San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

The full essay is at "San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival."

The Reader

The film, The Reader (2008), captures a frame of mind that may be so frequently overlooked when it is observed because it is so bizarre in its impact on reasoning that it difficult to explain, let alone grasp for what it is. The phenomenon is not of artifice; rather, it is a natural vulnerability of the human mind, or brain, due to its susceptibility to ideology that is highly unethical in its content, including a circumscribed and even warped mental framework and very unethical prescriptions for conduct. The ideology at issue in the film is that of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1933 to 1945.  The truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely does not fully account for the cognitive warping that is evinced by Hanna Schmidt during her trial in the film.

The plot centers around a sexual-relationship between Hanna Schmitz and Michael Berg during a summer more than a decade after the end of Nazi Germany. Because Michael is only 15 years old when Hanna, a middle-aged adult, seduces him sexually and gets him to read stories to her, she starts off the film as being culpable criminally, assuming that sexual intercourse with a minor is illegal in the film. To be sure, not even astute viewers would predict that her seduction of a minor means that she had worked as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp from 1943 until the death-march from Hungary in 1944, especially because Michael willingly returned to her apartment several times to read to her and have sex with her. As the film goes on, viewers quickly realize that her sexual crime is dwarfed by her crimes as a guard in Nazi Germany.

A portion of professor Rohl’s lecture in his law-school class in which Michael is enrolled as a law student years after his summer of sex is a useful way to contextualize Hanna’s Nazi crimes. Rohl begins by noting that out of the 9,000 people who worked at Auschwitz, only 19 have been convicted, and they were convicted according to law rather than morality. “The question was not, was it wrong, but was it legal, and not by our laws, no, by the laws at the time” and “intent must be proved.” One student observes that the law is narrower than is holding people to the dictates of morality. Professor Rohl readily agrees. To be convicted, Hanna and the other five guards with whom she worked must be found to have violated the relevant laws of Nazi Germany. So just following orders, which count as laws, is a viable defense.

In his trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was convicted precisely because he had violated Himmer’s order not to march Hungarian “enemies of the state” to Auschwitz. Eichmann violated the laws of Nazi Germany knowing that people would die as a result, so he could be convicted and even sentenced to death.  The film, The Reader, refutes Israel’s claim that former Nazis could not get an unbiased trial in West Germany. Both the Israelis and the Germans could be expected to hold biases regarding the Germans who were, or worked for, the Nazis, yet in the film as well as in Eichmann’s historical trial in 1961, jurisprudence passes the test in maintaining its narrow, and thus rigorous standards even against biases one way or the other.

In the trial in the film, Hanna admits to having been one of six female guards who selected 60 prisoners each month to be sent from their camp to Auschwitz even though the guards (and the prisoners) knew that the 60 people sent would be killed. Unlike the other women on trial, Hanna is honest in her testimony. Answering the chief judge’s question on why she selected 10 prisoners each month to be killed at Auschwitz, she answered, “but there were new arrivals arriving all the time, so the old ones had to make room for the new ones. We couldn’t keep everyone. There wasn’t room.” In Hanna having been oriented to the flow of prisoners being optimal, Hanna Arendt’s description of the Eichmann trial as showcasing the “banality of evil” in the bureaucracy of the Nazis applies here too. In the film, the chief judge is astonished at Hanna’s lapse concerning the obvious ethical problem: “But you knew you were selecting people to be killed.” Hanna replies, “What would you have done? Should I have never signed up at Siemens?” meaning to be hired by the SS. Hanna’s answers are themselves worthy of reflection, for they evince an absolute indifference to the plight of the chosen prisoners. In fact, she puts space-limitations at her camp above, as if justifying, the (necessary) plight. It is not as if she seems to have been wallowing in the power she had at the camp; she seems to have viewed herself as a manager working as if a hotel manager oriented to managing vacancies so no one arriving would be turned away, as if that were ethically more objectionable than sending prisoners to their death at the death camp in Poland.

Any such managerial excuse is belied when the judge turns to Hanna’s role in the march of all of the prisoners to Auschwitz when the camp in Hungary was closed. Hanna and the five other SS guards with whom she worked locked the doors of a church where prisoners were sleeping one night on the journey even though the guards knew that that church was on fire from a bombing raid. The chief judge asks Hanna, “Why did you not open the doors? In the written report, which you all signed, you claim you didn’t know about the fire until after it had happened. But that isn’t true, is it? . . . Why did you not open the doors?” Hanna quickly responds in a way that suggests that she thinks the judge has just asked a stupid question. “Obviously,” she says defiantly. “For the obvious reason. We couldn’t. We were guards. Our job was to guard the prisoners. We couldn’t just let them escape.” Her judgment that keeping the 300 people in the church, in which case they would all, except for one girl, die, was better than letting them out even if they would try to escape evinces something more than a warped moral compass. To be sure, letting prisoners escape is ethically preferrable to keeping them from evading death, but her reasoning too is flawed. The job of guarding prisoners does not in itself include playing a role in their respective deaths.

The judge next wants to assess whether Hanna and the other five guards feared for their lives should the prisoners have escaped from the burning building. “And if they escaped,” he asked Hanna, “you’d be charged? You’d be executed?” Hanna, hardly a defense attorney, answers emphatically, “No! If we’d opened the doors there would have been chaos. How could we have restored order? . . . and if they had all come out, we couldn’t just let them escape! We couldn’t! We were responsible for them!” That being responsible for prisoners could include deciding to let them die when they could be saved is, I submit, not just a moral lapse as if contributing to the death of 300 were morally better than letting them escape. Perhaps equally of concern, her reasoning—her cognition—was infected as if with computer malware. This can be more easily grasped from following statement, which is similar to what Hanna answers: We let the prisoners die because we were responsible for them! Her premise that the guards’ responsibility as guards is only to forestall escape—meaning that the responsibility of the guards was to the Nazi regime rather for the prisoners—even if that responsibility meant forcing the prisoners to be burnt alive is unsound and narrow; hence it may be the product of brain-washing.

It is not that being willingly enveloped by a political ideology spares a person from culpability. So, the judge tells Hanna, “So you did know what was happening. You did know, you made a choice. You let them die, rather than risk letting them escape.” She was neither forced nor insane; she knew what she was doing in keeping 300 people in a burning church. Hanna’s problematic mentality goes beyond the ethically problematic hierarchy of escape as being worse than being burned live. Even though she had obviously been “supercharged” into focusing narrowly in her job on escape being the worst thing possible, she was once again indifferent to the severity of the plight of other people. Both the narrowness and the sociopathic indifference were part of Nazi culture. In fact, the strong preference for order and aversion to chaos has arguably remained a salient part of German culture even though the Nazis’ ideology has been refuted. In the film, the judge does not question Hanna on her aversion to chaos or the high value she puts on order. This lapse is odd, considering that the judge may be guilty of scapegoating Hanna with a life sentence while giving the other five guards only four and a half years in prison. The other five guards contributed to the scapegoating, but the judge seemed not to realize this point.

Even though Hanna has answered the judge’s questions with an amazing forthrightness, the judge does not believe her when she denies that she wrote the report on the church fire. He even ignores her valid point that it doesn’t matter who wrote the report because all six women signed it. None of the six opened the church doors as the building burned, and there was no evidence that Hanna was in charge of the other guards. He should have relied more on Hanna’s testimony regarding the other defendants rather than say that it is easy to spread the crime to include other culprits. Furthermore, that Hanna does not give the convenient answer that she feared that the SS would execute her for letting the prisoners escape and that she answers honestly goes to her integrity, when supports my claim that she had been indoctrinated by the Nazis when she was hired to believe that the lives of the prisoners do not matter, especially as against them being able to escape (even from a burning building).

Lest it be concluded that only Nazi ideology could be so severely warping in terms of morality and reasoning, the claim of the Israeli army late in 2025 that a 3 year-old Gaza resident had to be shot because the child walking from a tent to an Israeli tank nearby was a security threat. So too, the claim by officials in the Israeli government, including Israel’s president, that all residents of Gaza were culpable of the attack inside Israel proper by Hamas is warped, both morally and cognitively. Israeli soldiers playing the game of who can shoot the most kids in Gaza, soldiers raping 6 year-old boys (and doubtlessly numerous Gaza women) in the name of security, and the Israeli government’s presumptuous and erroneous accusation of collective responsibility of everyone in Gaza for the attack carried out by a political group such that more than a million people were intentionally subjected to starvation, no medical care, and even homelessness all evince the toxic mental imprint of a sordid ideology of hatred every bit as sordid as the Nazi ideology had been. Shooting babies who had not even been born in 2024 demonstrates the utter irrationality in the statements of some senior government officials that all of the residents of Gaza deserve to suffer—that not even death is good enough for them. I contend that this last part renders the mass atrocities a holocaust rather than just a genocide. Subjecting over a million people to severe deprivation and thus horrid suffering, and killing over 60,000-75,000 residents outright through 2025 mean that the statements were not merely rhetoric. That the deaths of less than 1,500 Israelis in the attack in Israel in 2023—an attack of utter frustration contextualized by decades of being subjugated and occupied by an enemy state—could justify so many more deaths and the starvation of many, many more people in Gaza demonstrates not just severely flawed ethical judgment, but also corrupted reasoning as if such an imbalance could possibly be justified even in terms of state security. Were the Israeli officials intellectually honest, they would simply admit that they were simply unleashing their hatred of a “subhuman” people who are like dogs. Similarly, Nazi propaganda films portrayed Jews as rats infecting Europe. It is perhaps out of a global sense of guilt about the first holocaust that the unbalanced Israeli application of collective “justice” did not trigger a coalition of the willing among nations to rid Gaza military of the Israeli army, and that the equivalence of the Netanyahu and Hitler administrations has not been recognized and acknowledged. Ideology can indeed warp moral judgment and even cognition/reasoning as well as perception of world events.

That susceptibility of the human mind can operate “beneath the radar,” especially in regard to the severity of the depravity. The judge in the film tells the court that Hanna is in another class of criminality even from the five other guards. I submit that he is wrong about the five other guards, for they are just as culpable criminally because none of them were willing to open the church doors and thus were fine with 300 people being burned to death. Nevertheless, the judge aptly perceives Hanna’s “reasoning” as partial at best and her values as deeply problematic morally. They were our responsibility; we couldn’t just let them escape, so we decided that they would have to die. The 300 prisoners in the church did not have to die; they died because the six SS guards chose not to open the doors. It is conceivable that those guards could have opened the doors and maintained order while minimizing escapes by surrounding an open space and shooting the first person trying to flee.

Contemporary implications of the film include the point that the recognition of the subjectivity-based warping of the human mind by ideology means that the world needs more than the impotent UN and International Criminal Court (ICC) to hold back aggressive regimes such as those of the Nazis and the Israelis. Although not so ideological, the foray into Ukraine by President Putin of Russia based in part on a vision of a resurrected Russian empire (not the USSR) also deserved to be turned back by more than an imagined coalition of the willing in Europe. To the extent that the Russian officials viewed the Ukrainians as subhuman, thus justifying women being raped by Russian soldiers and children being sent deep into Russia, the ideological culprit at work in the Nazi government in the twentieth century and the Israeli government in the 2020s can be detected yet again. The vulnerability of the human mind is thus no accident, but is intrinsic. Therefore, the admixture of human hatred with political (and religious) ideology comes with a such steep toll that the ongoing system of international relations based on absolute national sovereignty can be deemed to be wholly inadequate. International means with military-enforcement power have been needed at least since the 1930s to restrain toxic regimes from inflicting severe harm on people presumed ideologically to be subhuman. 

The underlying problem is not merely humans being drunk with power; even though absolute power corrupts absolutely, and thus institutional checks and balances are advisable both within a government and between every government and the international community institutionalized in an organization or government with real enforcement power, the subjective human mind is too vulnerable to being brain-washed by ideology and this itself is a problem especially because the warped mind is typically impervious to correction both morally and in regard to its own faulty reasoning. In the film, there is no indication whatsoever when Hanna is imprisoned for 20 years that she comes to grips with how wrong she has been ethically and how flawed her reasoning was in her choice not to open the church door. During the trial, the limits of her ideologically-constrained reason are clear when she draws a blank and asks the judge, “What would you have done? Should I not have signed up at Siemens?” The significant imprint of a flawed ideology can readily be inferred. The system of international relations can and should be informed by just this inference that the film astutely provides.

The Irishman

Although Scorsese’s 2019 film, The Irishman, is a fictional crime story, it is based on Charles Brandt’s book, I Heard You Paint Houses, which incorporates interviews that the lead character, Frank Sheeran, who was in real life a close friend of James Hoffa of the Teamsters labor union, gave. Even so, viewers should not make the assumption that Scorsese’s intent was to represent contestable explanations of historical events, such as the disappearance of Hoffa. Similarly, it cannot be assumed that the actual writers of the four Christian Gospel faith-narratives intended to write historical accounts; in fact, it is perfectly legitimate to adapt historical events in making theological points. In making The Irishman, Scorsese no doubt wanted to present viewers with a problematic sketch of how weak the human conscience can be in certain individuals. In his book on Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill begins by lamenting that no progress had been made over thousands of years by ethicist philosophers on the phenomenon of human morality. Scorsese’s film supports Mill’s point.

Scorsese brought out the big guns to act the main characters, and his arduous efforts to bring Joe Pesci out of retirement to play Russell Bufalino arguably made the film what it is. To be sure, Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran and Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa also paid off, but the verbal and non-verbal subtlety that Pesci brought to his character provide not only that character, but also the film itself with depth. This is exemplified by Russell’s way of telling Sheeran that the mob had lost patience with Hoffa to the extent that not even pressuring the latter to retire on his Teamsters’ pension would be enough. It never pays to make enemies, especially if they are mobsters. Especially revealing, though not in terms of a historical fact, is the scene in which Pesci has his character lean forward in a chair to whisper to Sheeran, who is skeptical that the mob could kill a man with as much of a public persona as Hoffa: “We didn’t like a president. So, we can not like a head of a (labor) union.” The first sentence intimates what the real-life mistress of President Johnson revealed in a local television interview when she was too old to care about retaliation from anyone—the mob or the U.S. Government: The Giovanni crime-family of Chicago played a role in the assassination of President Kennedy. Pesci delivered the line so well that viewers can easily grasp that the mob could have kept such a secret, and that such a role could indeed have been the case, historically. Sometimes subtly reveals more than simply stating a historical fact can. Supporting the mentality intimated by how Pesci delivered the line is the way in which Sheeran’s conscience, or, rather, lack thereof, is presented.

Although both Russell and Frank lament the unspoken decision that the higher-up mob bosses had made that Hoffa would not be long for this world, Frank, in spite of being a close friend of Hoffa—even socializing his family with Hoffa’s—not only kills Hoffa but calls the widow to express his sorrow and to comfort her. At the end of the film, Frank asks a priest, “What kind of person makes such a call?” Even Sheeran himself is stunned by his own behavior, and he is mystified as to why he feels absolutely no guilt. Evidently, it is not as though he has any ability to will himself to have a conscience, so it could be that he is mentally ill, and this enabled him to transition so easily from killing combatants in World War II in Europe to being a hitman in New York.

A sociopathic mental illness in which a person has no conscience, is a counter-example that qualifies the typical assumption that anyone can will oneself to behave ethically. To an appreciable degree, human society is predicated on the assumption that people can will themselves not to harm other people because doing so would be wrong. Whether by reasoning, moral sentiment, or a traditional cultural norm that is unquestionably followed, a person is typically assumed to be able to be a moral agent, but this is not always the case. To the extent that human society depends on the assumption and it has holes, police action is necessary, even though it typically catches criminals rather than prevents sociopaths from harming innocent victims. Therefore, there is still a hole, in terms of how a city can protect its residents. In other words, do we rely too much on the typical assumption that people are moral agents, at least that everyone can be one?