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?

Emilia Pérez

In handling social ethics, especially if the topic is controversial, film-makers must decide, whether consciously or not, whether to advocate or elucidate. Whereas the former is in pursuit of an ideology, the latter is oriented to teasing out via dramatic tensions the nuances in a typical normative matter that move an audience beyond easy or convenient answers to wrestle with the human condition itself as complex. This is not to say that advocation should never have a role in film-making; The film, Schindler’s List (1993), for example, provides a glimpse into the extremely unethical conduct of the Nazi Party in ruling Germany. I submit that the vast majority of ethical issues are not so easily decided one way or the other as those that arose from Hitler’s choices regarding communists, Slavs in Eastern Europe, intellectuals, Jews, homosexuals and the disabled. In relative terms, the ethical controversy surrounding transsexuals is less severe and clear-cut. The value of elucidating is thus greater, as are the downsides of prescribing ideologically. One such drawback to indoctrinating on a controversial issue is that the ideological fervor in making the film for such a purpose can blind a film-maker to the cogency of the arguments made in favor of advocated stance on the issue. The film, Emilia Pérez (2024), illustrates this vulnerability, which I submit is inherent to ideology itself.

The film centers on the decision of a Mexican drug-kingpin to get surgery to “become a woman.” I am using quotes here because the statement itself strikes at the controversy itself. Can a biological man become a woman? If so, is it sufficient that the man’s penis be removed, or must a vagina be made?  Or does the making of a vagina out of the skin of a penis constitute a vagina? This seems not to be the case, and, furthermore, ovaries are typically not implanted. Yet the removal of the penis and testicles can be interpreted as the loss of manhood in the literal sense. Is the patient in gender-limbo? In contrast, there was no ethical limbo for the Nazis who murdered millions of people in Europe. It is no accident that Spielberg made Schindler’s List in black and white. Emilia Pérez is in color, and thus flush with the nuances of the world that most of us inhabit in our daily lives.

Lest it be contended that gender is separate from the biology, such that a man can be a woman without even penis-removal, then the contention itself can be reconceptualized and presented as a nuanced question rather than as a fact of reason that has already been established as in a fait accompli to be merely (but importantly!) ingested and promptly digested by audiences. When Emilia, after her operation, insists that she is just as much a woman as any other woman, another character could turn this statement into a question by asking, “But you don’t have ovaries, do you? Or eggs?” Similarly, when Emilia reverts to a man’s voice in expressing outrage upon discovering that her ex-wife has taken the children, the statement of being just as much of a woman as any other woman could be revisited in dialogue.

Moreover, film-makers need not shy away from making relevant philosophical issues transparent and even exploring possible lines of reasoning. For example, the assumption that in an alleged dispute between the body and the mind, the mind not only trumps the body, but is immune from the conflict of interest that is inherent in having one party of a dispute being the arbitrator is frequently passed over in sex-change decisions. Emilia Pérez lapses in not challenging this assumption. She assumes that her mind is right and her body is wrong, but she is using one of the two to make the decision, and thus pass judgment on itself.

Emilia’s decision to undergo a surgical operation is already decided when she meets with Rita, the lawyer who agrees to handle the logistics of Emilia’s operation (and subsequent hiding in plain sight as a woman) for a lucrative fee. Wasserman, the Israeli physician who performs the operation, tells Emilia beforehand that the soul of a person remains the same even if the body changes. Emilia disagrees: the body can change the soul, which in turn can change the world. Unfortunately, the film does not go further in unpacking either of these affirmations. That the human soul is notoriously difficult to conceptualize, much less define as to an essence and attributes may be why two statements are allowed to stand on their own—but are they really? The attitude of the film is clearly in favor of Emilia’s ideological belief even though it is hardly an established fact that by removing an organ or two, the soul itself changes appreciably. Emilia is on firmer ground in claiming that the world can change if enough souls change, but even here, the relevant change is arguably more from self-love issuing out in selfish self-interest to an enlightened self-interest manifesting benevolence, than in terms of gender. Does a soul even have a gender? The Christian Apostle Paul asserts in his epistle to the Galatians (3:28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In terms of souls, gender can be transcended. Perhaps both the physician and Emilia should stay clear of religious language altogether; psychology may be more relevant anyway. If the body changes, what would be the impact on the person’s psychology? Self-love in the psychological sense is different than self-love as a sin.

What about the world part of the tripartite linkage? Does removing a few organs relevant to gender render the world a better place, assuming enough people whose psychological state would be improved thereby undergo operations? More people who are comfortable literally in their own skin could indeed be expected, other things equal, to result in a happier world. Perhaps nothing is more destructive of a society than is the self-hate of some people at the expense of the many. In the film, Emilia turns from drug-dealing to founding a non-profit charitable organization geared to helping families of murder victims find some peace from the recovery of the bodies. Her newly-found self-acceptance clearly results in a better world; other people benefit from her new-found psychological relief in her externals finally reflecting her inner-self, which is a psychological rather than a theological concept. As for her soul, and what it might experience after her mortal body—whether male or female or neither—has died, God’s eyes might be more on the residue remaining Emilia’s soul from the killing of people for drug-profits than on any residue remaining from gender, whether psychological or biological.  

Approaching a controversial, and thus perhaps a not-easily-resolvable ethical issue as a question rather than as in the form of a premeditated ideological answer saves an audience from feeling that it is being viewed only as a means of furthering an ideology (whereas Kant’s ethic insists that we be treated as ends in ourselves rather than just as means) and a screenwriter from overlooking logical lapses occasioned from a fervent ideological agenda. Emilia’s insistence that changing a body changes a soul, which in turn changes the world may be a good line, but it seems more infused with ideological bent than having been thought out. It is better, I submit, not only to elaborate as the narrative unfolds on both of the contending claims, but also to open the viewers up to other, larger questions, such as raised here. Just as film can present the nuances in a tone of voice in a line excellently delivered by an actor, so too film can enunciate and enumerate on the nuances that typically forestall easy solutions to ethical problems. 

Moreover, both in enunciating abstract philosophical and theological points and exploring them, including pointing out where they clash, the medium of film has unrealized potential, as evinced in this analysis of Emilia Pérez. Against this potential, using film to advocate ideologically pales utterly. The hidden gravitational pull of ideology can render a producer, director, and screenwriter unwittingly susceptable to hasty and faulty reasoning in coming up with statements for dialogue that are nonetheless likely to be delivered by actors in a defiant tone of infallibility. I am just as much a woman as every other woman! If you say so, Emilia. A film can and should subject such ideological declarations to scrutiny as questions.

The Professor and the Madman

The film, The Professor and the Madman (2019), is based on the true story of James Murray, the editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19^th century, and William Minor, who contributed over 10,000 entries. Minor, who suffered from schizophrenia, was at the time a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for having killed Jack Merrett under the recurrent delusion of being chased. In the film, this narrative serves as the basis to explore whether even people who think they are unredeemable can nevertheless be redeemed, and thus freed, from their own guilt.

Once at the asylum, William Minor seeks to atone by making the injustice he has committed in committing the murder by making it up to the murdered man’s wife, Eliza, and her children by directing that all of his income go to them. Initially, Eliza refuses this offer, but facing crushing penury, she eventually accepts the income. Incredibly, guard Muncy of the asylum personally sees to it that the family is helped by the money. This generosity is a reflection of the goodness of Minor in spite of his unimaginable suffering from schizophrenia. Indeed, Minor even volunteers to teach Eliza how to read so she in turn could teach her children so they could escape from poverty. Although Minor is correct that he owes the widow and her kids money enough to survive, he is wrong that he also owes them the gift of reading. He is clearly going the extra mile.

Even so, he still believes he cannot be redeemed for his sordid act of murdering an innocent man, even though he has been found innocent by virtue of insanity. This verdict should be enough for Minor to let go of his guilt, for he is well aware of the role that his mental illness played in his heinous act. He is arguably too hard on himself, and Eliza comes to see this. In fact, she comes to love him for it. She writes down “If love…then what?” and hands the card to him. The open-endedness of the unknown expanse that opens up for a culprit and a victim once the latter has forgiven the former, who as gone the “extra mile” in making atonement, is, I contend, the most important message in the film. Minor’s 10,000 words that he donates to Murray pale in comparison; the matter of the heart is much more important, and I make this claim as an intellectual and scholar who loves words, especially when they are set in relation to each other.

It is ironic that a psychotic person goes so far beyond what the overwhelming number of “sane” criminals do in making amends to victims even to the point that a person who loved a victim comes to love the character and sense of obligation and contrition of the victimizer. Such atonement is so unusual that it is easy to feel empathy for Minor when he states that he still thinks he is unredeemable. It is not his mental illness that is responsible for his refusal to let himself accept that he can be free from his guilt, and thus redeemed; rather, it is the value that he places on being redeemed. No mention is made of a redeemer; Minor is faced with the heavy choice and responsibility of deciding whether he has atoned sufficiently to be redeemed. Indeed, his strength of character is such that he can be trusted, in spite of his mental illness, with the decision of redemption that God justly places on his shoulders.

So the movie ends with the open-ended question of where a victim and one’s victimizer go from hatred and fear, respectively. Where do they go in the freedom that the lack of vengeance and guilt open? In the film, Eliza even kisses William. Eventually, he is deported back to America, where he continues to supply Murray with words (through the letter v; Murray himself died when he was on the t’s). How far they get with the massive project is dwarfed by William Minor’s project of the heart by which he is redeemed even though he won’t accept it. Free-will, and what we do from using it, matters in terms of redemption, and "love thy enemy" is utterly transformative such that God, which is love, can be present even in the relationship between a murderer and the widow of the victim. This is perhaps the overriding message of the film.

Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Breathless (1960), is according to many film scholars difficult to classify in terms of genre. Relative to uncovering the philosophy espoused in the film, genre-classification looks superficial at best. The film becomes a crime story early on as soon as Michel shots a policeman for no apparent reason, and Godard seems more interested in highlighting the film noir stylistic features, such as when Michel repeatedly mimics Humphrey Bogart in running a thumb across lips and perhaps even incessantly smoking, than in constructing a gripping crime-story. Godard deviates from the crime genre as most of the middle of the film is centered on Michel and his love interest, Patricia before fusing the romance with the crime plot. I contend that the “hole” in the middle of the film is actually full of Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism, which is based on human subjectivity and the choices that are made out of it (and no other basis).

The film’s large middle section is not an enigma, even though the narrative is more or less suspended, and neither is Patricia. She represents the problem of twentieth-century modernity as described and explained by existentialism in that she is too weak to make a choice regarding whether to accept Michel’s romantic overtures to be a couple. She has only her own subjectivity on which base her choice, but the weight of the choice is too much for her as she struggles in fear. In contract, Michel steps up to the proverbial baseball home base and definitively choses her. In terms of Sartre’s philosophy, Michel is strong and Patricia is weak. This is not to say that Michel is immune from her weakness. Nietzsche, after all, explains why the strong can be beguiled by the weak and thus made vulnerable in spite of being stronger.

Patricia is the femme fatale precisely because her subjective take on whether she is free—the most important value, according to Sartre—is so mixed up or boggled in her mind that she winds up sacrificing Michel so as to be able know her own subjectivity enough not to be afraid (of it?) and to make a definitive choice regarding them becoming a couple. Her subjectivity is hardly strong enough to be the basis on which she can make a definitive choice. Pathetically, she backs her awareness of whether she has feelings for him out of her decision to turn him into the police. I must not be in love with you because I just decided to report you to the police. I submit that falling in love with someone can be likened to catching the flu rather than being slightly hungry. When a person has fallen for someone or has come down with the flu, one's experience is itself so impacted that it is rather obvious that one is down for the count, even allowing for some lag time in which the person is under the illusion that life will go on as usual. It's not like, Oh, I think I may be hungry. 

Patricia’s subjectivity is hardly strong enough to be the basis on which she can make a definitive choice because she is so unaware of her own consciousness of herself, and yet according to existentialism, such consciousness is the only possible basis on which a human being can make choices, and, in acting on them, invent oneself ex nihilo. “The problem is that I don’t even know,” she tells Michel concerning what is wrong. This alone can furnish her with existential fear, or angst. “I’m not unhappy,” she tells Michel, “but I’m afraid.” In perhaps the best line in the film—a line that suggests that Godard has split the crime narrative in the film in two in order to open the middle up for philosophy—she says, “I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.” She doesn’t even know if she is happy or unhappy! It is thus not possible for her, at least while in that condition of such limited self-awareness, to be authentic in herself and towards Michel. It is no wonder that he is frustrated with her state.

Heidegger would say that Michel is authentic. “Do you think of dying sometimes?” he asks Patricia. “I do,” he continues. “All the time.” He is not afraid to face the truth that he, like the rest of us, will eventually die. In what can be taken as a premonition, Michel blurts out, “I’m tired. I’m going to die.” In what can be taken as an indication that she has not faced the fact that she too will die one day, Patricia tells him, “You’re crazy.” He is actually well-grounded, and thus authentic, according to Heidegger. To avoid the realization—to hide from it—that death is inevitable is to lead an inauthentic life. In answer to Patricia’s question during an interview at an airport, a novelist says his greatest ambition in life is, “To become immortal, and then to die.” Of course, to be immortal is to not be able to die, so the answer just shows that the writer is evading his own realization. It is no wonder he is a sexist.

Michel is actually a stronger person than Patricia. He even tells her, “I’m more advanced than you.” Why? He has come to terms with his existence as finite, and this thus no longer afraid (as he was when he shot the policeman). As such, he can make an interesting choice that seems absurd or counterintuitive. Patricia reads Michel a line from William Faulkner, a novelist: “Between grief and nothing, I will take nothing.” It’s not clear whether nothing refers to not having any feeling, or not existing at all. Nevertheless, she asks Michel to choose between grief and nothing. At first, he demurs, and thus evinces momentary weakness in not being up to choosing based on his own subjectivity. “Grief is stupid,” he finally blurts out. “I choose nothing. Its no better, but grief is a compromise. You have to go for all or nothing. I know that now.” You have to go all in, rather than make half-baked choices. It is ironic that in being strong enough to choose based on his own subjectivity alone, his choice is for nothing rather than to feel something. It takes incredible strength of will to choose nothing rather than something. Perhaps it is in a human being having come to the realization that someday death will deprive oneself of existing (and out of this, an essence) that one’s choice can be nothing (i.e., either not feeling anything, or not existing) rather an uncomfortable emotion without freaking out.

 In contrast, Patricia does not go “all in” because she demurs on making a definitive choice until the end of the film, and even then, she backs into her choice by choosing indirectly by calling the police to report Michel. Until then, in not choosing, she is nothing because, according to Sartre, we are nothing but the choices (plans) that we make. It follows that Michel is in love with nothing, and yet he goes all in anyway. Put another way, it is not clear that he can be in love with her when she is virtually cut off from her own subjectivity. If she doesn’t know whom she is, and what she feels, and if she is incapable of making emotional choices, how can he love her? How could he trust her?  Well, this is perhaps his fatal flaw, at least in regard to the femme fatale. Even a more advanced, or stronger person is vulnerable. This is clear both to Hobbes and Nietzsche. Hence the latter recommends that the strong maintain a pathos of distance from the weak, lest the sickness, or bad odor, of the latter infect the stronger. Michel misses the “red flags” in Patricia’s indecision and her underlying emotional instability (e.g., her not knowing whether she is happy or unhappy), and thus misses the opportunity to walk out on her to protect himself from her possibly turning him into the police for the murder.  I submit that being in love is an existential space in which a person’s perception of one’s freedom drastically narrows.

Patricia, in Godard's film, "Breathless," is overcome by existential angst.

Patricia is dangerous to Michel because even though she knows that she is free to take or leave (or turn in) Michel, she has not come to the realization that she is indeed free. This is qualitatively different than having a sense of a de facto narrowing of freedom. She doesn’t know if her lack of freedom is causing her unhappiness, or whether her unhappiness is responsible for her lack of freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre would tell her, of course you’re free, for “there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.”[1] Drawing on Nietzsche’s famous yet typically misinterpreted line, “God is dead,” Sartre concludes as an atheist (whereas Nietzsche had been a theist) that there are no divine commands to ground ethical decision-making and thus “legitimate our conduct.”[2] The only thing a person has upon which to base one’s choices (i.e., plans and actions) is one’s own subjectivity. We are “condemned to be free,” Sartre writes, because the only basis of our choices, and our very essence, is our subjectivity.[3] We can’t get divine decrees from a god who is dead.

Lest we succumb to Patricia’s paralysis of indecision, Sartre wants to assure us that his existentialist philosophy is optimistic, for it “leaves to [mankind] a possibility of choice” because we can invent ourselves through our choices without being tethered to an external authority or tradition.[4] More abstractly stated (by Sartre), “there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept.”[5] In making choices, we can’t rely on a pre-conceived notion of human nature as good or bad. Therefore, subjectivity “must be the starting point.”[6] This spells trouble for characters like Patricia whose subjectivity is elusive, and yet amazing freedom to characters like Michel for whom subjectivity is like a rock on which to invent oneself without being tethered to antiquated crutches.

Drawing on Sartre’s existentialism, we can go further, underneath or beyond (i.e., transcend) the movie’s dialogue, to more fully take account of Patricia’s difficulty in deciding on whether or not to be Michel’s girlfriend. Generally, a person whose choices are based in one’s subjectivity must surely feel a sense of responsibility for those choices once taken. We are responsible for what we are as individuals, and this is in terms of the choices we make. “Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every [person] aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.”[7]  As if this is not enough weight on one’s shoulders, Sartre goes on to insist that the person is “responsible for all [people].”[8] This is quite a leap; whereas it is easy to accept that Patricia feels responsible for calling the police to report Michel’s whereabouts because her decision comes from herself—no god has decreed that she do so—that she is responsible for everyone as a result seems more tenuous to me unless I have missed dialogue in which she tells Michel that she made the choice not just for herself, but also to show herself as a normative, or model, type of person for others to emulate. Absent such dialogue, such a sense of responsibility from playing a role in the ongoing invention of our species is either absent in her case, in which she falls short of illustrating Sartre’s philosophy, or she is unconscious yet moved by the role-model responsibility.

Sartre maintains that how other people regard a person is important to how that person views one’s own subjectivity. So how one presents oneself—what sort of person one is—is important. The “absolute character of free involvement” enables everyone to realize oneself “in realizing a type of mankind.”[9] In choosing whether to accept Michel as her boyfriend or leave him, Sartre would insist that she has a sense that she is choosing what type of woman she wants other people to see in her. She and Michel have had sex. He very much wants to have sex with her again; in fact, he seems obsessed with several parts of her body at more than one point in the film. She surely realizes that having sex again if they are a couple reflects on her as a type of woman. Sartre would go further in contending that that being that type of person (for others to see as such) and not another type (sex without being his girlfriend) plays a role in the realization of mankind of a certain type.

According to Sartre, “(I)n creating the [person] that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of [mankind] as we think [it] ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose. As a result, my action has involved all humanity. . . . Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of [mankind] of my own choosing. [The person] who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility.”[10] Each choice contains normative content in that a value is being created or invented that in turn reflects how our species should be. It is as if each choice of each person is reflected in everyone else and in the whole, and, furthermore, that these are reflected, as in a gaze, back on the respective choosers and thus informing their respective subjectivities. In short, an individual person’s choice, even in whether to accept someone as one’s boyfriend or girlfriend, carries with it a profound sense of responsibility even if the person is not aware of it. Patricia seems not to be aware of it, even in terms of what sort of woman she would be morally.

Perhaps the species-formation “macro” aspect of the responsibility lies in what Jung calls the collective unconscious. Even just economically, Adam Smith held that in a competitive market, both buyers and sellers are fixated on their own respective self-interests and are thus oblivious to the unintended “macro,” or common good. Even as inventors of values from clean slates as Sartre contends, we don’t see how the typical choices we make even in a day play a role in the type of humanity that we collectively are inventing. Whether mankind is good or bad is not preordained, and thus can only be the product of individuals making plans and acting, for these in turn are essentially what we are, which presupposes only our existence.

In conclusion, I contend that Godard suspends the movie, at least as a crime narrative, to present us with two distinct paths open to each of us as envisioned by existentialism. Michel is not afraid to choose, even though his decision to accept Patricia as his girlfriend (and wife?) is based on nothing but his own subjective opinion, which he must know is biased because he knows he is in love with her. Yet he does not waver once he had made the choice. This character provides modernity with a solution to the problem of the death of God. In contrast, Patricia unwittingly succumbs to the crisis of modernity in essentially being lost without external supports like religion or a moralist state. She is thus unable (or unwilling) to reach down into her subjectivity and pull out an answer. She doesn’t even know whether she is happy, and she does not realize her freedom. She can invent values, and thus the type of person that she presents to the world and can even impact the sort of species that humanity is becoming, but all of this eludes her. She is not an enigma; rather, she is a casualty of modernity’s casting away the past—the good as well as the bad. She is explainable as a character in terms of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. If we have nothing but ourselves to fall back on in inventing ourselves from nothing, and knowing that the world is watching and may copy (or reject) us, making choices may scare the hell out of some people, while others, perhaps a few, may have the determination and guts to go forward boldly into that night of nothingness, which is ultimately death anyway. At the end of the movie, Michel pays the price of Patricia’s unmoored subjectivity and her resulting fear and unhappiness. He is not afraid even of death, and in fact he may bring it on by running away from the police. That his death is his choice may be reflected in the fact that he closes his own eyes. Yet even so, he is stronger than Patricia, and he, not she, can be taken as a role model playing a role in the type of humanity that our species should be.  

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[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1957), p. 22.
[2] Ibid., p. 13.  Sartre may be misinterpreting Nietzsche here, for he was no atheist. Rather, his claim was that in admitted vengeance into a being of perfect goodness, that concept of God is discredited. This is not to say that the divine itself does not exist (i.e., the living God). Sartre might reply, however, that without a viable idea of God, we have nothing to fall back on.
[3] Ibid, quoted material.
[4] Ibid, p. 12.
[5] Ibid., p. 15.
[6] Ibid., p. 13.
[7] Ibid., p. 16.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., p. 41.
[10] Ibid, pp. 17-18

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

To Aaron Swartz, the subject of the documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy (2014), the major concern in his day regarding the internet was not the ability of a person to create a blog or use social media; rather, the problem was in the trend of the power of the gate-keepers, who tell you were on the internet you want to go, concentrating. In other words, the issue concerned what commands our attention. More specifically, who gets access to the ways people find things on the internet. “Now everyone has a license to speak; it’s a question of who gets heard,” he said.  Although he was a computer wiz, he also had political aspirations; both of which were on display as he lobbied against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was introduced in Congress in October of 2011. Unfortunately, the combination of his computer and political skills got the attention of the FBI, which engaged in a relentless pursuit of him until, under the pressure, he committed suicide at the age of 26. His short life was one of idealism that should not have been squashed by an unstoppable criminal-justice system, especially when influenced by political pressure from corporations and politicians. Lest the overzealousness of law enforcement obscure a vision of Aaron’s idealism, it can be viewed as public access being restored to the public domain in terms of the internet.

Tim Lee, the founder of the internet who notably did not cash out but rather kept the web open, influenced Aaron. Although he bristled at the constraints in working at an internet company, he was also not primarily motivated by money. Instead, he was motivated by fairness as it applies to the public good. Whereas high-tech firms are oriented to their own private good, the public good implies public access—something about which Arron felt strongly. In other words, he detested the privatization of the public internet by private gate-keepers. “The public domain should be free to all, but it is often locked up” by corporations, said Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive. Aaron’s motivation and activity hinged on the question of how public access could be brought to the public domain. This was “one of the things that got him in so much trouble,” said Kahle.

Pacer, a company that made about $120 million a year charging for access to the public records of courts, caught Aaron’s attention. By law, the courts could charge only what is necessary to run Pacer. As that company was interested in charging “customers” much more, hence narrowing the public’s access, Aaron downloaded 20 million pages of court documents. This was not illegal, and yet the FBI began staking out his parents’ house. Once able to analyze the documents, he discovered “massive privacy violations.” Yet is was the restricted public access, caused by wealth disparity, that really caught his attention. As Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media asked rhetorically in the film, “The law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?” Put another way, the privatization of the public domain can be viewed as the onslaught of plutocracy, the rule by wealth, over democracy.

Besides access to common law, knowledge is vital to a republic. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson agreed on this point. Aaron looked at the gatekeepers of academic articles—private companies like Jstor—which were charging substantial fees for public access (whereas scholars working for universities could access the articles for free). Such gatekeepers can be distinguished from the journals/publishers of the articles. Although a journal rightfully charges for a copy, if a public library (or government-sponsored university) has purchased one, shouldn’t the public have access to the issue? Should libraries have to pay substantial fees to the gatekeepers?

At MIT, Aaron downloaded articles on Jstor. It is not clear what he would have done with them. He had downloaded databases simply to analyze their content rather than make it public. MIT found his computer in a computer closet and gathered evidence to build a case. At the time, he was working at Harvard. If he didn’t have a status at MIT and thus had to hack into the system, MIT had a case. After all, people should not be allowed to unilaterally plug their laptops directly into computer systems. Even so, that police assaulted him on his way home and that U.S. Secret Service, which under the Patriot’s Act, can investigate “schemes using new technology,” took over smacks as going too far, especially if the police were MIT’s own. This would suggest too much power having been given to the university administration whether by its board or the government of Massachusetts. Having its own police power, a university administration can find itself charged with the taint of abuse of power sans accountability. After all, a university is more like a business than a government, hence democratic safeguards are not necessarily in place.

Looking at Aaron’s downloading itself, Carmen Ortesz of Massachusetts’ district attorney’s office says in the film, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars.” Aaron’s attorney retorts, He wasn’t stealing; he wasn’t selling what he got or giving it away.” When he had been a student at Stanford, Aaron had downloaded the Westlaw database to find relationships between sponsoring organizations and favorable research results. He didn’t release the documents. So the criminal prosecution of Aaron for downloading Jstor articles was as a commercial violation yet no evidence of motive existed; it could not be assumed that he would sell or otherwise make the articles available to the public. The problem was that he had put his name to a blog post, “Gorilla Manifesto,” in which open access is advocated.

For his part, Aaron points out that sharing knowledge with friends is not stealing; rather, doing so is a moral imperative because corporations act as gatekeepers to make money—essentially clipping away at the public domain. This is none other than “theft of public culture,” he says in the film. It is interesting the police felt the need to assault him and yet the thefts by the powerful gatekeepers were somehow legal. He told his girlfriend, “I’ve been arrested for downloading too many academic journals,” as if acquiring knowledge were a crime worthy of the perpetrator being held in solitary confinement as he was. Even Jstor must have viewed the criminal justice system as going too far, for the company dropped the case, saying it had been the government’s decision to prosecute. In fact, Stephen Jeymann, the politically-aspiring assistant district attorney of Massachusetts who interestingly kept the case for himself, told Aaron that he still could face 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. This raises the ethical question of whether an individual should be made to suffer inordinately to serve as a deterrent.

If the public good is the reason why, then what then of the for-profit companies that were essentially privatizing parts of the public domain? MIT, which had moral authority, was mute when the defense asked for assistance. The university characterized this stance as neutral, but Aaron’s lawyer said it was actually pro-prosecutor.

In the film, David Sirota points to the problem of selective deterrence from political ideology. He points out that the Obama administration did not prosecute the financial institutions and individuals for crimes that led to the financial crisis of 2008, yet while devoting resources to prosecuting selective deterrents, including Aaron’s case. It is no coincidence, Sirota claims, that Obama left office as a billionaire, which he had not been when he was a legislator in Illinois’ government and law instructor at the University of Chicago. I would add that Goldman Sachs’ $1 million contribution to Obama’s ’08 presidential campaign is also relevant. Clearly, Obama’s “Wall Street Government” was doing the bidding of the powerful rather than standing up for public access of knowledge.

Aaron hit his stride in spite of his pending trial when he put his computer skills to use in lobbying against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which initially had many co-sponsors in the U.S. Senate. Specifically, he wrote software making it easier for people to contact Congress. The bill was ostensibly against online piracy of music and movies, but, according to Aaron, the legislation was really about the freedom to connect. A company could cut off a website from the internet or force Google to cut links to the site; a claim of copyright infringement, without due process (i.e., a trial), would be all that would be necessary. In the film, U.S. Senator Wyden of Oregon says the bill poses a threat to freedom of speech and civil liberties. “It makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet to combat piracy,” he points out. In a particularly revealing “macro” comment, the senator points to the power of private powers in the American democratic system. “Typically, the legislative fights in Washington are fights between different sets of corporate moneyed interests—all duking it out to pass legislation. The fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests and they are generally financially matched in campaign contributions and lobbying. The ones that aren’t even fights typically are those where all the money is on one side—all the corporations are on one side—and millions of people are on the other.” In other words, under the rubric of popular sovereignty (i.e., representatives representing their respective constituents as a group), the interests of private concentrations of wealth (i.e., corporations) essentially own the Congress and the White House.

In this case, constituents spoke up and their representatives in Congress noticed. Suddenly all but a few of the myriad co-sponsors (sponsored in turn by powerful private interests) dropped their support. People boycotted GoDaddy for its pro-SOPA support. Obama reversed his support, which interestingly suggests that he had been siding with the corporate interests rather than the People even though he was purportedly for “real change,” including greater democracy. Obama was going after Arron’s community, including not only hackers, but also democracy activists because they are able to make trouble for those who are already in power, corporate and governmentally. Obama’s administration went after Aaron in order to scare as many in his community as possible so they would not make trouble. Secrecy serves those who are already in power. Aaron was a threat because he was working toward open access to the public square even though reasonable people can disagree as to what rightly goes in there. Interestingly, Aaron had warned of the inordinate NSA spying.

SOPA didn’t pass. In fact, it was withdrawn. Aaron’s community won. Interestingly, the federal government charged Aaron with nine additional counts. Eleven of the thirteen total charges were for violating the terms of service of sites. Orin Kerr, a  lawyer, says in the film that such a type of indictment is unfair. Bryan Stevenson of Equal Right Initiative laments the excessiveness that had taken hold in the American criminal-justice system such that by Aaron’s day, “Anything we are angry about instinctively triggers a criminal justice intervention.” Even looking at a security guard the wrong way can trigger his “need” to call the local police, who have come to be prone to “overkill” in over-estimating degrees of threat. The impulse to “observe,” intimidate, threaten, indict, and prosecute has come to be triggered by people who are merely mad at something. The impulse, in other words, had become too sensitive even by Aaron’s time. Unfortunately, countervailing accountability on the occupants of that system has been hard to come by. The People en masse can pressure governments to contain even the passive aggression inflicted on citizens—particularly those who object. Though this is unlikely, considering how much energy it takes to stimulate a large number of people such that their elected representatives take notice. With regard to the People squeezing in where the corporate-governmental axis is dominant (hegemonic), the corporate lobbyists and the beneficiaries of corporate campaign contributions depend on the illusion of public accountability even as publicly they pay homage to the strong American democracy for and by the People. 

L'Argent

The film L’Argent (1983) is about how far people will go to get money (l’argent en francais). One major problem with greed is that people who are enthralled by it will go to virtually any length to get money. Even a religion can unconsciously warped to separate greed from earning and having wealth. Historically, Christian thought on greed and wealth has shifted from anti- to pro-wealth. Whether enabled by their religion or not, greedy people will think nothing of other people being hurt in the process. Hence, greed can be reckoned as selfishness incarnate. To claim that money is God not only puts a lower good above a higher one, but also manifests self-idolatry.

“Well, I’m not waiting around for universal happiness which, believe me, will be boring as hell. I want to be happy now, in my own way. O money, God incarnate, what wouldn’t we do for you?” says Yvon’s prison-roommate. “Given how corrupt the world is,” he continues, “and the impossibility of it changing, they who tell us to obey promise a future happiness.” Is money truly God incarnate? Does it even make sense that that which transcends the limits of human cognition, sensibility, and perception, as St. Denis maintained back in the sixth century, can be incarnate as material things? Is this not an oxymoron? “What wouldn’t we do for you?” follows from money being God incarnate, for no limits exist consistent with following that which is God; everything else is of a lesser priority as only God is sacred. Lastly, would universal happiness really be boring? Compared to a world in which people are rude and aggressive, I would take the inherently satisfying luster of happiness. Perhaps the prisoner likes a world of disagreements and even fighting. In other words, we must consider the source—a prisoner.

How does Yvon come to find himself in prison? He has violently killed a family in order to rob them. A perfect example of the wanton disregard for other people’s welfare in following money as God incarnate.  To the family’s hard-working woman, who is willing to be task-oriented but not inordinate in the pursue of money as criminals are wont to be, Yvon asks, “Why not just throw yourself in the river? Do you expect a miracle?” She replies flatly, “I expect nothing.” Money is not her God incarnate.

The filmmaking reflects the woman’s task-orientation. Conversations are monotone, direct, and purpose-economized without any small talk.  Hence, a lot of silence exists, which gives that film-world a harsh quality. When people interact, they do so like robots. Movements are precise, limited to purposes. The sound also is precise in emphasizing tasks, such as that of closing a door fully. Human beings are purpose-driven, intentional, beings.

After killing all of the family except the woman, Yvon asks her for money. There is none, so he kills her. What wouldn’t he do for money? In a twisted sense, he turns himself in as if redemption were in the confessing. In that story-world, the good lies in confessing rather than not viewing money as God incarnate in the first place. In spite of his confession, he is still legally, moral, and religiously on the hook for having gone too far in killing for money. Confessing is the least that he could do, once having committed such a violent crime. The latent self-idolatry in the selfishness that lies at the root of greed is protected by denial concerning the self-as-god assumption. Similarly, the God-incarnate status of money—that is, God as sourced in our human realm rather than transcendent—blinds Yvon from the fact that he goes too far in the pursuit of money, for it is merely a measure of economic value in our realm.

See God's Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of  Christian Thought on Profit-seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon. 

The Boys from Brazil

Josef Mengele, an SS physician infamous for his inhumane medical experimentation on prisoners at Auschwitz, is in this film a character intent on furnishing the 95 Hitlers he has cloned with Hitler’s own background. Crucially, Hitler’s father died at 65. So too, Mengele, reasons, must the adoptive fathers of the boy Hitlers. Otherwise, they might not turn out like Hitler. The ethics of Mengele’s task—killing 95 innocent 65 year-olds—is clear. When Ezra Lieberman stops Mengele in his tracks, the question turns to the ethics of killing the 95 boys so none of them will grow up to be another Hitler. This is a much more interesting ethical question, and the narrative—and film as a medium, moreover—would be fuller had the script been deepened to make the question, and thus the ethical and ontological dimensions, transparent for the viewers.

Even if the boys have the same upbringing environment as Hitler, and obviously the same genetics, the world was not the same after World War II. Antisemitism cannot be assumed—even less the Aryan-race ideology. The news of the Holocaust alone changed the public discourse. Hitler’s demise meant that any aspiring Hitler would face considerable headwind in securing a dictatorship in Western Europe. In short, the leap from same-environment, same-genetics to another Hitler is unsupportable. Hence, killing the boys to save future lives and even safeguard democracy could not be justified ethically under consequentialism.

Deeper than the ethical dimension is the question of whether a clone of a person is identical to the original person from which the DNA sample is used to make the clones. In philosophical terms, the question is that of ontological identity. I contend that such identity does not hold in the case of cloning.

That no two environments (e.g., upbringings) can be exactly the same means that a cloned person cannot be formed just like the original. It follows that the clone makes different choices, and even has different thoughts. In other words, the stream of thoughts is not identical. Indeed, the consciousnesses are different. It is not as if Hitler could see or hear the world through the boys after his death. The minds are thus not identical, even though the brains are constructed by the same genetics—but environment can impact brain chemistry! Severe abuse, for instance, can alter the chemistry. Hitler’s father was stern—perhaps abusive. If so, a cloned boy whose father is distant but not abusive would not have the same brain chemistry as Hitler.

The ontological non-identity provides a strong basis for the ethical claim that killing the 95 cloned-Hitler boys to prevent another Hitler from becoming a vicious dictator would be unethical. The assumption that another Hitler must necessarily result from a shared genetics and a similar upbringing is faulty because too many other variables would be in play for such a deterministic relationship to hold.

Should it be argued that the boys should be killed to punish Hitler, who in the film’s story-time is already dead, the ontological non-identity means that the 95 boys are innocent of Hitler’s atrocious deeds. Punishing the innocent is itself unethical. That Hitler is dead when the boys are cloned means that he would not be punished. Admittedly, killing the clones would not be in Hitler’s interest, and doing something that would impact Hitler negatively has ethical merit on account of Hitler’s deeds. However, the immoral act of killing the innocent outweighs such merit, I submit, both because of the boys’ pain of death and the fact that Hitler would not be aware of the punishment because he is dead.

Ethical analysis can be complex, but it can indeed lead to definitive answers. One philosopher who criticized moral theory, Friedrich Nietzsche maintained something very close to an ontological identity—the same consciousness being absent—in positing that given infinite time and the infinite possible number of galaxies, a person just like you—in effect, you—must certainly be the case at some point—and indeed innumerable times—on a planet somewhere that is just like Earth. In fact, Nietzsche holds that the person would be you! How excruciating it must be to know that all your heartaches are to be felt an infinite number of times. So Nietzsche has a demon announce:

"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"[1]

I submit that Nietzsche’s assumption of ontological identity (i.e., his use of the pronoun you) goes too far. As I argue above, even an identical genetics and the very same environment do not give the same consciousness. Physically, two (or more) brains exist. The recurrences are thus not really so. Nietzsche admits, for instance, that we have no awareness of our respective “recurrences; we don’t suffer again what we have suffered. Nor, for that matter, can we experience our past joys again. So you will not have to live once more, and innumerable times more, the life you have lived, even if that life is repeated; the reason is that the person is not ontologically identical to you.

Even in terms of physics, Nietzsche’s theory of the Eternal Return is problematic. Simply put, his idea is that infinite space means that infinite universes (each of which contains galaxies) exist so mathematically an infinite number of Earths with an infinite number of variations, including that which we experience in our lives, must be the case. In short, an infinite number is very, very large. Nietzsche applies the mathematics to physics:

“If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force -- and every other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless -- it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times. And since between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place, and each of these combinations conditions the entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game ad infinitum.”[2]

In short, Nietzsche is saying that a finite system within an infinite system must occur an infinite number of times. Even though Nietzsche calls this the Eternal Return, he is not suggesting that infinity itself is divine. If space is infinite—a claim that Einstein rejects in his theory of curved space—that space is in Creation and thus not divine. Even so, Nietzsche’s assumption not only that space is infinite, but also that galaxies exist throughout that space is problematic. If space goes on and on without limit, it is possible that matter and energy cease at a certain location.

Furthermore, even a “definite quantity of force” and “a certain definite number of centers of force” can involve an infinite number of variables. One reason why the social sciences fall short of the empirical lab experiments in the natural sciences (i.e., biology, chemistry, physics) is that all the variables that go into human behavior and social scenarios have not been identified and thus subject to being held constant or adjusted. I contend that the infinite number here cancels out the infinite number of recurrences (e.g., of you). Think of “infinite” in a numerator and “infinite” in a denominator of fractions. The two infinities cancel out. In short, there has not been, is not, and will not be another you.

In conclusion, even an “absolutely identical series” applied to identical genetics is not sufficient for us to posit the sort of ontological identity that would permit us to say that Hitler recurs in the 95 clones in the film. Killing the boys would thus be unethical. In keeping the audience from knowing that the boys are cloned from Hitler’s DNA, the story does not permit much time for discussion of the philosophical issues here. Even so, the Lieberman character is of the sort who would be inclined to have such thoughts and thus ask other characters, such as his wife, questions that could get the audience thinking. Such a narrative dimension would make film that much more powerful, and thus rich, as a story medium.

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[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 341.

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 1066.

Monsignor

Monsignor, a film made in 1982—in the midst of a very pro-business administration in Washington, D.C.—depicts a Vatican steeped in matters of finance centering around a priest whose degree in finance makes him a prime candidate to be groomed for the Curia. That cleric, Father John Flaherty, helps the Vatican operating budget during World War II by involving the Holy See in the black market through a mafia. In the meantime, he sleeps with a woman who is preparing to be a nun and subsequently keeps from her the matter of his religious vocation. The twist is not that Flaherty is a deeply flawed priest, or that the Vatican he serves is vulnerable to corruption inside, but that those clerics who mercilessly go after him are devoid of the sort of compassion that their savior preaches.

The pope, exquisitely played by Leonardo Cimino, demonstrates how upper-echelon leadership can transcend the managerial foci that so preoccupy partisans. Put another way, the social distance that tends to come with organizational figure-heads can give “the big picture” characteristic of “having perspective” some role in seeing to it that narrow organizational politics do not have the last say even in terms of what the criteria are to be. I suspect that too many CEOs go with the advice from their subordinates, and thus unwittingly buy into the managerial criteria charged with garden-variety one-upmanship. In such cases, organizational politics triumphs over what is really important from the standpoint of organizational mission statements.

In the film, the pope presides over the traditionalist cleric’s castigation of Flaherty . The pope later reads of Flaherty’s sordid deeds, and then speaks with the man presumably condemned. Rather than defend himself, Flaherty says, in effect, “guilty as charged!” Rather than take Flaherty’s misconduct as the most telling facet of the case, the pope observes that the traditionalist’s tone was that of jealousy, without any hint of sympathy for his brother in faith. The traditionalist’s utter lack of brotherly love stands out in retrospect to the pope as further from Christ, hence more serious, than Flaherty’s corruption. This prioritizing of values is made known to the viewer with the sight of Flaherty’s mentor, rather than the head traditionalist, as the next pope. In fact, the mentor reinstalls Flaherty in the Vatican after the contrite yet corrupt priest has spent some years in exile at a monastery. The film ends with the two men embracing, with facial expressions revealing true brotherly love—a real contrast from the cold, stern expressions of the traditionalists who had been so confident that the “prosecution” of Flaherty would result in one of their own as pope.

The message presented by the film is therefore that in a religion in which God is love, hardness in place of brotherly love is without any legitimacy whatsoever; it is worse than unethical conduct. This is one way of saying that religion does not reduce to ethics because more important things are involved. This is not to excuse corruption in the Vatican; the hypocrisy alone is repugnant to anyone who takes the clerics in the Curia at their word that they are following Christ in their living out of the Gospel. Even so, going after such hypocrisy without even sympathy for the human nature, which we all share, evokes the Pharisees whom Jesus goes after in the Gospels. A Church run by Pharisees does more than unethical conduct to undercut the faith espoused by Jesus because matters of the heart are more deeply rooted than conduct as far as Jesus’s preaching is concerned. 

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.