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.

A Star Is Born

The film, A Star Is Born (2018), has the narrative structure chiefly of two intersecting character arcs. They are multi-level in the sense that both interior emotional states and exterior vocational popularity change for both Jackson and Ally. Each of them must deal with feelings of insecurity at some point and both are singers. The antagonist is interesting as well, as it is a character that plays a small but decisive role in how the narrative ends.

The film begins with Jackson as a popular, albeit drunken singer. He spots Ally both for her singing ability and in terms of romantic interest. He is very self-confident as he pursues her, whereas she feels insecure as a singer and song-writer and is shy with Jackson romantically. He is successful, whereas she is an unknown singing in a drag club. He provides her with an entry to become a star by coaxing her to sing a duet with him in one of his concerts. The experience leaves her with more confidence both in regard to singing publically and reciprocating romantically. Her arc is in motion.

Meanwhile, Jackson’s arc is in decline in that his drinking and drug-use are getting worse, as is his relationship with his older brother and manager, Bobby, who quits working as Jackson’s “errand boy” after Jackson hits him because he had windmills put on their deceased father’s land in Arizona. As the film shifts to Ally’s singing, the attention to Jackson’s diminishes. When Jackson drunkenly follows Ally on stage at the Grammys as she accepts the award for Best New Singer, the difference in the trajectories of the two character arcs could not be more explicit. She has gained interest into the singing elite, whereas he has reached bottom in his alcoholism and drug-addiction. Her lack of confidence is gone not only in singing, but, interestingly, also in terms of her relationship with Jackson. Even as he is falling on the stage, she claims him as her man. His self-confidence is gone. He goes off for two months of rehab, during which he is not sure that Ally would have him back (she assures him he can come home). Back at home, no hint of his ongoing singing career is given; in contrast, her concert venue is very large. He is emotionally vulnerable; she is now running the relationship. The two character arcs have crossed each other both in terms of vocational success and emotional security. Just in terms of the transfer in whose music is foremost, even financially, the intersection can be understood as being difficult for the relationship. The shift in power, both from the shift in singing success and in emotional security, certainly puts pressure on the couple. 

As for how the narrative ends, it is important to bring in the matter of the antagonist. To claim that the alcoholism and drug-addiction were both antagonists is to conflate antagonist with obstacle. Certainly an antagonist presents obstacles for a protagonist, but the character to character relation is lost if an antagonist can be generalized to impersonal obstacles even in the story-world itself, as is, “The fire is the antagonist.” In this film, Rez, Ally’s manager, is the clever antagonist. Knowing that Ally wants to take the post-rehab Jackson along in her upcoming European tour, Rez speaks to Jackson without Ally knowing. Rez plays on Jackson’s insecurity by blaming Jackson for having almost derailed Ally’s singing career. Rez also tells the alcoholic that he would relapse, and when he does, he would sink Ally’s career so he should be nowhere near her, especially on her tour. During Rehab, Jackson has expressed to Ally his sorrow for having gotten in the way of her acceptance speech at the Grammy’s, so it follows that he would take his own life rather than risk hurting her career, as she loves him so much. In putting this guilt-trip on a vulnerable Jackson, Rez is the film’s antagonist. He is a sly one, as neither Bobby nor Ally can know who (and what) triggered Jackson. Ally presumably continues with Rez, not knowing what he has done to her late husband. In the end, the film can perhaps be said to be about the limits of justice in the human condition. In other words, sometimes the bad guys get away with it.

Pope Francis Excommunicates the Mafia:Theological Lessons from “The Godfather”

As though a lamb going into a lion’s den, Pope Francis journeyed to Sibari in southern Italy on the Summer Solstice of 2014 to castigate the Italian mafia, and more specifically the Ndrangheta crime group, as an example of “the adoration of evil.”  He added that “(t)hose who in their lives follow this path of evil, as mafiosi do, are not in communion with God. They are excommunicated.”[1] Presumably so too are the mafia families in other European states, and in the American states as well. As laudable as such excommunicating is, the fact that such murderous thugs have regarded themselves as Catholics, and, more generally as Christian, points to a more profound need for reform within the religion itself. In this essay, I draw on The Godfather saga to present this argument.

Under the pope's order, Michael of the fictional Corleone family would not be able to stand as godfather to his sister’s child. In the film, Michael had ordered the murder of his godson’s father, and various other such orders were being carried out even as the baptism was taking place. Doubtless many viewers came to associate the Roman Catholic Church is a “look the other way” stance even before the clerical pedophilia story reached the light of day.

Ominously for Pope Francis, Pope John Paul had been the last Roman pope to preach openly against the mob back in 1993. That pope died shortly after becoming the pontiff. As The Godfather, Part 3 suggests, that pope’s death may have been contrived by the mob eager to keep the Vatican Bank free of prying reform. Asked in an interview shortly before his trip to southern Italy about his relative lack of security, Pope Francis said that at his age he had comparatively little to lose. In his view, the members of the Mafiosi have a lot to lose in a salvific sense.

In The Godfather, Part 3, Michael goes to the Vatican to speak to a humble Cardinal who would become the pope who is murdered. During the conversation in a courtyard, the priest seizes the moment by inviting the godfather to confess his sins. “I always have time to save souls,” the cleric offers. “What is the point of confessing if I don’t repent,” the mobster replies. “What have you got to lose?” the priest counters. Finally, Michael confesses to having given the order to kill his elder brother. Fittingly, the camera shows a solid pillar of stone between the humble religious man and the man guilty of fratricide, and the flowers may portend both the hope extended by the priest and the death of the other man’s soul.

The formal words absolution, said in authoritative-sounding Latin, is belied by what the priest himself says to Michael. “Your sins and terrible, and it is just that you suffer; your life could be redeemed, but I know that you don’t believe that; you will not change.”  Before the confession, the Cardinal had bemoaned the lack of progress that Christianity had made in Europe. Breaking open a small stone that had been in a small fountain, the red-clad cleric likened the still-dry inside of the stone to Europe, which had been immersed in Christianity for centuries yet little had so far penetrated. So too, the godfather, like his father before him, had gone through rituals in Church yet the principles and values preached and lived out by Jesus had not penetrated those two souls. Even popes have contravened even well-known principles, as for instance the four who promised salvation to Christians willing to fight in the Crusades instead of loving the enemy, turning the other cheek, and offering even more to those who take.  

Even though excommunicating members of the Mafiosi is entirely appropriate and fitting, at least as long as they refuse to change, the religion’s own pliability is itself a problem in need of an audacious leader willing to speak truth to power, or dogma in this case. Jesus says in the Gospels that he came to preach on the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, yet even early Church leaders such as the Apostles have relegated those principles in favor of attention on Christology as being the religion’s litmus test.  

Clearly, daylight between valuing the principles and believing the Creedal identity claim shows what must be a rather loose coupling; for a Christian can act in ways that contradict the deemphasized teachings without much fear of charges of hypocrisy as long as the Christological belief is correct. I submit that precisely this fault-line running through the history of Christianity is largely responsible for the fact that the religion has not penetrated Europe in spite of a presence there for almost two millennia. The “wriggle room” that exists between a cognitive assent to an identity claim and valuing principles advocated by Jesus has also made it possible for the Mafiosi members to regard themselves as Christians in spite of violently contravening the principles and values of the Kingdom of God. 

In The Godfather, Michael gives his cognitive assent during the baptism ritual to the existence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, even as his murderous orders are being carried out antithetical to Jesus’s principle of loving one’s enemy. Had the latter received such creedal treatment from the outset in historical Christianity, perhaps Pope Francis’s announcement of excommunication in 2014 would have been preceded by many others directed against those who harass, threaten, and murder for a living.

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[1] Reuters, “Pope Excommunicates Mafiosi,” The Huffington Post, June 21, 2014.

Dallas Buyers Club

The maturation of a story’s protagonist—as “growth” eventuated through the progression of the narrative—provides a source of dynamism that can keep a film from being static, or falling flat for lack of character development. At the same time, a good screenwriter is careful not to overdo it, lest a character’s internal transition occur too quickly in terms of the story to be believable. In Dallas Buyers Club, Ron Woodroof—played by Matthew McConaughey—“turns on a dime” in his attitude toward gays. The flip is hardly believable. The question is why.

When a physician informs Ron that he has AIDS—beyond being HIV positive—the rodeo enthusiast and electrician by trade reacts vehemently against the implication that he had contracted the disease from sex with another man. Even from that point, he refers to a gay man as Tinkerbell. The implication is that Ron is severely prejudiced against homosexuality, and his context being that of rodeos in Texas makes this interior state very believable.

Yet without giving the viewer a sense of sufficient story time having elapsed, Ron latterly chokes Tucker, one of his rodeo friends in a grocery store for refusing to shake hands with Ron’s business partner, the cross-dressing, AIDs infected Rayon, played by Jared Leto. Even for Ron to have lost his strong prejudice is hard to fathom, as he could have worked with, and even come to like Rayon without losing his distaste for homosexuality; for Ron to violently force Tucker to shake Rayon’s hand is apt to strike the viewer as sheer artifice on the part of the screenwriter and director. It is as though Ron were a Janus-like fictive caricature rather than a character based on an actual person.

Taken to an extreme, a character’s quick “about face” can leave the viewer wondering where the antagonist went. Indeed, the distinction between a protagonist and an antagonist can become confused, infecting even the structural integrity of the narrative itself. In the 2014 film Godzilla, Godzilla loses all his monster lore built up through preceding films to become—all of a sudden—the savoir of San Francisco. What had been a fight between Godzilla and two other dinosaurs is all of a sudden Godzilla protecting the city and its human inhabitants from the radiation-eating male and female animals invented in this film-version. The switch from antagonist to protagonist simply is not believable, and the story itself suffers as a consequence.

Fortunately, remedies exist. Using story-time rather than short-circuiting can be part of the mix. Lincoln says in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, “time is a great thickener of things.” A montage can give the viewer a sense not only of time passing, but of a character undergoing maturating learning as, for instance, from sustained suffering in the process. Signs of an interior change vital to the narrative can begin in the montage, or otherwise patently as the story resumes. Staggered thusly (like a recurring, subtle melody in the string section of an orchestra) and so only gradually anticipated by the viewer, when the change finally manifests full-blown as vital to the story, the realized “growth” or change is credible. This credibility can actually contribute to the suspension of disbelief that is so vital to the believability of the story and thus its constructed world and characters. 

Godzilla

The allure of the technological advances in film-making is particularly pressing in the action genre. Three challenges come to mind—that of how to have the film stand as a metaphor for something that is both good and bad in “real life,” develop a relationship storyline amid the digital effects that enable such tremendous scale of action, and restrain the visual effects lest they manifest as a sort of visual diarrhea. Godzilla (2014) is illustrative of what can happen when a film-maker is not up to these challenges.

As a sci-fi film, Godzilla performs the requisite function of standing for something going on in society at a distance. The monsters who eat nuclear fuel deliver the message, albeit filtered through the science fiction, that nuclear power is dangerous. Interestingly, just as not all of the monsters in the film turn out to be bad, nuclear technology has its good point in holding promise in blowing up the bad monsters who ironically eat nuclear fuel. If nuclear technology, like fire, puts us in a sort of a double-bind, so too do the monsters in the film. Unfortunately, turning Godzilla into a “savior of the city” at the end and not simply a foe of the nuclear-eating monsters violates the Godzilla character inherited by the film. A similar problem is in the Twilight films, which violate vampire lore not only by having them out in daylight, but also by glittering like jewels in the sunlight. Stephanie Meyer wrote a romance, rather than a vampire story, and the film-maker tried to have it both ways—monsters who aren’t really monsters. So too, Godzilla ends up not as a monster and yet technically so, presumably to embrace as a symbol the ambiguity in our attitudes toward nuclear technology.

The film also falls short in melding its human story with all the digital glitter. The problem is in how the two very different scales (the digital technology extending the larger) are related. As the monsters get “up close and personal” with the human protagonist, such intimate contact between such vastly different scales is too contrived to be believed. The distortive effect includes much too much significance being attributed to the scientist’s grown son. In other words, the narrative is distorted by the film-maker’s attempt to extend the larger scale (possible with the digital toys) while still having the emotional heart-tugs from a “human interest story.” The attempt is clearly to make the son the hero who saves the city even as Godzilla is dubbed “savoir of the city,” but the narrative itself supports neither. The son did not have such a role, and Godzilla was merely fighting adversaries rather than trying to save the humans. In the end, narrative itself gets sacrificed on the altar of special-effects technology. Given the complexity in the human relation to nuclear technology, constructing a workable narrative would have been quite a feat anyway—the eye-candy just making the achievement of suitable substance all the more daunting.