Mickey 17

Ethical, theological, and political issues are salient in the film, Mickey 17 (2025), which is about Mickey Barnes, a character who is repeatedly cloned on a space-ship and on a distant planet. The one-way trip alone takes over four years, during which time Mickey is tasked with dangerous tasks because when he dies, another clone is simply made. A mistake is made when the 18^th clone of Mickey is made even though the 17^th is still alive; they are “multiples,” which is a crime for a theological reason. I contend that reason is erroneous, as is the political, ethical, and theological regime that undergirds clones being expendable. 

In a flashback to back on Earth, a man who represents an evangelical Christian perspective urges lawmakers to criminalize multiples even on other planets because a soul cannot have two bodies. Such a claim turns the soul into something imaginary—an abstraction only. In the movie, that no two clones of a person have the same personality suggests that they do not have the same soul. They make different choices and can even have different values, as when Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are at odds on whether to kill Timo, a pilot who had been in business with the original Mickey. Both clones have the memories of the original Mickey, yet the two clones have very different attitudes towards Timo. Mickey 18 is more aggressive than Mickey 17, and yet the former decides in the end to sacrifice his life to kill Kenneth Marshall, an autocrat who fixes elections by the Assembly in order to stay in power on the mission. Furthermore, that Kai Katz prefers Mickey 17 romantically while Nasha is really turned on sexually by Mickey 18, and even that Nasha wants both clones for herself as a three-some sexually implies that the two clones are different people. In effect, they are identical twins, and even such twins do not share the same soul. Although not clones by any means, my brothers and I could not be more different from each other. That the clones of Mickey differ suggests that the cloning “printing” doesn’t replicate the DNA exactly. That Mickey 18 is so different than Mickey 17 immediately after being “printed” means that the differences cannot be due to environmental factors. Therefore, the theological argument that two clones should not be alive simultaneously because they share the same soul fails.

The argument that multiples is against the “natural order” also fails because cloning itself is not natural. So if multiples are objectionable theologically for this reason, then cloning should be illegal not only on Earth, but also on colonies on other planets. Furthermore, the argument used that human cloning is a sin, but it can be sued by humans on spacecrafts and on other planets is a non-starter, for a sin is a sin, no matter where it is being committed.  The argument seems to be that if the sin takes place far away from the rest of us, and if the sin has unintentional beneficial consequences, which Augustine claimed of sin in general (for otherwise, our species would have self-destructed), then consequentialism trumps the duty not to sin. In the utilitarian ethical principle of the greatest pleasure to the most people, the suffering of the clones of Mickey can be said to be ethical because the clones’ dangerous tasks make it possible for everyone on the ship to survive. That the same rationale could ethically justify the Nazi’s concentration camps and eastward expansion strongly suggests that utilitarianism fails if the distribution of suffering is concentrated within a collective.

Just as the ethics of cloning for use in dangerous tasks is ultimately answered by blowing up the cloning machine at the end of the film, so too is organized religion eschewed. It is very significant that Kenneth Marshall accidently lets out the secret that the company behind the mission is in fact a church, and that the point of the colony is to create “the one and only pure colony planet,” meaning that the human inhabitants are genetically pure.

The religious auspices make use of political autocracy disguised as democracy. It is no accident that at one point, Kenneth and the audience of his show give each other the Nazi raised-arm salute. Kenneth’s religious hypocrisy extends to his willingness to have the clones suffer even apart from in performing dangerous tasks, such as breathing in a virus in the planet’s air so a vaccine could be made so everyone could venture outside without dying. The callousness of the “church, I mean company,” towards suffering is matched by Kenneth’s willingness to subvert elections to keep himself in power on the planet. That political resistance develops suggests that it is a natural consequence of unchecked power being exercised on a captive population that cannot leave. In the end, Mickey 18 blows himself up because Kenneth would also die. Kenneth had strapped bombs to Mickey 18 with impunity, even though the Assembly was in theory democratic rather than autocratic. It is significant that after Kenneth, legitimate trials began and even Nasha, whom Kenneth unilaterally declared to be a criminal, is elected to the Assembly.

The republic wins in the end, whereas the church and its prelate/dictator are discredited. Although in this respect the film has a happy ending, for the good guys win in the climax, what the film says about the hostility and even aggression that is in human nature even under the auspices of religion is a severe indictment of the species. This indictment is perhaps most revealed in the severe suffering that many of the Mikey clones must endure on the orders of other humans.

Empirically, the Milgrim experiment at Yale in 1968 found that 40 percent of the people in the study thought they were giving severe electric shocks on other people even though those people had been screaming at the previous level of shock, and just for being wrong in answering questions! Ironically, at the same university nearly 60 years later, and fifteen years after I had finished my studies there, two police departments, one under a city government and the other under the non-profit Yale Corporation, plus Yale’s proto-police security guards, kept up constant and overlapping “presence” on and around campus; in fact, by 2025, Yale’s police unit had accepted the FBI’s invitation to Yale to participate in counter-terrorism tactics used on students. The risk of autocratic passive-aggression even just to intimidate by an overwhelming “presence” as a deterrent was real where the film was screened (and where the director, Bong Joon Ho, would speak on May 5, 2025). The tactic itself evinces not only a very negative assumption about the human nature of Yalies (and local residents), but also reveals the sordid nature of those people using the tactics. In fact, the “overkill” in “presence,” which compromised the otherwise relaxed atmosphere on a college campus, can itself be viewed as hostile and autocratic, not to mention disrespectful of students and academia more generally. Turning around, and, as I had to do quite unexpectedly, having to walk off a sidewalk on campus while talking with students and faculty because a Yale police car was driving on the sidewalk on a weekday morning with red and blue lights on, and even headlights blaring, even though the car was only on a patrol, is at the very least uncomfortable and definitely antithetical to an academic atmosphere, where shows of the threat of might does not make right.

Yale security and police stationed outside of the classroom building where the film was screened.

With lights glaring, a Yale police presence "screens" outside after the screening of the film.

More yellow, blue, and red lit-up stationary "patrols" nearby after the film on April 19, 2025

It is interesting, in terms of the theological-political nexus in the film, that Yale was founded by Christian Calvinist ministers who had been at Harvard but would not tolerate the Unitarians having any influence. The dichotomy of the elect (saved) and the rest of humanity in Calvinism can easily result in repression of the latter, as if the rest of us were sub-human and thus needing to be constantly watched (which is a form of passive aggression). In the film, clones are viewed as such by the elite of the “church,” who are not bothered by their respective consciences for inflicting much suffering on the Mickeys even beyond that which results from the dangerous tasks for the good of the whole. Whether in the fictional film or on the ground at Yale, where the movie was screened and the director would soon thereafter give a talk, power without being checked can easily be used by human nature in very unethical and anti-spiritual ways.

The question from the movie is not whether each clone has his own soul, for in choosing to sacrifice his life, even Mickey 18 has a good soul, but, rather, whether Kenneth and his wife have souls, and even whether their “church” is at all religious or spiritual rather than a basis for autocracy being used to conduct medical experiments on clones and construct a genetically pure colony, although presumably with an underclass of servants who obviously would not be treated well, as they would not be among a Calvinist elect.

The Brutalist

It is easy to conclude that Adrien Brody “steals the show” in his depiction of Laszio Toth in The Brutalist (2024), a film about a Jewish architect (and his wife and niece) who emigrates to Pennsylvania from Hungary after World War II. As I was stretching my legs after watching the very long yet captivating film in a theater, a woman doing the same declared to me that Adrien Brody had definitively stolen the show. I wasn’t quite sure, though I perceived Guy Pearce’s acting out Harrison Van Buren to be emotionally fake, even forced. In understanding the film, it is vital to go beyond the obvious characters (and actors) to acknowledge the roles of two silent yet very present characters as definitive for the meaning of the film. Before revealing those characters, the proverbial elephant in the room must be discussed: Being Jewish even in the modern, “progress”-oriented world.

It is not long after Laszio sits down to talk with his initial host—Attila, the cousin—that the religious question comes up. Although Attila is Jewish, his wife Audrey is Roman Catholic and Attila has converted. Laszio shocked not only at this, but that Attila has changed his last name to the Americanized Miller. In the next scene, set outside, we see a large “Jesus Saves” lit sign in the background; in the foreground is bread-line, which is out of bread. Jesus may save souls, but apparently not hungry bodies. The implication is that Attila sold his soul in giving up his religion to fit in.

It is not that Laszio carries any grudge against Christianity; it had not been the force behind the Nazi’s Final Solution, and thus behind the concentration camp where both he and his wife Erzsébet had (separately) been sent. “Dreams slip away,” Harrison observes. Laszio can of course relate; he says at one point that he had no choice but to come to America. No longer a working architect, and unfairly deprived of housing by his cousin once in Pennsylvania, Laszio must stay in homeless shelter and shovel coal for work. To him, America is no shining city on a hill; he tells his wife at one point, “They don’t want us here. We are nothing; we are worse than nothing.” He has internalized the external prejudice against Jews, and perhaps may feel on some level that his internment in a concentration camp to have been justified. The Brutalist is not a light film.

To be less than nothing may be justified by the infliction of suffering and even death on others, as the Nazis did; to be forced to endure the sting of such intense hatred is on the contrary not to be less than nothing. Interestingly, we could say that the innocent civilians in Gaza in 2023-2024 were not less than nothing; less than nothing is applicable instead to the Israelis who can be implicated in and killed 55,000 Gaza residents and made more than a million homeless (even bombing in a tent camp). As these numbers far exceed the 1,200 Israelis who died and the couple hundred Israeli hostages, justified natural justice was also far exceeded by vengeance. That the Jewish deity saves that for itself makes this verdict all the more damning.

Just the president of Israel was wrong in his insistence that every resident of Gaza was guilty and thus deserved to suffer, so too it would be wrong to conclude that every Jewish person was culpable for the horrendous over-reaction in killing tens of thousands of Gaza residents and making many, many more homeless and facing famine and a shortage of medicine. Jewish people generally need not be in the awkward psychological position of both presuming to be the chosen people and a people that is worse than nothing.

Just as Laszio suffers wrongfully in interiorizing the sentiment of prejudiced people that Jews are worse than nothing, he does not have to carry his memory of the death-camp into his architecture. A drawing of one of his buildings is labeled, “The past in the present,” which conflicts with his intention that his buildings not only endure stylistically, but are apart from time. The underlying problem is that a human artifact cannot both hold on to the past and yet have an ambiance of eternity. The huge, cement building that he designs for Harrison looks like a giant tomb, such as the ones constructed in ancient Egypt. At the same time, the dark, hard-solid walled rooms could pass for the gas chambers used by the Nazis to kill people at the concentration camps. Laszio carries his dark past into his architecture in the “new world.” That he intentionally uses light to show a Christian cross in the distinctly Christian chapel in the building may connote the hope that had been utterly absent in the death camps. Laszio’s pride in this architectural achievement is ironic, given both his skeptical reaction to his cousin’s conversion to Catholicism to fit in, but it is not as if Laszio might convert to Christianity. After all, “Jesus Saves” is associated in the film with no bread left in the bread-line.

I submit that Christianity and the Holocaust are the two silent partners, or characters, in the film. That the consulting architect is a Protestant is no accident, for the city wanted assurance because Laszio is Jewish. Christianity is also present in Attila and Audrey’s bedroom in the form of a crucifix on a wall, and perhaps most explicitly in Harrison’s insistence that the chapel be distinctly Christian, rather than a prayer room as Laszio initially proposes. The light shown in the chapel from the cross on the ceiling cannot be missed in the otherwise gray tomb-monstrosity of a building.

As for the Holocaust, its subtle imprints can be found throughout the film. Perhaps that character is most felt—most present—not in the tomb-like rooms in the partially constructed community center—and it is odd that the public would want to spend leisure time surrounded by walls, floors, and ceilings of cement—but when slabs of cement are loaded onto a freight train. The heavy, almost deafening thuds on a drum, the iron tracks, and the train itself conjure up the trains on the way to the Nazi death-camps. When the train crashes, the fire may even evoke the ovens in the camps. It is perhaps no accident that the film has Harrison fire and evict Laszio (recall that his own cousin, the Christian Attila, kicked Laszio out earlier). The sudden freight of having to fend for oneself (and one’s family) is felt existentially, and such a fear must have been felt by the victims of the Holocaust. To subject anyone to such freight is to render oneself, rather than the victim, as worse than nothing.

Both Christianity and the Holocaust are very much present in the film, and yet obliquely so. The implicit message may be that as much as we want to be free of the past, it’s imprint can be found all around us. Why didn’t Christianity come to the rescue of the Communists, Jews, and gays in the Holocaust? Both hope and despair seem to coexist without cancelling each other out. What lies beyond Laszio’s attraction to the cross in the context of the tomb, and his unconscious interest in reimaging the dingy inner sanctum of a death camp? Why didn’t “Jesus Save” as the neon sign in the film insists?  To be free of the past does indeed lie in Laszio’s free-will, as it does for the rest of us, even though existential trauma, if left to its own devices, can reverberate through time if the severity is sufficiently intense to leave imprints in not only the human mind, but also its constructed artifacts. The human mind is perhaps too fragile for what people are all too willing to inflict on others. Not even our religions seem to be enough.

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.

Lolita

In being able to engage an audience both visually and audibly, and to do so at close range—something we don’t get from watching a play on a distant stage—the medium of film is capable of resonating with, challenging, and rebounding from both heart and mind. That is to say, the medium can engage us at a comparatively deep level and even touch us profoundly. The medium can tug at our ethical strings and even provoke uncomfortable thoughts and feelings precisely because sound and image can conjoin at close range such that we are brought closer to an ethical harm than is likely in our own daily experiences. Some ethical harms, such as that in a young woman not being able to stop a rape by an older man abusing a stark power differential, may simply be too horrific up close to experience even vicariously. A filmmaker can use devices, whether photographic, audio, or narrative, to moderate our exposure without sacrificing the depth at which the harm and its sordid scenario can reach in us. Such exposure to ethical problems or even to situations in which the ethical verdict is debatable can give to an audience a better realization of the ethical dimension of the human condition and improve our ability to render ethical judgements on specific issues and generally. Writ large, the medium of film can do these things for a society, reflecting and even provoking it with just enough directness to be palatable and grasped. The genre of science fiction in particular has been used to serve this purpose. Even by contrasting an original film with its remake decades later, a society’s changing nature can be glimpsed by an audience, especially as censorship guidelines are loosened as per changing social mores and ethical sensibilities of a society. The fictional film, Lolita (1962), and its remake, Lolita (1997), provide us with an excellent case study not only of changes in twentieth-century American society, but also of how powerful the medium of film can be in its treatment of the ethical dimension of the human condition.

Both the original film and the remake center around the ethical problem of incest. That it is wrong ethically is beyond dispute in the films. That this message is easily received even as the respective filmmakers use various techniques to dilute the intensity of the harm is a credit to the filmmakers. Make the presentation of an ethical harm too intense and audiences will bolt. On the other hand, the salient role of censorship on the original film risks that the harm is too distant to be grasped by audiences.

In terms of the narrative, both films, and especially the remake, mollify the audience, as if diluting whiskey so it doesn’t sting “going down the hatch.” In both films, the harsh atrocity of the incestual relationship would be harder to take were Prof. Humbert Lolita’s actual father rather than her step-father, and if he were that even before he marries Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, when he is merely renting a room in the house. Also, that the incestual sex between Humbert and Lolita begins midway through the film, when Humbert is no longer married to Charlotte and thus not technically her step-father and he and Lolita no longer even live in Charlotte’s house, makes it easier for an audience, which can view the relationship more from the standpoint of the difference in ages, which is still problematic because Lolita is fourteen years old, than from that of a biological father having sex with his daughter. To be sure, the ethically problematic co-existence of the parental and sexual roles by Humbert is obvious, as is the fact that Lolita is a minor whereas Humbert is a middle-aged adult, and both of these elements can be expected to make the typical viewer uncomfortable.

The remake makes a significant departure narratively from the original film in lessening, albeit marginally, Humbert’s blameworthiness. The story begins with Humbert as a teenager when he has a beautiful girlfriend who is not coincidentally also (i.e., like Lolita) fourteen years old. They are so in love, but she tragically dies of typhus. We sympathize with the teenage Humbert as he cries over his lost, beautiful love, and perhaps even feel that he deserves another such love. Tempering and adding complexity to the ethical issue of incest is the adult Humbert’s very human desire to get back a lost love, even if vicariously. The resemblance of the actresses playing Annabel Lee and Lolita is likely no accident. The sympathy dissipates, however, when Humbert crosses a line with Lolita by letting her perform sexual acts on him during their first hotel-stay.

Paradoxically, even as the remake, relative to the original film, makes the offence more palatable to us by adapting the narrative even more, we are brought closer to the sexual act both directly and by the story-world seeming more sensual. This is accomplished by both zoomed-in visuals and selective magnification of some ordinary sounds of things that we usually don’t notice in our daily lives but that, were we aware of them, could provide empirical experience with added depth. In fact, the medium of film moreover has great (generally unappreciated) value in being able to make us aware of the depth that experience is capable of, and thereby enrich our experience of living.

The original film, released in 1962, lacks sensuality and the references to sex are only indirect. Not even the word “pornography” is mentioned; it is instead artfully referred to as “art film,” as if every “Indie” film were pornographic, by Lolita when she tells Humbert that she refused to be in such a film. Neither Humbert nor Lolita visibly show much physical affection generally, Humbert even being physically revolted by Charlotte. Even when Lolita runs upstairs to say goodbye to him before she leaves for summer camp, she merely hugs him, with the camera doing a quick cut-away so not to show her kissing him on a cheek. In the same scene in the remake, Lolita literally jumps up on him, wraps her legs around his waist and gives him a big wet kiss on the lips. From such an exact comparison, we can infer that a shift in cultural attitudes in American society occurred between when the original film and the remake were made. The only time Humbert embraces Lolita is when she is mourning her mother’s death, and the contact does not imply anything sexual. For it is normal, and even expected, that a parental figure would hug a crying child.

In the remake, touching is a staple between Humbert and Lolita even when he is just a boarder in the house. In fact, Lolita’s legs and arms touch him so often that the girl comes off as uncoordinated. Interestingly, she sits in his lap early on when he is working at the desk in his room, and then again later in the film when both are naked and his dick is obviously inside her. In both cases, neither person is complaining. Although the first sexual episode between the two is not shown, three subsequent episodes are shown—two of which are not enjoyable for Humbert, as Lolita has learned how to use sex with him to get things, including money. All the touching, complete with its sound, makes the incest more real for the audience.

At the same time, that Lolita entices Humbert when he is a boarder by touching him even while sharing a porch swing with him and her mother, and kissing him goodbye, and then offers to give him a blow-job (and likely more) on the first morning of their first night at a hotel after Charlotte’s death moderates the ethical harm of the incest because she is willing even when she eventually realizes that she can get money from him from having sex with him. In one scene, both are naked in bed, obviously having sex, and she is trying to collect the various coins that on the sheets. “You’re demanding that I pay more in the middle?” he asks her. She smacks him with a hand for obstructing her collection effort.

To be sure, and this point should be made perfectly clear, an adult is ethically bound to refuse the sexual advances of a child, but at least in the remake the sex is not forced, and thus rape in that sense. The ethical harm is more in how Humbert’s monopoly of her in terms of dating and sex ruins the rest of her life than being only in the sexual act itself.

When we first see the 14 year-old Lolita in the remake, she is a smiling, carefree girl enjoying summer in her backyard. Lying on the grass, she is even enjoying the water from a water-sprinkler falling on her as she looks at pictures in a magazine. Her innocence can be seen in her beautiful smile, and this seems to be what catches Humbert’s gaze, but in retrospect it is clear that he is sexually turned on by the sight of her body even though she has not yet even developed female breasts. In her last scenes in the remake, she looks terrible, wearing a cheap dress and glasses and living in a shack with her new, impoverished husband. Significantly, she is no longer smiling. In his last scene in the film, Humbert laments that she is not among the children laughing in a distant village. “Can you forgive me for what I’ve done to you?” he asks her as he is leaving her small house after giving her what can only be guilt-money.

Lolita’s relationship with Humbert is clearly dysfunctional. Even though this takes place after Charlotte’s death, so strictly speaking, he is no longer Lolita’s step-father, he refers to himself as such to her and takes on a parental role. She is, after all, a child and behaves as such, and is in need of parental supervision. The power differential is uncomfortable for her, and us, though not for Humbert. She naturally bristles at his totalitarian control over her life, including her sex life even when she is attending a school while living with him as he teaches at a college. Anger and even violence result. To escape from him, she secretly plans to live with another pedophile, Clare Quilty, whom she claims to be attracted to, though he kicks her out after she refuses to be in a pornographic, or “art,” film in which she would have to “blow those beastly boys.” She is left alone with no money and with no previous normal sexual relationship. Due to his possessive selfishness and his refusal to respect the proper sexual distance between a child and an adult, Humbert clearly acts very unethically with respect to Lolita. Out of all the ethical theories promulgated historically, one in particular is especially applicable to this film, and to the nature of the medium in being able to provoke visceral emotional reactions.

David Hume theorized in the eighteenth century that the sentiment, or feeling, of a gut-level disapproval triggered by a moral wrong is essentially moral judgment itself. As one of my professors used to say, if you walk by a dead body that has a knife in its back, you are going to have a negative emotional reaction, unless you are pathological. This feeling is your ethical judgment that something unethical has happened. By engaging both our eyes and ears, film can reach down deep and trigger such a sentiment of disapprobation, and thus trigger ethical judgments in an audience during a screening. This is much more powerful than merely having an audience told that something unethical is happening in a film. Although hearing a neighbor tell Humbert in the original film that “the neighbors are talking” about Humbert’s relationship with “his daughter” and even seeing the concerned look of the drug-store clerk who serves Lolita an ice-cream shake in the remake provide subtle and thus believable indications of just how ethically problematic the “father-daughter” relationship really is, actually feeling a sentiment of disapprobation while watching and hearing Humbert and Lolita having sex is much more powerful in giving an audience a sense of the ethical dimension in the human condition.

Playing a “supporting role” in making the ethical problem “real” for an audience watching the remake are the means in which sensuality in the story-world is brought out by close-ups and the magnification of particular sounds. The remake is hardly alone among films in being able to bring taken-for-granted ordinary sounds to our notice, and thus giving us the opportunity to sense the depth of experience that is possible even in our banal daily lives. The sound of shoes walking on a hard floor, the sound of air-pressure from the car-door of a new car being closed, and the sound of a pen or pencil being used on paper are just a few examples of sounds that we typically overlook and yet can be made aware of in a film. Even the sound of rain can be made to stand out. One byproduct of this cinematic experience is that we might then notice more sounds in our daily experience, and thus have a fuller, or deeper experience of the world in which we live.

In the remake, not all of the heightened sounds are related to or intimate sex; sensuality as sensitivity in experience goes beyond the sexual. The lazy tires of Humbert’s car in the first scene, for example, bring us into the story-world without any suggestion that sex will be a salient feature of that world. The magnified sound of moths being electrically zapped on the hotel porch, where Humbert first meets Quilty, is likewise devoid of sexual inuendo; the point of that exaggerated sound is perhaps that both men are living dangerously in having sex with children. The sound of chocolate syrup shooting into Lolita’s glass, followed by the sound of a scoop of ice-cream being released, however, conveys more of a sense of sensuality, though still not as sexual as the sound of Lolita’s body moving under a sheet in a hotel bed that she will soon share with Humbert during their first night at a hotel (in the original film, he sleeps on a cot at the foot of the bed). That the sound of the two kissing even back when Humbert is a boarder can be easily heard is no accident. Even when Lolita’s disjointedly throws a leg or arm in Humbert’s direction when he is a boarder, the sounds can easily be heard and suggest a story-world in which touching is real. I submit that such use of sound ultimately brings the audience closer to the incestual act as being real in the story-world.

Film can employ both sound and visuals to enhance sensitivity to particular things in a way that leaves the audience itself more sensitive during the screening, and thus open to the ethical dimension, which is then more likely to stay with the viewers after the movie. In other words, by heightening experience, a filmmaker can prepare an audience to be brought closer in without feeling threatened or revolted. Hume’s sentiment of disapprobation can accordingly be really felt, rather than just thought about. In this way at least, the medium of film can get “inside” of people ethically and thus enhance our understanding of the human condition from an ethical standpoint.

In fact, the ethical dimension overshadows the dysfunctional psychology in Humbert’s obsession over Lolita even though James Mason’s Humbert in the original film is clearly shown as pathological in his reaction to the final rejection by Lolita when he visits her and her husband near the end of the film. We are perhaps more accustomed to film being used, as by Alfred Hitchcock, for psychological effect than to focus on the ethical dimension of the human condition by means of particular ethical problems or dilemmas.

The ethical dimension also overshadows the religious implications. In the original film, Charlotte asks Humbert if he believes in God. “Does he believe in me?” is Humbert’s telling reply. But nothing more is said or suggested of religion in the original film. Humbert is more interested in the state of his soul in the remake. As the narrator, he admits that having sex with Lolita is a sin, and furthermore that it has played a direct role in ruining her life. In asking her, “Can you forgive me for what I’ve done to you?” it is clear that he is thinking about forgiveness. He is explicitly interested in his redemption, for he says that Quilty prevented it by taking Lolita away. Perhaps the implication we can draw from this is that Humbert thought at least at one point that he could eventually make Lolita happy. That he is delusional in this is clear as he asks her to leave her husband and return even though she has just told him that Quilty is the only man she ever liked romantically. In short, Humbert’s understanding of his redemption is clouded by the delusion in his sexual obsession.  Even so, it is the ethical dimension rather than the religious and psychological explanations that stands out in Lolita.

The Zone of Interest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oppenheimer

An artificial sun rose on an otherwise dark night when the nuclear-bomb test named Trinity ushered in the era wherein our species’ aggressive instinct could render homo sapiens extinct. Given the salience of that instinctual urge—for we are related to the chimpanzee species—the wise (i.e., sapiens) species can be its own undoing. For it took a lot of intelligence in sub-atomic physics to invent the nuclear bomb, yet very little smarts went into deciding to use it against Japan, an enemy that would have lost anyway, in order to save American lives from having to invade the mainland (as if conventional bombs could not have reduced the casualties). Even less thought was put into the need to contain the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Expediency without heeding long-term risk is not a virtue. Kant wrote that even if our species were to institute a world federation, presumably having nation-states that would be semi-sovereign as a check against global totalitarianism, peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. This does not speak well of human nature, and this in turn renders the Trinity test something less than redeeming. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” In the film, Oppenheimer (2023), Robert Oppenheimer reads from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as a woman is on top of him in sexual intercourse. The irony of him being an instrument of mass destruction as director of the Manhattan Project and yet being engaged in potentially reproducing life with a woman is doubtlessly the point of that scene. Hindus who leap to the conclusion that Nolan is insulting their religion miss this point. Had the director included a scene in which Oppenheimer is praying, for example for the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time, a quote from the film, Gettysburg (1993) would have been similarly fitting. In that film, Col. Chamberlain of the Union army remarks, “What a piece of work is man . . . in action how like an angel!” Sgt. Kilrain replies, “Well, if he’s an angel, all right then . . . But he damn well must be a killer angel.” In the nuclear age, killer angel takes on added significance. The question is perhaps whether we have left angel behind as our species’ intelligence outdoes our species, whether in terms of nuclear war or rendering a climate unsuitable for us.

Even though Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, said that he had been unconcerned with whether people leave the theaters with something to think about, such as the ethical and political implications of nuclear weapons, including whether Truman should have used two such bombs against Japan; rather, the viewers are to be engaged emotionally in dramatic tension between the characters in the film. I consider this stance to be short-sighted, as it does not take advantage of the potential that the medium of motion pictures has to stimulate philosophical thinking, such as in ethics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. This benefit of films is why I write essays on films.  Even in spite of Nolan’s intention, Oppenheimer is a good example of the salience of ethics and political thought in film.

Although Nolan overdoes too many and too brief visuals of quantum mechanics from Robert Oppenheimer’s imagination, no doubt because he used the giant-screen “IMAX” film, and jumps around too much from scene to scene in Oppenheimer’s life, the emotional engagement of viewers in the dramatic tension between characters, especially between Oppenheimer and his antagonist Lewis Strauss, is formidable. Especially given the salience of Oppenheimer’s emotional wrestling with the ethical and political significance of the bomb, it is easy for viewers to hate Strauss, and Nolan satisfies our instinctual urge for justice by providing scenes in which Strauss is denied Senate confirmation to serve on Eisenhower’s cabinet and Oppenheimer’s “contribution” to the U.S. in World War II and his hacked reputation are recognized as President Johnson gives the protagonist an award. In being able to stimulate strong feelings of anger and relief in the viewers, Nolan is a master story-teller. Nevertheless, the film offers so much more. Nolan has outdone himself, even if it was not his intent.

The debate on whether President Truman should have used nuclear weapons against Japan is well-known in both Japan and the United States. The film would have been deficient had Nolan excluded that question. Because Truman comes off as dismissive and rude in his meeting with Oppenheimer, I suspect that Nolan wanted the film to have a pessimistic attitude on Truman’s decision, especially given the air-time given to Oppenheimer’s concerns. His motive in getting involved in the Manhattan Project is originally informed by his Jewish identity and geared to stopping the Nazis. The Japanese come off as an ordinary military foe relative to the Germans, so Oppenheimer naturally concludes that the rationale for the bomb has passed by the time of the Trinity detonation. Even in the nuclear age, “regular” wars, such as the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and Russia’s war against Ukraine, have been fought without resort to nuclear weapons. Once Germany had been defeated and the horrific, mass-scale atrocities stopped, World War II could have been viewed as reverting to a “regular” war. If so, the use of extraordinary weapons could have been viewed differently—as expedient.

Indeed, even the value of saving American lives (admittedly at the cost of many Japanese civilians) pales relative to being the first country to use a nuclear bomb and, the “genie being out of the bottle,” risking an arms race to the bottom. I am the destroyer of worlds is not a scriptural passage to be taken lightly. As evinced by that line, the film raises fundamental ethical and political questions beyond that of Truman’s decision.

By the 21^st century, Israel, a small country surrounded by Islamic countries, had already acquired nuclear weapons, and in 2022, the president of Russia repeatedly threatened the West that he might use such weapons against Ukraine. The world took notice at Putin’s attempt to normalize the use of the atomic bomb in a regular war, but even so, the warning of a shot which would be heard around the world in its dire significance of portended ruin did not stir any political discussion between world leaders, at least publicly, on the more urgent need for global safeguards.

In Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer’s concern is valid that, given human nature, large-scale nuclear war is almost inevitable at some point unless nuclear powers agree to mutually give up the bomb. Even in this respect, Oppenheimer—both the character and the movie—are too optimistic, for an international power to enforce the treaties would be necessary, again, given human nature. Among combatants in a war, the first casualty is truth-telling. If our species is indeed the wise, or sapiens, species of the homo genus, then it should be capable of not only uncovering quantum mechanics, but also self-regulating our most sordid and destructive instincts. We are animals, after all. If we are angels with a biological instinctual urge capable of sensing the presence of divinity, then alright, it must also be said that our death instinct can now also be fulfilled.   

Paul: Apostle of Christ

The film carries great weight, theologically, in that Paul describes a very particular kind of love that Jesus preaches and lives out in the Gospels. In so doing, Paul: The Apostle of Christ (2018) shows an overlooked criterion by which people who claim to be Christian can be ascertained as such or not. One implication from the film is that Christianity has contained (and still contains) a number of nominal Christians who are not in fact Christian. A related implication is that the historically (and modern) criteria by which people are considered (and consider themselves) Christian is not as useful (and valid) as the overlooked criterion that is so salient in the film.

In the film, Aquila heads a small Christian enclave in Rome at the time of Nero’s persecution of Christians (and Paul, who is arrested and sentenced to death) for being responsible for burning half of Rome. Never mind that Nero set the fire to have something other than refusals to sacrifice to the Roman gods, including the emperor with which to go after the Christians. When Cassius’s nephew is fatally beaten by Roman guards as the boy was voluntarily on an errand that had been arranged by Aquila, Cassius explodes in anger, insisting that he would extol revenge on Roman guards and then instigate a coup (supposing that Christian rulers would be better). “If any of you take up arms, you have no place within this community,” Aquila tells him. A woman then reminds the irate Cassius that Christians “are to care for the world, not rule it.” Luke reminds the young, passionate Cassius that “Paul has not raised a finger against his oppressors. Let peace be with you,” Luke advises, “for we live in the world but do not wage war as the world does. Peace begins with you, Cassius. Love is the only way.” Paul will tell Luke, “We cannot repay evil with evil; it can only be overcome with good.” The overcoming of the world’s evil is something that Jesus’s real followers, the anonymous Christians, do by valuing and putting into practice Jesus’s dictum to love your enemies, which translates into more than turning the other cheek (i.e., refusing to fight back); a proactive desire to help is also part of Jesus' conception of the Kingdom of God. 
In Luke 6:27, Jesus says, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you." To be sure, he also goes on to say, "If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also." The Golden Rule, "Do to others as you would have them do to you," encompasses both; don't fight back and try and help those who insult, hit, and steal from you. Further in the passage in Luke, Jesus points out, "If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? for even sinners do the same." Doing good to those who piss you off, or even just annoy you, talk behind your back to take you down, or assault you is so hard to do--so contrary to the default in human nature--that a holiness attaches to the person who takes this leap in faith to do what the world says is weakness. Strength in the kingdom typically stands as weakness according to human reckoning. In fact, where you come out on whether not only turning the other cheek, but also helping, such as Jesus does when he heals the ear of the guard whose ear Peter has cut off, is strength or foolishness determines whether you value Jesus' way into the Kingdom of God, and thus the latter as well. Jesus says he came to preach the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. You cannot disvalue the latter and still worship the means, which is the distinctive holy-rendering that goes with not only not fighting, but also not refusing to help. This could even be the litmus test in whether a person is a follower of Jesus.
In the film, Cassius is unyielding, and he goes on to storm the prison when both Paul and Luke are being held in Paul’s cell. It is extremely important theologically that Aquila tells the Christians living in the enclave that taking up arms, including to kill even enemies including the persecuting Romans, is enough to get them kicked out of the enclave. The implication is startling, for even having the cognitive belief that Jesus is the Son of God is not enough to counter or outweigh the criterion of valuing and practicing the kind of love taught by Jesus. Abstractly, valuing and practice are here more important than belief. Though this too is in the mix, is not valuing and doing something closer to love than is a cognitive belief? Aquila's criterion serves in the film as the litmus test for whether a person is a Christian or not because Aquila tells Cassius that he must leave the enclave if he insists on raising the sword to return evil for evil rather than good for evil. That Cassius believes that Jesus is a certain thing does not get Cassius a pass from Aquila; Cassius still gets the boot if he does not value and practice the particular kind of love valued and exampled by Jesus in the Gospels.

When Luke visits Paul in his prison cell after the incident with Cassius, Luke admits that Cassius’s reaction is sensible given what the Roman guards on the Palatine had done to the boy. Paul immediate chastises Luke by accusing him of not having accepted Christ, by which Paul means, the particular kind of love preached and exampled by Jesus. It is THE WAY into the Kingdom of God—Jesus’s mission being to preach the mysteries (i.e., the unknown) of the Kingdom. Both the means and the end must be valued, or else the Christian believer is only nominal rather than genuine.

It may be common for Christians to say like Augustine did that God is love without knowing that the love being invoked is actually of a particular sort (i.e., a particular concept of love, rather than just love broadly construed). In what I take to be the highlight of the film (without a doubt in terms of acting), Paul gives Luke a description of the love that had been so hard and yet achievable for Paul. 
“Love is the only way,” Paul says. “A love that suffers long, does not envy, is not proud, does not dishonor or seek for itself, is not easily angered, rejoices in truth, never delights in evil, protects, trusts, hopes, and endures all things. That kind of love sets us free and answers evil with good.” Cassius wants to answer the Roman guards’ evil deed with anger and destruction (killing). In a Gnostic vein wherein knowledge plays a vital role, Paul admits he had to “learn how to love”—meaning he had to know this particular form of love and how make the metric of his conduct toward other people, even the Romans. “This power,” Paul says at one point, “is strewn in weakness”—meaning human nature. The desire for vengeance can even be second nature to a person, whereas compassion and aid to enemies is anything but. 
So the suffering that is long in this kind of love goes further than "turning the cheek" when persecuted, attacked, or even insulted. Besides, relative to when the Romans persecuted Christians, not many modern-day Christians face persecution because of the Christian faith. Even the suffering that Paul and Luke face in the film as they face the Perfect's persecution goes further to include an even richer suffering--namely, that which is experienced from resisting the sort of instinctual urge that anger fuels in returning evil for evil. Luke and Paul are disgusted with the Roman guards and their superiors, and yet both of these Christians suffer through helping the Prefect's ill daughter rather than engaging in passive aggression by omission. 
The sort of suffering that goes beyond suffering persecution is distinctively Christian, whereas anyone could suffer persecution voluntarily. In fact, "carrying your cross" may refer not only to the suffering that goes with the pain in being persecuted, but also, and even more so, to the pain of resisting the urge to hit back and going on to help, even with compassion, those people who have taken from you, attacked you, or even just insulted you. Answering good for evil may itself be painful, whereas satisfying the urge to retaliate can be quite satisfying. Even though the pain of being stolen from, attacked, or insulted is significant, the more subtle pain of resisting the temptation to inflict pain in return and then actually being nice and feeling it may really get at what Jesus of the Gospels wants from his followers. Such suffering does not depend on the particular case of being persecuted for one's faith. Given Jesus' emphasis on internal feeling, and that the way to his Father's Kingdom turns the way of the world (i.e, human nature) upside down, the suffering that goes beyond turning the other cheek to actually loving rather than retaliating may actually be more important.

The film shows us an example of Paul putting the distinctive love into practice when he tells the Roman Prefect of the prison, who has had Paul whipped several times, that he knows a good physician (namely, Luke), who can heal the Prefect’s severely ill daughter. Although Luke asks Paul, “How can I bring healing when [the Prefect] and Rome bring so much suffering,” Paul replies that “God’s mercy, and thus his kingdom, are open to all,” and “Where sin abounds, grace abounds more.” Luke is convinced and volunteers to heal the daughter. The Prefect’s reaction is interesting—something more than puzzlement suggesting that something odd from the standpoint of human nature has just been witnessed. A similar facial expression is evinced by Pontius Pilot as he sees the strength of the whipped Jesus walking closer through a hallway in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Of course, that Paul and Luke can accomplish in their human nature a skewed human nature suggests that our own nature is pliable enough to incorporate such love, which, as Augustine wrote, is God. 

For implications for leadership, see "Christianized Ethical Leadership, a booklet available at Amazon.

Virtual Reality: Not Coming to a Theatre Near You

Virtual reality may be coming your way, and when it hits, it could hit big—as if all at once. The explosion of computers and cell phones provides two precedents. “Technologists say virtual reality could be the next computing platform, revolutionizing the way we play games, work and even socialize.”[1] Anticipating virtual reality as the next computing platform does not do the technology justice. I submit that it could revolutionize “motion pictures.” Even though the impact on screenwriting and filmmaking would be significant, I have in mind here the experience of the viewer.

Whereas augmented reality puts “digital objects on images of the real world,” virtual reality “cuts out the real world entirely.”[2] As a medium for viewing “films”—film itself already being nearly antiquated by 2017—virtual reality could thus cut out everything but a film’s story-world. The suspension of disbelief could be strengthened accordingly. The resulting immersion could dwarf that which is possible in a movie theatre. Already as applied to playing video games, “such full immersion can be so intense that users experience motion sickness or fear of falling.”[3] Imagine being virtually in a room in which a man is raping a woman, or a tiger is ready to pounce—or eating its prey, which happens to be a human whom you’ve virtually watched grow up. The possible physiological impacts on a viewer immersed in stressful content would present producers with ethical questions concerning how far it is reasonable to go—with the matter of legal liability not far behind, or in front. Watching, or better, participating in a film such as Jurassic Park could risk a heart attack.

On the bright side, the craft of light and storytelling made virtual could enable such amazing experiences that simply cannot be experienced without virtual reality being applied to film. To be immersed on Pandora in a nighttime scene of Avatar, for example, would relegate even the experience of 3-D in a theatre. The mind would not need to block out perspectivally all but the large rectangle at a distance in front. In short, the experience of watching a film would be transformed such that what we know as going to a movie would appear prehistoric—like travelling by horse to someone who drives a sports car.

---

1. Cat Zakrzewski, “Virtual Reality Comes With a Hitch: Real Reality,” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2017.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

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.