The Count of Monte Cristo

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is a Biblical saying that is perhaps as well known as it is typically ignored in the midst of passion. Even the advice that revenge is better served up as a cold dish rather than immediately when the grill is still hot is difficult to heed. The 1975 film, The Count of Monte-Cristo, can be likened to a “how-to” recipe book on how to exact revenge against multiple people, one after the other until the sense dawns on the avenger that one’s one life has been utterly consumed by the desire and then feels empty once the deserved suffering has been sufficiently inflicted. It is admittedly very difficult to walk away from a grievous injustice if the agent of the harm is allowed to evade suffering that is deserved. In the film, however, Abbé Faria, a Christian priest who has been unjustly held in an island prison for fifteen years, nonetheless urges Edmond Dantes, whose prison cell is connected to Faria’s tunnel, to resist the temptation to ruin the lives of the four men who had unjustly imprisoned Edmund, including De Villefort, Danglars, and General Fernand Mondego. In the end, Dantes, as the Count of Monte-Crisco, pays dearly for having gone down the road of vengeance. Even if the suffering inflicted on the unjust is deserved ethically, distinctly religious implications should be considered lest avengers are left existentially empty rather than as one might expect, finally at peace. The Christian notion of the Kingdom of God is prominent in this distinctly religious regard.

Edmund Dantes is a fervent believer of the religious significance of vengeance. It is, he says, a “holy remedy . . . an eye for an eye.” He also insists, “Revenge is a sweet thing to live for, or die for.” So Abbé Faria tells Dantes while both are in prison, “Vengeance belongs to the Lord, Edmund. Turn away from such unholy thoughts before they destroy you.” Nietzsche points out that ascribing vengeance to God carries with it the collateral damage of a contradiction being in a deity that incorporates a vice while still being omnibenevolent. That conception of God is discredited, and thus tot, or “dead,” precisely because of the contradiction, but could it not be argued that God is being benevolent to the victims of unjust harm by subjecting the culprits to harm? Even so, inflicting any harm, even if ethically deserved, can be said to exclude the peace that come with forgiveness even and especially enemies.

The distinctly religious question in the film is whether exacting revenge is a “holy remedy” justified by the committing of an injustice in the first place, or an unholy thought because revenge involves the intentional infliction of harm. The first claim is belied by the obfuscation of “holy,” a distinctly religious idea, with “injustice,” a distinctly ethical idea. Whereas inflicting harm can be justified ethically as deserved given the harm from an injustice, holiness itself can be said to exclude any infliction of harm. Instead, forgiveness goes with the holy. In fact, Jesus Christ’s conception of the Father’s kingdom can be said to be filled with compassion in the face of the pain of the human needs of a person’s enemies and even detractors. That revenge could ruin the life of an avenger may factor into a utilitarian-based cost-benefit analysis of whether to exact revenge, but any such negative consequence is not why a person seeking a taste of the holy via the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus in the Gospels would not engage in vengeance.

In the film while Abbé Faria and Dantes are digging a tunnel so they could escape, Faria gives Dantes the map to a treasure so Edmond could do good deeds rather than seek revenge. Faria’s strategy fails because although Edmund finds the treasure and promises himself that he would do good things with it, he actually uses his wealth and self-donned title of the Count of Monte-Crisco to take revenge on “four unjust, selfish men.” In fact, after the dual with the son of Mercedes, his former fiancée, Dantes says, “Providence again! I am the emissary of God. I’ve been spared to carry out his will.” In addition to engaging in the vice of vengeance, Edmund is guilty of the sin of presuming to know the will of God with the pride of claiming to be God’s emissary. It is interesting, therefore, that Edmund does not find peace after he has exquisitely vanquished the four men. This point is apparent in the final scene, when Edmund is trying to convince Mercedes to return to him rather than to move to Africa to be near her son. The religious existential toll that the series of vengeful strategies have taken on Edmund Dantes is finally revealed; the Abbé was right all along.

In trying to justify to Mercedes the vengeance taken on her husband, General Mondego, Edmund lies, “That was simple justice. Believe me, it gave me no joy.” It did in fact give him a feeling of satisfaction, which, by the way, if different than peace. Mercedes does not take the bait; instead, she replies, “Avenging angels may not ask forgiveness of their victims.” Even if the unjust deserve ethically to suffer, avengers would find asking for such forgiveness to be humiliating because of the suffering that they have undergone unjustly. Edmund replies, “I am no longer an instrument of God. I’ve been plunged back into nothingness. I’m searching for something lost. My soul; my self.” Unfortunately, she does not point out that he has been no such instrument and it is impious for him to hold onto that belief. Making this point would develop the distinctively religious element of the film. She could even say that even if her husband and the three other unjust men deserved to be punished for having inflicted severe suffering—ten years in prison!—on Edmund even though he was innocent, he should have transcended the ethical domain to act in a pious distinctively religious manner by forgiving the four culprits. That films shirk back from developing such theological and philosophical dialogue does not mean that the medium is not capable of doing so to get viewers thinking (but not to indoctrinate them).  Teasing out tension between the ethical and religious domains is a worthy task of the medium of film. In this film, however, Mercedes simply replies that he would never find the man he had been before being imprisoned. “That person died,” she laments. She tells him that she hopes he will find peace, but she does point out to him that he will not find peace because he has engaged himself so fully in exacting revenge, for satisfaction is not the same as peace.

I submit that presuming to know God’s will as if any human being could be omniscient (all-knowing), which is a divine attribute, and to being an instrument of God as if on a holy mission are sins, whereas vengeance is an ethical vice. That God demands that human beings leave the vice to God does not mean that the vice itself is thereby religious rather than ethical in nature. Moreover, that religion and ethics are related does not mean that the former reduces to the latter, or that the latter is itself religious. I contend that it is because vengeance involves the infliction of harm and that is exogenous to being in the presence of holiness that God urges us not to seek revenge. Put another way, that vice is antithetical to the humane compassion to an enemy in trouble and thus to Jesus’s conception in the Gospels of the Kingdom of God. An eye for an eye carried on and on, and the whole world would be blind because none of us act completely in line with what is just; only God is just from the standpoint of omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence. It is from this standpoint, that we should all give each other some leeway at least, that the Creator-Creature distinction is vital to keep in mind instead of merely applying the ethical principle of justice by which avengers legitimately claim that the unjust deserve to be punished. Religion and ethics are distinct domains even though they interrelate. Edmund Dantes may have a point that the four men deserve to suffer for having inflicted suffering on him, but he himself is left empty ironically from having presumed to have been on a holy mission even though inflicting harm is antithetical to forgiveness. Interestingly the name Dantes is very close to Dante, a philosopher and poet who wrote in the Renaissance on the rings of hell. Being plunged back into nothingness, in search of one’s self, and even one’s very soul, seems like a good description of what being in the state of hell must be like.

The Reader

The film, The Reader (2008), captures a frame of mind that may be so frequently overlooked when it is observed because it is so bizarre in its impact on reasoning that it difficult to explain, let alone grasp for what it is. The phenomenon is not of artifice; rather, it is a natural vulnerability of the human mind, or brain, due to its susceptibility to ideology that is highly unethical in its content, including a circumscribed and even warped mental framework and very unethical prescriptions for conduct. The ideology at issue in the film is that of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1933 to 1945.  The truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely does not fully account for the cognitive warping that is evinced by Hanna Schmidt during her trial in the film.

The plot centers around a sexual-relationship between Hanna Schmitz and Michael Berg during a summer more than a decade after the end of Nazi Germany. Because Michael is only 15 years old when Hanna, a middle-aged adult, seduces him sexually and gets him to read stories to her, she starts off the film as being culpable criminally, assuming that sexual intercourse with a minor is illegal in the film. To be sure, not even astute viewers would predict that her seduction of a minor means that she had worked as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp from 1943 until the death-march from Hungary in 1944, especially because Michael willingly returned to her apartment several times to read to her and have sex with her. As the film goes on, viewers quickly realize that her sexual crime is dwarfed by her crimes as a guard in Nazi Germany.

A portion of professor Rohl’s lecture in his law-school class in which Michael is enrolled as a law student years after his summer of sex is a useful way to contextualize Hanna’s Nazi crimes. Rohl begins by noting that out of the 9,000 people who worked at Auschwitz, only 19 have been convicted, and they were convicted according to law rather than morality. “The question was not, was it wrong, but was it legal, and not by our laws, no, by the laws at the time” and “intent must be proved.” One student observes that the law is narrower than is holding people to the dictates of morality. Professor Rohl readily agrees. To be convicted, Hanna and the other five guards with whom she worked must be found to have violated the relevant laws of Nazi Germany. So just following orders, which count as laws, is a viable defense.

In his trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was convicted precisely because he had violated Himmer’s order not to march Hungarian “enemies of the state” to Auschwitz. Eichmann violated the laws of Nazi Germany knowing that people would die as a result, so he could be convicted and even sentenced to death.  The film, The Reader, refutes Israel’s claim that former Nazis could not get an unbiased trial in West Germany. Both the Israelis and the Germans could be expected to hold biases regarding the Germans who were, or worked for, the Nazis, yet in the film as well as in Eichmann’s historical trial in 1961, jurisprudence passes the test in maintaining its narrow, and thus rigorous standards even against biases one way or the other.

In the trial in the film, Hanna admits to having been one of six female guards who selected 60 prisoners each month to be sent from their camp to Auschwitz even though the guards (and the prisoners) knew that the 60 people sent would be killed. Unlike the other women on trial, Hanna is honest in her testimony. Answering the chief judge’s question on why she selected 10 prisoners each month to be killed at Auschwitz, she answered, “but there were new arrivals arriving all the time, so the old ones had to make room for the new ones. We couldn’t keep everyone. There wasn’t room.” In Hanna having been oriented to the flow of prisoners being optimal, Hanna Arendt’s description of the Eichmann trial as showcasing the “banality of evil” in the bureaucracy of the Nazis applies here too. In the film, the chief judge is astonished at Hanna’s lapse concerning the obvious ethical problem: “But you knew you were selecting people to be killed.” Hanna replies, “What would you have done? Should I have never signed up at Siemens?” meaning to be hired by the SS. Hanna’s answers are themselves worthy of reflection, for they evince an absolute indifference to the plight of the chosen prisoners. In fact, she puts space-limitations at her camp above, as if justifying, the (necessary) plight. It is not as if she seems to have been wallowing in the power she had at the camp; she seems to have viewed herself as a manager working as if a hotel manager oriented to managing vacancies so no one arriving would be turned away, as if that were ethically more objectionable than sending prisoners to their death at the death camp in Poland.

Any such managerial excuse is belied when the judge turns to Hanna’s role in the march of all of the prisoners to Auschwitz when the camp in Hungary was closed. Hanna and the five other SS guards with whom she worked locked the doors of a church where prisoners were sleeping one night on the journey even though the guards knew that that church was on fire from a bombing raid. The chief judge asks Hanna, “Why did you not open the doors? In the written report, which you all signed, you claim you didn’t know about the fire until after it had happened. But that isn’t true, is it? . . . Why did you not open the doors?” Hanna quickly responds in a way that suggests that she thinks the judge has just asked a stupid question. “Obviously,” she says defiantly. “For the obvious reason. We couldn’t. We were guards. Our job was to guard the prisoners. We couldn’t just let them escape.” Her judgment that keeping the 300 people in the church, in which case they would all, except for one girl, die, was better than letting them out even if they would try to escape evinces something more than a warped moral compass. To be sure, letting prisoners escape is ethically preferrable to keeping them from evading death, but her reasoning too is flawed. The job of guarding prisoners does not in itself include playing a role in their respective deaths.

The judge next wants to assess whether Hanna and the other five guards feared for their lives should the prisoners have escaped from the burning building. “And if they escaped,” he asked Hanna, “you’d be charged? You’d be executed?” Hanna, hardly a defense attorney, answers emphatically, “No! If we’d opened the doors there would have been chaos. How could we have restored order? . . . and if they had all come out, we couldn’t just let them escape! We couldn’t! We were responsible for them!” That being responsible for prisoners could include deciding to let them die when they could be saved is, I submit, not just a moral lapse as if contributing to the death of 300 were morally better than letting them escape. Perhaps equally of concern, her reasoning—her cognition—was encrypted as if with computer malware. This can be more easily grasped from following statement, which is similar to what Hanna answers: We let the prisoners die because we were responsible for them! Her premise that the guards’ responsibility as guards is only to forestall escape—meaning that the responsibility of the guards was to the Nazi regime rather for the prisoners—even if that responsibility meant forcing the prisoners to be burnt alive is unsound and narrow; hence it may be the product of brain-washing.

It is not that being willingly enveloped by a political ideology spares a person from culpability. So, the judge tells Hanna, “So you did know what was happening. You did know, you made a choice. You let them die, rather than risk letting them escape.” She was neither forced nor insane; she knew what she was doing in keeping 300 people in a burning church. Hanna’s problematic mentality goes beyond the ethically problematic hierarchy of escape as being worse than being burned live. Even though she had obviously been “supercharged” into focusing narrowly in her job on escape being the worst thing possible, she was once again indifferent to the severity of the plight of other people. Both the narrowness and the sociopathic indifference were part of Nazi culture. In fact, the strong preference for order and aversion to chaos has arguably remained a salient part of German culture even though the Nazis’ ideology has been refuted. In the film, the judge does not question Hanna on her aversion to chaos or the high value she puts on order. This lapse is odd, considering that the judge may be guilty of scapegoating Hanna with a life sentence while giving the other five guards only four and a half years in prison. The other five guards contributed to the scapegoating, but the judge seemed not to realize this point.

Even though Hanna has answered the judge’s questions with an amazing forthrightness, the judge does not believe her when she denies that she wrote the report on the church fire. He even ignores her valid point that it doesn’t matter who wrote the report because all six women signed it. None of the six opened the church doors as the building burned, and there was no evidence that Hanna was in charge of the other guards. He should have relied more on Hanna’s testimony regarding the other defendants rather than say that it is easy to spread the crime to include other culprits. Furthermore, that Hanna does not give the convenient answer that she feared that the SS would execute her for letting the prisoners escape and that she answers honestly goes to her integrity, when supports my claim that she had been indoctrinated by the Nazis when she was hired to believe that the lives of the prisoners do not matter, especially as against them being able to escape (even from a burning building).

Lest it be concluded that only Nazi ideology could be so severely warping in terms of morality and reasoning, the claim of the Israeli army late in 2025 that a 3 year-old Gaza resident had to be shot because the child walking from a tent to an Israeli tank nearby was a security threat. So too, the claim by officials in the Israeli government, including Israel’s president, that all residents of Gaza were culpable of the attack inside Israel proper by Hamas is warped, both morally and cognitively. Israeli soldiers playing the game of who can shoot the most kids in Gaza, soldiers raping 6 year-old boys (and doubtlessly numerous Gaza women) in the name of security, and the Israeli government’s presumptuous and erroneous accusation of collective responsibility of everyone in Gaza for the attack carried out by a political group such that more than a million people were intentionally subjected to starvation, no medical care, and even homelessness all evince the toxic mental imprint of a sordid ideology of hatred every bit as sordid as the Nazi ideology had been. Shooting babies who had not even been born in 2024 demonstrates the utter irrationality in the statements of some senior government officials that all of the residents of Gaza deserve to suffer—that not even death is good enough for them. I contend that this last part renders the mass atrocities a holocaust rather than just a genocide. Subjecting over a million people to severe deprivation and thus horrid suffering, and killing over 60,000-75,000 residents outright through 2025 mean that the statements were not merely rhetoric. That the deaths of less than 1,500 Israelis in the attack in Israel in 2023—an attack of utter frustration contextualized by decades of being subjugated and occupied by an enemy state—could justify so many more deaths and the starvation of many, many more people in Gaza demonstrates not just severely flawed ethical judgment, but also corrupted reasoning as if such an imbalance could possibly be justified even in terms of state security. Were the Israeli officials intellectually honest, they would simply admit that they were simply unleashing their hatred of a “subhuman” people who are like dogs. Similarly, Nazi propaganda films portrayed Jews as rats infecting Europe. It is perhaps out of a global sense of guilt about the first holocaust that the unbalanced Israeli application of collective “justice” did not trigger a coalition of the willing among nations to rid Gaza military of the Israeli army, and that the equivalence of the Netanyahu and Hitler administrations has not been recognized and acknowledged. Ideology can indeed warp moral judgment and even cognition/reasoning as well as perception of world events.

That susceptibility of the human mind can operate “beneath the radar,” especially in regard to the severity of the depravity. The judge in the film tells the court that Hanna is in another class of criminality even from the five other guards. I submit that he is wrong about the five other guards, for they are just as culpable criminally because none of them were willing to open the church doors and thus were fine with 300 people being burned to death. Nevertheless, the judge aptly perceives Hanna’s “reasoning” as partial at best and her values as deeply problematic morally. They were our responsibility; we couldn’t just let them escape, so we decided that they would have to die. The 300 prisoners in the church did not have to die; they died because the six SS guards chose not to open the doors. It is conceivable that those guards could have opened the doors and maintained order while minimizing escapes by surrounding an open space and shooting the first person trying to flee.

Contemporary implications of the film include the point that the recognition of the subjectivity-based warping of the human mind by ideology means that the world needs more than the impotent UN and International Criminal Court (ICC) to hold back aggressive regimes such as those of the Nazis and the Israelis. Although not so ideological, the foray into Ukraine by President Putin of Russia based in part on a vision of a resurrected Russian empire (not the USSR) also deserved to be turned back by more than an imagined coalition of the willing in Europe. To the extent that the Russian officials viewed the Ukrainians as subhuman, thus justifying women being raped by Russian soldiers and children being sent deep into Russia, the ideological culprit at work in the Nazi government in the twentieth century and the Israeli government in the 2020s can be detected yet again. The vulnerability of the human mind is thus no accident, but is intrinsic. Therefore, the admixture of human hatred with political (and religious) ideology comes with a such steep toll that the ongoing system of international relations based on absolute national sovereignty can be deemed to be wholly inadequate. International means with military-enforcement power have been needed at least since the 1930s to restrain toxic regimes from inflicting severe harm on people presumed ideologically to be subhuman. 

The underlying problem is not merely humans being drunk with power; even though absolute power corrupts absolutely, and thus institutional checks and balances are advisable both within a government and between every government and the international community institutionalized in an organization or government with real enforcement power, the subjective human mind is too vulnerable to being brain-washed by ideology and this itself is a problem especially because the warped mind is typically impervious to correction both morally and in regard to its own faulty reasoning. In the film, there is no indication whatsoever when Hanna is imprisoned for 20 years that she comes to grips with how wrong she has been ethically and how flawed her reasoning was in her choice not to open the church door. During the trial, the limits of her ideologically-constrained reason are clear when she draws a blank and asks the judge, “What would you have done? Should I not have signed up at Siemens?” The significant imprint of a flawed ideology can readily be inferred. The system of international relations can and should be informed by just this inference that the film astutely provides.

Shadows in the Sun

Challenging the dichotomy between reading a book and watching a movie, a film can include writing lessons within a narrative that is oriented to a romance and the business of a publishing house signing a writer for a second book. In the film, Shadows in the Sun (2005), Jeremy, a young employee of a major publisher, is sent by his brass, business-minded boss, Andrew Benton, to sign Weldon Parish, who lives hundreds of miles away from London and has retired from writing due to his fear of failure. In resisting Jeremy’s efforts to manipulate him to sign, Parish agrees to talk shop with the young writer. Although by no means a major part of the film, Weldon’s brief lessons and exercises can be of use to viewers. Film can indeed serve the cause of writing rather than merely draw readers away from books to the screen. In fact, astute viewers can critique the brief lessons and thus actively make use of film for intellectual and vocational purposes. Going through the lessons and exercises in the film can illustrate such an active engagement.

The first lesson occurs when Weldon and Jeremy are looking out at a beautiful sunset over an impressive landscape. Weldon suggests that Jeremy think of words as colors, and the paper as the canvas. The accomplished, elder writer demonstrates how words can be utilized as such, by describing the sunset in the following words: “The sunset, slowly, (is) igniting the sky in fiery shades of red and orange; in the distance, dark clouds rolled over the horizon, riding the summer winds. Soon day will give way to night, and with it will come the silence that washes over everything.” Besides the problematic grammatical lapses, which I submit are problematic even if done for stylistic purposes, Weldon goes off topic when he slides into describing the night, which obviously does not include the sunset. Regarding the sunset itself, the clouds are arguably not dark. If he is overstating the darkness here, perhaps the shadows in his published book, Shadow Dancers, are also overstated. On a macro or “meta” level, perhaps the film’s title, Shadows in the Sun, overstates the salience of the metaphor of shadow in the film. Weldon misses completely the beautiful colored reflection of the sky on the fields below. Those colors are as vibrant as the orange and yellow part of the sky nearest to the sliver of sun. In fact, the colors in the sky and on the fields make for a rustic overall hue. In hurrying into the night, the writer’s “painting” of the sunset in words falls short.

The inattentiveness to detail is all the more significant because of what Weldon teaches Jeremy on the importance of drawing on one’s own experiences in writing. “If you’re writing a fight scene,” Weldon explains, “it helps if you have been in a fight.” Weldon then asks Jeremy to describe being hit in the stomach. Not impressed, Weldon proceeds to punch his de facto apprentice so Jeremy can experience being hit in stomach. Sure enough, Jeremy is then able to flush out the details that he had missed for lack of experience, like snot coming out of one’s nose and the watering of one’s eyes. The film’s screenwriter could have had Jeremy subsequently ask Weldon whether a writer should be bound by one’s experience; Weldon himself mentions the role of imagination in writing.

The lessons then move beyond technique to what makes a writer great. Such a writer finds that part of oneself that has something to say. “You know when you’ve found it,” Weldon says. Jeremy has not found it in himself, so he is dissatisfied with his writing. Weldon tries another way of making his point. “Art is not something you choose to do; it’s something that chooses you.” Good writing comes out of an irresistible urge to say or express something in particular; both the urge and the content lies within, so the challenge is to find or realize it. Even if experience does not limit what a writer can write about in detail, that which a writer is passionate about is limited, it does not come from the will, as if a writer could choose that which must be written. In writing short essays, I try to restrict myself to points I feel strongly about expressing; I resist writing just to keep the essays coming.

Knowing that Jeremy has fallen in love with Isabella, who is one of Weldon’s daughters, Weldon asks Jeremy to describe her face. The point is to try to put in words that which one is passionate about. Jeremy makes the following attempt: “Sunlight frames her body in a golden glow of honey light while the wind dances gently through the long strands of her hair. Her face is strong, proud, with eyes that don’t easily give away their secrets. It’s a face that doesn’t call out, but softly beckons.” Although Weldon is impressed, this coloring with words can be critiqued. First of all, Isabella is framed by grass rather than any “glow of honey light”—this description of light may itself be overdone. Sunlight does not frame her body; rather, green grass does. Furthermore, her hair is not long, and she has it in a pony tail so it is not dancing with the wind. As for her strong, proud face, her broad jaw bones do give that impression. As for eyes not giving away their secrets, her facial expressions vividly and straightforwardly show her disproval of the mischief of her father and Jeremy and then her affection for both men, obviously different in kind. In fact, her blue eyes sparkle such that they fill out her marvelous smile, but Jeremy misses this rather obvious point. As for a face that does not call out, I must confess that don’t know what a face that calls out looks like; I’m equally at a loss with regard to a face that softly beckons; usually people beckon with their arms and hands. So maybe it is for the best that I don’t write novels.

My point is that potential and even actual writers can learn how to write better from Weldon’s mini-lessons and exercises in the film by interiorizing these and going on to critique them. The medium of non-documentary, fictional film can be actively engaging for viewers both intellectually in terms of added knowledge and vocationally in terms of improved work-product.

The Physician

In the 11^th century, Christians were not welcome in Persia, so in the film, The Physician (2013), Rob Cole, a Christian, pretends to be Jewish in order to travel from Western Europe to study at the medical school of Ibn Sina, a famous physician in Isfahan. He eventually reveals his religion as that of “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” when he is on trial before the local imam. The Jews there doubtlessly feel used and betrayed. As interesting as interreligious controversy can be, I contend that the nature of Cole’s crime is more significant from the standpoint of religion itself. In short, the film illustrates what bad effects are likely to come from committing a category mistake with respect to religion and another domain. Whether conflating distinct domains or erasing the boundary between them, category mistakes had diminished the credibility of religion as being over-reaching by the time that the film was made. As for the matter of interreligious differences, the sheer pettiness by which the three Abrahamic religions that share the same deity have made mole hills into untraversable mountains is hardly worthy of attention, whereas that which makes religion as a domain of phenomena unique and thus distinct from other, even related domains, is in need of further work. The film could have done more in this regard.

Rob Cole’s crime is the desecration of a human corpse by dissecting it. It may be that dissection does not count as desecration because the study is done systematically and for the beneficial outcome of progress in medical science, but this argument is not even presented to the imam in the film. Even though the old man agreed to the procedure just before he died in Ibn Sina’s hospital (and medical school), and Cole’s purpose was to save lives by discovering human organs, the imam sentences not only Rob, but also Ibn Sina to be executed for having “violated Allah.” Presumably the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish deity is against progress in the science of medicine such that sickness is not so often a death-sentence. Holding to a dogma nonetheless demonstrates one of the fallibilities of the human mind when it enters the domain of religion. It is not as if Cole’s dissection and study would cause death and destruction—two things that are typically associated with evil. In fact, Rob, with Ibn’s assistance, which alone is an interesting role reversal, successfully operates on Shah Ala ad Daula, the king of Isfahan, using the knowledge obtained during the dissection of the corpse. That operation in turn enables the Shah to survive the next day, when his presence is needed as his army sets out to fight a radical Islam-only invading force to which the local imam is allied. That force is against the presence of the Jews in the city, and would certainly against the Shah pardoning Cole and Sina. In short, the Shah was too secular and tolerant for the imam and the related invading king.

The “religious” rationale for finding Cole in violation of Allah’s law should be treated as more problematic in the film. Cole, Sina, or even the Shah could engage with the imam during or after the “trial” on the validity in religious terms of the injunction against medical science advancing by study of human internal-organs, for what is scientific—and thus of that domain—is being claimed by the domain of religion. Hence it is assumed by everyone in the film except for the medical student and his teacher that religion can legitimately override medicine even in the domain of medicine.  I contend that this overreaching is invalid—it is akin to an invading army taking over a city—because religion’s coverage should fit within its borders. In other words, religion has primary jurisdiction over that which is distinctly religious. The overall domain of a religious deity holds sway within the religious domain, just like a king’s authority only extends throughout his kingdom even if he claims to be ruler of the world. Kings of other kingdoms could rightly object to the latter claim by insisting that another king’s authority extends only to the borders of that king’s realm. This does not invalidate the meaning of “ruler of the world” within that realm, just as “God is omnipresent and omnipotent” has meaning in the religious domain even though science and other domains, including metaphysics, psychology, and history, do not yield to the authority that is in the religious realm. Paradoxically, by overreaching, the credibility of that authority is diminished even within the religious domain. In the film, the validity of Cole’s dissection of a willing corpse is stronger than that of the religious decree against “desecrating” human corpses regardless of any benefits from it in other domains. The egocentric over-reaching of religion can be likened to a bully, who, once made transparent, is typically viewed as less than credible.

The gap between whether Cole (and Sina) should be applauded or punished is so large that they can be said to manifest from different social realities. Cole and Sina heal the Shah as a result of Cole’s dissection and his teaching thereof to a very enthusiastic Sina, yet the local imam ignores or dismisses the value of this progress and its benefit—perhaps not just for religious reasons as he is politically against the ruling Shah. Cole utterly dismisses the validity of the Imam’s ruling and sentencing on the basis of Cole and Sina having offended or violated Allah. Whereas Cole and Sina may have been religious, the narrow, and one-sided ruling makes sure that even if the two men survive, they would never be fully religious again. Running a hospital as a physician back in London at the end of the film, Rob Cole surely looks at religion itself more skeptically than he did before hearing the imam’s narrow ruling.

The upshot is that confining the authority and validity of religion to its own domain so it does not over-reach with the presumption of legitimately being able to overrule the innate authorities in other domains in those domains is a good thing. This does not mean that the distinctly religious belief that a deity is sovereign without limitation is rendered invalid in the religious domain. Likewise, claims that everything is political and religion is really just psychology (e.g., Freud) or a function of means of production (e.g., Marx) are valid only in the domains of psychology and economic philosophy, respectively. Religionists are not the only guilty party in terms of over-extending the authority of their domain onto others even over the authorities in those domains. Within a given domain, I contend that the substance and criteria of the domain is worthy of respect in itself rather than as a subsidiary of another domain’s substance and criteria. Disrespect in this respect may even contribute towards a mental habit that thwarts interreligious dialogue and peace. Even respect between people may be diminished.

In the film, Hope Gap (2019), Grace attempts to use the Roman Catholic Church’s religious injunction of legal divorce to undercut the validity of her separated husband’s request for a divorce. Edward’s request is unhinged from any reality, Grace insists (as if by even her faith she is omniscient with respect to realities). That she has been contemplating suicide suggests that she may be the person untethered from a viable reality. From the standpoint of a legal system of a country, the religious dictate of one party of a marital separation should not be allowed to overrule a law that permits divorce even if the counterparty (Edward) is religious. In the office of a lawyer, the substance and criteria of the law should prevail, just as the substance and criteria of distinctly religious meaning should prevail in the office of a priest, imam, minister, or rabbi. Those four functionaries have much more in common, being in and of the same domain, than they may realize. In fact, they could help each other to resist the power-aggrandizing temptation to overreach their religious authority in usurping the authority of authorities in other domains. Then the substance and unique criteria of the religious domain of human experience would be more respected. At the very least, humility and self-discipline—“coloring within the lines”—naturally earns respect.

Lest this critique be misconstrued as secular in nature, the upshot is that the stuff “within the lines” of the religious domain (i.e., distinctly religious phenomena, such as religious meaning that does not depend on history or science, as is not reducible to ethics or psychology) deserves to be uncovered from underneath the weeds that have hitherto been allowed to grow and even thrive from seeds that have drifted over from other gardens. In the film, the imam may not even understand what desecration means in a religious sense, and yet he is quick to interlard a religious belief as if it deserved to be decisive and thus hegemonic in the political and (related) jurisprudential domains. Similarly, I wonder whether people who deem themselves capable of accusing others of committing abominations as if the word itself warrants death know that the word only means “disliked by God.” This is distinct from “hated by God,” of which evil unequivocally qualifies. To be sure, in the religious domain, such activities that are disliked by the deity are not recommended, for the actual point is likely to obey God, but the commonly held dire connotations of the word as if dislike were equivalent to hate misses the mark and yet precisely such “making mole hills into mountains” has given rise to much suffering and harm historically. The sheer presumptuous of ignorance and what it feels entitled to, is, I suppose, hated rather than merely disliked from the perspective of the very condition of existence, or Creation, even when that condition or ultimacy is personified as a deity with divine attributes even if they anthropomorphic in appearance. Film has amazing potential as a medium through which such thoughts can be projected and put in dialogue with some depth and extent beyond what is typically done by filmmakers who want to hurry a plot as if skipping a stone quickly on the surface of a lake.

Hope Gap

Organized or institutional religion as the Roman Catholic Church is in the background in the 2019 European film, Hope Gap. Even with such names as Grace and Angela, religious connotations are present. In fact, the film can be interpreted, at least in part, as a critique on religion in general and Catholicism in particular. The medium of film can indeed play a vital role in critiquing sacred cows from the vantagepoint of an oblique angle or a safe distance.

Before turning to how religion is portrayed and critiqued, I turn briefly to the film’s narrative, or plot, which centers around Edward leaving Grace, his wife of 29 years, for Angela, the parent of one of Edward’s students. Edward has had enough of Grace’s violence and rigidity, but he is gracious enough to explain to her as he is leaving that they are very different people. Although the early years of their marriage had been good, he leaves her convinced that he had picked the wrong woman for him. So, Edward moves out to live with Angela, while the product of the marriage, Jamie, is left to care for his mother, Grace, whose hope that Edward might someday return must inevitably fade because he is in love with another woman. Unfortunately, Edward and Grace both use their son rather than confront each other directly to work out differences in the marital separation. Fearing that Grace might commit suicide, Jamie is the good son and draws her out of her hopeless shell by means of poetry rather than his mother’s religious faith.

That faith comes across as dogmatic and rigid, rather than as open like spirit. When Jamie first visits, Grace is not at all tolerant of his atheism or agnosticism—that we invent God to deal with life, which is miserable and unfair. Believing in God cannot be forced, according to Grace; she knows she cannot tell her son to believe in God.  Interestingly, she totally agrees with Edward’s claim that you feel love; you don’t tell love, so you can’t tell God to another person. “God is a conviction,” Edward says. He has faith, for instance, that his love for Angela is not illusory. The core teaching of Paul and Augustine that God itself is love is the foundation of Edward’s religious faith, and yet he has no interest in going to Mass. Rather, his faith in love is lived out as he moves from a woman whom he does not love to one whom he does love.

The irony is that Grace goes to Mass regularly and yet the way she treats Edward is not out of love. For instance, she has a history of violence against him (but not vice versa), she orders him around, and she even explicitly rejects and forbids him his “reality” that includes divorce. To her, marriage is a life-long sacrament. To commit a loveless, even possibly abusive marriage to such a rigid standard fails to take into account the human condition. Not even Angela is an angel, for she tells Grace that she has taken Edward because then only one person, rather than the three, would be unhappy.

Another way of viewing Grace’s need to dominate even to the point of arbitrating between “realities” to her own advantage is by looking at her efforts to manipulate Jamie for information on how she might contact Edward even though he is refusing to have any contact with Grace, as well as her decision to drive to Angela’s house and even enter it without even knocking at the door to confront Edward (and Angela) anyway. Her lack of basic respect for Edward belies her claim to love him, and it makes a shame of her attempt to foist her notion of the sacrament of marriage as applicable to their marriage. Her highhandedness even shows in her complaint about there being too many requests for mercy in the Mass. Obviously, she doesn’t believe that her religious faith warrants any mercy from God, even though of all of the main characters in the film, she is arguably farthest from God as inconvenient love even to one’s detractors and enemies.

To be sure, Edward’s notion of religious faith in God as felt as a conviction rather than to be imposed on other people is not perfect. Implying that Grace is weak, in that she will not accept the fact that their marriage has been over for a long time and it is best to split up, he voice-overs a poem that includes, “by abandoning the weak, the strong survive. It may seem brutal, but what the point of everyone being dead.” Abandoning Grace is what he needed to do to stay alive, whether literally or in terms of being able to love. It is ironic that Grace complains of too many references the need for mercy in the Catholic Mass, and yet Edward could stand to be more merciful to people who are vulnerable. His offer of friendship to Grace made as she is leaving Angela’s house comes off as fake or naïve.

The poem that Jamie reads to his mother at the end of the film is better. Strength and resilience are exactly what Grace needs to hear, and Jamie even provides her with a website by which she can post poems for other suffering or grieving people. It is through poetry, rather than her Catholic faith, that she finds solace. As she finds through poetry and volunteering at a secular charity that she is not alone in struggling and suffering, both Edward’s survival of the strong (by abandoning the weak) philosophy and Grace’s own rigid, imposing religious faith and church attendance recede into the background. Unless a religious organization can provide a place for the living, such that spiritual natures can ascend rather than being tied down by rules that should not be applied uniformly to human complexity, parishioners will look elsewhere even for spiritual food, whether that comes in the form of a dutiful, loving son, poetry, or something else that provides hope out of severe loss and suffering.

Suffering as a means of spiritual progress should not be applied to people who already grievously in emotional pain. Sacraments should be applied where liberating rather than felt as painful, destructive chains. The distinctly Christian kind of love that can be applied to Grace and Edward has to do with the compassion and mercy that each of them could extend to the other while they are separating. Such love does not necessitate that Edward drop or sacrifice his personal boundaries, and it does not give Grace license to violate them even in the name of compassion. Nor would mercy justify Edward in violating Grace’s need for emotional (and physical) space at the end of the film.

The Master

In The Master (2012), Lancaster Dodd tells Freddie Quell, the man whom Lancaster wants to cure of alcoholism and mental illness, “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man.” Given Lancaster’s presumption of infallibility concerning knowing that every human soul has been reincarnated even for trillions of years, the end of the line would more fittingly be, “I am a man above all (others).” With regard to being a physician, Lancaster comes up short because he underestimates the medical severity of Freddie’s alcoholism and his likely psychotic mental illness. Upon being released from jail, Lancaster should realize that Freddie’s rage and temper-tantrum in his jail cell evince mental illness of such severity that it is lunacy to suppose that the patient can be cured by walking back and forth in a room between a wall and a window and being sure to touch both, and by saying “Doris” over and over again in a dyad with Lancaster’s new son-in-law. In fact, Lancaster actually encourages Freddie’s alcoholism by asking that Freddie continue to make his “potion,” which contains paint-thinner filtered through bread. It is not Lancaster, but his wife, Peggy, who puts a stop to the “booze.” From her sanity, both that of Freddie and Lancaster can be questioned. That Lancaster is the Master of a religious cult, or “movement,” renders his mental state particularly problematic.

Lancaster is perhaps at his best as a writer; he is at his best in his second book, in which he subtly but importantly switches the question used in his hypnotic method to imagine your past lives from recall them. In being a religious leader claiming even to know that he and Freddie had worked together in a European army running supplies in a past life, Lancaster demonstrates the danger that can beset the human mind when it ventures into the domain of religion, wherein certainty is posited for that which only belief, and thus faith, can reach. That anyone would even believe that the embodied souls alive have had past lives for trillions of years even though the species has been around for only 1.8 million years demonstrates just how alluring, and thus mentally powerful charismatic leadership can be. That Freddie and Lancaster’s new son-in-law went to the hotel room of a man who had just been critical of Lancaster’s claim at a gathering at a private home and physically beat up the man testifies to just how dangerous charisma, or “gifts of the spirit,” can be.

In the 20^th century alone, Adolf Hitler, who led Nazi Germany, had incredible charisma, such that the Germans continued to follow him blindly, albeit with severe consequences if they objected outwardly to Hitler’s autocratic regime. At the same time, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt also had tremendous charisma, with millions of Americans tuning in to hear his Fireside Chats on the radio. Decades later, John F. Kennedy had Camelot-tinged charisma, and still later Ronald Reagan, a former actor, could deliver lines dripping with charisma. In the domain of religion, the Bible warns of false-prophets, whose charisma, like that of Jim Jones, who secretly served poisoned drinks to his followers because he deemed that the world was about to end, enabled the atrocity. That a religious leader can be so wrong yet still have devoted followers is portrayed in the film, whose A-list of actors gives it its emotional depth, which, by the way, is typically felt by followers of charismatic leaders.

At its core, the film is a picture of the human mind’s vulnerability when we enter the domain of religion. Unfortunately, this vulnerability tends to be invisible to the collective unconscious of humanity. In making such a blind spot transparent, raising it to the level of consciousness, the medium of film can serve a very important function for our species, and even contribute to its religious and political development, both of which have been retarded and thus kept from progressing. The mind’s innate susceptibility to religious lunacy as primped up as truth as if on stilts and thus untouchable can be grasped just by examining the substance of Lancaster’s teachings without the entrapment of narrative and charismatic characterization.

The first glimpse of Lancaster’s perspective comes when he officiates his daughter’s wedding on a boat: “as long as you hold these bodies, in this life, you may kiss the bride.” Lancaster goes on to give an utterly nonsensical speech at the reception, yet everyone in the room applauds. As a critic later says (before being beaten up), “Good science allows for more than one opinion. Otherwise, you merely have the will of one man, which is the basis of cult, is it not?” It is as if out of Lancaster’s sheer act of will serial reincarnation is created. Beyond the metaphysics of the human soul, Lancaster conflates religion with science. Of his dyad-based “method” by which participants can have bad memories from their past lives erased, Lancaster claims that some forms of Leukemia can be cured. He explains to his now-shocked critic, “In going back over past lives, we may be able to treat illnesses that started thousands, even trillions of years ago.” Doing away with negative emotional impulses from this and past lives can cross over onto medical science regarding the bodies that each of us “inhabit.” Even Freddie supposes himself to think scientifically; without a doubt, Lancaster considers himself a scientist.

Even though Freddie’s childhood had been horrendous, with his father having died a drunk and his other being committed for psychosis, facing Lancaster in the next jail-cell, Freddie glimpses the Master clearly. “You’re making this shit up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” As if a schizophrenic whose knowledge of other realities cannot be shaken, the Master replies, “I give you facts.” So it is a fact that, as Lancaster tells a women whom he has just put under hypnosis, “Our spirits live on in the whole of time, exist in many vessels through time.” Even the hypnotic time travel back to past lives is presumably a fact, and thus to be deemed to be effective, without any empirical evidence, in capturing the mind’s fatal flaws to correct the mind back to its inherent state of perfect, while, Lancaster insists, “righting civilization and eliminating war and poverty, and therefore, the atomic threat.” This is the Master’s project, supported by a religious metaphysics of the human soul, or spirit, embodying trillions of bodies through time. The astute reader may recall Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence.

Perhaps when Lancaster first meets Freddie and believes that the two have met, it is because both men “connect” in having similar mental impairments. It is ironic that even though Freddie is the “identified patient” in the film, it is he who laughs off Lancaster’s claim of having recalled that both men had run military supplies together in another lifetime. That Lancaster changes his method in his second book from recall to imagine may just be an attempt to grow his movement by making it more credible, or he may have been coming to question even his own access to metaphysical truth. Such truth would have it that Lancaster and his followers were all about the human imagination, which, if so, raises the uncomfortable question of whether religious myth itself is so too, once the metaphysical and historical stilts are removed. Yet distinctively religious meaning, and thus truth, can be distinguished from these stilts and, as such, be unthreatened by the role of human imagination in clothing such meaning. 

Properly classified in terms of its distinctive genre, religious truth can be understood to not be about history, metaphysics, or medical science—claims of those domains are off-limits to the religionist; otherwise, conflicts and quagmires with the latter domains are inevitable while the innate fauna of the religious garden are obscured and overlooked. Were Lancaster to simply state that he uses hypnosis to get his patients to confront painful memories by imagining the latter to be safely distanced psychologically in “past lives,” then his medical practice would not be polluted by the assumed religious garb of infallibility, but then the film would not be such a good demonstration of one of the major lapses that is triggered in the human mind when it enters the religious domain: the deactivating of the mind’s ability to self-check, as in thinking, have I gone too far, maybe I’m wrong, so I should be more circumspect, for I am human, all too human.

Pope Leo on the Cinema: A Distinctively Religious Role?

As “part of the Vatican’s efforts to reach out beyond the Catholic Church to engage with the secular world,” Pope Leo spoke with actors and directors on November 15, 2025 about the ability of film “to inspire and unite.”[1] He spoke to the filmmakers about film itself as an art, and what it can do socially. What it can do in a distinctively religious sense was oddly left out. I submit that leaving out how film can contribute to spirituality wherein a transcendent is explicitly included, while instead discussing the social functions of film not only limits the potential of film, but also ironically marginalizes a significant potential of film ironically in the pope’s own field.

The full essay is at "Pope Leo on the Cinema."

---

1. Nicole Winfield, “Pope Leo XIV Celebrates Cinema with Hollywood Stars and Urges Inclusion of Marginal Voices,” APNews.com, November 15, 2025.

My Name is Bernadette

The film, My Name is Bernadette (2011), focuses, almost as an obsession, on the question of whether the girl “actually” saw the Virgin Mary in a series of visions at Lourdes. All too often, miracles are treated as ends in themselves, rather than as pointers to something deeper. Even the girl in the visual and auditory (albeit only to Bernadette) apparition identified itself only in terms of a supernatural miracle, the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception. I contend that Bernadette’s awe-inspiring spirituality visually conveyed on screen, and Monsignor Forcade’s spiritually-insightful advice to Bernadette as to her functions in her upcoming life as a nun is more important than the miracles, even from the standpoint of religion. In other words, the story-world of the film, which is based on the true story of Bernadette at Lourdes, is a good illustration of a what happens when everyone in a large group of people reduces religion to science and even metaphysics and misses the sui generis (i.e., unique) and core elements of religion. Such is the power of group-think that conflation of different, albeit related, domains of human experience can remain hidden in a societal blind-spot. Not even the film makes this blind-spot transparent.

The supernatural element is such a selling-point in religious myth/narrative that the thesis that the real value lies not in miracles must contend with a lot of resistance. The conflation, or fusing, of what is distinct about the domain of religion with elements that are actually borrowed from other domains is commonly done yet few people are aware that an error, or category mistake, is being committed. The error is compounded by dragging in yet another domain to ask, for example., whether something supernatural in a myth “really happened.” That it is perfectly legitimate for originators or conveyers of a religious myth to draw on historical events and modify them while still portraying them as historical in order to make theological points might be surprising to know. For example, in the synoptic Gospels of Christianity, “did” the Last Supper “happen” on the night of Passover in which the sacrifice of lambs in Exodus is commemorated (or “happened”)?  Pick your favorite Gospel for the answer that suites you, and then claim that answer to be a historical fact, but you would be no closer to history than when you started. Lest this point be mistaken as a denial either of the supernatural or history pertaining to religion at all, my point, it is simply that we cannot legitimately make historical or supernatural claims by means of myth (i.e., religious narrative) because it is a distinct genre of writing, as are historical accounts and even fiction. It is important to resist the temptation to over-shoot in one’s criticism in order to argue against something that was not argued, perhaps in hopes that such a critique will be taken as a valid counter to the actual point being contended.

In the film, the obsession of virtually every character, except for Bernadette and the Virgin Mary in the vision that appeared 18 times to the 14 year-old girl, revolves around the question of whether the girl is mentally ill or really seeing something that exists ontologically albeit from a religious metaphysical realm and only visible to Bernadette. Three physicians are brought in to examine her, and the exam even includes measuring the size of her skull and whether a small bump on it is indicative of a psychosis capable of producing hallucinations! I contend that we are just as primitive when it comes to distinguishing the unique elements of religion from the non-native fauna that has drifted in from other, related, domains. The medical report of the three physicians concludes that Bernadette is sane, and curiously notes that she has lively eyes. The eyes, it has been said, are windows into a person’s spirit, and Katia Miran did an excellent job in portraying her character, Bernadette Soubirous, with a facial expression of spiritual openness and even wonder; so much so in fact that the Abbé Dominique Peyramale hesitates in giving her Communion because she looks up at him so spiritually, so much like a saint. 

That facial expression, which is also present each time Bernadette sees and hears the Virgin Mary, rather than the question of whether the young woman in the visions exists beyond Bernadette’s brain, should be the religious highlight of the film. Put another way, such open, wondrous spirituality, and thus piety, which Jesus may be pointing out in the Gospels is more spontaneous and more open in children than in adults, is specific to religion, whereas metaphysics or ontology is not.

In the film, only the priest, Peyramale, and Monsignor Forcade eventually grasp what is going on with Bernadette herself spiritually. Not even the journalist who says to an arriving journalist who thinks the villagers are in a mass hysteria, “a miracle cannot be explained; it is experienced,” goes beyond the miracle. The local authorities are worse, for they try to explain away the visions by investigating the grotto, or cave, outside of which the visions are taking place. Even some of the local priests show a lack of faith, at least initially. Even Peyramale initially demands that the young woman seen by Bernadette make a rose bloom and provide her name before he will have a chapel built at the grotto and allow the Church to get involved. He even points out, “true faith does not need folklore, and is not measured by the number of followers,” to counter a young priest’s insight that the fervor of the villagers at the grotto is sincere, and so the Church should recognize that the Virgin Mary has chosen Bernadette as a messenger. The assumption that the selection of Bernadette is solely by grace rather than owing to her authentic piety and wondrous spirit is unfair and even diminutive of the pious girl.

In any case, the local clerics, and the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, eventually come around and claim that Bernadette has indeed seen and heard the Virgin Mary. It doesn’t matter, and in fact supports her credibility, that she has no knowledge of the theological doctrine by which the girl in the vision makes her identity known: the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. Bernadette’s piety does not depend on having had an education in theology. Nor is constant good behavior and a positive attitude requisite, for as Bernadette herself admits to her cousin, “I’m not a saint; I’m normal.” Even so, a normal person can have a deeply-ingrained spirituality that is open to transcendence. 

Therefore, I contend that the Virgin Mary chose Bernadette not only by grace, but also because of Bernadette’s incredible spirituality. In fact, one of Mary’s messages pertains directly to Bernadette, who has had asthma throughout her young life: You will be happy in the next life. From a religious standpoint, Bernadette deserves the message. At least initially, her distinctly religious worth is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, even though it reveres the Virgin Mary as if she were a goddess.

To the serious monsignor dressed entirely in red (not Forcade) who tells Peyramale, “I cannot accept a heavenly message brought by an illiterate peasant. I need proof. Irrefutable proof,” it could be asked whether he thinks he can accept the heavenly message brought by an illiterate peasant in the Gospels—a figure who is also dismissed by the powers that be, as a religious threat. That Bernadette says while being examined by that cleric and two others that she felt “immense joy” in seeing the girl in the visions finally gets the attention of the three clerics.

Even so, it is Monsignor Forcade whose stance and spiritual advice fit and are worthy of Bernadette’s piety. “Do not try to be what you’re not. Be yourself. That’s all. Remain unnecessary and rejoice.” He adds something that fits both the sensitivity of spirituality generally and Bernadette in particular: “The greatest experience in life comes not from what you do but what you give out in love. From what is given out of love.” Empathy naturally is felt out of the sensitivity that is part of an authentic spirituality; such a person need not try to do anything. Indeed, Bernadette soon thereafter begins spontaneously to help the sick in the convent. This is in her nature, and thus does not need to be forced or even practiced. In the final scene of the film, she sits in the main aisle of the convent’s church and tells the Virgin Mary, “You promised [at the grotto] that I would be happy in the next life [for she has been quite sick]. I am already happy. It’s good to be useless and to give to others.”

In urging Bernadette to remain useless rather than being sent out to work in one of the charities run by the convent, Monsignor Forcade tells her the story of the tree that is useless. This story comes from an ancient, anti-Confucian Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi, though Forcade’s version is not complete because he stays with the tree remaining useless rather than having a use in line with its nature (which is distinct from striving). The tree is the only one in the forest that the loggers have not cut down for lumber or for firewood, due to the twisted branches and all the knots in tree’s wood. Smoke from twigs from the trees being burnt has irritated people’s eyes, so even firewood is not a viable use. The tree is “absolutely useless,” but even so, as the Monsignor makes clear, useless does not mean worthless. Indeed, in the original story, as formulated by Zhuangzi, the tree is the only one remaining so it alone can provide much-needed shade for people in the area, given that all of the other trees have been found to be useful and thus cut down. Zhuangzi’s point is that simply being according to one’s nature, including what comes naturally to oneself, is not only not worthless, but can be more useful than chasing after fame and wealth by accomplishing things even though doing so is artificial next to what is natural not only for the human species, but an individual human having distinct genetics and natural abilities that come naturally rather than needing much practice.

In the film, it is difficult for the characters in general to see and acknowledge how an authentic spirituality can naturally manifest itself and thus be trusted to be left to itself rather than put to work in a worldly venture. A tree being used to build houses or fuel fire places is a very different kind of use than is simply providing shade. Only the latter is in a tree’s nature, and only for individual trees that have broad leaves. Bernadette’s usefulness is in line with the latter, in being naturally empathetic and benevolent without seeking fame or wealth—she explicitly refuses both, which resembles the story of Jesus in the desert being tempted by Satan. Bernadette is hardly perfect; she hates having to sign autographs, for example, and she is not the most obedient, given the angry frustration of Mere Alexandrine when Bernadette is late to class because she wants to marvel at a donated dress hung in the convent’s donation room. It is Monsignor Forcade, and the priest, Peyramale, who insightfully grasp just how unusually spiritual and pious Bernadette’s particular nature is. Even more astonishingly, given how the world usually works regarding work, Forcade is even able to provide Bernadette with particularly well-suited advice on the value of being useless by the world’s standards but not worthless, by allowing her authentic spiritual nature to manifest itself freely and spontaneously rather than being subservient to a work-assignment foisted by a person with authority to assign nuns to work-stations. That such freedom would be abused by many people shows just how miraculous Forcade’s insight and advice are. This is arguably the best miracle in the film.

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.