Mickey 17

Ethical, theological, and political issues are salient in the film, Mickey 17 (2025), which is about Mickey Barnes, a character who is repeatedly cloned on a space-ship and on a distant planet. The one-way trip alone takes over four years, during which time Mickey is tasked with dangerous tasks because when he dies, another clone is simply made. A mistake is made when the 18^th clone of Mickey is made even though the 17^th is still alive; they are “multiples,” which is a crime for a theological reason. I contend that reason is erroneous, as is the political, ethical, and theological regime that undergirds clones being expendable. 

In a flashback to back on Earth, a man who represents an evangelical Christian perspective urges lawmakers to criminalize multiples even on other planets because a soul cannot have two bodies. Such a claim turns the soul into something imaginary—an abstraction only. In the movie, that no two clones of a person have the same personality suggests that they do not have the same soul. They make different choices and can even have different values, as when Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are at odds on whether to kill Timo, a pilot who had been in business with the original Mickey. Both clones have the memories of the original Mickey, yet the two clones have very different attitudes towards Timo. Mickey 18 is more aggressive than Mickey 17, and yet the former decides in the end to sacrifice his life to kill Kenneth Marshall, an autocrat who fixes elections by the Assembly in order to stay in power on the mission. Furthermore, that Kai Katz prefers Mickey 17 romantically while Nasha is really turned on sexually by Mickey 18, and even that Nasha wants both clones for herself as a three-some sexually implies that the two clones are different people. In effect, they are identical twins, and even such twins do not share the same soul. Although not clones by any means, my brothers and I could not be more different from each other. That the clones of Mickey differ suggests that the cloning “printing” doesn’t replicate the DNA exactly. That Mickey 18 is so different than Mickey 17 immediately after being “printed” means that the differences cannot be due to environmental factors. Therefore, the theological argument that two clones should not be alive simultaneously because they share the same soul fails.

The argument that multiples is against the “natural order” also fails because cloning itself is not natural. So if multiples are objectionable theologically for this reason, then cloning should be illegal not only on Earth, but also on colonies on other planets. Furthermore, the argument used that human cloning is a sin, but it can be sued by humans on spacecrafts and on other planets is a non-starter, for a sin is a sin, no matter where it is being committed.  The argument seems to be that if the sin takes place far away from the rest of us, and if the sin has unintentional beneficial consequences, which Augustine claimed of sin in general (for otherwise, our species would have self-destructed), then consequentialism trumps the duty not to sin. In the utilitarian ethical principle of the greatest pleasure to the most people, the suffering of the clones of Mickey can be said to be ethical because the clones’ dangerous tasks make it possible for everyone on the ship to survive. That the same rationale could ethically justify the Nazi’s concentration camps and eastward expansion strongly suggests that utilitarianism fails if the distribution of suffering is concentrated within a collective.

Just as the ethics of cloning for use in dangerous tasks is ultimately answered by blowing up the cloning machine at the end of the film, so too is organized religion eschewed. It is very significant that Kenneth Marshall accidently lets out the secret that the company behind the mission is in fact a church, and that the point of the colony is to create “the one and only pure colony planet,” meaning that the human inhabitants are genetically pure.

The religious auspices make use of political autocracy disguised as democracy. It is no accident that at one point, Kenneth and the audience of his show give each other the Nazi raised-arm salute. Kenneth’s religious hypocrisy extends to his willingness to have the clones suffer even apart from in performing dangerous tasks, such as breathing in a virus in the planet’s air so a vaccine could be made so everyone could venture outside without dying. The callousness of the “church, I mean company,” towards suffering is matched by Kenneth’s willingness to subvert elections to keep himself in power on the planet. That political resistance develops suggests that it is a natural consequence of unchecked power being exercised on a captive population that cannot leave. In the end, Mickey 18 blows himself up because Kenneth would also die. Kenneth had strapped bombs to Mickey 18 with impunity, even though the Assembly was in theory democratic rather than autocratic. It is significant that after Kenneth, legitimate trials began and even Nasha, whom Kenneth unilaterally declared to be a criminal, is elected to the Assembly.

The republic wins in the end, whereas the church and its prelate/dictator are discredited. Although in this respect the film has a happy ending, for the good guys win in the climax, what the film says about the hostility and even aggression that is in human nature even under the auspices of religion is a severe indictment of the species. This indictment is perhaps most revealed in the severe suffering that many of the Mikey clones must endure on the orders of other humans.

Empirically, the Milgrim experiment at Yale in 1968 found that 40 percent of the people in the study thought they were giving severe electric shocks on other people even though those people had been screaming at the previous level of shock, and just for being wrong in answering questions! Ironically, at the same university nearly 60 years later, and fifteen years after I had finished my studies there, two police departments, one under a city government and the other under the non-profit Yale Corporation, plus Yale’s proto-police security guards, kept up constant and overlapping “presence” on and around campus; in fact, by 2025, Yale’s police unit had accepted the FBI’s invitation to Yale to participate in counter-terrorism tactics used on students. The risk of autocratic passive-aggression even just to intimidate by an overwhelming “presence” as a deterrent was real where the film was screened (and where the director, Bong Joon Ho, would speak on May 5, 2025). The tactic itself evinces not only a very negative assumption about the human nature of Yalies (and local residents), but also reveals the sordid nature of those people using the tactics. In fact, the “overkill” in “presence,” which compromised the otherwise relaxed atmosphere on a college campus, can itself be viewed as hostile and autocratic, not to mention disrespectful of students and academia more generally. Turning around, and, as I had to do quite unexpectedly, having to walk off a sidewalk on campus while talking with students and faculty because a Yale police car was driving on the sidewalk on a weekday morning with red and blue lights on, and even headlights blaring, even though the car was only on a patrol, is at the very least uncomfortable and definitely antithetical to an academic atmosphere, where shows of the threat of might does not make right.

Yale security and police stationed outside of the classroom building where the film was screened.

With lights glaring, a Yale police presence "screens" outside after the screening of the film.

More yellow, blue, and red lit-up stationary "patrols" nearby after the film on April 19, 2025

It is interesting, in terms of the theological-political nexus in the film, that Yale was founded by Christian Calvinist ministers who had been at Harvard but would not tolerate the Unitarians having any influence. The dichotomy of the elect (saved) and the rest of humanity in Calvinism can easily result in repression of the latter, as if the rest of us were sub-human and thus needing to be constantly watched (which is a form of passive aggression). In the film, clones are viewed as such by the elite of the “church,” who are not bothered by their respective consciences for inflicting much suffering on the Mickeys even beyond that which results from the dangerous tasks for the good of the whole. Whether in the fictional film or on the ground at Yale, where the movie was screened and the director would soon thereafter give a talk, power without being checked can easily be used by human nature in very unethical and anti-spiritual ways.

The question from the movie is not whether each clone has his own soul, for in choosing to sacrifice his life, even Mickey 18 has a good soul, but, rather, whether Kenneth and his wife have souls, and even whether their “church” is at all religious or spiritual rather than a basis for autocracy being used to conduct medical experiments on clones and construct a genetically pure colony, although presumably with an underclass of servants who obviously would not be treated well, as they would not be among a Calvinist elect.

Return to Haifa

Return to Haifa (1982) is a film in which the political element of international relations is translated into personal terms on the levels of family and individual people. The establishment of Israel by the UN is depicted in the film as being accomplished not only incompetently, but in negligence of likely human suffering. In fact, the suffering of the indigenous population may have been intended, given the operative attitude towards those people as animals. That the human being can be so dehumanizing in action as well as belief ultimately makes victims of all of us, even across artificial divides. This is precisely what the film depicts, with the victims being the active characters while the real culprits remain for the most part off-camera. The viewer is left with a sense of futility that can be undone by widening one’s view to include the antagonists, who are not passive. It is not as if fate inexorably brought about the Nakba (or even the scale of the atrocities in Gaza in the next century, which, as the film was made in 1982, cannot be said to be anticipated by the filmmaker—though perhaps it could have been).

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestianian couple expelled from Haifa in the Nakba that took place in 1948, return in 1967 to what had been their house in Haifa. Recognizing that furniture does not make a home, Saeed and Safiyya are particularly interested in whether their now-grown son, Khaldun, whom they abandoned when they fled from their house in the Nakba, would now want to live with them in the occupied territory or remain with Miriam, the Israeli who lives in the house and adopted Khaldun. To the twenty-year-old Khadun, whom Miriam had named Dov, Saeed and Safiyya are strangers. All of them are victims.

That Miriam had survived the Holocaust and is empathetic to the Palestinian couple having lost their house keeps her from being the film’s antagonist. That, in a flashback, she criticizes the Israeli soldiers for throwing a dead Palestinian boy like a piece of wood into a truck during the Nakba also goes to her character, especially given that, in a flashback further back, she witnesses Nazi troops shooting her own son. Moreover, not only is it inappropriate to blame her for leaving Europe to live in the Jewish state after the Holocaust and even for moving into the empty house in 1948, she is worthy of praise for adopting an infant and raising him. To be sure, she is blameworthy for having lied for years to Dov about the circumstances of his infancy, and Saeed rightly makes this point. Even so, Saeed, Safiyya, and Miriam, and even Khadun/Dov, share the experience of victimhood even if the son is not aware of his own and he lacks empathy for his birth parents, who had lost not only their house, but their son too. In fact, he blames them for having abandoned him in the house when they (and everyone else in the town) was fleeing gun-fire without notice. Lest it be thought that he, or even Nazi Germany is the prime antagonist, I submit that squalid role goes to the nascent state of Israel, with the UN as the negligent accomplice.

With home, belong, and return arguably being the three concepts that underlie the film’s narrative, the thesis can be described in the following terms: Macro-political decisions and resulting societal-level events have social and psychological impacts that are destructive and even ruinous to individuals and families. The film’s thesis resonates with Israel’s disproportionate reprisals against Palestinians in Gaza—rendering over a million homeless and short of food for months on end as of early 2025, when I saw the film. It is one thing to read that 55,000 Gaza residents were dead or missing and to look at photographs of the demolition of cities in the occupied enclave, and quite another to be there and see the horrendous impact on individuals there. Put another way, it is one thing to read of Israel’s president claiming that every resident of Gaza was guilty (and thus deserved to suffer) after Hamas’ foray into Israel proper in October of 2023, and quite another to comprehend the scale of the subsequent devastation in Gaza. Upon assuming office in 2025, U.S. President Trump characterized Gaza as a demolition zone. Relative to that, the Nakba that is portrayed in the film can be regarded as tame.

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya arrive by ship with other European Jews in 1948. In spite of having suffered atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the human beings arriving in the new state of Israel felt empathy for strangers. “All we know,” one migrant says, “is that we are going to homes owned by others.” Not even having suffered in Nazi Germany gives those new arrivals any presumption. I submit that this attitude is in start contrast to Israel in how it needlessly aggressively managed the Nakba in 1948. Even the UN, which left it to the Israelis to uproot the indigenous residents, can be blamed, especially considering the reference in the film to the Israeli attitude in which Palestinians are regarded as though animals to serve the Jews. From such an utterly dehumanizing attitude, not only the Nakba, but also the huge atrocities in Nazi Germany, almost a century later, in Gaza, are all to easy for the aggressors to justify to themselves. Furthermore, if indeed the attitude was held by the new government of Israel in 1948 and its military, the UN can be reasonably judged as woefully negligent in failing to supervise on the ground the transfer of land in the process of the creation of the state.

Such a momentous political decision as creating a state in a territory which is already populated and the indigenous population has not consented has the potential for abuse against families and individuals, as the results of the Milgram and Stanford psychological experiments confirm; humans given power have an excessive inclination to harm others. This fact is hardly limited to the Nazi and Israeli governments, and international governmental infrastructure should be up to the task of being able to safeguard our questionable species from its own nature. Return to Haifa can be viewed as making the point through narrative that people across divides can all be regarded as victims from political decisions being taken without considering the possibility (or probability) that one group might view another as consisting of service animals rather than as other human beings, who having a rational nature (Kant) and sentiments (Shaftsbury), are worthy of being treated as not merely means, but also ends in themselves.

The Brutalist

It is easy to conclude that Adrien Brody “steals the show” in his depiction of Laszio Toth in The Brutalist (2024), a film about a Jewish architect (and his wife and niece) who emigrates to Pennsylvania from Hungary after World War II. As I was stretching my legs after watching the very long yet captivating film in a theater, a woman doing the same declared to me that Adrien Brody had definitively stolen the show. I wasn’t quite sure, though I perceived Guy Pearce’s acting out Harrison Van Buren to be emotionally fake, even forced. In understanding the film, it is vital to go beyond the obvious characters (and actors) to acknowledge the roles of two silent yet very present characters as definitive for the meaning of the film. Before revealing those characters, the proverbial elephant in the room must be discussed: Being Jewish even in the modern, “progress”-oriented world.

It is not long after Laszio sits down to talk with his initial host—Attila, the cousin—that the religious question comes up. Although Attila is Jewish, his wife Audrey is Roman Catholic and Attila has converted. Laszio shocked not only at this, but that Attila has changed his last name to the Americanized Miller. In the next scene, set outside, we see a large “Jesus Saves” lit sign in the background; in the foreground is bread-line, which is out of bread. Jesus may save souls, but apparently not hungry bodies. The implication is that Attila sold his soul in giving up his religion to fit in.

It is not that Laszio carries any grudge against Christianity; it had not been the force behind the Nazi’s Final Solution, and thus behind the concentration camp where both he and his wife Erzsébet had (separately) been sent. “Dreams slip away,” Harrison observes. Laszio can of course relate; he says at one point that he had no choice but to come to America. No longer a working architect, and unfairly deprived of housing by his cousin once in Pennsylvania, Laszio must stay in homeless shelter and shovel coal for work. To him, America is no shining city on a hill; he tells his wife at one point, “They don’t want us here. We are nothing; we are worse than nothing.” He has internalized the external prejudice against Jews, and perhaps may feel on some level that his internment in a concentration camp to have been justified. The Brutalist is not a light film.

To be less than nothing may be justified by the infliction of suffering and even death on others, as the Nazis did; to be forced to endure the sting of such intense hatred is on the contrary not to be less than nothing. Interestingly, we could say that the innocent civilians in Gaza in 2023-2024 were not less than nothing; less than nothing is applicable instead to the Israelis who can be implicated in and killed 55,000 Gaza residents and made more than a million homeless (even bombing in a tent camp). As these numbers far exceed the 1,200 Israelis who died and the couple hundred Israeli hostages, justified natural justice was also far exceeded by vengeance. That the Jewish deity saves that for itself makes this verdict all the more damning.

Just the president of Israel was wrong in his insistence that every resident of Gaza was guilty and thus deserved to suffer, so too it would be wrong to conclude that every Jewish person was culpable for the horrendous over-reaction in killing tens of thousands of Gaza residents and making many, many more homeless and facing famine and a shortage of medicine. Jewish people generally need not be in the awkward psychological position of both presuming to be the chosen people and a people that is worse than nothing.

Just as Laszio suffers wrongfully in interiorizing the sentiment of prejudiced people that Jews are worse than nothing, he does not have to carry his memory of the death-camp into his architecture. A drawing of one of his buildings is labeled, “The past in the present,” which conflicts with his intention that his buildings not only endure stylistically, but are apart from time. The underlying problem is that a human artifact cannot both hold on to the past and yet have an ambiance of eternity. The huge, cement building that he designs for Harrison looks like a giant tomb, such as the ones constructed in ancient Egypt. At the same time, the dark, hard-solid walled rooms could pass for the gas chambers used by the Nazis to kill people at the concentration camps. Laszio carries his dark past into his architecture in the “new world.” That he intentionally uses light to show a Christian cross in the distinctly Christian chapel in the building may connote the hope that had been utterly absent in the death camps. Laszio’s pride in this architectural achievement is ironic, given both his skeptical reaction to his cousin’s conversion to Catholicism to fit in, but it is not as if Laszio might convert to Christianity. After all, “Jesus Saves” is associated in the film with no bread left in the bread-line.

I submit that Christianity and the Holocaust are the two silent partners, or characters, in the film. That the consulting architect is a Protestant is no accident, for the city wanted assurance because Laszio is Jewish. Christianity is also present in Attila and Audrey’s bedroom in the form of a crucifix on a wall, and perhaps most explicitly in Harrison’s insistence that the chapel be distinctly Christian, rather than a prayer room as Laszio initially proposes. The light shown in the chapel from the cross on the ceiling cannot be missed in the otherwise gray tomb-monstrosity of a building.

As for the Holocaust, its subtle imprints can be found throughout the film. Perhaps that character is most felt—most present—not in the tomb-like rooms in the partially constructed community center—and it is odd that the public would want to spend leisure time surrounded by walls, floors, and ceilings of cement—but when slabs of cement are loaded onto a freight train. The heavy, almost deafening thuds on a drum, the iron tracks, and the train itself conjure up the trains on the way to the Nazi death-camps. When the train crashes, the fire may even evoke the ovens in the camps. It is perhaps no accident that the film has Harrison fire and evict Laszio (recall that his own cousin, the Christian Attila, kicked Laszio out earlier). The sudden freight of having to fend for oneself (and one’s family) is felt existentially, and such a fear must have been felt by the victims of the Holocaust. To subject anyone to such freight is to render oneself, rather than the victim, as worse than nothing.

Both Christianity and the Holocaust are very much present in the film, and yet obliquely so. The implicit message may be that as much as we want to be free of the past, it’s imprint can be found all around us. Why didn’t Christianity come to the rescue of the Communists, Jews, and gays in the Holocaust? Both hope and despair seem to coexist without cancelling each other out. What lies beyond Laszio’s attraction to the cross in the context of the tomb, and his unconscious interest in reimaging the dingy inner sanctum of a death camp? Why didn’t “Jesus Save” as the neon sign in the film insists?  To be free of the past does indeed lie in Laszio’s free-will, as it does for the rest of us, even though existential trauma, if left to its own devices, can reverberate through time if the severity is sufficiently intense to leave imprints in not only the human mind, but also its constructed artifacts. The human mind is perhaps too fragile for what people are all too willing to inflict on others. Not even our religions seem to be enough.

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) can be classified superficially as a coming-of-age film, for Hanna, the protagonist, starts out being immaturely contemptuous of her family’s ethnic and religious heritage and current practice. She tries to skip the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. That her aunt Eva had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp makes no difference to Hanna—that is, until she is transported back as her aunt’s cousin (for whom Hanna was named) and experiences the camp herself. Whether she is really transported back in time (and if so, how?) or is merely dreaming is answered in the end but not so blatantly as would insult the viewers’ intelligence. Then again, it’s not every film that has allusions both to theology and The Wizard of Oz. The different ways in which that movie is incorporated and alluded to in this film are actually quite sophisticated in extending the viewers’ sense of synchronicity beyond the film’s narrative.

In the first scene, Hanna is getting a tattoo; it’s a flower; the tattoo she gets later is of something else altogether: a number at a Nazi death camp.  At the tattoo parlor, she derides Passover as “a cracker thing;” driving home, she turns the radio from a station immediately when a man starts to describe what Passover is. Been there; done that. She is so over it. At home, she asks her mother if she has to go to the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. Her mother replies, “We’re going because it’s important; it’s important because I say it’s important.” In other words, the ritual is important to Jews, and she is Hanna’s mother. Period. But not end of story.

Hanna does go with her parents, and once at her grandparents’ house, she asks her aunt Eva why she never talks about her experience at a death-camp. Her aunt explains that the experience at the death camp was so far from Hanna’s world that it would mean nothing to her. In other words, Hanna has no idea how good she has it, and how bad it can get—how astonishingly bad humans can treat each other out of hatred. This can be taken as the baseline for Hanna’s character arc (i.e., to measure how much she is to change).

During the Seder meal, Hanna’s grandfather says, “We would still be enslaved had God not brought us out of Egypt.” This is of course figurative; even if historical evidence were to be discovered of Moses (and that he was in Egypt), no Jews alive in the 20^th century were old enough to have lived in ancient Egypt. So it is not “they” literally who would still be enslaved. Aunt Eva’s lived-experience of being enslaved, however, is quite literal in the film’s story-world, and quite consistent with historical accounts by actual prisoners. It is important, I submit, to distinguish story from experience. This is not to deny that stories cannot have valid religious and ethical meaning; it is to say that the film goes beyond that.

During the Seder, Hanna doesn’t want to get up to open the front door to let Elijah in. Prodded to do it, she goes to the front door of the house, opens the door, looks outside, then slowly walks backwards before turning sidewise to walk down a hall that heads away from the dining room, where the people are. The hall becomes the dream, if it is a dream. After walking a bit, she is in another house. The camera doesn’t look back, so we don’t know if there is a portal that closes, or if she walked through a wall, or suddenly appears in the room. He aunt Eva is there as a teenager and is with her mother. Hanna inhabits Eva’s cousin, who also lives there, as her parents were taken away by the Nazis. Hanna is of course surprised when Eva tells her that she has been sick and that they are first cousins, and she has no idea that Eve is the same person as her aunt in New York. Hanna was named after Eve’s cousin and is said to have a similar appearance.

The two young women go to an outdoor wedding, and Eve’s mother joins them there before the Nazi SS shows up to take all of the Jews immediately to Auschwitz. “You don’t need to go home to get your things; all your needs will be provided,” the commander lies. At the camp, Eva and Hanna stay in the same bunkhouse for some time. To calm the fears of the young children, Hanna tells them stories at bedtime. Hanna tells part of the story of The Wizard of Oz, an American film released in 1939 whom Eva’s cousin could not possibly have seen; hence Eva thinks her cousin has a very active imagination in telling such a story. At one point, Hanna tells the kids that Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home.” Everyone in the room could relate. There’s no place like home. Aware of her distant “other life” in America, Hanna says out loud, “I used to think this is a dream; now, I’m not so sure.” Eva seems to question her cousin’s sanity at that point. This is an instance of excellent screenwriting, for the film not only loosely follows the framework of The Wizard of Oz in that the protagonist is transported to distant place in what might be a dream, but also has Hanna explicitly reference the earlier film in the dialogue!

Film has great potential in terms of multiple layers, or levels traversing both dialogue and a basic framework in that this gets the mind thinking beyond what the narrative itself can stir up. A sense of synchronicity can be experienced by the viewers that goes beyond the narrative because something empirically extant is being referenced. More on this later, so hold onto this idea.

Hanna’s character arc is moving while she is at the camp, and this arc does not revert when she “wakes up” back home in her bed surrounded by her relatives (which Dorothy does too!). At the camp, Hanna asks the guy who asks her out, “Will you teach me to pray?” He is not sure how to pray. This is perhaps the film’s indictment of modernity. Of course, a religious topic is not the typical dialogue one would expect from two teenagers discovering their mutual sexual attraction. The guy tells Hanna that he and some other men will try to escape. Now, Hanna’s uncle Abe, Ava’s brother, said during the Passover meal that an escape attempt had failed in the camp, so Hanna, now at the camp, makes the connection and tries to stop her new beau from going. In fact, she warns all of the guys planning to escape. They don’t believe her, just as Eva doesn’t believe that she lived in America. How the guys or Eva know any of this about Hanna? Her “previous life” could only be known to her. Similarly, in the Book of Genesis, to everyone else, God’s decree to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is not revealed to other people, so they would naturally doubt Abraham’s theological claim; accordingly, Abraham could only be guilty of attempted murder. Hanna could hardly convince anyone in the camp what letting Elijah in led to or that the escapees would be caught and killed.  

The escapees are indeed caught and hanged. Hanna is distraught and the rabbi wails in Hebrew, calling out to Yahweh in existential anguish. Back in the barrack, Hanna tells Eva, “It’s too painful!” Eva tells her not to wish she were dead. “Your stories are keeping us alive; they give us hope.” Victor Frankl writes that even in such a dire, elongated circumstance, the human mind still seeks after meaning.

Three of the other prisoners are stretched to their emotional limit when the camp’s commandant comes into the barrack to take one woman’s baby away from the mother. “If you don’t let me go with my baby,” she tells the man, “I will kill you.” Another woman, Eva’s mother, tells him that he will burn in hell. He admits that he probably will, without caring much at all about that. She tries to attack him physically, but is too weak and falls into him. The Nazis take the baby, the mother, and Eva’s mother. Eva is obviously beside herself.

The next day, Hanna tells the rabbi that she wants to have a Seder later at the barrack. Hanna’s character arc is really moving! In the meantime, a Nazi guard teaches another guard how to shoot at close range to kill by having him aim his rifle at Hanna’s bent-over back at close range as she works outside. Eva talks the guard out of killing her cousin, saying, “She’s a good worker.” That night, Eva tells Hanna, “I call myself Rivka.” This is her secret name; no one else knows it. Hanna gives Eva hope, saying “You will survive; I promise you.” At her Seder that night in the bunkhouse, Hanna actually volunteers to open the door to Elijah. Before, at her grandparents’ house, she resisted going to the door because she wasn’t into the whole religion thing; at the camp, she is hesitant because she is risking her life in doing so. She is risking her life for religion. Sure enough, when she opens the door, a Nazi guard is right in front of the door and sternly tells her to shut the door.

The next day, while the prisoners are outside working, Eva is coughing. If the Nazis notice, they will assume not only that she would no longer be able to work, but also that her continued sickness could compromise the health of the workforce. Knowing this, Hanna coughs so she rather than her cousin will be taken to be gassed. Hanna even walks up to the Nazis to take their attention off Eva. The sacrifice is made; Hanna is gassed with the sick prisoners and Eva survives. The selfless compassion that Hanna feels and acts on while she is at the camp stands out, especially to Eva, whose compassion is also evident. Similar to how Gandhi’s compassion, or at least helpfulness, extended even to individual British officials even while is was strongly opposed to their policies, which included putting him in jail, the film’s screenwriter could have had Hanna and Eva extend their innate compassion to individual Nazis at the camp. The human need for meaning can be met by such inconvenient compassion and helpfulness. It would be interesting to see how such a movie would play out.

In the actual movie, Hanna wakes up as soon as she is dead in the gas chamber. Like Dorothy, Hanna is in a bed surrounded by her relatives. Black and white film is used in Hanna’s scene, just as it is when Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas. Admittedly, there are some notable differences. The scene of Hanna waking up gradually goes back to color, whereas Kansas is always in black and white in The Wizard of Oz. Also, whereas Hanna wakes up from having just experienced dying, Dorothy wakes up having just discovered that it was in her power all along to go home; she just needed to click her ruby red slippers three times and say, “There’s no place like home.” Hanna was vanquished by the Nazis, whereas Dorothy vanquished the Wicked Witch of the West.

Nevertheless, the allusion to The Wizard of Oz is conveyed—the macro “dream plot” and Hanna telling part of Dorothy’s story at the camp being the other two allusions. Being three different ways rather than only in the dialogue, the cinematic devices are more profound in terms of viewer experience. Qualitatively different modes (i.e., different in kind) expand the significance of a film to the viewer while it is in progress because the film becomes transparent in being a film and is related to “the real world.” The Wizard of Oz exists empirically, rather than just as part of The Devil’s Arithmetic. The synergy thus extends beyond evoking some of the narrative of the former film in the latter. The drawback, or cost, is that the suspension of disbelief—being in the story world psychologically—is breached.

Once back, Hanna realizes that her aunt Eva is the same person as Rivka at the camp, so Hanna reveals to her aunt the secret name that Eva only used when she was young. There is no way that Hanna could know it, and Eva knows this. Hanna provides even more proof to her aunt (and to the viewers who are trying to figure out if Hanna, like Dorothy, merely had a dream). Referring to Eva’s cousin, Hanna says, “She saved your life and went . . . “Eva interrupts with jaw-dropping astonishment, “instead of me. How do you know this?”  Hanna replies, “Maybe it’s from my imagination; maybe it’s from a dream I had. I don’t know. But what I don’t understand is how so many people could be punished: men, women and babies.” The compassion that Hanna has discovered deep within amid dire circumstances of immense suffering transcends her metaphysical curiosity—and perhaps even any curiosity she might have about whether letting Elijah in means that Elijah used a supernatural miracle to save Hanna from herself, in which case she was really at the camp, transported back in time to inhabit (or possess) another person (Eve’s cousin). Aunt Eva seems to sense something supernatural has occurred, so she asks Hanna, “Do you know how to talk to God?” Hanna answers, “So quietly that only God can hear me.” Eva says in a profound tone, “Oh yes.” Both women realize that it was no dream; that she was actually at the camp. “And I will always remember what happened. Always,” Hanna says. Her aunt admonishes her, “Yes, remember always.”

Perhaps in opening the door at her grandparents’ house to Elijah, Hanna opened the door to something supernatural, which is commonly associated with religion via myth. The film’s narrative is a story that contains a supernatural element, and this can be a powerful way of conveying deep meaning. As much as the supernatural makes for a good story, I submit that it is Hanna’s selfless compassion for the other prisoners, including Rivka, that in the end defines and differentiates Hanna not only from the other prisoners, but also from the person whom she was at the beginning of the story. In her own mind once she is back home in her grandparents’ house, her compassion transcends questions of the supernatural. To some extent, this might be because finite beings bound by the laws of nature (i.e., natural science) cannot know whether a certain event is supernatural; it may also because the point of the supernatural in stories is to inculcate compassion. It is no accident that the film ends with Hanna happily singing at the dining room table with her relatives. She may have died at the camp, but her compassion lives on.

The Bride and the Curfew

Our species is capable of horrific cruelty that defies any claim of having a conscience, and yet we can be willing to override our otherwise intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation for an ethical principle; that is to say, a person can choose to lay down one’s life for another person. Our biological nature—how we are hardwired—includes both vicious aggressiveness resembling that of chimps and yet the ability to “act on principle” in selfless love. In the Albanian film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), these two facets of human nature are on display, in direct contact as it were, such that the sheer breadth in human nature is made transparent. The two poles are personified by the Nazi military commander and Shpresa, the young Albanian woman living who assassinates a Nazi solder in her Nazi-occupied village.

From the very start of the film, it is clear that the Nazis place no value on human life per se. Hitler’s second priority in coming to power was to clear Eastern Europe of the Slavs to make room for Germans to spread out from Germany. It follows that the lives of the Albanian inhabitants have no value to the Nazi commander in the film. That Nazi soldiers are shooting down the street at whomever is using chalk to draw a partisan resistance symbol—a star—on buildings makes the point clear enough that human life means nothing. The stress daily on the villagers must be tremendous. The filmmaker’s use of lighting to build tension and sound to magnify the hard claps of shoes on cement provide the audience with the sense that life under such a totalitarian German occupation is indeed harsh. The literal translation of the film, “The Bride and the State Siege,” alludes to the severity of the onslaught.

The combination of a totalitarian regime and a wholesale disvaluing of human life by the oppressors is indeed a toxic cocktail. That the Nazi’s extermination of 20 million Slavs in Eastern Europe (not counting those killed on the battlefield) and the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust—not exactly Kantian facts of reason—came after the European Enlightenment (of reason) does not bode well for human civilization. Moreover, that the twentieth century included two world wars does not bode well for Hegel’s theory of a trajectory through history of an increasing spirit of freedom. Two world wars seem like more than a momentary regression, and the regimes of Hitler and Stalin should not be left out in making the claim that the sordid twentieth century was not just a regression. Perhaps it is not God that is dead, as Nietzsche has been interpreted as claiming, but, rather, Hegel’s optimistic theory, given the statis of human nature even given the gradual process of natural selection.  

The Enlightenment should not have been taken as a panacea. Reason, even cleverness, can be employed in evil designs. Hannah Arendt, who wrote from her experience as an observer of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claimed that the Nazi bureaucrat simply didn’t think; he was simply working out train routes and schedules so as to maximize a commodity that had to be transported. Yet Eichmann did think for himself when he violated Himmler’s order not to make the Jews in Hungary march to a death-camp in Poland, and this is what got him convicted by the Israeli judges. The thought that many of the Jews would very efficiently die of attrition en route appealed to the value that he put on business-like efficiency. Given the goal of exterminating Judaism in Europe, it was reasonable to violate an order so a more efficient option could be taken. So it is not the benching of reason that accounts for the mass murder; quite the opposite. Bureaucracy, it should be pointed out, is based on reason rendered as structure and procedure, and it is not contrary to reason to suspend a procedure in order to put in place a more efficient remedy.

Lest it be concluded that Nazi Germany was the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, the passions were also involved. Eichmann hated Jews, and his strong emotion was backed up by the Nazi social reality in which Jews were portrayed as sub-human, even akin to rodents. This message was clear in the Nazi propaganda films in which Jews are likened to the rats that spread the plague over Europe in the fourteenth century from China. Both Hume and Adam Smith posited the imagination as playing a role in the social realities we come up with to order the world. “Confronted with the vast and seemingly chaotic complexity of the world in which we live,” one scholar on Adams explains, “we feel an instinctive need to impose some sense of order on our perceptions, and it is our imagination that enables us to do so.”[1] The social reality evinced in a leader’s vision and propagated through speeches and film can satisfy what for Victor Frankl is our innate need for meaning. Although he showed at even the victims in the concentration camps had that need even as they were starving, it is no less true that the Germans, and indeed, any human being, seeks the order that a social reality can provide. The role of the imagination in the crafting of a social reality means that subjectivity is salient. Hence Eichmann was not a mere, unthinking bureaucrat; he was a warm-blooded human being whose subjective emotions were nestled in the Nazi social reality in which Jews were vermin. This likeness is made explicit in the film, Inglorious Basterds, when the SS officer explains how he approaches hunting Jews by thinking like a rat does.

In The Bride and the Curfew, the Nazi commander applies his hunting skills to snuffing out the resistance. Although he does not view Shpresa as a rodent, it is clear that he puts no value on the lives of any of the villagers, including hers. In complete contrast, Shpresa provides a light on the human condition. Her message is the following: My life isn’t mine anymore; it no longer belongs to me; it serves the ideal of freedom, which includes a free Albania. Even though she is living in constant danger, she embraces an ideal even to her own detriment. Whereas the Nazis are acting in line with their primitive instinctual urge of aggression, the young woman is willing to override her urge of self-preservation—an instinct that Hobbes claims in Leviathan is primary. Whereas the Nazis can draw on a collective social reality to base their subjectivity, Shpresa is virtually alone in making her decision to place freedom above even her own life.

She has but her own subjectivity on which to base her choice, hence, as Sartre points out, the gravity of her choice is weighty. She does not appeal to God or even to authority or tradition, although there is a hint of the later in her mention of free Albania. Conforming to the Nazis would obviously be more convenient, though she would not thereby make use of their social reality. She embraces the hard responsibility that lies in making a choice that goes against the grain. The story-world of the film, the Nazi-occupied Albanian village, is the antithesis of freedom, and so she stands out in belonging to the ideal. Villagers do come to her aid, specifically in getting her out of town as if she were a bride, but the decision is hers alone, and must ultimately rest on her subjectivity. The film thus evinces the existentialist philosophy.

Perhaps the main question in the film is whether human beings are willing to assume the responsibility of making difficult choices when they have nothing to fall back on but our own individual subjective experience, without even the order-conferring comfort of a societal social reality. In their dependence on a social reality provided by Hitler, the Nazi subjectivity is hardly such a feat. Although it is easy to beat up on the Nazis, the implication that relying on the vision of a leader evinces weakness may not be so convenient. Heidegger, after all, advocates an authentic life over one lived out in conformity. Nietzsche tells his readers not to be Nietzscheans; rather, have your own ideas. These are difficult words for people living in an age in which we are such organizational creatures and we pay such attention to the politics of our leaders.

---

[1] Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), p. 66.

Conscience

Volodymyr Denyssenko’s film, Conscience (1968), is set in a small Ukrainian village under Nazi occupation during World War II. Vasyl, a Ukrainian man, kills a German soldier, and the chief German stationed there gives the villagers an ultimatum: Turn in the culprit or the entire village will be liquidated; all of the villagers will be executed. The film is all about this ethical dilemma. According to Jeremy Bentham’s ethic of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number should prevail; any villager would be ethically justified in bringing Vasyl to the Germans to be executed so that the villagers can be spared. The ongoing pleasure of 100 people outweighs the ongoing pleasure of one person. But the film doesn’t follow this logic, and can thus be looked at as a critique of Bentham’s ethical theory. This is not to say that deontology, operating as an ethical constraint on utilitarianism, is entirely without risk. If I have just lost you, my dear liebe reader, consider this: Going beyond ethical constraints on an otherwise ethical theory, what if, as in the film, a political (or religious) cause is allowed to upend ethical considerations altogether, or at least to eclipse them?  I contend that the villagers do this in the film, for they sacrifice themselves as a matter of conscience to protect a murderer because they value his political cause, which is resistance to the Nazi occupation. At what cost? If in relegating the ethical level our species opens the floodgates to committing atrocities by good intentions, what might people like the Nazi occupiers in the film do without a conscience and external ethical constraints?

In the film, the villagers maintain their silence, but it is clear that they do not view Vasyl as a culprit, and thus as a murderer whom should be turned in. As a partisan fighting the Nazis, the violence that he commits is justified because the totalitarian control by the Nazi chief is so oppressive in the daily lives of the villagers. In a similar film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), which is an Albanian film about a partisan woman whom the Nazis attempt to find because she has killed an Albanian collaborator and drawn chalk figures of resistance on buildings, the villagers do not view the protagonist as a murderer, for she has dedicated her life to a higher cause. At one point, she says that her life no longer belongs to her, for it serves the ideal of freedom, as in freeing Albania from the Nazi occupation. Several Albanians help her to escape, which she does. Unsatisfied with the original ending of the woman in a horse carriage being chased by a Nazi in a car, an Albanian Communist Party official had the ending changed so the Albanians in the carriage gun down the Nazis in the car, mob-style. It is not enough that the woman is being chased because she committed a murder; we the audience must see her as victorious. Beyond the need for closure, the Albanian official at least needed to see the immediate victory of the political cause.

In Conscience, Vasyl is not so lucky, though the villagers do more than the Albanian villagers do in The Bride and the Curfew for the Ukrainian villagers know that their own lives are on the line. Although there’s no reason to suppose that they have studied the 18^th century Bentham or his theory, the notion of the benefit of the villagers as a whole surviving outweighs that of one of them is clear to them. At one point, a woman tells Vasyl that a hundred souls will be lost because of his refusal to turn himself in, but she will not turn him in even though she is saying that a hundred lives are worth more than one. She, and the rest of the villagers, support the partisan cause against the Germans.

Finally, Vasyl does turn himself in, but the Nazi commander thinks Vasyl is lying and repeatedly slaps him. The commander has the villagers rounded up and shot and then he himself shoots Vasyl and the compliant Ukrainian woman who has been acting as his translator. So Vasyl can be read as finally concurring with Bentham’s ethical theory in being willing to sacrifice his life to save those of so many more. Is it the case, however, that Bentham’s calculus should have the final say when heroism is entered into the equation? The villagers are willing to keep silent. They go to their mass grave without having turned in the partisan murderer, but like Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, where a divine decree to sacrifice Isaac trumps the immorality of murder, the villagers put the partisan (i.e., resistance) cause above Vasyl being a murderer and thus a criminal to be legitimately turned in. The villagers feel an ethical duty to protect him even if doing so costs them their own lives.

In terms of philosophy, the villagers are deontologists because they recognize a constraint on Bentham’s “greatest pleasure for the greatest number” ethic. In terms of Kierkegaard, the villagers recognize a value about the ethic against murder. Whereas for Abraham, God trumps the realm of morality, the villagers recognize a political cause as suspending the ethical realm such that it is ethical to let a murderer get away with his crime, and, moreover, to violate Bentham’s ethical theory of utilitarianism. A political cause and a religious cause can each, if valued sufficiently, relativize or even vacate the ethical level. Such a cause can be valued so much that a man in one story is willing to sacrifice (murder) his son and an entire village in another story is willing to be sacrificed. Sacrifice, after all, is a noble virtue, but it should not be lost on us mere mortals that there are dangers to allowing the ethical dimension to be eclipsed.

If we are angels, then we must surely be killer angels even with good intentions. Doesn’t relativizing or even violating ethical strictures open the spigot to all kinds of ways to justify unethical conduct? Can our species afford even those lofty causes that we can value so much that the ethical domain takes a back seat or is lost altogether? One need only consider how sociopathic the Nazi commander is, utterly without a conscience in Conscience as he himself shoots his translator in the back of her head. Is not the hegemony of ethics, including Bentham’s insistence that maintaining or providing for the pleasure of the greatest number of people, something we should maintain, given our species’ horrific aggressive instinct? Our biological nature, hardly refined through Darwin’s natural selection, ought not be forgotten as we reach for the sky toward our great religious and political ideals.

The Nazi commander takes advantage of the villagers’ suspension of the ethical for a political cause by committing genocide rather than honoring such a people for acting on principle even at great personal sacrifice, and therefore ironically shows how dangerous it is not only for the villagers, but also then for people like the Nazis to suspend the ethical. The villagers are sufficiently civilized that they can afford to suspend the ethical for a cause without thereby opening the floodgates to all sorts of unethical behavior by them, but the atrocious and heinous conduct of the Nazis that results demonstrates just how much our species needs the ethical constraint. In other words, even though the villagers can bypass the ethical for a higher cause without then acting unethically in general because the ethical dimension no longer matters (even though they are acting unethically in letting the murderer escape), the Nazis’ resulting unethical conduct (without any superlative political cause) demonstrates the need our species has of ethical constraints that cannot be suspended or upended. Notice that having a good religious or political cause does not really make the ethical go away. Abraham is still guilty of attempted murder and the villagers refuse to turn in a man who has murdered another person. Even so, I submit that this is not enough, given our species’ aggressive nature. In the end, the entire village, except for one boy, is wiped out by men of entirely no conscience whatsoever.  

Rainbow

Rainbow (1944) is a Soviet patriotic propaganda film about the brutal Nazi-German occupation of a village in Ukraine. Filmed in 1943 while Ukraine was still occupied, the film was shot in the U.S.S.R. in central Asia rather than in Ukraine. The plot centers on the efforts of Nazi captain Kurt Werner to get a resistance (partisan) fighter to reveal where her group was heading. The woman is stark (strong), for she does not budge even as the Germans torture her both mentally and physically. I contend that the film pivots on a few lines spoken by an old Russian man in the village on the nature of power itself. Those lines stand out for being the only philosophical abstractions in the dialogue of the film. The film is about the nature of power.

The ubiquitous presence of German troops holding guns sends the audience a clear message that the basis of government is raw force: the ability to kill. A preponderance or monopoly of the use of force is decisive. Although the villagers vastly outnumber the German troops, both use of the guns to kill many people in succession and on the other side the (irrational?) psychology of passivity engraved in the Russian psyches and perpetuated by the decentralization of a village population (mass meetings being controlled by the Germans) maintain the status quo as if the village were a closed system until the Russian army liberates the village from the outside. Although it seems that if the villagers turned on the guards all at once, the German regime in the village would quickly fall, the Hobbesian instinct of self-preservation and the lack of a selfless ethic of sacrifice prevent what would be necessary: a group of villages to start “the ball rolling” in anticipation that an onslaught of villagers inside their houses would quickly join so the troops would be overwhelmed.

So we tend to equate power with actual brute force or the threat thereof. The real foundation of a government (i.e., a “state” in political realism) is its ability to kill threats to its very existence as well as its presumed entitlement to tell people what to do and thus be obeyed. Locally, this means that the last-resort basis of a city government is actually its police force, rather than its mayor or city council. The ability to shoot or arrest a person is the foundation of government. From this foundational vantage point, lofty speeches by heads of state seem peripheral and perhaps even luxuries.

The film, which is actually misnamed Rainbow because in extreme cold where ice-crystals are in the air, the sun’s rays hitting those crystals actually create “sun-halos,” proffers a different conception of power. In the few lines on power itself, an old Russian man tells a few other villagers in a basement that power is not holding a gun; rather, power lies in not saying a word when the Nazis want information. To resist even torture by not giving in so the aggressor gets what one wants is power. I contend that such power is internal, which admittedly can have external effects (e.g., the Nazi captain is not told where the partisan group is based), whereas holding a gun can be external power (i.e., getting another person to do something, or not to do something).

The interaction effect is significant. Holding a gun does not in itself give the holder power over another person; the interior power to resist temptations (e.g., to talk to save oneself or one’s child) can be sufficient to render the power inoperative. In the film, the villagers withhold bread even though the Germans have taken hostages. High external power and low internal power render the external power effective (i.e., power). The combination of low external power and high internal power is a worse-case scenario for an aggressor. High external power and low internal power is what an aggressor counts on in being able to gain or maintain power over another person.

Therefore, I contend that the old Russian man was only partially correct. Holding a gun is a case of power, assuming that the other person has weak or low internal power in being willing to resist temptations. Having the self-discipline or control sufficient to not say a word when an aggressor (bully) is using (the threat of) force to get information, as in the film, is also power. The Russian village is largely in a stalemate because no one is giving up bread or speaking to the Nazis and the latter have the guns (the ability to kill the villagers). Captain Werner kills (and has his troops kill) mostly out of frustration. The nature of power is not as one-sided as it appears; the force of will of the partisan villagers is strong as is the force of the German guns.

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. 

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.   

Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding.

The prosecutor, Tad Lawson, having liberated death camps, rebuffs the General Matt Merrin’s pressure, and the four defendants get life sentences.  Whether Merrin’s claim that the U.S. needs the support of the German people in the Cold War is valid or not, pressuring a prosecutor is clearly depicted as unethical and so Lawson comes off as virtuous in resisting the exogenous pressure even though he is in the American military. It is certainly ironic that the victor army would push for lighter sentences for the vanquished; typically the question is whether a trial by the victors can be fair. Israel’s kidnapping and subsequent trial of Eichmann brought this question to the forefront. A trial in Germany would have also brought up this question. Britain would have been a good choice that would have avoided the conflict of interest.  In the film, Lawson successfully resists exploiting a conflict of interest by deciding not to curry favor with the general by urging the judges to go light in sentencing the defendants.

To be sure, chief judge Haywood has an opportunity to give a light sentence to one of the defendants. Ernst Janning, an expert jurist before the NAZI period and the Minister of Justice under Hitler, is the only one of the defendants who should have known better than knowingly convict innocent people, including Irene Hoffman for having sex with a much-older Jewish man, and sterilizing others, including Rudolph Petersen for being mentally impaired. Janning gives an impassioned speech to the court in which he admits his guilt, and that he should indeed have known better. Haywood holds Janning responsible for the latter’s use of the judicial system to send Jews and Poles to the death camps anyway; the crimes are simply too heinous for justice to be ignored. In the final scene, Haywood tells Janning that he should have known that it would come to such crimes the moment he convicted a person Janning knew was innocent. Using the gutted-out infrastructure of a judiciary to enable the state to engage in mass murder seems to particularly bother the chief judge. That is to say: a jurist who has written juridical books has no excuse in making a mockery of a judiciary.

After the last scene, the film indicates that none of the actual defendants of the American trial of jurists were still in prison as of 1961, when the film was made. Janning is loosely based on Louis Schlegelberger, who was State Secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice. He got a life sentence for conspiracy to perpetuate war crimes and crimes against humanity. He instituted procedures for the persecution of Jews and Poles, and thus played a vital role in the mass extermination. As much as such severe harm deserves harsh justice, he was released just a few years after having been convicted for “health reasons” even though he died in 1970. Similarly, Rudolf Oeschey had his life sentence commuted to 20 years, but he was released in just 8 years. Guenther Joel, chief prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice, got a 10 year sentence but was released in 1951. The same for Ernst Lautz, the Chief Public Prosecutor of the People’s Court. Herbert Klemm, State Secretary in the Ministry, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released after just 10 years. Oswald Rothaug, a senior public prosecutor in the People’s Court and Chief Justice of the Special Court, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released in just 9 years. Justice was clearly not served, and the film acknowledges this frailty of justice “in the real world.” The implications are that none of the fictional defendants would actually serve a life sentence, and the American military, which had tried and failed to get its way in the sentencing, ultimately gets its way. Any relief from Lawson resisting the pressure to urge light sentences such that justice wins the day is short-lived as the viewers read the film’s caveat at the end that in the end, all of the actual defendants of the jurist Nuremberg trial were still in prison as of 1961.

Interestingly, Maximilian Schell, who plays Hans Rolfe, the German defense attorney who applies NAZI thunder in severely questioning Irene Hoffman—such zeal being objected to by Lawson but allowed by the chief judge—beat out Spencer Tracy, who plays the chief judge who comes down on the side of justice (and is fair in ruling on the objections during the trial) and thus resists manipulations by “friendly” former NAZI civilians and the American military and a U.S. Senator, to get the Best Actor Oscar in 1961. Spencer Tracy is so mild-mannered throughout the film that his acting was typical rather than exceptional, whereas Richard Widmark, who plays Lawson, should have been in contention with Schell for the Oscar. Both actors are impassioned and frustrated, hence they both drew on strong emotions in playing their respective roles. Perhaps both should have gotten the award. The world, however, is not so just, as the movie makes clear in the end even if justice momentarily has the upper hand.

Anne Frank Remembered

While studying at Yale, I took a seminar on documentaries following two other, more pertinent film courses on narrative itself. I even took a preaching seminar on story-telling. The documentary choice was off my trajectory. The opportunity cost was large, considering that I was otherwise taking courses in Yale’s better-reputed humanities fields of philosophy of religion, theology, and history. Now perhaps my excursion into the documentary genre can bear some fruit, for I analyze here the documentary, Anne Frank Remembered (1995). The strength of this documentary I take to be its reliance on witnesses even at the expense of narration to tell the story. People could say with definiteness what had happened to Anne Frank since she and her sister and parents left Amsterdam. Their journey evinced the mentality of the Nazis as one not just as dehumanizing the Jews, but as treating them worse than livestock. Even when Nazi Germany was losing the war, the Nazis foreswore the use-value of the Jews starved or gassed.

The eye-witness account of the Franks’ train trip from Vesterborgh, a transfer camp in The Netherlands, to Auschwitz in southeast Poland. The trip for the 1,019 “passengers” began on September 3, 1944 and lasted three days. The Jews onboard were in cramped livestock cars that uncomfortably held forty to fifty people. The “passengers” had to sit mostly, though some had to stand even while “sleeping.” Urination and defecation make the trip worse still. The Jews felt completely powerless. “We felt the end would not be good,” the eye-witness said. Even so, “we refused to imagine the worst.”

The worst was Auschwitz. The Nazis there told the new arrivals that they would die there. “Our brains functioned differently,” the eye-witness from the train said. It was a matter of survival. Crucially, she added, “We were less than beasts—less than animals.” This is reflected not only at the camp, but in the train ride as well. At least animals would have been fed en route. At Auschwitz, the food consisted of a piece of bad bread.

On October 28, 1944, the two Frank sisters were sent to Bergen Belsen Camp in Germany. New buildings were under construction, so the Jews had to spend the upcoming winter cramped in unheated tents. On November 7, a fierce storm destroyed some of the tents. The Jews were being deliberately starved, frozen, and racked with disease even though the medications were not far away. In this sense too, the Jews were not only dehumanized, but also treated less well than beasts. After all, who would starve an animal that could otherwise be of some use? Both Margret and Anne succumbed to disease late that winter. The subsequent publication of Anne’s diary vindicated her potential “use-value” to German society as a notable writer, yet she was intentionally starved and not treated.

Without a doubt, being at a death camp triggered changes to the occupants’ minds so they could adapt to survive in a context in which survival was forbotten. So too, the minds of the men who decided to treat certain humans worse than animals must also have been warped. The variability of the human mind is perhaps here the real culprit. Specifically, that a mind could find meaning in a situation that was essentially a slaughter house, and another mind could think of other people as having worth less than that of livestock, tell us that this species, homo SAPIENS, cannot safely rely on its mind as a safeguard or reality-tester. Especially as time passes, the documentary may hopefully become more and more estranger in the sense of being not only foreign, but strange as well. The mentalities discussed from up close may be so far from those of the viewers that the inescapable inference will be that the mind itself cannot be trusted; it can treat as valid some of the most horrendous notions and related ways of treating other people. Even the way the brain seeks to preserve its sanity in an awful situation attests to the mind’s willingness to leave reality behind. In the documentary, even the Jews themselves who were in the Holocaust look back at how their minds changed and remarked at how strange (and dramatic) the change was. Watching the Israeli court’s coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 can give the viewer an eerie sense of the mentality on the other side, which, in being preoccupied with making the trains run efficiently, merely assumed that the living cargo was less than animals. It is the mind’s presumption to being right when it was so utterly wrong that was perhaps really on trial.