Apocalypse Now

Imagine being an American soldier sent to Vietnam to fight the militarized Marxist Communists there. The Vietnam War provides many examples of such a plight. Now consider how much worse it would be to be sent into a seemingly constantly rainy, hot and humid jungle deep in Cambodia to assassinate an American colonel because he is a renegade Special Forces military officer who has gone insane. Just in case this is not dire enough, simply add in that he has the local village protecting their god with weapons. Surely safer secret military missions exist than to assassinate an insane former special-ops man with a small army of devotees. This is the central plot of the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who had directed The Godfather earlier that decade. Behind the plot of Apocalypse Now is a dichotomy wherein human nature itself is bifurcated into a dichotomy of good and bad. This is interesting because some of the characters may fall in between, suggesting that human nature has a gray zone in which most of us live.

Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando are in both films. All of the characters played by both actors in those films have both laudable and sordid qualities. In The Godfather, Dulvall’s Tom Hagen delivers the Godfather’s threats to innocent people on pain of death and yet evinces steadfast loyalty to the crime family that had adopted him when he was a boy. In Apocalypse Now, the actor’s Lt. Col. Kilgore loves the smell of toxic napalm gas in the morning and is loyal to the United States and brave rather than cowardly. Similarly, in The Godfather, Brando’s Don Vito Corleone gives orders to his henchmen to murder people and yet he strives for peace between the families in the wake of the murder by one of those families of his son, Sonny. In Apocalypse Now, Brando’s Col. Kurtz tortures and brainwashes people, including Capt. Willard, whom the U.S. Army has sent to assassinate the insane Kurtz, and yet Kurtz politely asks Willard to urge Kurtz’s son back in the U.S. not to judge Kurtz too harshly. Kurtz is as sensitive as he is insane and cruel; he even has a copy of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which traces historical shifts from cruel customs to moral and religious values. Interestingly, when Willard hacks Kurtz to death with a machete, the villagers are shown hacking a cow to death as a religious sacrifice; editing shows a back and forth between the two killings, and the villages then drop their guns and kneel to Willard, treating him as if he were a god for having killed another god, Kurtz.

The relationship between ethics and theology in the Abrahamic religions that is analyzed in Kierkegaard’s short text, Fear and Trembling, comes to mind in the interlaced camera shots of Willard murdering Kurtz and the villagers sacrificing a bull. To Kierkegaard, Abraham is guilty of being unethical in attempting to murder Isaac even though Abraham is faithful to Yahweh’s divine command to sacrifice Isaac, with a knife! The ethical verdict against attempted murder and the approbation of Abraham’s religious faithfulness to a divine command at great personal cost to Abraham are both valid. The co-extant validity of two different, albeit related, domains of human experience point back to the complexity of human nature itself. And yet, in the film, the depiction of humanity’s higher nature and brute cruelty, as well as its susceptibility to mental illness, in the Col. Kurtz character is set within a larger dichotomous framework in which people are either good or bad, and no one is in between. The complexity of Kurtz’s character itself suggests that the film’s dichotomous paradigm of human nature may be artificial, perhaps even imposed by the structure of the human mind along the lines of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

During what can be characterized in terms of Joseph Campbell’s notion of a hero’s journey, Willard (the film’s protagonist) is hosted for dinner and an overnight stay by a French family in Cambodia. The daughter, who treats Willard to opium and sex in her bed as if both activities were routine, tells him, “There are two of you. You kill and you love. You are a god and an animal.” We are indeed a species in the animal kingdom, but it is doubtful that we constitute gods, although generals on a battlefield may come close. In the film, Gettysburg (1993), Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who holds the line against charging confederate soldiers by flanking them while having to resort to bayonets, says, “Generals can do anything. There’s nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.” That film is based on Michael Shaara’s book, The Killer Angels,” the title of which comes from Chamberlain’s recollection of his father’s reaction to a speech that Joshua made as a student in which he quoted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man.” Joshua’s father, as later recollected by Joshua, had remarked at the time, “Well, boy, if [man is] an angel, he’s sure a murderin’ angel.” In the film, Pvt. Buster Kirain replies to Col. Chamberlain of man, “Well, if he’s an angel, alright then. But he damn well must be a killer angel.” This line went on to become iconic. If we are angels, then surly we are killer angels. This line fits the overall paradigm of Apocolypse Now.

A line by the photo journalist, played by Dennis Hopper, to Willard also contributes to the dichotomous paradigm. “There is only love and hate. You either love a person or hate a person.” Even so, the fact that the demented photographer idolizes Kurtz as “a genius” and a “poet-warrior” even though Kurtz has threatened to kill the photographer if he takes another picture of Kurtz suggests that something in interpersonal relations exists between love and hate, or maybe both can exist together, besides like and dislike as gray areas. Similarly, Col. Kurtz tells Willard, “horror and ethical atrocities are your friends; if not, they are your enemies.” There is apparently no in between. Interestingly, the film ends with Willard’s voice-over, “the horror, the horror” in a tone of astonishment at the sheer extent of it that he has witnessed in human nature. Behind the gloss of assassination lies sordid murder, of which he is guilty. Even Willard is difficult to assess in terms of good and bad.

We mere mortals are quick to judge one another as either “good” or “bad.” The distinction between ethics and religion confounds such an easy categorization of people under the blanket labels of “good” and “bad.”  Apocalypse Now presents the dichotomy as artificial—even perhaps insane—ironically because Kurtz, and even perhaps Willard, are presented as having both laudable and not so praiseworthy qualities. Even in Kurtz’s insanity, are there not credible nuggets of insight of which he is capable? Willard does not dismiss Kurtz’s philosophizing outright; at least Kurtz can reason through his philosophical claims. The philosophizing of the photojournalist is so insane that no line of reasoning whatsoever can be detected. People are not always so bad that a person must vacate to Aruba to collect oneself before getting married (such a marriage may not be wise), and yet people are not so exclusively good that a prudent person would let down one’s guard. In assessing other people, a wise person takes into consideration the distortive mental impact of the dichotomous mental paradigm of the human mind that may go back to the brain’s dichotomous left-brain/right-brain physical structure.

His Girl Friday

In Intro to Film courses, Citizen Kane (1941) and His Girl Friday (1940) typically play major roles in the teaching of film-analysis. Hidden gems include novel camera angles in Citizen Kane and the use of dialogue and editing to quicken the pace of certain scenes in His Girl Friday. In the latter film, Cary Grant, who plays the newspaper editor, Walter Burns, hurriedly mentions Grant’s real name, Archibald Leach, in referring to another character during a phone call! Such a nugget points back to a director or screenwriter who knows his or her craft well enough that the finished product has multiple levels without breaking the viewers' suspension of disbelief (i.e., being engrossed in a film's story-world). Typically, films have both “task” and “romance” elements, which should in some way be connected, such by involving a protagonist’s “love-interest” somehow involves in the protagonist’s task-objective. His Girl Friday is both a crime drama and a romance film. This distinction is similar to Donelson Forsyth’s model of leadership in which behaviors of a given leader can be classified as either performance maintenance or relationship maintenance.[1] The crime-element of the film includes not only a man who did not mean to shoot someone due to be executed anyway, but also the mayor and police chief of New York City being utterly corrupt so as to stay in office by having the criminal executed even in the knowledge that the governor has cancelled the execution. The romance-element is perhaps just as harsh even though (and even because) it is centered on the phenomenon of falling in love.

The expression, all is fair in love and war, applies to His Girl Friday. That electoral politics are a “constrained” channeling of the instinct for war is well known. Less well known, perhaps, is the nature of the phenomenon of falling in love. It may or may not come as a surprise that the ancient poet, Ovid, classified lovesickness as an illness. In Phaedrus, Socrates describes love as “madness” (mania), owing to the overwhelming quality of the intensity that hits once a person has fallen in love with another person. Although beauty may serve as an initial attractor, falling in love is really of another person’s personality.

In His Girl Friday, Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson are already divorced, and she is engaged to Bruce Baldwin. Burns, the editor of the newspaper where Hildy still works, repeatedly manipulates both Hildy and Bruce so she will dump the mild-mannered man from Albany, who lives with his mother, and return to the conniving editor and ex-husband, Walter. For instance, Walter directs Louie, an employee, to give Bruce counterfeit money so that Bruce will be arrested (again), and thus kept away from Hildy long enough for Walter to seduce her to stay at the paper rather than move to Albany to marry Bruce. Watching Hildy working with Walter on the execution story, Bruce finally says to her, “You don’t love me; you are just like him.” She keeps working in indifference to what her fiancé is saying. Even though Hildy has figured out that Walter has been tricking Bruce, she loves Walter in spite of his sordid character. In fact, at the end of the film, when she admits to Walter that she is still in love with him, she even gleefully recounts to him the time when they had stolen someone in the process of pursuing a story. Furthermore, she is in love with Walter even though when she is crying, Walter barely even touches one of her shoulders. Walter even admits that Bruce can give her a better life. Even though Walter is a lying, manipulative person, Hildy is still in love with him, and ends up remarrying him. She is utterly indifferent to Bruce even though she agreed to marry him. Bruce comes to realize both Hildy’s indifference to him and that she is just like Walter. Left unsaid, however, is whether, as I suspect, Bruce has realized that Hildy is still in love with Walter. Bruce makes a wise decision nonetheless not to compete with Walter; competing for a woman who is in love with another man is bound to result in humiliating failure. Even though Walter seems to be incapable of physical and even emotional intimacy, the fact that Hildy is in love with him is enough for her to be fine with Bruce returning to Albany so she can remarry Walter. Such is the depth of falling in love with another person that prospective suitors are wise to walk away rather than fight the gravitational pull that exists when a person falls in love with another person.

In The Godfather, Part III (1990), Kate admits to Michael Corleone, the head of the Corleone crime family, that she still loves him even after decades since their divorce and even though he is at bottom a murderous thug. She says to him, “I guess, if it’s any consolation, Michael . . . I want you to know that I’ve always loved you, and I always will.” She admits to this even though she knows that he is and has been a ruthless murderer as the head of, and then head of, a crime syndicate. Falling in love with someone transcends ethics—whether the beloved is ethical or unethical—and thus can be considered to be deeper, or more fundamental, to human nature than is the ethical dimension. Kay is too smart to remarry Michael. Similarly, Bruce wisely leaves Hildy to Walter because she is still in love with the latter, even though Bruce is arguably a better person. In fact, Bruce realizes where Hildy's heart is directed before she does. In fact, the quickness with which Hildy realizes this about herself in the last scene of the film may be unrealistic and thus trite. So too is the saying that good people can fall for bad people. 

His Girl Friday is arguably about the extraordinary depth that falling in love reaches in the human psyche and heart. Even so, Plato’s dictum that reason should have the upper hand over emotions, or passions, is powerful too, and a person who has fallen in love with a manipulative, self-centered liar can draw on inner fortitude in spite of being in love to walk away so as to obviate years of suffering in being betrayed. Although Hildy has divorced Walter, she agrees to remarry him, perhaps because she is just like him, ultimately in being just as comfortable as he is in distancing emotional and physical intimacy.  That falling in love can exist even in such a condition goes to show just how deep, or fundamental, the phenomenon is.

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1. Donelson R. Forsyth, Group Dynamics, 5^th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), p. 253.

NAZA

While a student at Yale, I took Charlie Musser’s seminar on documentary films on a whim, after having taken two courses oriented to film narrative (not screenwriting). Because my studies were mainly in philosophy of religion, historical theology, and history at Yale, I think neither Charlie nor I knew quite why I was taking his course. At the time, I would not have thought that I would be writing on the genre thirty years later. The film, NAZA (2026), makes my earlier endeavor entirely worthwhile, and integrated into my main academic areas of study and research, which include ethics and political theory. The documentary “examines ‘the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians’” in Gaza, and as of October, the theatrical release was being extended due to so many sold-out showings.[1] The Venice Film Festival awarded the film with the Special Jury Prize, and the two filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, “received a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation at the festival.”[2] The film can be interpreted as documenting the magnified harsh effects that unchecked power over other people can have when those others are dehumanized. It is interesting how close “NAZA” is to another infamous word, NAZI.

Another film, The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), is based on the actual psychology experiment in which a group of college students were randomly divided into prisoners and guards. In the simulation, the guards presumptuously violated the rule against the use of violence because their power went to their heads like strong drink effects a sailor. The experiment dramatized in the film showed just how dangerous unchecked power can be in the hands of the human brain. I contend that the same phenomenon was playing out in the ministers of Israel’s government for three years as of September, 2026, for the holocaustic genocide that those human beings unleashed on the Palestinian people, in extreme disproportion to the harm and deaths inflicted by Hamas in one attack in October, 2023,  has involved even the pathological dehumanization of another people. It is interesting, therefore, that Naza and Nazi are so much alike even just as words, for the Nazis readily dehumanized Jews, which goes beyond merely declaring them to be enemies of the state.

The documentary NAZA “features interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers, soldiers and whistleblowers.”[3] In the film, those people “describe how Palestinians are being targeted and how strikes are carried out using AI and automated surveillance in military targeting systems—despite Israel being away that civilians are present in targeted areas.”[4] Targeting civilian dwellings was something that Russia’s President Putin was also doing as part of his military invasion of Ukraine, so such targeting does not in itself distinguish the Israeli government ministers. More insidious is the Israeli leveling of entire cities in Gaza, and thus relegating over a million inhabitants to live in tents for years in de facto concentration camps in Gaza.

That the entire population was intentionally made homeless conveys the fittingness of the accusation by the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity and the conclusion of the UN that Israel was committing a genocide. The ICC also found sufficient evidence for a genocide taking place to be highly probable. Relatedly, Abraham and Szor have said, “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible.”[5] If mass killing is not sufficient to signify a contention that Netanyahu and his ministers were conducting a genocide, then the underlining dehumanization of the Palestinians not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, and thus as a people, surely is sufficient for the label of genocide to be fitting and appropriate, and thus entirely valid. Implicitly relating Naza to Nazi, the filmmakers went on to say, “While filming over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20^th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like?”[6] In Nazi Germany, they looked like Adolf Eichmann efficiently coordinating the trains coming and going from the concentration camps. In Naza Israel, the inner workings included U.S.-made bombs leveling entire neighborhoods in Gaza, shooting Palestinian children for fun, and outright stealing (in the West Bank).

The fact that Nazi Germany was not a “one off” by 2023 suggests that what had been assumed to be an extreme aberration of absolute power was actually a manifestation of what the prison experiment in California found—that the human brain and absolute power over other people are dangerous together. In other words, the fallible human brain cannot be trusted to be vested with such power as can incur even the assumption of dehumanization. By implication, a coalition of the willing—of militaries from around the world—should have mobilized to Ukraine as soon as the Russian invasion began and to Gaza as soon as entire apartment buildings were being bombed. Absolute, unchecked military power should be resisted by counter-power because of the human brain’s inherent vulnerability to a warping of cognition and perception, as well as to denial and rationalization, from having a lot of violent power over other people or even a people. Large nation-states did not exist during the long hunter-gatherer period in which natural selection formed our species; not even large organizations, whether governments or corporations, existed. So, it should be no surprise that our brains are ill-equipped for the massive power made possible by large organization of people, money, and destructive equipment. Nazi Germany was not an isolated case; Israel proved this to the world in the mid 2020’s, and the documentary NAZA documents this point if viewers step back to see the big picture behind the film.

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1, David Mouriquand, “Gaza Documentary ‘NAZA’ Beating ‘Avengers Endgame” Encore’ at Box Office,” Euronews.com, 1 October 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Forbidden

The early film, Forbidden (1932), asks the viewers to sympathize with a married politician and his mistress, who together have a “love child,” even though the politician, as a governor, finally follows his conscience and admits to the decades-long affair. Lulu, the mistress, selflessly remains alone and hidden from public view so Bob can climb the political ladder without scandal. At one point, Bob offers to leave his wife, Helen, and leave with Lulu for a shared life somewhere else, but Lulu refuses for the sake of Bob’s career in politics. She places his interests above her own. The film’s attitude toward the “cheater” and his mistress ethically is complex, as is human nature itself. The film presents the complexity that can go with some, but certainly not all, ethical controversies.

Because Lulu acts so selflessly in putting Bob’s interests ahead of her own, the affair comes off as ethical even though Bob’s wife is harmed by her husband’s infidelity. But is she? Bob and Lulu are successful in keeping their affair a secret, so it can be said that what Helen doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her. On the other hand, that Bob is cheating sexually on her is in itself unethical, as it involves infidelity both sexually and in lying to her.

Next to the affair, Lulu’s contrived marriage to Holland, a newspaper editor as ambitious as Hildy Johnson the later film, His Girl Friday (1940), so Holland will not publish a front-page article on Bob’s affair and love-child with Lulu, seems unethical on Lulu’s part. As in the character Ralph Bellamy plays in His Girl Friday, Holland is duped by a woman who loves someone else. In His Girl Friday, Hildy still loves Walter Burns, played by Cary Grant; in Forbidden, Lulu still loves Bob. Holland discovers the truth not only about the decades-long affair, but also why Lulu has just married him. To stop him from exposing Bob, who is by then the governor, Lulu shoots Holland. She is eventually pardoned by Bob, who “comes clean” to his conscience by writing on his deathbed that he has loved Lulu and has a daughter by her. Again selflessly, Lulu throws away the letter just after Bob’s death. She is again acting on his behalf. She really does love him, which makes the affair seem ethical, especially because Helen never learns of the affair, but Lulu’s reason for using Holland by marrying him without loving him is clearly shown to be unethical because she has hurt him greatly. Of course, murdering him is unethical too. Lulu’s role as a mistress and even Bob’s cheating on his wife come out as relatively ethical even though both Bob and Lulu are behaving unethically in their affair.

Typically, characters in a film who are having an affair are portrayed as bad people. Not only is the act portrayed as unethical; the adulterer and the accomplice are viewed as not being virtuous in character. Forbidden presents its audiences with a different take. To be sure, the affair itself is not portrayed as ethical in itself; rather, Bob and Lulu are presented as worthy of sympathy even though they go decades without paying heed to conscience. Were cheating itself, whether on a boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or a wife, approached in the film as not being unethical, the film would (hopefully) suffer from not be credible, for infidelity (i.e., lying) in an emotionally intimate relationship is indeed very unethical, even if the lies hold up and thus are not revealed. Lying itself takes a toll on the victim nonetheless, as the person lying can only be so intimate emotionally, and a significant other deserves more.

Therefore, it is interesting that Lulu’s selflessness is portrayed as virtuous even though she is enabling Bob to cheat on his wife. Even Bob comes off as virtuous on his deathbed as he finally bows to his conscience and writes to make public not only the affair, but the existence of his daughter with Lulu. It would be quite different were Bob and Helen to have agreed to have a sexually open relationship, assuming mutual consent rather than Bob claiming to be “polyamorous” as an excuse to have sex separately with emotional attachment or connection with other people outside of the relationship. The film’s complex attitude toward Bob and Lulu ethically does not excuse infidelity itself, which makes the film’s sympathetic portrayal of Lulu and even the affair interesting; it is as if Helen were not hurt at all because she never discovers Bob’s infidelity—though I suspect that on some level she intuits it and so the marriage is harmed nonetheless in terms of emotional intimacy.

A cheater cannot really “have his or her cake and eat it too.” At Bob’s deathbed, Lulu and Bod realize the toll that their ongoing arrangement has taken on both of them—that they were not able to have it both ways—Bob remaining married while he and Lulu continue their relationship on the side. Lulu finally realizes that she had been stubborn in refusing Bob’s offer to leave his wife, and Bob admits that he has been unhappy acting contrary to his conscience. In the end, both characters come off as ethical even though what they did for decades is itself highly unethical. Good people can act unethically.

Love, especially theological love but also falling in love, is neither a virtue nor an ethical principle. The slogan, “All is fair in love and war,” wherein the opposite of love is actually indifference rather than anger, gets at this point. The sort of deep, even profound love that is sourced in an existential connection between two people, or a person and the divine, is not in the domain of ethics. In Forbidden, Bob and Lulu have such a strong connection that they cheat on Helen so not to have to part ways. Holland loves Lulu, though his connection to her is not as strong as Bob’s is; even so, Bob, in feeling betrayed by Lulu because she has married him not out of love, but, rather, so Holland, an ambitious journalist, would not ruin Bob’s governorship by exposing the decades’ long affair, intends to hurt Lulu by running the story on the newspaper’s front page. Generally speaking, if a person is unfortunate enough to fall in love with a person who is in love with another person more, it is better to walk away from the person (and the connection) than to constantly fight against the gravitational force of the beloved’s other, deeper relationship. Being the person “settled for” when the beloved is in love with someone else can result in unethical conduct out of resentment, jealousy, and sheer emotional hurt. Ironically, love can cause good people to act unethically because love is on a deeper level than are ethics, which are oriented to conduct, which in turn is relatively superficial (i.e., on the surface). 

I suppose the bottom line is that human nature craves the sort of existential connection that occurs naturally rather than by will or intention. Magnifying the value of such love, the automatic or natural bonding can be quite rare. Ethical judgment can thus be subject to the strong gravitational pull of what may seem like a black hole at the center of a person who is in love; not even light can escape from such a hole. To face severing such a connection must surely seem like sheer hell; behaving unethically to keep from losing an existential connection or because the connection is unrequited by the other person can seem like a small price to pay in knowingly violating conscience. The medium of film can indeed bring the human condition to light. 

Life

The musical group, R.E.M.’s most popular song is arguably “Losing My Religion.” The first two lines of the lyrics are, “Life, it’s bigger; It’s bigger than you.” It’s bigger me too. It's bigger than our species, and in all probability bigger than all of the life that is on Earth. I sing that song periodically in karaoke, though as too many people in charge of karaoke are corrupt in that they slide in their friends, new arrivals, and even regulars into rather than at the end of the line, I go less and less often. To an ethicist, corruption even on that small level is intolerable; indeed, the mentality of such a DJ is truly culpable. It is easy to commit the fallacy of anthropomorphizing such an unethical, sordid intent as that of a dishonest karaoke host onto other species, even in regard to their biological need to feed in order to survive. In the film, Life (2017), astronauts, a physician, and a scientist on board a space-station orbiting Earth wisely avoid precisely that fallacy even though a species from Mars being cultivated by Hugh Derry, the scientist, feeds on all but one of the six humans on board.

At one point, Hugh tells the others regarding the animal, “Calvin doesn’t hate us, but he has to kill us to survive.” That is to say, the organism’s apparently aggressive actions against the humans are sourced in biological necessity rather than hatred. Like Krishna’s line in the Hindu myth, The Bhagavad-Gita, “I am time; I am the destroyer of worlds,” so there’s no need to have ethical scruples about fighting against relatives and former teachers in a civil war because from the deity’s perspective those who are fated to die are already dead, destruction is part of the essence of life, at least in the animal kingdom.

The Martian organism is very unusual from the standpoint of biology as we know it. As he is cultivating the nascent, very small organism, Hugh is astonished because every cell is muscle and “eye.” What he does not yet realize is that every cell contains high intelligence. Not that each cell is “a brain,” for even though the organism is highly intelligent, it does not have cellular complexity, as in having specialized organs. Being an “advanced” organism and yet with basically undifferentiated cells goes against biological principles here on Earth. The rapid increase in the organism’s size each time it feeds on first a rat and then the crew is also something unexplainable to the crew on board. That the creature is a danger not only to the humans on board, but also to our species should it land on our planet is, however, something that the crew grasps early on when the creature crushes one of Hugh’s hands/forearms. Even so, Hugh emphasizes that the creature is not maliciously trying to destroy the crew; the intent is merely to survive, biologically. This lesson has implications in how we interpret attacks by animals such as grizzly bears and sharks.

Since the film, Jaws (1975), it has been easy to assume that great white sharks are violent, aggressive animals that attack humans with malicious intent. After all, the shark attacks Quint’s boat. “We’re going to need a bigger boat” is one of the most iconic lines in movie history. The shark even “climbs” onto the tilting boat to kill Quint as if the two were antagonists. In the end, Brody, Amityville’s sheriff who is on board, blows the shark to smithereens. The enemy is finally defeated. But in real life, sharks do not view us enemies; rather, shark bites, which are rare, are the result of sharks mistaking us for something like seals, which are in a shark’s diet. This is part of the oceanic food-chain, rather than an instance of two antagonists facing off in a dual, or an aggressor maliciously trying to kill humans.

In June, 2024, the first fatal shark attack off the island of Oahu in Hawaii in two decades took the life of a popular lifeguard. More typically, tiger sharks attack off Maui. On December 30, 2023, for instance, Jason Carter was surfing when a tiger shark “suddenly attacked. The shark just started biting him and pull him down . . .,” a witness said.[1] This description, especially the use of the words, “suddenly,” “just started,” and “pull him down” may connote a malicious intent rather than the shark simply beginning to eat what it took to be food. Whereas implying unethical intent may make for titillating news reporting for marketing purposes, the unintended byproduct may be that people blame sharks as if that species were out to exterminate our species.

So it is notable that in the film, even as the Martian animal is seeking out humans on board to feed, and thus to survive biologically, the crew does not lapse into assuming that the organism is trying to exterminate the crew out of sheer aggressiveness. If anything, it is our species that kills out of spite, and for other sordid reasons; we even hunt for sport, as if killing were fun. No shark bites off a human arm or leg because doing so is fun. On August 14, 2013, “20-year-old Jana Lutteropp was snorkling at White Rock Beach in Makena when a shark bit off her arm . . . 50 yards off shore. Pat Briney, 57, was in a kayak fishing between Maui and Molokini on Dec. 2, 2013, when a shark bit his right leg as it dangled over the edge. . . . Briney died as a tour boat operator brought him to shore.”[2] Those sharks were no doubt hungry, rather than biting human limbs for sport or out of a sense that we are a danger to sharks.

Life has a habit of instinctually going on living, and thus doing what is necessary to survive. Life will find a way, and the Martian animal in the film is so intelligent that it not only survives, but quite intelligently gets to Earth by overcoming the physician, David Jordon, who gets the creature into a rescue vehicle in order to take the organism deep into space rather than to Earth. In the film at least, we are not the wisest species.

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1. “Fatal Shark Attack Is the First Off Oahu In More Than Two Decades,” Hawaii News Now, June 24, 2024.
2. Ibid.

The Exception

The medium of film is capable of bringing nuances of power to audiences, even when the story-world is steeped in autocracy and totalitarianism. The Exception (2016) is such a film, for in terms of power the film shows the relationship between the Nazi government of Germany and (retired) Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Netherlands, which has just been occupied by Germany. The Nazi officials represent the state, whereas Wilhelm’s “soft” power stems from royalty. As Wilhelm’s attendant, Col. Sigurd von Ilsemann, observes, no one is safe from Nazi reprisals, not even Wilhelm and his high-brow wife. So he is not the exception alluded to in the title in the sense of being exempt from raw Nazi power; the night of the long knives demonstrated that no one is safe, even though the former king still means a lot to the German people. The exception refers instead to Capt. Stefan Brandt, and in particular to his moral scruples concerning the Nazi mass murders in eastern Europe. As the story unfolds with a visit by Himmler, Wilhelm becomes an exception in this sense too. Even in a totalitarian autocracy, a surprising amount of soft power can exist in opposition. Taking a moral stand can manifest "soft" power even though an ethic is semi-permeable by power-aggrandizement.

The captain has been sent by General Falkenberg to Wilhelm’s country house in Holland to guard the former Kaiser. Stefan and Mieke, a Dutch Jew who is a maid in the house and is secretly funneling intel to the British via a clergyman in town, fall in love. Mieke discovers that Stefan too has reservations about the Nazis’ brutality, and he goes so far as to keep her outlawed ethnicity a secret and then to help her escape. Even Wilhelm helps her by feigning a heart attack and thus a rationale to be driven seemingly to a hospital. As the story unfolds, Stefan and Wilhelm both turn vehemently though of course secretly against the Nazis, having learned of their utter moral depravity by listening to Himmler at a dinner for him at the house.

That visit highlights the real power dynamics between the Nazi state and the former king. Wilhelm and his wife appease Himmler outwardly because the Nazis have all of the official power; they give the household a financial allowance and allow the former king and his wife to continue living. In exchange, the couple put up a public display of loyalty to the state. Yet even in this regard, the pedigree “soft” power of being royalty allows the couple to refuse to say, “Heil Hitler” back to Himmler in his arrival. Even though Himmler could order the couple to be shot, he does not use his power to force the royals to speak the two words. The film thus illustrates that oppositional “soft” power can exist even in a totalitarian dictatorship; power dynamics are complex rather than linear.

Before sitting down to the dinner, Himmler holds what he calls “a private audience” with Wilhelm to offer the former king the choice of whether to return to Berlin to once again wear his ceremonial crown. Of course Hitler would never tolerate even a ceremonially-based potential rival or threat to his authority as the Leader (Fuhrer), and Himmler reveals to Stefen and Dietrich that the offer is really a ploy to uncover pro-monarchists in order to have them killed. Even though Stefen uses his soft power to inform Col. Ilsemann of the trick, Wilhelm choses not to return to Berlin to take up his crown again before being informed that the offer is a plot. Instead, Wilhelm acts on moral principle to use the soft power in Himmler having given Wilhelm the choice. Taking advantage of being given a choice is another example of soft power even in the context of a totalitarian regime.

Wilhelm makes his decision based on what he learns about Himmler and the Nazis from Himmler himself at the dinner table. To be sure, both men are in perfect agreement on the dangers posed by international Jewry. In 2026, after years of the Israeli holocaustic genocide in Gaza and Israeli blatant theft and outright, unprovoked violence in the West Bank against lawful Palestinian homeowners, someone in the U.S. casually informed me, “more people are going back to Hitler’s writings.” This information at first shocked me, as I would never have believed such a statement in the twentieth century, but then I understood why people—especially young people—would do so. In the film, that Himmer and Wilhelm, a Christian who would exercise restraint on the Nazi state were he to re-assume his crown in Berlin, agree on the dangers poised in terms of power (and money, as, for example, AIPAC represents in the U.S.) lends credibility to the stand. Himmler’s observation that the danger posed only became widely known in the 1920s harkens back to the refusal of rich German Jews to extend their charity to other Germans (as if they constituted another people) during the years when Germany had to pay harsh post-World War I war reparations. 

The two men deviate, however, when Himmler pivots to discuss the need to remove people in eastern Europe to make room for Germans—“other means” would be needed if removal is not sufficient—and to kill retarded and crippled children on a scale beyond the capabilities of injecting poison into the heart because not enough of them would be killed fast enough that way. If allowed to reach adulthood, those people would only continue to be a drain on the resources of state. The revelation of Himmler’s thinking and values leaves Wilhelm and his wife, as well as Capt. Stefan and Col. Ilsemann speechless in dombfoundness; none of them had keine Anung of just how sordid the Nazis are. Mieke too, being Jewish, looks on in a harsh facial demeanor; she knew, for her parents were killed by Himmler’s SS. At the end of the dinner, as Stefan walks past her, she sternly tells him, “They are the rule; you are the exception.” She knows of what his reaction to Himmler’s statements must have been. She would hardly have fallen in love with him had he been “the rule,” though it is admittedly possible to fall in love with someone with dreadful, mendacious values.

Even when Wilhelm and Stefan know that Mieke is an enemy agent, the two men help her to escape. The willingness of both men to help can be interpreted not only as indicative of their admiration for her, but also of their utter rejection of the Nazi party and its horrendous tactics. At the University of Wisconsin in the 2000s, I sat in on a course on Nazi Cinema (in contrast to Stalin’s blatantly patriotic Soviet cinema). The eighty-year-old German professor, who flew to Wisconsin every autumn to teach, had been forced to go to a Hitler youth camp, and he had seen Hitler in person. Even though the professor told me that Hitler was not behaving like the angry, sullen man typically pictured in the footage selected by the Allies to air over decades, that the Nazis murdered 19 million Slavs in eastern Europe—in a myriad of non-combative villages and towns rather than in battle—is a relatively unknown fact that best attests to the Nazi mentality.

In the film, Wilhelm leaves the dinner is silence to chop wood so he can reconsider whether to accept Hitler’s “offer” of resumed kingship, now that Wilhelm knows how horrendously different the Nazis are. Even though Stefan has informed Col. Ilsemann that the offer is a ploy—a “deception” in Himmler’s own words—word has not yet reached Wilhelm by the time he decides to stay at his country house with his wife for the rest of his life rather than be in any way associated with the government. Because Wilhelm wants nothing more than to resume his kingship, his decision illustrates just how much sway ethical principles can have against other motives. To be sure, such principles are semi-permeable, in that they can be broken through in the quest for power or money, for instance, but that they have this quality renders Wilhelm’s stance all the more worthy of human nature. Just as power-aggrandizing and economizing (e.g., greed) can break through ecologizing (semi-permeable) constraints (e.g. the equilibrium state of an ecosystem in nature), so too power-seeking and greed can act as rockets shooting through the higher net of ethical values.

As Al Pacino says at the Devil in The Devil’s Advocate (1997), “Free-will, it’s a bitch!” In The Exception, Stefan uses his free-will to risk asking Col. Ilsemann whether a solder can have a loyalty higher than to one’s country; Ilsemann points out that Germany may not be their country any longer, as it belongs to the Nazis with whom both men reject, albeit in the silence of their own hearts. Wilhelm is able to use the “soft” power of royalty to reject Himmler’s offer, as Wilhelm is given a choice, even though Himmler then having Wilhelm killed is easily imaginable.

Finally, Mieke uses her free-will to marry Stefan, if he survives the war; she is, after all, pregnant with his child. She has been willing to open herself up to his seed in part because he is the exception rather than the rule in Nazi Germany. Being the exception is all about values and free-will. To be willing to fully open up to, and take hold of romantic love without too much emotional harm, a person must sense congruent values and therefore trust in another’s free-will so as not to be constantly looking over one’s shoulder for the roof to suddenly fall in from a searing, heedless, and utterly selfish betrayal. It comes as no surprise in the film to see Himmler in a bedroom in the country house with a half-naked woman, who, as Wilhelm’s wife coyly observes in greeting Himmler when he arrives, is not Himmler’s wife; Himmler just looks on, wholly unperturbed in his visage, and then says he is tired from the journey and wants to go to the bedroom that has been prepared for him. The ecologizing, semi-permeable quality of ethical stances—whether the ethical is to be valued or not—is  a matter of character mixed with free-will. It is a fool’s errand in college (e.g., in vocational business schools) to suppose that ethical conduct can be imposed through teaching.

The Omen (2006)

Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains, rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water” in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive, rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.

Robert Thorn remembers and repeats the poem—which as a cinematic device subtly tells the viewers that the poem is important in the film. The poem goes as follows: “When the Jews return to Zion, when the comet fills the sky, when the holy Roman empire rises, then you and I must die. From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore, turning man against his brother, till man exists no more.” It is the Antichrist, Damien, who will set man against man until everyone is dead, and presumably in hell for having fought rather than loved one’s enemies. The poem goes from religion to astronomy to the political domain (the Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in history), and thus runs the risk of conflating qualitatively different, albeit related, domains of human phenomena. This risk is a bit like treating different genres of film—fiction, nonfiction, westerns, sci-fi, and horror—as interchangeable. Closer to my point, the risk is like assuming that genres of literature—religious myth, historical accounts, novels, nonfiction, and academic treatises—are interchangeable, such that a myth could legitimately be taken to be a historical account. That which is distinct about myth would be lost, even though the writers of myths did not view themselves as historians and thus subject to that genre’s criteria.

In what follows, I subject the first few subordinate clauses of the poem to critique in line with my thesis. By the way, my intent is to support my thesis with arguments, rather than to convey or prescribe my own religious beliefs; this holds for the books I’ve written too. Applying Hume in the concluding chapter   of Godliness and Greed, which is on the history of Christian thought on greed in relation to profit-seeking and wealth, and then altering that interpretation by incorporating the divine Logos in the final chapter of God’s Gold do not reflect my own religious beliefs. Hence scholarship can be distinguished from opinion pieces.

The phrase, “when the Jews return to Zion” raises the question of whether Zionism is primarily religious or political; if both, then the concept can be regarded as messy. The risk is that a portion of a myth could be misconstrued as translating directly into the political domain. Exactly twenty years after the remake’s release, weaponized Israeli settlers in the West Bank presumed the political right to walk into the houses of Palestinian homeowners, declare that God gave the house to the Hebrews, and kick out the residents. One video shown on social media shows a settler removing a refrigerator from a house owned by a Palestinian family in the West Bank, as if the Jews’ deity declares in the Bible that God has given the refrigerator to that particular settler. The genocide then still going on in Gaza illustrates how atrocious misconstruing the genre of myth as valid in the political domain can be.  Life can give art added significance and clarity, and art can inform how geopolitical events are interpreted and situated paradigmatically.

The association of the return of Jews to Zion with the apocalypse can be interpreted in religious terms as ushering in the Antichrist’s role in turning man against man. That is to say, theologically the return (and stay) would be a bad rather than a good thing. In 2026, the International Court of Justice declared Israel to be illegitimate because that state’s government had refused to exit Gaza and the West Bank. A UN commission had determined that Israel was guilty of committing a genocide in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants. Any of these determinations would have been out of line had they been based on the theological interpretation that the Jews returning to Zion is a bad thing in religious terms. Jurisprudential and political judgment is properly made on political grounds even if personal religious belief is related.

Turning to the poem’s second phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” jumps from myth to astronomy, and thus science, as if these domains were continuous rather than discrete. In the Nativity Story in the gospels, efforts by scientists to find a comet misconstrue myth as a distinct genre. The inconsistency of a star being in that myth and a comet being associated with the birth of the Antichrist is not a problem in the genre of myth because the point is not astronomical or historical, but rather in signaling heightened religious meaning. Put another way, even if no star could be found to have occurred over the Middle East, this would not detract from the meaning that the star plays in the Nativity story. A star determined empirically to be over a particular town and thus serving to locate the town from a distance is not possible, but this is not a problem as long as myth is construed as myth rather than as astronomy or history). The phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” risks being taken as empirical astronomy rather than as in the religious genre. To be sure, myth can incorporate empirical events, natural as well as human, but changing those events to make religious points is totally acceptable in the religious genre, which thus cannot be assumed to contain historical accounts.

In the film, the next phrase, “when the holy Roman empire rises,” is erroneously interpreted, which can be expected when geopolitics is conflated with religious myth. Historically, the Holy Roman Empire was primarily geopolitical rather than ecclesiastical; it was not a religious organization. In the film, the European Union is assumed to be the new holy Roman empire because of the Treaty of Rome, but the Maastricht Treaty is arguably more significant to that political union, and the E.U. state of Italy can hardly be said to dominate at the federal level; the state of Germany has arguably been the state with disproportionate influence, especially during the debt crisis in which the Commission sided with German creditors over the E.U. states of Greece and Spain. So to refer to the E.U. as Roman—not to mention holy!—is ludicrous. The adjectives holy and Roman may alternatively lead to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church instantiates the Roman Empire in a new guise. Such an interpretation would resituate the phrase properly within the religious domain. The Crusades, selling indulgences, the Inquisition, prosecuting Galileo as if the criteria of religion were hegemonic over scientific criteria in the domain of science, making a treaty with Hitler, and covering up rapes committed by pedophile priests on children, and social prejudice within the Vatican against Blacks, gays, and even women, and even the obsession of the identity of Christ over preaching and practicing humane compassion especially when doing so is least convenient (e.g. to detractors and enemies as well as to people who have been rude, arrogant, or subject to one’s prejudices—we all have them) have at the very least compromised the legitimacy of that religious institution even though the religious and ethical domains are distinct. This is not to minimize the actual worship of the divine in the Mass, or the faith of the faithful who yearn to transcend the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion to the beyond, whether personified and thus anthropomorphic or not.

Self-idolatry on a collective scale—rather than an astronomical event or the formation of a political empire such as the E.U. or U.S.—and the tremendous harm unleased by such selfishness at the expense of other people can be regarded as the Antichrist personified in us. In the film, Wonder Woman (2017), Mars, the Greek god of war, tells Diana (Wonder Woman) that he doesn’t have to do much to facilitate man turning against man in war; aggression is very much in the nature of the beast, according to that god. Diana, on the other hand, refuses to view humans as beasts, for she has come to love the species (and Steve Trevor in particular). She sees our better nature, whereas her nemesis sees no positive worth in our species existing at all. The complexity in human nature itself is personified by deities in that film; in general, polytheism reflects our non-simplistic nature that can be analyzed into parts.

In both versions of The Omen, Damien survives being murdered physically and spiritually by Robert Thorn, so evil ends up with the upper hand. The god of war would be pleased, but human nature is more complex and thus may forestall the final verdict of extinction, even though climate-change, Russia invading Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran (and Lebanon) evince a troubling trajectory. In the economic and political domains, however, selfishness (stemming from self-interest) rather than self-idolatry (a sin) is pertinent even though the two concepts can be related to each other. For example, Adam Smith’s economic theory of the competitive market is premised on economic self-interest. Even though the latter can be related to self-love, and thus self-idolatry, the claim that Smith’s theory of capitalism is based on self-love would be based on a category mistake even though self-interest is arguably sourced in self-love taken as a sin. In terms of navigating in a certain domain of human experience, it is important not to drift or swerve into another lane as if in driving on a road no lanes can be discerned. The poem that undergirds The Omen (2006) swerves between lanes as if none exist, and thus invites erroneous category mistakes and thus flawed interpretations.

Equals

The film, Equals (2015), presents a fictional story in which people in “the collective” are deemed healthy by the health and safety “police-state” as long as emotions are not detected. Being healthy is predicated on the assumption that emotion just gets in the way, not only of work, but in life more generally. To be sure, they can indeed be difficult for people who have suffered severe psychological and/or physical abuse, or have lost a loved one whether by a death or outright rejection. In the film, Silas voluntarily submits to a cure to the illness of having emotions coming through consciousness because he has been told that Nia, the woman whom he has fallen in love with, has just died. In a modification of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Silas does not commit suicide; instead, he gets the injection because the emotional pain of having lost his loved one is simply too much. Anyone who has fallen in love only to be rejected would be tempted to have emotion itself blocked rather than to go on feeling. As a testament to just how deep love is as an emotion, Silas still feels something for Nia even after the injection as the couple travel on a train to escape from the totalitarian collective. He reaches out to put one of his hands on one of hers. Deep inside, he is fighting the “cure.” In actuality, the cure is the disease, foisted by an authoritarian collective on individuals.

Silas and Nia both work in the educational-books department of the collective. At first, he pays her no more attention than he does to the other coworkers, but such equality is based on no one having access to emotion. Rather than being healthy, as the collective claims, such an equality is artificial because emotion is innately part of human nature. A person who refuses to feel emotion due to past emotional/physical abuse actually suffers from severe psychological problems because “stuffing” natural emotions is actually repression. The quip, “emotions have never worked out for me,” is a cop-out that actually makes matters worse, psychologically. Rather than making a person fit for a romantic relationship, such wholesale repression actually inhibits any genuine relationship. A retired psychiatrist once told me that if a person has reached the point of refusing to feel emotion, that person has severe emotional issues that need to be addressed in therapy. In the film, such pathology is considered to be healthy, but Silas and Nia rightly reject the collective’s version of reality, which, by the way, is said to be found by investigating outer rather than inner space. Hence the book department's writers write on astronomy, whether as nonfiction or fiction. 

The assumption that the answer to the question of ultimate reality is to be found far away in outer space is itself problematic because astronomy and ontology are two different fields of knowledge. Put another way, perception and empirical study are bounded and thus cannot capture raw reality itself.

To be sure, astronomical science can be used as an analogy for human dynamics, through neither one gets us to an answer concerning ultimate reality. Even as deeply meaningful as loving another person is, the emotional intensity cannot reach reality in the sense of Kant’s “things in themselves.” 

The emotionless equality of humans that is espoused by the collective as a sort of dogma can be understood as artificial by looking at the cosmic background radiation “photo,” which shows areas of greater and lesser heat—the outer edge of the Big Bang’s blast is not internally equal. Similarly, Silas begins to look at Mia more than he looks at his other coworkers. He even stares at times, which she notices. She in turn begins to look at him more. The quality of increasing inequality can be discerned from the film in the gradual process of falling in love.

First, Silas’s eyes are increasingly drawn to Mia. He notices her facial and eye expressions, which take on greater meaning and significant for him emotionally, whereas the nonverbal expressions of his other coworkers are no more significant, and so a new inequality is evident, which is entirely natural, just as the cosmic background radiation of the universe shows unequal temperatures.

Second, certain statements made by Mia take on added significance emotionally for Silas. Whereas he could easily forget something that another coworker may say to him, Mia’s ideas are as though etched or engraved in Silas’ mind.

Third is touch. When Silas and Mia touch hands, the significance emotionally is greater than were either to touch a hand of another coworker. Inequality thus emerges in terms of touch, and this inequality expands as the coupling process moves toward and includes sex, which with emotional intimacy can seem utterly superficial as not being close enough.

Fourth is a subtle feature that comes about when the process of falling in love is a fait accompli. Silas gets to the point of telling Mia that he does not want her to leave. The continued presence of the other person is being earnestly sought. She complies because she is falling for him. In fact, when he gets his transfer to work in a garden because seeing her everyday and yet not being able to be with her for fear of being taken to a mental hospital for electric shock “treatments” to block emotion and thus “restore” him to “health, she desperately comes to his apartment because she wants to be with him.

As long as presence is maintained, emotion is not a problem in a mutual coupling, but if the love is unrequited or  two who have naturally coupled are separated, emotional hurt can be unrelenting—so much so, that it may in fact be a mental illness.  If so, the autocacy in the filmcauses rather than treats mental illness by trying to detect and separate the couple.  The fact that Silas prefers to feel nothing permanently once he is misinformed that Mia has committed suicide in the mental hospital may suggest that he would agree. With respect to falling in love, emotion can be a boon or a bust in terms of quality of life. The sheer intensity of emotion either way suggests a heaven or hell dichotomy. The collective’s claim that “social bonds help to alleviate anxiety” and thus are not of value in their own right is based on the erroneous assumption that interpersonally-related emotion can only make life a living hell. A person who blocks one’s emotions especially interpersonally operates under the same assumption, and is accordingly severely impacted by the decision psychologically because not only because repression can cause or worsen mental illness, according to Freud and Nietzsche, but also because positive emotions are given up. Therefore, people who have been the victim of abuse when young should see a psychologist to face the emotional hurt so it can naturally dissipate rather than refuse to feel emotion and thus miss out on falling in love while feeling lived by the other person.

The message of the film is that emotion is innate in human nature, so efforts to block emotion in a human psyche are unhealthy and thus counter-productive, especially in terms of interpersonal relations. I read that China considers a particular religion to be a case of mental illness. In the film, the collective authority considers S.O.S., Switched On Syndrome, to be a “debilitating disease.” When emotions are “switched on” in a person’s consciousness, the collective views that person as sick, and even as a threat.  The “treatments” are based on inhibitors that dampen the onset of emotion. If allowed to manifest unfettered, emotion is assumed by the authorities to lead to chaos, so the prime value of the collective is order. Emotion itself results in chaos, and chaotic individuals mean a chaotic, destabilized collective. Even two people falling in love is situated in a political theory as a political threat. That Mia becomes pregnant is therefore a red flag that gets her dragged to the mental hospital for an abortion and electric shock treatment.  

Jonas, a friend to Silas who helps him by arranging for Mia’s escape from the Den (i.e., the mental hospital), observes, “You two were in love; that’s clear. According to the collective, coupling makes the disease worse. But the inhibitors keep people from being “who they really are.”  Referring to falling in love, Silas tells Mia, “The truth is right here,” rather than in outer space as the collective claims. This statement is not far from Augustine’s claim that God is love. That deity can manifest as unconditional love and as wrath; so too, emotion can be a boon or bust depending on how the coupling process goes. To extract emotion itself from a person’s consciousness is one-sided and deeply problematic, given how we humans are “hard-wired” by nature. To “switch off” emotion wholesale in one’s psyche is itself very unhealthy.

In terms of political theory, the autocratic collective’s authority is totalitarian in a way that goes beyond George Orwell’s novel, 1984, if ridding people of emotion is more invasive than controlling what people think. Preventing group-think, such as is evinced in the film when Silas and Mia agree that the collective is backward-wrong in what the authority considers to be health and disease, is one thing; severing emotion so people can’t even feel is arguably more severe. Silas and Mia would doubtlessly consent to considering coupling to be harmful medically but they would (and do) refuse not to feel the love they feel for each other. “Love is like oxygen,” Christian tells his new friends in the film, Moulin Rouge! A government regarding falling in love as making a disease more severe and then that same government going further by preempting the process of falling in love by forcing ardous separations is therefore incredibly invasive; it is like ridding an inhabited room of oxygen. Furthermore, viewing coupling as a threat that would lead to political instability makes Hobbes’ Leviathan look like an instance of limited sovereignty, as if Hobbes did not go far enough in devising his totalitarian political theory to stave off civil war. A totalitarian, autocratic government delving into psychology—politicalizing disease and mental health—is much more of a danger to humanity than is people falling in love.  

Enemy

Villeneuve’s film, Enemy (2013), is ostensibly about two men who look alike (they are played by the same actor). Jake Gyllenhaal plays both Adam and Anthony. That both characters have the same frontal scar in the same bodily location signals that the identity goes beyond the possibility that they are identical twins. The identity topic in philosophy of mind is thus salient in the film, and this has invited several commentators to delve deeply into psychological analysis to suggest that Adam is a figment of Anthony’s subconscious, or vice versa. The film does not make clear what exactly is real and what may be a character’s mental construction. Suffice it to say that the film is very difficult to comprehend. Even when Anthony’s wife appears to Adam/Anthony as a giant spider at the very end of the film, it is only conjecture to assume that the spider represents the heaviness of constraint in being in a relationship of commitment rather than anything goes—the latter being inconsistent with a real relationship. The film presents the viewers with intimations of philosophy of mind and more directly of relationship ethics; these two domains play off each other.

Anthony is a movie actor who has trouble being faithful sexually to his wife, Helen, who is pregnant. Having discovered that he and Adam look alike even down to the same scar, Anthony angrily demands that Adam turn over the clothes he is wearing and the keys of his car so Anthony can pick up Mary, Adam’s girlfriend, for a “romantic getaway,” meaning sex; this cherade is a way to have yet another affair. Adam hands over his suit and the car keys, and heads over to Anthony’s apartment and to Helen, who realizes that Adam rather than Anthony has turned up. She is happy to have Adam sexually and even to stay, which he can do because Anthony and Mary have just been killed in a car accident while fighting because Mary has discovered that the man she is with cannot possibly be Adam. Whereas Adam is meek and caring, Anthony is a sexual predator and, not coincidentally, emotionally disturbed in an aggressive way. Both women easily catch on to the switch a roo, and whereas Helen welcomes the substitution, Mary does not. 

It is the stark difference in the men’s psychology that keeps them from being identical as understood in the philosophy of mind sub-discipline, and that has invited commentators to propose that one of the two men is actually a mental projection of the other. The film may not provide enough fodder from which a definite conclusion regarding whether only one of the two men exist beyond being a projection, the sexual ethics of the two men are more straightforward, and yet even in this respect, some blurring is evident.

Neither Adam nor Anthony is very close emotionally to their significant other in spite of living together. Adam would rather grade papers than have sex with Mary one night even though she is drunk and horny, and Anthony almost ignores Helen, and, as mentioned above, he is oriented to the pursuit of other women, to the adrenaline of the chase as well as the sex. Men who are addicted to the high from the conquest for sex, and from sex itself tend to treat romantic relationships as if they were possible without ethical commitment even though the latter is essential for emotional trust and intimacy. Even responding to a plea of, “I need you now, emotionally,” with “I’m going to a bar to meet some friends” eviscerates emotional trust even though sex is not involved. Such selfishness and callousness render a person utterly unfit for a genuine relationship unless the person wants to change, because emotional commitment is requisite to any romantic relationship. A relationship without at least emotional trust is a contradiction in terms. Even so, I believe that such a person as Anthony can change, and from within; asking for help is not necessary, and, besides, love provides help without having to be asked.

When outside sex is added to the mix, the toxicity of the callousness is magnified in emotional terms. A person’s de facto, unstated priorities reflect whether commitment itself is valued or rejected. Take for instance a woman whose “sugar daddy” sets her up with a monthly allowance enables trips to Miami Beach from Mexico in exchange for her always “coming back to him” in Mexico. Prioritizing such a “trophy with sex” arrangement means deprioritizing possible love that is authentic in the sense of involving commitment and thus real love. Helen instantly senses that Adam is a man with which she can have these.

Wanting to have it both ways, such as Anthony plays out in staying with Helen while cheating on her—he would even misuse “I’m poly” as if that meant separate sex as an excuse for cheating—is easily detected by potential suitors who instinctively know when they have been deprioritized below even a lower good. The combination of an allowance and an open policy on outside sex is too tempting to a weak, avaricious psyche that is addicted to sex, but this does not mean that even a weak person cannot gradually gather will-power from within and leave the void of what is actually empty space. Faced with such an arrangement as befits a sexual addiction, using people, and an aversion to commitment and thus emotional intimacy, a real suitor has no choice but to walk away unless or until the “Anthony” turns himself around. 

Emotional intimacy does not necessarily mean instituting monogamy and thus a social conservative ideology. An "open relationship" sexually may be preferred, if, for instance, a significant age difference exists such that sexual drives differ in intensity, as long as no separate romantic connections go along with the separate sex and neither person is lying or feeling emotional pain.

In the film, it is clear that Helen has given up on Anthony, and yet she is pregnant with a baby with him. Were Adam not to have slipped in due to Anthony’s insistence on going off for the weekend to have sex with Mary, Helen would be in the living hell of being with a serial liar who is emotionally absent.

Can someone like Anthony turn around? Were he not killed in the crash with Mary near the end of the film, would he eventually get tired of the recurrent empty sex with other women and come to value and even crave Helen’s emotional/sexual affection? Do people who are trophies of “sugar daddies” eventually tire even in spite of the money and seek out a real relationship—meaning one that includes emotional commitment rather than lies? In the film, even Adam decides to cheat on Helen by taking the key that he has discovered to a stripper club that evening. Even Adam, who presumably has been faithful to his girlfriend, Mary, has absorbed a bit of Anthony.

Whether one of the two men is actually the alter-ego of the other—a mere figment in a divided psyche—the message of the film may be that emotional commitment requires maturity and the desire and will to take oneself as a being a promise-keeper rather than an exploiter and serial liar. The sheer divergence mentally between Adam and Anthony, even though neither is perfect nor could be expected to be, demonstrates the difference between sexual ethics as a challenge and alternatively as disvalued in favor of utter selfish disregard even in the face of another’s love. To say that the Adams of the world are pure whereas the Anthony’s are lost causes is too strict and thus not realistic. To say Adam is “good” and Anthony is “bad” is oversimplistic, and thus inaccurate. We are all human, all too human. In Anthony, there is something worthy of being loved, and in Adam, something that diminishes emotional intimacy. Adams may occasionally lapse (and be forgiven for being human), and a few Anthony’s may decide to shift from one world to another, especially if a soul-mate happens to be met. The fates of both Adam and Anthony are not written, and outside help is not required, should either or both men (or the same person) actively opt for emotional intimacy in a genuine relationship. Besides hinting at the identity problem in philosophy of mind, the medium of film is capable of projecting two alternative routes in terms of sexual ethics in the context of a higher good of which everyone is capable of attainment.

 

The Children Act

I contend that religion and science are two distinct and unique domains, and thus qualitatively different. It follows that they have their own distinctive criteria, which are rightly hegemonic in their respective domain. In other words, the criteria of religion should not be extended onto the domain of natural science, especially if in doing so the native criteria of science are eclipsed or overridden. Likewise, the criteria of science should not be superimposed into the domain of religion, especially if at the expense of the sui generis criteria of religion. The film, The Children Act (2017), demonstrates the problems entailed in imposing religious criteria onto medical science. An interesting question from having seen the film is whether any such hypertrophy of one domain’s criteria onto another domain inevitably incurs a narrowing of perspective and a corresponding warping of judgment.

The film’s narrative centers around Fiona Maye, a judge in Britain, and Adam Henry, a 17-year-old who has leukemia. From the standpoint of medical ethics and religion, the first half of the film is salient, whereas the second half centers around Adam’s infatuation for Fiona and her efforts to distance herself from him. The infatuation is likely a result of the fact that he has lost his religious grounding due to Judge Maye’s order that him be given a blood transfusion in violation of the dogma of the Jehovah Witness sect of Christianity. It is precisely that transfusion that is the legal/moral/religious issue that is presented in the film. If as I contend the medium of film is an excellent means of bringing to people matters of ethics and theology (and philosophy generally), then delving into the complex issue before the court in the film is warranted.

Adam’s parents have asked the court to stop the hospital from giving Adam a potentially life-saving blood-infusion, without which he would die (as the film’s end demonstrates). The parents’ lawyer presents the theological position of Jehovah’s Witnesses against blood transfusions. Genesis, Leviticus, and even Acts are cited as scriptural support, but no passages are cited before the court. The theological potential of the film would be strengthened were even a bit of exegesis presented to the judge (or she could be shown studying the matter at home, especially as her husband is away having an affair). The lawyer for the hospital points out in court that blood transfusions did not exist in ancient times, so we can infer that the relevant scriptural passages are at best indirect, being on blood itself as necessary for life. The hospital lawyer points out that if blood is tantamount to life itself, then the sect should be heartily in favor of blood transfusions to continue life.

Even though no reference to blood transfusion itself is in the Bible, the Jehovah Witness religious organization denounces the medical treatment as if God prohibits it. In court, Adam’s father says that he knows this, but in matters of religious, belief, and thus faith, rather than knowledge sans doubt applies. The notion that blood is or carries a person’s soul, which is implied in the sect’s position, conflates the material and spiritual, and in terms of domains, the biological and the religious. Conflating different domains can indeed lead to such astonishing claims that a person’s soul is in one’s blood. Typically, people dismiss such a claim without realizing that the underlying problem is a category mistake in terms of conflating two different domains or hyperextending one onto another.

Even were scripture to proscribe blood transfusions in particular and explicitly, rather than by an assumed inference from a passage on blood, such a prohibition would be of minor importance given the leitmotif of the gospels. In them, Jesus does not mention transfusions of blood; nor does he mention abortion or gay marriage, yet that hasn’t stopped some Christians from treating such ethical issues as foremost and as religious in nature. This is not to say that transfusions, abortions, and gay people marrying are ethical or unethical. Instead, my point is that from a religious standpoint generally and from the perspective of the New Testament, those issues are not particularly salient. Before the judge’s ruling, Adam is worried that his Church would disenfranchise him were he to get an infusion even if against his will! Even just to distance a member on the basis of an ethical issue that carries little or no distinctly religious importance, especially given the salient feature in the gospels of compassion where it is least convenient (i.e., to detractors, outsiders, and even enemies), incurs a bias in terms of perspective and judgment. Treating a minor factor as though everything hinges on it is to judge erroneously. To violate the theological principle of caritas seu benevolentia universalis (love as universal benevolence) under the rubric of Christianity and especially on a theologically minor issue incurs hypocrisy. The sick are to be cared for—this is very evident from the gospels. Magnifying some passages on blood (rather than more specifically on transfusions as if that practice were proscribed) such that the prohibition eclipses the main theological thrust of the gospels demonstrates a lack of good judgment (and common sense).

Because the transfusion would likely forestall Adam’s eventual death from the cancer means that, as Judge Maye declares from the bench, the Jehovah’s Witness organization was acting against rather than in line with Adam’s welfare. Something had gone very wrong in the governance of that organization. Adam’s welfare includes the happiness that continuing to live can make possible; a religious institution that is in favor of precluding a person’s future is likely making a category mistake underneath—in this case, extending religious criteria onto medical science at the expense of that domain’s own criteria.

As Fiona realizes when she visits Adam in hospital before her verdict, he is a lively, precious young man full of a lively spirit, which is shown in his sarcastic grin even more than in his blood. A person’s soul—isn’t it through a person’s eyes anyway? A person’s entire being is the “form” of one’s soul, as evinced especially in tone of voice and facial expressions as well as the language that one uses. The role of blood is biological, and thus of science, in human life, whereas the spiritual transcends the limits of human thought, perception, and emotion. The religious domain can thus be understood to be distinct from that of natural science.

Murder on the Orient Express

If viewers can get past Hercule Poirot’s extraordinarily long (and awful) mustache in the 2017 film, Murder on the Orient Express, listening closely to some of the detective’s choice observations on human nature and ethics can deliver philosophical dividends. Indeed, Poirot admits to being able to see the world only as it should be, which enables him to detect even small physical (and psychological) aberrations, even concerning eggs for breakfast, and so he has become, as he unabashedly states, the world’s best detective. After having solved the case on the stopped train, however, he realizes that even his “gift” at detection is not fully in line with how things should be, and so he compromises with his austere ethical standards because he finds himself in a “gray area,” ethically speaking.

At the end of the film, Poirot asks the man who is waiting for the detective to arrive, “Would you please straighten your tie?” The man does so. It is an odd, fastidious request that subtly confirms Poirot’s own admission early in the film that his sensitivity to even tiny deviations from how things should be is pathological, and yet very useful in detective work. So it is extraordinary as far as he is concerned that he says to the group of people on the train, “There are no killers here” even though he has figured out that all of them jointly savagely stabbed Rachett, who had kidnapped and killed (even after having received the ransom!) Daisy, the Armstrong young girl. Sometimes the scales of justice should not be in balance, Poirot tells the group. At the beginning of the film, he says, “There is right and wrong and nothing in between.” So, when Rachett sits at Poirot’s table in the dining car on the train, the detective instantly detects that the kidnapper/killer of the Armstrong child is not in line with how the world should be. Because, as Poirot says at one point, “Human nature is perverse in its complexity,” it is no surprise that he admits, “I am at my happiest when I am alone.” Applied ethics would be an alternative vocation for Poirot, and he would doubtless prefer to be alone than in the company of business practitioners, given their orientation to their self-interest and gain. To be sure, criminal justice is no small matter, given the heinous nature of murder. As the man who invites Poirot to travel on the train tells him just after both men discover that Rachett has been murdered in bed, “You are the only person who can bring justice.” Otherwise, the Black physician would likely be hanged “just because of the color of his skin,” which would be a grave injustice. So the detective agrees to take the case even though he is on vacation.

Rachett has not only gotten away with his horrible crimes against the Armstrong family, which ruined it, but has also caused 12 other people, who were either in that family or in various degrees of affiliation to it, to have their lives, according to Poirot, “wounded, deformed, ended.” This too “demands justice,” and so may justify the joint stabbing by the twelve of Rachett in his berth. In other words, Poirot sees the ethics of the vengeful act as being a gray area, rather than either right or wrong, because Rachett’s original crimes led to the additional crimes of having ruined twelve other lives. Hence, Poirot tells the group that sometimes the scales of justice should be unbalanced. The twelve seek revenge—vengeance—“for the life of an innocent,” Poirot says, “a life for a life.” But it is more than a life for a life, for Rachett has ruined the lives of the 12 emotionally aggrieved people on the train who stab Rachett; it is Rachett’s life for many more, and the criminal justice system has failed to bring Rachett to justice. In fact, the son of the prosecutor who wrongly prosecuted an innocent woman for Daisy’s murder is one of the twelve on the train!

To be sure, the twelve people, whom Poirot admits are not killers at heart, lie to him. “It appears that there is no end to the lies manufactured just for me,” Poirot observes after having spoken with them all. Even though lies violate Kant’s ethic (i.e., the Categorical Imperative), Poirot’s reflection that the joint stabbing may be justified ethically raises the question for us as to whether the end justifies the means (i.e., the lying). As for Poirot himself, he tells the group, “I cannot lie.” That he holds firm on the ethic of honest even as he considers the act of vengeance as possibly justified ethically—“I cannot just this,” he admits—directly contradicts his general perspective that there is right and wrong and nothing in between. His sensitivity to abnormalities from how things should be is clear from his discomfort looking at a man whose tie is not straight, hearing the conductor walking quickly to Rachett’s berth, and seeing the cracked glass of the picture frame of his beloved Catherine who has presumably died. Because, as he puts it, “crime is an anomaly” because it takes “a fracture of the soul” to murder another human being, he cannot resist man with the crocked tie who accosts the detective as he is finally leaving the train and states, “There has been a murder on the Nile.” Human nature is indeed perverse to a man who cannot help but see the world as it should be, and the motive to remove defects must indeed be strong in such a person. That he is confronted with a case in which the scales of justice should not be in balance is itself an aberration that must be intolerable to him, and to such an extent that he does lie to the police as to his theory on the murder on the Orient Express.

“There are no killers here,” the famed detective has said to the twelve when he announces to them that he has discovered their joint, premeditated crime. Linda Arden, aka Caroline Hubbard, the mother of Sonia Armstrong and Helena Andrenyi, and the grandmother of Daisy Armstrong, tells Poirot, of the eleven others on the train who participated in her masterminded plot to kill Rachett, “these are good people.” Poirot does not dispute that. They are not like the murderers whom he has known; they are not like Rachett. In Poirot’s extreme sensitivity to defects from how the world should be, none of the twelve are defects; rather, they are innocent victims of Rachett’s original crime. The sheer anger and emotional suffering in their “wounded, deformed” lives since the kidnapping cry out for justice; that it takes an act of vengeance to bring about such justice, and thus closure, even though the act is indeed murder, defies Poirot’s normative world-view. “I cannot judge this,” he tells the murderers. Perhaps moralists the world over could take a lesson from such humility.

The film raises the question of whether the vice of vengeance, or revenge, may be ethical in some cases. If so, should the biblical passage, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” be qualified? To be sure, that that very passage was so obviously disregarded in Israel in the mid-2020s in so exceeding what could conceivably be regarded as ethical revenge by committing a genocide in decimating Gaza and even intentionally killing even children (and for fun!) so the Arab people would not go on there does not justify qualifying the divine decree that vengeance belongs to Israel’s deity alone, rather than to the Israelis themselves. But Nietzsche’s claim that vesting the deity with vengeance discredits the very concept of Yahweh because it also contains omnibenevolence (i.e., perfect goodness, which Nietzsche claims is antithetical to any vice) may need to be reconsidered if Poirot is right that the murder on the Orient Express may be ethical even though it counts as vengeance. For if some cases of human vengeance are ethical in being just, then divine vengeance may not necessarily be inconsistent with perfect goodness. If so, then the attempt behind the biblical passage to get the Israelis to cease being so revenge-oriented may not be as problematic as Nietzsche thought, even though the attempt has been in vain.