Life

The musical group, R.E.M.’s most popular song is arguably “Losing My Religion.” The first two lines of the lyrics are, “Life, it’s bigger; It’s bigger than you.” It’s bigger me too. It's bigger than our species, and in all probability bigger than all of the life that is on Earth. I sing that song periodically in karaoke, though as too many people in charge of karaoke are corrupt in that they slide in their friends, new arrivals, and even regulars into rather than at the end of the line, I go less and less often. To an ethicist, corruption even on that small level is intolerable; indeed, the mentality of such a DJ is truly culpable. It is easy to commit the fallacy of anthropomorphizing such an unethical, sordid intent as that of a dishonest karaoke host onto other species, even in regard to their biological need to feed in order to survive. In the film, Life (2017), astronauts, a physician, and a scientist on board a space-station orbiting Earth wisely avoid precisely that fallacy even though a species from Mars being cultivated by Hugh Derry, the scientist, feeds on all but one of the six humans on board.

At one point, Hugh tells the others regarding the animal, “Calvin doesn’t hate us, but he has to kill us to survive.” That is to say, the organism’s apparently aggressive actions against the humans are sourced in biological necessity rather than hatred. Like Krishna’s line in the Hindu myth, The Bhagavad-Gita, “I am time; I am the destroyer of worlds,” so there’s no need to have ethical scruples about fighting against relatives and former teachers in a civil war because from the deity’s perspective those who are fated to die are already dead, destruction is part of the essence of life, at least in the animal kingdom.

The Martian organism is very unusual from the standpoint of biology as we know it. As he is cultivating the nascent, very small organism, Hugh is astonished because every cell is muscle and “eye.” What he does not yet realize is that every cell contains high intelligence. Not that each cell is “a brain,” for even though the organism is highly intelligent, it does not have cellular complexity, as in having specialized organs. Being an “advanced” organism and yet with basically undifferentiated cells goes against biological principles here on Earth. The rapid increase in the organism’s size each time it feeds on first a rat and then the crew is also something unexplainable to the crew on board. That the creature is a danger not only to the humans on board, but also to our species should it land on our planet is, however, something that the crew grasps early on when the creature crushes one of Hugh’s hands/forearms. Even so, Hugh emphasizes that the creature is not maliciously trying to destroy the crew; the intent is merely to survive, biologically. This lesson has implications in how we interpret attacks by animals such as grizzly bears and sharks.

Since the film, Jaws (1975), it has been easy to assume that great white sharks are violent, aggressive animals that attack humans with malicious intent. After all, the shark attacks Quint’s boat. “We’re going to need a bigger boat” is one of the most iconic lines in movie history. The shark even “climbs” onto the tilting boat to kill Quint as if the two were antagonists. In the end, Brody, Amityville’s sheriff who is on board, blows the shark to smithereens. The enemy is finally defeated. But in real life, sharks do not view us enemies; rather, shark bites, which are rare, are the result of sharks mistaking us for something like seals, which are in a shark’s diet. This is part of the oceanic food-chain, rather than an instance of two antagonists facing off in a dual, or an aggressor maliciously trying to kill humans.

In June, 2024, the first fatal shark attack off the island of Oahu in Hawaii in two decades took the life of a popular lifeguard. More typically, tiger sharks attack off Maui. On December 30, 2023, for instance, Jason Carter was surfing when a tiger shark “suddenly attacked. The shark just started biting him and pull him down . . .,” a witness said.[1] This description, especially the use of the words, “suddenly,” “just started,” and “pull him down” may connote a malicious intent rather than the shark simply beginning to eat what it took to be food. Whereas implying unethical intent may make for titillating news reporting for marketing purposes, the unintended byproduct may be that people blame sharks as if that species were out to exterminate our species.

So it is notable that in the film, even as the Martian animal is seeking out humans on board to feed, and thus to survive biologically, the crew does not lapse into assuming that the organism is trying to exterminate the crew out of sheer aggressiveness. If anything, it is our species that kills out of spite, and for other sordid reasons; we even hunt for sport, as if killing were fun. No shark bites off a human arm or leg because doing so is fun. On August 14, 2013, “20-year-old Jana Lutteropp was snorkling at White Rock Beach in Makena when a shark bit off her arm . . . 50 yards off shore. Pat Briney, 57, was in a kayak fishing between Maui and Molokini on Dec. 2, 2013, when a shark bit his right leg as it dangled over the edge. . . . Briney died as a tour boat operator brought him to shore.”[2] Those sharks were no doubt hungry, rather than biting human limbs for sport or out of a sense that we are a danger to sharks.

Life has a habit of instinctually going on living, and thus doing what is necessary to survive. Life will find a way, and the Martian animal in the film is so intelligent that it not only survives, but quite intelligently gets to Earth by overcoming the physician, David Jordon, who gets the creature into a rescue vehicle in order to take the organism deep into space rather than to Earth. In the film at least, we are not the wisest species.

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1. “Fatal Shark Attack Is the First Off Oahu In More Than Two Decades,” Hawaii News Now, June 24, 2024.
2. Ibid.

The Omen (2006)

Exactly 30 years after The Omen (1976), The Omen (2006) was released. An older boy plays Damien in the remake, which means that the actor is capable of acting facial expression-reactions; even so, what really distinguishes the remake as having more depth than the original film is the explicit use of a poem that undergirds the veracity of the narrative—that Damien as indeed been sent by his father, Satan, to usher in the apocalypse in a way that will fill hell with human souls. The poem is a Christian prophesy that functions in the film’s narrative as a thread. I contend that the poem partakes of several domains, rather than being exclusively religious in nature, and thus “muddies the water” in terms of answering the question of how the religious domain is distinctive, rather than to be read psychologically, historically, or scientifically.

Robert Thorn remembers and repeats the poem—which as a cinematic device subtly tells the viewers that the poem is important in the film. The poem goes as follows: “When the Jews return to Zion, when the comet fills the sky, when the holy Roman empire rises, then you and I must die. From the eternal sea he rises, creating armies on either shore, turning man against his brother, till man exists no more.” It is the Antichrist, Damien, who will set man against man until everyone is dead, and presumably in hell for having fought rather than loved one’s enemies. The poem goes from religion to astronomy to the political domain (the Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in history), and thus runs the risk of conflating qualitatively different, albeit related, domains of human phenomena. This risk is a bit like treating different genres of film—fiction, nonfiction, westerns, sci-fi, and horror—as interchangeable. Closer to my point, the risk is like assuming that genres of literature—religious myth, historical accounts, novels, nonfiction, and academic treatises—are interchangeable, such that a myth could legitimately be taken to be a historical account. That which is distinct about myth would be lost, even though the writers of myths did not view themselves as historians and thus subject to that genre’s criteria.

In what follows, I subject the first few subordinate clauses of the poem to critique in line with my thesis. By the way, my intent is to support my thesis with arguments, rather than to convey or prescribe my own religious beliefs; this holds for the books I’ve written too. Applying Hume in the concluding chapter   of Godliness and Greed, which is on the history of Christian thought on greed in relation to profit-seeking and wealth, and then altering that interpretation by incorporating the divine Logos in the final chapter of God’s Gold do not reflect my own religious beliefs. Hence scholarship can be distinguished from opinion pieces.

The phrase, “when the Jews return to Zion” raises the question of whether Zionism is primarily religious or political; if both, then the concept can be regarded as messy. The risk is that a portion of a myth could be misconstrued as translating directly into the political domain. Exactly twenty years after the remake’s release, weaponized Israeli settlers in the West Bank presumed the political right to walk into the houses of Palestinian homeowners, declare that God gave the house to the Hebrews, and kick out the residents. One video shown on social media shows a settler removing a refrigerator from a house owned by a Palestinian family in the West Bank, as if the Jews’ deity declares in the Bible that God has given the refrigerator to that particular settler. The genocide then still going on in Gaza illustrates how atrocious misconstruing the genre of myth as valid in the political domain can be.  Life can give art added significance and clarity, and art can inform how geopolitical events are interpreted and situated paradigmatically.

The association of the return of Jews to Zion with the apocalypse can be interpreted in religious terms as ushering in the Antichrist’s role in turning man against man. That is to say, theologically the return (and stay) would be a bad rather than a good thing. In 2026, the International Court of Justice declared Israel to be illegitimate because that state’s government had refused to exit Gaza and the West Bank. A UN commission had determined that Israel was guilty of committing a genocide in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants. Any of these determinations would have been out of line had they been based on the theological interpretation that the Jews returning to Zion is a bad thing in religious terms. Jurisprudential and political judgment is properly made on political grounds even if personal religious belief is related.

Turning to the poem’s second phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” jumps from myth to astronomy, and thus science, as if these domains were continuous rather than discrete. In the Nativity Story in the gospels, efforts by scientists to find a comet misconstrue myth as a distinct genre. The inconsistency of a star being in that myth and a comet being associated with the birth of the Antichrist is not a problem in the genre of myth because the point is not astronomical or historical, but rather in signaling heightened religious meaning. Put another way, even if no star could be found to have occurred over the Middle East, this would not detract from the meaning that the star plays in the Nativity story. A star determined empirically to be over a particular town and thus serving to locate the town from a distance is not possible, but this is not a problem as long as myth is construed as myth rather than as astronomy or history). The phrase, “when a comet fills the sky” risks being taken as empirical astronomy rather than as in the religious genre. To be sure, myth can incorporate empirical events, natural as well as human, but changing those events to make religious points is totally acceptable in the religious genre, which thus cannot be assumed to contain historical accounts.

In the film, the next phrase, “when the holy Roman empire rises,” is erroneously interpreted, which can be expected when geopolitics is conflated with religious myth. Historically, the Holy Roman Empire was primarily geopolitical rather than ecclesiastical; it was not a religious organization. In the film, the European Union is assumed to be the new holy Roman empire because of the Treaty of Rome, but the Maastricht Treaty is arguably more significant to that political union, and the E.U. state of Italy can hardly be said to dominate at the federal level; the state of Germany has arguably been the state with disproportionate influence, especially during the debt crisis in which the Commission sided with German creditors over the E.U. states of Greece and Spain. So to refer to the E.U. as Roman—not to mention holy!—is ludicrous. The adjectives holy and Roman may alternatively lead to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church instantiates the Roman Empire in a new guise. Such an interpretation would resituate the phrase properly within the religious domain. The Crusades, selling indulgences, the Inquisition, prosecuting Galileo as if the criteria of religion were hegemonic over scientific criteria in the domain of science, making a treaty with Hitler, and covering up rapes committed by pedophile priests on children, and social prejudice within the Vatican against Blacks, gays, and even women, and even the obsession of the identity of Christ over preaching and practicing humane compassion especially when doing so is least convenient (e.g. to detractors and enemies as well as to people who have been rude, arrogant, or subject to one’s prejudices—we all have them) have at the very least compromised the legitimacy of that religious institution even though the religious and ethical domains are distinct. This is not to minimize the actual worship of the divine in the Mass, or the faith of the faithful who yearn to transcend the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion to the beyond, whether personified and thus anthropomorphic or not.

Self-idolatry on a collective scale—rather than an astronomical event or the formation of a political empire such as the E.U. or U.S.—and the tremendous harm unleased by such selfishness at the expense of other people can be regarded as the Antichrist personified in us. In the film, Wonder Woman (2017), Mars, the Greek god of war, tells Diana (Wonder Woman) that he doesn’t have to do much to facilitate man turning against man in war; aggression is very much in the nature of the beast, according to that god. Diana, on the other hand, refuses to view humans as beasts, for she has come to love the species (and Steve Trevor in particular). She sees our better nature, whereas her nemesis sees no positive worth in our species existing at all. The complexity in human nature itself is personified by deities in that film; in general, polytheism reflects our non-simplistic nature that can be analyzed into parts.

In both versions of The Omen, Damien survives being murdered physically and spiritually by Robert Thorn, so evil ends up with the upper hand. The god of war would be pleased, but human nature is more complex and thus may forestall the final verdict of extinction, even though climate-change, Russia invading Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran (and Lebanon) evince a troubling trajectory. In the economic and political domains, however, selfishness (stemming from self-interest) rather than self-idolatry (a sin) is pertinent even though the two concepts can be related to each other. For example, Adam Smith’s economic theory of the competitive market is premised on economic self-interest. Even though the latter can be related to self-love, and thus self-idolatry, the claim that Smith’s theory of capitalism is based on self-love would be based on a category mistake even though self-interest is arguably sourced in self-love taken as a sin. In terms of navigating in a certain domain of human experience, it is important not to drift or swerve into another lane as if in driving on a road no lanes can be discerned. The poem that undergirds The Omen (2006) swerves between lanes as if none exist, and thus invites erroneous category mistakes and thus flawed interpretations.

A Ghost Story

As if the macabre specter of a ghost, albeit in a white sheet with two black eye-holes, were not enough for a spooky film, David Lowery endeavored to shoot and edit his 2017 film, A Ghost Story, using a relatively fast 33 frames per second in shooting the ghost moving, and editing without music so the story-world’s supernatural element would be subtly apparent. Although a prognosticator delivers a long philosophical monologue at a party somewhere in the middle of the film, Lowery does not characterize the meaning of the film in terms of that monologue’s point that the universe will eventually end so a person should live each day as if it were the last day of one’s life. Of course, none of us need worry about the universe burning up any time soon, so from that standpoint we can expect to live full lives without being nihilist on a daily basis. Fortunately, the meaning of the film, Lowery states in an interview, is not to live each day as if it is your last day. A more interesting question is whether the film is an exponent of nihilism as the real, ontological state of existence, or whether human fulfillment can fill human hollowness with the fullness of experienced life. Moreover, does a supernatural dimension, such as a heaven, exist such that human souls can depart from the human condition and even loved ones while still existing (after death). In other words, does holiness transcend hollowness? The latter may pertain more to the phenomenal realm of lived human existence than to the noumenal realm of things as they are in themselves, and thus what each of us really is.

The film’s plot centers around a young married couple, unnamed, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. The husband dies early on in the film in a car-crash in front of the couple’s house in the country.  He bypasses going to heaven and instead returns to their house as a ghost. His widow does not lose time in moving out, however, and it is clear from his anger (as a ghost!) that he is not at all happy about her leaving. Eventually, he gets the message, literally and figuratively, that she will never return. Not showing the crash—only smoke from his car leading the camera-shot slowly to his head resting on the steering wheel—or the funeral singles Lowery out as a film-maker who thinks outside the box in movie-making rather doing things the usual, formulaic way; there have certainly been too many of those movies. Relatedly, the philosophical dimension that he brought to the film goes beyond even what he consciously intended, and is in sync with his efforts to subtly convey the atmosphere of the film.

For example, in subtly elongating camera shots at the end of a few scenes and thus holding the viewers to a fixed picture within which nothing is happening, Lowery makes us uncomfortable because he breaks the “rule” on camera-shot length, which on average had been getting shorter perhaps to appease the proclivity of audiences from the mid-1970s for titillating, quick-action disaster flicks as if they were displays of fireworks in constant finale. Lowery challenges audiences to “sit still,” which, if it triggers psychological discomfort, is the fault of the viewers rather than the filmmaker. This was not Lowery’s intent, however. Rather, holding a camera-shot at the end of a scene long enough for the holding itself to become transparent to viewers allows them to feel the emptiness and lonely isolation of Rooney Mara’s character in the house. Perhaps that her husband, while alive, is emotionally stunted or unavailable contributes to her day-to-day dreariness. The stationary shots also point a spotlight on time itself, not only as it is perceived by the bored wife, but also that time is different for a ghost than for us. Both the young wife’s loneliness and the ghost’s expansive sense of time can be thought of as nihilist. Her boredom itself can be expected to feel like emptiness. Regarding the ghost, from our standpoint, the length of time that the ghost stays in the house, even far into the future and going into the past, would be intolerable. Although the ghost may experience the long expanse of time spent in the house, especially when it is empty, as fleeting, from our standpoint so much time without any action would be intolerable. Likewise, movie-viewers looking at a very long, non-moving camera shot of a scene in which nothing is moving may feel a sense of suspended animation, as if becoming were necessary for being and so just being without becoming is merely nihilist nothingness. A narrative must have a strong sense of becoming or people will lose interest in following the story and move on to do something else. We are doers even if our very being is not based in functionalism.

To the ghosts in the film, time not only is perceived differently, but also is fundamentally different in that time-travel is possible. Even in filming the husband-ghost at a different film-speed so to show a supernatural quality to what otherwise looks like a child’s Halloween ghost-costume, Lowerly didn’t fully grasp the implication that time itself is different to a ghost. This idea, Lowery said, “plays into the thematic parts of the movie so thoroughly, I should have realized that on set. I’m always surprised at how many of these things are just completely—there are amazing details in every movie that you would expect to be conscious decision, but are purely happy accidents and unconscious inspiration.”[1] Such inspiration applies here to a director’s own thinking on philosophy—in the case, of time—applied to his film. Philosophically, a different metaphysic has implications for time itself as well as how it is perceived. Accordingly, a philosophical analysis of a film can and should go beyond a filmmaker’s own intentions and even thinking on philosophy as it bears on the film. Because the story-world of a film, whether in a director’s head or on the screen, is wholistic in supporting a narrative, everything that contributes to philosophy in a film may not be consciously thought out by a film’s filmmakers and yet be valid.

By philosophy, I do not have in mind mere (i.e., unphilosophical) psychology, such as applies to characters in a film. For example, the husband-ghost in the film is only rarely a doer; he periodically “plays” with the lights, pounds on a piano when he goes back in time by falling off a skyscraper in the future, and throws dishes on the floor of the kitchen to scare off the new family that moves in after his widow moves out. Even though he is in a supernatural dimension that is separate from our mundane dimension, the ghost can have physical, or empirical impact in terms of physics. We can thus go beyond the fact that ghosts can apparently feel emotion in the film to grasp the metaphysical relationship between the realm of ghosts and of living people.

Going further, perhaps the rareness of the ghost’s functionality empirically is related to why time is different for the ghost. Doing, or function, hardly captures what it is for a ghost in the film to exist. Functionalism falls short in capturing existentialism. The very human notion of living so to work rather than working so to live is refuted, or simply does not apply to ghosts in this film because they spend so much time “standing” around even if the passage of so much time eludes their notice because time passes differently for ghosts. Time may pass quickly when we are having fun (or are busy at work), but for ghosts in the film, the speed of time may be different, as well as the ability to change time-frames (i.e., jump far into the future instantly and then go back in the past). That we easily get bored, even when a camera-shot is held longer than usually to end a scene, does not necessarily mean that the husband-ghost was bored in the empty house because of the sheer amount of time involved. Yet from our standpoint, we posit boredom onto the ghost because it is difficult for us to get beyond our vantage point to grasp the otherness of another. Feeling like life is empty—that it is really nothingness—may be partly why the wife/widow perceives days going by so slowly; such a sense of nihilism may even result in suicide, which, absent any heaven or hell, can be thought of as a fast track to nihilism sans even one’s own being, or existence. Suicide obviously does not apply to ghosts as they are already dead (yet they seem to feel emotions, have intentions, and can even throw dishes!). Existence after death may be an oxymoron.

In addition to existentialism (ontology), however, philosophy of religion and even a bit of theology makes its way into the film, for we (and the ghost) get a glimpse of heaven, or at least its gateway. This has major implications for the nihilist, dank atmosphere that runs throughout the film and thus seems absolute but is actually not foundational to human existence. A few minutes after getting up from the physical body in the hospital’s morgue, the ghost walks down a hall and pauses upon seeing a brief opening to heaven, a portal that is represented as a very bright, home-film-screen-sized square of light that opens momentarily on a wall. The ghost passes on heaven, and instead heads to the house, presumably to be with his widow. Although not explicitly or even implicitly linked, that heaven exists relativizes the isolation of the wife/widow, whose nihilism may not have the last word in her existence. That the portal opens as if “on cue” suggests furthermore that some “intelligence” or being having intention and thus a will exists as a common denominator with respect to the realms of ghosts and living persons. Already in the film, the widow, whose desire to move is clear at the film’s beginning, hires movers, packs up, and drives away, with her satisfied facial expression being shown in the translucent sunlight. She is headed to a brighter future and will not miss that house, and maybe not even her dead husband for long as he had evinced the emotional absence of a ghost even during the marriage. The husband’s ghost is not happy about her decision to move away, but it is only when he finally opens a note that she has sealed in wood paneling in the house that he “gives up the ghost,” and the sheet collapses. The ghost next door had just done the same thing when that ghost finally realized that the person being waiting for would never return, for the house had just been torn down. Therefore, the note left by the widow was probably one of closure—of saying farewell to the house, and thus to the ghost in it. Indeed, she would never be back; we know this because the ghost remains in the house far into the future, beyond even the time when the house is torn down and is replaced by a skyrise office building. We can conclude that the continued existence of ghosts here among the living, rather than being in heaven, is predicated on the hope of continuing on with a loved one. But lest it be forgotten, wedding vows include the words, till death do us part. The husband-ghost is suddenly faced with having to accept the finality of the end of a relationship, and thus he “gives up the ghost” and presumably takes heaven up on its offer. In reading the note, he lets go of the hope he has had in seeing her again, but the resulting nihilism may be replaced with the fullness of heaven. The ghost presumably finds peace in finally accepting the finality of the end of his relationship with his wife (now widow). If so, then nihilism does not have the last word not only for his widow, who may remarry but has at least moved on from the emotional isolation that she has known in that old house with her husband, but also for the ghost, who has finally given up the ghost by accepting the finality of a relationship that wasn’t very intimate anyway.

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1. Tasha Robinson, “A Ghost Story Director David Lowery on How Technology Fixed His Lonely Ghost,” The Verge (theverge.com), July 14, 2017 (accessed July 22, 2026).

The Mephisto Waltz

In a retelling of the proverbial Faustian deal with the devil, The Mephisto Waltz (1971) plays out with the deal paying off, as Duncan Ely is able to live on in the body of Myles Clarkson. It doesn’t hurt that Ely is a master pianist and Clarkson has long, spry fingers (and that he has a beautiful wife, Paula). Even so, both Paula and the Clarkson’s daughter stand in the way of Duncan being able to get back to his own wife, and the film ends with Paula making her own deal with the devil so she can live on even though Duncan (and his wife) have already set about her demise. Because Duncan’s “after-life” transition is successful and even Paula, who has been opposing Duncan’s possession of Myles, ends up turning to the devil, the lesson of the film, Faust (1926) is effectively debunked. Besides The Mephisto Waltz, that God does not smite every case of injustice in the world—the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in the 2020s being a vivid and blatant example—may even further instigate interest in Faustian deals with the devil, even though that entity is known to be deceiver and thus not to be trusted. The allure of selfish gain can be worthwhile nonetheless for some people. For Duncan Ely, being able to go on living and gain even more fame as a performing pianist is worth the gamble, and it pays off. The medium of film is an excellent means of presenting the religious level, which is distinct yet interacts with the ordinary world that anchors the film.

As Duncan attempts to kill the Clarkson daughter and Paula, the latter’s dream-state shows the drama. After waking, Paula is horrified to find the blue dots that Duncan has put on both her daughter’s and her own forehead in the dreams. It really happened. Additionally, a bricolage of fleeting images highlighting symbols relevant to religion punctuate that part of the film. The duality or dichotomy of Paula’s dream- and waking-states is thereby set in a context in which the film itself has mythic qualities; it is not like a historical drama, for instance. At times, the audience may be overwhelmed visually by the quick succession of symbolic-oriented images, while missing the underlying point that the religious realm transcends the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion.

That idea comes from the 6^th century Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius. Such transcendence differentiates the domain of religion from all other domains of human experience. Even wondering how action in a dream could possibly “really have happened” as evinced in a person’s waking state—a phenomenon that is at least in part psychological in nature—does not go far enough in representing or inculcating the religious domain. In other words, religion does not reduce to the psychology of dreams and their relationship to a person’s waking state. I contend that the rapid series of symbolic images on the screen are meant to point to the limits of humans beyond which religious phenomena go and are based. A similar bricolage is used by Polanski in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) during the scene in which Satan rapes Rosemary. It is not just that we are seeing the effect of Rosemary being drugged, for she has not consumed much of the drug because she does not trust her next-door neighbors. Rather, the interaction between a mortal and a theological entity goes beyond our ability even to imagine because that entity is based in a realm unknown and inaccessible to us mere mortals. We only get a glimpse of Satan’s face as it is having sex with Rosemary. Similarly, we only get a glimpse of the face of the resulting baby when Rosemary finally accepts it as hers.

Perhaps film is best as a medium in capturing the liminal numen quality of transcendence when the normal “rules” of filmmaking are broken, or at least distorted. The viewers are not meant to grasp the bricolage of religious symbols that rapidly flicker on the screen when the transcendent and ordinary—the sacred and the profane—touch, or dance. Rationalistic questions of whether a person should make a Faustian deal with the devil seem superficial relative to the visualizations when an inherently transcendent entity or realm temporarily comes in contact with ordinary time and the world that we inhabit on a daily basis. Even if no other realm (or entity therein) exists ontologically, the experience of coming up against the inherent limits of our cognitive, perceptual, and emotional capacities as human beings may include elements such as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, given the numinosity of the transcendent, which Rudolf Otto associates with the holy in his book by that name. Visually, a rapid series of images containing religious-oriented symbols with discordant instrumentals is an effective way in which filmmakers can attempt to depict the heightened terrifying and fascinating emotions that the other-worldly, and thus numinous, mysterious power evokes. From such a vantage-point, in such an overwhelming experience, is anyone in a position to decide whether a Faustian deal is worthwhile?

Even narrative itself is transcended. Film can only go so far even in visually and auditorily pointing beyond the medium’s limits; but even in this respect the medium can effectively relativize the other domains of human experience from being conflated with the transcendent realm of religion. Efforts to comprehend the attributes of its innate entities, whether they are real or only posited, may be secondary to the yearning-experience for radical transcendence. Hence in the rape scene of Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary’s experience in being in close intercourse with an entity based in a transcendent, wholly theological realm, is given priority over images of that entity, and in The Mephisto Waltz, so much of Paula’s dream-waking-transcended experience of being manipulated by dynamics based in the religious realm is distorted visually. We may focus inordinately on the nature of the entities thereof rather than on the numinous nature of religious experience even though the entities are inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility.

Silent Night

The medium of film has an amazing ability to trigger emotions, even very strong ones, through dialogue, narrative, cinematography and sound. The suspension of disbelief, if achieved, renders the impact all the more complete. Dread, for example, can be conjured up even with another yet different emotion, such as joy, even in the same song. The medium is also capable of stimulating thought not only as viewers attempt to figure out unnecessarily convoluted plots, but also thinking more abstractly in philosophical or theological terms. Such abstractions, besides being implicitly or explicitly treated in the narrative, extend beyond the confines of a narrative and its story-world. “Life and death” is such a theme, as is whether the human soul is immortal. Less tantalizing, though arguably just as important for typically being overlooked, philosophy of mind (and philosophy of psychology), for which a strange, incomprehensible plotline is by no means requisite or even constructive, stands as a rich reservoir for filmmakers. Even though the question of life and death is central to the film, Silent Night (2021), which interestingly was made during the global coronavirus pandemic—there is even a “Covid Supervisor” listed in the credits!—a seldom-recognized vulnerability innate to the human mind may deserve top billing in that film. The group-think evinced by the group of friends at the house on Christmas Eve and perhaps a wider mass-hysteria only touches the surface of the problem in terms of the human mind. I contend that the star-attraction in the Christmas film rightly goes to the human mind’s vulnerability to presumption to the assumption of infallibility (and susceptibility to group-think cognitively and as in terms of power).  In the context of a group’s suicide pact, critical thinking in the sense of critiquing whatever assumptions are being held is so very important, yet it is only evinced by Art, a young boy, who is under unrelenting pressure especially from his parents to take a fatal pill before a “cloud” of toxic, climate-changed gases hits.

As for the film’s plot, Nell and Simon, who have three boys, including Art, invite friends that they have known since school over for Christmas in Nell's mother's upscale house. Everyone is trying to celebrate Christmas, so they resist turning the subject to their impending self-inflicted, albeit presumably necessary, deaths. Death is assumed as certain and very painful for anyone who does not take the “exit” suicide pills that the government has made available to British citizens, but not to the homeless and illegal immigrants—a moral problem really only bothers Art. The assumption that suicide, or an “exit,” as in “Brexit,” is necessary presupposes that death from the toxic ground-level “cloud” is certain. Art’s mother, Nell, makes this assumption; so too does her husband, Simon. They are determined to force Art to take the pill rather than to allow their eldest son to hold out with James’ fiancée, Sophie, who is pregnant and does not want to kill her baby. James even tells Art that the scientists all agree with the government that failure to take the pill would result in intolerable suffering from inhaling the inevitable and long-lasting poisonous gases. As it turns out, Art is correct, and they are all wrong, because he wakes up the next morning, alive, after the “cloud” has passed by and snowfall has cleared the air. His parents had not given him a pill when they took theirs because they assumed that he was already dead merely because he had blood on his face. That Simon and Nell make this assumption without even checking for breathing or a pulse and yet somehow know that survival inside the house post-cloud will not be possible just because the scientists and governments say so belies the validity of the parents’ claim to be so confident in their reasoning and conclusion. That suicide is involved means that the stakes are high, and yet unchecked assumptions are allowed to preempt even holding off on the pill until such time as active poisoning is taking place.

Only Art insists on that strategy of wait-and-see, and his parents promptly veto it. Nell assumes that her son would be suffering alone—another unfounded assumption. Only Art questions the critical assumptions being made by the adults. He even subjects the adults’ suicide “pact” as well as a government policy of issuing suicide pills (only) to citizens to moral critique. He even points to his parents’ stupidity in giving him Christmas toys that night, which of course he will not be alive for long to use! “Your mom is a bit daft,” Simon admits to his son in a touching scene on the stairs. At least Nell recognizes that Art is intelligent, for at the Christmas dinner, she tells him, “You clever, clever boy!” He has just scolded all of the adults at the table, “You all should be ashamed of yourselves!”, for not having done enough politically—such as in voting Green rather than Conservative, as Bella and Sandra lament later—to reduce carbon emissions so the atmosphere would not throw air-borne toxins back and kill at least half of the human population (so far). Even during the dinner, a toxic brown “cloud” of poisonous gases and fierce winds traveling at ground-level is sweeping through the land and will hit the house sometime after midnight, hence on Christmas. Besides having taken climate toxicity too lightly for decades, the adults at the table are apparently unaware of the Christmas line, and a child shall lead them. Nell admits to everyone that Art is clever and yet she dismisses his very reasonable arguments in favor of “wait and see” rather than preemptively taking suicide pills under the assumption that doing so before the “cloud” arrives is necessary to obviate what is sure to be intolerable suffering. Instead of considering Art’s arguments, Simon and Nell, as well as James, their physician friend, are oriented to refuting Art’s objections to suicide as preventative rather than as a last resort in a worse case scenerio.

To the adults in the house, the government, scientists, and even the adults themselves could not be wrong, and yet no one except Art realizes that the toxins might pass with the passing “cloud” rather than stick around for, as Nell supposes without any evidence, a hundred years. She may be thinking of a thermo-nuclear winter, though for that a hundred years may be too optimistic. Such a mistake is indeed possible for Nell; after someone says at dinner that the Queen could be in a bunker with beans and dog food, Nell states how bad it would be to have to eat dog food for a hundred years even though it is obvious to everyone else at the table that Queen Elizabeth II had several small dogs throughout her life and would include them, and their food, in a bunker. Therefore, we can be skeptical of Nell’s explanation to Art that suicide is necessary beforehand because the airborne poisonous gases can go through water pipes and glass windows and thus reach throughout the house. In fact, the belief that the Queen is probably in a bunker implies that suicide as preventative rather than as a last resort is de facto refuted in action at a high station to which even the government is due loyalty. With so much on the line—literally life and death—it is significant that no one at the table suggested that they go to the basement when the “cloud” arrives and come out the next morning to see if the danger has passed or else whether there really is no alternative to suicide other than dying a painful death.

Moreover, the lack of questioning and debate regarding the assumptions being made is itself a red flag concerning the human mind. At one point, Sandra (whose beauty, I might say, steals the show) tells Bella in a hallway that the news reports of the gruesome deaths from around the world cannot be wrong. True enough, but it is possible that all such deaths took place in the “cloud” rather than after its passing, especially if rain or snow ensued. Even James’ medical assumption that no one can survive the gas is undone by Art ingesting some of it in a mini-twister outside that night and yet waking up the next morning. He has breathed in some of the toxin and yet survives it!  Not even what the physician is assuming medically is correct!

Not even Sophie, who initially does not want to commit suicide, questions the reigning assumption that the toxic gas will kill everyone in its path. Art’s willingness to stand by Sophie rather than take the pill is quickly shot down by his mother, Nell, and both of his parents go into hyperdrive in conveying to their eldest son that he will take the pill because, “We are your parents.” Who in growing up has not heard that line! With his life on the line, Art emotionally distances himself from his “protective” parents whom he says love him but are “trying to kill me.” It is not that Simon and Nell are bad people; in fact, they are trying to keep all of their boys from suffering extremely painful deaths. However, the eventuating of snow falling overnight, which likely cleanses the air of the poison, demonstrates that especially Simon, Nell, James, and Bella “leapt to conclusions” in supposing the inevitability of the worst-case scenario quite erroneously. At the very least, everyone should have been open to holding off from taking the pills until clear indications of poisoning could be seen either upon the “cloud’s” arrival or the next morning. Had Bella not stabbed Alex after she threw up the pill that Bella had stuffed in her sleeping mouth, Alex would wake up the next morning and presumably find Art lying in his parent’s bed alongside his dead family. Sophie would wake up and presumably go on to give birth had James not insisted that she take a pill with him. Generally speaking, were the group-think “pact” pushed less severely, more people could wake up in the house the next morning—Christmas morning—and be stunned and grateful for the falling, cleansing snow. Minds are closed to the possibility that the “cloud” could be like a passing thunderstorm in that people could safely wait out the passing storm deep inside the house, and it dawns on nobody that falling snow overnight could cleanse the morning air of the poison, so taking the pill would most prudently be at least held off.  When suicide is an option, it is dangerous to have a mind that does not counter its own values, beliefs, and “findings,” and thus assumptions and conclusions; such minds are particularly susceptible to group-think, in which a group of people hold a narrow view and fight off any challenges or objections to it; dissent, in other words, is subject to vitriol and exclusion.  

Art, a young boy, is the only person in the house who questions the “group-think” party-line and its assumptions. Only he survives, at least to the next morning, which the adults had insisted over and over again would not be possible. He wakes in a house whose beds are laid upon by the bodies of his brothers, parents, and their parents’ friends. As the credits roll, the closing instrumental version of the song, “Silent Night,” masterfully juxtaposes the holiness of Christmas Eve with the dread of impending mass suicide.

The film may lead audiences to question not only mankind's ignorance and culpability in having let climate change get so out of control, but also, from Art's questioning of the assumption of certain death, the human tendency not to question the assumptions that we make and to take precautions in case an assumption is wrong. We are too liable to assume that we are infallible creatures, even though the fact is, we are human, all too human. Having caused climate change to the extent that a toxic cloud circles the globe and then to needlessly commit suicide makes our species look very bad. We have done it to ourselves is the lesson from the film. In at least implicitly assuming that we know more than we actually do, and thus avoiding criticism of our assumptions and conclusions as unnecessary and even a waste of time, the vulnerability of the human mind is laid bare. It would be a profound human service of film if it would lay bare the vulnerability to a presumptuousness of de facto infallibility, which in turn preempts the activation of critical thinking in the sense of questioning one’s own beliefs, assumptions, values (and thus ideologies), and conclusions. The human mind is not as logical innately as we may perceive it to be; at least a semester of logic should be required of any college student. In the film, Nell’s reasoning is atrocious, and yet she comes down hard on Art’s very reasonable argument.

Nell thinks the Queen would be eating dog food in a bunker for 100 years. That the dog food would obviously be for the queen’s dogs is a more reasonable assumption than that the queen would eat dog food for a century, and yet in stating how bad that would be, Nell has no recognition of how faulty her reasoning is. This means that it is nothing short of dangerous for her to turn to Art and insist that he will take a pill rather than wait and see in case the gases are airborne only as the “cloud” is passing. Forget the queen and her pets; the emperor (and what parent is not an emperor?) is proverbially not wearing any clothes! That a power that is presumably clothed is actually bare is precisely the attitude toward one’s own mind—one’s own assumptions, theories, and conclusions—that I suggest the film implicitly advocates. This is done by showing just how damaging group-think, perhaps even a global hysteria, and especially a failure or refusal to critique one’s own thinking and assumptions can be.

Besides the distortive impact of its unconscious, the human mind does not ratiocinate nearly as well as we suppose. As the impact of our species on the planet increases, whether by igniting nuclear war or burning fossil fuels, questioning our own thinking and that of others becomes more crucial. The adults in the film may be in the midst of a suicide-pact doomsday hysteria that has gripped the world, or they could merely be too intolerant to dissent in a sort of group-think mentality within the house. Either way, they are not thinking clearly enough to warrant the assumption of infallibility, especially considering the myriad of factors that are involved in climate, including whether a heavy snowfall will clear the air.

The Crow

Considering the amount of screentime devoted to raw violence, it may come as a surprise that The Crow (1994) is actually about love. Not that the film is about an abusive romantic relationship, for the respect that is necessary for love is instantly expunged as soon as violence enters into the equation. The infliction of violence is a manifestation of self-love in the sordid sense of self-idolatry, rather than of love that is directed to other people. So, it may be difficult to fathom how violence can serve love, and even be a manifestation of love, as The Crow illustrates.

The film’s plot hinges on a horrific event that precedes when the film’s story begins. Eric Draven and Shelly Webster have been brutally shot and serially raped (and beaten), respectively, by a pathetic group of violent criminals who work for Top Dollar, a psychopath criminal kingpin. The film begins when Eric, aided by a crow, makes his way through the ground from his buried coffin to the world as an “undead” avenging Shelly’s very painful death by killing each of the men who beat and raped her. When Top Dollar has the crow shot, though still alive, Eric’s supernatural ability to withstand being shot ends, even though he is still dead, which is a curious combination as vampires, for example, do not bleed yet Eric does when Top Dollar shots and stabs him in the climatic violent scene on a roof between the main protagonist and antagonist, Eric and Top Dollar.

In fact, the supernatural condition of Eric being undead, having climbed out of his grave, and Top Dollar’s statement before Devil’s Night (the night before Halloween) to other criminal-heads in the city that greed is for amateurs whereas he is interested in chaos, hints at a religious element being in the film, rather than merely ethics.

Before Eric and Top Dollar fight on the roof, they meet by accident in an abandoned Christian church, which, considering all the violence in the city, says, in effect, that God is dead, as Nietzsche avers in his philosophical writings. But Eric outsmarts Top Dollar, whose greed ironically is his final undoing, as it gets him close enough to Eric that he can grasp Top Dollar’s head to transfer all of Shelly’s pain in the hospital that Eric has been holding onto; thirty hours of pain all at once! Top Dollar, being a weak coward as all bullies are, can’t take the pain. The kingpin falls and, on his way down, is impaled on one of three stone hooks being held by a stone gargoyle extending from an outer wall of the abandoned church.

God is not dead after all, for, as Paul and Augustine wrote, God is love, and Eric acts out of love first for Shelly, and then, at the end of the film, for the girl Sarah, whom Top Dollar has kidnapped in order to lure Eric to be murdered. Whereas violence out of sheer hatred knows no bounds, avenging the pain of a loved one stops when all of the perpetrators have been hurt or killed. Eric would not have gone after Top Dollar had Sarah not been kidnapped, so Eric was acting out of love in going after Eric. The church building may have been dilapidated from neglect, but God as love lives even in Eric’s dead body. It is easy to view religion in the supernatural element rather than where the spirit of God really manifests.

The film ends as a vindication of the power of love with Sarah narrating, “If people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.” She has loved Eric and Shelly, and they were stolen from her very violently. Interestingly, the young girl finds solace in the love she feels even though the couple are dead, rather than in the fact that Eric has avenged the beating, rape, and murder of the woman whom Eric loves, even beyond the grave.

Presence

The medium of film has great potential in playing with ontology, the branch of philosophy that asks (and tries to answer) the fundamental question: What really exists?  Put another way, what does it mean for something to exist. The being of “to be,” as opposed to not-be may be thought of, can be labeled as existential ontology. Whereas in the Hindu Upanishads, being itself is Brahman, which pervades everything in the realm of appearance, the Abrahamic religions posit the existence of a deity that creates existence and thus is its condition or foundation. Creation ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing) is another way of grasping why the Abrahamic god is not existence, or being, itself, for that which brought (and sustains) existence into (and as) being cannot logically be existence itself. Fortunately for most viewers who lead normal lives, the film, Presence (2024), does not hinge on such abstractions; the salience of ontology, or what is real beyond our daily experiences (in the realm of appearance), is merely implied in there being an entity that intriguingly is only a presence. It is real to both the main characters in the film’s world and to viewers of the film because of the inclusion of supernatural effects that the entity is able to register in the perception of the family living in the house. Crucially, such effects do not overwhelm the subtlety in how the presence is known to exist (i.e., be real). In this way, Presence succeeds where Poltergeist (1982) and Ghost (1990) do not: Presence is more philosophically intriguing and thought-provoking than the latter two films, and is thus a better example of the potential that the medium of film has in engaging viewers in philosophy. Being less oriented to visually titilating supernatural effects, Presence can better engage the mind philosophically. 

Presence can be regarded as instantiating an innovative approach to the horror genre. At the film’s very beginning, Chris (husband to Rebekah and father to Chloe and Tyler) corrects Rebekah regarding Chloe’s shock at the apparent drug-overdose of her best friend: “It’s not life; it’s death.” The tenuousness of the line between the two conditions—existing and not existing—is a leitmotif throughout the film. The film challenges this dichotomy itself, for in that story-world, people really do exist non-materially after the body dies. The modern default of medicine (and, more specifically, psychiatry) is evident in the film as Chloe’s parents grapple with Chloe’s sense of a dead girl’s presence in the house, but the supernatural eventually manifests even to Chris, Rebekah, and Tyler. Their notions of what is real—or, what really exists—is widened to include the existence of ghosts. Ironically, it takes manifestations that register in physics, such as books moving visually on their own, for the family to accept as a fact that reality includes entities that reside beyond the limits of (living) humans’ perception and even cognition. The modern assumption that natural science must be impacted in a supernatural way for the reality of an entity that lies beyond our realm to be accepted is erroneous yet it is accepted by the filmmakers and their characters in the film; the ghost need not act in ways that burst through into being perceived by the family for the ghost to exist, or even be known to exist. The psychic who visits the house is proof of there being sensed/known to be a presence even though no supernatural effects are witnessed. In fact, she knows that the ghost exists before Chris, Rebekah, and Tyler do.

The extension or deepening of reality to include entities that are in another realm from that of living people is “the reality” that the film presents. The very subtly of the presence (putting aside the supernatural events) invites philosophical reflection perhaps even more than reading a book on ontology does, for film engages sight (into a story-world) more tangibly than can the imagination) and hearing. The Matrix (1999), for example, does the human mind a great service in manifesting the philosophy of solipsism, the view that our brains are really in vats such that all that we perceive is an illusion, in a way that no one can get by reading a book. The human mind is such that when presented with vivid visuals and distinct tones of voice, the staying power is arguably longer than are sentences in a book. In Presence, the psychic describes the entity as “a presence that does not want to be forgotten.” Ideas can be like that too; hence it is a shame when a scholar dies before or without having published one’s knowledge, and that films perish before having been preserved.

Presence is especially ripe for philosophical reflection in furnishing the psychic’s description of the realm unknown to us wherein ghosts exist; it is not just in there being such a realm and thus an extension or depth of reality beyond appearance that the film furnishes to audiences. Whereas Chris can only admit, “There is mystery in this world,” the psychic describes the entity as suffering and being confused, for the past and present can be simultaneous for it. The entity can even anticipate the tragic accident that will occur in the house and even sense that there is a role for the entity itself to play in the incident. That the role is to protect Chloe even though the psychic says that the entity is not Chloe’s dead friend expands the viewers’ archetype of ghosts being angry and harmful. That the entity in Presence was not Chloe’s friend when alive renders the helpful nature even amid the anxiety of being in a realm that is qualitatively different from that of living humans all the more foreign to viewers, and thus intriguing philosophically. In short, going on to describe rather than merely stipulate the existence of a realm that is real and yet has very different dynamics than does the realm in which we live out our lives makes the film more philosophically interesting and idea-stimulating. Even though the viewers do not get the psychological payoff in being able to enter that realm vicariously by being shown it in the film, the point that reality is not exhausted or completely known to us comes through loud and clear.

Kant’s nominal realm of reality as distinct from his phenomenal realm of appearances may in fact be the basic paradigm on which the film and its story-world is founded. The philosopher’s theory that the human mind structures perceptions of space and time along rational lines is itself on the level of a paradigm. So too is Einstein’s theory of physics in which gravity can bend space itself and effect time, slowing it in proximity to a great mass. The film depicts space not as inert or static, as the entity can emit energy of such intensity and force that ripples in space are visible. As for time, I have already mentioned the observation of the psychic that the past and present are perceived as occurring simultaneously by the entity in the realm in which it found itself suddenly to be in at death. The line between living and death may be slim and thus easily and even accidentally crossed without notice, as the theologian and early-modern philosopher Jonathan Edwards sermonized to young people in an age in which they died in disproportionate numbers, yet the two distinct realms in Presence are very different—the paradigm in which the entity exists challenging and stimulating commonly held assumptions that we have from the world in which we live. Rendering the relativity or situatedness of our lived-in paradigm transparent to us is a great contribution that film-makers can make (and some have made) to the Hegelian progress of our species in coming to know itself in successively greater freedom. For being freed ideationally from our innate paradigm in being cognizant of its basic assumptions relative to others is indeed of value.

Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Gothic and philosophical novel written by Oscar Wilde, was first published in 1890. The first motion picture, taking the same title, came out in 1945. Relative to The Secret of Dorian Gray (1970), the initial adaptation of the book can seem quite restrained, or Victorian, even though the novel had been controversial in its day. The 1970 film is awash in the sexual revolution, and is thus also affected by its times. The next film adaptation, Dorian Gray (2009), goes back to a classy nineteenth-century Dorian. The emphasis is on sexual immorality, albeit different than in the sexual revolution in the next century. The film largely departs from the plethora of religious symbolism and language in the 1945 film, though unlike in the 1970 film, a spiritual realm is not presumed to be an antiquated notion. Instead, the 2009 film substitutes supernaturalism for religion, especially in the climax.

Regarding the salient element of religion in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), the film goes back and forth between ancient paganism and Christianity. The tension between the two goes through the film. Basel remarks refer to the gods, which immediately disassociates the story world from the monotheistic religions. The gods, he says, give us good looks even though we suffer from them. Henry disagrees, quipping, “There is only one thing in the world worth having and that is youth.” Not yet realizing the power through the painting on aging, Basil vaguely intuits a transcendent aspect of the painting in remarking, “There’s something I can’t quite understand—something mystic about it.” As he is working on a sketch of the cat already pictured in the painting, he adds, “It seems as if a power outside of myself was guiding my hand. It’s as if the painting has a life of its own, independent of me.” Later in the film, Basil tells Dorian, “Perhaps you’ve seen the same mysterious quality in it. Have you noticed something curious in the painting? Something that at first did not strike you but that subsequently revealed itself suddenly?” Dorian replies, “I saw something curious about the painting. You’re right; there can be something fatal about a portrait.”

Because the transcendent lies beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and feeling according to pseudo-Dionysius (St. Denis) and others in the Middle Ages, a portal itself can be expected to have a vague mysterious quality. In his text, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto ascribes mysterium to the holy. In antiquity, the term simply meant “unknown.” It is fitting that a way to transcendence would also have the air of the unknown.

Unless anyone misses the connection between the mystical quality and the cat in the film, Dorian is shown posing next to a statue of the cat. Between them, Dorian and Henry make the connection explicit. For the first time, Dorian is conscious of his youth, and that he would someday lose it “If it were that I would stay young and the picture would grow old,” he wishes. Henry cautions him, “You wouldn’t express your wish in the presence of that cat; it is one of the 73 great gods of Egypt and perfectly capable of granting your wish.” A relationship exists between Dorian and the cat through the medium of the painting. This is the transcendent axis that runs through the film. The statue of the cat is also involved, as Sybil remarks while she is at Dorian’s house, “It’s that cat; I thought I saw its eyes move.” Dorian replies, “Perhaps you did. . . . It is one of the 73 great gods of Egypt.” He then reads a passage to her: “Hideous cat . . . you make me what I would not be. You make my creed a barren sham. You wake foul dreams of sensual life.” This gives us an indication of how the transcendent relationship would affect Dorian. The reference to the creed suggests Christianity, which Dorian will abandon in favor of sensual pleasures.  “What a strange poem,” Sybil remarks, “Who wrote it?” Dorian answers, “Oscar Wilde.” Wilde himself cast aside Victorian moral norms and laws to pursue sexual pleasure wherever it would lead him. In contrast to Wilde’s pleasures, Dorian’s, such as sex and drugs, are deemphasized in this film, whereas his harm to other people, such as breaking Sybil’s heart and killing Basel, are highlighted especially in how they change the painting.

The pleasure obtained from harm is arguably worse morally than that which experienced sensuously, especially in ancient paganism wherein morality is not as tied to religion as in the Abrahamic faiths, which risk obfuscating morality and theology. Yet Christianity is again implied when Dorian states his wish: “More than a painting, it is part of myself. . . . If only the picture would change and I would stay the same. For that I would give everything. . . . I would give my soul for that.” To lose one’s soul is typically related to the devil, as in to the case of Faust, who makes a pact with the devil to regain youth. Dorian may be an incarnation of the Foust character, though in this film at least without the devil character. Henry brings us back to the basis in ancient Egyptian polytheism, saying of the gods’ perspective of humans: “They worship us and keep bothering us to do something for them.” Interestingly, Henry’s version of pleasure is sensual nonetheless. “Pleasure is nature’s sign of approval,” he states. “When we are good, we are not always happy.” Dorian is admittedly affected by Henry’s philosophy, though notice sensuous pleasure follows from hurting Sybil. After she flunks the test that Dorian had gotten from Henry (i.e., she stays at Dorian’s house), Dorian tells her, “Now you are nothing to me. Henceforth I shall live for pleasure. I’ve been living a life of illusion.” This illusion is that happiness can come from being faithful even though it involves resisting sexual temptations.  The picture changes in that “a touch of cruelty” can be seen in the mouth. The cruelty refers back to hurting Sybil rather than living for sensual pleasure. In other words, the painting shows Dorian’s bad conscience from harming other people. When Henry tells Dorian of Sybil’s suicide, Henry observes, “She killed herself for love.” Dorian reacts with, That’s not my fault! He has an air of indifference toward his bad conscience. Sensual pleasure is merely a byproduct; Dorian says, “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions; I want to use them, enjoy them.” Again distancing the film from Abrahamic morality, Basil gives Dorian a book on the Buddha, which Dorian predictably dismisses—but he is not now turning against his creed, at least explicitly, and yet he is. He has a moralistic faith (i.e., Christianity) and yet the transcendent basis in this film is an ancient Egyptian god that presumably wants Dorian to keep the pact rather than behave morally.

The narrator then invokes Christianity implicitly as Dorian hides the painting. “He would have eternal youth while the portrait bore the burden of his shame. He was caught in an evil destiny.” That is, destroying the painting would break this destiny off by his death; he had said it is “a part of me.” As if recalling the worst sin according to Augustine, the narrator says, “Prideful individualism is a work of evil.” Here, selfishness is evil. Admittedly, both harm to others and unrestrained sensuous pleasure can be byproducts of the evil vice of selfishness. When Dorian shows Basil the painting, which is now in color, the narrator says, “It was as if some moral leprosy were eating the painting away.” Immorality is thus evil, presumably even when no one is getting hurt.

Even Basil’s view of the painting has changed from mysterious to monstrous, from a sense of a transcendent element to something supernatural. The starkness of the latter typically dwarfs any subtle mysteriousness that is also a quality of transcendence itself. In contrast, monstrous points to something in our realm. Looking at the painting, Basil declares, “This is monstrous, beyond nature, beyond reason.” Basil is conflating supernatural with the transcendent—a category mistake perhaps arising out of Deism—namely, that God not only set up nature’s laws but also intervenes outside of them. Is such intervention supernatural in that it is an alternative to the natural sciences? If so, the domains of science and religion blend so much that category mistakes can be made—one example being that Zeus is present when a storm has lightening. If the domain of religion is unique, and thus qualitatively different than science, then just because a phenomenon does not fit within known science does not mean that the phenomenon is religious in nature. In The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001), for example, the paranormal is not associated with anything religious.

The use of the supernatural (or paranormal) as a litmus test or even as proof that a spiritual realm really exists involves a category mistake; rather than being the standard, the basis ought to be tossed out; the transcendent is wholly other and is thus not within our cognitive or perceptual grasp. Even trying to grasp revelation is like looking through a smoke-stained dark window, according to Augustine. Hence belief rather than knowledge is as far as we can go in trying to cognitively penetrate anything transcendent. Hence we yearn for transcendence, as in striving for communion with God. Whereas the transcending experience of yearning can be known in as much as it is in our realm, attributes of the divine object, which lies beyond our reach (i.e., is transcendent) can only be believed through faith. Even our collective imagination, which has come to inexorably fit the validity of religion through the gates of supernaturalism, draws on stuff in our realm rather than anything beyond the limits of cognition, perception, and sensibility.

Nevertheless, Dorian comes to view the monstrous painting in Christian terms by invoking Oscar Wilde’s poem. “The painting has destroyed me,” Dorian states, “Each of us has heaven and hell inside.” Basil does not miss a beat, replying, “The prayer of your pride was answered; perhaps a prayer of repentance would be too.” Basil’s book on the Buddha is nowhere to be seen! The story has gone far from the original amoral paganism of an ancient Egyptian cat-god to the morally and soteriologically redemptive god-man of Christianity.

The story ends with the theme of redemption. When Dorian destroys the painting, he dies. Is he redeemed or did he pay the price for having sold his soul by having a short life—albeit a short, constantly youthful life? A Christian preacher says, “What shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world but lose his soul? . . . The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold. It can be poisoned or made perfect. . . . The wretched creature whose soul is filled with vile thoughts and foul deeds must dwell in darkness. Even though he walks under the noonday sun, he carries his own vile dung around with him.” The soul, it turns out, is capable of transcendence, and can therefore be heaven or hell.  A bad conscience has its own weight, which eventually catches up with and drags down Dorian. Vile thoughts and foul deeds can pertain both to engaging in sensual pleasures and making a deal with the devil. The derived pleasure can be outweighed by a bad conscience. Dorian tells Henry, “I would do anything if I could change and get older like other people.” Once again, the narrator supplies a Christian interpretation: “A life of humility and denial, he would restore the painting, but it would tire of him.” Dorian asks God for forgiveness, the portrait breaks, and he looks old. The ending shot is of Wilde’s poem, propped up in front of the statue of the cat. The poem in part: “I sent my soul through the Invisible, my soul returned to me. And answered:  I myself am Heaven and Hell.” So the film ends with this curious mixing of ancient Egyptian religion and moralistic, Victorian, Christianity. Perhaps the tight morality of Victorian times—Wilde having published the story first in 1890—had an influence on the story itself and even on the 1945 film version. on the 1945 film version.

Similarly, the sexual revelation going on in 1970, when The Secret of Dorian Gray came out, can be seen as a major influence in the film, which is even set in its own contemporary day. In the opening scene, for example, Dorian is with friends in a gay bar watching a drag queen. Dorian and Sybil have sex on the day they meet. Posing for the painting, Dorian has his shirt off, has a loose tie on, and wears rugged jeans. He looks like a male prostitute. What the camera shows is much more revealing than in the 1945 film. After a posing session, Dorian is shown in an outdoor shower; that he is wearing a swimming suit seems foisted on the film by censors. Basil refers to Dorian as being “entirely sensuous,” to which Henry adds, “What is vice anyway—pleasure in chains.” His sister attributes this view to Oscar Wilde. Regarding sex and marriage, Henry recommends, “Ideally, one should enjoy everything and possess nothing.” Yet religion, and specifically Christianity, is not brought in, given the secularity that was gaining ground even in 1970. To be sure, Dorian invokes his soul when he says, “Why should I get old while this [painting] stays young? Why can’t it be the other way around?” . . . “I would give anything to stay like that; I would give my soul to stay like that.” Basil’s reply is more psychological than religious. “You see, I’m right; he is in love with himself.” Narcissism! Even in Dorian’s reply that the painting is “part of me now. I don’t know which part,” the allusion to a mystic element is missing. When Dorian takes a sample of the picture’s paint to a chemist, it is clear that belief in a spiritual world is something of the past. The chemist asks Dorian, “You mean, can the seen world be changed by what used to be called the spiritual world?” I submit that regarding the notion of the spiritual world as being in the past reflects the secular culture that was coming of age when the film was being made.  The only allusion to religion is made by Dorian when an older Henry asks someone, “How does Dorian look so young?” Dorian replies, “You should know that Henry, I sold my soul to the devil; you introduced me to him.” Henry’s philosophy was one of acting on temptations for sensual pleasure.

Whereas allusions to religion are rare, commercialism can clearly be seen in the film, which was made after at least two decades of the commercial hegemony of the U.S. in the world after World War II. For instance, Henry buys the painting for Dorian, observing as if it were a fact, “Painters must be paid.” In the 1945 film, Basil gives Dorian the painting out of friendship. Commercialization, it seems, had made inroads since the end of World War I. Although the dominant theological take on profit-seeking and wealth had long since shifted from anti-wealth to pro-wealth, thus reducing Christianity’s force as a constraint on greed, secularization is a fertile bed for a commercial society.[1]

Both commercialism and secularity privilege the exterior to a person’s interior. In viewing a spiritual world as an antiquated notion, the 1970 film cuts off an interior realm (e.g., the kingdom of God is within). Similarly, in a commercial context, the exchange of money means that how people are inside doesn’t matter. Dorian tells Sybil, “Inside? Who wants to know what filth is inside? Beauty is what we see—nothing else.” Henry will tell a friend, “Today beauty is more important than genius.” What is exterior is more important than what is interior. Also, Dorian gets money for having a picture of his face in a magazine. This holds even in the case of the painting, which represents Dorian as a gigolo. At the very least, Dorian lacks internal substance; he can be regarded as a fucking machine.

It is no accident that the exterior-oriented Dorian socializes with other people who are live on an exterior level. In the film, such people are not only the sexually promiscuous, but also the wealthy of the commercial caste. Dorian tells Sybil that he is going to a party with rich people who may be filthy inside but beautiful on the outside. Wealth, it seems, is a shield. In a secular world, appearance is what matters. Business is discussed at the party. Perhaps commercialization, or an encroaching business culture over society, can act as such a shield. Sybil values what is on the inside of a person, whereas Dorian does not; he intends to please himself by turning outward. This is not to say that he is a business type. As if to distinguish himself from all the business talk, he says, “We rich people don’t care about money.” So it is not greed that Dorian suffers from; his vice is lust.

Dorian tells a woman, “I think, if you want something desperately, it’s worth whatever you’ve got.” Rather than having religious overtones, such as in making a pact with an Egyptian cat-god or the devil, the meaning is sexual. Dorian goes off and kisses (and has sex with?) a younger woman. Later he takes her and friends to Sybil’s performance. Because she is an awful actress, Dorian calls her a bore, slaps her and leaves her on a city bus. The harm element is de-emphasized, while sexuality is anything but. “It’s funny how somethings you once thought were significant are not really at all,” he remarks about his past relationship with Sybil, and then he has sex with Henry’s sister. The de-emphasis on harm is visible in just a very slight change in the painting—just in the expression of the eyes—from having hurt Sybil.  When Henry informs Dorian of Sybil’s suicide, Henry says, “We are responsible for our own lives and nothing else.” Dorian has more sex, and then two women have sex. Dorian swims with topless women, and seduces a newlywed by taking off his clothes. 

It is as if the film were soft-porn. The character resembles a porn star even as represented in Basil’s painting. In this way, the sexuality in this film differs from how sexuality is portrayed in the 2009 version, which, while it includes orgies, is less driven by sex. Regarding Dorian having sex with married women in the 1970 film, Basil says, “Dorian, there must be some limit; you corrupt and destroy anyone who comes in contact with you.” Unlike in the 1945 film, the harm is a byproduct of Dorian’s unrestrained lust. Even Henry touches Dorian while he is showering. In the next scene, Dorian is checking out gay men. Later in the film, Henry watches Dorian swim naked. Henry’s facial expression is creepy; this is also a way in which this film differs from the next one. Meanwhile, the painting is being affected mostly in the face and fingers—not nearly as dramatically as in the 1945 version in which the painting is in color when seen from the point of view of a character. The message in the 1970 film reflects Oscar Wilde’s own life, wherein sexual wantonness had long-term consequences (i.e., he was imprisoned for homosexual acts with Bosie, and died in middle age from a medical condition due to the imprisonment). In the 1970 film, the pact with the Egyptian cat, or the devil, is absent; instead, social immorality is at the fore. Even in the midst of the sexual revolution, sleeping with married women went too far. 

Sex, with drugs added in, is also salient in Dorian Gray (2009), though not as much as in the 1970 version. The orgies and visit to a whore house do not give Dorian the look of a porn star.  Rather, he is portrayed as enjoying life as a wealth young man. Although the story is set in the nineteenth century, the change reflects both the surge in high-end party drugs and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s, both of which had had an effect on the world by the time the film was made. In other words, the sexual revolution had long since ended.

Also, more allusions to Christianity suggest that the West was no longer so hostile to religion by 2009, though the religious references are much fewer than in the 1945 film. At one point, Dorian tells Henry, “Perhaps I should nail myself to the devil’s altar.” At the end of the film, Dorian admits to Henry, “I have lived the life you preached.” Yet the very word preached seems an over-reach, as Henry’s philosophy was one of unlimited sensual pleasure, without any transcendent basis. Although the dichotomy of sensual pleasure and having a heart can be taken as having a religious aspect (e.g., God is love), Henry, like the philosopher Nietzsche, who in the last half of the nineteenth century, is oriented to eschewing modern morality.

Henry encourages Dorian to smoke, for instance. Nothing irreligious is inherent in smoking. Regarding the castigation of morality, Henry tells Dorian, “Conscience is just a polite term for coward,” and the “only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” In his writings, Nietzsche advises overcoming instinctual urges by mastering them. Henry does not mean a religious temptation; in fact, he takes Dorian to be with several prostitutes at once. Unlimited sexual pleasure, rather than harm, is the main antagonist. Sybil’s suicide causes only a cut on a hand in the painting (and a small worm coming out of one eye). Dorian then says, “A toast to intoxication.” Then he has sex with a woman at a party, followed by sex with her mother with the daughter is hiding under the bed. “There are no limits,” Henry says. Then Dorian is with many women. He wants sex with men too. Reckoning all this as evil, Basil tells Dorian, “There is good in your heart; I’ve seen it. You’re not this devil.” Is sexual promiscuity really evil? Immoral? Basil would have an easier argument were he able to point to Dorian stabbing him several times, and yet even such a horrific act translates only to a subtle change in the painting—the mouth having just a few teeth opens a bit! After Dorian kills Basil, we see Dorian at an orgy. Even though murder is worse than attending an orgy, the emphasis of the film is on Dorian’s sexual activity. For instance, after that orgy, we see Dorian at another, this time with violence involved.

Many years later, Henry’s adult daughter, Victoria, speaks with what may be considered religious undertones. Dorian tells her, “Love is an illusion,” to which she later says, “They say you devote yourself to pleasure.” But I know “you do have a heart.” Pleasure is dichotomous with love. Reflecting the interior/exterior dichotomy that is so strong in the 1970 film, Dorian replies, “Perhaps below the surface.” Pleasure, however, is felt inside, just as love is, whereas sexual activity is external. Also, no reference is made to God being love; rather the love is of the romantic type, which can be swayed by lust.

Not even the climax of the film can be taken as distinctly religious unless the supernatural is assumed to be indicative of something religious. Both when Dorian tries to kill Henry and when Dorian stabs the painting, the latter moves and growls. When the painting is being stabbed, the head leaps forward at Dorian, who dies in the fire that Henry started. Although visibly apocalyptic, the climax contains no religious language and no hint of the devil. Rather, the painting itself is portrayed as a supernaturally “living” entity distinct from Dorian. In other words, the 2009 film is a horror rather than a religious film. Rather than a pact with the devil, pleasure without constraints (including conscience) is the problem.

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.