Strange River

Not every film has an implicit Thoreau signature reflective of the nineteenth-century Romantic turn from the age of Reason. Not every film brings to mind the Romantic painter, Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whose painting of nature’s green growing over classic Roman pillars as if to say, nature has the last word. The European film, Strange River (2025), is such a film. The key to making these connections lies not in the film’s dialogue, but, rather, in Jaume Muxart’s consistent choice to direct the film by ending several scenes with elongated camera-shots of nature. This leitmotif has Thoreau’s Walden Pond written all over it and is an implicit critique of rationality and the related artificial societies that mankind has constructed at the expense of being natural.

The film centers on Didac, a sixteen year-old boy who, as a typical teenager, is engulfed in the growing pains of self-discovery. This takes place on a family biking and camping trip along the Danube river. The film opens while the parents and three boys are biking near the mouth of the river, and ends with the family angst gone where the river is much larger; life has been more fully experienced, with the parents having reunited from being emotionally fraught, and Didac having had a brief fling (not including gay sex) on a small boat overnight with another boy. Boys will be boys; nothing definite should be extrapolated. Early on, Lena, the mother, tells Didac, “This might be the last summer that the family is together.” Two arguments between the parents bear out the mother’s prognosis that the couple might get a divorce, and her sexual fling with a young man one night during the trip bears out her desire to wander.

Meanwhile, Didac is initially aggrieved that Gerard, a boy from school on whom Didac has a crush, has been ignoring him. Didac speaks with his father, Albert, on “the frustration of not being desired.” Albert urges his teenage son to share how he feels with Gerard. Both parents support Didac’s romantic interest in Gerard. “You guys kissed,” both parents separately remind their son with winks. For something much deeper than an infatuation, frustration is an understatement, so Didac’s crushes on boys are clearly not very serious, and he may eventually be sexually interested in women. Put somewhat bluntly, the importance of the role that water plays in how Muxart depicts nature in the film, especially with shots of Didac in particular swimming naked, brings to mind the problem in nature wherein heterosexual sexual intercourse is naturally well-lubricated (if not rushed) whereas anal penetration is not, but Didac’s instinctual urges for boys sexually are natural too. Also problematically, the two elongated camera close-ups of Didac’s butt while he is swimming on two occasions almost creep out the wide shots of a boy swimming naked, which prima facie can be construed as showing a human being fully in nature, and thus natural (whereas wearing gray suits in bland offices in artificial skyscrapers is not). If the film can be characterized as a love story, it is that of a family, rather than two boys, and, moreover, a love story with nature. To be sure, Didac takes after his mother in that both engage in “extracurricular” flings during the trip. In fact, Didac sees Lena kissing a younger man one night at a camp-grounds. “Don’t look at me that way,” Lena tells her eldest son the next day; she goes on to tell him that she had had a romantic night with a stranger on the same route twenty years before the present trip. That foray took place on a small boat and the young man disappeared, and Didac has the same experience with a boy on the current trip. With that boy, Alexander, disappearing in the morning before Didac wakes up, the film lapses in skipping ahead to Didac being with his family on a large boat without accounting for how the 16 year-old boy gets from the small boat anchored in the large river back to his parents. If Didac’s brief, free-spirit, foray with Alexander is supposed to feel magical, Alexander leaving Didac alone on the boat is too much reality. In fact, rather than viewing the film as falling within the “gay cinema” genre, if there is such a type (try “romance films,” as falling in love is falling in love), I contend that Muxart situates the film as a family dynamic couched within nature, in and as a part of nature. Rather than being apart from nature, and thus other animals, our species, homo sapiens, is in the animal kingdom, and this is evinced both sexually and in how we raise our offspring.

During the trip, while at an empty school that Albert attended as a boy, he gives his wife and three boys, who are less than attentive, a lecture on the building’s architecture. Albert claims that the rationalistic style is relaxing, but this is undercut as an argument ensues. Significantly, that scene ends with the camera staying on a tree whose fine branches and leaves are swaying in the wind. Nature is relaxing. In fact, Muxart has the 16-mm lens changed as the trip goes on because the river is larger as the family progresses on the route along the river, and shots of the water are salient in the film and to its very meaning. In fact, the film ends with a wide, sustained shot of the wide river, as if to say that nature has the last word as image. That the family, or at least Didac, swims nude can be taken as saying that his teenage growing pains are natural—that he is part of nature. When he is masturbating on the bank of the river after swimming nude alone, the greenery around him is as natural as his facial expressions, especially his eyes, as he is stroking his penis. As he approaches orgasm, a long camera shot of the river water sparkling in the sunlight with emotive instrumental music makes the connection with nature clear. What he is doing is entirely natural, and thus good. Even after Didac and his dad have a father-son talk on Didac having kissed a boy at school, a homosexual encounter that Didac initially denies as he tells his father, “You are too old to understand,” a long camera-shot of the river, which is wider than at the beginning of the film, ensues as if to say, nature has the last word; Didac should go on his natural instincts rather than try to rationalize or justify his attraction to other boys. My point is that Didac’s homosexual urges are not the point of the film; rather, such urges serve as props for Muxart’s leitmotif that we as a species are a part of nature, rather than cast apart, as Albert says in the film, “When no one lives in a building, it dies.” We may design and build buildings, but we are corporeal, organic beings and thus a part of nature.

We can move figuratively to a larger “camera shot” by changing our lens to the nineteenth century, when Romanticism evinced both by the painter Joseph Turner and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau eclipsed the Age of Reason. To be sure, it had been during the eighteenth century that the Earl of Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith wrote on ethics by stressing the sentiment of disapprobation as being ethical judgment that some conduct has been unethical. There is no hint of Kant’s ethical categorical imperative wherein a logical contradiction in universalizing a maxim can be taken as evidence that the maxim is unethical. Instead, the viewer of the film is looking out on the river perhaps as Thoreau looked out on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Even Aristotle looked to nature, and so too does Muxart in making Strange River; we just need to look at how several important scenes end. Just as Albert and Lena do not move forward with divorce, so too, the family does not divorce itself from nature. 

The Pledge

Even though The Pledge (2001) is murder-mystery film, it is fundamentally a tragedy without regard to the murder. Jack Nicholson plays Jerry Black, a retired police investigator who loses everything because he is faithful to a pledge that he made to the parents of the young girl who had been raped and murdered by a serial killer. It is Jerry’s fidelity to the pledge that is highlighted throughout the film, and ultimately ends in his ruin. The film thus depicts what in Kant’s ethic is the ability of rational beings to be taken as promise-keepers bound by the promises we make as if they had the necessity of law.

Close to the opening of the film is Jerry’s surprise retirement-party given by his boss and police co-workers. He has been an excellent detective, and his co-workers have paid for him to go on a vacation to Mexico.  He has been well-liked. The party is interrupted, however, with news of a young girl having just been savagely murdered. Jerry accompanies the detective-in-charge to the scene, and later breaks the news to the girl’s parents. The mother, Margaret Larsen, played intensely by Patricia Clarkson, gets Jerry to pledge on the little cross that had been crafted by the murdered daughter that he would seek justice in the case and find the killer. Being an excellent detective, he sees right through the pathetic confession of a criminal achieved by detective Krolak and continues to look for the real killer. Jerry gives up his trip to Mexico in order to work on the case even though he is no longer employed by the police department. In fact, he buys a rural gas station and house, paying too much for them, just in order to live in the small town where the murder took place.

It is precisely the lengths to which Jerry goes to fulfil his pledge that the film highlights. In fact, he may even take in a young girl and her mother at least in part so he could use that girl as bate to attract the serial killer, though his tender feelings for both the daughter and the mother are genuine. He does use the girl as bate when he learns from her that the culprit has planned to meet the girl at a park, and news of this set-up, with police protection, nonetheless prompts the girl’s mother to immediately take her daughter and leave Jerry (the mother’s romantic feelings for Jerry could not have been very deep).

This presents us with the possibility that in the ethics of promise-keeping, an unethical act may be done in furtherance of the pledge. Does the fact that Jerry used the woman’s daughter as bate and kept this from the mother nullify the ethics of keeping the promise to the mother of the girl who had been murdered? Here we have film narrative being able to tease out an ethical nuance, and thus the medium of film being quite useful in the service of laying out ethical dilemmas. If as in Kant’s ethical theory, rational beings can take the moral law as binding with the necessity of law, then Jerry’s fidelity to the pledge depicts how rational beings should behave according to Kant. However, Kant’s theory also holds that other rational beings should not be used as mere means, but also regarded and treated as ends in themselves because reason has absolute value because it is by means of reason that we assign worth to things. Although Jerry does not lie to the girl’s mother by not informing her of the set-up in the park in which her daughter is the bate, using the daughter as bate treats her only as a means (to Jerry’s end of catching the serial killer). That this end is ethically praiseworthy does not justify using the little girl as bate unless, as I reckon, she is so protected by the police squad there in the park that she is in no danger. Even though Jerry, who is emotionally attached to the girl (and thus he would hardly put her in danger), complains to Krolak in the park about not having police shooters close enough to the girl when she is at the picnic table, we can take Krolak’s reassurance as sufficient evidence that the girl faces no danger. So, I think the girl’s mother over-reacts when she confronts and slaps Jerry just before she leaves him. This may be why he is speechless. In the end, he loses the mother, the girl, and even his gas station is defunct and he is drinking. He has lost credibility with the police because the killer is killed in an automobile accident on the way to the park and thus is a no-show. All this translates into the point that in keeping promises, people can tragically lose a lot. This hardly seems fair, but the possibility is what makes keeping promises so intrinsically valuable, ethically speaking.

A rational being can hold oneself to the strictures of what one ought to do even though doing so runs contrary to one’s self-interest. Those strictures can have the force or necessity of law, even though—and this is the incredible feature—holding to the ought is entirely voluntary! To value being faithful to a pledge (and disvaluing being unfaithful) can be so powerful in human nature that the faithfulness itself is treated as though it has the necessity that goes with obeying a law. Jerry’s faithfulness to his pledge runs throughout the entirety of the film, and he never loses faith in his belief that the killer is still at large (he doesn’t know about the automobile accident).

Of course, rational beings are fully capable of putting self-interest of the moment above being faithful to a pledge—of promise-keeping. Kant does not claim that rational beings are hardwired to necessarily do what they ought to do. In theological terms, as Al Pacino says as the Devil in the film, Devil’s Advocate, “Free will is a bitch.” Rational beings are fully capable of treating others as mere means rather than as ends in themselves. Put another way, evading ought rather than holding it as having a necessity is very easy for rational beings to rationalize doing. In terms of romantic relationships, one of the worst things that a person can say to the other is, “I’m afraid I will hurt your feelings by infidelity.” The person might as just as well say, “I don’t love you and I won’t love you.” In hearing such a line, the best choice is to immediately exit, stage left. Because Jerry in the film loses so much in the end because he refuses to be emotionally unfaithful to the mother of the slain girl by breaking the pledge that he has made to her, we can see just how much daylight exists within human nature and across respectable and sordid human character because the unfaithful sort is all too evident in the world in which we live. Reducing self-interest to what is momentarily convenient, such as in pursuing pleasure, and thereby treating one’s promises as optional rather than as having moral necessity (i.e., as a moral law), reduces rational beings to primitive, instinctual beings. 

That we are capable of loving the moral ought and thus treating it as an end in itself is what Kant was really trying to convey in his Critique of Practical Reason. When we treat the moral ought thusly and other rational beings not just as means to our ends, but also as ends in themselves, we are truly civilized and worthy of emotional intimacy. That a person such as Jerry can hold to fulfilling a promise (i.e., what ought itself essentially demands) and yet lose everything by doing so is indeed tragic.

 

Eyes without a Face

The film, Eyes without a Face (original title: Les Yeux sans Visage) (1960), can be taken as a demonstration of the validity of Kant’s ethical theory. Whether or not viewers have studied Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the film is a good representation that it is unethical to treat other people only as a means. Kant claims that people should always be treated also as ends in themselves. In the film, physician Génessier literally goes into innocent young women with his scalpel, using them as means in his obsession to provide his daughter, Christiane, with skin on her face. She has no skin on her face because of an automobile accident in which her father was at fault. For our purposes, the film's message is relevant. Companies literally have  human resource departments and so many states use human beings as expendable soldiers. The very notion of a soldier can be viewed as an oxymoron to the extent that beings having a rational nature are sent out to be killed. It's not like having a flee killed. The film provides us with a great service in bringing Kant’s ethic to us, if only in that we don’t to read the philosopher's recondite ethical treatise (though Hegel's books are even more difficult).

Génessier tells Christiane that everything that he is doing, all the (as he later admits) terrible things, he is doing for her good. He also says that if he succeeds, the benefit would be “beyond a price.” Whereas for Kant, reason, or beings having a rational nature (such as us), has absolute value because we use reason to assign value to other things, the devious physician treats his daughter’s good as being absolute. This difference is crucial in terms of ethics. For Kant, rational beings deserve to be treated not just as means to someone’s goal (or interest), but also as ends in themselves precisely because being rational is of absolute value. What about when we don’t think (or behave) rationally? Kant would say that we still have a rational nature, and thus are worthy of being respected by other rational beings not just as means to another’s desire.

Does Génessier use reason—does he think rationally—in removing skin from two young women’s faces and grafting the skin on his daughter’s skinless face? I contend that the father does so because he has a strategy by which to achieve the good, which for him his daughter having a pleasant life. At one point in the film, it looks like the latest skin transplant will work. He tells his daughter that he would pay for her to take a vacation so she could enjoy life after having lived so isolated for so long. He uses the young women and potentially a vacation as means to his daughter’s good, and in this way he is using reason. It is quite another question whether he is being ethical. It is easy to see that he is not an ethical man.

In short, he uses people. Besides the two young women whom he kidnaps and operates on to give their skin to his daughter, he is using Gabrielle as an accomplice and nurse; he had fixed her face, so she feels obligated to do unethical things for him. Interestingly, the police also use someone in the film. Specifically, the police inspector uses a shoplifter as bait to catch Génessier. The inspector is not very concerned about treating the woman as an end in herself, hence he puts her at risk, as if the misdemeanor justifies doing so.

Christiane is the protagonist, and even the heroine, in the film, in resisting her father’s strategy. Whereas he admits that he has done terrible things but they are justified because they serve his daughter’s good, Christiane feels guilty in her new skin during the weeks when it lasts. Génessier remarks that her face looks angelic, but she disagrees. Interestingly, she says that it seems like the experience seems from the beyond. This allusion to religion seems at first out of place, especially given her father’s horrors. But her true, internal angelic nature comes through at the end when she kills the nurse to free the shoplifter. In fact, she goes on to free the dogs and white birds. Like them, she has felt as if she were in a cage. Her father hadn’t bothered to ask her whether she consented to his sordid strategy of abducting young women for their facial skin. In the end, she walks outside, past her dead father whom the dogs have attacked. One of the white birds sits comfortably on one of her arms. She is as though an angel come to liberate the oppressed, which includes herself, and in so doing see that the wicked are punished. Divine retribution. Indeed, Kant’s formulation of his categorical imperative in which the means/ends dichotomy is salient resembles the neighbor-love of Christianity. In other words, the Golden Rule involves treating other people not just as means to one’s own designs, but, rather, how one would want to be treated. Presumably no one wants to be treated only as someone else’s means to their goals. Of course, the difference between Kant’s imperative in this formulation and the Golden Rule is that rational nature is the grounding of the former whereas the soul, and ultimately God, is the basis of the latter. Benevolentia universalis, which Augustine imparts as he emphasizes having a good will (benevolentia), is essentially love, which transcends ethics. The bad doctor Génessier does not love the young women whose skin he flays as a means to providing his daughter with a face. His love suffers for want of universalis.

In Kantian language, which relates to the Golden Rule but is not itself religious, we might say that those who have a rational nature but do not treat others of the same nature as ends in themselves, but only as means, do not themselves deserve to inhabit a rational nature. We could even suppose that it is not rational enough to devise unethical (i.e., means only) means involving beings having a rational nature, so  Génessier can be seen as not reasoning well—not partaking sufficiently in his innate rational nature—in devising his strategy; even his notion of the good fall short in being confined to his daughter’s happiness. To evoke another of Kant’s formulations of his ethical imperative, a person’s maxim or policy for action should be universalized without falling apart in absurdity. The (theory of the) good that the ethic serves should also be universal, as in the good of humanity, or, more precisely, beings having a rational nature.

But such abstractions are not necessary for film to be an excellent medium for conveying ethical dilemmas and even relating them to religious themes that transcend ethics. It is enough that the viewer sees Génessier use other human beings so atrociously and then sees Christiane reject her father’s unethical conduct even though she herself stood (potentially) to gain from it. In the rejection and the demise both of Génessier and his assistant, we see the value in Kant’s ethical dictum that we should respect other people as ends in themselves even while we are using them for our own purposes.

Even if a person stands to benefit, such as a stockholder benefitting from a higher dividend, as managers use employees without taking into account that they have lives outside of work, the ethical obligation is to oppose such unethical business conduct and favor lower dividends. I refused a doctorate in business ethics because there were no ethics courses in philosophy in the program. At the very least, a seminar on Kant should be required of anyone who claims to be a scholar of business ethics. Bentham’s utilitarianism and Rawls' theory of justice also warrant coursework. I stood to benefit from that doctorate, but I could not regard myself as a scholar of business ethics (i.e., business, government, and society). Fortunately, I switched to the humanities—to historical moral, political, and ethical thought—but I did so in their own right—treating such thought as an end in itself rather than as means to understanding business (even though I still have a BS and MBA).

The value in going beyond rational nature to treat things as having value in themselves rather than merely functionally or in line with one’s self-interest goes beyond Kant’s theory of ethics, and yet the dynamic is consistent with Kant’s theory in broad outlines. Christiane kills the nurse and thereby consciously ends any chance of getting skin because like Luther at the Imperial Diet of Worms, she finally says, in effect, Here I stand; I can do no other. I submit that even a principle can be treated as an end in itself, as partaking in absolute value, relative to egoist desire. But is it reason that assigns such value, or might feeling also be involved? Luther was probably acting on feeling, and Christiane has clearly had enough. Kant’s theory relies solely on reason; Hume’s ethic and even Adam’s Smith’s economic theory do not.