Civil War

In the film, Civil War (2024), Texas and California have “tecaexited” the U.S., to use the European recondite ideological parlance for secession that began with “Brexit” in order to evade “seceding from the Union.” The U.S. president in the film repeatedly lies to the public that the secessionists are on the run; in actuality, as the film progresses, the three journalists, Lee, Joel, and Sammy, along with their young protégé, Jessie, eventually witness up-close the rebel military conquering the White House in order to shoot the president in the Oval Office. The film provides only scant clues as to the reason for the secession; the rebel who shots Tony, a friend of the three journalists, obviously detests foreigners and delights in “real Americans,” such as are from Colorado and Missouri. This could be a reference to Trump’s “MAGA” movement, so the film is possibly playing out Trump’s followers revolting; historically, on January 6, 2021, some of them rioted, though admittedly did not as a revolt so to topple the U.S. Government, but rather to make a statement by temporarily stopping Congress from counting the States’ respective electoral ballots for president. Even so, it is too great an inferential leap to conclude that the two States seeking to exit the U.S. in the film are MAGA, even though MAGA ideology and the “woke” ideology clashed in early (and mid) 2020s when the film was being put together. Rather than being about contending, violently clashing ideologies, the film is about how violent our species is when not suppressed by an overarching police presence that can act as a deterrent.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century European political philosopher, argues that in order to stave off a short, nasty and brutish life filled with recurrent threats of theft and violence, a person, together with the others, must cede all political (and even theological interpretive) sovereignty to a governing authority, whether a king or an assembly. The only right retained even against such a power is that of self-preservation, though the sovereign has the right to put a rebel to death. Similarly, Machiavelli wrote The Prince to give rulers strategic “Machiavellian” advice in the context of political fighting so those rulers could survive in power even ruthlessly. That philosopher’s History of Florence left out such advice because the context in the book was stable rather than violent. The message of these two philosophers is that left to our own devices in a state of political nature, we can regress to our ruthless savage nature, which is always there but latent in a societal context in which a sovereign power acts as a suppressant and deterrent.

In the film, as the three journalists and the girl drive west then south from New York, ending up in Washington, D.C. to witness the secessionist army shooting its way into the White House to kill the president, indications of small-scale violence are very evident. At a gas station, a man holding a machine gun shows Jessie where two “looters,” too bloodied to be recognizable, are hanging, while still alive, out back. The man even agrees to be photographed by Lee showing him standing between the two hanging men. The subtle message is that he has nothing to fear in being held accountable for shooting the two victims as Jesse and Lee are still there to witness. Man’s savagery goes beyond just killing other humans; not even severe cruelty is sufficiently resisted if there is no fear of having to pay a price in terms of lost freedom or pain.

After Jessie foolishly switches cars through open windows as both are being driven fast and is taken prisoner by two rebels who are operating independently in having killed a truck-load of people, one of those two men shoots Tony and Bohai because they are not “real Americans.” The sheer arbitrariness of the acts to Joel causes him to momentary react angrily before suddenly realizing that the shooter is so irrational that anyone could be shot next, even Joel. Fortunately, Sammy comes to the rescue by driving the journalists’ car into the shooter, but at a cost, for the other shooter kills Sammy as he is driving away with the other journalists.

Relative to these isolated cases of wanton, unjustified violence by individuals, the coordinated military attack on the White House by the rebel army looks civilized. In fact, it is astonishing just how embedded Joel, Lee, and Jessie are with the soldiers as they are shooting at U.S. soldiers and the Secret Service agents. That the soldiers who are about to shoot the president in the Oval Office pause so Joel can get a last quote from the president suggests that the cause is political rather than just for the sake of getting to be violent and kill. In other words, the indications and instances of isolated killings in the countryside en route reveal our species violent, unimpeded nature more so than do the scenes of army units fighting against opposing units.

By implication, political movements in the early 2020s to “defund” local police departments in some of the American States seem wrongheaded, for even if police-power is too much for human nature to wield properly, human nature itself, as depicted in the film, attests that having a police department is a necessary evil that a society cannot (and should not) do without, and, furthermore, that the strictures that only being in a society can provide are also necessary, for in the proverbial state of nature, which can exist even within a society (e.g., neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago), human nature is too prone not only to violence, but also to cruelty—even to the point of enjoying it. Nietzsche argues that the origins historically of punishment lie in the debtor-creditor relationship, wherein creditors found pleasure in taking “a pound of flesh” strangely as if that pleasure from inflicting pain were equivalent and thus sufficiently compensating. Nietzsche states that the rendering of such an equivalence is “strange,” but he may simply be discounting or ignoring the savage nature of our species underneath the patina of civilized Man.

It should not be lost on the viewers, however, that glimpses of the finer qualities of human nature are included in the film. In the camp in the stadium, for example, camera shots showing people being docile, even kind to each other, are likely meant to show this contrast to the film’s leitmotif. Lee’s self-sacrifice at the end of the film in saving Jessie’s life by taking the bullet herself when Jessie is in the line of fire in a hallway in the White House attests to the sheer normative distance that exists within human nature, for, building on a famous line that is in the book, The Killer Angels, which is about the U.S. Civil War, if we are angels, then we are surely killer angels, though this does not mean that violence and cruelty exhaust human nature for we are capable of self-sacrificial love for other human beings. Though even if we are “made” to be creatures of love, still we have not managed to shake our innate penchant for violence and even cruelty. The true civil war is perhaps that which exists within each of us. 

Strange River

Not every film has an implicit Thoreau signature reflective of the nineteenth-century Romantic turn from the age of Reason. Not every film brings to mind the Romantic painter, Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whose painting of nature’s green growing over classic Roman pillars as if to say, nature has the last word. The European film, Strange River (2025), is such a film. The key to making these connections lies not in the film’s dialogue, but, rather, in Jaume Muxart’s consistent choice to direct the film by ending several scenes with elongated camera-shots of nature. This leitmotif has Thoreau’s Walden Pond written all over it and is an implicit critique of rationality and the related artificial societies that mankind has constructed at the expense of being natural.

The film centers on Didac, a sixteen year-old boy who, as a typical teenager, is engulfed in the growing pains of self-discovery. This takes place on a family biking and camping trip along the Danube river. The film opens while the parents and three boys are biking near the mouth of the river, and ends with the family angst gone where the river is much larger; life has been more fully experienced, with the parents having reunited from being emotionally fraught, and Didac having had a brief fling (not including gay sex) on a small boat overnight with another boy. Boys will be boys; nothing definite should be extrapolated. Early on, Lena, the mother, tells Didac, “This might be the last summer that the family is together.” Two arguments between the parents bear out the mother’s prognosis that the couple might get a divorce, and her sexual fling with a young man one night during the trip bears out her desire to wander.

Meanwhile, Didac is initially aggrieved that Gerard, a boy from school on whom Didac has a crush, has been ignoring him. Didac speaks with his father, Albert, on “the frustration of not being desired.” Albert urges his teenage son to share how he feels with Gerard. Both parents support Didac’s romantic interest in Gerard. “You guys kissed,” both parents separately remind their son with winks. For something much deeper than an infatuation, frustration is an understatement, so Didac’s crushes on boys are clearly not very serious, and he may eventually be sexually interested in women. Put somewhat bluntly, the importance of the role that water plays in how Muxart depicts nature in the film, especially with shots of Didac in particular swimming naked, brings to mind the problem in nature wherein heterosexual sexual intercourse is naturally well-lubricated (if not rushed) whereas anal penetration is not, but Didac’s instinctual urges for boys sexually are natural too. Also problematically, the two elongated camera close-ups of Didac’s butt while he is swimming on two occasions almost creep out the wide shots of a boy swimming naked, which prima facie can be construed as showing a human being fully in nature, and thus natural (whereas wearing gray suits in bland offices in artificial skyscrapers is not). If the film can be characterized as a love story, it is that of a family, rather than two boys, and, moreover, a love story with nature. To be sure, Didac takes after his mother in that both engage in “extracurricular” flings during the trip. In fact, Didac sees Lena kissing a younger man one night at a camp-grounds. “Don’t look at me that way,” Lena tells her eldest son the next day; she goes on to tell him that she had had a romantic night with a stranger on the same route twenty years before the present trip. That foray took place on a small boat and the young man disappeared, and Didac has the same experience with a boy on the current trip. With that boy, Alexander, disappearing in the morning before Didac wakes up, the film lapses in skipping ahead to Didac being with his family on a large boat without accounting for how the 16 year-old boy gets from the small boat anchored in the large river back to his parents. If Didac’s brief, free-spirit, foray with Alexander is supposed to feel magical, Alexander leaving Didac alone on the boat is too much reality. In fact, rather than viewing the film as falling within the “gay cinema” genre, if there is such a type (try “romance films,” as falling in love is falling in love), I contend that Muxart situates the film as a family dynamic couched within nature, in and as a part of nature. Rather than being apart from nature, and thus other animals, our species, homo sapiens, is in the animal kingdom, and this is evinced both sexually and in how we raise our offspring.

During the trip, while at an empty school that Albert attended as a boy, he gives his wife and three boys, who are less than attentive, a lecture on the building’s architecture. Albert claims that the rationalistic style is relaxing, but this is undercut as an argument ensues. Significantly, that scene ends with the camera staying on a tree whose fine branches and leaves are swaying in the wind. Nature is relaxing. In fact, Muxart has the 16-mm lens changed as the trip goes on because the river is larger as the family progresses on the route along the river, and shots of the water are salient in the film and to its very meaning. In fact, the film ends with a wide, sustained shot of the wide river, as if to say that nature has the last word as image. That the family, or at least Didac, swims nude can be taken as saying that his teenage growing pains are natural—that he is part of nature. When he is masturbating on the bank of the river after swimming nude alone, the greenery around him is as natural as his facial expressions, especially his eyes, as he is stroking his penis. As he approaches orgasm, a long camera shot of the river water sparkling in the sunlight with emotive instrumental music makes the connection with nature clear. What he is doing is entirely natural, and thus good. Even after Didac and his dad have a father-son talk on Didac having kissed a boy at school, a homosexual encounter that Didac initially denies as he tells his father, “You are too old to understand,” a long camera-shot of the river, which is wider than at the beginning of the film, ensues as if to say, nature has the last word; Didac should go on his natural instincts rather than try to rationalize or justify his attraction to other boys. My point is that Didac’s homosexual urges are not the point of the film; rather, such urges serve as props for Muxart’s leitmotif that we as a species are a part of nature, rather than cast apart, as Albert says in the film, “When no one lives in a building, it dies.” We may design and build buildings, but we are corporeal, organic beings and thus a part of nature.

We can move figuratively to a larger “camera shot” by changing our lens to the nineteenth century, when Romanticism evinced both by the painter Joseph Turner and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau eclipsed the Age of Reason. To be sure, it had been during the eighteenth century that the Earl of Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith wrote on ethics by stressing the sentiment of disapprobation as being ethical judgment that some conduct has been unethical. There is no hint of Kant’s ethical categorical imperative wherein a logical contradiction in universalizing a maxim can be taken as evidence that the maxim is unethical. Instead, the viewer of the film is looking out on the river perhaps as Thoreau looked out on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Even Aristotle looked to nature, and so too does Muxart in making Strange River; we just need to look at how several important scenes end. Just as Albert and Lena do not move forward with divorce, so too, the family does not divorce itself from nature. 

Dying

As a Jewish kid in Nazi Germany, Michael Roemer, a filmmaker who went on to teach documentary at Yale (I took Charles Musser’s seminar a semester after Roemer had left), had to lie in order to survive. In making the film, Pilgrims Farewell, he wanted to get as close to the truth as a human can. He didn’t want to lie anymore. He wanted to deal with the real thing. In making the documentary, Dying (1976), he realized that the people whom he documented as they were dying were more real that what he was going through in his family in New York. Artists and their families pay, he remarked decades later at Yale. “I neglected my family; I was always working. Once I started, I had to make the film,” he said after a presentation of the film on dying. “The people dying knew something we didn’t know,” he added. The prospect of death apparently makes things incredibly real, before they’re not.

In the film, Sally, who is dying, says that everyone dies, so “I have no fear of death.” Harriet, Bill’s wife, is relieved when her husband’s cancer recommences out of remission. “The longer this gets dragged out,” she complains to his doctor. Stunningly, she says, “I prayed that the chemotherapy wouldn’t work.” The physician reminds her that Bill’s feelings should be taken into account. “He has the basic right to make some of these decisions.” After the film, Roemer informed the audience at Yale that Bill’s wife had been abandoned by her mother. After Bill’s death, she married a man who had left his wife and had five kids. Harriet had had a bad life. Her attitude toward Bill’s prospect of dying was indeed very real—human, one might way, all too human. The question is perhaps whether she is culpable in the film for wishing that her husband would finish the job and just die. I contend that she is, regardless of her past, for as depicted in the film, she is his wife and so she should be supporting him as he faces the ultimate demise. There is a revealing scene in which the two of them are sitting together in silence. Is she waiting for him to die?

Also documented in the film is Rev. Byrant, an old Black man who is dying of cancer. “The only thing I can do is put my trust in God, and try to live as long as possible,” he says. In preaching a sermon at his church, he says, “Jesus tells the man, your daughter is sleeping.” She is dead. Later, he remarks, “Jesus died for me on the Cross; he will take me.” Such faith is laudable. With people like Harriet in the world, the Rev. Byrant can hardly be blamed for having such an other-worldly faith.

Whether in the midst of a troubled marriage or in hopes of being taken by Jesus, these stories in Michael Roemer’s documentary attest to people being honest regarding how they are approaching the prospect of death, whether that of a close relation or oneself. The medium of film has been said to ultimately be on the human condition. Even science fiction has something to say about us as we really are. For the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and the residents of Gaza during the Israeli genocide, the essentials of life were undoubtedly felt as very real. Living itself was doubtlessly made transparent in itself. Film can do this too. Even in portraying the brutal honesty of the Nazis and Israelis with regard to people they deemed as sub-human, the medium of film can help the rest of us to be more aware of the fullness of human nature, beyond our knowledge of ourselves and our immediate context.

Anatomy of a Fall

The medium of film literally consists of “talking” pictures in succession; that is to say, sound and image. Amidst astounding technological improvements, audiences in the twenty-first century could not be blamed for losing sight of what the medium actually is. It is easy to get lost in the “bells and whistles” and miss the power simply in relating sound and visual images. It is perhaps less forgivable when directors allow themselves to get lost in the rarified computerized air at the expense of realizing the potential in relating sound and image. A strong narrative is of course also essential, and it is easy to find examples in which an orientation to creating visually astonishing eye-candy comes at the expense of creating a deeply engaging narrative. Nevertheless, here I want to focus on the power that lies in relating sound and image, both of which “move” in a motion picture (after the silent era, of course). In the film, Anatomy of a Fall (2023), the theory that sound should extenuate image to form a more wholistic unity in service to narrative meets with a counter-example. At one point in the film, the loss of an accompanied visual that goes with the sound (to be replaced by another visual) renders the continuing sound more powerful in triggering raw emotions. The point being made by the film at that point regards the viability of close-contact, long-term human relationships, given our species’ innate instinctual urges to be aggressive. After all, our closest relative is the chimp. It is possible that the “civilized” conception of marriage that became the norm presumably only after the long hunter-gatherer phase in which the vast majority of natural selection has occurred is not as congruent with how our species is “hard-wired” than we might think.

In Anatomy of a Fall, the word fall refers to not only a physical fall—that of a husband from either a balcony or an attic window (i.e., suicide or murder)—but also the decline of a marriage. As the multilevel meanings of fall hint, the film is deep both intellectually (as a mystery) and emotionally. Beyond the superficial yet gripping question of whether the wife kills her husband or whether he commits suicide lies the larger human matter of whether our species’ instinctual aggressive urges are compatible with long-term relationships in which two people are in prolonged close contact.

Having never been married myself, I have been astounded from time to time in hearing about married couples who do everything together, including in their work lives. My mother had a law practice with her second husband, and of course they lived and socialized together. When they married and announced that they would be partners of a law firm (with one poor guy as the third partner, or “wheel”), I thought even as teenager that it would involve too much “together time.” As the years passed, long after I had left home for college, I noticed my mother increasingly wanting to take solo daytrips to a nearby large city to “get away.” It was clear from her tone of voice that too much “togetherness” had taken its toll on her. He likely felt the same way, especially if I am correct that our species is not “hard-wired” to spend so much time with one person over a long period of time. On one visit, I got a glimpse of the real condition of the marriage. Nearly constant contact had seemed to extenuate arguments. After I showed the couple the long version of Cinema Paradiso (1988), in which the budding romance receives more emphasis, my mother thanked me, saying in a revealing tone, “We really needed that.” Her husband was silent, but they were sitting close together on a sofa.

It is no secret that romance, being “in love” with someone, is typically short-lived; fewer people investigate whether the residue of the desire for constant contact is consistent with human nature. Too much contact with another human being may be incompatible with our more unsavory instincts that can sometimes overwhelm us. Doing everything together is a romantic notion for people who have just fallen in love, but the reality of so much contact with the same person is quite another thing. Of course, some married couples doubtlessly really love each other, and perhaps some of these remain in love for decades. I am not contending that the instinctual aggressive urge in our biology overwhelms the instinct for emotional intimacy in every case. Constant contact, though, can try even cases in which a couple were in love at some point.

The wife in the film may never have been in love with her husband. She tells her lawyer that she married her husband because she believed he understood her by what he told her. She admits to the court that she has cheated on him, and, interestingly, she shows little empathy when asked if he was hurt when she told him. The lack of empathy is perhaps a hint as to whether she is guilty. The film highlights her lies instead.

Now we get to the crux of the matter concerning the film and human nature in the context of close relationships. In the trial, an audio-tape is played of an argument that the couple had not long before the husband’s death. A visual flashback back to the argument accompanies the tape until—and this is important—the violence begins, or, rather, the talking leaps to shouting. The sudden shift back to the courtroom matches this leap as well as that from the shouting to—just as abruptly—violence. Not being able to see it renders the incident more vivid and even real to the audience. Although less wholistic for the viewers, the effect on emotions, including fear, is greater. Hearing violence without being able to see it may trigger the primitive (reptilian) part of the brain of “fight or flight.” Seeing the source of violence may give us a greater sense of being in control of the violence; it is out there rather than possibly so near to be a threat.

At that point of the film, I noticed that the 250 people in the theatre were completely silent as we heard enraged shouts, glass breaking and a series of hard punches. Once the couple becomes violent, they are silent. Persuasion has given way to might, as if force itself could persuade. Hearing the deep thuds of the punches and claps of the slaps left me emotionally raw. It was as if the microphone were placed very near the points of contact. Seeing the violence as well as hearing it would have allowed the audience to situate the violence in space, thus eliminating the fear that the violence is indeed as up-close as it seems and therefore could encompass the viewer. Matching the visual images with the sound of the violence within a scene would normalize the violence in the context of watching any scene of a movie in which there is action and diegetic sound. The violence would be seen to be at a distance, even in spite of the up-close deep sounds of the slapping and punching.

The abrupt cessation of the visual of the argument as the sounds continue and then the coordinated end of the shouting with the beginning of the violence as if on cue demonstrates that the management sound and image is a powerful device by which raw emotions of an audience can be engaged at a deep level. Perhaps too often directors become consumed with the calls for more “eye candy” afforded by computer graphics and in so doing overlook the possibilities from cleverly relating audio to image. In other words, the basic level of the medium of “talking” pictures warrants attention.

The scene of the couple’s argument plays an important role in the narrative too, and is thus powerful intellectually. When the wife tells the judge that her husband was hitting a wall (rather than her hitting him), I was surprised that the prosecutor does not point out that the audio itself of muffled thuds hitting flesh is inconsistent with a human fist hitting a hard surface. The wife’s convenient claim is yet another hint that she is guilty, as is her lie that bruises on her arm are from brushing against a counter’s edge in the kitchen. If her husband was not hitting a wall during the argument (and hitting a wall during a violent fight seems implausible or odd even for someone considering suicide) and the counter cannot account for the bruises, then the evidence of prior violence could be taken as such by the jury.

Relatedly, I was also surprised that the prosecutor does not point out to the court that the son’s sudden realization that his father’s comments about making do once the family’s dog has died are actually made to prepare the boy for his father’s suicide. I could not find in the audio and visuals of the flashback of the boy riding in a car with his father anything that could be taken definitively to point to an intention to commit suicide. The prosecutor lapses, therefore, in failing to flag the son’s conflict of interest in wanting to protect his mother from going to jail—an event that would presumably throw the son into foster care or a group home.

Also subtly revealing is the fact that the wife is happy rather than in mourning while eating and especially drinking with her attorney at dinner after the non-guilty verdict. In fact, the two nearly kiss at one point. Back when she walks outside and sees her husband’s dead body in the snow near the house, she does not wail; in fact, she seems rather self-composed.  

The film does not reveal at the end whether the wife has murdered her husband. Nor does the audience get any indication of whether the husband repeatedly hit a wall during the argument. These “loose ends” are disconcerting, as is the chaotic music that the husband plays in the attic while his wife is attempting to be interviewed on the house’s second floor. The harsh, chaotic diegetic (sourced in the scene) sound is consistent with the out-of-control quality of human violence, and may even excite the wife enough to a physically attack her husband. This music is also consistent with the speechless audio of the violent stage of the argument. The emotional discomfort from the music pales in comparison with the emotional shock from listening to the savage violence.

That even a husband and wife can inflict on each other such violence as surpasses verbalizing a disagreement raises questions about marriage, given human nature, and, moreover, whether a person can really know another. How can a person be sure that something really is as it appears? In the New Testament, Jesus says of a couple to be married, “the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh.”[1] Does unity imply being of one nature, and, if not, can two natures who don’t really know each other be one flesh? The Council of Nicea (325 CE) decided that Jesus has one essence (ousia) and two natures (hypostasis). Those natures are distinct, yet of the same essence. Can spouses be of the same essence if they can’t really know the other’s underlying nature?

Anthropologically, we can ask whether our notion of marriage is an artificial social-construction that is not fully compatible with human nature. If we cannot completely know another human being, perhaps an all-inclusive (i.e., constant) long-term relationship that monopolizes a person’s interpersonal relations is dangerous. Even if one person could truly know another, perhaps the strictures of social convention result in pent-up emotion that at some point explodes. A couple is suddenly in the “state of nature,” where the repressed aggressive instincts can be expressed. Perhaps they can be over-expressed from all of the pent-up pressure that has built up.

The film seems to marvel at the depths to which a marriage can fall, or deconstruct. This is not to say that the film is an indictment on marriage itself. Couples who fell in love and are still in love decades later can be differentiated from couples whose loveless marriage never knew love and continues “for the children.” Even so, it might be useful to investigate the extent to which the modern social-construction of marriage is consistent with marriage during our species’ formative “hunter-gatherer” period. Has marriage become too totalitarian for our nature? By this I mean both in terms on monogamy and spending so much time together, especially if this is at the expense of doing things with other people.

So it can be asked whether monogamy was pre-historical convention. Is monogamy over decades natural, given human instincts and even reason? In their argument, the couple in the film argue over sex—one person is depriving the other of sex. As Freud pointed out, repressed eros can suddenly explode in violence. Perhaps early humans in such a situation did not have a moral or legal inhibition against getting sex from a third party, as marriage certificates and churches did not yet exist. Furthermore, perhaps the hunter-gatherer couples did not spend so much time together. The lack of modern conveniences meant that more time was taken up with work. So it can be asked: Did couples spend so much time together, especially if exclusively, during the hunter-gatherer period?

To the extent that constant, long-term contact up close with a particular person is artificial, and thus contrived as an ideal or as normal, the social construction of the modern marriage may go too far. Why do so much together? Is it wrong to take breaks by doing things with other people? Are friendships naturally (assuming that married couples are friends) so monopolistic? These are questions that the film’s example of a marriage gone so badly wrong can raise. If sound and image are managed with sufficient foresight by a screenwriter, director, and actors, then the message as regards the human condition can be felt on a deep level in addition to be reflected on. The modern conception (and praxis) of marriage in the West may be ahistoric and ill-conforming to the human being. Perhaps we do not pay sufficient regard to the social distance that our human instincts require at times. Our closest relative, after all, is the chimp. We are animals, and though social, were are more than rational beings.

---

1. The Gospel of Mark 10:7-8.

Little Women: Strong in Death and Love

Little Women (1994), based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott, can be thought of as a social history of civil-war-era New England—that is to say, the film captures what life must have been like on a daily basis. Yet the human predicament resonates and thus makes the film moving for viewers far removed from the world of the Marsh family in Concord, Massachusetts. In particular, the film confronts the viewer with the hard task of going on even with the emotionally heavy experience of loss.

The film presents the uneasy feeling of “ending” through two manifestations: death and love. Regarding the former, the Marsh family, and especially Jo, must come to terms with the loss of Beth. With a weakened heart from a fever and minutes from death, Beth tells her sister Jo, “I know I will be lonely for you, even in heaven.” Jo’s realization after the death that she will never see Beth is so hard that she writes a novel of her childhood as a means of vicariously holding on to Beth. It is difficult indeed to come to terms with never again seeing a person who has meant so much. This is true too in romantic love when it is as if fate has brought two people together, and yet one demurs and the other must accept the loss.

“You don’t need scores of suitors; you only need one, if he’s the right one,” young Amy Marsh advises her three older sisters.  When a beloved is felt to be “the one,” the forced return to life without that person can feel like a long prison sentence. Few people rise to such a rank; they can be few and far between—which is a testament to their tremendous value. So much distance, in other words, exists between “getting in” and “never to be seen again” that the heart struggles to make the journey.

In rejecting Laurie’s proposal of marriage, Jo feels that she will never find “the one” tailored to her, for she is rather unique as an independent writer in the nineteenth century. Faced with the unfathomable distance between loving Jo and never seeing her again, Laurie marries Jo’s younger sister Amy. At first, she resists, saying she will not date someone still in love with her sister.  Laurie denies it of course, telling Amy, “I have always known I should be part of the Marsh family.” Amy eventually agrees to marry him, and he need not face the prospect of never again seeing someone who has meant so much to him. Although he need not face such a hard sentence, his chosen path back to “just friends” with Jo is not easy.

The transition that Laurie undergoes in his relation to Jo is not one that many people in Laurie’s emotional place can make. Once you start falling in love with a person, it is nearly impossible to going back to just being roommates, for example. Once you discover that the person you are falling for is not falling for  you, continuing as "just friends" almost certainly goes with much pain, especially if the one you love starts dating someone else. 

Fortunately for Jo Marsh, she finds love in Friedrich, a poor academic tutor from Europe. That he is much older than her and comes with empty hands (i.e., not much wealth) are of no concern to Jo, as she really loves him. Putting her hands in his, she tells him that his empty hands are full now. That's love, which transcends, and thus relativizes, all those criteria that seem important in the absence of love but suddenly pale in comparison when a deep connection is felt. 

Life goes on even amid deaths and loves lost—and even love takes hold in spite of it all. This is the message conveyed by Little Women. Facing the prospect of their father’s possible death in battle and Beth’s weakened heart, the little women are hardly little; and years later, in going on after Beth has died, knowing they would never again see her, Meg, Jo, and Amy are hardly little women. Jo is hardly little when she wraps her heart around poor Friedrich. Life is indeed not only the struggle for existence as Darwin postulated; it is also the plight of the elusive yet very deep meaning felt as two people come together as if by instinct. 

Son of God: Comparative Religion in Film

The 2014 film, Son of God, follows a familiar trajectory well-known to viewers who had seen films such as George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). Watching the Passion story yet again, I could not help but take note of the repetitiveness from sheer likeness. Yet one scene sticks out among the usual denouement—that scene in which Jesus in the wilderness, the high priest in the Temple, and the Roman Pontius Pilate with his wife in their chambers pray in their own ways and with differing assumptions about divine intent toward a petitioner. The interplay of petitions plays like a tutorial for the ears and eyes on comparative religion, found here even within a religion.

“Father, I know it must be as you will it. Father, take this from me; spare me,” Jesus implores in a quiet voice nearly breaking in the emotionality of the intimate petition. God’s Will is here not in line with Jesus’s immediate comfort; indeed, following that Will would mean severe upcoming suffering and even death.

“Lord I know you are pleased with me, for you sustain me in sincerity,” the Jewish high priest announces as he looks upward, flanked by his fellow priests, in the stone Temple. In stark contrast to Jesus’s approach, an air of formality characterizes the Temple-centric relation. The chief priest finds himself benefitting from God’s Will, thanks to the sincerity the man finds in himself. Such sincerity, he assumes, must surely be based in a foundation beyond himself—namely, God.

In this back-and-forth film-making technique, the viewer is presented with polar opposites within Judaism. The mode or style of discourse with Yahweh and whether the Godhead’s will is convenient or to be grudgingly accepted are each pushed into two camps. Can organic creatures approach the source of existence intimately without dismissing the abyss between Creator and Creation? On the other hand, is formality nothing but puffed up human artifice? Furthermore, does divinely sanctioned suffering represent self-mortification writ large or is the existential angst a reflection of the dearth of pathos in a canyon so wide? On the other hand, is not the presumption that perfect being is so well pleased (and so conveniently) in a hardened heart in actuality an eruption of arrogance? With such questions boiling just below the surface, the viewer is then thrust out of Judaism, if only for a few seconds, and even out of monotheism.

“We thank you, our ancestors, for watching over us,” Pilote’s wife prays as her husband looks on. Ancestors in ancient Roman religion are like saints in that they can intervene to protect if petitioned. Unfortunately, the film overlooks the Roman pantheon of gods, such as Jupiter and Mars, that are roughly equivalent Yahweh. Even so, the petition to the ancestors presents the viewer with the suddenly odd combination of intimate relation and convenient alignment of wills.

“Father,” Jesus implores, whispering intimately. Coming off the convenience of the priest and Pilote, the viewer is suddenly confronted with a very painful misalignment---Jesus’s flesh being weak.

“Praise the Lord, God of Israel, everlasting and everlasting. Amen. Amen.” the high priest shouts. Coming on the heels of Jesus’s soft cry, the distance in the priest’s formality is transparent. Praise the god that is well-pleased in me. Were the priest in Job’s place, would he still praise the everlasting source that can allow for such unjust pain?

“If you will it, Father,” Jesus says in a quiet voice as a tear streams down his left cheek, “if you will it, your will is mine.” The congruence of wills even in the midst of still so much suffering to come severs Jesus from the high priest, and hence the fabric of Judaism would be ripped apart.

In short, this rather unorthodox scene-analysis demonstrates how an entertaining feature-film can present comparative religion in a very effective way. Even within a religion, comparative religion can be done. Perhaps the major pitfall to avoid is that of reductionism. The mature screen-writer and director bracket their particular preferences rather than cast all of the options but one as straw men designed to fail. The multiplicity teeming in human nature naturally manifests itself both in the myriad approaches to the divine in worship and the assumptions that we have regarding alignments and clashes of Will with will. 

Is Modern Civilization Immune from Autocratic Rule or Susceptible to It?

Die Welle (The Wave), a German film released in 2008, centers around a week-long mini-course on autocracy. The following question put to the high-school students as well as the film’s viewers: Is a totalitarian regime like the National Socialists in the second quarter of the twentieth century still possible? Undergirding this question is the more basic question pertaining to human nature. Namely, does human nature crave the intensity of collective meaning through uniformity that a dictator can provide?

In his discourse on inequality, Rousseau argues that additional, distinctly artificial, economic (and political) inequalities are all but certain in the unnaturally large social arrangements requiring more social interaction with strangers than was the case when members of the homo sapiens species lived as hunter-gatherers in small groups, or bands.[1] Living in small groups fit well with the human tolerance for interacting with less than 150 people—enough to trust without undue anxiety. Inequalities going along with this congruence were, Rousseau asserts, quite natural—not as large as, say, those between a king or emperor and “the masses.” 

The Wave explores why we mere mortals put up with such inequalities of power, and thus whether autocracy is still possible in Germany, und der Welt. Are we immune, buttressed by the artificial safeguards seemingly built into our modern societies, or do we crave a larger meaning that is ostensibly possible only by subsuming a sense of individuality to blend into a larger whole led and enforced by autocratic artifice?  Are we that hungry to fill the emptiness that ensues from the onslaught of post-modern deconstructivism within the shell of modernity’s fractured communities and families?

---

1.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed., Vol. 34 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1910).

Inglorious Basterds: A Feat beyond Human Dignity

Thirteen pages into Tarantino’s screenplay for the film, Inglourious Basterds, Col. Landa delivers the film’s thesis statement, essentially encapsulating the entire narrative in one line. “I’m aware,” the SS officer tells the French Jew-hider in his country house, “what tremendous feats human beings are capable of once they abandon dignity.”[1] Landa is referring to the lengths to which Jews in hiding will go to evade being captured. He likens them to rats, yet interestingly refers to their evasive means as feats. Perhaps the SS officer admires his prey in this respect. Perhaps he admires the human instincts that spring into action once dignity has been discarded.

In fact, the Landa character can be characterized by the odd combination of polished politeness and brutal aggression, two seemingly disparate poles, being situated as two natures proximate in one person, one essence.[2] This character is on full display when Landa is in the cinema’s office with the famous German movie star, Bridget Von Hammersmark, whom the SS officer suspects is a spy. At one moment, Landa “very delicately unfastens the thin straps that hold the fräulein’s shoes on her [feet].”[3] As if Landa had turned on a light switch, he suddenly jumped the woman to strangle her “lily-white, delicate neck . . . with all the violence of a lion in mid-pounce.”[4] The janus-face flashed inside Landa manifests now in the exchange between the two characters. 

It is no accident, I suspect, that Tarantino explicitly notes that strangling “the very life out of somebody with your bare hands is the most violent act a human being can commit.”[5] The image of the most violent act possible literally in the same shot with a delicate neck of a cultural aristocrat captures Tarantino’s main point: The giving up of human dignity impacts human instinct, not to mention emotion and behavior, tremendously. Whether the person is a Jew in hiding or an SS officer, the animalistic, predator-prey instincts can kick in with remarkable speed and force, as though a severe thunderstorm rolling in on the plains.

Whether the predatory and primitive survival behaviors are indeed feats is itself an interesting question. As discussed above, the Jew Hunter refers to the survival strategies of the Jews as feats. He obviously does not admire the “rats” themselves. Rather, he admires the extreme measures—more, precisely, that human beings are capable of going so far acting on the instinct of self-preservation once they have decided to abandon their dignity. Likewise, he doubtless identifies with the violent lengths to which human predators can go once they have gently and carefully removed the lady’s shoe. 

Through Landa, Tarantino evinces a fascination with the extremes on both sides of human dignity. Enjoying a dessert in a nice restaurant, Landa clearly relishes his impeccable politeness as something much more than a subterfuge as he interrogates Shosanna, the Jew whose family he had murdered and whose cinema would host the Nazi high command and other Nazi elite for the premiere of Göbbels’ National Pride. This penchant for precise politeness does not detract from Landa leaping to the most violent man-on-man (or movie star) civilian combat possible once he has turned off dignity’s internal switch. Most importantly, the two extremes can coexist without blending in the least. Human nature in its rich, complex (rather than moderate, or “every day”), and stretched condition is itself the feat that Tarantino demonstrates and explores by means of the film.

---

1. Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds (New York: Weinstein Books, 2008), p. 13.

2.  I have in mind the “fully human and fully divine” natures that are in Jesus Christ without blending together within him.

3.  Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, p. 136.

4. Ibid., p. 137.

5.  Ibid.