Presence

The medium of film has great potential in playing with ontology, the branch of philosophy that asks (and tries to answer) the fundamental question: What really exists?  Put another way, what does it mean for something to exist. The being of “to be,” as opposed to not-be may be thought of, can be labeled as existential ontology. Whereas in the Hindu Upanishads, being itself is Brahman, which pervades everything in the realm of appearance, the Abrahamic religions posit the existence of a deity that creates existence and thus is its condition or foundation. Creation ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing) is another way of grasping why the Abrahamic god is not existence, or being, itself, for that which brought (and sustains) existence into (and as) being cannot logically be existence itself. Fortunately for most viewers who lead normal lives, the film, Presence (2024), does not hinge on such abstractions; the salience of ontology, or what is real beyond our daily experiences (in the realm of appearance), is merely implied in there being an entity that intriguingly is only a presence. It is real to both the main characters in the film’s world and to viewers of the film because of the inclusion of supernatural effects that the entity is able to register in the perception of the family living in the house. Crucially, such effects do not overwhelm the subtlety in how the presence is known to exist (i.e., be real). In this way, Presence succeeds where Poltergeist (1982) and Ghost (1990) do not: Presence is more philosophically intriguing and thought-provoking than the latter two films, and is thus a better example of the potential that the medium of film has in engaging viewers in philosophy. Being less oriented to visually titilating supernatural effects, Presence can better engage the mind philosophically. 

Presence can be regarded as instantiating an innovative approach to the horror genre. At the film’s very beginning, Chris (husband to Rebekah and father to Chloe and Tyler) corrects Rebekah regarding Chloe’s shock at the apparent drug-overdose of her best friend: “It’s not life; it’s death.” The tenuousness of the line between the two conditions—existing and not existing—is a leitmotif throughout the film. The film challenges this dichotomy itself, for in that story-world, people really do exist non-materially after the body dies. The modern default of medicine (and, more specifically, psychiatry) is evident in the film as Chloe’s parents grapple with Chloe’s sense of a dead girl’s presence in the house, but the supernatural eventually manifests even to Chris, Rebekah, and Tyler. Their notions of what is real—or, what really exists—is widened to include the existence of ghosts. Ironically, it takes manifestations that register in physics, such as books moving visually on their own, for the family to accept as a fact that reality includes entities that reside beyond the limits of (living) humans’ perception and even cognition. The modern assumption that natural science must be impacted in a supernatural way for the reality of an entity that lies beyond our realm to be accepted is erroneous yet it is accepted by the filmmakers and their characters in the film; the ghost need not act in ways that burst through into being perceived by the family for the ghost to exist, or even be known to exist. The psychic who visits the house is proof of there being sensed/known to be a presence even though no supernatural effects are witnessed. In fact, she knows that the ghost exists before Chris, Rebekah, and Tyler do.

The extension or deepening of reality to include entities that are in another realm from that of living people is “the reality” that the film presents. The very subtly of the presence (putting aside the supernatural events) invites philosophical reflection perhaps even more than reading a book on ontology does, for film engages sight (into a story-world) more tangibly than can the imagination) and hearing. The Matrix (1999), for example, does the human mind a great service in manifesting the philosophy of solipsism, the view that our brains are really in vats such that all that we perceive is an illusion, in a way that no one can get by reading a book. The human mind is such that when presented with vivid visuals and distinct tones of voice, the staying power is arguably longer than are sentences in a book. In Presence, the psychic describes the entity as “a presence that does not want to be forgotten.” Ideas can be like that too; hence it is a shame when a scholar dies before or without having published one’s knowledge, and that films perish before having been preserved.

Presence is especially ripe for philosophical reflection in furnishing the psychic’s description of the realm unknown to us wherein ghosts exist; it is not just in there being such a realm and thus an extension or depth of reality beyond appearance that the film furnishes to audiences. Whereas Chris can only admit, “There is mystery in this world,” the psychic describes the entity as suffering and being confused, for the past and present can be simultaneous for it. The entity can even anticipate the tragic accident that will occur in the house and even sense that there is a role for the entity itself to play in the incident. That the role is to protect Chloe even though the psychic says that the entity is not Chloe’s dead friend expands the viewers’ archetype of ghosts being angry and harmful. That the entity in Presence was not Chloe’s friend when alive renders the helpful nature even amid the anxiety of being in a realm that is qualitatively different from that of living humans all the more foreign to viewers, and thus intriguing philosophically. In short, going on to describe rather than merely stipulate the existence of a realm that is real and yet has very different dynamics than does the realm in which we live out our lives makes the film more philosophically interesting and idea-stimulating. Even though the viewers do not get the psychological payoff in being able to enter that realm vicariously by being shown it in the film, the point that reality is not exhausted or completely known to us comes through loud and clear.

Kant’s nominal realm of reality as distinct from his phenomenal realm of appearances may in fact be the basic paradigm on which the film and its story-world is founded. The philosopher’s theory that the human mind structures perceptions of space and time along rational lines is itself on the level of a paradigm. So too is Einstein’s theory of physics in which gravity can bend space itself and effect time, slowing it in proximity to a great mass. The film depicts space not as inert or static, as the entity can emit energy of such intensity and force that ripples in space are visible. As for time, I have already mentioned the observation of the psychic that the past and present are perceived as occurring simultaneously by the entity in the realm in which it found itself suddenly to be in at death. The line between living and death may be slim and thus easily and even accidentally crossed without notice, as the theologian and early-modern philosopher Jonathan Edwards sermonized to young people in an age in which they died in disproportionate numbers, yet the two distinct realms in Presence are very different—the paradigm in which the entity exists challenging and stimulating commonly held assumptions that we have from the world in which we live. Rendering the relativity or situatedness of our lived-in paradigm transparent to us is a great contribution that film-makers can make (and some have made) to the Hegelian progress of our species in coming to know itself in successively greater freedom. For being freed ideationally from our innate paradigm in being cognizant of its basic assumptions relative to others is indeed of value.

Oppenheimer

An artificial sun rose on an otherwise dark night when the nuclear-bomb test named Trinity ushered in the era wherein our species’ aggressive instinct could render homo sapiens extinct. Given the salience of that instinctual urge—for we are related to the chimpanzee species—the wise (i.e., sapiens) species can be its own undoing. For it took a lot of intelligence in sub-atomic physics to invent the nuclear bomb, yet very little smarts went into deciding to use it against Japan, an enemy that would have lost anyway, in order to save American lives from having to invade the mainland (as if conventional bombs could not have reduced the casualties). Even less thought was put into the need to contain the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Expediency without heeding long-term risk is not a virtue. Kant wrote that even if our species were to institute a world federation, presumably having nation-states that would be semi-sovereign as a check against global totalitarianism, peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. This does not speak well of human nature, and this in turn renders the Trinity test something less than redeeming. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” In the film, Oppenheimer (2023), Robert Oppenheimer reads from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as a woman is on top of him in sexual intercourse. The irony of him being an instrument of mass destruction as director of the Manhattan Project and yet being engaged in potentially reproducing life with a woman is doubtlessly the point of that scene. Hindus who leap to the conclusion that Nolan is insulting their religion miss this point. Had the director included a scene in which Oppenheimer is praying, for example for the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time, a quote from the film, Gettysburg (1993) would have been similarly fitting. In that film, Col. Chamberlain of the Union army remarks, “What a piece of work is man . . . in action how like an angel!” Sgt. Kilrain replies, “Well, if he’s an angel, all right then . . . But he damn well must be a killer angel.” In the nuclear age, killer angel takes on added significance. The question is perhaps whether we have left angel behind as our species’ intelligence outdoes our species, whether in terms of nuclear war or rendering a climate unsuitable for us.

Even though Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, said that he had been unconcerned with whether people leave the theaters with something to think about, such as the ethical and political implications of nuclear weapons, including whether Truman should have used two such bombs against Japan; rather, the viewers are to be engaged emotionally in dramatic tension between the characters in the film. I consider this stance to be short-sighted, as it does not take advantage of the potential that the medium of motion pictures has to stimulate philosophical thinking, such as in ethics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. This benefit of films is why I write essays on films.  Even in spite of Nolan’s intention, Oppenheimer is a good example of the salience of ethics and political thought in film.

Although Nolan overdoes too many and too brief visuals of quantum mechanics from Robert Oppenheimer’s imagination, no doubt because he used the giant-screen “IMAX” film, and jumps around too much from scene to scene in Oppenheimer’s life, the emotional engagement of viewers in the dramatic tension between characters, especially between Oppenheimer and his antagonist Lewis Strauss, is formidable. Especially given the salience of Oppenheimer’s emotional wrestling with the ethical and political significance of the bomb, it is easy for viewers to hate Strauss, and Nolan satisfies our instinctual urge for justice by providing scenes in which Strauss is denied Senate confirmation to serve on Eisenhower’s cabinet and Oppenheimer’s “contribution” to the U.S. in World War II and his hacked reputation are recognized as President Johnson gives the protagonist an award. In being able to stimulate strong feelings of anger and relief in the viewers, Nolan is a master story-teller. Nevertheless, the film offers so much more. Nolan has outdone himself, even if it was not his intent.

The debate on whether President Truman should have used nuclear weapons against Japan is well-known in both Japan and the United States. The film would have been deficient had Nolan excluded that question. Because Truman comes off as dismissive and rude in his meeting with Oppenheimer, I suspect that Nolan wanted the film to have a pessimistic attitude on Truman’s decision, especially given the air-time given to Oppenheimer’s concerns. His motive in getting involved in the Manhattan Project is originally informed by his Jewish identity and geared to stopping the Nazis. The Japanese come off as an ordinary military foe relative to the Germans, so Oppenheimer naturally concludes that the rationale for the bomb has passed by the time of the Trinity detonation. Even in the nuclear age, “regular” wars, such as the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and Russia’s war against Ukraine, have been fought without resort to nuclear weapons. Once Germany had been defeated and the horrific, mass-scale atrocities stopped, World War II could have been viewed as reverting to a “regular” war. If so, the use of extraordinary weapons could have been viewed differently—as expedient.

Indeed, even the value of saving American lives (admittedly at the cost of many Japanese civilians) pales relative to being the first country to use a nuclear bomb and, the “genie being out of the bottle,” risking an arms race to the bottom. I am the destroyer of worlds is not a scriptural passage to be taken lightly. As evinced by that line, the film raises fundamental ethical and political questions beyond that of Truman’s decision.

By the 21^st century, Israel, a small country surrounded by Islamic countries, had already acquired nuclear weapons, and in 2022, the president of Russia repeatedly threatened the West that he might use such weapons against Ukraine. The world took notice at Putin’s attempt to normalize the use of the atomic bomb in a regular war, but even so, the warning of a shot which would be heard around the world in its dire significance of portended ruin did not stir any political discussion between world leaders, at least publicly, on the more urgent need for global safeguards.

In Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer’s concern is valid that, given human nature, large-scale nuclear war is almost inevitable at some point unless nuclear powers agree to mutually give up the bomb. Even in this respect, Oppenheimer—both the character and the movie—are too optimistic, for an international power to enforce the treaties would be necessary, again, given human nature. Among combatants in a war, the first casualty is truth-telling. If our species is indeed the wise, or sapiens, species of the homo genus, then it should be capable of not only uncovering quantum mechanics, but also self-regulating our most sordid and destructive instincts. We are animals, after all. If we are angels with a biological instinctual urge capable of sensing the presence of divinity, then alright, it must also be said that our death instinct can now also be fulfilled.