Awake

Although no overtly theological or religious material is in the film, Awake (2007), which is different than being woke, because greed itself is the real antagonist, idolatry can be imputed, and thus the true sordid condition of the vice can be grasped. In in his letter to the Colossians, Paul ends his list of sins with greed, “which is idolatry.”[1] The easiest way to interpret this classification of greed being a case of idolatry is to assume that the idol is money (or wealth). The idolatry of wealth is enunciated and perhaps even personified by Gordon Gekko in the film, Wall Street (1987). No amount of personal wealth is enough. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” greed being the desire for more. Gekko delivers the line during his speech to Teldar Paper stockholders. Left unsaid in his speech is the tremendous toll that greed can take not only on other people, but also oneself, for a very circumscribed, as to benefits, selfishness goes along with greed and may even be its foundation. A greedy person would presumably think nothing of betraying a friend if doing so would increase the person’s wealth, especially if no future financial benefit is likely from the friend. To be sure, greed need not be oriented to more money; a selfish person addicted to sex (i.e., in the sense of being regularly driven to have more of it) would have no problem betraying a even a spouse, and even demand of him or her that the addict’s outside sex with others, even with a romantic connection, must and even should be accepted in order to stay. Such extreme, unrepentant callousness can apply to greed for money too, and this is evinced in Awake. The vice of greed as ultimately self-idolatry has an evil connotation, given how much pain and thus harm self-idolatry can easily inflict on other people. The virtue of self-sacrifice is farther than the farthest star from such greed, and the sheer pathos of distance between self-sacrifice out of love and self-idolatry as greedy selfishness is palpable in the film, which arguably intimates and may even stimulate religious sensibilities without being explicit or preachy.

The film’s plot centers on the billionaire young adult, Clay Beresford, and his girlfriend, Samantha Lockwood. She plays him like a fiddle under the subterfuge of love. Actually, she is conspiring with Jack Harper, a heart surgeon, and two other medical personnel because she knows that Clay has a weak heart and will need a transplant. She wants Clay to choose Jack to operate because Jack would kill Clay during the transplant operation and Samantha would inherit (and pay off the other culprits). Jack has been delaying a heart for Clay until he marries Samantha so she could inherit millions. Not by coincident, Clay marries her just hours before a heart is suddenly available. Jack is ready and waiting at the hospital; he assumes Samantha would follow through in sharing her inheritance with the other culprits if he kills Clay. Although greedy himself, he does not fully grasp the true nature of greed.

Fortunately, Lilith Beresford, Clay’s very insightful mother, discovers the plot, including Samantha’s complicity in it, during the operation. Lilith calls her friend, Jonathan Neyer, a famous heart surgeon whom she had been wanting to perform the operation anyway, and the good doctor shows up just in time to find Lilith dead in the hospital waiting room and then transplant her heart into Clay, who is being kept alive in the operating room artificially. Lilith leverages the requirement that her permission is necessary for the “plug” to be pulled on her son; she intentionally refuses to give her consent to play for time to give Neyer time to arrive and take charge. He does just that, and is able to save Clay’s life. Interestingly, Clay is awake during the operation and so he discovers the plot as it is unfolding in the operating room, but he is paralyzed by the anesthesia (but he can feel the pain from his chest being cut open; his inner dialogue and screams make that scene very skippable). Even though he has an out-of-body experience, it is his mother who is in a position to report the crime. In spite of that experience, and the dialogue in an august, dark living room between him and his mother when he is on artificial life-support and she is dead, no religious implications are in the film. Whether the metaphysics of the film allow for the afterlife is an open question. The main thrust of the film lies in contrasting virtue with vice, and differing relationships with selfishness that they have.

Clay lives due to the self-sacrifice of his mother, which is antipodal to the abject greed and selfishness of the culprits, who are arrested before they can leave the hospital. In the film, a second virtue besides self-sacrifice out of love is salient. A strong need for justice is implicit in the attention given to whether the culprits get away with their attempted murder for money. In watching the film, the human instinctual urge for greed almost can be expected to kick in. It is indeed a powerful urge in the human psyche, and the film presents the value for justice as being in direct conflict with greed, another powerful urge. In contrast to both of these urges, the intention to sacrifice oneself is hardly overwhelming and in fact may take considerable will-power. Justice that is actually vengeance is especially sordid; justice desired by third-parties who are unharmed can also go along with selfishness, but is less toxic, ethically speaking, due to the pathos of distance. In the film, Lilith reports the culprits not only as vengeance, but also because she does not want her son to die, but she is hardly a distant witness reporting a crime out of a sense of justice itself. Her self-sacrificial act in dying so Clay could have her heart ranks higher than her pursuit of justice, which, like greed, is consistent with selfishness.

Mercy can be interpreted as a higher, unselfish form of justice. How many husbands would urge a jury to be merciful to a rapist of one’s wife or daughter? In the film, were Neyer to be able to use the original transplant heart even after Sam (whose true identity is a nurse at that hospital) gave it a fatal shot, such that Lilith would not commit suicide, would Lilith be inclined to appeal for mercy for the culprits after having reported them? Perhaps mercy should replace justice in Aristotle’s four virtues, or at least be a fifth, which trumps justice. Under no circumstance should greed and vengeance be added.

Regarding the culprits in the film, Jack Harper is the least culpable because his conscience has considerable sway because he has gotten to like Clay even though the “friendship” was for Clay a means to convince Clay to choose Jack rather than another surgeon to perform the transplant operation. Even so, Jack took a liking for Clay, and so Jack came close to refusing to kill Clay on the operating table. Samantha, who is actually a nurse at that hospital, convinces Jack to go along; she grabs the needle and ruins the heart for Clay. After the operation, while police are searching through the hospital to arrest Jack, his assisting surgeon Puttnam, and nurse Carver, Samantha refuses to go with Jack. His reaction may suggest that he intends to marry her, and he exacts vengeance (not justice!) by showing her that he has kept the needle with her fingerprints on it. The police are then shown arresting her. Jack’s vengeance has been satisfied and we may even feel that she deserves it, for in her selfish greed, she has betrayed Jack romantically, and would almost certainly do so again by refusing to share her inheritance were he able to evade the police pursuing him. She severs ties with all of the other culprits as soon as she discovers that the police want to arrest them. To the extent that a greedy person can be trusted only by people who can still be used for more money, the close link between greed and selfishness is established. Samantha illustrates this link in how it can play out in promises being broken all too easily. How very distant her mentality is from that of Lilith’s self-sacrifice. 

To be sure, Lilith doubtlessly does not want to live in grief of her dead only son, but she gives her life, and this runs against the selfish urge of self-preservation, which Thomas Hobbes argues in Leviathan is fundamental to human beings. In fact, Christians may legitimately infer the leitmotif of the Gospels as being highlighted the film’s highest virtue of voluntarily laying down one’s life for another out of love, so indirectly, not just Clay’s out of body experience and the dialogue “somewhere” with his mother when he is unconscious and she is dead hint at a religious dimension in the film’s story-world. Subtilty can be more revealing than being preached at.

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[1] Col. 3:5 (NIV)

A Ghost Story

As if the macabre specter of a ghost, albeit in a white sheet with two black eye-holes, were not enough for a spooky film, David Lowery endeavored to shoot and edit his 2017 film, A Ghost Story, using a relatively fast 33 frames per second in shooting the ghost moving, and editing without music so the story-world’s supernatural element would be subtly apparent. Although a prognosticator delivers a long philosophical monologue at a party somewhere in the middle of the film, Lowery does not characterize the meaning of the film in terms of that monologue’s point that the universe will eventually end so a person should live each day as if it were the last day of one’s life. Of course, none of us need worry about the universe burning up any time soon, so from that standpoint we can expect to live full lives without being nihilist on a daily basis. Fortunately, the meaning of the film, Lowery states in an interview, is not to live each day as if it is your last day. A more interesting question is whether the film is an exponent of nihilism as the real, ontological state of existence, or whether human fulfillment can fill human hollowness with the fullness of experienced life. Moreover, does a supernatural dimension, such as a heaven, exist such that human souls can depart from the human condition and even loved ones while still existing (after death). In other words, does holiness transcend hollowness? The latter may pertain more to the phenomenal realm of lived human existence than to the noumenal realm of things as they are in themselves, and thus what each of us really is.

The film’s plot centers around a young married couple, unnamed, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. The husband dies early on in the film in a car-crash in front of the couple’s house in the country.  He bypasses going to heaven and instead returns to their house as a ghost. His widow does not lose time in moving out, however, and it is clear from his anger (as a ghost!) that he is not at all happy about her leaving. Eventually, he gets the message, literally and figuratively, that she will never return. Not showing the crash—only smoke from his car leading the camera-shot slowly to his head resting on the steering wheel—or the funeral singles Lowery out as a film-maker who thinks outside the box in movie-making rather doing things the usual, formulaic way; there have certainly been too many of those movies. Relatedly, the philosophical dimension that he brought to the film goes beyond even what he consciously intended, and is in sync with his efforts to subtly convey the atmosphere of the film.

For example, in subtly elongating camera shots at the end of a few scenes and thus holding the viewers to a fixed picture within which nothing is happening, Lowery makes us uncomfortable because he breaks the “rule” on camera-shot length, which on average had been getting shorter perhaps to appease the proclivity of audiences from the mid-1970s for titillating, quick-action disaster flicks as if they were displays of fireworks in constant finale. Lowery challenges audiences to “sit still,” which, if it triggers psychological discomfort, is the fault of the viewers rather than the filmmaker. This was not Lowery’s intent, however. Rather, holding a camera-shot at the end of a scene long enough for the holding itself to become transparent to viewers allows them to feel the emptiness and lonely isolation of Rooney Mara’s character in the house. Perhaps that her husband, while alive, is emotionally stunted or unavailable contributes to her day-to-day dreariness. The stationary shots also point a spotlight on time itself, not only as it is perceived by the bored wife, but also that time is different for a ghost than for us. Both the young wife’s loneliness and the ghost’s expansive sense of time can be thought of as nihilist. Her boredom itself can be expected to feel like emptiness. Regarding the ghost, from our standpoint, the length of time that the ghost stays in the house, even far into the future and going into the past, would be intolerable. Although the ghost may experience the long expanse of time spent in the house, especially when it is empty, as fleeting, from our standpoint so much time without any action would be intolerable. Likewise, movie-viewers looking at a very long, non-moving camera shot of a scene in which nothing is moving may feel a sense of suspended animation, as if becoming were necessary for being and so just being without becoming is merely nihilist nothingness. A narrative must have a strong sense of becoming or people will lose interest in following the story and move on to do something else. We are doers even if our very being is not based in functionalism.

To the ghosts in the film, time not only is perceived differently, but also is fundamentally different in that time-travel is possible. Even in filming the husband-ghost at a different film-speed so to show a supernatural quality to what otherwise looks like a child’s Halloween ghost-costume, Lowerly didn’t fully grasp the implication that time itself is different to a ghost. This idea, Lowery said, “plays into the thematic parts of the movie so thoroughly, I should have realized that on set. I’m always surprised at how many of these things are just completely—there are amazing details in every movie that you would expect to be conscious decision, but are purely happy accidents and unconscious inspiration.”[1] Such inspiration applies here to a director’s own thinking on philosophy—in the case, of time—applied to his film. Philosophically, a different metaphysic has implications for time itself as well as how it is perceived. Accordingly, a philosophical analysis of a film can and should go beyond a filmmaker’s own intentions and even thinking on philosophy as it bears on the film. Because the story-world of a film, whether in a director’s head or on the screen, is wholistic in supporting a narrative, everything that contributes to philosophy in a film may not be consciously thought out by a film’s filmmakers and yet be valid.

By philosophy, I do not have in mind mere (i.e., unphilosophical) psychology, such as applies to characters in a film. For example, the husband-ghost in the film is only rarely a doer; he periodically “plays” with the lights, pounds on a piano when he goes back in time by falling off a skyscraper in the future, and throws dishes on the floor of the kitchen to scare off the new family that moves in after his widow moves out. Even though he is in a supernatural dimension that is separate from our mundane dimension, the ghost can have physical, or empirical impact in terms of physics. We can thus go beyond the fact that ghosts can apparently feel emotion in the film to grasp the metaphysical relationship between the realm of ghosts and of living people.

Going further, perhaps the rareness of the ghost’s functionality empirically is related to why time is different for the ghost. Doing, or function, hardly captures what it is for a ghost in the film to exist. Functionalism falls short in capturing existentialism. The very human notion of living so to work rather than working so to live is refuted, or simply does not apply to ghosts in this film because they spend so much time “standing” around even if the passage of so much time eludes their notice because time passes differently for ghosts. Time may pass quickly when we are having fun (or are busy at work), but for ghosts in the film, the speed of time may be different, as well as the ability to change time-frames (i.e., jump far into the future instantly and then go back in the past). That we easily get bored, even when a camera-shot is held longer than usually to end a scene, does not necessarily mean that the husband-ghost was bored in the empty house because of the sheer amount of time involved. Yet from our standpoint, we posit boredom onto the ghost because it is difficult for us to get beyond our vantage point to grasp the otherness of another. Feeling like life is empty—that it is really nothingness—may be partly why the wife/widow perceives days going by so slowly; such a sense of nihilism may even result in suicide, which, absent any heaven or hell, can be thought of as a fast track to nihilism sans even one’s own being, or existence. Suicide obviously does not apply to ghosts as they are already dead (yet they seem to feel emotions, have intentions, and can even throw dishes!). Existence after death may be an oxymoron.

In addition to existentialism (ontology), however, philosophy of religion and even a bit of theology makes its way into the film, for we (and the ghost) get a glimpse of heaven, or at least its gateway. This has major implications for the nihilist, dank atmosphere that runs throughout the film and thus seems absolute but is actually not foundational to human existence. A few minutes after getting up from the physical body in the hospital’s morgue, the ghost walks down a hall and pauses upon seeing a brief opening to heaven, a portal that is represented as a very bright, home-film-screen-sized square of light that opens momentarily on a wall. The ghost passes on heaven, and instead heads to the house, presumably to be with his widow. Although not explicitly or even implicitly linked, that heaven exists relativizes the isolation of the wife/widow, whose nihilism may not have the last word in her existence. That the portal opens as if “on cue” suggests furthermore that some “intelligence” or being having intention and thus a will exists as a common denominator with respect to the realms of ghosts and living persons. Already in the film, the widow, whose desire to move is clear at the film’s beginning, hires movers, packs up, and drives away, with her satisfied facial expression being shown in the translucent sunlight. She is headed to a brighter future and will not miss that house, and maybe not even her dead husband for long as he had evinced the emotional absence of a ghost even during the marriage. The husband’s ghost is not happy about her decision to move away, but it is only when he finally opens a note that she has sealed in wood paneling in the house that he “gives up the ghost,” and the sheet collapses. The ghost next door had just done the same thing when that ghost finally realized that the person being waiting for would never return, for the house had just been torn down. Therefore, the note left by the widow was probably one of closure—of saying farewell to the house, and thus to the ghost in it. Indeed, she would never be back; we know this because the ghost remains in the house far into the future, beyond even the time when the house is torn down and is replaced by a skyrise office building. We can conclude that the continued existence of ghosts here among the living, rather than being in heaven, is predicated on the hope of continuing on with a loved one. But lest it be forgotten, wedding vows include the words, till death do us part. The husband-ghost is suddenly faced with having to accept the finality of the end of a relationship, and thus he “gives up the ghost” and presumably takes heaven up on its offer. In reading the note, he lets go of the hope he has had in seeing her again, but the resulting nihilism may be replaced with the fullness of heaven. The ghost presumably finds peace in finally accepting the finality of the end of his relationship with his wife (now widow). If so, then nihilism does not have the last word not only for his widow, who may remarry but has at least moved on from the emotional isolation that she has known in that old house with her husband, but also for the ghost, who has finally given up the ghost by accepting the finality of a relationship that wasn’t very intimate anyway.

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1. Tasha Robinson, “A Ghost Story Director David Lowery on How Technology Fixed His Lonely Ghost,” The Verge (theverge.com), July 14, 2017 (accessed July 22, 2026).

Valkyrie

Claus von Stauffenberg was a Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008 film, Valkyrie, chronicles the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly. Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of religion is ill-suited to the political drama.

Lest it be concluded that God is against political dictatorship itself, and thus divine favor rests instead with democracy, efforts to apply religion to politics evaluatively come rife with pitfalls because the two domains are distinct; I would even say that the religious domain is unique, given the nature of distinctly religious transcendence. In reference to democracies, lest they be supposed to represent the Kingdom of God on Earth, it is notable that the U.S. dropped the first two atomic bombs on inhabited cities, and Israel committed a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and in 2026 its sitting prime minister even announced that he would run for re-election! The human condition is indeed far removed from the gods and their Valkyrie.

In the scene in which Stauffenberg presents his revised Valkyrie plan to Hitler for his signature at Hitler’s mountain retreat, Hitler asks him, “You know your Wagner, Colonel? The Valkyrie: handmaidens of the gods, choosing who will live and who will die, sparing the most heroic from an agonizing death. One cannot understand National Socialism without knowing Wagner.” Perhaps the implication is that the Valkyrie save Nazi heroes on the battlefield from agonizing deaths, and, moreover, that the Nazi Party is geared to esteeming heroes as they were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as strong, courageous conquerors, and, perhaps also by implication, riding society of the weak, whose very existence brings down the strong, if the statements by Joseph Goebbels and Hitler at the dinner table in the bunker in the film, Downfall (2004), accurately reflect Nazi ideology concerning strength and weakness: most notably, the eradication of the weak is necessary for the strong to be strong. Although seemingly drawing on Nietzsche, his philosophy merely counsels that a pathos of distance be maintained between the self-confident strong and the resentful weak who seek to beguile the strong. Nietzsche does not advocate that the weak be eradicated. Furthermore, unlike Hitler in Valkyrie, Nietzsche does not posit divine help via handmaidens for the strong; neither does Nietzsche claim that divine wrath is directed against the resentful weak who seek nonetheless to dominate even the strong. As for Hitler’s reference to heroes, it is not clear that Wagner’s Valkyrie would help Nazi “heroes” escape agonizing deaths because such a claim assumes that those heroes really were heroes rather than villains. The appropriation of religion is thus fraught with difficulties, given self-interest, ideology, and the limits of our ability to know the wills of the gods, especially as pertaining to political events. It is best to leave the gods out of our human internecine conflicts rather than conveniently assume that the Valkyrie favor one side or the other.

Given the horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, the Christian motif of redemption is more difficult to avoid even in the political context. Speaking in a bathroom to General Erich Fellgiebel to enlist his help in the plot, Staffenberg reminds his compatriot, “You were involved in a crime against your country long before you met me. There may still be time to redeem yourself. Only God can judge us now.” Redemption would come by helping rid Germany of Hitler’s rule. Although redemption by killing Hitler seems obvious enough, is religious redemption—and the ensuing sentence regarding God as judge means that the redemption being referred to here is indeed religious in nature—really fitting with respect to a person having been unpatriotic? What about the unpatriotic protests in America when the U.S. was bombing Cambodia in the Vietnam conflict in the late 1960s through 1974? Because that conflict was premised on a lie involving the Gulf of Tonkin, unblinking patriotism may have been cause for redemption. In actuality, God may think little or nothing either way of our notions of patriotism and our political protests. Again, God may be quite distant from our notions of political good and bad, even if the Nazi and Israeli atrocities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, seem pretty cut and dry as state-sponsored evil against people conveniently deemed “subhuman.” Perhaps from God’s perspective, we are all subhuman, or, in Nietzsche’s phraseology, human, all too human. Hence the political domain can be distanced from that of religion, in that the former reeks of human pride and thus presumptuousness, whereas the latter goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion and is thus not centered on us.

Ben-Hur

By 2026, the world hardly needed any convincing regarding the strident zeal for endless vengeance in the Middle East, given the genocide still occurring in Gaza against the Palestinian people. In 1945, the world had needed no convincing on just how severe, and at what tremendous scale, state-sponsored (and engineered) hatred against a people deemed “subhuman” could be. The 1959 film-version of Ben-Hur is saturated with the desire for vengeance, with the antipodal motive of forgiveness only being shown as a more powerful, and thus stronger, phenomenon at the end of the film when Judah Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are spontaneously cured of leprosy at the very moment in which Jesus dies on the Cross. Only in aiding Jesus with water on his arduous way to the Cross does the Jewish man, Judah, realize the value of the suffering man’s righteous, unmerited suffering, especially relative to the value of even satisfied vengeance. At the moment of his death, Jesus, freed of a mortal body, cures the two women as a result of Judah’s change of heart. The message is that forgiveness wins over resentment and vengeance from a spiritual standpoint.

Prior to the period shown in the film, the wealthy Ben-Hur family took in and raised the Roman boy, Messala. So, it is with a sense of utter ungratefulness that as an adult and a Roman official that Messala turns on Judah for refusing to divulge the names of dissidents by banishing him to work in as a rower in the Roman navy for five years and sending Judah’s mother and sister to prison and then to a leper’s colony. Fortunately, Judah saves a Roman general from drowning in a battle-at-sea and is rewarded by being adopted by the general and given Roman citizenship. Judah has the wherewithal to return to Jerusalem to challenge and vanquish Messala in a chariot race. Even after Messala dies from being injured by Judah’s chariot during the race, Judah is still not satisfied—still not free of his resentment. He walks by as people are gathering to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which causes Balthasar to remark, “You are choosing death.” This intriguing line can be unpacked.

Even vengeance satisfied, albeit with Judah’s mother and sister still suffering from leprosy, is death—of the spirit—whereas the qualities valued by Jesus in his sermon represent a freed up spiritual life. Interestingly, were Balthasar to deliver the line to Judah as Jesus is dying on the Cross, the allusion to death could be taken literally, given the soteriological meaning of the Passion Story. Specifically, the salvific meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection is that the vicarious, voluntary sacrifice pays off original sin and thus reconciles humans with God. Literally walking past Jesus on the Cross would connote the choice of death rather than eternal life. It is interesting that Balthasar remarks that Judah is choosing death in refusing to stay to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. The death is figurative, in that Judah is still buried in resentment because his mother and sister are still ill as a result of Messala’s punishments. As for Messala, in turning on, in utter betrayal, the generous family that had raised him, he can be reckoned as spiritually dead, and his literal death occurs before he can let go of his chackles. Judah takes considerable time, but, unlike his adopted-brother, Jesus’s example of selfless agape-love even amidst severe suffering sinks in and softens Judah’s harden heart.

Before Messala’s death at the hands of Judah in the famed race, Judah is rebuffed in his zeal for vengeance by Ester, who, having heard Jesus preach, tells Judah that a young rabbi has said that “forgiveness is greater, and love is more powerful than hatred.” Later, just before the horse race in which Judah intends to kill M, Judah prays, “God forgive me for seeking vengeance, but my path is set. Into your hands I commit my life. Do with me as you will.” The request to be forgiven is a lie because Judah himself has decided that his path towards exacting retribution is set. Judah is not committing his life to God in any sense, and is again lying when he says God can do with him what God will. In actuality, Judah is very much in the driver’s (or chariot’s) seat concerning what he will do during the upcoming race.

Judah goes on to win the race and, in the process, he has killed his nemesis who has so unfairly subjected Judah to years of severe hardship and suffering simply because Judah would not betray his fellow Jews. The presiding Roman official remarks at the end of the race that the spectators have made Judah the victor their god, albeit just for the time being. Drunk with having exacted revenge, Judah is still of a hardened heart when he leaves the track and walks past Jesus, who is shown atop a hill in the distance—and not shown frontally in a close-up—just as he is just about to give his famed Sermon on the Mount. Judah is still hardened, nevertheless, because his mother and sister still have leprosy as a result of having been in a dank prison-cell for five years. As his dying nemesis says to Judah just before dying after the race, “The race continues.”

In witnessing Jesus struggling physically and mentally as he is being prodded and whipped by Roman guards no the way to be crucified, Judah is taken back. “What did this man do to deserve this?” Judah asks out-loud. That is the man who helped Judah with water when Judah was under extreme duress. It is not suffering itself that is given positive significance, but, rather, the willingness to take on the sins of others by suffering what they should by all rights suffer. The silent strength evinced by the suffering man who seems so weak suddenly is clear to Judah, who can now free himself from the chains of his own resentment. Ironically, letting go of resentment owing to the ongoing suffering of his mother and sister ends their suffering. He lets go of his resentment prior to the miracle healing that removes the ongoing reason for the resentment.

The miracle itself is important because it shows that in the story-world of the film, as in that of the Gospels, Jesus is the Son of God. Esoterically (i.e., the following is optional reading), the noetic significance of the religious title is dwarfed by the ontic significance of spiritual freedom over spiritual captivity, as evinced by Judah Ben-Her in the film as he offers Jesus water on the way to the Cross over having felt himself internally compelled to pass by Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.

Whereas the sort of explicit power evinced by Messala and the ship-galley task-masters, and, moreover, the Romans in Jerusalem even against Jesus on the way to the Cross, is quite visible, the power of letting go of vengeance and even offering compassion to detractors and even enemies is silent yet paradoxically stronger. The litmus test for Judah has finally to do with which of the two types of power he values more in the sense of which is stronger, and thus has more worth in itself. The relevant death is not physical, but, rather, spiritual, as per the human instinct for freedom, which Nietzsche ironically calls the will to life, or will to power, as ultimately felt best in overcoming (i.e., mastering, not repressing!) one’s most intractable instinctual urge, such as that of vengeance.  

Civil War

In the film, Civil War (2024), Texas and California have “tecaexited” the U.S., to use the European recondite ideological parlance for secession that began with “Brexit” in order to evade “seceding from the Union.” The U.S. president in the film repeatedly lies to the public that the secessionists are on the run; in actuality, as the film progresses, the three journalists, Lee, Joel, and Sammy, along with their young protégé, Jessie, eventually witness up-close the rebel military conquering the White House in order to shoot the president in the Oval Office. The film provides only scant clues as to the reason for the secession; the rebel who shots Tony, a friend of the three journalists, obviously detests foreigners and delights in “real Americans,” such as are from Colorado and Missouri. This could be a reference to Trump’s “MAGA” movement, so the film is possibly playing out Trump’s followers revolting; historically, on January 6, 2021, some of them rioted, though admittedly did not as a revolt so to topple the U.S. Government, but rather to make a statement by temporarily stopping Congress from counting the States’ respective electoral ballots for president. Even so, it is too great an inferential leap to conclude that the two States seeking to exit the U.S. in the film are MAGA, even though MAGA ideology and the “woke” ideology clashed in early (and mid) 2020s when the film was being put together. Rather than being about contending, violently clashing ideologies, the film is about how violent our species is when not suppressed by an overarching police presence that can act as a deterrent.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century European political philosopher, argues that in order to stave off a short, nasty and brutish life filled with recurrent threats of theft and violence, a person, together with the others, must cede all political (and even theological interpretive) sovereignty to a governing authority, whether a king or an assembly. The only right retained even against such a power is that of self-preservation, though the sovereign has the right to put a rebel to death. Similarly, Machiavelli wrote The Prince to give rulers strategic “Machiavellian” advice in the context of political fighting so those rulers could survive in power even ruthlessly. That philosopher’s History of Florence left out such advice because the context in the book was stable rather than violent. The message of these two philosophers is that left to our own devices in a state of political nature, we can regress to our ruthless savage nature, which is always there but latent in a societal context in which a sovereign power acts as a suppressant and deterrent.

In the film, as the three journalists and the girl drive west then south from New York, ending up in Washington, D.C. to witness the secessionist army shooting its way into the White House to kill the president, indications of small-scale violence are very evident. At a gas station, a man holding a machine gun shows Jessie where two “looters,” too bloodied to be recognizable, are hanging, while still alive, out back. The man even agrees to be photographed by Lee showing him standing between the two hanging men. The subtle message is that he has nothing to fear in being held accountable for shooting the two victims as Jesse and Lee are still there to witness. Man’s savagery goes beyond just killing other humans; not even severe cruelty is sufficiently resisted if there is no fear of having to pay a price in terms of lost freedom or pain.

After Jessie foolishly switches cars through open windows as both are being driven fast and is taken prisoner by two rebels who are operating independently in having killed a truck-load of people, one of those two men shoots Tony and Bohai because they are not “real Americans.” The sheer arbitrariness of the acts to Joel causes him to momentary react angrily before suddenly realizing that the shooter is so irrational that anyone could be shot next, even Joel. Fortunately, Sammy comes to the rescue by driving the journalists’ car into the shooter, but at a cost, for the other shooter kills Sammy as he is driving away with the other journalists.

Relative to these isolated cases of wanton, unjustified violence by individuals, the coordinated military attack on the White House by the rebel army looks civilized. In fact, it is astonishing just how embedded Joel, Lee, and Jessie are with the soldiers as they are shooting at U.S. soldiers and the Secret Service agents. That the soldiers who are about to shoot the president in the Oval Office pause so Joel can get a last quote from the president suggests that the cause is political rather than just for the sake of getting to be violent and kill. In other words, the indications and instances of isolated killings in the countryside en route reveal our species violent, unimpeded nature more so than do the scenes of army units fighting against opposing units.

By implication, political movements in the early 2020s to “defund” local police departments in some of the American States seem wrongheaded, for even if police-power is too much for human nature to wield properly, human nature itself, as depicted in the film, attests that having a police department is a necessary evil that a society cannot (and should not) do without, and, furthermore, that the strictures that only being in a society can provide are also necessary, for in the proverbial state of nature, which can exist even within a society (e.g., neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago), human nature is too prone not only to violence, but also to cruelty—even to the point of enjoying it. Nietzsche argues that the origins historically of punishment lie in the debtor-creditor relationship, wherein creditors found pleasure in taking “a pound of flesh” strangely as if that pleasure from inflicting pain were equivalent and thus sufficiently compensating. Nietzsche states that the rendering of such an equivalence is “strange,” but he may simply be discounting or ignoring the savage nature of our species underneath the patina of civilized Man.

It should not be lost on the viewers, however, that glimpses of the finer qualities of human nature are included in the film. In the camp in the stadium, for example, camera shots showing people being docile, even kind to each other, are likely meant to show this contrast to the film’s leitmotif. Lee’s self-sacrifice at the end of the film in saving Jessie’s life by taking the bullet herself when Jessie is in the line of fire in a hallway in the White House attests to the sheer normative distance that exists within human nature, for, building on a famous line that is in the book, The Killer Angels, which is about the U.S. Civil War, if we are angels, then we are surely killer angels, though this does not mean that violence and cruelty exhaust human nature for we are capable of self-sacrificial love for other human beings. Though even if we are “made” to be creatures of love, still we have not managed to shake our innate penchant for violence and even cruelty. The true civil war is perhaps that which exists within each of us. 

Eichmann

There comes a point in the film, Eichmann (2007), which is based on Avner Less’s series of interviews with Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli jail, when the man who was in charge of transport to the Nazi death camps realizes that he will lose the upcoming trial and be hanged; the hitherto unemotional Eichmann instantly tears up in front of Avner Less in the small, windowless room and laments never being able to see his children again. Less points out that Eichmann has sent many children to their deaths, “but they were Jews,” Eichmann counters. The inroads into the psyche that Nazi propaganda reached was suddenly obvious, even odd. Ideology with the machinery of state as a proponent and enforcer can short-circuit the human mind without the mind being aware of its own cognitive distortions. Eichmann states, “but they were Jews” as if anyone would understand because he takes the validity of the statement as a given. Translation: Jews were not only enemies of the state; they were also subhuman. In an earlier interview, Eichmann disclaimed being antisemitic with a tone that conveys to the audience that he really believes his statement. At the very least, the mental pathology of disassociation seems to have been caused by the earlier Nazi propaganda. State ideology can indeed be mentally invasive, and this may say as much about the vulnerabilities of the human brain as the danger latent in political power than can manifest in massive states as not only war crimes, but also the more severe crimes against humanity.

Ironically, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Israelis would adopt the same subhuman stance (the stance itself being subhuman as well as regarding people deemed to be subhuman) towards the Palestinian people living in Gaza especially, but also in the West Bank (and Lebanon). Can the infliction of one holocaust be understood as an instinctual aggressive reaction on an intergenerational collective basis to an earlier one that has been inflicted on ancestors? The misfiring is obvious because the Palestinians and Germans are two different peoples, so the adage, two wrongs don’t make a right applies. Another adage reads, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” The biblical intent is to keep vengeance out of the hands of (God’s?) children. But whose Lord is that?  

Eichmann was evidently an atheist; the Nazi party was officially so. Had Eichmann regarded himself as a Christian, the man’s cognitive dissidence would have been too much even for him to ignore and manage, though admittedly the Crusades were committed by “Christians” in the name of Christ without enough dissidence for them to turn back and go home. Ironically, Eichmann had studied Hebrew, which is why, according to Avner Less in the film, Eichmann was selected to head his department that was oriented to the Jewish problem in transportation. Even though Eichmann repeatedly insists in the interviews that he was just a cog in the massive Nazi state machine, and therefore wielded no significant power of his own for which he should be held morally responsible, being the head of all the transportation to the death camps came with too much power to be labeled merely as bureaucratic.

In fact, the narrative’s pivot, or inflection point, is on Eichmann’s own abuse of power, which is to say, an abuse that he cannot claim to have been merely following orders on pain of death. He was sufficiently high in the Nazi hierarchy to have wielded power of his own and thus to be held responsible for any consequent suffering and death. Whether the latter two can become so massive and severe that even just following orders even on pain of death cannot obviate being morally responsible is an interesting ethical question without an easy answer—perhaps answering the related question of whether self-sacrifice is not only a virtue, but also a duty if many people would suffer severely and unjustly die otherwise is prerequisite. In suggesting that Indians stand up to invading Nazis were they to invade India, Gandhi advocated such a duty and even claimed that it has much moral power in resisting evil.

Although Eichmann strangely volunteers to sacrifice his life as a lesson to anti-Semites, Avner Less dismisses the offer as disingenuous. As a policeman, he is savvy. Crucially, anticipating the film’s pivot, it is clear that he is clever in detecting the nuance in Eichmann’s pattern of minimizing the fact that he took orders directly from Himmler rather than from Hitler himself. Eichmann is hiding something, and Avner Less senses this, so he immediately has his staff focus exclusively on pulling all of the written correspondence between Eichmann and Himmler that the department has. Avner Less’s abrupt shift in his investigative strategy is in line with having realized the utter futility in getting a confession from the devoted, high-ranking Nazi. Having been in the SS, Eichmann too is savvy to say something self-incriminating. Avner Less too is savvy; he notices that Eichmann covered his tracks well by having retained written documentation of the orders he was obeying. No one is perfect, however, and in giving the order that over 70,000 Hungarian Jews walk from Budapest to a death camp in Poland, Eichmann actually defied Himmler’s order that such a march not take place! Visually precise for viewers, Avner Less places the papers of both orders side by side on the desk in front of Eichmann. The two orders contradict each other—crucially with Himmler’s order having an earlier date. Eichmann, being a firm believer in the value of written documentation, can only slump silently in his chair, knowing that he had not sufficiently covered his tracks as an SS man, and therefore he would be convicted and put to death. Given the historical accuracy of the film, this means that during the entire trial, which is not depicted in the film, Eichmann knew he would be convicted and die.

The film ends with Avner Less mailing the letter than Eichmann had begged be mailed to his family. That Avner’s own father died in a Nazi camp makes the generous nature of the gesture all the more astonishing, especially given the violent protests by Israelis of the interviews happening at all, and thus of Avner Less’s involvement, on the grounds that Eichmann does not deserve even a trial, given the monstrosity of the crimes against humanity—a label that was coined at the famous Nuremburg trial.

In the film, and perhaps in the historical record too, Avner Less does not ask Eichmann why he violated Himmler’s order and gave the order to proceed with the march anyway. Perhaps Eichmann was more realistic than Himmler and Hitler that time was limited for the Nazis in November 1944, given the military progress of the Allies, so desperate means were needed to quickly kill as many Hungarian Jews as possible.  Perhaps Himmler (or Hitler) was worried so late in the war that the evidence of thousands of bodies left along the way could be used by the Allied victors after the war to prosecute the Nazis. Eichmann was likely frustrated with the slow pace with which his superiors were ridding Europe of Jewry. This is precisely why it is so strange that he repeatedly resists the label of anti-Semite in the interviews with Avner Less. Impatience with ridding Europe of the subhuman “race” is of course highly anti-Semitic, but, strangely, and here the nefarious, dangerous power of a state-sponsored ideology should be flagged for future reference, Eichmann does not appear to “connect the dots” in his (brainwashed?) mind. “But they were Jews.”

In The Reader, released in 2008—a year after Eichmann—Hanna Schmitz, a former death-camp guard on trial in Germany, astonishes the chief judge with just such a line. To the judge, Hanna’s rationale is astonishing to the point of utter disbelief that anyone could use such a warped justification for standing by while other people needlessly die. Meanwhile, to her, the justification is something that presumably anyone would simply take for granted as being entirely reasonable. The pathos of distance is incredible. To paraphrase her rationale: Of course, we let the Jewish prisoners burn in the locked church; they were our prisoners; we were responsible for them; we couldn’t just open the doors and let them escape. This line, plus Eichmann’s, reveal the visceral depth with which the propaganda of a state can insidiously damage the human mind without it having a clue as to its own warped condition. Therefore, it behooves each human being to routinely self-check for having gone too far in one’s own ideological commitments, as well as to critique the ideology itself with the understanding that no human ideology is or can be perfect, for we are human, all too human.

San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

The full essay is at "San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival."

Enzo

In 2025, when the film, Enzo, was released, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine was still in progress before being overshadowed in the media by fresh American and Israeli military attacks in Iran. The film distinguishes the respective attitudes of two Ukrainian construction workers in the E.U. state of France regarding whether to return to Ukraine to join the army. This contrast implies that patriotism, and, moreover, duty, is a weak force in human nature, even when a citizen’s country is in serious, existential trouble in being invaded by an empire-scale military aggressor.

In the film, the Ukrainians’ dilemma is overshadowed by the salient class distinction between Enzo’s upper middle-class family and a vocation of manual labor, including construction work. Enzo’s father, Paolo, may even take Enzo’s desire to continue as a construction-apprentice as a personal betrayal. Even though Enzo is only 16 years-old, he is able to “hit” back during a family dinner at home by characterizing his father’s academic profession as utterly fake (for what use is “book” knowledge?), especially relative to construction because, Enzo says, walls continue to stand even when the human beings who dwell within them have died. That Enzo’s own natural proclivity to draw would, as a profession, which Paulo is urging Enzo to adopt, be one of manual labor goes unsaid in the film. By implication nonetheless, the intricate use of fingers is of higher social class than the sore, blunt use of hands. To be sure, getting rich by selling art is heard of, whereas how many construction workers get rich by overlaying brick and mortar?

Enzo is, as a typical teenager, lost, and therefore needs time to find himself. His crush on Vlad, one of the Ukrainian construction workers, attests to the boy’s jejune state. Even his claim at the end of the film, on the phone to Vlad who has called in the midst of a battle in Ukraine, of having “fallen in love” with Vlad cannot be taken seriously. The film’s political and economic ethical elements are so salient that Enzo cannot be labeled as gay cinema.

Even though the ethic of socio-economic class is more salient than is the political leitmotif, the stark contrast in an early conversation between Miroslav and Vlad, the two Ukrainian guest-workers in the E.U., is riveting and thus worthy of notice and elaboration. Whereas Miroslav strongly feels a sense of duty to return to Ukraine to take up arms against the Russian invaders because “I might not have a country to come back to,” Vlad recognizes no such duty. Of course, the Ukrainian government is not going to forcibly grab Vlad and return him to his native country, and Vlad undoubtedly knows this, so his disavowal of a basic duty in citizenship can stand. Both men know that Miroslav’s intent to return to Ukraine is entirely voluntary, and it is precisely in this regard that duty can be understood as being a weak force in human nature. For all that deontologically-oriented ethicists make a big deal out of duty per se (e.g., Kant), the force, like gravity, is actually weak. The fullness of emotion that people in the rapture of fulfilling a duty belies the fact that duty must be willed, and slavish attachment to momentary pleasure is actually a stronger force as an instinctual urge.

So it is interesting, as well as perplexing, that both of the Ukrainians tell their construction boss that they would be returning to Ukraine (implication: to fight) in two weeks without anything in the screenplay as to how or why Vlad changed his mind. The oversight, or leap, can be construed as an understatement concerning how much mental effort is involved in a change of will. It is not as if Vlad suddenly grew an internal sense of duty. Presumably Miroslav had said something that convinced Vlad to return to fight. It is precisely because duty is so voluntary, unless mandated by a government at gun-point or threat of imprisonment, that Miroslav’s rationale is so crucial to Miroslav’s change of heart—or is the rationale more practical in appealing to Vlad’s self-interest? In not furnishing an answer, the film falls short in terms of political theory, whereas the socio-economic ethical tension is more fully depicted and resolved as Enzo capitulates to his parents’ world after having tried to commit suicide at the construction site, for going to New York to learn English can be construed as being on track to eventually joining his parents’ echelon vocationally, even as an international artist whose art sales could benefit from connections made in New York. Such a world is miles way from that of a construction worker. 

In contrast, Vlad being scared to death by bombs exploding nearby in Ukraine—how he got to that point—is unexplained and thus unaccounted for. Next to such fear, and even the anticipation of such fear, the emotive sense of duty is weak. Even in Hobbes’ Leviathan, the instinct for self-preservation can legitimately be acted upon even against a sovereign power. Whether a “right” or not, self-preservation is an inalienable feature of human nature even after an alleged social-contract by a group of people to give up power (even to interpret scripture!) to a sovereign power, whether a king or legislative assembly.  

Strange River

Not every film has an implicit Thoreau signature reflective of the nineteenth-century Romantic turn from the age of Reason. Not every film brings to mind the Romantic painter, Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whose painting of nature’s green growing over classic Roman pillars as if to say, nature has the last word. The European film, Strange River (2025), is such a film. The key to making these connections lies not in the film’s dialogue, but, rather, in Jaume Muxart’s consistent choice to direct the film by ending several scenes with elongated camera-shots of nature. This leitmotif has Thoreau’s Walden Pond written all over it and is an implicit critique of rationality and the related artificial societies that mankind has constructed at the expense of being natural.

The film centers on Didac, a sixteen year-old boy who, as a typical teenager, is engulfed in the growing pains of self-discovery. This takes place on a family biking and camping trip along the Danube river. The film opens while the parents and three boys are biking near the mouth of the river, and ends with the family angst gone where the river is much larger; life has been more fully experienced, with the parents having reunited from being emotionally fraught, and Didac having had a brief fling (not including gay sex) on a small boat overnight with another boy. Boys will be boys; nothing definite should be extrapolated. Early on, Lena, the mother, tells Didac, “This might be the last summer that the family is together.” Two arguments between the parents bear out the mother’s prognosis that the couple might get a divorce, and her sexual fling with a young man one night during the trip bears out her desire to wander.

Meanwhile, Didac is initially aggrieved that Gerard, a boy from school on whom Didac has a crush, has been ignoring him. Didac speaks with his father, Albert, on “the frustration of not being desired.” Albert urges his teenage son to share how he feels with Gerard. Both parents support Didac’s romantic interest in Gerard. “You guys kissed,” both parents separately remind their son with winks. For something much deeper than an infatuation, frustration is an understatement, so Didac’s crushes on boys are clearly not very serious, and he may eventually be sexually interested in women. Put somewhat bluntly, the importance of the role that water plays in how Muxart depicts nature in the film, especially with shots of Didac in particular swimming naked, brings to mind the problem in nature wherein heterosexual sexual intercourse is naturally well-lubricated (if not rushed) whereas anal penetration is not, but Didac’s instinctual urges for boys sexually are natural too. Also problematically, the two elongated camera close-ups of Didac’s butt while he is swimming on two occasions almost creep out the wide shots of a boy swimming naked, which prima facie can be construed as showing a human being fully in nature, and thus natural (whereas wearing gray suits in bland offices in artificial skyscrapers is not). If the film can be characterized as a love story, it is that of a family, rather than two boys, and, moreover, a love story with nature. To be sure, Didac takes after his mother in that both engage in “extracurricular” flings during the trip. In fact, Didac sees Lena kissing a younger man one night at a camp-grounds. “Don’t look at me that way,” Lena tells her eldest son the next day; she goes on to tell him that she had had a romantic night with a stranger on the same route twenty years before the present trip. That foray took place on a small boat and the young man disappeared, and Didac has the same experience with a boy on the current trip. With that boy, Alexander, disappearing in the morning before Didac wakes up, the film lapses in skipping ahead to Didac being with his family on a large boat without accounting for how the 16 year-old boy gets from the small boat anchored in the large river back to his parents. If Didac’s brief, free-spirit, foray with Alexander is supposed to feel magical, Alexander leaving Didac alone on the boat is too much reality. In fact, rather than viewing the film as falling within the “gay cinema” genre, if there is such a type (try “romance films,” as falling in love is falling in love), I contend that Muxart situates the film as a family dynamic couched within nature, in and as a part of nature. Rather than being apart from nature, and thus other animals, our species, homo sapiens, is in the animal kingdom, and this is evinced both sexually and in how we raise our offspring.

During the trip, while at an empty school that Albert attended as a boy, he gives his wife and three boys, who are less than attentive, a lecture on the building’s architecture. Albert claims that the rationalistic style is relaxing, but this is undercut as an argument ensues. Significantly, that scene ends with the camera staying on a tree whose fine branches and leaves are swaying in the wind. Nature is relaxing. In fact, Muxart has the 16-mm lens changed as the trip goes on because the river is larger as the family progresses on the route along the river, and shots of the water are salient in the film and to its very meaning. In fact, the film ends with a wide, sustained shot of the wide river, as if to say that nature has the last word as image. That the family, or at least Didac, swims nude can be taken as saying that his teenage growing pains are natural—that he is part of nature. When he is masturbating on the bank of the river after swimming nude alone, the greenery around him is as natural as his facial expressions, especially his eyes, as he is stroking his penis. As he approaches orgasm, a long camera shot of the river water sparkling in the sunlight with emotive instrumental music makes the connection with nature clear. What he is doing is entirely natural, and thus good. Even after Didac and his dad have a father-son talk on Didac having kissed a boy at school, a homosexual encounter that Didac initially denies as he tells his father, “You are too old to understand,” a long camera-shot of the river, which is wider than at the beginning of the film, ensues as if to say, nature has the last word; Didac should go on his natural instincts rather than try to rationalize or justify his attraction to other boys. My point is that Didac’s homosexual urges are not the point of the film; rather, such urges serve as props for Muxart’s leitmotif that we as a species are a part of nature, rather than cast apart, as Albert says in the film, “When no one lives in a building, it dies.” We may design and build buildings, but we are corporeal, organic beings and thus a part of nature.

We can move figuratively to a larger “camera shot” by changing our lens to the nineteenth century, when Romanticism evinced both by the painter Joseph Turner and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau eclipsed the Age of Reason. To be sure, it had been during the eighteenth century that the Earl of Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith wrote on ethics by stressing the sentiment of disapprobation as being ethical judgment that some conduct has been unethical. There is no hint of Kant’s ethical categorical imperative wherein a logical contradiction in universalizing a maxim can be taken as evidence that the maxim is unethical. Instead, the viewer of the film is looking out on the river perhaps as Thoreau looked out on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Even Aristotle looked to nature, and so too does Muxart in making Strange River; we just need to look at how several important scenes end. Just as Albert and Lena do not move forward with divorce, so too, the family does not divorce itself from nature. 

Downtown

Like the coronavirus in the early 2020s, HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s and for at least a decade after then paid little or no attention to national borders or even to nationalities. Even though coronavirus freely walked through the boundaries of our various group-identities with the implication being that they are actually artificial demarcated constructions, AIDS showed us that sub-societal cultural differences do exist. In fact, within a given sub-culture and thus group-identity, one set of values may be ethically and psychologically better than another set, so broad-strokes can be understood as over-simplifications. Even within the same group culture within a given society, drastic differences can exist to the extent that some people embrace and others reject cultural norms that are salient for the group. This is salient in the European film, Downtown (2026), which is about three gay men both when they are young adults in 1986 and old men in 2021. Even though the screenwriter and two producers emphasized in their respective remarks at a film festival in 2026 that that the filmmaking and the narrative of the film are both heavily Dutch, the lessons conveyed by the film transcend nationality and geography and thus betray the over-the-top states’ rights ideology in the E.U. that would claim that the E.U. state of the Netherlands is unique among the several states.

The film is saturated with death and yet the three men have survived. Lennart, immune-compromised from having had AIDS (not just HIV), refers to “Covid” as a “toy virus” relative to AIDS even though his father has died of “Covid” just two weeks before the dinner at Ronnie’s house in 2021. Lennart has paid a high price medically for having carelessly contracted AIDS in 1987 either from his own sexual forays or that of Bas, whom the film shows as living with Lennart for a time back then. In contrast, Ronnie, Lennart’s platonic friend from the mid-1980s on, is careful then and does not test positive for the virus in the film. Even though Lennart chastises Ronnie in 1987 for being too careful by “sitting on the sidelines” sexually and even for putting so much effort into helping men who are dying from the virus, it is Lennart rather than Ronnie who deserves the criticism, and not just sexually. The film demonstrates that gay men who are like Ronnie should confront gays who are like Lennart other on what boils down to fear and avoidance of emotional intimacy and the role of sex in distancing people where it counts. In fact, the difference between the characters of those two men renders efforts to generalize the gay “community” with a single stroke, as the Roman Catholic Church has done, as highly inaccurate and unhelpful, for the Lennarts should be “fair game” for ethical and even psychological critique while the Ronnies should be lauded.

Throughout his adult life, Lennart is uncomfortable with emotional intimacy being expressed physically, so he is drawn, at least as a young adult, to impersonal sex with guys whose names he does not even know, or care to know. This discomfort is dramatized in the early scene in which Ronnie tries repeatedly to put his arm around Lennart while the two are sleeping in the same bed (non-sexually). Besides being so self-centered that he does not notice that Ronnie is in love with him, Lennart is astonishingly rude when Ronnie invites him to go to a beach and then to a restaurant. In both cases, Lennart leaves with other men for impersonal sex; Ronnie can be seen to be visually stunned at the sheer rudeness of his new “friend.” Without doubt, Lennart is a narcissist who has emotional problems related to emotional intimacy likely stemming from his relationship with his emotionally-distant and harsh father (whose funeral attracts only six people).

Lennart’s distancing himself from any sort of emotional intimacy is once again on display in Lennart’s “relationship” with Bas, who moves in with Lennart. Bas confides to Ronnie that Lennart wants it “both ways” in being able to go out separately to have impersonal sex with other men and yet still wanting “a cozy domestic life.” The film’s message is that the two desires are incompatible, especially when “open” relationships include “poly,” which is when the outside sex includes romantic feelings. Frank Houtappels, the film’s screenwriter, arguably should have gone further by including in the dialogue between Bas and Ronnie, something to the effect that Lennart has a psychological problem that is impairing his ability to form and have genuine romantic relationships, and that he is acting like a child in wanting to have it both ways—anonymous sex separately while keeping Bas to himself. At one point, Lennart says to a worried Ronnie, “Why would Bas even look at other men? He just needs to look at me.” The asymmetry is not lost on Bas, which I suspect is why he moves out without leaving his new address as soon as he is diagnosed HIV positive. Such convenient (to Lennart) asymmetry belies trust, which in turn is requisite to an emotionally intimate relationship. Confronted with these points, had they been in the script, Lennart could have been made, as per the script, to have a temper tantrum befitting his abject immaturity and his related refusal to confront himself and make difficult choices. The stunted condition of his character would really have been made transparent.

Once at the beach, Bas quietly scurries away from lying with Lennart on the sand to have anonymous sex with a man, which is likely how Bas (and perhaps then Lennart, though he is being careful sexually) contracts HIV. Lennart has refused Bas’s preference that the two men be monogamous. Such a request is very reasonable, not only so the “couple” could build up enough exclusive intimacy to have a genuine romantic relationship, but also because so many other men around them are dropping like flies from having contacted HIV and then AIDS. Incredibly, Lennart even dismisses Ronnie’s question: “Do you trust Bas to be careful?” Ronnie, more so than Lennart, is looking out for Lennart’s best interest in terms of staying alive. Something is clearly wrong with Lennart, and his sexual promiscuity and avoidance of commitment evince something more serious than just a “lifestyle.”

In 2021, when Ronnie has both Lennart and Bas over for dinner, dramatic tension is palpable because Lennart and Bas have not been in contact since Bas left Lennart without even saying good-bye in 1987. At the dinner, Bas explains that he had been very angry at Lennart, and rightly so, for Lennart had not been fair at all with Bas sexually. Even at the dinner, while Lennart is upstairs talking with Ronnie, Bas leaves unannounced, which means that Bas is not interested in any contact with his former “boyfriend.” It is then that Lennart realizes not only that he has been needlessly lonely throughout his life—he tells Ronnie and Bas that they have been the only people who have really known him—but also that Ronnie has been and still is in love with Lennart. Finally, and therein lies the tragedy of it all, Lennart is able to embrace Ronnie both emotionally and physically and Lennart invites Ronnie to embrace him physically. Had enough gay men confronted Lennart in the 1980’s on his severe problem with emotional intimacy stemming from an emotionally-distant and very critical father, and on how Lennart was using anonymous sex to distance the men closest to him, perhaps he would not have been able to deny his psychological condition by assuming that he was behaving in line with a popular non-monogamous “lifestyle” that is admittedly so popular in the gay “community,” and had even become normative, and thus imposed, in the Castro gay district in San Francisco by 2026.

The film can thus serve an important role in its message that any “lifestyle” which uses promiscuity to foil emotional intimacy can legitimately be criticized rather than taken as valid in an “anything goes” relativism in which the feelings of other people don’t matter. The pathetic Don’t Judge excuse can finally be exculpated and replaced with valid criticism. Just because a lot of gay men use anonymous (and even “poly” so-called loves) sex to obviate emotional intimacy does not mean that validity follows. It may be that so many gay men are clinically compromised and thus weak in refusing to end their slavish addiction to momentary pleasure because “coming out” (i.e., admitting being gay to other people, especially close friends and family, especially to parents) has been emotionally traumatizing. Addressing the resultant scars goes completely under the radar under the subterfuge of the norm of gay promiscuity as “cool.”

Because not even the very real danger of AIDS motivated such men as Lennart in the 1980s to curtail anonymous, unprotected sex especially if there is a devoted man at home, the underlying emotional fragility and fear of the weak who are so prone to betray close romantic relations and even put life itself at risk can be assessed as severe.  Ronnie and even Bas, whose “infidelity” is understandable given Lennart’s passive aggression using sex with other men, can be viewed as healthy standards from which the sheer distance to Lennart’s can be perceived. Implied in the film is the value in making such distance transparent within the gay “community,” such that gay men like Ronnie and Bas can finally gain enough momentum to hold up a mirror by which the Lennarts in the gay world may finally see themselves for what they represent and instantiate. Even so, the sweet honey of momentary pleasure could forestall sufficient motivation to change even if the result of continued denial is a life of loneliness, such as Lennart has suffered until he and Ronnie “find” each other at the dinner in 2021 in the midst of another pandemic. Watching Lennart when he is a young man, it would be difficult to visualize him as a shrunken shell in some hospital bed, or, as is the case, as a bitter, lonely old man whose health has been ravaged by AIDS. That he somhehow defies the death sentence in the late 1980s may seem unjust, given how passive aggressive he is to both Ronnie and Bas as a young adult, until the depth of emotional pain is revealed on Lennart’s face at Ronnie’s house in 2021, when the former beauty of his youth can no longer mask his inner condition.

In discussing the film live to an audience in 2026, Houtappels, the screenwriter, said that at least the “covid” virus did not discriminate, whereas AIDS spread largely (though not completely) between gay men. The film can be interpreted as making the point that sordid values and bad behavioral choices (i.e., bad character) and even mental illness played a role in why the virus spread so, though admittedly the extent to which sexual promiscuity has been valued in the gay “community” even as normative (rather than sordid) can also be blamed. In The Normal Heart (2014), for example, Julia Roberts as Dr. Emma Brookner strongly advises gay activists to wear condoms during anal sex because how the virus is transmitted is not yet known. “You don’t know what you are asking of us!” one of the gay men in the room objects as if she is asking them to live like monks. Crucially, she stares the men down and is unrelenting: You need to wear condoms whether you like it or not. She is stunned that grown men would prioritize moments of momentary pleasure so highly that even wearing condoms to stay alive asking to much. In Downtown, Ronnie asks Lennart if he trusts Bas to be careful sexually. It is a pity that physician Brookner is not in the film to sit Lennart down for a reality-adjustment. I certainly am judging you for being so stupidly careless and even risking Bas’s life.

Lest it be concluded that every young gay man is like Lennart, it is important to note that Ronnie and Bas are also major gay characters in the film. Ronnie is out promoting societal awareness of the pandemic afflicting mostly gay men, and he is even caring for dying men in hospital beds. Religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention gloss homosexuality as if every gay men were a Lennart, and thus miss the saintliness of gays like Ronnie even while hypocritically preaching on separating the wheat from the chaff! To castigate what Lennart represents from the pulpit is hardly anti-gay, and lauding the Ronnies and the Bas’s for compassion for the sick and courage for a committed romantic relationship, respectively, would prove that exposing the Lennarts is hardly “homophobic” (which is a convenient misnomer). The film provides a clear template from which preachers can separate the wheat from the chaff because Lennart and Ronnie are so very antithetical, even in their own relationship. 

I Want Your Sex

The 2026 film, I Want Your Sex, is ostensibly about sex, for the film is saturated with that leitmotif, but the narrative is actually a critique of California culture, with European culture playing a minor role to provide a contrast. Generally, comedy can be used by screenwriters as a means by which audiences can accept, or at least acknowledge criticism that would otherwise be met with ferocious denial befitting a drug addiction. In 2026, the sheer dogmatism of ideologically-soaked imposing at will, as if with facts of reason rather than the gloss of merely subjective opinion, was the mentality of the day afflicting (young) adults under 40 years-old in California. Film can expose such banality to the light of day and thus serve as a self-correcting agent for a societal or sub-societal culture, for the human brain, standing on its own as arrogance on stilts, may be woefilly and unretrievably vulnerable to purblindness when beliefs and values are in the grip of ideological idolatry.

The film’s plot centers around Elliot being hired by Erika Tracy, a commercial artist. Her art’s theme is sexual in nature, and it is not long before she enlists all-too-willing Elliot in sadistic-masochistic sexual fantasies, for Elliot’s girlfriend, Minerva, is cold as ice in bed—even going so far as to fake enjoying sex with Elliot. As the film’s narrative unfolds, Erika and her pretentious (and violent) assistant, Vikktor, temporarily frame Elliot for murder (of Tracy!) in order to raise the asking prices for the art. The two come to a working-agreement wherein both profit from business dealings with the other, and the film ends with Elliot and Erika separately having the same dream in which they get married and she finally reveals herself as a self-imploding demon, which may refer to the true nature of the culture being critiqued by the film.

Erika, Vikktor, and the film’s gay trope/slut, Zap, another of Erika’s employees, are so intensely narcissistic that even their external mannerisms come off as pretentious. Erika even tells Elliot, “People think only about themselves.” She also tells him that most people are idiots and cowards, so don’t worry about what they think. Arrogant self-vaulting, as if on stilts during a flood, looks down on the pathetic losers below. According to M. Scott Peck’s book, People of the Lie, however, a sense of inner emptiness lies behind such pretention and narrow, selfishness along with a callous indifference to whether other people are suffering. Erika’s inner emptiness can be grasped in Erika’s statement to Elliot, “Sex is everything and nothing.”  She even makes fun of her European acquaintance for having told Elliot that sex is a dance and a language of touch, and thus of even emotional intimacy. “That’s why I hate Europeans,” Erika says when Elliot recounts what the European woman told him in her hotel room. But in reducing sex to impersonal S & M, which highlights pleasure from the inflicting of pain, Erika can be critiqued on her judgment on the European’s interpretation of sex. For according to Erika, “Sex is a drug, like every other addiction,” so a person has to “learn how to control it or it will control you.” Because sex is Erika’s life in terms not only of her art, but also relationships that might otherwise be romantic, the implication is that her life, and even her sense of self, is actually empty, encased in an addiction to inflicting pain through impersonal, and mechanical sex. Her admission to Elliot, “We’re both emotionally stunted and suck at communicating” actually applies only to herself, for Elliot is the proverbial adult in the room.

Erika’s superficial toughness does, however, have a benefit, in that she is able to criticize the young-adult generation that has been so coddled by parents that ideological discomfort itself is a trigger. Anything uncomfortable is attacked even though discomfort can spur psychological development—something the “woke” generation sorely lacks. Erika recounts to Elliot that a young adult using social media (Tic-Tok) complained in a comment because the person had not given consent to see a photo of two people holding hands!  The sheer presumptuousness evinces a puerile stage of psychological development and thus a proclivity to throw a temper-tantrum when “accosted” by the discomfort of a hated ideological stance held by another person as if such a stance were unlawful and incorrect. It is no wonder, Erika says, that 30 percent of that generation play video games rather than have sex.

The film’s director and writer, Gregg Araki, told an audience in person in 2026 that the 30 percent line is important to the film. What he did not make explicit is that a generation of emotionally-stunted and isolated judgmental people is not of benefit to a society. The sheer ideological intolerance and presumption exclusively to truth, which in the 1980s had been associated with evangelical Christians, had come to characterize “politically-correct” children-adults in California by 2026. To such enraged intolerance, the rest of us can be said to have a duty to reply to such primped arrogance on stilts, Deal with it. But as “woke” as the “politically correct” were in 2026, they were actually asleep in their presumption and abject, narrow selfishness, which pathetically defines truth itself from such a standpoint and regards differing people as capable only of mere opinion. How convenient. A person can be addicted to an ideology too.

 

Iván & Hadoum

As the protagonists in the film, Iván & Hadoum (2026), neither Iván nor Hadoum, who fall in love, are heterosexuals even though by all appearances, save the long surgical scares under Iván’s former breasts, the couple is a man and a woman, and indeed Iván psychologically identifies himself as a man and Hadoum is a woman both biologically and in how she sees herself. To claim that Hadoum is heterosexual simply because Iván views himself as being a man, even though Hadoum is sexually attracted to Iván’s vagina, would be utter ideological nonsense. Besides being gay or bisexual, and thus easy targets for discrimination by agriculturalists in southern Spain, the two people are of different national origins, for Iván was born in Spain whereas Hadoum’s family hails from Morocco. Additionally, Iván is Caucasian whereas Hadoum is an Arab, and Iván is Christian whereas Hadoum is Islamic. Even in terms of labor-management relations, the couple is ripe for division by other people, for Iván is on a management tract—the warehouse being still owned by his uncle Manuel—whereas Hadoum is a greenhouse/warehouse worker, and a disgruntled one at that. It would seem that Ian de la Rosa has written and directed a film in which many ethical tropes are in play; which one is subject to the most unethical harm goes unanswered. Even so, by including unethical conduct on all of them, the film takes a step in the direction wherein audiences can think philosophically in weighing the ethical harms relative to each other.

Iván is a fork-lift driver in the warehouse when the film begins, and Manuel promotes him to being a line supervisor with an eye to possibly making him the warehouse manager. Iván wants the position because he needs it in order to get a loan. Meanwhile, Hadoum sorts vegetables on a line alongside other non-supervisory employees. Manuel’s attitude and labor practices incur resentment, and even resistance, from the line-employees, including Hadoum even after she has fallen in love with Iván. Perceiving that the two are “thick as thieves,” Manuel becomes suspicious of Iván and even uses him to manipulate Hadoum into stopping the workers from undermining Manuel’s efforts to sell the warehouse to an interested buyer. Iván reluctantly agrees, on condition that Manuel not fire Hadoum, but Manuel does not keep his side of the bargain and Iván confronts Manuel in front of the buyer at the warehouse. Hadoum, already fired by that point, learns of Iván’s valiant act in defense of her and the trust requisite for genuine emotional intimacy is achieved in spite of the efforts of other people to separate the pair.

Besides being on opposite sides of a tense labor-management situation, Iván is a “female-to-male” transsexual who has been taking estrogen and is breastless, though still a woman in having retained the reproductive organs. Regardless, Hadoum and Iván have a lesbian sexual relationship because both have vaginas, even if the denial ensuing from a contemporary ideological agenda fights like hell against such a claim, even labeling it as incorrect. Even though a person’s psychological stance towards one’s gender need not be in sync with one’s genitalia, two people who are sexually attracted to the other’s vagina are not heterosexuals. That the homosexual relationship (or Iván being a transsexual) faces prejudice in the film is evident when Iván’s mother says that that Hadoum’s parents would never accept Iván. Also, Manuel’s son threatens Iván with violence if Iván were “a real man.”

The film also contains allusions to the fact that Hadoum’s family is Moroccan rather than European. Again, Manuel’s son is an antagonist, referring to Hadoum’s family as “different,” rather than one of us here in Spain. To be sure, Hadoum feels no emotional attachment at least to the region, for she wants to move on even though she has fallen for Iván by the end of the film. She is indeed a nomad, and in this regard she may reflect the indigenous culture of her native land in Northern Africa.

Over all, the most ethical deed in the film is Iván’s standing up to Manuel for having fired Hadoum. Even if the firing were justified, for she had deliberately removed the required cap while the interested buyer was present with Manuel, Iván’s self-sacrificial act out of love for Hadoum is laudable. Another worker informs Hadoum of Iván’s unexpected heroic act, and Hadoum goes from only having fallen in love to something even deeper.

As for the most unethical act (or comment) by any of the many antagonists in the film, this question is much more difficult to answer, and arguably the film does not go far enough in this regard even though providing an answer as a fait accompli would be counter-productive to fostering philosophical thinking in viewers during and after viewing. Of course, the particular controversies—labor-management, nationality, sexual orientation (which is tied to genital-attraction even if “gender”-“identity” is not), and transsexuality—were in the West so steeped in ideology in the West by 2026 that ideological hubris could also be expected to be triggered by the film. So perhaps in addition to going a step further in providing some stepping stones to comparative ethical analysis, Rosa could have included dialogue wherein ideological prejudices or biases are made transparent so viewers could exculpate them from thinking philosophically in assessing which unethical statement is “worst” ethically speaking. A character, whether a protagonist or antagonist, could be made to state an opinion and then insist that it is a fact, and thus that anyone who disagrees is incorrect rather than just wrong. “How arrogant! My opinion is just as valid as yours!” The spreading category mistake wherein some ideologically-soaked opinions are misconstrued (and misproclaimed) as fact could thus be taken on, head-on.

As for comparing the unethical, prejudiced “slaps in the face” waged by antagonists in the film, one argument, for example, could be in favor of the anti-transexual statements being the most unethical. It could be argued, for example, that whereas nationality and union-sympathy are de-personalized, Iván’s breast-removal operation and treatment of female hormone is intensely personal as both pertain to Iván’s body. In other words, being said not to be a whole man could hurt Iván more deeply than Manuel’s anti-labor comments to Hadoum and other comments that she is a foreigner (which is only vaguely hinted at in the film). Generalizing, even disparate unethical statements can be compared along the axis of how deep the resulting emotional hurt is felt. Perhaps a utilitarian argument would come to the opposite conclusion, with aspersions against a nationality doing the most harm to the most people, even if only as generalized to a population from comments made to one person such as Hadoum. Manuel’s firing her could be found to be most unethical from Kant’s principle wherein rational beings should be treated not just as means, but also as ends in themselves. Manuel is far from treating his workers as ends in themselves, which is why Iván is advised to remember as a line supervisor that the workers on the line are human beings. At a well-managed workplace, such a reminder would not be necessary. In short, different ethical theories or principles can lead to different answers. So it is important that a filmmaker not impose one, for that would be dogmatic in the sense of arbitrariness. The objective should instead be to prompt audiences to think. To the extent that ideology has tended to override rational thought in the world, stimuli to rational, philosophical thinking are of particularly great value.