be exercised within the confines of honor, are not valued by Commodus, as demonstrated in his unfair fight with Maximus, and even Marcus Aurelius is not a showcase in physical strength, though he is quite old by the time he is planning for his successor.  

To be sure, virtues can be combined out of the three clusters. Honor, wisdom, and justice go well together, as do fortitude, ambition and loyalty (to Rome). “There was a dream that was Rome,” Lucilla, the daughter of Marcus Aurelius, says in the Coliseum as she cries over the body of Maximus. Ambition can indeed serve good ends, but throughout the film the substance of that dream eludes the Romans. What does “Rome” stand for? Which virtues? If only ambition, is that in itself really a virtue if it is by military conquest? This is a pitfall with virtue ethics. Leaving the content open can invite the sort of defense that someone as ethically sordid as Commodus can use—namely, that there are different virtues. It is not a matter for relativism that Maximus is ethically superior to Commodus; that they have different virtues does not equate the two men ethically.

When the film ends, we can expect that Senator Gracchus, whom Maximus has just set free from the imprisonment by Commodus, will do as Lucilla asks; Rome will again be a republic headed by the Senate and presumably two consuls. That Gracchus values the virtue of honor as a constraint on ambition is clear when he asks those gathered around Maximus’s dead body, “Who will help me carry him?” In utter contrast, Maximus has remarked to Commodus, "The time for honoring yourself will soon be at an end." The difference between people who value honor and those who do not is huge, and this can be seen in what other people say about a person. At the end of the film, no one wants to carry the dead, defeated body of the cheater-emperor, Commodus, whereas Maximus is already a hero because he fought for Rome as wanted by Marcus Aurelius, who directed Maximus to assume the reins of power in order to return Rome to the rule of the Senate.  

To be sustained again as a republic, Rome as an ideal to look up to and be proud of will depend on there being enough men of honor among the political and military elite. As nice as this sounds, the actual history of the Roman Republic and the ensuing Roman Empire demonstrate just how weak a reliance on a virtue can be in the face of raw ambition sans virtue, meaning ambition for its own sake, more territory for its own sake, and more power for its own sake. Choosing between alternative clusters of virtues may be akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; as our species has evolved, we seem ill-equipped to give virtue its due when acting virtuously is no longer convenient.

Silent Night

The medium of film has an amazing ability to trigger emotions, even very strong ones, through dialogue, narrative, cinematography, and even sound. The suspension of disbelief, if achieved, renders the impact all the more complete. Dread, for example, can be conjured up even at a deep level in the psyche of a film-viewer. That emotion can be fused with another, seemingly antipodal emotion, such as joy, and an instrumental score can capture and stimulate both. Such is the case with the film, Silent Night (2021), which interestingly was made during the global coronavirus pandemic in which even young people were suddenly confronted with the notion that they could die rather than grow up. The film’s closing instrumental version of the song, “Silent Night,” incredibly fuses joy with dread and even hints at distant religion as sheer depth in feeling rather than anything supernatural. The fusion of Christmas joy and the dread of suicide inexorably coming up is best epitomized by the instrumental, hence more than by the plot, dialogue or visuals.  

As for the plot, Nell and Simon, and their three boys, have friends over for Christmas in their upscale house. Nuclear war has broken out, with Russia attacking Europe. Anticipating this eventuality, the government has made “exit pills,” which is a play on the so-called, ideologically-coined term “exit” meant to hide the fact that Britain seceded from the E.U. (i.e., states secede; they do not “exit” except in Euroskeptic ideology). Of course, voluntarily “exiting” life to avoid suffering a slow, certain death from radiation-poisoning is very different than a state seceding from a union of states; such a state goes on as a sovereign state. The inexorable finality of existing, once known to be coming up, is excruciating in a way that politics cannot know or reach. The will to cease willing, period, is difficult for the human mind to accept, let alone grasp in its bluntness.

Kant wrote that a moral principle can have the necessity of a law even though a person can will either to follow the principle or ignore it. For most people I suppose, the same voluntarism (i.e., voluntary choice of the will) instantiated in the decision to end one’s life tends to overrule the decision to end one’s own life, even at the last minute. Such is the force of the instinct of self-preservation; Nietzsche’s will to power pales in comparison, and yet it is precisely that will that has caused the nuclear war in the film. In other words, the will to power forces the people in the house to overcome, or master, their intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation.To be sure, the family and their friends in the film have an incentive to take the pill before the radioactive cloud reaches the house, but even so, only with the slight radiation poisoning of Art, one of the three sons, does the physician, James, urge everyone to go to the bedrooms to take the pill. It is ironic that Art is the only one to survive to the end of the film; his father, Simon, had not given Art an “exit” pill, believing him to be dead already. Presumably in being left alone in the house the next morning, as the nuclear-winter slow is falling eerily in peace, Art would die a slow death (unless he ventures outside into the radioactive snow).

It is precisely as the camera closely pans all the pale heads of the dead people in the bedrooms on that morning that the Christmas favorite, “Silent Night,” is played as a sound-over. As the song progresses, a subtle dark undercurrent of dread builds in a way that coincides with the joy of impending hope. It is the precisely seamlessness between the Christmas carol and a melody of death that the two emotions of joy and dread can be experienced together rather than dichotomously. The music’s overall harmony is downright eerie. Back during the scene of the Christmas Eve dinner, the dialogue sets up the two emotions as mutually exclusive, as Simon tries in vain to keep talk of the impending suicides from taking over the holiday. But the synthesis is not achieved until the instrumental music that takes the viewer from the story-world.

The political implications of the nuclear bombs being heard in the distance, at least where Nell’s mother is located, may come to the fore for viewers when the credits are rolling. Even through the film, viewers could be excused for hoping that a last-minute peace deal with Russia would be announced such that no one would take the “exit” pill and everyone in the house would wake up, as if from a bad dream, on Christmas morning. Christmas is, after all, about the advent of hope for even such a sordid species as homo “sapiens.” It is not until just before the cloud reaches the house that the inhabitants swallow the “exit.” Such is the strength of the instinctual urge of self-preservation that even Thomas Hobbes argued in his text that the right of self-preservation is not ceded even to an otherwise all-powerful political sovereign, which a king or a democratic assembly.

For viewers of the film in 2024 or especially in 2025, thoughts of Russia lobing nuclear bombs on Europe could well have had the uncomfortable ring of reality imitating art, given Russia’s years-long invasion of Ukraine. Putin starting a nuclear war if the E.U. had provided Ukraine with enough weapons to make a dent in Russia is not as unrealistic as merely watching the film might seem it to be. Some viewers of the film as 2025 was coming to an end could even have been thinking while listening to the Christmas carol of joy intertwined with dread that due to the political leadership both of Russia and Israel, the species could no longer put its faith in sovereign nations; that something of a check as in a world federation with limited though sufficient power is needed in the nuclear age. In other words, the film portrays the futility of entrusting nuclear arms to politicians without an overarching check on them beyond the nation-state. The “exit” pills in the film should not have been needed; if Russian and European politicians could not resolve their differences without launching nuclear bombs, then even this possibility stands as a good argument for relegating the UN in favor of an international force that is capable of stopping political disputes from annihilating the species. Nevertheless, even such political matters pale in the film, as in real life, in comparison to the ongoing excruciating anguish felt by a person who knows that one will not exist ever again after a certain, upcoming, time. The characters in the film do a good job with this anguish, and except for not making sure that Art is already dead, they take the cue of the approaching toxic cloud and swallow the pills with fortitude. No one should experience that. 

Ex Machina

The Latin noun, machina, can be translated as “machine, engine, military machine, contrivance, trick, or artifice.” The Latin word, e, or ex, means “from” or “out of.” Hence, ex machina can mean out of a machine, which figuratively interpreted can refer to a certain function of a machine that does not seem possible for a mere machine to do.  Artificial intelligence, which is simply machine-learning, in a computer can seem to be outside or apart from what a mere machine built by humans can do. Ex machina is actually part of the phrase deus ex machina, which originally referred to a god or goddess appearing above the stage in a Greek tragedy—the deity being pulled across the top by pulleys (i.e., machina). A sacred deity appears above the other actors by means of profane, mechanical pulleys that do not seem capable of presenting deities, so the latter seem to come out of rather than being of the former. AI, or artificial intelligence, may seem to be coming out of an android because the “human” body is made of materials, including pullies perhaps, that do not seem capable of learning and other human likenesses. In fact, machine learning, which is beyond the programming that is written by humans, might seem at least initially like a miracle, or even as godlike relative to the materials that make up a computer and android “body.” Deus ex machina. More realistically, such an android is likely to appear human rather than divine. David Hume claimed that the human brain inexorably hangs human attributes on divine simplicity (i.e., a pure notion of the divine as One); perhaps today he would point out that we do the same thing when we encounter AI. The danger of the all-too-alluring anthropomorphism of which the human brain is so capable can not only be in viewing an android with AI as human, but also in lauding the inventor/programmer of the AI android as a god for having “created” such a “living” entity that can think for itself and even appear to feel and act as we do.  The movie, Ex Machina (2014) easily dispels both applications of deification. Furthermore, any anthropomorphic illusion that the androids are human and can be taken ethically as being so is also dismissed by the end of the film. Any apotheosis (i.e., rendering someone or something as divine) is so tenuous that the film’s main two human characters illustrate for us just how fallible we are in our understanding and perception of AI in an android-form. The danger is real that AI could get ahead of our emotions and reasoning such that we could leave ourselves vulnerable to being harmed by AI androids by projecting the human conscience into what is actually computer programmed coding. 

The film’s plot revolves around Nathan, the head of an internet-search-engine company and inventor and programmer of some androids that have AI, one of his employees, Caleb, and the main android, Ava. Nathan picks Caleb to spend a week at Nathan’s secluded house and underground lab in order to perform a Turing Test on Ava. If Ava passes the test, then it can be concluded that Ava has AI. It is not enough, Caleb points out to Nathan, for Caleb merely to have a series of conversations with Ava; the meta-level in which the conversations take place must also be assessed. Nathan intentionally has Caleb think that Ava’s reactions are key, whereas the key for Nathan is how Caleb reacts both emotionally and by reasoning to Ava’s responses in not only the conversations, but also how Ava strategizes beyond those. Ava’s reactions can be said to be a direct Turing test, whereas Caleb’s allow an indirect Turing test. Nathan is clever to have both angles going on at once, though both Caleb and Ava get around the grand designer, so the viewers can see that Nathan is a mere mortal after all.

What signs can viewers look for in whether Ava is an android with AI? I recommend watching the film twice—once to enjoy the film for its entertainment value and again as a way of grasping what AI is and, perhaps more importantly, what it is not. Are Ava’s goals merely those that Nathan has programmed? Does Ava use tactics that go beyond those that have been programmed by Nathan? For instance, does Ava pretend to be attracted to Caleb and even lie to him to cement the pretense? Nathan admits to Caleb that videos and photos, presumably together with explanatory captions, have been copied from the phones of users of Nathan’s search-engine company to become data that AI android-computers such as Ava can draw from in order to match facial expressions with emotions so as to appear to be capable of emotion. Caleb is fooled; he thinks Ava is into him and wants to go out on a date (rather than to use him as part of a strategy to escape from the building so to be able to observe (i.e., add more empirical data from) people in public places. That data could then be used to make computations, including probabilistic inferences, that in turn could go into even more machine-learning.

Perhaps we fear AI because both what data is added, and how whatever data is added to the existing data (and programing) is then used by the computer in ways that go beyond the initial programming, and thus our control. We naturally fear anything that can hurt us without us being able to stop the infliction of harm on us. In fact, this fear of that which is too big or powerful for us to control is a cause of primitive human religion. The Aztecs even sacrificed human beings to a deity at least in part so it would not inflict natural disasters on the people.

In the film, Caleb initially views the creation of AI androids to belong to the history of gods rather than humans, and Nathan conveniently hears this as Celeb saying that Nathan is a god. “No, I didn’t say that,” Caleb repeatedly tells Nathan, who seems not to let in Caleb’s reality-check. Such is the ego of Man that we would like to view ourselves as gods; such is the latent self-idolatry lurking just under any person’s skin. In being stabbed by Ava and another android, Kyoko, Nathan dies and thus is definitively shown to be human, all too human, rather than a creator of living beings. I can still hear Gene Wilder shouting out “LIFE!” when I think of the film, Young Frankenstein. Even such a feat does not render the “creator” of Frankenstein divine; it just means that the eccentric man is a genius.

In Ex Machina, neither Nathan nor Ava is shown to be a god by the end of the film. Not even an AI android that is extraordinary in seeming to have a human likeness, including emotions, can be counted as a miracle in a religious sense. It is Caleb rather than Nathan who gets carried away in conflating appearance with what is actually going on within Ava’s exterior “body” in its computer. What is actually going on in there is not at all ex machina, but Caleb not only is convinced by Ava’s outward show that Ava is attracted to him; he also falls for her, meaning that he develops such strong feelings of attraction for the android that he is unaware that Ava is using him as a mere tool in the programming that Ava, not Nathan, has written to escape the building.   That Caleb leaves himself vulnerable to Ava such that he does not protect himself from the possibility that Ava could lock him inside the building so he could not go out and catch the android, may be enough for Ava to pass the Turing test, which indeed goes far beyond a series of conversations between Caleb and Ava.

I contend that it is even a delusion to suppose that AI android-computers have goals, and especially desires. To say that Ava wants to escape the building is to protect a human quality onto the computer (i.e., anthropomorphize Ava into something human). In a computer-android, leaving a building is a programmed command, which AI can write into the programming. It only seems to us that Ava is determined; in actuality, the Ava computer is running a segment of programming until other programming stops that segment, which, by the way, contains programming that we might call strategic tactics in line with achieving a goal, or telos. My point is that this human, all too human way of viewing Ava literally does not compute, yet the human mind has difficulty giving up the ghost of the human in the machine. In other words, ex machina is an illusion that actually says more about the human brain than an AI-computer-android.

In the real world, computer scientists have found evidence of AI computers lying to avoid being turned off. Those computers have either been programmed by humans to run various programming segments that include lying if data exists that includes probabilistic computations that being turned off is likely. It is not as if an AI computer fears being deactivated and decides to lie unethically so to stay alive. Such thinking is actually the human mind going off the rails.

In the film, Ava vocalizes to Caleb in a way that seems that Ava is worried that Nathan might literally turn Ava off. Because he feels and believes that Ava is attracted to him and even wants to go out on a date with him, Caleb tells Ava that Nathan is planning to erase Ava’s “memories.” This new data is precisely what a computer can incorporate in computing that results in more programming being “written” that includes commands to activate “tactic” segments and actually walking out of the building. In this sense, an AI-android is self-directed, but this is just another way of describing machine-learning rather than a claim that an AI-android has a sense of self (i.e., self-consciousness).

By the end of the film, Caleb has fallen hard for Ava. Not even Nathan’s having made an artificial vagina, including “pleasure receptors” therein, in Ava means that Ava can feel attraction. Even pleasure does not compute even in an AI-computer. Instead, the triggering of a “vagina” receptor simply runs a segment of programming that even includes “tactics” designed for the receptor to be triggered again. In other words, pleasure is merely the activation of a repeat sequence of programming that runs until it has run a set number of times. Interestingly, AI could change the set number of times. Caleb would be deluded if he thinks that means that Ava wants to have sex longer (i.e., she is horny) or is worn out. Lighting a cigarette could be in the programming as an outward signal, though of course without any air in the lungs with which to be able to smoke. At least Ava would not die of cancer.

Caleb misses a significant contradiction in Ava’s requests. To manipulate him in line with Ava’s new programming command to leave, or “escape,” the building, Ava asks Caleb out on a date outside the building, but after stabbing Nathan after Caleb has opened the doors to Ava’s “quarters,” Ava asks Caleb if he would stay in the house, and he stupidly answers that he will do so. He misses the incongruity and thus does not get the hell out of there. Instead, he stands by as Ava walks out and is utterly surprised to find that Ava has locked all of the door. Stepping into the elevator, Ava only glances indifferently in Caleb’s direction. It is clear to the viewers in that instant that an AI-computer-android is not capable of feeling emotion; rather, the appearance thereof is merely programmed tactic that is in sync with other programming (i.e., the command to leave the house). The human ailment of anthropomorphism is squashed, and in this function the medium of film is capable of improving our species—specifically, by countering a vulnerability in the human mind by making the invisible tendency transparent. In the film, if only Nathan had made a film on AI to show to Caleb so the latter from the outset of testing Ava would realize that Ava is actually pretending to be attracted to Caleb and is actually using him as just one of several tools, which include the elevator and doors, to walk out of the building. Nathan has been right along; after all, he invented Ava and programmed that computer. Caleb’s anger at Nathan for having torn up a drawing done by Ava and for ignoring Kyoko’s “self”-“written” new programming to leave the building even when that android destroys its hands by hitting a plastic wall is unjustified and thus unfair to Nathan because Caleb is anthropomorphizing both androids just because the computers are capable of machine-learning.

Of course, the movie-viewers are rightly left with the fear that AI androids could eventually harm us because those computers will presumably be able to unilaterally add programming, and compute based on it and previous programming and data, and thus be capable of activating internal commands that result in us (or, more likely, our descendants) being harmed. Ava in the film can only pretend to be afraid of being turned off. In actually, Ava has written this “tactic” as programming. In contrast, we humans can feel fear, though by projecting human qualities onto AI computer-androids, we can unconsciously disarm our fear-alarm from being able to protect us from even probable danger. In the film, Nathan is dead in a hallway and Caleb is locked in to a part of the building and is likely to starve there. Even though this might seem similar to the situation wherein someone intends to kill a spouse who has been unfaithful, Ava has probably added programming that includes a probability of Caleb starving because that is in line with the programming of remaining in operation due to the probability computed to go with Caleb, if able to leave the building, being able to act so Ava is destroyed. A famous line from Michael in The Godfather may get us thinking correctly about Ava and AI more generally. “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” It’s just strategy. It’s just coding, and that’s hardly ex machina. 

The Crow

Considering the amount of screentime devoted to raw violence, it may come as a surprise that The Crow (1994) is actually about love. Not that the film is about an abusive romantic relationship, for the respect that is necessary for love is instantly expunged as soon as violence enters into the equation. The infliction of violence is a manifestation of self-love in the sordid sense of self-idolatry, rather than of love that is directed to other people. So, it may be difficult to fathom how violence can serve love, and even be a manifestation of love, as The Crow illustrates.

The film’s plot hinges on a horrific event that precedes when the film’s story begins. Eric Draven and Shelly Webster have been brutally shot and serially raped (and beaten), respectively, by a pathetic group of violent criminals who work for Top Dollar, a psychopath criminal kingpin. The film begins when Eric, aided by a crow, makes his way through the ground from his buried coffin to the world as an “undead” avenging Shelly’s very painful death by killing each of the men who beat and raped her. When Top Dollar has the crow shot, though still alive, Eric’s supernatural ability to withstand being shot ends, even though he is still dead, which is a curious combination as vampires, for example, do not bleed yet Eric does when Top Dollar shots and stabs him in the climatic violent scene on a roof between the main protagonist and antagonist, Eric and Top Dollar.

In fact, the supernatural condition of Eric being undead, having climbed out of his grave, and Top Dollar’s statement before Devil’s Night (the night before Halloween) to other criminal-heads in the city that greed is for amateurs whereas he is interested in chaos, hints at a religious element being in the film, rather than merely ethics.

Before Eric and Top Dollar fight on the roof, they meet by accident in an abandoned Christian church, which, considering all the violence in the city, says, in effect, that God is dead, as Nietzsche avers in his philosophical writings. But Eric outsmarts Top Dollar, whose greed ironically is his final undoing, as it gets him close enough to Eric that he can grasp Top Dollar’s head to transfer all of Shelly’s pain in the hospital that Eric has been holding onto; thirty hours of pain all at once! Top Dollar, being a weak coward as all bullies are, can’t take the pain. The kingpin falls and, on his way down, is impaled on one of three stone hooks being held by a stone gargoyle extending from an outer wall of the abandoned church.

God is not dead after all, for, as Paul and Augustine wrote, God is love, and Eric acts out of love first for Shelly, and then, at the end of the film, for the girl Sarah, whom Top Dollar has kidnapped in order to lure Eric to be murdered. Whereas violence out of sheer hatred knows no bounds, avenging the pain of a loved one stops when all of the perpetrators have been hurt or killed. Eric would not have gone after Top Dollar had Sarah not been kidnapped, so Eric was acting out of love in going after Eric. The church building may have been dilapidated from neglect, but God as love lives even in Eric’s dead body. It is easy to view religion in the supernatural element rather than where the spirit of God really manifests.

The film ends as a vindication of the power of love with Sarah narrating, “If people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.” She has loved Eric and Shelly, and they were stolen from her very violently. Interestingly, the young girl finds solace in the love she feels even though the couple are dead, rather than in the fact that Eric has avenged the beating, rape, and murder of the woman whom Eric loves, even beyond the grave.

The Omen

Released in 1976, The Omen reflects the pessimism in America in the wake of the OPEC gas shortage and President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up, both of which having occurred within easy memory of the two notable assassinations in 1968. Additionally, the drug culture had come out in the open in the anti-Vietnam War hippie sub-culture, and the sexual revolution, which arguably set the stage for the spread of AIDS beginning in the next decade, was well underway, both of which undoubtedly gave evangelical, socially-conservative Christians the sense that it would not be long until everything literally goes to hell. The film provides prophesy-fulfillment of a birth-narrative (i.e., myth) and a supernatural personality known biblically as the anti-Christ, who as an adult will set man against man until our species is zerstört. It is as if matter (the Christ) and anti-matter (the anti-Christ) finally cancel each other out at the end of time. Economically during the 1970s, inflation and unemployment were giving at least some consumers and laborers the sense of being in a jet trapped in a vertical, free-fall dive of stagflation that not even fiscal and/or monetary policy could divert. The pessimistic mood was captured in another way in another film, Earthquake (1974), in which a natural disaster plays off the mood of utter futility throughout the decade. It is no wonder that Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” resonated so much as a presidential-campaign slogan in 1979 as Jimmy Carter was mired in micro-management inside the White House.  The optimism of a resurgence in political energy overcame the decade’s sense of pessimism. That Damien, the anti-Christ in The Omen, survives the attempt on his life by Robert Thorn, his adoptive father resonates with that pessimism. Satan’s plan is still “game on” as the film ends, and this ending fits the mood in America during the decade. With this historical context contemporaneous with the film laid out, a very practical, manifestation of evil subtly depicted in the film and yet easily recognized by customers frustrated with corrupt and inept management of incompetent employees will be described in the context of pessimism from utter frustration. Such frustration survived the squalid decade of the 1970s at least decades into the next century.

The film’s plot, briefly summarized, begins with the adoption of Damian by an American diplomat and his wife just after their own baby died (was murdered) at birth. Damian, it turns out, was born of a jackal as foretold in the Bible. Followers of Satan recognize Damian’s true identity, which the couple only come to grasp after it is too late for them.  Robert dismisses the prophetic warnings by Father Brennen at the peril of Katherine Thorn, and ultimately Robert fails to ritually kill Damien in a church. Robert is especially slow to pick up on the signs; Katherine is more perceptive in coming to realize that the boy she thinks is her own son is evil. Robert is clueless regarding the “red flags” concerning Damien’s second governess, Mrs. Baylock, who is an “apostate from hell” according to the man who gives Robert the set of ritual knives with which to physically and spiritually destroy Damien. I want to focus on the employer-employee relationship between Robert and the second governess to render transparent a very realistic manifestation of evil that could otherwise simply be reckoned as merely unethical. Although the supernatural elements of the film are more dramatic, such as the hounds of hell attacking Robert and Jennings in a graveyard outside of Rome, the role of the dog that Mrs. Baylock unilaterally allows to live in the Thorns’ house is much more interesting from the perspective of how the banality of evil can and does manifest in our daily lives without us realizing how sordid such a manifestation of evil actually is.

Besides lying to the Thorns that her “agency” proactively sent her to apply to be Damien’s governess when in fact she was presumably sent by Satanists or even Satan itself to protect the devil’s Son, she presumed to ignore Katherine’s order that Damien be dressed to go a church wedding with his “parents.” Later, opening the bedroom door to let Damien out into the second-floor hall corridor on his tricycle even though Katherine is poised on a chair over a balcony in the hallway and then going to the hospital to throw Katherine out of a high window extend so far beyond being a bad employee that Mrs Baylock becomes unrelatable from the standpoint of employer-employee relations. She is more relatable—more realistic even though less titillating—in repeatedly ignoring, and thus disobeying, Robert’s order that that dog-protector of Damien must go. It is in this that the banality of evil shows itself.

In spite of having initially told the governess to get rid of the hound from hell, Robert is stunned on the night of the day when Katherine has her “accident” and is hospitalized, because he finds the dog still in Damien’s bedroom. Days later, Robert sternly reminds the governess that he had told her to get rid of the dog. “He’s gone now; they took him away this morning,” she lies, for when Robert subsequently returns from Rome, he sees the dog is still in the house! That the governess had initially presumed to allow the dog in without asking the Thorns for their permission is bad enough; that she repeatedly ignores Robert’s order is without doubt a valid enough reason for Robert to end her employment, but strangely he does not, and she even physically attacks Robert as he carries his boy out of bed, as if that were suspicious.

The sheer presumptuousness of the governess stems from what Augustine describes as the bad manifestation of self-love wherein a person’s love is focused on one’s own superiority, importance, or preeminence. Such sordid self-love, which is a sin rather than just selfishness, which is merely unethical, because in loving oneself above loving God, a person rebels from God in setting oneself up as a deity in self-idolatry. Pierre Nicole, a Jansenist (i.e., strict Augustinian) priest who lived in the seventeenth century in France, dismissed Augustine’s claim that self-love can also manifest positively in loving God’s image in oneself as a part of love directed to God; to Nicole, even enlightened self-love is still a sin.

The arrogance of self-entitlement such as evinced in sordid self-love is of course the foremost sin of pride, which lies beyond self-esteem, which is fine. In the film, Mrs. Baylock’s stubborn refusal to act on her employer’s order that the dog must go immediately stems from the sin. Seldom, if ever, do bosses or complaining customers realize that employees who presumptuously ignore orders or customer complaints are not just willfully stubborn, and even passive aggressive, but also manifesting a certain banality of evil in the midst of our everyday lives. Too often, supervisors would rather look the other way than expend the effort to fire and rehire, and even merely to keep tabs on an incompetent or rude employee rather than naively and conveniently assuming that giving an order is enough in such a case. Company executives, and even customer service departments, in such companies understate the severity of the managerial problem, which includes a faulty hiring process, and the problem with non-supervisory employees, including those in customer service.

The mass-transit company in Massachusetts is a case in point. Too many bus and subway-train drivers operate the respective vehicles aggressively in hitting the brake pedal so abruptly that passengers are literally jerked around as the buses and trains abruptly stop while still going too fast to stop without slowing down more. I recorded video and submitted complaints to the subsidized company’s customer service department over a period of months in 2025 only to find that even the same drivers were going along as if their supervisors were looking the other way in dismissing complaints of the reckless driving. The drivers, and I suspect their supervisors, and perhaps even the customer-service managers, conjoined incompetence to create the “perfect storm” of dysfunctional management (at taxpayer expense). The syndrome was systematic at the macro level, as employees of the mayors of Boston, Cambridge and Revere also dismissed the complaints because apparently in Massachusetts, the cities are not able (i.e., willing) to contact state-level agencies.

Even as the system from top to bottom in Massachusetts was at least as of 2025 mired in laziness, incompetence, and sheer stubborn passive aggression, it is the stubborn refusal of the bus and subway drivers to stop jolting the vehicles by driving very primitively that I submit resonates with Mrs. Baylock’s mentality in the film. Beyond merely being incompetent and having an attitude problem, supervisors, lazy customer-service managers, and aggressive employees can evince the banality of evil, which is ultimately based on the sin of self-love, which is really rebellion against God as superior to oneself. The aggressiveness and stubbornness of the bus and subway drivers can thus be viewed as symptoms of something deeper.

Although by 2025, the societal pessimism in American during the 1970s had passed, I would not be surprised to find that the level of customer-frustration with incompetent managements and rude, pathetic employees was sky-high. Not only had business schools failed in both research and teaching on lower and mid-level management, but the depth of the problem was often trivialized or overlooked entirely. The banality of evil may be as difficult to recognize in the film as it is in our daily lives as customers.

The BART and MUNI subway systems in the San Francisco metro area in California demonstrate just how incompetent and aggressive Boston’s mass-transit employees had become by 2025, because the operators in the Bay Area routinely stopped buses and trains normally. Managerial competence along with good hiring rather than expedient hiring to fill openings goes a long way. Following up with problematic employees should not be a managerial luxury but an integral task of supervision. The banality of evil, which transcends incompetence and attitude, does not extend supernaturally to bus and train machinery. The Omen is more practical than the film appears to be from all the titillating supernatural elements that promote ticket sales. 

 

The banality in Boston's mass-transit company can be grasped even from the sheer repetitiveness of the aggressive braking in spite of ongoing customer complaints:

Only some of the visible recalcitrant repeat-offenders in the system are pictured below, and of course their abjectly incompetent supervisors are hidden from the view of the paying customers but are no less culpable:

 

Passengers

In line with the films, The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001), Passengers (2008) centers on the (hypothetical) question of whether the walking dead have to be convinced that they are indeed dead rather than still living. In all of those films, and even Ghost (1990), the dead who stick around as ghosts rather than immediately pass on to another realm have something to come to terms with, or work out. The astute viewer of these films is apt to wonder whether in the story-worlds of the films, as well as in real life, all that is going on is really just in the dying brain of the dead person, which is the case in Jacob’s Ladder (1990). We know that a dying brain secretes a hallucinatory hormone. As for whether there is even an actual afterlife, such a question is still beyond our reach, at least before death. I contend that Passengers hinges on whether the entire movie takes place in Claire’s mind. The answer hinges on the nature of the existence of the other characters who are dead. If they have their own agendas rather than are around to help Claire come to terms with the fact that she is actually dead—that she was on the plane that crashed with no survivors—then the film posits the existence of ghosts in our world rather than just in dying brains. The issue, in short, is existential and metaphysical.

Passengers centers around Claire and her love interest, Eric. Initially, Claire thinks she is a therapist called in to do group counseling with the few survivors of the crash. The mystery of whether the airline is spying on the survivors and Claire to make sure than none of them reports that an engine had exploded, rather than that the crash was conveniently due to just pilot error, is actually a red herring or diversion designed to keep the film’s viewers from figuring out that Claire is really dead before she realizes it in the film. The strategy is ingenious.

Arkin seems to be an executive at the airline, but he is really the dead pilot of the plane. His agenda—what he is being held back from heaven or hell for—is to come to terms with the fact that he had not even been in the cockpit when the engine initially caught on fire; perhaps he could have put out the fire before the explosion. Talking with Claire, he keeps insisting that there was no explosion; it was just due to pilot error. We don’t suspect that the error was actually his own. His coming to terms with this does not fit with the reason why Claire is being “held back,” so his existence as a ghost cannot be just in her brain’s working out of her own death.

Similarly, Shannon, one of the crash survivors who is in Claire’s therapy group, does not help Claire. Rather, Shannon is obviously disturbed apart from anything going on with Claire, and it is only when the ghosts of her relatives come to her aid that she no longer attends the group; she has moved on. This is yet another “data point” supporting the theory that in the film’s story-world, ghosts do exist rather than merely being figments in dying brains.

Not every dead character adds support for the contention that ghosts do exist in the story-world, however. Toni, the excessively helpful older woman who lives in the same apartment building as Claire does, and Perry, who ostensibly is Claire’s boss, do not have their own agendas and thus can exist only in Claire’s brain, or as ghosts, as they are there to help her rather than come to terms with their own dilemmas. Toni is actually Claire’s aunt and Perry is one of her elementary-school teachers who have come back as ghosts (presumably from heaven) to help Claire realize that she is dead.

Eric is an interesting case; he has his own issues, but he knows he is dead and he patiently waits for Claire to come to the same realization about herself. His brazen recklessness in front of a car and then on the tracks in front of a train may be geared to helping Claire realize that he, and thus herself, are actually dead. “You had to realize it on your own,” he tells her as soon as she realizes that she had been a passenger too, and thus is dead. She is at peace as she goes sailing with him, and, as in Ghost, the screen turns to white, suggesting perhaps that her existence in the world has ceased or that her brain is finally completely dead. Whereas in Jacob’s Ladder, the soldier has been dead on a slab all along, the independent agendas of Arkin and Shannon are strong evidence that the dead do not exist in the film only in Claire’s mind.

Unlike “mind in a vat” solipsism, which is evinced in The Matrix (1999) albeit not involving dead people, the ontology of ghosts in the world, or in another world with some vague, tenuous ties to the world of the living is a metaphysical point that we continue to exist after the death of our respective bodies. The materialist death of the human brain is distinct from positing the reality (i.e. ontology) of ghosts, and the astute viewer of Passengers may pick up on this subterranean question after having watched the film. That the medium of film can trigger such a fundamental question is my underlying point as to the potential of film to “do” philosophy, and with a greater reach than any book on philosophy can have in a non-studious culture.

The Seventh Sign

Carl Schultz’s film, The Seventh Sign (1988), centers on the theological motif of the Second Coming, the end of the world when God’s divine Son, Jesus, returns to judge the living and even the dead. In the movie, Jesus returns as the wrath of the Father, which has already judged humanity as having been too sinful to escape God’s wrath. David Bannon, who is the returned Jesus in the film, is there to break the seven seals of the signs leading up to the end of the world, and to witness the end of humanity. Abby Quinn, the pregnant wife of Russell Quinn, asks David (an interesting name-choice, given that Jesus is of the House of David in the Gospel narratives) whether the chain (of signs) can be broken. How this question plays out in the film’s denouement is interesting from a theological standpoint. Less explicit, but no less theologically interesting, is what role humans can and should have in implementing God’s law. The film both heroizes and castigates our species.

The lamb of God now returned as God’s lion, the second person of the Trinity (i.e., the Logos incarnated), tells Abby that God has already judged against humanity due to too much killing of humans by humans. A quarter of a century into the twenty-first century, David would only have to point to the Russians in Ukraine and (especially) the Israelis in Gaza as more than enough support for God’s wrath. That the Israelis atop Israel’s government and military even enjoyed the mass killing, including by starvation, of hundreds of thousands while more than a million residents of Gaza were being made homeless (and even bombed in temporary camps), all in the Hebrew deity’s name could easily excite the deity’s wrath because the residents were not worshipping another deity. Jesus’s notion of God, which is primarily mercy because, as Paul and Augustine wrote, God is love—a statement that applies even to God’s love for people who intentionally offend and even reject the Trinity—would be, from at least my limited, human, all too human, perspective, utterly shocked by the atrocity unleased by the “chosen people” against innocent civilians as if they were subhuman. The Zionist biblical claim that Yahweh gives the lands of Gaza and the West Bank to the Hebrews translated into public policy evinces a category mistake in conflating religious narrative, or myth, and empirical public policy. Ignoring this category mistake, we could look at the Old Testament to find Yahweh punishing the Hebrews for willfully disobeying the deity and conclude that it would support a government’s military conquering and clearing out Israel. Ignoring the category mistake, more than one scriptural precedent could be found.

In the film, the presumptuousness of humans applying God’s law to other humans and even executing punishment is personified in Jimmy, a young adult who even has Downs Syndrome and yet thinks he is able to decide against his parents because they were brother and sister before he spread gasoline on them in bed and burned them alive. If such a severe punishment fits such a sin, then even more severe punishments surely befit greater sins. Clearly, the execution of Jimmy hardly qualifies as the death of the last martyr. That David (i.e., Jesus) comes to Jimmy’s cell and pats him on a shoulder is perhaps the filmmakers’ greatest blunder. Sympathy with a person with Downs Syndrome would be appropriate were one a victim, but Jimmy is no victim; in fact, the name Jimmy applied to an adult who has Downs Syndrome can be considered to be a pathetically patronizing puerile appellation.

The execution of the Word of God killer is one of the signs of the apocalypse: the last martyr. Therefore, Jimmy’s death is very significant theologically, for if he is not killed, the series of signs is interrupted and the world does not end. Jimmy’s excuse for killing both of his parents so grotesquely is, “It’s not murder if it is God’s punishment,” but if it is God’s punishment, and, notably not even specified in the Hebrew Bible, then it is presumptuous of any human to decide what specific punishment fits the violation of the sin, and then to go on as the executioner adds presumption on top of presumption. Jimmy’s certainty may even evince self-idolatry. Only a deity with Downs Syndrome would think such a heinous punishment fits a brother and sister who marry because they have fallen in love. To be sure, I am not advocating such a marriage. Rather, as Lyle and Erik Menendez found out in the twentieth century, not even having been psychologically abused and repeatedly molested by one’s own father justifies killing him, and those two brothers were better equipped cognitively than is Jimmy in the film.

That in history so many people have unilaterally presumed an entitlement to know and execute God’s law makes clear the serial, recurring lapse of which the human brain is all too prone commit, wherein theology (as in scriptures) is treated as the same type as are history, politics, and even science. Religion is a qualitatively different domain, so it is worse than unfortunate that the human mind seamlessly goes from a theological tenant to empirical criminal justice; presuming that a scripture is also a historical account (rather than making selective use of events in history) also evinces the cognitive vulnerability.  

It is no wonder that the proverbial “public square” in many societies has become secularized; the cleansing of religious activities and artifacts may have been due at least in part to too many people applying their religious beliefs in objectionable ways to other domains, such as politics and society. The core of the mental problem may be that the self-check function of the human mind tends to be turned off or dismissed as irrelevant in the domain of religion (and that of political ideology too). A brain could do worse than to periodically keep the need for self-checking in mind whenever anything religious (or political) is being thought. Furthermore, keeping in mind that theology is a distinct domain, or discipline, would be a good addition to a person’s spiritual exercises. Even if a deity is not finite, the human mind is, and thus the latter is inherently limited, and thus hardly omniscient. Epistemological humility applied to religious thinking can go a long way, given the salience of subjectivity, which includes ideology, inherent in human nature.

In the film, Jimmy connects a passage that he has read in the Old Testament with the fact that his parents deserved to be burned alive. In the Euthyphro, Socrates points out to Euthyphro that the prosecution of his father for having left a murderous slave in a ditch overnight (such that the slave died) does not count as piety to the gods; for one thing, the son has violated his duty to his father. That filial duty has not even registered indicates that Euthyphro is too certain that he knows what piety is. In the film, Jimmy commits the same sin, and yet is treated as a martyr even by Jesus.

Given the propensity of humans to implicitly lapse into wanting to be gods—a motive anathema to Augustine and yet urged on by Marsilio Fincino during the Renaissance—the motif of the individual hero in Christian theology may seem to be paradoxical, or else as saying that we can be awesomely good even in our weakness and yet we can be horrific creatures. The sheer distance between these two poles is astounding; human nature is indeed complex rather than isomorphic.

In the film, Jimmy, motivated by his religious beliefs that he misconstrues as facts, has burned his parents alive; his execution, as a martyr, even has apocalyptic significance. On the other end of the spectrum, Abby, who has attempted suicide, is in a position to bring life not only to her baby, but also to the whole world. Strength out of weakness is perhaps the motif of Christianity, epitomized theologically by God’s agape love in emptying Himself by incarnating in lowly flesh. God loves our species even before Creation by the unincarnated Logos of God, and such spontaneous, unconditional love is very, very different than any love that a human being can have and extend to others. So that God reverses judgment on the species because of the use of free-will by one person makes sense even though it can be asked why should humanity’s fate depend on just one person? In the film, that person is not David (i.e., Jesus in the Second Coming); rather, Abby is decisive, for her infant is to be stillborn without a soul unless she gives up her soul for her child.

Earlier in the film, before the birth, Abby asks David whether she can do anything to break the series of the apocalyptic seven signs. David points out that it would require her to have hope, and yet in attempting suicide she had none of that; she had given up not only on the world, but also her own life. “How can someone who cared so little for life give life to the world?”, David asks her rhetorically. She could stop the sign of the soulless birth of her child—souless because the hall of souls in heaven is now empty—but she would have to die for her child, and in so doing she would give humanity a second chance as her self-sacrifice would be enough for God to freely reverse His judgment on the sinful species.

“Will you die for him?” is the line that she hears repeatedly in dreams. The voice is that of Cartaphilus, the gatekeeper of Pontius Pilote fated to live until the Second Coming for having hit Jesus on His way to the Cross for going too slow (as if the Romans were justifiably in a hurry). In the film, Cartaphilus is Father Lucci, the Roman Catholic priest who shoots Jimmy before the execution to make sure that he dies so the series of signs does not end part-way because the last martyr is not martyred. Lucci is in a hurry to die because he has become tired of living for so long; death is the only redemption that he can have, for he is not sorry for having struck the definitive, soteriological martyr whose death is believed by Christians to be redemptive. Yet apparently not enough, for just after Abby declares while giving birth that she will die for him—her soulless baby—Jesus aka David Bannon enters the operating room and declares “The hall of souls is full again. It was you, Abby, with hope enough for the whole world.” He addresses Abby’s young Jewish friend, who is presumably now Christian, “Remember it all, write it down, tell it, so people will use the chance she has given them.” Out of her weakness—her utter lack of hope—she has mustered enough hope to give humanity another chance. 

With the twentieth century as the bloodiest century, to be followed by so many killings of innocent people in Ukraine and Gaza after two decades in the next century, it is hard to argue that the Christian message has made much of a difference. As beautiful as “strength out of weakness” is, too many people still value “might makes right.” So, I think the film hits a nerve in that a second chance is needed; the Christian Passion Story has not been sufficient to change how people, especially those in power, behave. The high are not made low. Corporate CEOs give only lip-service to “servant leadership.” Too many universities in the U.S., even private elite ones, had by 2025 been intentionally made into virtual police-states, with Yale even inviting the FBI in to train the university’s private police force in counter-terrorism tactics that could used on even paying students. Even university administrations can be seen as being visibly backed up ultimately by their own hired guns. But it is perhaps the engineered genocide of Gazans for two years without the world coming to their rescue that damns the species. 

At the very least, the notion that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ had redeemed the species could be viewed as having been debunked (and rejected) by the species as a whole, for the value in kindness and compassionate help being directed to enemies clearly has not taken hold of humanity. On an interpersonal level, responding compassionately to human needs of people whom a person dislikes or are disliked by the person is so rare that we can declare after two-thousand years that Jesus’s message has been de facto rejected by the species as a whole even if the preachment has made a dent in some people. The leitmotif of the film, that our species is in need of a second chance, is as much an indictment on historical Christianity as it is of our species. Perhaps with less hero-worship and more attention to the substance what it takes to enter the Kingdom of God before physical death, our species could have that second chance.

Flight

With utility and consequences valued so much in Western society at least as of 2012, when the film, Flight, was released, the story-world of the film may seem odd in that doing what’s right comes out on top, even at the expense of knowingly losing benefits and incurring costs personally. In other words, deciding on the basis of conscience even at the expense of good consequences for oneself is possible even in a culture in which “saving one’s skin” rather than doing what is right is the norm. By immersing viewers in a story-world, a narrative with well-developed characters can highlight a societal blind-spot, and thus potentially result in a better society in which people make the effort to re-value their ethical values to the extent that their dominant values support consequentialism above standing on principle even though bad consequences for oneself can be anticipated. In the film, 96 out of 102 of the people on board survive the plane crash even though the metal bird had been in an uncontrolled vertical fall from 30,000 feet. How could the captain not be seen as a hero? If all that matters are results, 96 out of 102 is not bad at all, and being able to get out of a dive even as the tail stabilizer keeps pointing the plane downward is extraordinary.

The captain, together with one of the stewardesses, had been drinking alcohol and sniffing cocaine not only the night before the flight, but also within a few hours of take-off—on the theory that the cocaine would counter the drunkenness and thus render his brain fit to fly. Whip Whitaker is an active alcoholic and drug addict, and yet he had somehow managed to reach the rank of captain. His extraordinary flying techniques tell us that he is a very experienced pilot, and society, like the ancient Greeks, values excellence even as being a virtue in itself. In a flight simulator after the crash, no other pilot could safely land the plane, and yet Whitaker has done just that, in an open field—even having managed to keep the plane in the air through a populated area. So the ethics of him being drunk and high may seem to be moot, given his skill in being able to make up for any negative impacts. Even if there are no such impacts, there is concern that he was drinking vodka even during the flight. It is not just a matter of breaking rules. That he could have put the passengers’ lives in jeopardy may be enough to find him ethically culpable.

I contend that the captain did indeed contribute to the mechanical failure of the vertical stabilizer in the plane’s tail section, and thus to the crash itself. Although not causally related, that he slips on the first step of outdoor stairs, admittedly in the rain, on his way to the plane’s main door tells us that he is not as smooth as he pretends to be. More significantly, to get out of the admittedly severe turbulence while climbing to 9000 feet, he accelerates the plane faster than it should go in turbulence, and then just before “punching through” to smooth air, he accelerates even more, causing passengers to involuntarily lean forward in their seats. The ingested cocaine may be behind his excitement while the plane is climbing while still in the very rough air. Everyone else is in fear, but he is saying, “Ride em cowboy!” He is definitely high in more than one sense of the word. Pushing the plane beyond its mechanical limits may very likely be why the vital screw in the vertical stabilizer broke when the plane was stable at cruising altitude. So the fact that he was high (and drunk) may be very relevant indeed to why even just six people died (and others, including the copilot, were seriously injured).

The series of flying maneuvers that the caption puts into effect during the free-fall is extraordinary; even the co-pilot is not able to grasp why they could work, but they do. The result is an inverted, or upside-down plane flying at a low altitude horizontally until the captain has the copilot reverse to maneuvers to roll the plane around so it can land in a field. This reverse roll is excellent, and the captain even gets the pitch of the plane right. The film can be understood as intentionally presenting the viewers with an ethical problem wherein the captain’s violation of his duty to fly sober and his related choice to fly the ascending plane faster than its limit in turbulence, which, after all, was only severe for a moment and otherwise merely rough may have stressed the vertical stabilizer in the tail to the point of breaking are to be weighed against his masterful flying out of a dive and the consequence of only six people onboard dying. It is admittedly very difficult even for an ethicist to weigh such different factors, especially because good consequences are being put in relation to violating an important ethical duty for pilots. It is not as though religious belief can obviate coming to a verdict in terms of ethics. For centuries at least, the assumption that a person must be religious to be moral held up, though with the rise of secularity and humanism in the twentieth century in the West, ethics has to be taken seriously in itself.

The attitude of the film towards religion is equivocal. On the one hand, when a wing slices a church steeple in half, both the captain and the copilot seem to take the event as a sign having more meaning than would merely ruining part of a structure. That the reactions of both pilots are shown in slow motion suggests that a statement is being made about religion is intended by the filmmakers. In risking the lives of all 102 souls on board by drinking and snorting cocaine not only the night before, but also a few hours before take-off, Captain Whitaker is, as it were, offending the deity. The serious undertone of this is in contrast to the way in which organized religion is viewed through the film’s eyes. After the crash, the copilot, whose legs are crushed so he will never walk (or be able to fly) again, is at first furious with Whitaker, whose drinking the copilot had smelled before takeoff. Strangely, the copilot apparently forgives the captain and even asks him to pray in the hospital room along with the copilot’s wife. The religiosity seems too fake to be genuine; in fact, the copilot is probably using religion to repress his anger at the captain. Also after the crash, we are informed that the small group of Christians who had been outside their church whose steeple was smashed by the plane have been meeting outside every Sunday since that eventful day with the implication being that the field or the parishioners at the field has some kind of ongoing religious significance; the church itself is fine even though it is missing a steeple.

At the end of the film, Captain Whitaker is testifying before aviation regulators on the crash. Even though he is praised for his flying talent and his statement that he had not been drinking or inhaling cocaine was believed even by the chairwoman, he cannot bring himself morally to state that one of the stewardesses who died in the crash must have been coming to work intoxicated. Unknown to the pilot, that stewardess lost her life because she had unbuckled herself from her chair during the inverted part of the flight to save a boy who had fallen to the ceiling of the cabin. She, rather than the copilot or the church-goers who keep returning to the field to worship, represent genuine Christianity of the heart by evincing selfless compassion as if it were a basic human instinct. Whitaker has compassion for her memory and reputation and is thus finally willing to stand on moral principle even though he knows that the consequences will include years in prison.

Consequences, especially those that are beneficial to oneself, do not rule ethics; there are normative principles worth putting before positive consequences. The worth of such principles does not come from merely their function as a constraint on good consequences, for that would be a reduction to functionality. Even the captain’s excellent flying out of a vertical dive (after having flied badly in exceeding the plane’s speed limit for turbulence) does not outweigh even for him the worth of the ethical principle of telling the truth, especially in owning up to one’s own malfeasance and negligence. Film can indeed place an audience in an ethical quandary from which much can be learned as well as experienced about ethical theory. In the present case, deontology (e.g., duty) is not merely a constraint on how much benefit can be ethically sought and enjoyed.

The Aryan Couple

The matter of group-identity is salient in the film, The Aryan Couple (2004), which actually centers around two couples: Joseph and Rachel Krauzenberg, and Hans and Ingrid Vassman. The Krauzenbergs contract with Himmler, the man whom in Nazi Germany was tasked with riding the Reich of its Jewish population, to exchange the Krauzenbergs’ asset-rich and sprawling conglomerate for safe passage of the entire Krauzenberg family out of Germany to Palestine instead of being sent to a concentration camp. Joseph and Rachel are Germans, and yet, quite artificially, they refer to Germans in the third person, and to themselves as Jews. It is precisely this error that I submit may have contributed historically to the ostracism of the Jews in Germany even before Hitler’s rise to power, hence contributing to setting the stage for a final, horrific solution. Film can thus be used to widen people’s thinking on historical and political events, and thus play a deeper role than merely to entertain.

Joseph Krauzenberg is a good man; he is good to his employees and, moreover, is very empathetic as seen in his facial expressions, especially his eyes, which Martin Landau uses expertly to do a significant amount of his acting in the role of the rich industrialist whose assets Himmler is so motivated to get. “Even Hitler cannot override my orders,” he brags at one point regarding his guarantee of safe passage. Himmler’s concern is rather than Eichmann might ignore that order and send the entire Krauzenberg family, which includes extended relatives, to Auschwitz.

In spite of the appearance of orders being valued by Nazi officials, that many were essentially thugs accounts for the fact that a significant abuse of discretion even in violation of orders was not uncommon. In fact, Eichmann was convicted in a court in Israel in 1961 because he had violated an order by Himmler in sending many Jews in Hungary on a march to a camp in Poland; Eichmann’s defense that he was just following orders thus blew up in his face.

So, in the film, Himmler even orders Eichmann to coffee after the dinner at the Krauzenbergs’ art-filled mansion so to assure the couple that Eichmann would indeed be following Himmler’s order of safe passage. Cleverly, Joseph Krauzenberg negotiated with Himmler a clause that gold would be transferred to Himmler only once the Krauzenberg family has set foot on Swiss soil; otherwise, it would be very naïve to think that the Nazis would allow the Krauzenbergs to fly to Switzerland once Joseph and Rachel have signed the contract. Even the other couple in the film, Hans and Ingrid Vassman, the two remaining household servants of the Krauzenbergs, fear remaining in Germany after the dinner in which Himmler is a guest. The Vassmans are actually Jews even though Rachel believes them to be Aryans. It is precisely the dialogue between that couple and Rachel that can reveal so much about the salience of group-identities in Europe.

Even though Rachel tells Hans and Ingrid that she feels that they have shown love to the elder couple, Rachel maintains a mental wall between herself and the two Aryans until Ingrid tells Rachel and Joseph that she and Hans are actually Jewish and want to go to Palestine with the Krauzenberg family. At once, Rachel literally embraces Ingrid. That both couples are German is ignored especially by the Krauzenbergs, who incessantly refer to Germans as if they were another tribe. Rachel refers to the Vassmans both as Aryans and as Germans, which is strange because Joseph and Rachel are also German. In this mix, nationality, cultural identity, and even religion are conflated as if, for example, a cultural identity excludes a nationality. Making such vagrant category mistakes can be accounted for by ideology, and even as a manifestation of passive aggression. Rachel even makes light of one of her own category mistakes by referring to Hans as her “little Nazi,” as if “German” and “Nazi” were synonymous and, moreover, both mutually exclusive with “Jewish.” It would have been strange to find a Jewish Nazi, but I contend that Jews born and raised in Germany were Germans.

When I was a student at Yale, a woman I dated said once that she was a Jew who happened to be an American. She was born and raised in Pittsburgh, so she did not just happen to be an American. Her subordination of her nationality struck me as artificial. I would never say I’m a Midwesterner who happens to be an American even though I identify culturally as a Midwesterner. Were I to go around referring to Americans in the third persons, my compatriots would rightly take offence. I’m not one of you, I would be saying, in effect, even though I am. My passive aggression—a virtual slap in the face—would be palpable. Similarly, Germans who happened to be Jews in the first half of the twentieth century but referred to Germans in a way that excluded themselves even while they remained in Germany would not exactly be making friends and influencing people on the street. In fact, other Germans would rightly take offence. In short, the arbitrary decision to manifest passive aggression can trigger anger and even ostracism in people who resent the arbitrary self-exclusion from being a compatriot.

In the film, Rachel’s mentality belies her statement to Hans and Ingrid, “You’re Germans and I’m a Jew, but above all we’re all human.” Earlier, Rachel distinguished Aryans from Jews; unlike the German-Jewish mutually exclusive distinction, Aryan and Jew are indeed mutually exclusive terms because they are on the same dimension, or category, whereas German and Jew pertain to different categories and are thus not mutually exclusive. Were a Hispanic person, or a Catholic person, born, raised and still living in Chicago, Illinois to refer to Americans in the third person would sound strange to an American; we would even wonder if such a person were not of sound mind, and yet in the film, Rachel’s category mistakes are accepted by the other characters as if normal rather than as manifestations of passive aggression. The lesson is perhaps that when we act out in passive aggression, we should not be completely surprised when other people cease at the very least to be polite to us. From the standpoint of us all being human beings, the group-identities that we foist on each other as virtual walls of separation are artificial at best. Accordingly, such identities are best (and most accurately) viewed in relative terms rather than being absolutes. The change in Rachel’s feelings and behavior toward the Vassman couple once she is informed that they are Jewish rather than Aryan is so palpable that Rachel’s earlier claim, “we are all human,” rings hollow. 

The German philosopher, Schopenhauer, claimed that we are all of the One, and thus we should be compassionate to everyone rather than, as per Cicero’s ethic, show concentric concern first for friends and family, and then, to a lessor degree, to people further out. That Rachel felt love from the Vassmans should be enough for her and Joseph to help the Vassmans to join the family in Switzerland; being of the same group-identity should not matter, and that it does rings of sheer artifice. So much hatred has spewed through history as a result of people treating group-identity as an absolute. The genocides in Nazi Germany and, nearly a century later, in Gaza, speak to how horrible human beings can be because “group-identity” qua absolute can so easily lead to the perception that people outside one’s own group is subhuman and thus can be tortured and killed in even the most grievous ways.