NAZA

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment, is not a documentary of the experiment on power aggrandizement that took place in 1971; actors play the supervising professor s well as the 24 students who were the subjects—12 randomly being assigned as guards and the other 12 as prisoners. The film can be characterized as a psychological drama on human nature, and in particular, on the salience therein of the will to power, especially when a power differential exists. Had Nietzsche been alive to watch the film, he would have been engrossed, finding much to confirm his theory that not only the will to power is the basic human motive, but also the weak too easily resort to cruelty (and pettiness) to feel any pleasure they can out of the exercise of whatever power they can muster, given their innate weakness.

In the film, professor Philip Zimbardo, who lets the experiment run on too long, given the violence being committed by the students who are playing prison guards, initially tells all of the students that touching (let alone hitting others) is against the rules of the experiment. Due to just the potentialpower differential in the experiment's scenerio, it isn’t long before one guard, and then another, presumptuously break that rule, and the guards’ violence only gets worse. To be sure, Zimbardo does not intervene to give a disincentive to the guards who have violated the rule because the professor wants to see how the psychological dynamic of power naturally unfolds. That the subjects are actually students who know that the “prison” space is actually on campus, and thus is not a real prison and they are not really guards and prisoners renders the increasingly guards' increasingly encroaching power aggrandizement by the guards on the prisoners and the natural resistance of some of the prisoners, due to their will to power, all the more amazing. By increasingly encroaching, I mean that human beings naturally seek to pick at at least some differential in power in order to increase the gradiant. Like picking at a scab, the urge is hard to resist. The film accurately depicts this vital finding.

The implications are huge, especially in terms of the value in having formidable institutional checks on prison guards and municipal (and university) police employees. Their tendency to “take liberties” even in easily turning to unjustified violence to impose whatever power they presume is justified psychologically should be assumed, rather than merely hypothesized, by government officials and city (or university) residents in a position to design, pass, and implement checks on the aggrandizement. The case of university police in the United States, the federal constitution of which reserves  police power to the state and federal governments exclusively, is especially dangerous, given the tenuous link of accountability from the standpoint of representative democracy. In fact, university police managers are subject institutionally to a conflict of interest in that their bosses in university administration may be one party to a dispute, such as in the case of student protests. At Yale, for example, during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the university’s police arrested 46 students—the remaining protesters went immediately to sit in a street intersection so they would be under the jurisdiction of the municipal police department, which in turn is accountable to a local government rather than a private, non-profit corporation.

As the case of Israel in Gaza dramatically shows, even a democratically elected government can perpetuate crimes against humanity, so it is incorrect to claim that such crimes are committed only by dictators. In the case of the Putin administration in Russia and its multi-year invasion of Ukraine, the Stanford prison experiment is very relevant in explaining the “widespread, systematic torture and ill-treatment of both Ukrainian civilian detainees and prisoners of war, including cases of sexual violence,” according to Claudia Julio, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, who spoke at an informal session of the UN’s Security Council on August 11, 2026.[1] “More than 95% of the Ukrainian prisoners of war and 85% of the civilian detainees reported being tortured or ill-treated, often repeatedly. They also reported being subjected to sexual abuse and food deprivation while being held in inhumane conditions and not being provided adequate medical services.”[2] After watching The Stanford Prison Experiment, anyone could readily grasp how such horrendous treatment can come about in conditions in which such a stark power-differential exists. Even just the natural human reaction to being unjustly subject to abuses of power can be expected to result in more violence as if to retaliate in enforcing the presumed entitlement to the unjustified power. Rules or laws against such violence are easily obviated mentally, and even more violence is inflicted as if to say, how dare you resist my over-reaching! You will pay dearly! Countering externally the sheer presumption to exercise such power is two degrees of separation from the squalid mentality. In the film, were the professor to directly confront the guards in real time for having unilaterally violated the rule against even touching the prisoners, let alone hitting him merely for resisting the unjustified violence, the guards would have been shocked in realizing just how out of line they allowed themselves to go. The human mind can go on and on in taking liberties without checking itself by thinking, Have I gone too far? In other words, the human brain short-circuits itself in terms of is presumption to power-aggrandizement. This is the idea from the film that has been so overlooked.

Whether examining the conduct of the Russian prison-guards or the Israelis soldiers in Gaza with regard to people they view as sub-human, a sordid perspective that also can be gleamed from the sheer violent presumptuousness of the student-guards in the film, the conduct and its psychological underpinnings are no accident. The innate tendency to go too far in terms of power is not limited to cases of mental illness, but is in human nature itself, so rather than treat violent over-reaches even in violation of law as aberrations, they should be expected and thus fortified against, institutionally.

In terms of local and private police departments, an implication is that those departments’ internal affairs offices should not be relied upon as sufficient to ensure accountability on abuse police employees. In terms of governments committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, an implication is that a global order treats national sovereignty as absolute is insufficient; international adjudication and enforcement of international law is necessary. Treating abuses of power, whether by prison guards or police employees, or by government officials, as exceptions to human nature rather than as very likely ignores the vital lesson that the film can provide to humanity. In other words, human nature is very susceptible to getting carried away with power even to the extent of unilaterally resorting to violence to enforce on other people the power that one presumes the right to inflict on others. The sheer presumption of power that is dubious and the use of vocal and even physical violence to enforce the presumption reveal just how pathetic human nature is with respect to wielding power over other people. Were more people to take the real message of the film seriously—and it is astonishing that the film has not had more impact—much more would presumably be done legislatively to hold police and even governments accountable. The assumption would change from treating abuses of power as exceptions to being the rule, and thus as being in more need of being checked institutionally and legislatively. Even taking national sovereignty as absolute could be subject to amendment so as to allow for the enforcement of international law.

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1. Jerry Fisayo-Bambi, “Over 16,000 Ukrainian Civilians Remain Detained and Tortured by Russia, UN Says,” Euronews.com, 12 August, 2026.
2. Ibid.

Enzo

In 2025, when the film, Enzo, was released, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine was still in progress before being overshadowed in the media by fresh American and Israeli military attacks in Iran. The film distinguishes the respective attitudes of two Ukrainian construction workers in the E.U. state of France regarding whether to return to Ukraine to join the army. This contrast implies that patriotism, and, moreover, duty, is a weak force in human nature, even when a citizen’s country is in serious, existential trouble in being invaded by an empire-scale military aggressor.

In the film, the Ukrainians’ dilemma is overshadowed by the salient class distinction between Enzo’s upper middle-class family and a vocation of manual labor, including construction work. Enzo’s father, Paolo, may even take Enzo’s desire to continue as a construction-apprentice as a personal betrayal. Even though Enzo is only 16 years-old, he is able to “hit” back during a family dinner at home by characterizing his father’s academic profession as utterly fake (for what use is “book” knowledge?), especially relative to construction because, Enzo says, walls continue to stand even when the human beings who dwell within them have died. That Enzo’s own natural proclivity to draw would, as a profession, which Paulo is urging Enzo to adopt, be one of manual labor goes unsaid in the film. By implication nonetheless, the intricate use of fingers is of higher social class than the sore, blunt use of hands. To be sure, getting rich by selling art is heard of, whereas how many construction workers get rich by overlaying brick and mortar?

Enzo is, as a typical teenager, lost, and therefore needs time to find himself. His crush on Vlad, one of the Ukrainian construction workers, attests to the boy’s jejune state. Even his claim at the end of the film, on the phone to Vlad who has called in the midst of a battle in Ukraine, of having “fallen in love” with Vlad cannot be taken seriously. The film’s political and economic ethical elements are so salient that Enzo cannot be labeled as gay cinema.

Even though the ethic of socio-economic class is more salient than is the political leitmotif, the stark contrast in an early conversation between Miroslav and Vlad, the two Ukrainian guest-workers in the E.U., is riveting and thus worthy of notice and elaboration. Whereas Miroslav strongly feels a sense of duty to return to Ukraine to take up arms against the Russian invaders because “I might not have a country to come back to,” Vlad recognizes no such duty. Of course, the Ukrainian government is not going to forcibly grab Vlad and return him to his native country, and Vlad undoubtedly knows this, so his disavowal of a basic duty in citizenship can stand. Both men know that Miroslav’s intent to return to Ukraine is entirely voluntary, and it is precisely in this regard that duty can be understood as being a weak force in human nature. For all that deontologically-oriented ethicists make a big deal out of duty per se (e.g., Kant), the force, like gravity, is actually weak. The fullness of emotion that people in the rapture of fulfilling a duty belies the fact that duty must be willed, and slavish attachment to momentary pleasure is actually a stronger force as an instinctual urge.

So it is interesting, as well as perplexing, that both of the Ukrainians tell their construction boss that they would be returning to Ukraine (implication: to fight) in two weeks without anything in the screenplay as to how or why Vlad changed his mind. The oversight, or leap, can be construed as an understatement concerning how much mental effort is involved in a change of will. It is not as if Vlad suddenly grew an internal sense of duty. Presumably Miroslav had said something that convinced Vlad to return to fight. It is precisely because duty is so voluntary, unless mandated by a government at gun-point or threat of imprisonment, that Miroslav’s rationale is so crucial to Miroslav’s change of heart—or is the rationale more practical in appealing to Vlad’s self-interest? In not furnishing an answer, the film falls short in terms of political theory, whereas the socio-economic ethical tension is more fully depicted and resolved as Enzo capitulates to his parents’ world after having tried to commit suicide at the construction site, for going to New York to learn English can be construed as being on track to eventually joining his parents’ echelon vocationally, even as an international artist whose art sales could benefit from connections made in New York. Such a world is miles way from that of a construction worker. 

In contrast, Vlad being scared to death by bombs exploding nearby in Ukraine—how he got to that point—is unexplained and thus unaccounted for. Next to such fear, and even the anticipation of such fear, the emotive sense of duty is weak. Even in Hobbes’ Leviathan, the instinct for self-preservation can legitimately be acted upon even against a sovereign power. Whether a “right” or not, self-preservation is an inalienable feature of human nature even after an alleged social-contract by a group of people to give up power (even to interpret scripture!) to a sovereign power, whether a king or legislative assembly.  

Nuremberg

It is said that history is written by the victors. The film, Nuremberg (2025), bears that out. Even though Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Nazi trial, compromises its integrity and thus breaches due process by pressuring Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist assigned to the Nazi prisoners (most notably Goring), to obtain and pass on the defense’s strategy to Jackson, which Kelley does, the trial is presented nonetheless as legitimate and the Nazi prisoners as even deserving an unfair trial. Nevertheless, nations governed by the rule of law are never justified in putting on corrupt trials, or skewing them to push a particular ideology. The film itself is skewed to highlight the Nazi crimes against the Jews at the expense of delving more into the distinctly war crimes even though those crimes were just as important in the charges in the actual trial.

Jackson’s questioning of Goring on whether the Treaty of Versailles justified Germany to take over Austria and the Sudetenland was brief, and the invasion of other occupied territories, such as France, was entirely omitted in the film. Instead, Jackson pushed Goring on what he knew about the concentration camps. Jackson’s reason, which he states in the film, is that what the Nazi SS did in those camps separates the Germans from the Americans. In other words, the holocaust singles out the Nazis in world history. But as of 2025, that statement could not stand, for the holocaustic genocide of the Palestinian “race” in Gaza meant that the Nazis’ crimes against humanity were no longer unique. If, as the psychiatrist says in the film, the Nazi holocaust is “the definition of evil,” then that definition could be extended beyond the scope of the Nazis in the twenty-first century to include, ironically, Israel.

What gave rise to World War II was not the concentration camps. Rather, Germany’s invasions of other sovereign countries in Europe, especially Poland, was the cause. Hitler’s militarism in taking over Europe should thus have received most of the screen-time of the film. If as Jackson argues, Germany could not blame the treaty that ended World War I as justifying occupying Austria, what of other countries, such as France, Denmark, and the Netherlands, which were not Germanic culturally? In short, the filmmakers could have drawn on more material on the war crimes to balance out the film. That would be consistent with the fact that the Jewish matter was only the third priority of the Nazis. The first priority—and why Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor—was to get rid of the Communist Party. The second priority was to create living space in Europe beyond Germany for the German people.

Also receiving too little attention in the film was Jackson’s questioning of Goring on why the Nazis got rid of political opposition, and thus democracy. Goring’s answer that democracy had produced weak leaders could have been explored, especially as the Nazis came into power in 1933 by democratic means. The party held enough of the Bundestag for Hitler to have a legitimate democratic claim as a possible chancellor. Such inconvenient facts are arguably more interesting than simply reminding the viewers of the holocaust. The irony is that emphasizing it so much in the film, viewers in 2025 could have thought of Netanyahu and his crime against humanity in Gaza. Using a film to push an ideological agenda can come back to bite filmmakers.

Furthermore, given the militaristic forays of Russia’s Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu, and America’s Trump in the mid 2020’s, more screentime devoted to why the democracy fell to the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, what was behind Hitler’s invasions of other countries, and why no other country’s government stopped the aggression in time to avert a global war could have addressed contemporary events facing the world as international law was no longer a viable means of restraint, internationally. The film could have had Goring explain Hitler’s rationale more for having instituted a dictatorship, and for why Hitler played other governments so his invasions could continue unabated. The susceptibility of democracy to slip into a dictatorship was a salient worry in the U.S. in the early and mid-2020s due to fears that President Trump was or would shirk democracy. Governments doing nothing to stop Hitler’s incremental advancements militarily could be compared with governments doing nothing to stop Israel’s genocide of the race in Gaza, and too little to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The film being used primarily to remind viewers of how the Nazis viewed and treated Jews is both redundant (e.g., Schindler’s List) and has a rather large opportunity cost in terms of what the film could have covered more adequately but did not due to the screentime devoted to the Jewish theme. To be sure, Goring admitting in court that he would have followed Hitler even knowing about the holocaust only from the trial (which is a lie) is a poignant moment in the film. Crimes against humanity, whether in Gaza or Germany, are indeed horrific, but it is a mistake to minimize distinctively war crimes just because they are more ordinary.

The Zone of Interest

It is, unfortunately, all too easy for the human brain to relegate the humanity of other human beings—to dehumanize them. This is the leitmotif of The Zone of Interest (2023), a film whose release took place in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza in which civilians, including women and children, were targeted as if they were culpable for the break-up of the U.S.S.R. and the Hamas attack in Israel. Under the fallacy of collective justice, dehumanizing carnage can run wild. In The Zone of Interest, the banality of evil is evident even though it is subtle under the protection of the status quo. To be sure, other films depict such banality of the ordinary; what distinguishes The Zone of Interest is how it shows us the rawness of human violence ironically by now showing it.

In the film, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig, and their children live in a house next to the camp. Eerily, the house and its outdoor garden and pool have come to be home to them so much that Hedwig fights tooth and nail to stay when Rudolf is transferred. It is as if Hedwig could no longer see the ubiquitous gray smoke billowing from the chimneys, even as her mother has trouble sleeping because of the “factory” noise and the distant smoke. There are two degrees of separation between Hedwig and her mother their reactions to what is going on inside the camp. Of course, Hedwig is proud of her garden and does not want to leave what she has worked so hard on. Interestingly, the close-ups on the red flowers can be interpreted as standing for the purity of nature or, especially in light of her children swimming among human bones and ashes in the river, as intimating a funeral, and thus death itself. That the flower means one thing to Hedwig and quite another to the viewers shows us just how warped the human brain can be without realizing it. Although not arbitrary, our social realities are hardly objective, and we can be so dreadfully clueless on just how warped one’s own can be.

The language of dehumanization in the film is spoken as Rudolf meets with a few men to discuss the efficiency of adding another furnace, and later when as an inspector he compares the “yields” of different camps. Referring to the human victims as “pieces” and to “loads” to be gassed chills the ears as watching the Höss kids playing with teeth of the cremated does to the eyes. In being able to tug at our ears and our eyes, movies can make real ethical problems in ways that singular-dimension books cannot reach.

As much as “moving pictures” are visual in nature, the choice to turn the camera away and focus only on sound can be very effective in conveying sordid human interactions. In Inglorious Basterds (2009), SS Col. Hans Landa demonstrates just how quickly and starkly humans can become savagely violent once courtesy is given up. In The Zone of Interest, we glimpse with our ears only the sheer roughness in the violence with which the camp’s guards manhandle the people as they came off the trains. We hear the thuds of guards shoving the people disembarking from the cattle cars and the moans and grasping for air of the "herd animals." The sounds are raw; they depict us humans as animals, both as birds of prey and prey. 

Human beings in the state of nature, Hobbes would say. Unlike Locke's claim, there are no natural rights in such a state. That the viewers can only see Rudolf’s stoic looking-on as if above the fray only dramatizes the extent of human versatility from stoic self-discipline to unconstrained violence, the latter perhaps going even beyond the unethical to being raw nature as it is rather than how it ought to be. Whereas the Nazi policy to exterminate enemies of the state can certainly be reckoned as unethical, the raw violence itself points to our genetic makeup as animals. 

Concerning nature itself, we might say that it is problematical to get ought out of is, which is what Hume calls the naturalistic fallacy. Does it even make any sense to say that the lion should not kill and eat its prey? I abhor people who shed polite society so easily in order to instantly become violent. The experience of being in raw violence is so unique, and so different from anything ordinary, that it is perhaps the only way we have of getting in contact with what life might have been like for our prehistoric ancestors. Contending with a violent person does not lend itself to ethical analysis; even though the attacker can be deemed unethical after the fact, ex post facto, the experience itself, after the choice, seems to break through the wall into raw experience, which is beyond good and evil. 

So, we are not completely divorced from our primitive ancestors after all. For another fallacy is to suppose that reasoning, including the impersonal business calculus that can act as a cover for the banality of evil, and techological progress can sever us from our own animal nature. As Locke points out, it is possible to find oneself in the state of nature in the experience of violence even amidst being in a civilized society (e.g., before the police arrive). It is the sheer distance between our rational nature and the experience of unrestrained violence that is so well depicted in The Zone of Interest." 

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.  

Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren” plays Golda Meir in the film. Rather than evincing gratitude that the excellent actress would play an ugly character, the implication is that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. That another of her courses was Israeli Identity and Culture may explain why her knowledge of film was eclipsed, namely by an ideological agenda or orientation. I contend that underlying her delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) is a much larger problem: that of the artificial monopolization by one group identity. In actuality, each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is problematic.

The craft of acting lies precisely in being able to inhabit a character in spite of the fact that its background is other. Hence actors do research in advance on a character to be played, whether it is fictional or nonfictional. Such research includes, for example, the character’s occupation and even the location where the character lived or is set to live in the film. Emotional work is also involved as an actor considers what within oneself can be drawn on in playing a given character. Johnny Depp, for instance, said in an interview that he regularly draws on more than one person (or character) in coming up with how to embody a character. To claim, therefore, that an actor can only inhabit characters having the actor’s own background is to deny what acting is, namely, inhabiting someone else. No one would criticize Depp for not having grown up in a crime family in Boston in playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). In fact, quite the contrary. That I realized that Depp was the actor playing the role only well into the film attests to the actor’s skill precisely in inhabiting a character of a personality and background so different from Depp’s own. Moreover, that Depp had such versatility as to be able to play a pirate, the owner of a chocolate company, and a serious mobster demonstrates just how wrong it is to claim that an actor can only play a certain kind of character—one in line with the actor’s own background. This is such an obvious point concerning acting that that any claims to the contrary must surely involve false-belief and even delusion: qualities that ideology can have, according to Raymond Geuss in his book, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

An ideology, such as one stemming from a suffocating group-identification that seeks to foist itself over a craft such as acting, can be “dependent on mistaking the epistemic status of some of [the ideology’s] apparently constituent beliefs.”[1] In other words, an ideology may hinge on a false-belief. Indeed, the human mind seems to be vulnerable to circuit-failures as an ideologically important false-belief is presumed to be true as if it could not be false. In other words, the mind doesn’t seem to do a good job at flagging its own false beliefs especially if an ideology being held is dependent on them. Hence, a group-identification ideology can get away with utterly misconstruing the craft of acting. Geuss even includes delusion as pertaining to ideology pejoratively.

I contend that delusion pertains to an ideology in which one group-identification is established monopolistically for an individual. To be sure, Geuss insists that “(h)umans have a vital need for the kind of ‘meaningful’ life and the kind of identity which is possible only for an agent who stands in relation to a culture.”[2] The kind of identity is here that which is informed by a person’s relationship to a culture. Each of us is connected to more than one cultures, and, relatedly, more than one group-identity applies.

I’m a Midwesterner; that’s my ethnicity. Identifying as an American in terms of culture is a looser or more general and even secondary ethnicity for me, whereas my group-identity as an American is foremost politically. My vocational group-identity as a scholar goes beyond vocation, and I have more than one religious group-identifications informing my religious identity. Other group-identifications apply to me as well. My racial group-identification as a Caucasian, or “White,” is actually not one that I an conscious of very often, so other people who are constantly referring to themselves and others by race strike me as unnaturally obsessed with the racial group-identification at the expense of others.

Seldom do we realize that one’s group-identification and that of another person may be different not only on the same axis (e.g., being of different racial groups), but also in emphasizing different types. One person might say, “I’m a Black person,” and the hearer might reply, “I’m a Catholic.” The types, or bases, of the two group-identifications are different: race and religion, respectively. This essentially relativizes a person’s favorite basis because others could alternatively be the person’s favorite. The choice seems arbitrary. The hearer could have replied, “I’m an American.” It is not self-evident that a Black person should view oneself primarily in terms of race rather than nationality (or religion or ethnicity, which is yet another category rather than isomorphic with race). More than one Black person has told me that only in leaving the U.S. and living in the E.U. has that person been able to de-prioritize his race-identity to other bases on which to self-identify. It seems to me, however, that a person has more control over which basis upon which to predominately group-identify, even if one basis is foisted upon oneself by a group to which one is accustomed to identifying with primarily.

Because each of us has several group identifications, any one of which a person could perceive as primary, allowing one to monopolize one’s group-identity temporally or geographically can be seen as dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In getting into character, a good actor does not ignore the subordinate group-identifications. In the case of Golda Meir, she was actually from the Ukraine in the Soviet Union, so the claim Helen Mirren’s portrayal suffers because the actress was not Israeli can be understood to be fallacious. In the film, Golda tells Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State, that during her childhood in the Ukraine, people would beat up Jews in the streets with impunity. The character doesn’t even identify mostly as an Israeli. Furthermore, her ethnic and religious group-identity as a Jew, while salient, does not monopolize her self-identity.

In fact, the film shows actual television footage of Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat in which Golda says, “As a grandmother to a grandfather, . . .” She could have said, “As a Jew to a Muslim,” or “As an Israeli to an Egyptian,” or “As a politician to a politician,” but her group-identification as a grandmother is on top at that moment. I submit that in her depiction of Golda Meir, Mirren draws significantly from her own group-identity as a woman and a mother.

Three times in the film, Golda empathizes with the typist whose husband is fighting in the war. It is clear from her facial expressions that Mirren is having the character react as a woman to another woman’s experience. Golda is even crying when she watches her assistant inform the typist that her husband has been killed. In listening to a soldier being attacked in battle, Mirren has Golda react as a mother would: to the boy’s anguish. Even in urging Henry Kissinger to eat borscht, a Ukrainian soup, Mirren portrays Golda as a mother—admittedly, as a very Jewish mother. But even in that scene, Golda’s Jewish group-identification is not the only one in play.

To be sure, Mirren does a great job in playing Golda’s specifically Jewish group-identity.  In a scene in which Golda is talking with Ariel Sharon, then a general, she tells him that all political careers end in failure. She even adds fatalist, “huh,” at the end of the sentence. Mirren portrays Golda’s Jewish ethnicity most stridently and explicitly along with Golda’s identification as a mother in the scene in which Kissinger is eating the soup.  As an immediate context, Golda makes explicit the primacy of being Jewish in Israel to Kissinger (e.g., “In Israel, we read right to left”) and even says that her cook is a survivor (i.e., of the Holocaust. It is the posture that Mirren adopts while watching the Jewish American eat the Ukrainian soup that may be Mirren’s most Jewish statement, and, given her skill as an actress, she didn’t need to be Jewish herself.

So, the rather pedestrian, non-intellectual comment of the faculty member at Yale that the non-Israeli, non-Jewish actress would be playing Golda Meir in the film says more about the sordid motive to impose an ideology containing a false-belief (and a delusion) as a weapon than it does about the actress or her (ability to play the) role. The group-identifications of Golda Meir that Helen Mirren uses most are actually as a woman and a mother. Even in this respect, whether Mirren was a mother at time of filming is not terribly important because her craft would have included the ability to play a mother regardless. To be sure, being able to draw on a common background or group-identity is an asset for an actor, but the viability of the craft does not depend on having a common background. That any given character has more than one group-identity makes it more likely that an actor can draw on personal experience in some respect and thus have an experiential connection with the character. This is not to say, however, that such experience is necessary, and even less that experience in one of the several group-identifications of a character is necessary. Besides, the most obvious group-identification of a character to an observer may not actually be primary either to the character (or the historical person on which the character is based) or to the actor in portraying the character. Part of Mirren's talent may be to assess which of a character's group-identities really drives the character, and, relatedly, which is decisive in pulling off the role. As observers, we bring our own ideological agendas, and this is especially problematic if we allow one of our group-identities a monopoly over our self-identity.

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1. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 22.

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.