Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

The film’s title, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” (1975) is nothing but the name of the principal character, a widowed single mother of a teenage son, Sylvian, followed by her mailing address, complete with the zip-code 1080 and her apartment number 23. Her mundane daily life matches the generic title being her name and full address. To be sure, Dielman’s apartment is a ubiquitous fixture as the film’s setting, and the object of the lead character’s daily household chores, which she does so dispassionately and so often that the film can be reckoned as a statement on the utter meaninglessness than can come to inhabit a solitary person’s life when it excludes interpersonal intimacy and even God.

Even though meaningless and boredom can easily be felt in watching the film for 3 hours and 21 minutes, and seen on the screen as Jeanne Dielman goes from task to task, the film hints of going beyond the banality of the mundane when Sylvian admits to his mother that he no longer believes in God, and when he did, as a kid, he thought the sexual act of penetration must be so hurtful to a woman that the act evinces God’s wrath. He adds that he does not understand why a woman would have sexual intercourse with a man whom she doesn’t love. Jeanne replies, “You don’t know what its like to be a woman.” Indeed, kept secret from her son, she regularly prostituted herself in the apartment during the afternoons for extra cash. The dialogue here relates an angry and then an absent deity to sex without love. Given the potential of the medium of film to elucidate theological and ethical thought, the filmmaker could have had the film elaborate on the dialogue as it relates sexual ethics and theology.

Moreover, even though the lack of meaning in watching Dielman cook, clean, and go on errands can be felt by viewers, the instinctual urge for meaning, as described by the scholar, Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, could be discussed in dialogue, and related explicitly to theological questions, such as why a benevolent and omnibenevolent deity would create a species that could wallow in meaningless. Is not a person’s life to have purpose? To be sure, the lack thereof can be inferred in Sylvian and his mother, Jeanne. Furthermore, if God is love, as Paul and Augustine explicitly state in their respective writings, then doesn’t it follow that emotional intimacy is part of the human condition? Of course, both a sense of meaning in life and purpose can, with free will, be denied oneself, without thereby implying any wrath of God or blight.

The scant dialogue between Jeanne and Slyvian when they are in the apartment at in the evenings plays into the lack of intimacy and meaning in their mother-son relation, and the same is likely so in their respective relationships with other people. There is not even a television set in the apartment even though the film takes place in 1974. They do have a radio, but it is not on much. Even in the rigid way in which Sylvian sits on the sofa-bed in the living room after dinner, it is clear that the apartment is not much of a home.

Therefore, it would admittedly be out of sync to have the two have a sustained dialogue on ethics and religion. It is almost as if both characters were robots. In fact, after Jeanne is uncharacteristically lively, including with facial expressions, as she has an intense orgasm with a man who pays her for sex, she quickly returns to her automaton condition of expressionless action and even staid, cold inaction. It is from that condition, rather than out of passion, that she nonchalantly stabs the man with scissors and calmly walks away and sits motionless and expressionless at her dining-room table. The viewers are left to figure out why she murders the man, and the film ends before Sylvian returns so even that “payoff” is denied the film’s viewers, who are thus left without a sense of meaning. Perhaps in returning to her mundane, meaningless, and godless daily life, Jeanne Dielman essentially commits suicide in that she would undoubtedly be in prison for a long time. That she sometimes sits in a chair motionless and expressionless in the film would fit with being in a prison cell and connotes death.  

Not even functionalism can save Jeanne Dielman from her plight of inner emptiness. Is this the denouement of insular secularism? If the need for meaning is engrained in our very makeup, does the refusal or inability to meet that need end in self-destructiveness? This is not to say that a person must believe in a deity to escape the black hole of meaninglessness, for humanists can surely find meaning that does not have a transcendent referent. Even so, the message of the film may be that meaningfulness, as well as emotional intimacy, is not to be found in a life of functionalism as a series of work-tasks and even in identifying oneself by one’s job title, whether that be a plumber or a house-maker. This is not a story of oppression, as Jeanne tells Sylvian that she had wanted to be a single mother. Nor was anyone, or society, forcing her to be a prostitute; it was not like she could not enjoy the sex with men whom she didn’t love. Yet she seems somehow trapped, internally, in a meaningless and loveless life.

Lord of War

Lord of War (2005) is a film in which a Ukrainian-born American arms dealer, Yuri Orlov, and his brother, Vitaly, who works with Yuri when not in voluntary rehab for drug abuse, make money by selling military arms to dictators including Andre Baptiste of Liberia. Whereas Yuri is able to maintain a mental wall keeping him from coming to terms with his contribution to innocent people getting killed by the autocrats who are his customers, Vitality is finally unable to resist facing his own complicity, and that of his brother. This itself illustrates that moral concerns may have some influence on some people but not others. Yuri’s position, which can be summed up as, what they do with the guns that we sell them is none of our business, contrasts with Vitaly as he realizes that as soon as the Somalian warlord takes the guns off the trucks, villages down the hill will be killed. Vitaly even sees a woman and her young child being hacked to death down below. Yuri tries to manage his brother so the sale can be completed and the two brothers can get out of Somalia, but Vitaly has finally had enough and has come to the conclusion that he and Yuri have been morally culpable by selling guns to even sadistic dictators like Andre Baptiste. Even as Yuri ignores his own conscience, Vitaly finally cannot ignore the dictates of his own, and he takes action. Does he ignore his happiness, and thus his self-interest, in being willing to die to save the villagers by blowing up (admittedly only) one of the two trucks, or has he reasoned through his conscience and found that it coincides with his happiness? In other words, are the moral dictates of a person’s conscience necessarily in line with a person’s happiness, and thus one’s self-interest? This is a question that the filmmaker could have explored in the film.

Joseph Butler (1692-1752), a European, Anglican bishop, theologian, and philosopher, “explicitly upheld the claims of conscience against all rivals, especially interest”, otherwise known as self-interest, which Butler claims is interested in the happiness of the self.[1] To be sure, because “’the greatest satisfactions to ourselves depend upon our having benevolence in a due degree’”, “’even from self-love we should endeavor to get over all inordinate regard to and consideration of ourselves,’ and cultivate other-regarding desires.”[2] Even with this extension, Butler took it for granted that “the dictates of conscience and self-love coincide,” even though, when he considered “which is the real arbiter of virtue, he [always came] down on the side of conscience.”[3] In the “cool hour” passage in one of his sermons, he asserts, “’Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such; yet that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it’”.[4]  This does not mean that the ground of rightness is conduciveness to happiness, [and thus self-interest, and the passage] does not even mean that the motive of self-love is a good motive—the good motive is ‘affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such’—it simply means that as a motive to action, self-love is more influential than the dictates of conscience.”[5] Yet rational self-interest, which is based or premised on self-love, is coincident to matters of conscience, he insists, so why should it matter which is more influential? 

Firstly, Butler includes the happiness of heaven in self-interest, and so just looking at our embodied life here, even rational self-interest can give different results than conscience. "Butler believed, on theological grounds . . ., that virtuous behavior brings the greatest happiness in the end."[6] Secondly, Butler states that other-regarding benevolent motives (and acts) do not necessarily impact the moral agent’s mental state, and thus happiness. A person can indeed follow one’s own conscience to act benevolently such that the other person’s mental state will change without one’s own necessarily changing (i.e., being happier). So in terms of ethics alone, excluding theology, even Butler would admit that self-interest and the normative dictates of conscience can conflict. From this standpoint, Vitaly's ethic in the film can be analyzed. 

Vitaly was lost and unhappy both in being a cook in his parents’ restaurant and working for his brother Yuri. In fact, his desire to escape—to feel happy—had been so great that he resorted to cocaine and repeatedly went to a clinic without success. It is only in coming to terms with the immorality of what he and his brother were doing in selling arms to dictators around the world that Vitaly found meaning sufficient to act with purpose. In witnessing a man in the nearby village use a machete to kill a woman and her young child, Vitaly does not decide to destroy the weapons to keep the warlord from killing all of the people in the small village in order to have purpose; rather, he is overwhelmed emotionally by the severity of the harm to the two innocent people and out of this sentiment he reasoned that by destroying the guns in the trucks, he could prevent the deaths of all of the villagers. That Vitaly found purpose—essentially, found himself—is not his motive even though as he lays dying after being shot by Baptiste’s son for blowing up one of the trucks, Vitaly finally is at peace and then he dies. It is like in Jainism, where spiritual freedom from the material realm is only realized as a person lies dying without even relying on one’s heart.

Therefore, even though acting justly by honoring rather than bracketing the dictates of conscience may, and Butler would say, does coincide with the self-interest that stems from self-love, being motivated does not depend on the extra push from being happy as a result even though happiness may result. In other words, the film can be interpreted as contradicting Butler’s theory by showing that Butler depends too much on self-love and its interests (i.e., to be personally happy as a result) in motivating a person to follow one’s conscience. Other-regard, or benevolence, can be oriented to improving the mental states, and thus self-interests, of other people without being motivated by one’s own happiness being positively affected too. This is so even if the moral agent is happier as a result.

To be sure, Vitaly clearly is very troubled internally by Yuri’s instance that Vitaly not disrupt or impede the sale going through. Yuri is doubtlessly motivated by self-interest, but in terms of money and being able to leave alive. That he has no moral scruples does not mean that he is oblivious to how bad his customers are as people. Vitaly, I submit, cannot live with himself unless he blows up the sale, literally, so in this respect he can be said to be motivated not only because he does not want the innocents below to be shot after he leaves, but also because he wants to improve his mental state from being in such pain. However, his ethical/mental crisis is triggered by his having witnessed the horrendous double-murder with the murderer calmly walking away with impunity. Being so emotionally shocked —in Hume’s terms, judging morally by having a strong sentiment of disapprobation—is the basis of Vitaly’s motivation to follow his conscience even though that means betraying his own brother.

The operative motive is not Vitaly’s rational self-interest in being happy or at peace, as Butler would claim, especially as Vitaly undoubtedly knows that he would probably be killed. What people are capable of doing to other people can be so horrific that a moral agent may emotionally disapprove so much and be so motivated to forestall further harm that one’s own self-interest qua happiness is of no concern. Even if relieving one’s own internal angst is motivated by a non-rational, instinctual urge, and one may indeed be at peace afterward, the angst and peace can be effects of something else that is triggering the distinctly normative, or ethical, process that ends with a decision and an action. It is Vitaly’s strong emotional reaction in seeing a woman and young child hacked to death out in the open that is decisive in motivating him to try to blow up both trucks so nobody else in the tents below would be killed. It can perhaps even be said that he is willing to sacrifice himself, and thus his happiness, to save the lives of others. It is an odd, unfortunate, commentary on human nature itself that even if Yuri had also witnessed the violence, he would still be intent on completing the sale. Yuri’s ethical compass is extremely compromised—he even reasons that because eventually lies become the norm in a marriage, it is only logical to start one off by lying. His wife Ava leaves him, and his parents disown him, and Vitaly is dead. So much for self-love and even rational self-interest. Butler gave them too much credit. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t.

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1. Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons,” Philosophy 27 (1952), 329-44, p. 332.
2. Stephan Darwall, “Introduction,” in Joseph Butler, Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue. Ed., Stephen Darwall (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 7.
3. Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons,” Philosophy 27 (1952), p. 332.
4. Ibid., p. 337.
5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 340

Conclave

In the film, The Godfather, Part III (1990),  Cardinal Lamberto laments that Christianity, like water surrounding a stone that is in a water fountain, has not seeped into European culture even after centuries of being in Europe.  Watching the movie, Conclave (2024), a person could say the same thing about the Roman Catholic Church, though the ending does provide some hope that internecine fighting and pettiness for power, even aside from the sexual-abuse epidemic by clergy, need not win the day.

Concerning the dead pope, we are told at the beginning of the movie that he never had any doubts about God; what he had lost faith in was the Church. Through the movie, the reason is obvious. At one point, the new Cardinal Benitez from Kabul, Afghanistan aptly characterizes his fellow cardinals as “small petty men” concerned with power. Even thusly characterized, the cardinals elect Cardinal Benitez as pope, and it is only fitting that he chooses the name, Innocent. It is in the innocence of a person who has no ambition to be pope and is genuinely surprised to be elected that the Church has hope.

The outcome of the election is subtly anticipated early on by the notably unique sincerity in the blessing of the food that Cardinal Benitez gives at the beginning of the conclave, and is implicitly guaranteed by the rebuttal that he later makes in front of the other cardinals to Cardinal Tedesco’s claim that the Church is at war with Muslims. After the second bomb, Tedesco declares, “We need a leader who fights these animals,” who are the Muslims in Europe. Cardinal Benitz disagrees: Inside each of us is what we are fighting. This is exactly what Mary Magdalene tells Peter and the other disciples in the upper room after the resurrection in the film, Mary Magdalene (2018); rather than waiting for Jesus to come on clouds to vanquish the evil Roman soldiers, the change starts within, “in the transformation of our own hearts.” Accordingly, the kingdom of God is already here even as it is not yet—pending us vanquishing the enemy within, which is done in part by being compassionate to people who are suffering.

In the conclave, “the men who are dangerous are the men who do want it.”  Cardinal Bellini says he doesn’t want it, but he does. He has progressive views (e.g., more of a role for women in the Curia), which he refuses to hide in his campaign, and this strategy makes him appear to have integrity, but he doesn’t. Even though he is a Christian, and even a cleric, he angerly rebukes Cardinal Lawrence’s claim, “This is a conclave, not a war,” by saying of Cardinal Tedesco and the conservatism which that cardinal represents, “This is a war!” This is the first of two mentions of being at war—Tedesco’s war with Muslims being the second.

Even Cardinal Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, who laudably seeks the truth concerning Cardinal Tremblay and even Cardinal Benitez, is a partisan. The homily that he gives on the first day of the conclave subtly favors the progressive platform of Cardinal Bellini, whom Lawrence was still supporting to become pope. Cardinal Lawrence lauds the Church’s diversity in being comprised of people in different countries, whereas Cardinal Tedesco wants an Italian pope. “Certainty is great enemy of unity,” Lawrence tells his brothers. “Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. . . . Faith walks hand and hand with doubt. Otherwise, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.” This message is in line with Cardinal Bellini’s liberal platform because the presumption of certainly saturates Cardinal Tedesco’s ideology. As the Cardinals sitting at tables at the first dinner, Cardinal Tedesco observes that the tables are “divided by language.” He suggests to Lawrence that the next pope be Italian so it is not Cardinal Adeyeme, a black African. Cardinal Lawrence is rightly disgusted and leaves the table. Lawrence even prays with Adeyine as he cries, and puts his hand on Adeyine’s hands even though Lawrence knows that Adeyine had impregnated a teenage woman when he was 30.

Furthermore, at some point in his search for the truth concerning whether the dead pope had fired Cardinal Tremblay, Cardinal Lawrence tells a bishop, “No more secrets; no more investigations; let God’s will be done.” That Lawrence himself later investigates by entering the sealed-off papal apartment is justified by what he uncovers not only concerning the dead pope, but also Cardinal Tremblay. Finally, Lawrence is justified in keeping Cardinal Benitez’s medical secret after that Cardinal's election. Even though Benitez’s rather unique medical situation technically violates church law, Lawrence earlier said to Cardinal Bellini, “I thought we were here to serve God, not the Curia.” 

As truth-oriented as Cardinal Lawrence is, faith without love is for naught in Christian terms. In this regard, Cardinal Benitez steals the show; he is the true protagonist in the end. Just as Mary Magdalene’s rebuttal to Peter on the nature of the kingdom of God gives the film, Mary Magdalene, so much theological value for audiences, it is Cardinal Benitez’s rebuttal to Cardinal Tedesco that the Church is at war with Islam that not only gets that cardinal elected, but also provides the theological value, and thus hope, of Conclave. Take on the enemy within—one’s own hatred of Muslims—rather than fight them, Benitez tells his brothers. He could have gone further by preaching to the petty, power-seeking men: feel and exercise kindness and compassion to Muslims; go out of your way to serve them, especially those who dislike you, for something more is involved spiritually than the much easier, "love thy neighbor as thyself." Then you will find that you have conquered the enemy within and entered the kingdom of God.

Obsession

Brian De Palma’s film, Obsession (1976), harkens back to Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo (1958) primarily in that resemblances between a character-contrived myth, or story, and the closely related (though different in key respects) social reality in the film (i.e., what’s really going on in the film’s story-world) trigger perplexed reactions for the character being duped by other characters in the film. I thought she died, but there she is . . . or maybe that’s another woman who looks like her—so much so that I believe I can will the woman to be her. The human mind may be such that it convinces itself of even a supernatural explanation rather than admits to have been fooled by someone else’s cleverness. At the very least, doubt as to what is really going on can be stultifying. The human mind is all too willing obviate its uncertainty by either resorting to a supernatural explanation or making something so by force of will, as if believing something to be the case is sufficient to make it so.

The European philosopher, David Hume, wrote a text on the natural history of religion in which he suggests that we mere mortals have an innate tendency to add familiar ornaments onto divine simplicity; we innately anthropomorphize the wholly other so it looks human. Then we believe that our artifices are ontological, or real, and even divine. De Palma’s Obsession explicitly draws on religious iconography and even dream-like mysticism in conveying Michael’s vision of Sandra as Elizabeth brought back from the grave. Viewers may resist the religious cross-over because it is easier to accept that a distraught man believes someone is his deceased wife than that our minds are just as prone to lapses when we enter the domain of religion. This is not to suggest that religious meaning is thus invalid, or even that symbol, myth and ritual cannot be useful in enabling religious experience; rather, Obsession can, if we allow it to do so, gently show us what our minds may be up to in making metaphysical and ontological leaps in matters of religious faith. At the very least, the human mind ensconced in the religious domain regularly confounds belief with fact, whether epistemologically or ontologically. Similarly, we conflate two distinct literary genres: faith narrative and historical non-fiction as if the respective purposes were the same even to the respective writers themselves. We are much better at distinguishing films that are fictional from those that are based on a true story. Even a fictional film can hold a mirror up to human nature as it exists in us. I submit that the human mind is not as goof-proof as we think. Both in Vertigo and Obsession, the minds of the protagonists are definitely put under stress by observation of resemblances that don’t make sense yet are extremely inviting.

In Vertigo, Scottie thinks he recognizes Madeleine even though the contrived story is that she jumped to her death at a convent. In Obsession, Michael thinks Sandra, whom he sees priming for a painter in an Italian church, is his former wife, Elizabeth, whom the contrived story has as having died in a car more than a decade earlier. Whereas Madeleine really is Madeleine, Sandra is not Elizabeth, but is actually Michael’s (and Elizabeth’s) daughter, who is in on the scam that is being perpetrated by one of the kidnappers and Robert, Michael’s very patient real-estate partner.  Sometimes investments like swindling jobs can take over a decade before the returns come in.

In Obsession, it is not just the resemblance—though curiously not adjusting for the difference in ages—of Sandra and Elizabeth by which De Palma conveys isomorphic (i.e., of the same shape or form) resonances throughout the film The images shown at step-wise distances as the open credits are shown are of a church on a hill in Italy. Michael and Elizabeth first met there, and this is where Michael sees Sandra during a business trip with his business partner over a decade after Elizabeth died. The visual resonance of the church is found in the large memorial structure that Michael has erected in a park for his dead wife and daughter. That even as a real-estate developer he refuses to carve up that part is a testament to how dear that monument is to him. The church and the memorial edifice are also isomorphic with the top of the wedding cake in Michael’s dream of his wedding to Sandra, who, uncomfortably, it turns out, is really his daughter, Amy. That incest may have occurred by the time the couple return to America is left up to the audience, though that Michael has his arm around Sandra in a taxi connotes a certain physical intimacy, especially given the changed sexual mores in the 1970s. The ethics aside, any discomfort felt by viewers can be said to have its source in the obvious lapse in Michael’s will of wish-fulfillment as being sufficient, to him, to render the young Sandra as a replacement or even incarnation of Elizabeth as if from the grave. Willing it so does not make it so. Michael’s dull gaze at Sandra when she is on a painting riser in a church full of religious iconography not only shows the suspension of his rational mind, but also the implication that religious devotion is also susceptible to such a lapse.

One way in which myth touches us emotionally and even spiritually is in the resonances between symbols in myth and things in the world in which we live. The human brain makes use of such likenesses in dreams, such as the one that Michael has of his wedding to Sophie. Whether intentionally or not, De Palma converges myth with the dream in portraying Sandra as translucent and even other-worldly as if she were a goddess. Sandra is vicariously Elizabeth, who has come back from the grave to give her inattentive husband another chance. Michael believes this to be so even in his waking state, and his temporally elongated gaze at Sandra at several points in the film resembles how a person might look at a religious statue, such as that of the Virgin Mary, in adoration. Sandra gains goddess-like standing in the myth, which Michael accords as real empirically.  Therefore, myth can also touch our world in that a person thought to be real (in our world) has mythic resonances. In Christianity, both Jesus and Mary are typically believed to have existed historically and also in a distinctly religious state (i.e., heaven) while maintaining human form via the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the bodily assumption of Mary.  

I submit that the salience of Christianity in the film allows the viewers to grasp that the myth in the story-world, which Michael believes is real in his waking daily life, resembles distinctly religious myth as it is believed in as real by religionists. Of course, one big difference is that viewers find out what is really the case in the film, and this bursts the story’s credence, whereas religious people are not debriefed as to whether the characters of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in the Gospel stories are merely nominally real in the stories or actually existed historically. The debriefing in the film can be understood as giving the audience a psychic payoff in lieu of the one that never comes in religion.

Perhaps such a payoff in religion is not really what we want; after all, at the end of the Da Vinci Code (2006), Robert asks Sophie whether it is worth deflating the faith of Christians by revealing that Jesus was married and had at least one child—thus implying perhaps that Jesus was a man rather than a god-man. The religious meaning in Sophie’s spiritual, inherited qualities is not deflated, but the faith of many Christians who have not been debriefed on the relation between the myth and history could be expected to take a hit to the extent that the basis of their faith is the divinity of Jesus Christ rather than, say, compassion itself to people one doesn’t like (or don’t like the person).

If the reality is different than the myth, does the distinctly religious meaning in the latter necessarily or inherently collapse? Not so for Mary Magdalene in the film, Mary Magdalene (2018), who tries in vain to convince Peter in the last scene that the kingdom of God is within, and thus starts with the transformation of one’s own heart from compassion toward others, rather than with Jesus coming on clouds in the future to defeat the evil Romans and free Israel. Michael’s debriefing by Robert in Obsession is like wish-fulfillment writ large for an audience that is not accustomed to finding the meaning of a religious myth in the myth itself, rather than in other domains, such as history, astronomy, and even moral science.

Obsession is embellished with ornate religious settings and even meaning, especially with Sandra appearing like a goddess of sorts in Michael’s dream—his dead wife being de facto a goddess. As in the domain of religion, there are stories and there is the world in which we live out our daily lives. Resonances between the two give us pause, as we are not really sure what is going on—and what is really real of the two, or what the resemblances mean. Michael’s bubble is burst, but he comes out just fine in realizing that his daughter was still alive and that they have found each other in something more tangible, perhaps even more real, than the world of myth that Robert had foisted on Michael in order to swindle of him of his money. To be sure, the world of myth can come in handy, for surely there is some sense of reality that goes with the claim that Robert, once killed in his climatic fight with Michael, is in hell.  

La Dolce Vita

Thus says the LORD: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts run away from the LORD. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream." Jeremiah 17:5-7

Levi Strauss theorized that the function of a myth lies in reconciling basic contradictions, whether they are felt within a person or at the societal level. Such contradictions, and even dichotomies, can be used to energize a story’s dramatic tension and for comic effect, such as through misunderstandings. Typically, contradictions are reconciled in the denouement of a narrative; if so, the audience gets a psychic payoff. Otherwise, the audience is left with the uneasy feeling that the world is somehow not in order. I don’t believe that Fellini reconciles the contradictions in his film, La Dolce Vita (1960). The last scene, in which the film’s protagonist, Marcello, a young and handsome single man who is a tabloid columnist, turns back to follow his high-society drinking friends, who are leaving the beach. He makes the choice to return to his life of late night parties with empty socialites rather than to walk over to the only sane, available woman in the film.  Marcello does not find or establish an equilibrium, but goes on as a lost soul. Although religion is not much discussed by the characters in the dialogue, the film’s structure can be described in terms of going back and forth between two contradictory basic principles—one represented by the Roman Catholic Church and the other by the Devil. In spite of the back-and-forth, which even includes the visually high (overlooking Vatican Square) and low (in the basement-apartment of a prostitute), the main characters remain as if in a state of suspended animation between the dichotomous and contradictory relation between God and the devil. If commentators on the film haven’t highlighted this axis, the verdict could be that film as a medium could go further in highlighting religious tensions and contradictions than it does—not that going beyond religious superficialities to engage the minds of viewers more abstractly necessarily means that the contradictions must always be resolved or sublimated in a higher Hegelian synthesis and the dichotomies transcended.

In La Dolce Vita, Marcello parties the nights away for seven days while contending with an emotionally needy and suicidal fiancée. His hero of sorts, Steiner, seems like a pious man but ends up shooting his kids and committing suicide. Marcello realizes that he has barely known his father, but is not able to turn that around. The utter lack of emotional intimacy in his life is clear, and he goes on as a lost soul, with God being suggested as very distant—the Virgin Mary’s appearance to some kids amid lots of hype being dubious at best. Steiner’s piety turns out to be dubious as well. So too, Jesus, or at least the statue, is literally distant as it is up in the sky being taken to the Vatican by a helicopter in the film’s first scene.

A prostitute and a crept are much closer to Marcello, though he does not succumb to either. Although he hits on beautiful young women, including a movie star from America, he does not have enough sex to label him as a male slut. That he returns in his sports car at dawn to pick up his fiancée, whom he had stranded during an argument, distinguishes him from the empty, promiscuous women at the parties. Yet he is interested enough in other women that he realizes that at least for now, he is not the marrying sort. I submit that this, and even Fellini’s comedic satire on Rome’s contemporary party scene, can be situated within two polarities in which religion is salient in the film.

The lack of resolution or higher synthesis in the film’s narrative is epitomized by the continued back-and-forth between religious and devilish themes through the film. In the first scene, the flying statue of Jesus sets the tone for the film in the sense that religion will have a role. The scene picturing the idyllic Jesus is followed by one in which Marcello and a woman he has met at a party go to a prostitute’s flooded basement apartment to have sex. This is followed by a visual overview of Vatican Square, after a climb up a staircase, vicariously from the dark basement. This scene is followed by a night-time party outside, with large mounted torches in the background—whose fires connote hell. Then Sylvia, the movie star whom Marcello is after for sex, goes into one of Rome’s huge fountains. Both that she is wearing white and water connotes purity and even baptism brings the viewers back from hell. The purity doesn’t last, for in the next scene a jealous boyfriend slaps his girlfriend who has been hanging out with Marcello and beats him up. Then Marcello is in a church, where Steiner makes the film’s main dichotomy explicit in saying, “Priests aren’t afraid of the devil.” Then, just in case the audience has missed this point, Marcello says, “Where the devil is this place?”

Not only do the devil and Jesus have roles in this film, the Virgin Mary ostensibly puts in an appearance for two children (and their father, who takes tips). The people at the site are so desperate to see or be healed by Mary that that the viewer is able to take stock of the mob itself as if it consists of rabid wild animals. Why would the Virgin deign to make an appearance among a pack of hungry wolves? Marcello, and a priest who is there too, are skeptical as to the veracity of the two kids, especially when they whip up the crowd into a frenzy by saying, “She’s over there,” then, after sprinting to another area of the field, exclaiming, “She’s over there!” It is significant that there are no supernatural visuals in the film’s story-world. Ironically, if the reports of the “Sun miracle” associated with the Virgin’s appearance to three children in Europe in the twentieth century are empirically valid, then the non-supernatural, secular story-world that Fellini constructed may be regarded as partial, and even biased. Even in the seance in which a woman is seemingly possessed by the soul of a dead person, Marcello is not convinced that ghosts do in fact exist. The dichotomy between the Virgin Mary and the possessed woman is yet another instance of the back-and-forth structure of the film. If there is a metaphysical realm of the sacred, it is not in Fellini’s story-world. Marcello and the rest of the main characters are on their own, and there is scant any character arc in the film, even after Steiner’s suicide and murder of his kids, which would be enough of a shock emotionally to motivate Marcello to find peace and meaning.

The audience is left on its own too, assuming resolution and synthesis are naturally sought by the human mind when faced with contradictions and dichotomies, as exist in the case of the realms of the devil and that of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. In terms of religion and what is typically associated with the devil (e.g., suicide, orgy-like parties, prostitution, sex), the film shows first one then the other, und so weiter. The utter futility in transcending the dichotomy and resolving the contradiction between God and evil while in the secular world of socialites and fame may have been Fellini’s (at least unconscious) point in making the film. It is no Rosemary’s Baby, in which, by the way, the contradiction in having sweet Rosemary give birth to a creature fathered by the devil is finally resolved when she finds that she can love the baby without becoming a Satanist because her mother’s instinct is healthy.

Fellini’s protagonist does not “find” religion; nor does he leave his party-circuit socialite friends and the world of hollow fame. Presumably Marcello goes on, after the last scene, with alternating views that can connote religion and hell, respectively, while he is a static entity wandering somewhere in between. The interior settings are hard, with bland walls that do not exactly connote warmth or emotional intimacy. Perhaps that world is none other than modern secularity, wherein meaning is futilely sought in drinking, sex, and our careers. Were Marcello to say, for example, "I am a tabloid journalist," would that capture the essence of his self? An affirmative answer wherein functionality is definitive would, I submit, be worse than chasing the gossip of the famous. Therefore, Fellini's masterpiece can be understood as going well beyond a critique of the debauchery of the socialite Roman society of his day.

Bell, Book and Candle

If ever there were a mistaken title for a movie, Bell, Book and Candle must rank in the upper tier, for the spells in the bewitching comedy hinge on a cat and a bowl rather than bell, book, and candle. Magic can be thought of as the making use of concrete objects, combined with words, to engage a supernatural sort of causation meant to manipulate sentient or insentient beings/objects for one’s own purposes.  The film, Bell, Book and Candle (1958), is not only a love story and a comedy, but also the presentation of a story-world in which witches and warlocks engage in contending spells for selfish reasons. That story-world in turn can be viewed as presenting a religion, which can be compared and contrasted with others. Most crucially as far as religion is concerned, the supernatural element that is observable in the story-world points to the existence of a realm that lies beyond the world of our daily lives and thus renders the film’s story-world different. Put another way, the unique type of causation, which appears only as coincidence to the characters who are not in on the existences of witches and warlocks in the story-world, transcends appearance because the “laws” of the causation operate hidden from view, as if in another realm. I contend that it is precisely such transcendence not only in terms of belief, but also praxis, that distinguishes the domain of religion as unique and thus distinct from other domains, including those of science (e.g., biology, astronomy), history, and even ethics.

The film’s plot, in short, revolves around a spell-induced romance between Shepherd Henderson and Gillian Holroyd. He is “a human being,” an odd label that witches and warlocks in the film apply to others as if witches and warlocks were not also human beings. Gillian is a witch. Gillian’s relatives, Queenie and Nicky, are like Gillian, at least through most of the film. Interestingly, Elsa Lanchester, who plays Queenie, would go on to be in the hit television series, Bewitched. In that series, a witch is married to a “human being.” Unlike in that series (which I watched as a child and thus had in the back of my mind as I watched the film), the film contains descriptors of witchcraft, which I submit can be regarded as a religion due to the transcendent element in the supernatural causation. Implicitly, the film provides viewers of other religions with a comparative-religion mindset.

One lesson in comparative religion is that fear may naturally grip a person of one religion when exposed to another. This point is made visually in the film when Shepherd looks into Gillian’s store window from the sidewalk and sees the intense greenish fire towering up out of a bowl as a spell is being enacted. Unaware of the existence of witchcraft, Shepherd leaps to the conclusion, in fear, that the store is on fire (he lives above the store, so naturally he has more an a passing concern). The supernatural element is scary to him because it is different and he does not understand it, so he references it to something that is familiar to him (i.e., a fire in a store). I submit that we tend to do this when we come in contact with another religion than our own. In watching the movie, viewers do not make Shepherd’s assumption because the presence of witchcraft in the story-world is conveyed up front, so we are vicariously inside the religion of witchcraft and so we laugh at the comedy rather than are afraid as if it were a horror movie. Even so, in watching Shepherd’s fear, the viewers are “taught” a lesson of comparative religion in how people of one religion naturally react to seeing another. Furthermore, the viewers can take the secrecy of Gillian and her relatives when Shepherd enters the store because there’s a fire as also being a very human tendency of co-religionists in holding some information back from outsiders. We are indeed a territorial species, and this goes for religion too.

The film also furnishes the film-viewers with an admittedly negatively-biased list of the attributes of witches and warlocks, such as that they cannot cry or blush, they float in water, and cannot love (though they can lust). As an exercise in comparative religion, angels in Christianity can be contrasted in that they definitely can love (and cannot lust). Angels don’t float, cry, or blush because unlike witches and warlocks, angels do not have corporeal bodies. The distinction on love is the most significant because whether or not a person can love others colors one's very existence. 

Spells, in the admittedly biased view assumed by the film, which, after all, was released in 1958, are made for selfish reasons. Gillian admits admits this to Shepherd, and she adds, moreover, “I have lived selfishly.” Left out are spells that are meant to help other people. With spells coming solely out of selfishness, Gillian tells Shepherd, “we end up in a world of separateness.” Unlike “humans,” witches and warlocks as they are in the film are thus not likely to marry, for a relationship of give and take based on mutual love, and thus other-regardedness, would “mean giving up a way of thinking and even a whole existence” that is built on self-centeredness. That existence is depicted in dramatic terms when Gillian and her brother, Nicky, threaten each other with spells in order to manipulate the other for their own selfish interests. 

People who belong to Wiccan covens in the twenty-first century would balk at the claim that their religion is founded on selfishness and manipulation. Such people might claim that the film unfairly depicts Wiccan as Satanist, or at least with attributes that are antithetical to Christianity, whose primary orientation, at least in theory, is to neighbor-love rather than to placing self-love above God. It is interesting that Gillian is usually dressed in black until she ceases to be a witch, and that Nicky refers to her by saying, “Well, speak of the devil.” 

The film's depiction of witches renders them (and warlocks) as being antithetical to Christians. Portraying such a stark dichotomy surely made it easier for the viewers in the 1950s and 1960s to distinguish the religion of witchcraft from the Christianity that was so dominant then in American culture. Furthrmore, beyond listing some of the attributes of a witch that are so obviously different that those of angels (except for Lucifer), making the foundation of selfishness explicit in what is paradigmatically a witch's “whole existence” helps the viewers to go beyond the particular characters to view witchcraft as part of a religion That is to say, the witches and warlock in the film can be understood as being in a religion that is distinct, and thus can readily be compared and contrasted with others. That prejudice against witches and warlocks in the 1950s could be useful in making contrasts in a way that makes it easier for movie audiences to think in terms of comparative religion by going to a movie does not render the project ethical. Also, the effort to distinguish a religion from others too much can backfire in that things in common can be brushed under the rug, or missed, in the process.

For example, applying religious faith to spells is completely unique to witchcraft. The notion of a spell-using words and certain material objects to trigger causation that operates in another, transcendent realm, can be applied to the consecration by Christian priests of bread and wine into having the essence of Christ’s real presence (which is based in another realm) in what is called transubstantiation and consubstantiation in Christian theology. The expression commonly used in magic, hocus-pocus, is what Medieval Christian laity used to say when, in not knowing Latin, they would repeat the words of consecrating priests, hoc est corpus, which translates as “This is the body (of Christ).” This declaration in liturgical ritual, evinces the spoken word being applied to a material object (i.e., bread) to transform that object's essence according to whatever laws pertain to a transcendent-based, supernatural (i.e., not based on a law of nature) sort of causation. The filmmakers could have gone further in making this commonality explicit. Queenie, for example, could say to Shepherd, “Why is it so strange to you that witches conjure spells; your priests do the same in transforming bread into the body of your Jesus.” That would probably have been too much for Christian viewers to swallow when the film was released, but I contend that the film (and the medium of film more generally) would have been more valuable as a contribution to opening up the academic field of comparative religion to the public (i.e., academic laity) had the screenwriter and director empowered the dialogue to go further. 

As for the negative bias towards spells and the entire existence of witches and warlocks, subjecting it to debate in the dialogue may have been beyond the ken of the filmmakers then. A more intellectually stimulating film would have resulted had Wiccan advocates been consulted. To be sure, that spells may be inherently manipulatory is a legitimate claim not to be dismissed by going too far in the other direction, but holding a society's religious biases up to audiences as being at least debatable is a positive role that filmmakers can assume, with better, more thought-provoking films resulting. This gets at what is precisely my thesis concerning film: that the medium has untapped potential to stimulate philosophical (and theological) reasoning by people who have not necessarily taken courses in philosophy and theology. 

Return to Haifa

Return to Haifa (1982) is a film in which the political element of international relations is translated into personal terms on the levels of family and individual people. The establishment of Israel by the UN is depicted in the film as being accomplished not only incompetently, but in negligence of likely human suffering. In fact, the suffering of the indigenous population may have been intended, given the operative attitude towards those people as animals. That the human being can be so dehumanizing in action as well as belief ultimately makes victims of all of us, even across artificial divides. This is precisely what the film depicts, with the victims being the active characters while the real culprits remain for the most part off-camera. The viewer is left with a sense of futility that can be undone by widening one’s view to include the antagonists, who are not passive. It is not as if fate inexorably brought about the Nakba (or even the scale of the atrocities in Gaza in the next century, which, as the film was made in 1982, cannot be said to be anticipated by the filmmaker—though perhaps it could have been).

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestianian couple expelled from Haifa in the Nakba that took place in 1948, return in 1967 to what had been their house in Haifa. Recognizing that furniture does not make a home, Saeed and Safiyya are particularly interested in whether their now-grown son, Khaldun, whom they abandoned when they fled from their house in the Nakba, would now want to live with them in the occupied territory or remain with Miriam, the Israeli who lives in the house and adopted Khaldun. To the twenty-year-old Khadun, whom Miriam had named Dov, Saeed and Safiyya are strangers. All of them are victims.

That Miriam had survived the Holocaust and is empathetic to the Palestinian couple having lost their house keeps her from being the film’s antagonist. That, in a flashback, she criticizes the Israeli soldiers for throwing a dead Palestinian boy like a piece of wood into a truck during the Nakba also goes to her character, especially given that, in a flashback further back, she witnesses Nazi troops shooting her own son. Moreover, not only is it inappropriate to blame her for leaving Europe to live in the Jewish state after the Holocaust and even for moving into the empty house in 1948, she is worthy of praise for adopting an infant and raising him. To be sure, she is blameworthy for having lied for years to Dov about the circumstances of his infancy, and Saeed rightly makes this point. Even so, Saeed, Safiyya, and Miriam, and even Khadun/Dov, share the experience of victimhood even if the son is not aware of his own and he lacks empathy for his birth parents, who had lost not only their house, but their son too. In fact, he blames them for having abandoned him in the house when they (and everyone else in the town) was fleeing gun-fire without notice. Lest it be thought that he, or even Nazi Germany is the prime antagonist, I submit that squalid role goes to the nascent state of Israel, with the UN as the negligent accomplice.

With home, belong, and return arguably being the three concepts that underlie the film’s narrative, the thesis can be described in the following terms: Macro-political decisions and resulting societal-level events have social and psychological impacts that are destructive and even ruinous to individuals and families. The film’s thesis resonates with Israel’s disproportionate reprisals against Palestinians in Gaza—rendering over a million homeless and short of food for months on end as of early 2025, when I saw the film. It is one thing to read that 55,000 Gaza residents were dead or missing and to look at photographs of the demolition of cities in the occupied enclave, and quite another to be there and see the horrendous impact on individuals there. Put another way, it is one thing to read of Israel’s president claiming that every resident of Gaza was guilty (and thus deserved to suffer) after Hamas’ foray into Israel proper in October of 2023, and quite another to comprehend the scale of the subsequent devastation in Gaza. Upon assuming office in 2025, U.S. President Trump characterized Gaza as a demolition zone. Relative to that, the Nakba that is portrayed in the film can be regarded as tame.

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya arrive by ship with other European Jews in 1948. In spite of having suffered atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the human beings arriving in the new state of Israel felt empathy for strangers. “All we know,” one migrant says, “is that we are going to homes owned by others.” Not even having suffered in Nazi Germany gives those new arrivals any presumption. I submit that this attitude is in start contrast to Israel in how it needlessly aggressively managed the Nakba in 1948. Even the UN, which left it to the Israelis to uproot the indigenous residents, can be blamed, especially considering the reference in the film to the Israeli attitude in which Palestinians are regarded as though animals to serve the Jews. From such an utterly dehumanizing attitude, not only the Nakba, but also the huge atrocities in Nazi Germany, almost a century later, in Gaza, are all to easy for the aggressors to justify to themselves. Furthermore, if indeed the attitude was held by the new government of Israel in 1948 and its military, the UN can be reasonably judged as woefully negligent in failing to supervise on the ground the transfer of land in the process of the creation of the state.

Such a momentous political decision as creating a state in a territory which is already populated and the indigenous population has not consented has the potential for abuse against families and individuals, as the results of the Milgram and Stanford psychological experiments confirm; humans given power have an excessive inclination to harm others. This fact is hardly limited to the Nazi and Israeli governments, and international governmental infrastructure should be up to the task of being able to safeguard our questionable species from its own nature. Return to Haifa can be viewed as making the point through narrative that people across divides can all be regarded as victims from political decisions being taken without considering the possibility (or probability) that one group might view another as consisting of service animals rather than as other human beings, who having a rational nature (Kant) and sentiments (Shaftsbury), are worthy of being treated as not merely means, but also ends in themselves.

Presence

The medium of film has great potential in playing with ontology, the branch of philosophy that asks (and tries to answer) the fundamental question: What really exists?  Put another way, what does it mean for something to exist. The being of “to be,” as opposed to not-be may be thought of, can be labeled as existential ontology. Whereas in the Hindu Upanishads, being itself is Brahman, which pervades everything in the realm of appearance, the Abrahamic religions posit the existence of a deity that creates existence and thus is its condition or foundation. Creation ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing) is another way of grasping why the Abrahamic god is not existence, or being, itself, for that which brought (and sustains) existence into (and as) being cannot logically be existence itself. Fortunately for most viewers who lead normal lives, the film, Presence (2024), does not hinge on such abstractions; the salience of ontology, or what is real beyond our daily experiences (in the realm of appearance), is merely implied in there being an entity that intriguingly is only a presence. It is real to both the main characters in the film’s world and to viewers of the film because of the inclusion of supernatural effects that the entity is able to register in the perception of the family living in the house. Crucially, such effects do not overwhelm the subtlety in how the presence is known to exist (i.e., be real). In this way, Presence succeeds where Poltergeist (1982) and Ghost (1990) do not: Presence is more philosophically intriguing and thought-provoking than the latter two films, and is thus a better example of the potential that the medium of film has in engaging viewers in philosophy. Being less oriented to visually titilating supernatural effects, Presence can better engage the mind philosophically. 

Presence can be regarded as instantiating an innovative approach to the horror genre. At the film’s very beginning, Chris (husband to Rebekah and father to Chloe and Tyler) corrects Rebekah regarding Chloe’s shock at the apparent drug-overdose of her best friend: “It’s not life; it’s death.” The tenuousness of the line between the two conditions—existing and not existing—is a leitmotif throughout the film. The film challenges this dichotomy itself, for in that story-world, people really do exist non-materially after the body dies. The modern default of medicine (and, more specifically, psychiatry) is evident in the film as Chloe’s parents grapple with Chloe’s sense of a dead girl’s presence in the house, but the supernatural eventually manifests even to Chris, Rebekah, and Tyler. Their notions of what is real—or, what really exists—is widened to include the existence of ghosts. Ironically, it takes manifestations that register in physics, such as books moving visually on their own, for the family to accept as a fact that reality includes entities that reside beyond the limits of (living) humans’ perception and even cognition. The modern assumption that natural science must be impacted in a supernatural way for the reality of an entity that lies beyond our realm to be accepted is erroneous yet it is accepted by the filmmakers and their characters in the film; the ghost need not act in ways that burst through into being perceived by the family for the ghost to exist, or even be known to exist. The psychic who visits the house is proof of there being sensed/known to be a presence even though no supernatural effects are witnessed. In fact, she knows that the ghost exists before Chris, Rebekah, and Tyler do.

The extension or deepening of reality to include entities that are in another realm from that of living people is “the reality” that the film presents. The very subtly of the presence (putting aside the supernatural events) invites philosophical reflection perhaps even more than reading a book on ontology does, for film engages sight (into a story-world) more tangibly than can the imagination) and hearing. The Matrix (1999), for example, does the human mind a great service in manifesting the philosophy of solipsism, the view that our brains are really in vats such that all that we perceive is an illusion, in a way that no one can get by reading a book. The human mind is such that when presented with vivid visuals and distinct tones of voice, the staying power is arguably longer than are sentences in a book. In Presence, the psychic describes the entity as “a presence that does not want to be forgotten.” Ideas can be like that too; hence it is a shame when a scholar dies before or without having published one’s knowledge, and that films perish before having been preserved.

Presence is especially ripe for philosophical reflection in furnishing the psychic’s description of the realm unknown to us wherein ghosts exist; it is not just in there being such a realm and thus an extension or depth of reality beyond appearance that the film furnishes to audiences. Whereas Chris can only admit, “There is mystery in this world,” the psychic describes the entity as suffering and being confused, for the past and present can be simultaneous for it. The entity can even anticipate the tragic accident that will occur in the house and even sense that there is a role for the entity itself to play in the incident. That the role is to protect Chloe even though the psychic says that the entity is not Chloe’s dead friend expands the viewers’ archetype of ghosts being angry and harmful. That the entity in Presence was not Chloe’s friend when alive renders the helpful nature even amid the anxiety of being in a realm that is qualitatively different from that of living humans all the more foreign to viewers, and thus intriguing philosophically. In short, going on to describe rather than merely stipulate the existence of a realm that is real and yet has very different dynamics than does the realm in which we live out our lives makes the film more philosophically interesting and idea-stimulating. Even though the viewers do not get the psychological payoff in being able to enter that realm vicariously by being shown it in the film, the point that reality is not exhausted or completely known to us comes through loud and clear.

Kant’s nominal realm of reality as distinct from his phenomenal realm of appearances may in fact be the basic paradigm on which the film and its story-world is founded. The philosopher’s theory that the human mind structures perceptions of space and time along rational lines is itself on the level of a paradigm. So too is Einstein’s theory of physics in which gravity can bend space itself and effect time, slowing it in proximity to a great mass. The film depicts space not as inert or static, as the entity can emit energy of such intensity and force that ripples in space are visible. As for time, I have already mentioned the observation of the psychic that the past and present are perceived as occurring simultaneously by the entity in the realm in which it found itself suddenly to be in at death. The line between living and death may be slim and thus easily and even accidentally crossed without notice, as the theologian and early-modern philosopher Jonathan Edwards sermonized to young people in an age in which they died in disproportionate numbers, yet the two distinct realms in Presence are very different—the paradigm in which the entity exists challenging and stimulating commonly held assumptions that we have from the world in which we live. Rendering the relativity or situatedness of our lived-in paradigm transparent to us is a great contribution that film-makers can make (and some have made) to the Hegelian progress of our species in coming to know itself in successively greater freedom. For being freed ideationally from our innate paradigm in being cognizant of its basic assumptions relative to others is indeed of value.

Farha

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, being in the wake of the Nazi atrocities, was arguably viewed generally then as something that the world owed to the Jewish people. Perhaps for this reason, the UN did not take adequate measures on the ground to safeguard the Palestinian residents. In retrospect, the possibility, even likelihood, that people who group-identify with (or even as) victims consciously decide to become victimizers should have been better considered. The film, Farha, made in 2021, illustrates the sheer indeterminacy, and thus arbitrariness, of human volition when it issues orders to the body to be violent against other rational beings. Channeling Kant, it can be argued that the decision to shoot a family that poses absolutely no threat impurely out of hatred based on group-identity fails even to treat other rational beings as means—to say nothing of as ends in themselves. The unadulterated deplorability in being unwilling even to use another person as a means to some selfish goal, preferring instead to kill rather than respect the otherness of another person, grounds the verdict of the culprit being less than nothing. In another film, The Brutalist (2024), Laszio, the Jewish protagonist, erroneously concludes that Jews must surely be less than nothing, given how they were treated not only in Nazi Germany, but also in Pennsylvania even after the news of the Holocaust had reached the other shore. Whether brutality or passive-aggressive prejudice is suffered, however, turning one’s victimhood into victimizing is ethically invalid, for such a callous reaction fails to treat other rational beings as ends in themselves, and may even be so severe as to fail to treat them even as means.

Near the beginning of Farha, an Islamic teacher of girls looks on approvingly as one of the girls reads that the words of an unbeliever are the lowest. I submit that this line sets the tone for the film, and underlies how the Israelis and Palestinians have treated each other as groups historically, and most egregiously in how the Israeli government killed and decimated in Gaza in 2023-2024, interestingly just after Farha had been made. The unprovoked willfulness, or volition, that the film depicts of an Israeli commander deciding to have two of his subordinates shoot an unarmed Palestinian family and leave the just-born infant to die because a Palestinian baby is not “worth a bullet,” can be interpreted as the prima causa that, aggregated, lead to Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, which in turn led to the disproportionate Israeli decimation of Gaza, with as many as 55,000 killed and over a million residents rendered homeless and suffering a famine. In other words, the pivotal incident of the film can be heard has the proverbial first shot. As it was not heard around the world, the filmmaker of Farha performed that service for the world.

Myopia circling self-identification based on groups perpetuates cycles of hatred and violence. In Farha, the Islamic teacher objects to Farha’s father, who decides to allow his daughter to attend school in the city. She already knows the Koran, the teacher says. “What else is there to learn?” Closing the loop, as it were, can lock in antagonism based on group-identity, for the Koran not only states that the words of the unbeliever are lowest, but also that if a nonbeliever living in the same village refuses thrice to convert, it is better that that person be killed than risk that one’s false beliefs pollute the believers. I read this line while I was spending a Spring Break at Yale reading the Koran for a term paper. In Christianity, the Apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 that Christians should avoid close contact with people who do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. To be sure, merely avoiding contact is ethically superior to killing, but an Islamicist could point ironically to the story of Abraham as teaching that divine commands (and thus revelation) trump even universally-accessible moral principles.[1]

In Farha, the Israeli group-commander is not following a divine command when he uses his free will to give the order to shoot the Palestinian family; he is thus culpable. He even knowingly breaks the promise he made to Farha’s uncle, who was anonymously helping the Israeli commander, that women and children would not be harmed. Even though the commander’s group-identification-saturated paradigm backs up his volition, he is blameworthy as an individual, for his volition is his alone and so, as the Americans say of the U.S. President, the buck stops with him.

Coming away from the film, a viewer might wonder why it is that the village had to be evacuated immediately. The loud-speakers repeatedly threaten that any (Palestinian) villagers who do not leave the village immediately will be shot. Why such a hurry?  Ironically, the Israeli military could cite Paul’s no-contact dictum; the possibility of sharing the village is never brought up in the film. The dire urgency is undercut visually in the last scene, as Farha sits on a swing next to that which her friend had sat—that other swing is now broken. The village is deserted—no Israelis have moved in. Flies swarm the dead baby in the courtyard—the corps not having been worth even a bullet.

Is it such an Augustinian, Hobbesian, Pascalian, and Machiavellian world that peace is only possible once all humans have been removed from the equation?  For only finally, at the end of the film, is the village at peace; Farha walks away in silence and no one is left. She leaves the village in desolate peace. If the Age of Reason did indeed fall to the Holocaust and Gott ist tot as Nietzsche claimed, such that all we have left is human subjectivity, as the decimated philosophical phenomenologists of the decadent twentieth-century erroneously concluded, how will humanity pull itself together, especially if group-identification is permitted to continue to have such staying power in human consciousness?  Until her world was needlessly turned upside down, Farha just wanted to be a teacher; she wanted to break through constrained knowledge and help others to do so too. She ends up just trying to survive long enough in a small pantry-room to escape the arbitrariness of an antagonistic human will. Perhaps a little Buddhism might be helpful in dissolving the grip of group-identification; a group’s name can be understood as just a label, rather than as corresponding to an actual group-self, which does not really exist. In other words, “Israeli” and “Palestinian” may be interpreted as labels in a nominal rather than a realist way in terms of whether anything existent corresponds.  

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1. See Soren Kierkegaard’s book, Fear and Trembling, on this point: namely, the divine command to sacrifice Isaac trumps the ethical charge of murder even though only Abraham knows of the command whereas the ethical principle not to murder is accessible to anyone.

The Brutalist

It is easy to conclude that Adrien Brody “steals the show” in his depiction of Laszio Toth in The Brutalist (2024), a film about a Jewish architect (and his wife and niece) who emigrates to Pennsylvania from Hungary after World War II. As I was stretching my legs after watching the very long yet captivating film in a theater, a woman doing the same declared to me that Adrien Brody had definitively stolen the show. I wasn’t quite sure, though I perceived Guy Pearce’s acting out Harrison Van Buren to be emotionally fake, even forced. In understanding the film, it is vital to go beyond the obvious characters (and actors) to acknowledge the roles of two silent yet very present characters as definitive for the meaning of the film. Before revealing those characters, the proverbial elephant in the room must be discussed: Being Jewish even in the modern, “progress”-oriented world.

It is not long after Laszio sits down to talk with his initial host—Attila, the cousin—that the religious question comes up. Although Attila is Jewish, his wife Audrey is Roman Catholic and Attila has converted. Laszio shocked not only at this, but that Attila has changed his last name to the Americanized Miller. In the next scene, set outside, we see a large “Jesus Saves” lit sign in the background; in the foreground is bread-line, which is out of bread. Jesus may save souls, but apparently not hungry bodies. The implication is that Attila sold his soul in giving up his religion to fit in.

It is not that Laszio carries any grudge against Christianity; it had not been the force behind the Nazi’s Final Solution, and thus behind the concentration camp where both he and his wife Erzsébet had (separately) been sent. “Dreams slip away,” Harrison observes. Laszio can of course relate; he says at one point that he had no choice but to come to America. No longer a working architect, and unfairly deprived of housing by his cousin once in Pennsylvania, Laszio must stay in homeless shelter and shovel coal for work. To him, America is no shining city on a hill; he tells his wife at one point, “They don’t want us here. We are nothing; we are worse than nothing.” He has internalized the external prejudice against Jews, and perhaps may feel on some level that his internment in a concentration camp to have been justified. The Brutalist is not a light film.

To be less than nothing may be justified by the infliction of suffering and even death on others, as the Nazis did; to be forced to endure the sting of such intense hatred is on the contrary not to be less than nothing. Interestingly, we could say that the innocent civilians in Gaza in 2023-2024 were not less than nothing; less than nothing is applicable instead to the Israelis who can be implicated in and killed 55,000 Gaza residents and made more than a million homeless (even bombing in a tent camp). As these numbers far exceed the 1,200 Israelis who died and the couple hundred Israeli hostages, justified natural justice was also far exceeded by vengeance. That the Jewish deity saves that for itself makes this verdict all the more damning.

Just the president of Israel was wrong in his insistence that every resident of Gaza was guilty and thus deserved to suffer, so too it would be wrong to conclude that every Jewish person was culpable for the horrendous over-reaction in killing tens of thousands of Gaza residents and making many, many more homeless and facing famine and a shortage of medicine. Jewish people generally need not be in the awkward psychological position of both presuming to be the chosen people and a people that is worse than nothing.

Just as Laszio suffers wrongfully in interiorizing the sentiment of prejudiced people that Jews are worse than nothing, he does not have to carry his memory of the death-camp into his architecture. A drawing of one of his buildings is labeled, “The past in the present,” which conflicts with his intention that his buildings not only endure stylistically, but are apart from time. The underlying problem is that a human artifact cannot both hold on to the past and yet have an ambiance of eternity. The huge, cement building that he designs for Harrison looks like a giant tomb, such as the ones constructed in ancient Egypt. At the same time, the dark, hard-solid walled rooms could pass for the gas chambers used by the Nazis to kill people at the concentration camps. Laszio carries his dark past into his architecture in the “new world.” That he intentionally uses light to show a Christian cross in the distinctly Christian chapel in the building may connote the hope that had been utterly absent in the death camps. Laszio’s pride in this architectural achievement is ironic, given both his skeptical reaction to his cousin’s conversion to Catholicism to fit in, but it is not as if Laszio might convert to Christianity. After all, “Jesus Saves” is associated in the film with no bread left in the bread-line.

I submit that Christianity and the Holocaust are the two silent partners, or characters, in the film. That the consulting architect is a Protestant is no accident, for the city wanted assurance because Laszio is Jewish. Christianity is also present in Attila and Audrey’s bedroom in the form of a crucifix on a wall, and perhaps most explicitly in Harrison’s insistence that the chapel be distinctly Christian, rather than a prayer room as Laszio initially proposes. The light shown in the chapel from the cross on the ceiling cannot be missed in the otherwise gray tomb-monstrosity of a building.

As for the Holocaust, its subtle imprints can be found throughout the film. Perhaps that character is most felt—most present—not in the tomb-like rooms in the partially constructed community center—and it is odd that the public would want to spend leisure time surrounded by walls, floors, and ceilings of cement—but when slabs of cement are loaded onto a freight train. The heavy, almost deafening thuds on a drum, the iron tracks, and the train itself conjure up the trains on the way to the Nazi death-camps. When the train crashes, the fire may even evoke the ovens in the camps. It is perhaps no accident that the film has Harrison fire and evict Laszio (recall that his own cousin, the Christian Attila, kicked Laszio out earlier). The sudden freight of having to fend for oneself (and one’s family) is felt existentially, and such a fear must have been felt by the victims of the Holocaust. To subject anyone to such freight is to render oneself, rather than the victim, as worse than nothing.

Both Christianity and the Holocaust are very much present in the film, and yet obliquely so. The implicit message may be that as much as we want to be free of the past, it’s imprint can be found all around us. Why didn’t Christianity come to the rescue of the Communists, Jews, and gays in the Holocaust? Both hope and despair seem to coexist without cancelling each other out. What lies beyond Laszio’s attraction to the cross in the context of the tomb, and his unconscious interest in reimaging the dingy inner sanctum of a death camp? Why didn’t “Jesus Save” as the neon sign in the film insists?  To be free of the past does indeed lie in Laszio’s free-will, as it does for the rest of us, even though existential trauma, if left to its own devices, can reverberate through time if the severity is sufficiently intense to leave imprints in not only the human mind, but also its constructed artifacts. The human mind is perhaps too fragile for what people are all too willing to inflict on others. Not even our religions seem to be enough.

Emilia Pérez

In handling social ethics, especially if the topic is controversial, film-makers must decide, whether consciously or not, whether to advocate or elucidate. Whereas the former is in pursuit of an ideology, the latter is oriented to teasing out via dramatic tensions the nuances in a typical normative matter that move an audience beyond easy or convenient answers to wrestle with the human condition itself as complex. This is not to say that advocation should never have a role in film-making; The film, Schindler’s List (1993), for example, provides a glimpse into the extremely unethical conduct of the Nazi Party in ruling Germany. I submit that the vast majority of ethical issues are not so easily decided one way or the other as those that arose from Hitler’s choices regarding communists, Slavs in Eastern Europe, intellectuals, Jews, homosexuals and the disabled. In relative terms, the ethical controversy surrounding transsexuals is less severe and clear-cut. The value of elucidating is thus greater, as are the downsides of prescribing ideologically. One such drawback to indoctrinating on a controversial issue is that the ideological fervor in making the film for such a purpose can blind a film-maker to the cogency of the arguments made in favor of advocated stance on the issue. The film, Emilia Pérez (2024), illustrates this vulnerability, which I submit is inherent to ideology itself.

The film centers on the decision of a Mexican drug-kingpin to get surgery to “become a woman.” I am using quotes here because the statement itself strikes at the controversy itself. Can a biological man become a woman? If so, is it sufficient that the man’s penis be removed, or must a vagina be made?  Or does the making of a vagina out of the skin of a penis constitute a vagina? This seems not to be the case, and, furthermore, ovaries are typically not implanted. Yet the removal of the penis and testicles can be interpreted as the loss of manhood in the literal sense. Is the patient in gender-limbo? In contrast, there was no ethical limbo for the Nazis who murdered millions of people in Europe. It is no accident that Spielberg made Schindler’s List in black and white. Emilia Pérez is in color, and thus flush with the nuances of the world that most of us inhabit in our daily lives.

Lest it be contended that gender is separate from the biology, such that a man can be a woman without even penis-removal, then the contention itself can be reconceptualized and presented as a nuanced question rather than as a fact of reason that has already been established as in a fait accompli to be merely (but importantly!) ingested and promptly digested by audiences. When Emilia, after her operation, insists that she is just as much a woman as any other woman, another character could turn this statement into a question by asking, “But you don’t have ovaries, do you? Or eggs?” Similarly, when Emilia reverts to a man’s voice in expressing outrage upon discovering that her ex-wife has taken the children, the statement of being just as much of a woman as any other woman could be revisited in dialogue.

Moreover, film-makers need not shy away from making relevant philosophical issues transparent and even exploring possible lines of reasoning. For example, the assumption that in an alleged dispute between the body and the mind, the mind not only trumps the body, but is immune from the conflict of interest that is inherent in having one party of a dispute being the arbitrator is frequently passed over in sex-change decisions. Emilia Pérez lapses in not challenging this assumption. She assumes that her mind is right and her body is wrong, but she is using one of the two to make the decision, and thus pass judgment on itself.

Emilia’s decision to undergo a surgical operation is already decided when she meets with Rita, the lawyer who agrees to handle the logistics of Emilia’s operation (and subsequent hiding in plain sight as a woman) for a lucrative fee. Wasserman, the Israeli physician who performs the operation, tells Emilia beforehand that the soul of a person remains the same even if the body changes. Emilia disagrees: the body can change the soul, which in turn can change the world. Unfortunately, the film does not go further in unpacking either of these affirmations. That the human soul is notoriously difficult to conceptualize, much less define as to an essence and attributes may be why two statements are allowed to stand on their own—but are they really? The attitude of the film is clearly in favor of Emilia’s ideological belief even though it is hardly an established fact that by removing an organ or two, the soul itself changes appreciably. Emilia is on firmer ground in claiming that the world can change if enough souls change, but even here, the relevant change is arguably more from self-love issuing out in selfish self-interest to an enlightened self-interest manifesting benevolence, than in terms of gender. Does a soul even have a gender? The Christian Apostle Paul asserts in his epistle to the Galatians (3:28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In terms of souls, gender can be transcended. Perhaps both the physician and Emilia should stay clear of religious language altogether; psychology may be more relevant anyway. If the body changes, what would be the impact on the person’s psychology? Self-love in the psychological sense is different than self-love as a sin.

What about the world part of the tripartite linkage? Does removing a few organs relevant to gender render the world a better place, assuming enough people whose psychological state would be improved thereby undergo operations? More people who are comfortable literally in their own skin could indeed be expected, other things equal, to result in a happier world. Perhaps nothing is more destructive of a society than is the self-hate of some people at the expense of the many. In the film, Emilia turns from drug-dealing to founding a non-profit charitable organization geared to helping families of murder victims find some peace from the recovery of the bodies. Her newly-found self-acceptance clearly results in a better world; other people benefit from her new-found psychological relief in her externals finally reflecting her inner-self, which is a psychological rather than a theological concept. As for her soul, and what it might experience after her mortal body—whether male or female or neither—has died, God’s eyes might be more on the residue remaining Emilia’s soul from the killing of people for drug-profits than on any residue remaining from gender, whether psychological or biological.  

Approaching a controversial, and thus perhaps a not-easily-resolvable ethical issue as a question rather than as in the form of a premeditated ideological answer saves an audience from feeling that it is being viewed only as a means of furthering an ideology (whereas Kant’s ethic insists that we be treated as ends in ourselves rather than just as means) and a screenwriter from overlooking logical lapses occasioned from a fervent ideological agenda. Emilia’s insistence that changing a body changes a soul, which in turn changes the world may be a good line, but it seems more infused with ideological bent than having been thought out. It is better, I submit, not only to elaborate as the narrative unfolds on both of the contending claims, but also to open the viewers up to other, larger questions, such as raised here. Just as film can present the nuances in a tone of voice in a line excellently delivered by an actor, so too film can enunciate and enumerate on the nuances that typically forestall easy solutions to ethical problems. 

Moreover, both in enunciating abstract philosophical and theological points and exploring them, including pointing out where they clash, the medium of film has unrealized potential, as evinced in this analysis of Emilia Pérez. Against this potential, using film to advocate ideologically pales utterly. The hidden gravitational pull of ideology can render a producer, director, and screenwriter unwittingly susceptable to hasty and faulty reasoning in coming up with statements for dialogue that are nonetheless likely to be delivered by actors in a defiant tone of infallibility. I am just as much a woman as every other woman! If you say so, Emilia. A film can and should subject such ideological declarations to scrutiny as questions.