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.

The Seminarian

A closeted gay student at an evangelical seminary is a contrast with a rather obvious clashing point, with the predicted ending being that the student is kicked out and must find or come into his own identity free of exterior constraints. Yet The Seminarian (2010) smartly avoids that road well-traveled. Instead, the screenwriter risks giving theology a prominent, and perhaps even central place in the film. The venture is at odds with the bottom-feeder mentality of Hollywood represented in the film, De-Lovely (2004), in which Cole Porter’s bisexuality occupies center-stage. Comparing these two films, irony drips off the screen as De-Lovely, which is patterned after a theatrical musical, looks down on Hollywood and yet has a common theme, while The Seminarian is a film through and through and yet takes the high road by supposing that the viewers can and will stay through some substantive theology, which transcends social issues and even the dramatic.

Theologically, The Seminarian, through its protagonist Ryan, wrestles with the relation of God as love and the love that is in human relationships. Specifically, if God made us capable of feeling love for another person so to demonstrate that God is love, then why do we suffer in relationships in which there is love? Ryan, who is suffering because he is falling for a guy he met online but keeps postponing a second date, runs the risk of using theological analysis to work out a personal problem. He supposes that we suffer in matters of love here below because God suffers for want of love from us. The unmentioned implication is that Jesus suffers on the Cross because we have fallen short from loving God. We have hurt God and so stand in need of being redeemed in order to be able to love God such that it will not suffer from want of our love. The suffering servant on the Cross is not just a human suffering, but also the divine suffering. Yet doesn’t this imply that God is incomplete in some way? God may have created humans so to be loved by us—hence the hurt from having love denied—but God itself is the fullness of love. As Augustine and Calvin emphasize in their respective writings, God is love. This is the subtitle of the film!

So, as in most theological problems worth their salt, an internal problem can be found and begs to be solved. Although Ryan attempts a solution in his thesis, the problem of God being complete unto itself is not addressed in the film. Perhaps God voluntarily created a vulnerability within the divine when he created humans to love, and thus glorify, it. The second person of the trinity, the Logos, is a part or manifestation of God since before the beginning, and we can perhaps find the vulnerability—even if still when the suffering of God is potential—meaning before the Incarnation of Jesus as a god-man, fully human and fully divine, and even so fully able to suffer. In other words, the divine in Jesus suffers too; it is not just his human nature that suffers. Interestingly, the Gnostic text, The Gospel of Philip, has the divine leave, or abandon, Jesus on the cross just before he dies, and thus after he suffers. The question is perhaps whether love that is by its very divine-nature complete or whole yet suffer. If so, the pain would be from humans not loving God as we were meant (by God) to; the pain suffered by God would not be from a want of divine love.

It is significant, I submit, that a Hollywood film would give viewers such ideas to ponder rather than focus on the gay-guy-meets-conservative-religionists element of the narrative—a theme which had already enjoyed pride of place in many films that tease the tension that is in a society in motion. To be sure, Hollywood is indeed still capable of dishing out banal sugar to a superficial public, but this makes the choice made in the screenwriting of The Seminarian all the more noteworthy and deserving of emulation.

Hugo

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) is an intriguing story based on vocational functionalism, which in turn is based on deism. In other words, the film essentially applies an early modern theological "argument from design" to a pillar of modern society: one’s profession. In this regard, the film is not just a kids’ movie. The visual "3D" feature is not where the real depth of the film is located. The story achieves its fullness beyond the visuals in having several levels around a core philosophy, which serves as the story's core meaning. For this reason, Hugo has the potential to become a classic. In this essay, I explore the philosophy that lies at the basis of the film's story. I begin with deism and tie it to functionalism.

Deism posits that God is akin to a “clock maker,” designing Creation, “winding it up,” and then "stepping back" to let it work without divine intervention. The salient divine attribute is that of designer. The world, in turn functions as designed. Because the design comes from God, malfunction due to a problem of design is theologically problematic. Indeed, not functioning as designed can be viewed as evil, or at least immoral. Furthermore, if perfect design ensues from a divine designer, bad fits in nature's design must be held to be problematic. For example, the bodies of a man and woman to fit together quite well sexually; the same cannot be said of two men, yet what if the two men are in love? Those who value love are not likely to view the physiological relative lack of natural fit as problematic, yet the fact that the male and female fit is better is difficult for them to ignore. Lest it be objected that the relative lack of fit is not from God, it is difficult to hold that God is omnipotent and still maintain that design-induced malfunction is not sourced in God.

In Hugo, the deism is not made explicit, so its theological problems are not dealt with directly. Rather, the theology is implied as Hugo observes the world could be one big machine. If so, it follows that even people might be machines. Because each machine contains just the number of parts needed, if the world is a machine, then—Hugo reasons—he must have a purpose even though he doesn’t know it because he has no parents to tell him what it is. In other words, Hugo faces existential angst because he does not know his function.

Combining society-as-machine with deism, Creation itself is one machine consisting of machines. In one scene, Hugo dreams that he himself consists of the internals of a clock, and furthermore, that everything is wheels. An implication is that God does not create extra parts (or extra machines). Put another way, God does not permit unnecessary machines to go on existing. The orphanage represents the place where such machines—the reprobate—go. As enforced by the train station’s inspector, kids without parents do not work, and therefore much be removed from society. To work again, Hugo says, is to do what one is supposed, or meant, to do, as per how one was designed (by God); it is to have a purpose, without which one faces nothing short of nihilism. Essentially, this is functionalism, the philosophy that one is what one does. In business schools and especially in the business world itself, people tend to assume that function explains what one is. Even in ordinary conversation, someone is wont to say something like, “I am a lawyer.” The implication is that the vocation identifies who one is. Alternatively, the sentence could read, “I do lawyering.” This sentence refers only to function, rather than ontology.

The film identifies having a function—working (as a machine works and in the sense of having a job)—not only with what one is supposed or meant to do, but also with having a home. This is ethically problematic, for it implies that people who do not work do not deserve having a home. This problem provides the basis of the film’s dramatic tension. According to Hugo’s understanding, an orphan without a home (i.e., parents) cannot know, and therefore perform, his function; he cannot work as designed. He is thus surfeit in society-as-machine, whose parts can only be necessary. Kids that don’t work (at recognized jobs) do not legitimately exist, from the vantage point of society so conceived. More abstractly, meaning is presumed to depend on function, or being able to work. Everything, including everyone, is supposed to work—meaning being meant to have a particular function. This is the deist ethic.

What of mentally or physically impaired people who cannot work as designed? Does vocational deism justify the Nazi killing of members of society deemed worthless because they are retarded? Should unemployment compensation be stopped because the unemployed are not working? Moreover, does human worth come from function or design? A person who has not found his or her functional raison d’etre might wonder if he or she deserves to exist. This is essentially what Hugo is about.

Hugo’s objects of desire all represent means he thinks will lead him to discover what he is “meant” or “designed” to do—how he was designed to function. He is driven to overcome all odds to work; he is a machine, as are we all, and he is driven to discover his purpose. His antagonist is ultimately nihilism, which can be defined here in terms of not having a purpose. Home represents the security of having evaded non-existence (or expulsion from society, as in going to the orphanage) by having found one’s necessary function and thus being able to work “as intended” and thus as one should. Deism provides the theological background here, as the design is presumed to be the basis of purpose. Ironically, Hugo’s function is to fix human machines that no longer function as designed. His function is sourced in the design of his heart in having compassion for others who have broken down. Interestingly, he didn't have to recognize his design or function in order for it to work throughout his journey. To function vocationally making use of one's design (e.g., as in Asa Butterfield being a natural actor), however, one must first recognize the natural ability in order to apply it in a job.

Hugo is an amazing story in covering several levels precisely because it goes from Deism (abstractly) to functionalism as vocation (tangible). In laboring (i.e., working), a person works like a machine works. For the viewer, the questions go from whether function proffers worth to whether our function from design is that which we use in our work. In the documentary on Woody Allen on PBS (2011), the comic points out that some people can draw really good pictures, such as of horses. Allen admits that he does not have that talent. He goes on to say that jokes, however, naturally come to him, even while he is taking a walk. It is simply how he sees the world; the jokes just come to him. He has an aptitude that is natural for him. The obvious implication is that each person naturally does some things better than other things. If a person has no idea of what comes naturally—perhaps because he or she is so close to it—that person could presumably benefit greatly by discovering it. There is indeed very little choice in one's "gifts." They are what given in one's design. If a person realizes and functions in line with one's natural excellences, one is on what Joseph Campbell called “the blissful path.” However, if worth is not derived only or primarily from function, then the blissful path does not depend on discovering one's natural talents; being transcends doing. In Hugo, this issue is front and center, with Deism serving as the foundation.

See related essay: "Oscars: Beyond Eye-Candy"