Barbie

In The Wizard of Oz (1939), Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, tells Dorothy at the end of the film that it had been within her power to go home to Auntie Em’s farm in Kansas at any time, simply by clicking the heels of her ruby shoes thrice together. At the end of Barbie (2023), Ruth, who created the Barbie and Ken dolls, tells the traditional Barbie that she can become human herself simply by choosing to feel, and thus to live. The Witch and Ruth occupy similar roles, as do Dorothy and Barbie. But whereas Dorothy is trying to get back to the home she had known and now appreciates from faraway Oz, Barbie is trying to get to what she was made for—something qualitatively different than not being alive. Barbie’s plight is existential, and she discovers that the root of her identity transcends the feminist agenda. As home transcends ideology, what a person is made for transcends even home. Put another way, home is ultimately in being who one really is, hence being transcends location.

Many people who see Barbie undoubtedly fixate on the battle of the sexes between the Barbies and Ken, but I submit that as ideologically titillating as that ideological fix is, the tension between the humans and the dolls is more fundamental. The CEO of Mattel is motivated to close the opening that Barbie had opened between the land of the dolls and the “real” world. Indeed, Barbie does not view herself as real precisely because she cannot feel and is thus not alive. Being something that people pay for is to be of less reality than is someone who is alive and can feel, and thus be happy. To be—i.e., to exist—as what she was made for is not a simple matter with an easy answer for the traditional Barbie, unlike the other dolls. It is only after she has won the battle of the sexes in Barbieland that she goes beyond her gender identity as a woman to focus on discovering her more fundamental identity. It is only at that point that the film becomes sentimental.

In a kind, motherly tone that resembles that of Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, Ruth reveals to Barbie that it is no surprise that the doll is not sure whether she had been made to be a doll or human because Ruth made her open-ended, unlike the other dolls. We too are open-ended, though not with the extent of open-ended freedom of an uncircumscribed horizon that Sartre supposes in his existentialism. Even for an atheist, a person’s upbringing and the culture in which a person is raised detract from complete openness and thus freedom in one’s choices. One’s biology too constrains freedom; aging teaches us this vital lesson. To Barbie, biology is definitely salient in her decision to become human; once she has willed herself to become human and is in Los Angeles, she heads to a gynecologist, for, unlike human women, female dolls do not have vaginas.  Being human rather than a doll involves more than having feeling.

In “being made for” something, it is natural to think in terms of the purpose for which a person was created. Theists believe that a Creator instills in everyone a purpose. In the film, Ruth, a human being, created Barbie and left the doll’s purpose open-ended because Ruth “put some of” her own daughter in that Barbie. Having a purpose, however, can also be viewed as a human construction used to give an ex post facto meaning to what a person (or doll) has discovered to be one’s essence. Hence Sartre claimed that existence precedes essence.

I submit that a person’s biological, psychological, and spiritual makeup gets at what a person “is made for.” Einstein’s brain was “made for” physics—meaning that his brain was particularly well-suited to thinking (e.g. thought experiments) in that field. In coming up with his theories of relativity, he may have said to himself, I was made to do this. “Purpose” could be thought about later, for the aptitude of his mind in particular for physics above all other fields is the key here.

Being a writer was among the last things I thought I was made for, given that the neurological mechanism that fuses both eyes on the same object has never been operative in my brain. Even being a scholar has seemed like something I was not made for. Even if a love for words, ideas, and reasoning reveals what I was made for—in terms of happiness even more than ability—I have wondered whether I have never seen the passion I was made for; such a passion, such as a person says to oneself, I can’t believe someone is paying me to do this, presumably does not suffer from any biological impediments, and so excellence as well as happiness cohere. If only a Glenda or Ruth would say to me that the answer has been right in front of me all along and all I need to do is recognize it—to see it.  In the process in which my brain will die, perhaps I’ll hallucinate a benevolent figure comforting me that I had indeed been made for thinking and writing after all and that my handicap actually made them so. For now, I must admit to wondering if there isn’t something else, something more intrinsic to me, hence the thing I was “made for.” But I am guilty here of reducing essence to function—of thinking about whether there is something I am better at than writing and research because of how I am biologically, psychologically, and spiritually constituted, or “made.”

Barbie decides what she really is. She has transcended functionality by convincing the other female dolls that their innate functions do not reduce to serving Ken dolls. Once she has solved that problem, she finds that she is still in a quandary—still unsettled—for what she was made for goes beyond functions. Beyond even discovering what your passion is lies discovering who you are. Barbie and The Wizard of Oz converge in the mantra that a person is never at home until one is comfortable in one’s own skin. Interestingly, the camera immediately goes to a close-up of Barbie’s now-perspiring skin on her upper chest to show that she has decided to become human. That she had lost the ability to float down to her car and that she had become flat-footed indicate that being a doll was no longer working out for her—meaning that she was really made to become human. Her freedom was circumscribed in that she really couldn’t return to being a doll (whereas Dorothy could return back to the farm in The Wizard of Oz). To be fully alive, and thus happy, is what each of us were “made for,” whether by God or that of the natural sciences. This may turn out to be a false-dichotomy.

To be fully alive is to relish feeling as an end in itself. Rather than keeping up with the Jones, being fully alive is to be at home in one’s own skin. This is more fundamental, and thus more important than discovering the skills at which one excels and one’s proper role in society. Barbie as a movie goes beyond its surrounding marketing campaign and even the salience of the ideology of feminism, for at the end, the film “arrives” at the human condition itself and only does the film come alive in terms of sentiments.

There is no wizard to tell Barbie, as he tells the Tin Man, who wants a heart, “You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable,” though I don’t think this warning would change Barbie’s mind. Had I been a contributing screenwriter of Barbie,  Ruth would also quote the Wizard’s next line to the Tin Man: “And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” Essentially, the message would be that Barbie already has a heart, and that to become human all she has to do is realize that she had indeed been loved. Gloria, the human mother who, with her daughter, accompanies Barbie back to Barbieland, shows love in trying to relieve Barbie’s unhappiness, for Barbie has lost her ease as a doll and "Barbieland" to the Kens. Because Barbie is crying at the time, her existential angst running deeper than her shock in seeing the other Barbies serving the Kens, we can infer that she has feelings, and is thus "real" and human even though she doesn't realize the extent of her transition by then. Even the other Barbies and the original Ken display a slight, or muted, sentimentality when they are waving goodbye to Barbie as she walks off with Ruth, never to return to Barbieland. Therefore, Barbie’s heart can be inferred from not only from the fact that she is crying when Gloria tries to cheer her up with a feminist speech and how kind Barbie is to the other Barbies and even to the original Ken during and after the battle over Barbieland, but also how much she has been loved (by humans) and thanked by the dolls.

Pardoxically, Barbie has no freedom in so far as she transitions in Barbieland; her freedom comes once Ruth has revealed that Barbie need only to will to be human. So there is evidence of teleology in the transition, for Barbie has no control over no longer being able to float and reverse becoming flatfooted, and of freewill in choosing whether to make the transition definitive by being and living with humans or resist it by remaining in Barbieland, albeit in a compromised condition. Theists can point to Ruth and the transition that takes place in Barbieland, and humanists can point to the power that Barbie herself has merely from a realization. Only after Dorothy realizes that she could have left Oz at any time can she leave Oz. Similarly, only after Barbie realizes that she has only to will herself to be human can she leave Barbieland for good.

Avatar: The Way of Water

Sequel to Avatar (2009), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) contains many parallels with the original film—perhaps too many. The most outlandish, yet philosophically robust, concerns the return of Steven Lang even though his character, the antagonist Col. Miles Quaritch, is killed by Neytiri at the end of the first film. Lang delivers some outstanding lines, so it is no wonder that David Cameron wanted to extend Lang’s character’s life. In so doing, Cameron invented the devise of a recombinant, a Na’vi artificially grown with the human Quaritch’s memories and personality implanted in the brain. This device is fundamentally different than a Na’vi avatar body in which a human brain is temporarily infused remotely by a human. In the case of Jake’s avatar body, which has both Na’vi and Jake’s DNA, there is no question that Jake’s avatar is not Jake himself. In the second film, the lines of identity blur between the human Miles Quaritch of the first film and the Na’vi Quaritch of the second. Cameron himself seems to be not of one mind on the question of whether the Na’vi Quaritch is the same “person” as the deceased human Quaritch. I contend that they are not, and, by implication, that a person’s self-identity, based on existing (or experience of oneself) does not rest solely with one’s memories and personality. In short, there is more to being a person. Before applying philosophy of personhood to the Quaritch characters in the films, I want to provide a context by briefly laying out the extent of parallels between the two films.

In the first film, a small, floating rock represents what pays for everything the humans are doing on Pandora. By the second film, the solid substance, unobtanium, is curiously not even mentioned; a liquid, amrita, extracted from the brains of (whale-like) tulkuns, is “what’s paying for everything on Pandora now.” The fluid acts as an anti-aging agent on humans. In the first film, a small rock represents unobtanium; in the second, a vial of amrita represents what comes from a much, much larger animal. The implication is that even a small sample is lucrative, and therein lies the strong motive for the humans’ colonial exploitation of Pandora at the expense of the Navi. Another parallel involves Lo’ak, the youngest son of Jake and Neytiri, who is taught the sea-culture ways by Reya, son of the local chief, in the sequel. “You bonded with an outcast!,” the chief exclaims to his daughter. Similarly, the chief in the first film was not at all pleased when Neytiri tells him that she has bonded with Jake’s avatar. Also, the reference to Jake, Neytiri, and their children as “children” in the sea way of life in the second film mirrors Neytiri telling Jake in the first film, “You’re like an infant.” The astute viewer of the sequel may notice that Neytiri manages a smirk when she and her family are being referred to as children, for she is then as Jake had been when Neytiri began teaching him the ways of the forest Na’vi. Still another parallel exists between the Tree of Souls that is on solid ground (until the giant bulldozers come by) in the first film and the Spirit Tree that is under water in the second film. The implication is that there is more than one way to “connect” with Eywa, so the loss of the Tree of Souls is not as catastrophic as it seems in the first film.

Parallelism as a tool for relating the two films is epitomized, and I think stretched too far, in Col. Miles Quaritch’s “return” as a recombinant in the second film. Quaritch’s becoming conscious in the second film parallels Jake when he first inhabits his avatar body in the first film even though a recombinant and an avatar are very different even though both have a Na’vi body. Becoming conscious from not having been conscious before is not like having one’s consciousness transferred from one’s own brain to that of one’s avatar. Unlike Jake only vicariously occupying his avatar body in the first film, the Na’vi Quaritch has no such mind-body duality; his mind and body are fused together and thus Na’vi rather than human. Therefore, Cameron overstates the parallelism between the Na’vi Quaritch in the second film and Jake’s occupied avatar body in the first film. Similarly, the parallelism between Miles Quaritch of the homo sapiens species and Quaritch of the Na’vi species is overdone—in this case, as identity, both in terms of a person’s identity and the identity of the two characters as identical (i.e., the same “person”).

Yet even as preposterous as the device to continue Steven Lang as an actor in the second film is, the relationship between his two characters is the most philosophically rich aspect of the second film. The political economic issues in the human colonization of Pandora pale in comparison because ontology and existentialism are more fundamental than political and economic thought philosophically. Indeed, my own studies went from political economy to theology and philosophy precisely to go deeper. From such a basis, I contend that Cameron overstates the existential self-identities of the two characters, erroneously fusing them into one identity, and thereby loses sight of what it is to be a particular person rather than someone else.

First, I need to unpack my term, existential identity. The word identity applies both to a person’s awareness of one’s self (i.e., one’s identity) and to two things being identical. Regarding the relationship between the human and Na’vi Quaritches, which spans two films, I could perhaps replace the adjective existential with ontological. Ontology (i.e., about what is real) applies here to whether the two characters are actually one entity, whereas existential places the emphasis on the two existences of (i.e., as experienced by) the two characters—the human and Na’vi Quaritches—without first asking whether they have the same essence. I contend that the experience (i.e., conscious existence) of the Na’vi Quaritch includes awareness of being a different entity than the human Quaritch. Put another way, the Na’vi Quaritch’s conscious experience does not consist only of (the human’s) memories (and personality). Unlike Jake’s avatar in the first film, the existence of the Na’vi Quaritch begins when he becomes conscious.  So I will argue that the Na’vi Quaritch is not a seamless continuation of the human Quaritch. In other words, we shouldn’t take them to be the same “person,” and thus identical, for the respective experiences of the two characters are distinct even though they have a personality and some memories in common. By implication, having the same memories and personality are not sufficient to be someone.

Ontologically, the two characters are two entities; each has his own body that is distinct and separate from the other. They aren’t even in the same film! Even in terms of DNA, they differ because they are, as the Na’vi Quaritch points out to Jake and Neytiri in referring to Spider, the human son of the human Quaritch, of different species. From this ontological basis, the Na’vi Quaritch experiences himself, and thus his identity, as distinct from the human Quaritch, and yet, the Na’vi Quaritch uses the first person, singular pronoun, “I” in referring to the human Quaritch in being betrayed by Jake. Very bizarre indeed. It demonstrates that Cameron has overreached in trying to extend Steven Lang’s character in the first film into the second film.

Just as there is (arguably) more to understanding than the manipulation of symbols (i.e., words) according to rules because a person’s understanding is a part of one’s experience, similarly experiencing oneself as a self—one’s selfhood—is not merely to have a certain set of memories and even a certain set of personality traits. To be sure, memories and personality are powerful ingredients in a person’s identity.

Cameron is on safe ground in having the Na’vi Quaritch repeat lines said by the human Quaritch, such as “Do not test my resolve” and “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” These lines resonate, and so they could have been etched in the human Quaritch’s memory, upon which the Na’vi Quaritch could easily draw from. They resonate so because they reflect a distinct personality, which the two characters both have. Even an impeccably identical vocal stress in the Na’vi Quaritch’s repetition of sayings of the human Quaritch is plausible. “You make it real clear,” “You’re not in Kansas anymore,” and “Lite em up” are the most notable instances. It is precisely such lines that likely motivated Cameron to “essentially” reprise Steven Lang’s role. It could be argued, admittedly, that people usually don’t repeat sentences word for word, so Cameron could be overreaching and thus overstating the identity between the two characters to give audiences more of what worked the first time around.

Even so, Cameron does not characterize the Na’vi Quaritch in general terms as a parrot. In fact, certain differences, such as in the Na’vi Quaritch using the words, scalp in referring to killing Na’vis, Mr. Sully rather than “Jake” in referring to Jake Sully, and labcoats rather than “scientist pukes” in referring to the scientists, can be taken as indications that the Na’vi Quaritch’s personality is distinct from that of implanted one. It would make sense that the experiences of the Na’vi Quaritch, which could not have gone retroactively back into the first Quaritch, have an impact on the personality of the Na’vi Quaritch alone. For one thing, experience with General Ardmore, which the human Quaritch presumably does not have in the first film, may boost the Na’vi Quaritch’s inclination show greater respect and less disdain for his enemies, including Jake and the scientists. The General’s professionalism in torturing Spider, for example, may rub off on the Na’vi Quaritch.

Therefore, both in terms of memories and personality, the Na’vi Quaritch is not identical with the human Quaritch. This suggests that the second Quaritch is at least in part his own “man.” He could still be a continuation of the human Quaritch, but, ontologically, barriers to a seamless continuity in terms of being the same person exist. As I have already argued, the beginning of the Na’vi Quaritch’s consciousness does not extend back to the human Quaritch’s existence because consciousness is not merely of memories and personality, and the body of the Na’vi Quaritch is distinct and separate from that of the first Quaritch. In fact, at one point in the second film, the Na’vi Quaritch crushes the scull of the first Quaritch! It would be absurd were the second Quaritch to say that he is destroying part of his own body. Rather, the second clearly views the scull as that of another “person.”

Nevertheless, the Na’vi Quaritch is of two minds on whether he is the same “person” as the previous Quaritch. General Ardmore also seems to be confused, though she at least seems to come to her senses. In meeting the Na’vi Quaritch, she tells him, “A lot’s changed since your last tour here.” The problem is that the human Quaritch had the tour.  The line is jarring, even out of place. Fortunately, she later reminds the Na’vi Quaritch that Miles (Spider) Socorro, a son of the human Quaritch, is “not your son.” By her tone of voice, I suspect that she realizes that the Na’vi Quaritch has gotten carried away in identifying himself as the human Quaritch and she is trying to draw him back to reality. Were the General to hold both that the Na’vi Quaritch had the prior tour of duty on Pandora and is not the father of Spider, then we would be in a pickle, or a pretzel, for logically we would be faced with a contraction. Unfortunately, this is precisely what confronts us when we turn to the Na’vi Quaritch’s own statements regarding himself in relation to the human Quaritch.

The Na’vi Quaritch oscillates somewhat on the question of paternity, telling Spider, “I’m not your father, technically,” and tone implies that a technicality doesn’t really matter. The General has already sternly “reminded” the Na’vi Quaritch that Spider is not his son. So the “but for a technicality” suggests not only that the Na’vi Quaritch is self-identifying as the human Quaritch, but also that the identification is an over-reach. Somewhat later, the Na’vi Quaritch disavows paternity, telling Jake and Neytiri concerning Spider, “He’s not mine; we’re not even the same species.” This is obviously a bluff, so Neytiri would realize the lack of value in using Spider as a hostage, but at least the Na’vi Quaritch is aware that he and the human Quaritch are, by implication, also not of the same species and thus cannot be the same “person.”  

That the Na’vi Quaritch comes to care about Spider, as shown in his decision to release Jake’s daughter so Neytiri won’t kill Spider, or that the Na’vi Quaritch even takes on a parental role in warning Spider that he might get a whipping if he misbehaves, does not mean that the Na’vi Quaritch takes himself to be Spider’s father, and thus the same “person” as the human Quaritch. That the Na’vi Quaritch empathizes with the human Quaritch, whose memories and personality have been implanted, and whom after all has been killed by Neytiri, is understandable, and thus so too is his assumption of the role of an adoptive parental figure. This is especially so, as Spider could not be expected for be fully at home in Neytiri’s family. Indeed, watching Neytiri kill a human, Spider hides from her lest her prejudice against the Sky People punctuate itself in vengeance against all humans after the murder of one of her sons by a human. Always one to point out that the humans and Na’vi are different and distinct, Neytiri would naturally be skeptical of the actual identity of the Na’vi and human Quaritches, and yet her decision to use Spider as a hostage to get the Na’vi Quaritch to release one of her daughters hinges the Na’vi Quaritch’s self-perception of identity with the human Quaritch. It is not clear whether the Na’vi Quaritch gives up his leverage by letting go of his hostage (i.e., the daughter) because he views himself as Spider’s father, for an adoptive parent would do likewise, but given how much the Na’vi Quaritch wants to kill Jake, I believe that the assumption of fatherhood, and thus of being a continuation of the human Quaritch, exists. This continuation even includes believing that what was done to the human Quaritch was done to the Na’vi Quaritch.

At the same time that the Na’vi Quaritch tells Jake and Neytiri that Spider is not his son, he tells Jake, “I took you under my wing; you betrayed me.” Na’vi Quaritch’s “I” extends back to include the human Quaritch, and yet the Na’vi Quaritch earlier insisted, “I’m not that man, but I do have his memories.” I’m not that man and you betrayed me. Now we are at the crux of the matter! A rational being, whether Na’vi or human, cannot hold that what happened to another being (rational or not) happened to oneself as if “that man” and “I” were not mutually exclusive. Self-identity cannot embrace the identity of oneself and another being. In other words, recognizing the human Quaritch as that man is to recognize that he is at an existential and ontological distance. By the law of non-contradiction, something cannot be both another entity and not another entity. The two entities are thus not identical; they have distinct and separate identities. This makes sense in the case of the human and Na’vi Quaritches, as their respective experiences are different; they aren’t even of the same species. The Na’vi Quaritch did not have a previous tour on Pandora before he first became conscious; General Ardmore is wrong in saying so, but she seems have realized this by the time she tells the Na’vi Quaritch that Spider is not his son because the human Quaritch was the boy’s father.  She comes to realize that the Na’vi Quaritch has been playing the dead character. Were she present later in the film when the antagonist and protagonist finally clash in person, she might tell the Na’vi Quaritch, No, Jake did not betray you. He betrayed the guy whose scull you crushed in one of your hands, so move on, get over it; your life is yours. You are not the person whom even you yourself have referred to as “that man.”

Wall Street

Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street (1987) was filmed in the midst of U.S. President Reagan’s push for financial deregulation. As a MBA student at the time, I volunteered to help a professor with his paper on financial deregulation. The theory behind why the NASD (the National Association of Securities Dealers) could self-regulate its members seemed solid enough to this idealistic youngster (i.e., me); I had yet to witness human nature in the field, and over decades. Similar to Marx overlooking the human need for economic compensation as an incentive to work on a daily basis (though I overlook it too in posting free essays online), I was blind to human nature in that I did not see that the NASD itself would protect even its most sordid members so to safeguard the reputation of the profession and, even more realistically, stick up for other “members” of the “club.” The Newtonian-like automatic mechanism whereby industry self-regulation would work was too beautiful to let human nature interfere. Similarly, when I worked in public accounting, I saw the “check mark” indicating that, “as per comptroller, discrepancy resolved,” was just one of several technical points in conducting an audit. The illusion of technique as somehow objective in the business world can shield practitioners from the ethical content. In case you’re wondering how this relates to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, the antagonist Gordon Gekko is the poster child for greed, and thus the reason why the public should not rely on industry self-regulation to police Wall Street. Bud Fox goes headlong into being Gekko’s insider-trading protégé, easily ignoring conscience personified by Lou Mannheim even though he and Bud work in the same brokerage office. In Freudian terms, the id easily defeats the superego. It’s not even a close fight.

This is precisely why externally-imposed (i.e., free of the influence of the political contributions made by Wall Street firms) government regulation is necessary in a Capitalist economic system. Even Adam Smith recognized such a need, and thus that his theory of moral sentiments would not be sufficient. Greed can destroy persons and even entire economies. Wall Street’s greed for the very profitable unregulated sub-prime mortgage-bonds (and the insurance policies on those financial derivative securities), for instance, led to the financial crisis of 2008. The Clinton administration had fought to keep those instruments unregulated. Even after the crisis, Wall Street refused to accept blame. Even after the fact, conscience was easily dismissable.

In the film, Bud Fox’s conscience, as represented by Lou, tells him that there are no short-cuts. Bud dismisses Lou’s wisdom culled from at least 20 years of experience. Bud’s position is that he can good later; got to get the wealth first though—as if doing good depends on being wealthy—but Lou is not referring to philanthropy after retirement from working on Wall Street. Later in the story, Lou senses that Bud has been cutting corners ethically and perhaps even legally and tells the young enterprising man that money makes a person “do things you don’t want to do.” Bud wants to profit off insider info about his dad’s company, however, in order to snag the big fish, Gordon Gekko.

Carl Fox, Bud’s working-class father, tells his son, “Stop going for the easy buck.” But Carl is going after Bud’s industry and thus misses an opportunity to counsel his son on his tactics. To Carl, financial brokerage itself is problematic in that it does not produce anything. He contrasts brokers with lawyers, but both mediate parties who make things. To Carl, GNP is constituted by goods—not services. This is interesting because as an airline mechanic, Carl must know that oil is important to keeping an engine going, and thus things to be produced.

In the 1980s in the U.S. at least, finance was king and business schools were booming. I must admit that I got sucked into that vortex, quite unaware of what was happening in higher education, for I did not even realize that I was reducing education to vocation in the process. In a MBA course, I read what Robert Reich wrote about the American economy increasingly comprised of paper entrepreneurism. Manufacturing had been a casualty in the recession of 1981. During that recession, my hometown lost practically all of its machine-tool industry to Europe and unemployment stood at 21 percent. Gekko’s view of wealth as a zero-sum game fit with the empirical reality of companies moving their factories abroad to capitalize on cheaper labor markets and less onerous regulations. Gekko could have written speeches for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. “America’s a second-rate power,” Gekko says at one point. The federal government is a “malfunctioning corporation” rather than a functioning democracy. The trade and budget deficits were just two indications that the government was in a pathetic way. Pro-business Reagan would hardly have agreed with Gekko’s negative view of corporate America, however.

In too many corporations, Gekko explains at a stockholder meeting, it’s a case of survival of the unfittest. Stockholders have ceded control to non-owner managers, who are after all really just bureaucrats. As a result, too many companies have become bloated. Referring to the company’s management sitting on the stage, Gekko complains that the company has 33 vice presidents. Gekko’s claim to be a liberator of companies has some merit. In breaking up badly run, overextended companies, hostile takeovers cut the fat and move the evolution of American Capitalism in the direction of greater efficiency and effectiveness. What about Bud’s father, Carl, who would lose his longstanding job were Gekko buy another company, Bluestar Airlines, and sell it for parts? Performing radical deconstructive surgery on the U.S. economy involves people’s livelihoods.

Carl has Gekko’s number. This is very clear. “He’s using you,” Carl says to his son. Carl knows that Gekko is lying about intending to keep the airline running. Bud dismisses his dad’s intuition. It does not help that Gekko has become a surrogate father and that Carl is at least in part jealous of Gekko, even apart from Gekko’s wealth. It is important to know that Bud has not gained a second father, for Gekko is not loyal to other people, and certainly not to a young salesman. Gekko lies to Bud about intending to keep the airline together and let Bud run it. That he actually thinks he could run a business merely because he has some experience executing trades shows just how delusional greed can be. Carl provides a reality-test here when he points out to his son that brokerage does not give a person experience tantamount to being able to manage a large business. Blinded by Gekko’s statement, “I’m going to make you rich,” Bud thinks he can do anything. Both Bud and Gekko are in fact greedy and consequently neither man pays any heed to insider-trading law or financial ethics. The S.E.C. is presumably on holiday.

Such is the delusion that can come from greed, the desire for more. This desire is treated as an end in itself. That is to say, that desire is assigned absolute value. God is knocked out of its perch, and relationships go by the wayside. The root is self-love, wherein the self is situated as the center and end of all; truth is a function of subjectivity.

“Greed is good,” Gekko states at the stockholder meeting. Greed works; it clarifies, which I assume means that it puts priorities in order. This goes for “love, life, and money.” Not surprisingly, Gekko admits to Bud’s fake girlfriend, Darien, with whom Gekko has been secretly sleeping with, that he has tried to avoid love. Presumably it gets in the way of his first priority, money. Lest it be concluded, however, that Gekko is the Devil incarnate, we get a glimpse of Gekko appreciating the beauty of the ocean while walking on the beach on Long Island. Even a greedy person is a human being. Even so,  greed eviscerates relationships, especially in a commercial context for there is no loyalty on which business relationships can be built, for the quick buck is all that matters.

Once when I was going to extend my hotel stay at a Merriott hotel, I asked that my rate be continued. The hotel manager refused, saying that hotels are like airlines so the rate is whatever is currently available online, given whatever supply and demand happen to be at the moment. This is in line with the hotel maximizing revenue on a nightly basis. The narrow fixation and the absolute priority on revenue cut off a business relationship from developing. Because hotels differ from airlines in that flights end whereas hotel stays can be extended, I knew that the company’s technocrats had adopted a flawed, ill-fitting model. I did not extend my stay at that hotel; rather, I went to another hotel, and, once checked-in there, I put the Merriott “loyalty" program card, which a front desk employee at the previous hotel had given me, in a trash can. One-sided loyalty is an oxymoron. To be sure, the Merriott company got some revenue from me, but the company stumbled over itself in that it lost much more (without knowing about the future lost business). Any marketing ploy that refers to hotel customers as “guests” is disingenuous because the “hospitality” industry, at least in the U.S., practices such radical conditionality in customer relations. From my observations and reactions to managers at that Merriott hotel, I could sense just how inimical greed is to human relationships in a commercial context.

In general, greed cannot tolerate the ongoing bonds that sustain human relationships, whether business or personal, if those bonds constrict a gain that could otherwise be snagged. Greed’s interests are immediate because the desire for more cannot refuse even a momentary gain even if it means diminishing or losing a long-term arrangement. Even a person’s or company’s reputation is no constraint if there is an easy gain to be had. This does not mean that greed eschews long-term investments and even business relationships that are advantageous (e.g., a discount for frequent business). It’s just that greed cannot be relied upon by counterparties to stay on course should conditions change. Like a cheating spouse, greed won’t let a vow get in the way of instant gratification.

In the film, it is not surprising that Gekko has been cheating on his wife by having sex with Darien. Even business relationships are difficult if greed is all that matters. Larry Wildman, who is trying to buy a steel manufacturer so to improve it rather than break it up (whereas Gekko would break it up), calls Gekko a “two-bit pirate and a blackmailer” who would sell out his own mother. Presumably no one on the street is going to go into a deal with Gekko because he can’t be trusted beyond what is in his immediate financial interest.

Therefore, greed is shortsighted not only in wrecking the finer things in life, such as love, but also in terms of business relationships and even in terms of maximizing wealth in a time horizon beyond immediacy.  Rarely does a person enthralled with greed look into the abyss and find his character. This, Lou tells Bud just before he is arrested at the brokerage office, is what keeps a person out of the abyss. A narrow, “pinhead” mentality is the natural funnel that forms when a person allows the desire for more (i.e., greed) to encompass one’s experience and even existence. Sartre claims that a person’s existence precedes one’s essence. The danger in subjectivity being the basis of one’s essence is that absolute truth is abdicated. Subjectivity itself can narrow without thereby recognizing this and thus being self-correctable. More than looking into an abyss is necessary to grasp a normative anchor. In the film, neither Gekko nor Bud even look into the abyss.

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

Bladerunner

In 1982, when Bladerunner was released, 2019 could only have been a blink of an eye in people’s thoughts. Even the year 2001, the year in which the movie 2001: A Space Odessey (1968) takes place, must have seemed far off. Of course, the actual year was not so futuristic as to have a computer take over a space station; controversy over AI eclipsing the grasp of human control would not hit the societal mainstream for twenty years.  So, Ridley Scott can hardly be blamed for positing flying cars, and, even more astonishing, imposing the notion of a replicant, a being of genetic biomechanics that fuses computer and human characteristics, on 2019. Even acknowledging the tremendous impacts on society of inventions since the dawn of the twentieth century, the pace of technological change is slower than we imagine. In 2019, on the cusp of a global pandemic, flying (and self-driving) cars were just in the prototype/testing phase, and AI existed rudimentarily, and certainly not corporeally in human form. Scott missed the mark, probably by decades, though he got the trajectory right. Indeed, the film’s central issue—that of the threat of run-away, or “rebellious,” AI to humans—was reflected in the press especially during the first half of 2023. I contend, however, that the philosophical merit of the film lies not in political theory, but, rather, in what it means to be human. The nature of human understanding, self-awareness, an ethical sense, and matters of theological reflection are all brought to the forefront in the question of whether the replicants can and should be taken as human beings. In other words, it is the fusion of AI, or computers more generally, and biology that lies at the core of the film.

In the film, Deckard is hired to kill replicants who have rebelled by traveling to Earth. His character arc can be grasped in terms of a gradual recognition that they essentially human, or at least enough like us that they can and should be regarded as subjects rather than objects. The film furnishes us with several criteria in which the replicants can be counted as human.

Self-awareness is the foremost criterion: taking oneself to be an entity that has subjectivity. At one point in the film, Pris, a female replicant, says, “I think, therefore I am.” Cogito ergo sum. The screenwriter doubtlessly had Descartes in mind. I am aware that I am thinking, therefore I exist. Even if an evil deceiver has us believing incorrectly that the world of appearances exists, we know that our thinking does not depend on any external world. In the film, the replicants can indeed think; they have been programmed to do so by Tyrell, who is a genius. In fact, the leader of the rebel replicants on Earth, Batty, refers to Tyrell as the replicant’s creator (god) even though it could be argued that the genetic bioengineers who grow the biological organs of the replicants also warrant such divine status. In actuality, there is nothing divine about programming AI or growing biological organs presumably out of stem-cells. It is not as if Tyrell and his engineers create everything, whether ex nihilo or not (one of the Creation accounts in Genesis is not ex nihilo). In other words, the give rise to existence itself is qualitatively different than creating something in particular in the realm of already-existence.

So the replicants have the human attribute of being self-conscious of themselves as entities that can think. This is not to say that they are minds in vats filled with chemicals. Pris insists that she is also physical, by which she means biological or corporeal in nature. She has a body; a replicant has biomass and even human genes. One of the biometric engineers tells a replicant, “You have my genes in you.” Can we say then that Descartes’ mind/body duality pertains to replicants? The replicant’s mind is programmed whereas the bodies are grown organically. The film does not provide us with a definite account of how the replicant brain is “hard-wired”—whether it is a computer physically emmeshed in a biological body or that computer code has somehow been written into the organic neuro-networks. The latter alternative lies beyond our comprehension, at least as of 2023. Indeed, it may even seem paradoxical. In a Gospel narrative, the risen Jesus walks through a door yet he is hungry and eats a fish. It is clear that his corporeal body has been transformed yet is still corporeal. In Pris insisting to the bioengineer who grows eyes using his own genes for replicants that she is physical rather than merely a thinking thing, the implication is that the replicants are entirely biological (i.e., every organ is organic rather than machine). Yet in her death throws after being shot (not tased!), Pris’s body shakes violently as if it were being electrocuted. The implication here is that her brain was hit and is electronic circuits rather than made of flesh. If so, it is remarkable, again from the standpoint of the actual world in 2023, that a hard-wire computer can have self-awareness, and thus be taken as a subject (i.e., having subjectivity).

Furthermore, the replicants have emotions, which are in the subjectivity; that is, the replicants know that they themselves feel. The replicants, especially Batty being of the sixth generation, are intelligent. So too is Tyrell, who had programmed Batty; both are superb at the game of chess. The replicants know that they (i.e., their respective subjectivities) will one day come to an end. In being mortal, they are like us. Similarly, they fear death. Two replicants, one of whom is Batty, make it clear that they fear dying. Batty even tells Deckard, the bladerunner, that it is precisely that fear that makes someone a slave—a slave to one’s fear. So it is clear that AI extends in the story-world of the film beyond intelligence to include emotions. Additionally, Batty clearly mourns Pris, and even exacts vengeance on Deckard for having killed Pris and another replicant in Batty’s rebel group.

Even more astonishingly, the AI manifesting in Batty includes a moral sense. When Tyrell tells Batty, “You’re the prodigal son,” Batty retorts, “I’ve done questionable things.” Ironically, it is the human Tyrell who seems to be missing the moral sense, for he replies, “Also extraordinary things!” It is indeed extraordinary that a replicant would then bring in theology in saying quite sadly, “Nothing that the god of biomechanics would let you into heaven for.” Batty even conceptualizes heaven. At one point while fighting Deckard, Batty says, “Go to hell; go to heaven.” Batty’s sarcastic quip, “Aren’t you the good man” to Deckard for not fighting fair, can be assumed to have theological and not merely moral overtones. Batty even calls him a bastard spirit. Finally, clearly aware that he is soon going to die, Batty saves Deckard rather than kills him. Kindness to one’s enemy has explicit religious overtones in Christianity even if most Christians prefer to focus instead on a metaphysical belief-claim that is only indirectly linked to helping one’s enemies. Indeed, the history of Christianity presents examples of Christians having “true belief” yet belying the claim by persecuting rather than helping people they didn’t like. Here in Bladerunner, it is a replicant that ironically provides us with an illustrative example of Christian charity. Deckard can only look up perplexed at Batty’s change of heart. When Batty dies, he releases a white dove, which flies away, evocative perhaps of Batty’s soul leaving his body. At the very least, Batty has in his mind the idea of God. In his proof that God exists, Descartes posits that existence because the idea, itself having full perfection, could not come from a being of less perfection. So God must exist for there to be the idea of God in a human mind. Yet a finite mind can also have the idea of infinity without there even needing to be infinity.

At the very least, it is clear that Batty thinks a lot about morality and even religion. In contrast, Deckard does not. Even though Batty has done “questionable things,” it is telling that he is quite aware of this. Historically, Shaftsbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith all posited a moral sentiment in human nature; we are fundamentally sociable creatures who gain pleasure from shared experience that “fellow feeling,” or sympathy, and imagination can provide. When Batty saves Deckard from falling, the two share an intimate moment emotionally as Batty shares the marvels of what he has seen.  He is saying, in effect, that he had not been merely an instrument, or object, that humans sent out to protect the colonies in space; rather, his existence has chiefly been that of a subjectivity, and is thus worthy of being taken as an end in itself, rather than merely as a means to a human’s plans. Kant’s ethical claim that beings partaking in rational nature—being able to use reasoning—should be valued in themselves is taken up and embraced implicitly by the most advanced replicant. As he was being used as an instrument—an object—to protect the intergalactic colonies, Batty was marveling at the sights. He was not merely a machine. Perhaps by observing the humanity of the dying replicant, Deckard then comes to the realization that he loves Rachael, one of the female replicants, and that she can love and trust him. The two recognize each other as subjects—each as having a subjectivity rather than being taken as an object.

In short, the film essentially asks what it means to be human. Self-awareness, reasoning, emotions, a moral sense, and even contemplation of ideas transcending the limits of human conception and perception are qualities that pertain to at least the most advanced generation of replicants. It is ironic that it is a replicant, Batty, who brings up and critiques Deckard from moral and religious standpoints. Clearly, a replicant’s understanding goes beyond the machine-type of “manipulation of symbols according to rules.” Moreover, the cognition and understanding mesh with emotions and self-awareness, as well as the awareness of other subjects. Indeed, the aforementioned qualities of the replicants are sufficient to support the claim that they can love and be loved in return—the Bohemian ideal expressed in Moulin Rouge. 

In Bladerunner, both Deckard and Batty come around to being more human, and thus more humane. Both can be taken as subjects rather than objects; both have subjectivities. Perhaps it can even be said that Deckard’s humanity depends on that of the replicants, or at least to the recognition that they are sufficiently human to be taken as such rather than as walking computers. Certainly, it is the humaneness of Batty that Deckard literally comes to depend on to live another day. It certainly would not make sense to say that Deckard owes anything to the replicant were it merely a machine that manipulates symbols according to rules even assuming the existence of machine learning. Yet that Batty has a subjectivity and thus experience that goes beyond his essence—an existentialist assumption—means that Deckard can feel that he owes Batty a debt of gratitude. Certainly Deckard feels an ethical obligation toward Rachael because she not only loves him, but trusts him as well. She is thus capable of being hurt emotionally, should he betray her by reverting back to viewing the replicants as objects. Finally we have in Bladerunner what it means to be human, ironically in its fullest sense.  

The Bride and the Curfew

Our species is capable of horrific cruelty that defies any claim of having a conscience, and yet we can be willing to override our otherwise intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation for an ethical principle; that is to say, a person can choose to lay down one’s life for another person. Our biological nature—how we are hardwired—includes both vicious aggressiveness resembling that of chimps and yet the ability to “act on principle” in selfless love. In the Albanian film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), these two facets of human nature are on display, in direct contact as it were, such that the sheer breadth in human nature is made transparent. The two poles are personified by the Nazi military commander and Shpresa, the young Albanian woman living who assassinates a Nazi solder in her Nazi-occupied village.

From the very start of the film, it is clear that the Nazis place no value on human life per se. Hitler’s second priority in coming to power was to clear Eastern Europe of the Slavs to make room for Germans to spread out from Germany. It follows that the lives of the Albanian inhabitants have no value to the Nazi commander in the film. That Nazi soldiers are shooting down the street at whomever is using chalk to draw a partisan resistance symbol—a star—on buildings makes the point clear enough that human life means nothing. The stress daily on the villagers must be tremendous. The filmmaker’s use of lighting to build tension and sound to magnify the hard claps of shoes on cement provide the audience with the sense that life under such a totalitarian German occupation is indeed harsh. The literal translation of the film, “The Bride and the State Siege,” alludes to the severity of the onslaught.

The combination of a totalitarian regime and a wholesale disvaluing of human life by the oppressors is indeed a toxic cocktail. That the Nazi’s extermination of 20 million Slavs in Eastern Europe (not counting those killed on the battlefield) and the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust—not exactly Kantian facts of reason—came after the European Enlightenment (of reason) does not bode well for human civilization. Moreover, that the twentieth century included two world wars does not bode well for Hegel’s theory of a trajectory through history of an increasing spirit of freedom. Two world wars seem like more than a momentary regression, and the regimes of Hitler and Stalin should not be left out in making the claim that the sordid twentieth century was not just a regression. Perhaps it is not God that is dead, as Nietzsche has been interpreted as claiming, but, rather, Hegel’s optimistic theory, given the statis of human nature even given the gradual process of natural selection.  

The Enlightenment should not have been taken as a panacea. Reason, even cleverness, can be employed in evil designs. Hannah Arendt, who wrote from her experience as an observer of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claimed that the Nazi bureaucrat simply didn’t think; he was simply working out train routes and schedules so as to maximize a commodity that had to be transported. Yet Eichmann did think for himself when he violated Himmler’s order not to make the Jews in Hungary march to a death-camp in Poland, and this is what got him convicted by the Israeli judges. The thought that many of the Jews would very efficiently die of attrition en route appealed to the value that he put on business-like efficiency. Given the goal of exterminating Judaism in Europe, it was reasonable to violate an order so a more efficient option could be taken. So it is not the benching of reason that accounts for the mass murder; quite the opposite. Bureaucracy, it should be pointed out, is based on reason rendered as structure and procedure, and it is not contrary to reason to suspend a procedure in order to put in place a more efficient remedy.

Lest it be concluded that Nazi Germany was the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, the passions were also involved. Eichmann hated Jews, and his strong emotion was backed up by the Nazi social reality in which Jews were portrayed as sub-human, even akin to rodents. This message was clear in the Nazi propaganda films in which Jews are likened to the rats that spread the plague over Europe in the fourteenth century from China. Both Hume and Adam Smith posited the imagination as playing a role in the social realities we come up with to order the world. “Confronted with the vast and seemingly chaotic complexity of the world in which we live,” one scholar on Adams explains, “we feel an instinctive need to impose some sense of order on our perceptions, and it is our imagination that enables us to do so.”[1] The social reality evinced in a leader’s vision and propagated through speeches and film can satisfy what for Victor Frankl is our innate need for meaning. Although he showed at even the victims in the concentration camps had that need even as they were starving, it is no less true that the Germans, and indeed, any human being, seeks the order that a social reality can provide. The role of the imagination in the crafting of a social reality means that subjectivity is salient. Hence Eichmann was not a mere, unthinking bureaucrat; he was a warm-blooded human being whose subjective emotions were nestled in the Nazi social reality in which Jews were vermin. This likeness is made explicit in the film, Inglorious Basterds, when the SS officer explains how he approaches hunting Jews by thinking like a rat does.

In The Bride and the Curfew, the Nazi commander applies his hunting skills to snuffing out the resistance. Although he does not view Shpresa as a rodent, it is clear that he puts no value on the lives of any of the villagers, including hers. In complete contrast, Shpresa provides a light on the human condition. Her message is the following: My life isn’t mine anymore; it no longer belongs to me; it serves the ideal of freedom, which includes a free Albania. Even though she is living in constant danger, she embraces an ideal even to her own detriment. Whereas the Nazis are acting in line with their primitive instinctual urge of aggression, the young woman is willing to override her urge of self-preservation—an instinct that Hobbes claims in Leviathan is primary. Whereas the Nazis can draw on a collective social reality to base their subjectivity, Shpresa is virtually alone in making her decision to place freedom above even her own life.

She has but her own subjectivity on which to base her choice, hence, as Sartre points out, the gravity of her choice is weighty. She does not appeal to God or even to authority or tradition, although there is a hint of the later in her mention of free Albania. Conforming to the Nazis would obviously be more convenient, though she would not thereby make use of their social reality. She embraces the hard responsibility that lies in making a choice that goes against the grain. The story-world of the film, the Nazi-occupied Albanian village, is the antithesis of freedom, and so she stands out in belonging to the ideal. Villagers do come to her aid, specifically in getting her out of town as if she were a bride, but the decision is hers alone, and must ultimately rest on her subjectivity. The film thus evinces the existentialist philosophy.

Perhaps the main question in the film is whether human beings are willing to assume the responsibility of making difficult choices when they have nothing to fall back on but our own individual subjective experience, without even the order-conferring comfort of a societal social reality. In their dependence on a social reality provided by Hitler, the Nazi subjectivity is hardly such a feat. Although it is easy to beat up on the Nazis, the implication that relying on the vision of a leader evinces weakness may not be so convenient. Heidegger, after all, advocates an authentic life over one lived out in conformity. Nietzsche tells his readers not to be Nietzscheans; rather, have your own ideas. These are difficult words for people living in an age in which we are such organizational creatures and we pay such attention to the politics of our leaders.

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[1] Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), p. 66.

Subtle Anticipations in Film Narrative: Foreshadowing in A Single Man

Tom Ford’s approach in screenwriting and directing his first feature film, A Single Man (2009), which is based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel of the same title, can be characterized as thoroughness oriented to the use of film as art not merely for visual storytelling, but also to probe the depths of human meaning and present the audience with a thesis and thus something to ponder. As Ford reveals in his oral commentary to the film, that thesis is that we should live in the present, attending to it more closely, because today might be our last day of life. George, the film’s protagonist, supposes that in intending to commit suicide at the end of the day covered by the film, he chooses the final day of his life—hence retaining and exercising some control over his otherwise hackneyed daily routine. Though an exquisite use of foreshadowing that subtly and vaguely anticipates his death, the film gains a depth of meaning that operates at different levels. The underlying meaning is nuanced, even multivalent, rather than entirely opaque and transparent. In this essay, I take a look at Ford’s use of hints anticipating George’s death. Being salient in the script, they serve as a good illustration for aspiring and even accomplished screenwriters who want to touch the unconscious as well as awareness.

The most transparent foreshadowing takes place at the beginning of the film, in the morning before work, in the kitchen. George’s heart disease suddenly clenches and he winces in a quick spat of pain. In Christopher Isherwood’s book of the same title, which Ford adapted for the film, the fit is a spasm—a mere cramp that George has on a regular basis.[1] The film begins closer to consciousness.

“I don’t see my future,” George says as our narrator at the beginning of what would turn out to be the last day of his life in spite of his last-minute decision not to kill himself. Sitting in his modern, Frank Lloyd Wright-based house in Malibu, California on November 30, 1962, he knows he plans on killing himself—an intent that is entirely missing in the book. The professor is genuinely perplexed, as if the lack of any envisioned future would be any surprise on his last day on earth. He is inexplicably stupefied even as he goes over his plan to commit suicide. In the book, George tells Kenny at the bar late that night, “The future—that’s where death is.”[2] It is all so open-ended, as if a blank screen so bright nothing on it can be seen.

Just as vaguely, George says “I’m going away” in answer to a hustler’s suggestion of “Maybe another time?” as the two look into the setting golden sunlight after work. Later that night, George answers his friend Charlie’s desire to get together again real soon with, “I think I will be quiet this weekend.” In the book, George nearly falls down stairs going out from Charlie’s front door, very nearly falling “ten, fifty, one hundred million feet into the bottomless black night.”[3] In retrospect, these remarks are chilling, even ominous, for they imply an insufferable, terminal void into which even a person’s consciousness and thought dissolve; and yet, as George lies prostrate on his bedroom floor, dying of a heart attack just before 3 a.m., his voice narration informs the audience, “And suddenly it happened.” Another foreshadowing, perhaps, though this one is for the viewers, who in answer to the anticipated void at the end of their own lives dare to hope.

The foreshadowing is also done by substituting awkward inexplicable reactions in place of the expected. The effect is to open up the narrative, as if pregnant with new-found potential directionality. Looking at George during cocktails before dinner at her stylish house, for instance, Charlie observes, “Darling, you don’t look well; remember that heart attack you had?  You don’t look so hot.” Even though George intends to put a pistol to his head later that night, I find it odd that he barely registers a reaction. To be sure, he has no incentive to run to a hospital for a stress test.

After dinner and an enjoyable dance, George lights two cigarettes and hands one to his former lover. “It’s not like smoking will kill me,” he deadpans. Charlie, her own drunken state doubtlessly being a factor, does not take the hint as she should. Is George unconsciously crying out for help? Rather than two people connecting, the two alcoholics are talking past each other even as they presume (and crave) emotional intimacy. George lost it a year earlier when his partner Jim died in a car crash in Ohio, and life was in black and white for him ever since—except for that last day, when George found himself amazed with the beauty in the ordinary and then unexpectedly connecting.

After leaving Charlie’s house, George goes to his neighborhood bar. Finding Kenny, a student clearly obsessed with his professor, curiously there (pensively waiting, in the book’s version), George confides to him (hence establishing emotional intimacy), “You know the only thing that has made the whole thing worthwhile, has been those few times when I’ve been really, truly been able to connect with another human being.” The question is thus whether this new, unforeseen connection will mean a suspension or cancellation of the current plan.

The answer is not delivered directly or all at once. Once again, the narrative has depth, and thus reaches out on more than one level using foreshadowing. Back at his place with Kenny after their short swim in the Pacific Ocean after drinks at the bar, George realizes that his watch has stopped. “My watch seems to have stopped,” he says—again, strangely perplexed. A hint for us that time has run out for George, only he does not realize it even though he still intends to end his life that night; he is still under the impression that he is in control of when his life will end. Besides being a neat-freak, George has nearly suffocated himself tightly in controlling his interior and exterior, yet as a functioning alcoholic he is anything but in control of even himself.

Minutes after realizing that his watch has stopped, George passes out as Kenny looks on. In his recurrent dream of drowning, the depressed, still grieving professor finally gets to the surface and can breathe. This awakens him, and he finds and locks away his gun, no longer intent on ending his life.  No doubt the emotional intimacy with Kenny—finally connecting with another human being again—has brought color back into George’s life. Ford cleverly varies color saturation to distinguish the pallid world of George’s depression from Charlie’s liveliness and Kenny’s emotional connection. In fact, Kenny plays a savior role, rather than merely that of an obsessed student—even keeping his professor safe by holding the gun while sleeping on the couch after carrying George back to bed. According to Ford, although it is not clear that Kenny is interested in men, he willingly offers his body to George when the two return earlier from swimming.

Kenny has indeed saved George, at least in terms of suicide.  Yet the Fates, intimated for the audience by the sight of an owl taking flight as George opens his front door to glimpse the nearly-full ruddy moon, will have the last word in this affair we call life. As Ford points out in his commentary, the owl has long stood for death being not long in coming. George is in a state of suspended animation, for he finds himself ensconced in one of his rare, fleeting moments in which the universe and everything in it, including his own life and even his partner’s crash, make sense. “A few times in my life,” he narrates, “I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few, brief seconds, the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp, and the world seems so fresh; it’s as though it had all just come into existence.” Burning the suicide notes he had written to Charlie and someone else, he concedes that he can never make such moments last. “I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I’ve lived my life on these moments; they pull me back to the present.” With that, the thesis is transparent: live in the present, for today may just be your last. Such alignment is suddenly undercut, however, as George gets his wish even if he is no longer willing it.

Realizing that “everything is exactly the way it’s meant to be,” George reaches out for to his bed stand for water only to feel himself in the clutches of a fatal, all-consuming heart attack. Ford says George is even wrong about everything then being just right in his life. How cruel it is of the Fates to cut into one of those rare conditions of insightful equilibrium. The Fates will not be denied by what little control we think we can muster, or perhaps George pulled the trigger with all the years of smoking and drinking—a subtle and gradual means of suicide.

As he lay on the floor barely alive, we hear the slowing clicks of his alarm clock. The clock stops, and George sees his deceased partner lean down and kiss him on the cheek—the kiss of death—for “just like that, it came.” Suddenly the overhead camera shot turn to black and white; there is no longer any living in the now for George. We are left with what is perhaps the deepest level of meaning in the film—what now?

With George narrating his own death, his soul must exist in the film’s story-world. “And suddenly it happened.” People don’t usually say that death came. So I suspect that given the sense of amazement in “just like that,” George experienced something liberating, or at the very least a sudden change or transformation into another realm of existence in which his emotional pain could not go. He does not mention his dead partner, Jim, so I suspect that whatever suddenly came, it was existential rather than restorative in terms of human relationships. In effect, death relativizes them such that seeing earlier departed loved ones is no longer important.

Narrative visual art can indeed plumb the mind’s depths and thus register as substantive instead of superficial eye-candy. Films that leave an audience thinking and feeling deeply for a sustained period of time are themselves multi-layered, with multivalent symbols placed at various degrees of subtlety throughout the narrative to foreshadow. Such films register at various depths of human meaning and reflect its complexity through the use of linguistic and visual symbols, each of which contains by its very nature more than one loosely-related meaning. They play even with time by lending to human nature more omniscience than it has a right to. It as if the screenplays have been written as orchestral pieces, with more than one instrument group—each at its own level of subtlety and duration, and yet likely simultaneous with various others at foreshadowed intervals.

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[1] Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man , (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1964), p. 13.

[2] Ibid., p. 157.

[3] Ibid., p. 145.