Don’t Look Up

The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet economically successful species, that continues on after a large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?

For a species to have reached such plenty economically as ordinary people could live better than medieval kings had in Europe and yet be so petty and reckless, essentially squandering what the species had built up, with indifference even to an upcoming cataclysmic event, is what the astronomer-protagonist in the film is left marveling at just before his life, along with those of friends and family sitting around his dinner table, is instantly ended. “We really tried,” he says. I suspect that climate-activists may be saying the same thing regarding the abject refusal of enough of our species and its power-brokers to take combatting carbon-emissions seriously enough.

“Most social life seems a conspiracy to discourage us from thinking” about “what, if anything, can we do about death—now, while we are still alive?”[1] Even so, “there is a rare type [of person] for whom death is present every moment, putting his grim question mark to every aspect of life, and that person cannot rest without some answers.”[2] So it is that in the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa beseeches Yama, the king of death, to answer his burning question on whether there is an afterlife. “When a person dies, there arises this doubt: ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does not,’ say others. I want you to teach me the truth. This is my third” wish.[3] Although the answer is beyond the reach of human cognition and perception, Yama reveals that the essence of a person, one’s essential self, or atman, survives the death of the body. Nachiketa’s undaunted urge to know the truth anyway points back to how much thoughts of death are part of life. That Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is based on the assumption that the instinct for self-preservation is primary in human beings is yet another indication of how important it is to us to put off our own death for as long as possible.

So it is a “red flag” in the film, an indictment on human nature, that so very few people are thinking about the prospect of their own death even though the two scientists and then even the U.S. president have announced on television that a comet is hurling through space, heading directly at Earth in what is known as an extinction event. Initially, two television hosts dismiss the two astronomers who had calculated that the comet would hit Earth and be of such magnitude that our species would go extinct; those journalists are more interested in the romantic life of a young singer. Not even the U.S. President, or her chief of staff, are much interested, at least until after the midterms, for their party could lose control of both chambers of Congress. It is only when the political calculation changes that the White House decides to make a public announcement. This prudence is short-lived, however, as the president calls for the space shuttle to abort its mission to bomb the comet into a new trajectory that would miss the planet. An Elon-Musk-type, new-age CEO of a cell-phone company has so much influence on the president, no doubt from having made donations to her campaign, that she heeds his direction to abort the in-progress space-shuttle mission to bomb the comet to divert it from hitting Earth, and instead send risky, untested drilling machines to land on the comet in order to blow it into pieces, which would then presumably fall harmlessly to the Pacific Ocean to be harvested by the U.S. navy so tech companies using computer chips could profit wildly. The CEO is a businessman, even though he angrily rebuffs the astronomy professor for pointing out, “You are a businessman,” who thus has absolutely no formal education in astrophysics and spacecraft technology upon which to make the judgment to abort the mission that would probably have diverted the comet. Instead, his idea is to send untested drillers to land on the comet to dig holes in which to place bombs so the comet would blow up into profitable chunks. The astronomy professor is correct when he calls out the cell-phone techie, but the president sides with the latter nonetheless.

Regarding just how pathetic the president, her immature chief of staff, and the techie businessman are, at the end of the movie, the professor turns down the president’s offer to join her, the businessman and other elite personalities on a spacecraft that returns to Earth when it is again habitable. You enjoy your (obnoxious) chief of staff; I’m all set here, he tells the finally contrite president by phone. Faced with an imminent extinction event, the level-headed astronomer makes the judgment that it is better to die with friends and family then go on living with superficial comet-deniers for whom already having a lot of power and wealth, respectively, is not enough, and other people are to be used in line with power-aggrandizement and higher profits.

Science fiction is an excellent genre for bringing up contemporary controversies without setting off alarm-bells and thus having one’s message blocked by the opposition. The allusions to President Trump and Hilary Clinton, and the tech titan Elon Musk are hardly subtle. That the film was released in 2021 means that the relationship between the president and the techie CEO are not based on the later relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk. Instead, the president character is, I submit, based on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The president in the film is engaged in “comet-denial” as a political slogan similar to how Trump was engaged in climate-change-denial during his first term, is a woman like Hilary Clinton in subsuming everything, even the destruction of the species, under political calculation, and easily forgetting to save her chief of staff in the end, perhaps as the Clintons left Brent Forster in their wake before Bill Clinton was president. The political-calculating, selfish president in the film is herself an indictment on American democracy, for presumably she was elected. At a certain point in the film, people need only look up to see the comet for themselves to realize that the U.S. president was lying. The comet in the movie, like climate change in our world, is real, and it is the political and economic elite that in both the film and real life drop the ball, even though the respective stakes are both huge. Of course, in both cases, the American people are to blame too.

It is strange, in watching the movie, how indifferent people generally are to even the possibility that they could die in a bit over six months. Even after Ivy League experts ironically favored by the White House confirm the calculations of the astronomy professor, the president decides to play political games rather than take the first possible opportunity to divert the comet. Then she decides to do the bidding of her techie billionaire donor and “turn lemons into lemonade” by recklessly (in terms of rocket technology) helping him to profit from the comet once it has been pulverized and felled to the ground. Lemonade cannot be made if the lemons are handled recklessly rather than rendered usable. Just before dies, the astronomy professor remarks on the species to his friends and family, “We had everything.” The implication is: and yet we blew it, because some powerful people in business and government wanted more. Even though the techie billionaire had developed a very advanced and financially lucrative cell phone, it is as if that man perceived himself as not having enough, and thus as needing more.

The desire for more is a good definition of greed. Even given declining marginal utility, there seems to be no base limit of wealth that is enough in terms of a person not risking even everything to profit more.  A rational person might realize that pushing the comet out of the way of Earth should be priority number 1, and that NASA and other space agencies around the world should be entrusted with that task, or else all current wealth could be lost, as you can’t spend it when you’re dead. It is as some powerful people in the business and political American elites dismissed even the 99.97% chance that the comet would smack into the Earth because greed and power-aggrandizement are instinctual urges that lie by distorting both cognition and perception. We “modern” humans may be so used to being so narrowly self-interested in accumulating money and power that we regard the indifference shown in the film to a catastrophic event to be surreal or even as too incredulous to even be believed in a film!

Even though the movie ramps up the explosive and sudden climax to keep viewers titillated in movie theatres, the same dynamic of indifference and denial applies as our species stews unabatedly in a hotter and hotter climate that one day may be very difficult or even impossible for our species to continue to live on Earth. This prospect having become realistic when the film was made, and definitely in June, 2025, when both parts of the E.U. and U.S. suffered from long heat-waves, should be enough to make resisting coal and other business interests and their captured politicians by making climate a high political and economic priority, but alas, too many people are like the people in the movie, who are taken in by the comet-deniers and profiteers, as if the masses of people were consisting of Nietzsche’s herd animals that are oblivious as they are being taken to the slaughter house. Presuming that we could just move to Mars or the Moon, and that we could even profit by doing so is the sort of thinking that does not work out in the movie, so the lesson is that it is reckless for us to deny climate-change and postpone cuts in fossil-fuel emissions under the assumption that we will be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat just in time when the time comes to pay the bill as species. To be sure, whereas the comet hitting Earth is a sudden event, the baleful effects of climate-change are gradual, yet accumulating, and thus human nature is less well-equipped to take immediate action rather than putting it off. Even so, the denial for partisan advantage and the proclivity of managers in companies to compartmentalize at the expense even potentially of the survival of the species even within a few generations are the same. Perhaps Nietzsche was correct in claiming that ideas are really instinctual urges, and reasoning is the tussling of contending urges—the most powerful of which reaches consciousness. Rather than being a check on passions, reason is itself a manifestation of instincts. The lesson of the film is that there is no guarantee that the instinctual urge that dominates others is in line with self-preservation and even the medium-term (and even short-term) survival of the species.

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1. Introduction to Katha Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).
2. Ibid.
3. Katha Upanishad, 1.1.20, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).

Lolita

In being able to engage an audience both visually and audibly, and to do so at close range—something we don’t get from watching a play on a distant stage—the medium of film is capable of resonating with, challenging, and rebounding from both heart and mind. That is to say, the medium can engage us at a comparatively deep level and even touch us profoundly. The medium can tug at our ethical strings and even provoke uncomfortable thoughts and feelings precisely because sound and image can conjoin at close range such that we are brought closer to an ethical harm than is likely in our own daily experiences. Some ethical harms, such as that in a young woman not being able to stop a rape by an older man abusing a stark power differential, may simply be too horrific up close to experience even vicariously. A filmmaker can use devices, whether photographic, audio, or narrative, to moderate our exposure without sacrificing the depth at which the harm and its sordid scenario can reach in us. Such exposure to ethical problems or even to situations in which the ethical verdict is debatable can give to an audience a better realization of the ethical dimension of the human condition and improve our ability to render ethical judgements on specific issues and generally. Writ large, the medium of film can do these things for a society, reflecting and even provoking it with just enough directness to be palatable and grasped. The genre of science fiction in particular has been used to serve this purpose. Even by contrasting an original film with its remake decades later, a society’s changing nature can be glimpsed by an audience, especially as censorship guidelines are loosened as per changing social mores and ethical sensibilities of a society. The fictional film, Lolita (1962), and its remake, Lolita (1997), provide us with an excellent case study not only of changes in twentieth-century American society, but also of how powerful the medium of film can be in its treatment of the ethical dimension of the human condition.

Both the original film and the remake center around the ethical problem of incest. That it is wrong ethically is beyond dispute in the films. That this message is easily received even as the respective filmmakers use various techniques to dilute the intensity of the harm is a credit to the filmmakers. Make the presentation of an ethical harm too intense and audiences will bolt. On the other hand, the salient role of censorship on the original film risks that the harm is too distant to be grasped by audiences.

In terms of the narrative, both films, and especially the remake, mollify the audience, as if diluting whiskey so it doesn’t sting “going down the hatch.” In both films, the harsh atrocity of the incestual relationship would be harder to take were Prof. Humbert Lolita’s actual father rather than her step-father, and if he were that even before he marries Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, when he is merely renting a room in the house. Also, that the incestual sex between Humbert and Lolita begins midway through the film, when Humbert is no longer married to Charlotte and thus not technically her step-father and he and Lolita no longer even live in Charlotte’s house, makes it easier for an audience, which can view the relationship more from the standpoint of the difference in ages, which is still problematic because Lolita is fourteen years old, than from that of a biological father having sex with his daughter. To be sure, the ethically problematic co-existence of the parental and sexual roles by Humbert is obvious, as is the fact that Lolita is a minor whereas Humbert is a middle-aged adult, and both of these elements can be expected to make the typical viewer uncomfortable.

The remake makes a significant departure narratively from the original film in lessening, albeit marginally, Humbert’s blameworthiness. The story begins with Humbert as a teenager when he has a beautiful girlfriend who is not coincidentally also (i.e., like Lolita) fourteen years old. They are so in love, but she tragically dies of typhus. We sympathize with the teenage Humbert as he cries over his lost, beautiful love, and perhaps even feel that he deserves another such love. Tempering and adding complexity to the ethical issue of incest is the adult Humbert’s very human desire to get back a lost love, even if vicariously. The resemblance of the actresses playing Annabel Lee and Lolita is likely no accident. The sympathy dissipates, however, when Humbert crosses a line with Lolita by letting her perform sexual acts on him during their first hotel-stay.

Paradoxically, even as the remake, relative to the original film, makes the offence more palatable to us by adapting the narrative even more, we are brought closer to the sexual act both directly and by the story-world seeming more sensual. This is accomplished by both zoomed-in visuals and selective magnification of some ordinary sounds of things that we usually don’t notice in our daily lives but that, were we aware of them, could provide empirical experience with added depth. In fact, the medium of film moreover has great (generally unappreciated) value in being able to make us aware of the depth that experience is capable of, and thereby enrich our experience of living.

The original film, released in 1962, lacks sensuality and the references to sex are only indirect. Not even the word “pornography” is mentioned; it is instead artfully referred to as “art film,” as if every “Indie” film were pornographic, by Lolita when she tells Humbert that she refused to be in such a film. Neither Humbert nor Lolita visibly show much physical affection generally, Humbert even being physically revolted by Charlotte. Even when Lolita runs upstairs to say goodbye to him before she leaves for summer camp, she merely hugs him, with the camera doing a quick cut-away so not to show her kissing him on a cheek. In the same scene in the remake, Lolita literally jumps up on him, wraps her legs around his waist and gives him a big wet kiss on the lips. From such an exact comparison, we can infer that a shift in cultural attitudes in American society occurred between when the original film and the remake were made. The only time Humbert embraces Lolita is when she is mourning her mother’s death, and the contact does not imply anything sexual. For it is normal, and even expected, that a parental figure would hug a crying child.

In the remake, touching is a staple between Humbert and Lolita even when he is just a boarder in the house. In fact, Lolita’s legs and arms touch him so often that the girl comes off as uncoordinated. Interestingly, she sits in his lap early on when he is working at the desk in his room, and then again later in the film when both are naked and his dick is obviously inside her. In both cases, neither person is complaining. Although the first sexual episode between the two is not shown, three subsequent episodes are shown—two of which are not enjoyable for Humbert, as Lolita has learned how to use sex with him to get things, including money. All the touching, complete with its sound, makes the incest more real for the audience.

At the same time, that Lolita entices Humbert when he is a boarder by touching him even while sharing a porch swing with him and her mother, and kissing him goodbye, and then offers to give him a blow-job (and likely more) on the first morning of their first night at a hotel after Charlotte’s death moderates the ethical harm of the incest because she is willing even when she eventually realizes that she can get money from him from having sex with him. In one scene, both are naked in bed, obviously having sex, and she is trying to collect the various coins that on the sheets. “You’re demanding that I pay more in the middle?” he asks her. She smacks him with a hand for obstructing her collection effort.

To be sure, and this point should be made perfectly clear, an adult is ethically bound to refuse the sexual advances of a child, but at least in the remake the sex is not forced, and thus rape in that sense. The ethical harm is more in how Humbert’s monopoly of her in terms of dating and sex ruins the rest of her life than being only in the sexual act itself.

When we first see the 14 year-old Lolita in the remake, she is a smiling, carefree girl enjoying summer in her backyard. Lying on the grass, she is even enjoying the water from a water-sprinkler falling on her as she looks at pictures in a magazine. Her innocence can be seen in her beautiful smile, and this seems to be what catches Humbert’s gaze, but in retrospect it is clear that he is sexually turned on by the sight of her body even though she has not yet even developed female breasts. In her last scenes in the remake, she looks terrible, wearing a cheap dress and glasses and living in a shack with her new, impoverished husband. Significantly, she is no longer smiling. In his last scene in the film, Humbert laments that she is not among the children laughing in a distant village. “Can you forgive me for what I’ve done to you?” he asks her as he is leaving her small house after giving her what can only be guilt-money.

Lolita’s relationship with Humbert is clearly dysfunctional. Even though this takes place after Charlotte’s death, so strictly speaking, he is no longer Lolita’s step-father, he refers to himself as such to her and takes on a parental role. She is, after all, a child and behaves as such, and is in need of parental supervision. The power differential is uncomfortable for her, and us, though not for Humbert. She naturally bristles at his totalitarian control over her life, including her sex life even when she is attending a school while living with him as he teaches at a college. Anger and even violence result. To escape from him, she secretly plans to live with another pedophile, Clare Quilty, whom she claims to be attracted to, though he kicks her out after she refuses to be in a pornographic, or “art,” film in which she would have to “blow those beastly boys.” She is left alone with no money and with no previous normal sexual relationship. Due to his possessive selfishness and his refusal to respect the proper sexual distance between a child and an adult, Humbert clearly acts very unethically with respect to Lolita. Out of all the ethical theories promulgated historically, one in particular is especially applicable to this film, and to the nature of the medium in being able to provoke visceral emotional reactions.

David Hume theorized in the eighteenth century that the sentiment, or feeling, of a gut-level disapproval triggered by a moral wrong is essentially moral judgment itself. As one of my professors used to say, if you walk by a dead body that has a knife in its back, you are going to have a negative emotional reaction, unless you are pathological. This feeling is your ethical judgment that something unethical has happened. By engaging both our eyes and ears, film can reach down deep and trigger such a sentiment of disapprobation, and thus trigger ethical judgments in an audience during a screening. This is much more powerful than merely having an audience told that something unethical is happening in a film. Although hearing a neighbor tell Humbert in the original film that “the neighbors are talking” about Humbert’s relationship with “his daughter” and even seeing the concerned look of the drug-store clerk who serves Lolita an ice-cream shake in the remake provide subtle and thus believable indications of just how ethically problematic the “father-daughter” relationship really is, actually feeling a sentiment of disapprobation while watching and hearing Humbert and Lolita having sex is much more powerful in giving an audience a sense of the ethical dimension in the human condition.

Playing a “supporting role” in making the ethical problem “real” for an audience watching the remake are the means in which sensuality in the story-world is brought out by close-ups and the magnification of particular sounds. The remake is hardly alone among films in being able to bring taken-for-granted ordinary sounds to our notice, and thus giving us the opportunity to sense the depth of experience that is possible even in our banal daily lives. The sound of shoes walking on a hard floor, the sound of air-pressure from the car-door of a new car being closed, and the sound of a pen or pencil being used on paper are just a few examples of sounds that we typically overlook and yet can be made aware of in a film. Even the sound of rain can be made to stand out. One byproduct of this cinematic experience is that we might then notice more sounds in our daily experience, and thus have a fuller, or deeper experience of the world in which we live.

In the remake, not all of the heightened sounds are related to or intimate sex; sensuality as sensitivity in experience goes beyond the sexual. The lazy tires of Humbert’s car in the first scene, for example, bring us into the story-world without any suggestion that sex will be a salient feature of that world. The magnified sound of moths being electrically zapped on the hotel porch, where Humbert first meets Quilty, is likewise devoid of sexual inuendo; the point of that exaggerated sound is perhaps that both men are living dangerously in having sex with children. The sound of chocolate syrup shooting into Lolita’s glass, followed by the sound of a scoop of ice-cream being released, however, conveys more of a sense of sensuality, though still not as sexual as the sound of Lolita’s body moving under a sheet in a hotel bed that she will soon share with Humbert during their first night at a hotel (in the original film, he sleeps on a cot at the foot of the bed). That the sound of the two kissing even back when Humbert is a boarder can be easily heard is no accident. Even when Lolita’s disjointedly throws a leg or arm in Humbert’s direction when he is a boarder, the sounds can easily be heard and suggest a story-world in which touching is real. I submit that such use of sound ultimately brings the audience closer to the incestual act as being real in the story-world.

Film can employ both sound and visuals to enhance sensitivity to particular things in a way that leaves the audience itself more sensitive during the screening, and thus open to the ethical dimension, which is then more likely to stay with the viewers after the movie. In other words, by heightening experience, a filmmaker can prepare an audience to be brought closer in without feeling threatened or revolted. Hume’s sentiment of disapprobation can accordingly be really felt, rather than just thought about. In this way at least, the medium of film can get “inside” of people ethically and thus enhance our understanding of the human condition from an ethical standpoint.

In fact, the ethical dimension overshadows the dysfunctional psychology in Humbert’s obsession over Lolita even though James Mason’s Humbert in the original film is clearly shown as pathological in his reaction to the final rejection by Lolita when he visits her and her husband near the end of the film. We are perhaps more accustomed to film being used, as by Alfred Hitchcock, for psychological effect than to focus on the ethical dimension of the human condition by means of particular ethical problems or dilemmas.

The ethical dimension also overshadows the religious implications. In the original film, Charlotte asks Humbert if he believes in God. “Does he believe in me?” is Humbert’s telling reply. But nothing more is said or suggested of religion in the original film. Humbert is more interested in the state of his soul in the remake. As the narrator, he admits that having sex with Lolita is a sin, and furthermore that it has played a direct role in ruining her life. In asking her, “Can you forgive me for what I’ve done to you?” it is clear that he is thinking about forgiveness. He is explicitly interested in his redemption, for he says that Quilty prevented it by taking Lolita away. Perhaps the implication we can draw from this is that Humbert thought at least at one point that he could eventually make Lolita happy. That he is delusional in this is clear as he asks her to leave her husband and return even though she has just told him that Quilty is the only man she ever liked romantically. In short, Humbert’s understanding of his redemption is clouded by the delusion in his sexual obsession.  Even so, it is the ethical dimension rather than the religious and psychological explanations that stands out in Lolita.

Medium Cool

In Medium Cool (1969), John Cassellis, a cameraman, maintains a medium-cool level of emotion even in the midst of the socio-political turmoil in Chicago during 1968 until he learns that his station manager had been allowing the FBI access to the news footage. The film can be interpreted as providing a justification for his lack of trust in American law enforcement even as the need for law and order is made clear from the ubiquity of the human instinctual urge of aggression. For the film shows not only the extent of violence, but also its engrained nature in our species. By implication, the viewer is left to conclude that that law enforcement is necessary in a civilized society.  Yet this can only be a necessary evil, for the last few scenes of the film show just how likely discretion is to be abused. The atrocious and one-sided police violence during the peaceful protests outside of the Democratic National Convention make it clear that if given the legal authority to use weapons, human beings may abuse such discretion if too weak to restrain their own personal passions and, albeit less common, even their psychological pathologies.

The film opens with a small protest in a rural area in Illinois. Of immediate concern is the involvement of Illinois’s military in a domestic matter. The disproportionate heavy machinery of official force seems out of place. That the soldiers’ knives at the end of the guns are so close to the necks of the peaceful protesters also points to bad judgment. A journalist recalls police roughing up cameramen so they won’t show untriggered police brutality. The implicit conclusion is that the excessive means of force together with an aggressive mentality among soldiers and police is a dangerous cocktail.

The film moves to a scene at a rollerball game in which individual players are beating each other up even off the track. The crowd enjoys it, just as the viewers of local news like watching violence. Later in the film, we see Cassellis practicing at boxing—again illustrating the human need or penchant for violence. He explains to his girlfriend’s son, “The object is to knock the other guy’s brains out.” At one point in the film, a manager of a media company says on the phone, “We do not manufacture violence.” This is true enough, for, given the human aggressive instinctual urge, violence can be expected to be around plenty enough to fill the time-slots on the local evening news.

The propensity for violence interpersonally is made very clear as Cassillis and his sound man, Peter Bonerz, contend with hostility from several black people in an apartment in spite of the fact that the two journalists had interviewed one of the people and thus provided a mouthpiece for the racial grievances. Even though the Black woman is being verbally hostile to one of the journalists, a Black man insult to injury by angrily demanding, “You got to respect our women!” The journalists were respecting her, and, ironically, she had not been respecting them. Conflating societal phenomena and the two journalists in the apartment, the Black man insults them by calling them arrogant and exploiters. That the journalists provided a societal mouthpiece for one of the men contradicts the accusation of exploitation. But reasoning is often wan up against anger: hence the need for law enforcement.

Violence is also on the societal stage. Watching a television program on John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, all of whom had been assassinated, the teacher whom John is dating remarks, “It seems like no one’s life is worth anything anymore.” We hear King’s “I have a Dream” speech, which we can juxtaposition against the propensity towards violence in the apartment of the Black man whom the journalists had (thanklessly) interviewed. The ideal is one thing; extant human nature on the ground is quite another.

The documentary-like scenes of the anti-Vietnam War protests of chants of “No more war” again demonstrate the ubiquity of untriggered violence even among people who are hired to prevent violence. Against the song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” we see Mayor Daly’s “police state terror” playing out in the streets of Chicago as police attack non-violent protestors. The excessive response of Illinois’ army being present just renders the danger all the more of hiring people with criminal mentalities to enforce the law. On the radio, we hear, “The policemen are beating everyone in sight.” Another reporter states that the police are targeting a specific political group—the anarchists. Appropriately, onlookers were chanting, Zeig Heil! As a reference back to the Nazi thugs in uniform. The overwhelming, excessive machinery of force, including that of a military, combined with the fact that the police mentality was criminal inflicting severe injury on innocent victims—and the fact that the criminals got away with it—is the emotional-image that the audience is left with. But there is neither remedy nor solution proffered.

The toxic American dynamic is just there, and as the Black Lives Matter movement would attest, Americans would be well justified in approaching police employees as dangerous even as they enforce the law. I contend that given the salience of the aggressive instinct in human nature, the power (discretion) enjoyed by police employees (and departments) is dangerous. Internal affairs offices within police departments suffer from an institutional conflict of interest (e.g., being part of the “brotherhood”) and thus should not be relied on, and the hands-off attitude of many city governments in favor of “citizen police commissions” is tantamount to aiding and abetting police brutality. Given this dangerous cocktail, the erroneous (and passive-aggressive) assumption/tactic that intimidation by an overwhelming, police-state, police presence should not be permitted. Simply put, there is simply too many police employees abusing their discretion for residents to have to be presented with a constant police-presence. The says that children should be seen but not heard is too charitable to police; they should not be seen or heard, but, due to the human inclination towards violence, present behind the scenes. This is the uncomfortable position that the film provides. Law enforcement is necessary, but, given the urge that some people feel to abuse power by instigating violence if given the chance, democratic, municipal accountability that does not rely at all on “internal checks” within police departments is vital.

The legitimacy of police to use force is limited to enforcing law. Hence, physically attacking people, such as in punching them with clenched fists and kicking them, which go beyond restraining people, are exogenous to the job function. Police with a penchant for attacking people may have a warped perspective justifying in their own minds, psychologically, beating someone up as a legitimate tactic. In 2023 in Ohio, for example, in an attempt to justify a police employee who kicked a man repeatedly in the ribs and hit him 30 times (and used a stun-gun), the deputy chief stated, “sometimes you do have to throw punches.” Even though his subordinates had use of a stun gun, he tried to justify their resort to street-fighting, saying “This wasn’t blows to the face or blows to the throat.”[1] This excuse fails, however, given that one police employee had straddled the victim’s legs and punched him “at least 30 times with both fists.”[2]

I contend that in going on the offence in violence rather than merely restraining and protecting oneself from violence, a police employee should be regarded as only another citizen. As Hobbes claims in Leviathan, self-preservation is a natural right that is not contingent on law. If anyone is kicking or punching a person, one has the natural right to defend oneself. Although this does not depend on law, city governments should encase this natural right because of the extent of discretion given to police employees by cities—an extent that is easily hyperextended. By no means should resisting getting kicked and hit be considered a criminal offence; rather, the “off duty” city employee should be charged criminally.

An obvious example of when a police employee should be considered a mere citizen concerns an employee who held a supervisory position in the New York City police department. Working as a private investigator for the government of China, he “threatened, harassed, surveilled and intimidated” a Chinese man “between 2016 and 2019.”[3] In 2023, he was convicted by a federal jury in New York of conspiracy and stalking charges. It made no difference that he was a police employee (and supervisor!) because his aggressive intimidation and harassment rendered him as a mere resident when he was engaged in that activity.

Even the language that a police employee uses along with unprovoked violence can indicate that the individual is no longer acting within the purview of one’s job in law enforcement. In Alabama in 2023, for instance, a state trooper felt justified in inflicting violence on a man who was not resisting arrest simply because he had joked “Oh, yeah” when she asked him if he felt tip of the stun-gun she had stuck into his back as he laid on the hood of a car. In saying, “Shut your bitch ass up,” and “Shut the fuck up. You was big and bad,” she was clearly not acting in a law-enforcement capacity. Her language is not professional, and thus it points to a state of mind that is outside of acting in her official capacity, which alone justifies the use of the stun-gun. That she ignored his pleas for her to stop using her stun-gun means that her desire to inflict pain was immune to any sense of compassion.

In his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, who went on to write on competitive markets, claims that sympathy, aided by the imagination (in being in someone else’s place), is something that is normal to feel for others, especially if they are in pain. We don’t have to feel the pain in order to empathize. If someone who has been hired for a job in which deadly weapons can be used does not have compassion, then they are not the sort of psychology that should be hired for such a job. That such people have been hired suggests that the hiring processes of police departments are not yet advanced enough to be relied on, and so external accountability should receive more resources and attention.

Anger such that eviscerates natural sympathy can be immune even from the pleas of other police employees. Also in 2023, a Black man “was attacked by a police dog in Ohio after surrendering” to police employees “following a high-speed chase.”[4] That the truck driver had “refused to pull over, and was chased for about 25 minutes before spiked bars placed across the highway brought the rig to a stop” does not justify releasing an attack dog on the man when he was standing with his hands above his head, having clearly surrendered to the police.[5] Hence the police employee who released the dog was no longer acting in his capacity as an employee of the police department when he released the dog and could be charged criminally. 

The man's hands were up when the "SS (Nazi)" policeman released the attack dog. 

That the predator (i.e., the police employee) ignored his coworker’s demand, Do not “release the dog with [the black man’s] hands up. Do not release the dog with his hands up,” demonstrates just how flawed the hiring process of a police department can be, and thus how important external, municipality accountability is on police departments. The attacker shouted at the man, “Get your ass on the ground or you’re going to get bit!” which indicates not only extremely flawed judgment, which in turn likely points to underlying psychological problems, but that the guy was on a “power-trip” enabled by the discretion given to him as a police employee. That one of the police employees had aimed a machine gun on the truck driver can also be flagged in terms of flawed judgment. It is very significant that the employee had been hired for a position that includes use of a deadly weapon even though he had a penchant for violence.

The role of dysfunctional judgment is, I submit, a major problem in police departments. In 2023, two Los Angeles sheriff employees attacked an elderly Black couple in the parking lot of a grocery store because they had taken a cake (which could have been only a mistake). The employee attacking the man ignored the woman’s pleas that her husband was ill. Just for saying so, she was slammed to the ground by the other sheriff-department aggressor. Ignoring the woman’s pleas and shoving both people to the ground evinces utter disrespect, as if people deemed to be criminals by criminal police were not people. In actuality, such aggressors are not worthy of respect.

In yet another case, Los Angeles Sheriff deputies repeatedly punched a woman who was holding her 3-month-old baby simply because her maternal instinct would not allow her to release her baby to such aggressors. 

The aggressor's arm is circled as he repeatedly hits the mother as if in a street fight. There should be a special place in hell for men who slug women holding their infants. 

Interestingly, cities might consider enacting a “Good Samaritan” law protecting onlookers who stop attackers whether they happen to be city employees or not, for it is easy to tell if someone is resisting arrest or being pummeled with kicks and punches while passive. I contend that onlookers are ethically obligated to pull attackers off their passive victims, and, furthermore, that the criminal attackers should be criminally charged.

Because police hiring cannot be relied on, given the discretion with deadly force that police are given, the discretion should not include being able to turn off body-cams and cameras mounted on police cars. In 2023, internal documents showed that the police employee in Memphis, Tennessee who killed a man without cause didn’t turn on the body camera.[6] Just as Internal Affairs “internal accountability” within police departments should not be relied on, for police regard themselves in a brotherhood of sorts, so too is it a fatal flaw to presume that police employees can resist the temptation to turn off any cameras by which accountability could be aided.

We are all flawed, finite beings, human, all too human. Societies should thus be keen to check the power that is likely to be abused, and those with lawful physical power should be subject to psychological assessments that go beyond surveys and proforma interviews. Indications of “street” talk, bad (i.e., disproportional) judgment, and “street” fighting should be sufficient for terminations and criminal charges in cases involving violence, for the line between enforcing law and going on the attack is clear. Lastly, police employees should have more humility (i.e., a recognition of fallibility) in dealing with people assumed to be less, or lower, for every human being is worthy of respect as a human being. Being a city employee is conditional, rather than an entitlement. City governments should not only hold employees accountable, but also castigate police departments for policies allowing disproportionate force, such as aiming a machine gun at a truck simply because the trucker did not pull over. Retaliation is extrinsic to law enforcement. As the film demonstrates, accountability may be needed even on a mayor, such as Mayor Daly of Chicago, who astonishingly refused to stop the unprovoked violent attacks by his police even after his complicity was made public at the Democratic Convention. Even then, he evinced the Biblical pharaoh’s hardened heart. Similarly, the police predators discussed above demonstrated such stubbornness, in some cases even dismissing pleas for humanity from their fellow police employees.

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1. Dominique Mosbergen, “Police in Ohio Under Scrutiny after Video Shows Officers Punching Face-Down Man,” The Huffington Post, October 24, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Hannah Rabinowitz and Emma Tucker, “Former NYC Police Officer, 2 Others Convicted of Stalking New Jersey Family on Behalf of Chinese Government,” CNN.com, June 20, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
4. Nick Visser, “Video Shows Police Allowing Dog to Attack Black Man Surrendering After Truck Chase” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
5. Ibid.
6. Phillip Jackson, “Memphis Cop Who Fatally Shot Jaylin McKenzie Didn’t Turn On Body Camera, Internal Documents Show,” The Huffington Post, August 4, 2023.

Far from Heaven

The film, Far from Heaven (2002), centers around a woman whose husband turns out to be gay. That this is set in 1957-1958 in socialite Connecticut is all the more telling, as the Caucasian woman finds her groundskeeper, who is a Black man, to be “beautiful.” The film is arguably a remake, or at least informed by, the film All that Heaven Allows (1955), in which a widow begins dating a younger, muscular man who tends to her trees. Although race and homosexuality are not issues in this earlier film (which, after all, was made in the 1950s), that a woman who socializes with friends who belong to a country club in New England would dare to date a younger man of a lower economic class—albeit not as low as the woman’s son and friends stereotypically suppose—was scandalous enough in the 1950s to furnish a tantalizing plot. That a filmmaker in 2002 could get away with portraying an interracial extra-marital sexual interest and a gay or bisexual husband having anonymous sex with men (even showing the husband kissing one of the men), whereas a filmmaker in 1955 would not have been able to get away with including such taboos (much less making them central), says something about the cultural trajectory of western civilization temporally.

By 2002, American society had changed markedly since the late 1960s, which ushered in the Black, women, and gay rights movements. Also, film censorship had let up appreciably since 1955. From the standpoint of the early 2020s, even American ideological culture in 2002 could be looked back at as antiquated. As one indicator, gay sex had increasingly come to be shown in film. The European film, Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016), for example, begins in a gay bathhouse and shows the two men with frontal and back nudity having anal sex. Such a film would have been unthinkable even in 2002, and without a doubt back in 1955. In 2023, it was not clear whether such explicit displays were at the forefront in an evolution of freedom or a manifestation of lude displays going too far.

To be sure, American society as a whole cannot be said to have shifted so dramatically. This is evident because after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the court’s Roe v. Wade (1973) decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), restrictions on abortions were enacted in several member states. Regarding state-level legislation pushing back on gay rights, at least 417 bills had been introduced in state legislatures as of April 3, 2023 for that year, with a focus on banning access to gender-changing health care for minors and regulating curriculum in public schools.[1] Because discussion of sexual identity has been subject to bans, significant resistance to pro-transsexual material in films would exist even twenty years after Far from Heaven was made.

To homogenize the U.S., moreover, is to ignore the very different centers of gravity geographically in the various states in regard to the ideological “culture wars.” The “woke,” or identity-politics ideological movement, was also getting some push-back in the early 2020s. The resistance objected especially to the restriction of freedom of speech that ironically undercut the progressive claim of a Hegelian expansion of freedom since the 1950s in America. Indeed, the hegemony of group-identity ideology could be said to have become oppressive by 2023, dominating interpretations of cultural objects, including films.

Notwithstanding the politically-correct topics of race and sexual orientation in Far from Heaven, I contend that the film’s message transcends identity-politics to something about the human condition regarding emotionally intimate human relationships. Cathy and Frank Whitaker do not exactly present a loving marriage, and he does not seem to enjoy his work. In contrast, Raymond Deagan, their Black gardener who actually owns his own business and is educated at least in art-culture, is at peace enough that he ventures out to Cathy in friendship and perhaps more. Her sexual attraction to him is more apparent, and she becomes the driving force for any romantic relationship after Frank leaves her to be with a man. Before then, Frank is having sex with men anonymously, and rather than being comfortable with his homosexuality, it is a cause of mental anguish—especially since a psychiatrist advocates “conversion” therapy as if it were medical science. Cultural convention, including even ideology, thus makes use of natural science albeit without the latter’s empirical basis. Frank is in inner turmoil, and, meanwhile, that both Cathy and Raymond are the targets of mean stares and worse in public renders even a platonic relationship problematic. In a drunken rage, Frank angrily forbids his wife from having anything to do with that black man even though Frank’s homosexuality is perhaps even more societally taboo at the time. To be sure, in the 1950s, Connecticut law forbid both miscegenation (interracial marriage) and homosexuality. Even birth-control was illegal! In fact, it was not until 1965 that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Connecticut law that criminalized the use of birth control.

Bracketing the taboos of miscegenation and homosexuality (especially as adultery), however, we can zero in on the human relationships involved in terms of emotional intimacy. Just before Frank and Cathy break up, she indicates the emotional toll on her from Frank’s pattern of secrecy. Regardless of the specific content of the secrets, secrecy itself decimates the emotional intimacy of a relationship. Trust is absolutely fundamental. Even the relationship—even just in terms of friendship—between Cathy and Raymond can be critiqued on the basis of trust. Race is the context rather than the content here. Neither Cathy nor Raymond trusts the other enough to feel protected in the other’s world. To be sure, both worlds are segregated, but the matter can be generalized to that of trusting the other person to stand up in the midst of push-back from the other person’s social acquaintances.

In All that Heaven Allows, the younger man, Ron, does not trust the widow, Carie, not only to fend off her judgmental socialite acquaintances, but also to not care what they think or say. Ron doesn’t care what people think about him; he is comfortable in his own skin. Carie capitulates to the prejudice of her country-club friends and even her college-aged son and daughter, and thus justifies Ron’s lack of trust. Race and homosexuality are not in the picture, literally! Even the “younger man” and economic prejudices, which are salient in that film, pale in comparison to whether Carie and Ron trust each other enough to commit to starting a new life together. For Carie, that means leaving the house that she had had with her husband and kids, and all the security that a familiar surrounding offers even after the others have lived there. Ron, his friends, and his country house are so different from the life that Carie knows that she has trouble trusting Ron enough to make the leap. In short, the issue is trust, which is necessary for emotional intimacy, rather than age or economic class.

Race, homosexuality, age, and money are each capable of stirring up angst and prejudice, but more fundamental is the question of whether two people trust each other enough to have emotional intimacy. For without that, any relationship, of whatever color and stripe, is doomed or otherwise just a perpetuated shell within which two people escape life. Frank lies to Cathy in continuing to have sex with men. What is striking is that as he does so, she senses that he is keeping secrets. As Rose Castorini, Loretta’s mother in Moonstruck (1987), says of cheaters, eventually the other person in the relationship finds out. Her husband, Cosmo, a plumber, has been having an affair with Mona. “I want you to stop seeing her,” Rose tells him at the breakfast table with the rest of the family present. Cosmo “comes clean”—all he needs to say is, “Okay!”—because he knows that Rose really knows him, and therein lies the intimacy. In contrast, Cathy does not know Frank, and he does not know her. In bracketing identity politics, we can directly contrast the two couples without getting distracted and thus get a snapshot of what is essential for human relationships. Life without emotional intimacy is like living in a hollow shell far from heaven. So in the end, it doesn’t matter that Raymond is Black and Frank is gay; to get caught up on these attributes of the characters is to neglect the more fundamental point that trust is vital to any emotionally and physically intimate relationship. To borrow Nietzsche’s expression, we are all human, all too human.

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1. Annette Choi, “Record Number of Anti-LGBTQ Bills Have Been Introduced This Year,” CNN.com, April 6, 2023 (accessed December 13, 2023).

Wall Street

Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street (1987) was filmed in the midst of U.S. President Reagan’s push for financial deregulation. As a MBA student at the time, I volunteered to help a professor with his paper on financial deregulation. The theory behind why the NASD (the National Association of Securities Dealers) could self-regulate its members seemed solid enough to this idealistic youngster (i.e., me); I had yet to witness human nature in the field, and over decades. Similar to Marx overlooking the human need for economic compensation as an incentive to work on a daily basis (though I overlook it too in posting free essays online), I was blind to human nature in that I did not see that the NASD itself would protect even its most sordid members so to safeguard the reputation of the profession and, even more realistically, stick up for other “members” of the “club.” The Newtonian-like automatic mechanism whereby industry self-regulation would work was too beautiful to let human nature interfere. Similarly, when I worked in public accounting, I saw the “check mark” indicating that, “as per comptroller, discrepancy resolved,” was just one of several technical points in conducting an audit. The illusion of technique as somehow objective in the business world can shield practitioners from the ethical content. In case you’re wondering how this relates to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, the antagonist Gordon Gekko is the poster child for greed, and thus the reason why the public should not rely on industry self-regulation to police Wall Street. Bud Fox goes headlong into being Gekko’s insider-trading protégé, easily ignoring conscience personified by Lou Mannheim even though he and Bud work in the same brokerage office. In Freudian terms, the id easily defeats the superego. It’s not even a close fight.

This is precisely why externally-imposed (i.e., free of the influence of the political contributions made by Wall Street firms) government regulation is necessary in a Capitalist economic system. Even Adam Smith recognized such a need, and thus that his theory of moral sentiments would not be sufficient. Greed can destroy persons and even entire economies. Wall Street’s greed for the very profitable unregulated sub-prime mortgage-bonds (and the insurance policies on those financial derivative securities), for instance, led to the financial crisis of 2008. The Clinton administration had fought to keep those instruments unregulated. Even after the crisis, Wall Street refused to accept blame. Even after the fact, conscience was easily dismissable.

In the film, Bud Fox’s conscience, as represented by Lou, tells him that there are no short-cuts. Bud dismisses Lou’s wisdom culled from at least 20 years of experience. Bud’s position is that he can good later; got to get the wealth first though—as if doing good depends on being wealthy—but Lou is not referring to philanthropy after retirement from working on Wall Street. Later in the story, Lou senses that Bud has been cutting corners ethically and perhaps even legally and tells the young enterprising man that money makes a person “do things you don’t want to do.” Bud wants to profit off insider info about his dad’s company, however, in order to snag the big fish, Gordon Gekko.

Carl Fox, Bud’s working-class father, tells his son, “Stop going for the easy buck.” But Carl is going after Bud’s industry and thus misses an opportunity to counsel his son on his tactics. To Carl, financial brokerage itself is problematic in that it does not produce anything. He contrasts brokers with lawyers, but both mediate parties who make things. To Carl, GNP is constituted by goods—not services. This is interesting because as an airline mechanic, Carl must know that oil is important to keeping an engine going, and thus things to be produced.

In the 1980s in the U.S. at least, finance was king and business schools were booming. I must admit that I got sucked into that vortex, quite unaware of what was happening in higher education, for I did not even realize that I was reducing education to vocation in the process. In a MBA course, I read what Robert Reich wrote about the American economy increasingly comprised of paper entrepreneurism. Manufacturing had been a casualty in the recession of 1981. During that recession, my hometown lost practically all of its machine-tool industry to Europe and unemployment stood at 21 percent. Gekko’s view of wealth as a zero-sum game fit with the empirical reality of companies moving their factories abroad to capitalize on cheaper labor markets and less onerous regulations. Gekko could have written speeches for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. “America’s a second-rate power,” Gekko says at one point. The federal government is a “malfunctioning corporation” rather than a functioning democracy. The trade and budget deficits were just two indications that the government was in a pathetic way. Pro-business Reagan would hardly have agreed with Gekko’s negative view of corporate America, however.

In too many corporations, Gekko explains at a stockholder meeting, it’s a case of survival of the unfittest. Stockholders have ceded control to non-owner managers, who are after all really just bureaucrats. As a result, too many companies have become bloated. Referring to the company’s management sitting on the stage, Gekko complains that the company has 33 vice presidents. Gekko’s claim to be a liberator of companies has some merit. In breaking up badly run, overextended companies, hostile takeovers cut the fat and move the evolution of American Capitalism in the direction of greater efficiency and effectiveness. What about Bud’s father, Carl, who would lose his longstanding job were Gekko buy another company, Bluestar Airlines, and sell it for parts? Performing radical deconstructive surgery on the U.S. economy involves people’s livelihoods.

Carl has Gekko’s number. This is very clear. “He’s using you,” Carl says to his son. Carl knows that Gekko is lying about intending to keep the airline running. Bud dismisses his dad’s intuition. It does not help that Gekko has become a surrogate father and that Carl is at least in part jealous of Gekko, even apart from Gekko’s wealth. It is important to know that Bud has not gained a second father, for Gekko is not loyal to other people, and certainly not to a young salesman. Gekko lies to Bud about intending to keep the airline together and let Bud run it. That he actually thinks he could run a business merely because he has some experience executing trades shows just how delusional greed can be. Carl provides a reality-test here when he points out to his son that brokerage does not give a person experience tantamount to being able to manage a large business. Blinded by Gekko’s statement, “I’m going to make you rich,” Bud thinks he can do anything. Both Bud and Gekko are in fact greedy and consequently neither man pays any heed to insider-trading law or financial ethics. The S.E.C. is presumably on holiday.

Such is the delusion that can come from greed, the desire for more. This desire is treated as an end in itself. That is to say, that desire is assigned absolute value. God is knocked out of its perch, and relationships go by the wayside. The root is self-love, wherein the self is situated as the center and end of all; truth is a function of subjectivity.

“Greed is good,” Gekko states at the stockholder meeting. Greed works; it clarifies, which I assume means that it puts priorities in order. This goes for “love, life, and money.” Not surprisingly, Gekko admits to Bud’s fake girlfriend, Darien, with whom Gekko has been secretly sleeping with, that he has tried to avoid love. Presumably it gets in the way of his first priority, money. Lest it be concluded, however, that Gekko is the Devil incarnate, we get a glimpse of Gekko appreciating the beauty of the ocean while walking on the beach on Long Island. Even a greedy person is a human being. Even so,  greed eviscerates relationships, especially in a commercial context for there is no loyalty on which business relationships can be built, for the quick buck is all that matters.

Once when I was going to extend my hotel stay at a Merriott hotel, I asked that my rate be continued. The hotel manager refused, saying that hotels are like airlines so the rate is whatever is currently available online, given whatever supply and demand happen to be at the moment. This is in line with the hotel maximizing revenue on a nightly basis. The narrow fixation and the absolute priority on revenue cut off a business relationship from developing. Because hotels differ from airlines in that flights end whereas hotel stays can be extended, I knew that the company’s technocrats had adopted a flawed, ill-fitting model. I did not extend my stay at that hotel; rather, I went to another hotel, and, once checked-in there, I put the Merriott “loyalty" program card, which a front desk employee at the previous hotel had given me, in a trash can. One-sided loyalty is an oxymoron. To be sure, the Merriott company got some revenue from me, but the company stumbled over itself in that it lost much more (without knowing about the future lost business). Any marketing ploy that refers to hotel customers as “guests” is disingenuous because the “hospitality” industry, at least in the U.S., practices such radical conditionality in customer relations. From my observations and reactions to managers at that Merriott hotel, I could sense just how inimical greed is to human relationships in a commercial context.

In general, greed cannot tolerate the ongoing bonds that sustain human relationships, whether business or personal, if those bonds constrict a gain that could otherwise be snagged. Greed’s interests are immediate because the desire for more cannot refuse even a momentary gain even if it means diminishing or losing a long-term arrangement. Even a person’s or company’s reputation is no constraint if there is an easy gain to be had. This does not mean that greed eschews long-term investments and even business relationships that are advantageous (e.g., a discount for frequent business). It’s just that greed cannot be relied upon by counterparties to stay on course should conditions change. Like a cheating spouse, greed won’t let a vow get in the way of instant gratification.

In the film, it is not surprising that Gekko has been cheating on his wife by having sex with Darien. Even business relationships are difficult if greed is all that matters. Larry Wildman, who is trying to buy a steel manufacturer so to improve it rather than break it up (whereas Gekko would break it up), calls Gekko a “two-bit pirate and a blackmailer” who would sell out his own mother. Presumably no one on the street is going to go into a deal with Gekko because he can’t be trusted beyond what is in his immediate financial interest.

Therefore, greed is shortsighted not only in wrecking the finer things in life, such as love, but also in terms of business relationships and even in terms of maximizing wealth in a time horizon beyond immediacy.  Rarely does a person enthralled with greed look into the abyss and find his character. This, Lou tells Bud just before he is arrested at the brokerage office, is what keeps a person out of the abyss. A narrow, “pinhead” mentality is the natural funnel that forms when a person allows the desire for more (i.e., greed) to encompass one’s experience and even existence. Sartre claims that a person’s existence precedes one’s essence. The danger in subjectivity being the basis of one’s essence is that absolute truth is abdicated. Subjectivity itself can narrow without thereby recognizing this and thus being self-correctable. More than looking into an abyss is necessary to grasp a normative anchor. In the film, neither Gekko nor Bud even look into the abyss.

Valley of Peace

In Valley of Peace (1956), a Black American pilot and two Slovenian children head towards a valley in which the boy’s uncle lives—a valley of peace. In military terms, the valley has been designated as a “no-man’s” land, which means it is off limits to both the Nazi army and that of the Slovenian partisans.  As such, the peace of the valley is something more down to earth than the Biblical Garden of Eden. Even so, this ideal is a leitmotif in the film. For one thing, the two children repeatedly characterize that valley as not just where the boy’s uncle lives, but also as a utopia. I contend that the film makes a theological statement regarding the fallen world and the Garden of Eden. While only implicit, this statement is still more central to the film than is the significance of the race of the American pilot. I turn first to the fact that the American pilot who survives parachuting from a shot-up plane is Black.

The pilot’s name is Jim, which also happens to be the name of the escaped slave in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939). Both Jim-characters are fleeing violent people: Nazi troops and Southern slave hunters, respectively. Both characters are seeking freedom, so liberation is indeed a theme in The Valley of Peace. Even so, the Jim of this film, which was made after Huckleberry Finn, differs significantly from the ex-slave, who although moral did not show the strength of leadership and fight that the American pilot shows. The latter, for instance, fights along with a White partisan (Slovenian) soldier on an equal basis, whereas the ex-slave is never portrayed as commensurate with the Caucasians. So I think the emancipation theme is muted in Valley of Peace. Moreover, that theme is not central to the film, so claims to the contrary may be more about advancing an ideology than in being true to the film on its grounds.

More salient than the race of one of the characters is the contrast of the world of aggression in which the two children and Jim are trying to flee and the idyllic valley of peace that seems so utterly beyond strife that war could never interlard the serene mountain scenery shown in the last scene. The war-torn lives of the two children does not exhaust the aggression; even a dog bites the head off of the girl’s doll. This expansive application of aggression in an already war-torn film-world is more important than Jim coloring a doll-head black for the White girl. To be sure, the fact that she hugs that doll sets off American society by contrast, as does the fact that a partisan soldier quickly, almost instinctively welcomes Jim to the fight, in a “Hi . . . hi” quick exchange. But such cultural differences should be seen as being within the same paradigm: that of a fallen, deeply aggressive world where violence extends to other species (i.e., the dog decapitating the girl’s doll).

Step back from the internecine conflicts within cultures that themselves can be characterized as aggressive, and the wider chasm can be seen in the valley that lies between the fallen world and the mythic Garden of Eden. The film makes the point that the aggressiveness in the fallen, war-prone world that is populated by human beings is so strident that not even a valley of peace can withstand it and hold on for long. For the two armies do battle at the uncle’s farm in the valley of peace. The German commander says that the valley was merely a no-man’s land and, just like that, it is no longer off limits. The caprice of a mere decision can open the flood-gates of war over the hills into the valley of peace. 

The human instinctual urge of aggression must surely be salient in human nature, whereas any instincts supporting religiousity, which studies have shown are impacted by genetics (e.g., studies of biological and adopted kids), must sure pale in comparison. The Garden of Eden is itself just a no-man’s land in the film except to a child’s imagination. That archetypal emotion (peace)/image (fecund garden) is no match for the human propensity for violence. This, I submit, is the underlying message of the film. The valley of the (decapitated) doll dominates the valley of peace, which, it should be noted, is desolate. The horse is alone, and the uncle is gone. 

The implication is that peace is only possible where human interaction, and thus society, are absent. But it is not a case of moral man, immoral society, for the human being is an aggressive species, closely related to the chimp. Even within society, people can be isolated due to it. 

In Fassbinder's film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Emmi and Ali are isolated by the hostility of their neighbors, friends, and even family due to auslander (foreigner) prejudice (he is Turkish), agism (she is older than him), and racial prejudice (he has dark skin). In that film, the nature of prejudice does play a major role. The passive aggression from all sides gets to Emmi, whose adult children won't even speak to her upon hearing of her intermarriage to a much younger man, so the couple vacation to get away from all of the anger surrounding them yet at a distance. 

Being alone within society is not like being alone in the valley of peace, yet in both cases the verdict runs against our aggressive species. If our species is a social animal, then perhaps only within a narrow compass. Whether we like it or not, strife is the human condition, as constituted by 1.8 million years of hunting and gathering and populating, over whose vast expanse natural selection gradually adapted our species to an environment not at all like our modern society with its artificial institutional security.

Subordinate plotlines and depictions of characters should not be hyperextended at the expense of the central leitmotif of a film. In the case of Valley of Peace, an ontological truth regarding the human condition transcends emancipation. Of course, as far as the human race is concerned, Christians insist that the stain of original sin mutes or limits any real liberation but for salvation in the risen Christ. The film obviously does not venture that far, but stays with the leitmotif of an aggressive world and a valley of idyllic peace that eludes the two children and us. We will never (again?) enter into the mythic Garden of Eden.

Even contending ideologies on race, which can stimulate the illusion that race is the central theme or intent of a film, are and have been mere fodder for the human instinctual urge of aggressiveness. That urge itself, plastered on the walls of a paradigmatic world known as the fallen world, can be juxtaposed with the calmer, peaceful inclinations that project a mythic place, whether that be the Garden of Eden or Oz, but the latter elude us as if separated from us by, as Augustine wrote of revelation reaching us, a darken church window made of distortive colors. I once looked up at golden angels in a high stained glass church window as the sun shined one Sunday morning, but then I looked down at the other people in the choir. 

In the last scene of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas, shown in black and white rather than in color. The witch has been melted in Oz, so peace is presumably permanent there, but Miss. Gulch is presumably still alive in Kansas and she will most likely bike over again to take Dorothy's little dog, Toto, to the sheriff. Once when I was young, I saw the actress in person sitting on a giant rainbow chair on a lawn. Margaret Hamilton looked like any grandmother—no hint of Oz even in its dark side. The Emerald City was of course nowhere to be seen.