Even though The Pledge (2001) is murder-mystery
film, it is fundamentally a tragedy without regard to the murder. Jack Nicholson
plays Jerry Black, a retired police investigator who loses everything because
he is faithful to a pledge that he made to the parents of the young girl who
had been raped and murdered by a serial killer. It is Jerry’s fidelity to the
pledge that is highlighted throughout the film, and ultimately ends in his
ruin. The film thus depicts what in Kant’s ethic is the ability of rational
beings to be taken as promise-keepers bound by the promises we make as if they
had the necessity of law.
Close to the opening of the
film is Jerry’s surprise retirement-party given by his boss and police co-workers.
He has been an excellent detective, and his co-workers have paid for him to go
on a vacation to Mexico. He has been
well-liked. The party is interrupted, however, with news of a young girl having
just been savagely murdered. Jerry accompanies the detective-in-charge to the
scene, and later breaks the news to the girl’s parents. The mother, Margaret Larsen,
played intensely by Patricia Clarkson, gets Jerry to pledge on the little cross
that had been crafted by the murdered daughter that he would seek justice in
the case and find the killer. Being an excellent detective, he sees right
through the pathetic confession of a criminal achieved by detective Krolak and
continues to look for the real killer. Jerry gives up his trip to Mexico in order
to work on the case even though he is no longer employed by the police department.
In fact, he buys a rural gas station and house, paying too much for them, just
in order to live in the small town where the murder took place.
It is precisely the lengths to
which Jerry goes to fulfil his pledge that the film highlights. In fact, he may
even take in a young girl and her mother at least in part so he could use that
girl as bate to attract the serial killer, though his tender feelings for both
the daughter and the mother are genuine. He does use the girl as bate when he
learns from her that the culprit has planned to meet the girl at a park, and
news of this set-up, with police protection, nonetheless prompts the girl’s mother
to immediately take her daughter and leave Jerry (the mother’s romantic feelings
for Jerry could not have been very deep).
This presents us with the possibility
that in the ethics of promise-keeping, an unethical act may be done in
furtherance of the pledge. Does the fact that Jerry used the woman’s daughter
as bate and kept this from the mother nullify the ethics of keeping the promise
to the mother of the girl who had been murdered? Here we have film narrative being
able to tease out an ethical nuance, and thus the medium of film being quite
useful in the service of laying out ethical dilemmas. If as in Kant’s ethical
theory, rational beings can take the moral law as binding with the necessity of
law, then Jerry’s fidelity to the pledge depicts how rational beings should
behave according to Kant. However, Kant’s theory also holds that other rational
beings should not be used as mere means, but also regarded and treated as ends
in themselves because reason has absolute value because it is by means of
reason that we assign worth to things. Although Jerry does not lie to the girl’s
mother by not informing her of the set-up in the park in which her daughter is
the bate, using the daughter as bate treats her only as a means (to Jerry’s end
of catching the serial killer). That this end is ethically praiseworthy does
not justify using the little girl as bate unless, as I reckon, she is so
protected by the police squad there in the park that she is in no danger. Even
though Jerry, who is emotionally attached to the girl (and thus he would hardly
put her in danger), complains to Krolak in the park about not having police
shooters close enough to the girl when she is at the picnic table, we can take Krolak’s
reassurance as sufficient evidence that the girl faces no danger. So, I think
the girl’s mother over-reacts when she confronts and slaps Jerry just before
she leaves him. This may be why he is speechless. In the end, he loses the
mother, the girl, and even his gas station is defunct and he is drinking. He
has lost credibility with the police because the killer is killed in an
automobile accident on the way to the park and thus is a no-show. All this translates
into the point that in keeping promises, people can tragically lose a lot. This
hardly seems fair, but the possibility is what makes keeping promises so intrinsically
valuable, ethically speaking.
A rational being can hold
oneself to the strictures of what one ought to do even though doing so
runs contrary to one’s self-interest. Those strictures can have the force or
necessity of law, even though—and this is the incredible feature—holding to the
ought is entirely voluntary! To value being faithful to a pledge (and
disvaluing being unfaithful) can be so powerful in human nature that the
faithfulness itself is treated as though it has the necessity that goes with
obeying a law. Jerry’s faithfulness to his pledge runs throughout the entirety
of the film, and he never loses faith in his belief that the killer is still at
large (he doesn’t know about the automobile accident).
Of course, rational beings are fully capable of putting self-interest of the moment above being faithful to a pledge—of promise-keeping. Kant does not claim that rational beings are hardwired to necessarily do what they ought to do. In theological terms, as Al Pacino says as the Devil in the film, Devil’s Advocate, “Free will is a bitch.” Rational beings are fully capable of treating others as mere means rather than as ends in themselves. Put another way, evading ought rather than holding it as having a necessity is very easy for rational beings to rationalize doing. In terms of romantic relationships, one of the worst things that a person can say to the other is, “I’m afraid I will hurt your feelings by infidelity.” The person might as just as well say, “I don’t love you and I won’t love you.” In hearing such a line, the best choice is to immediately exit, stage left. Because Jerry in the film loses so much in the end because he refuses to be emotionally unfaithful to the mother of the slain girl by breaking the pledge that he has made to her, we can see just how much daylight exists within human nature and across respectable and sordid human character because the unfaithful sort is all too evident in the world in which we live. Reducing self-interest to what is momentarily convenient, such as in pursuing pleasure, and thereby treating one’s promises as optional rather than as having moral necessity (i.e., as a moral law), reduces rational beings to primitive, instinctual beings.
That we are capable of loving
the moral ought and thus treating it as an end in itself is what Kant
was really trying to convey in his Critique of Practical Reason. When we
treat the moral ought thusly and other rational beings not just as means
to our ends, but also as ends in themselves, we are truly civilized and worthy
of emotional intimacy. That a person such as Jerry can hold to fulfilling a
promise (i.e., what ought itself essentially demands) and yet lose everything
by doing so is indeed tragic.
