Philomena

In the film, Philomena (2013), the audience is confronted with the spectacle of unjustifiable cruelty committed under religious auspices. Philomena is this victim, and she must struggle to come to terms with her past ordeal as a young mother at an Abbey as she goes on a search for her son in America. Her traveling companion, Martin, is a journalist writing the story from his perspective as an ex-Catholic. Philomena defends her faith against Martin’s sarcasm even as she comes to terms with just how cruel the nuns had been to her. In the end, she and Martin confront the nuns. The question is how, by which I mean, from what direction? The answer has value in demonstrating how outwardly religious hypocrites can be put in their place.  

In the true story, pregnant girls were taken to an Abbey. The woman had to pay the Abbey 100 pounds to leave after having given birth. Not having such money, the women had to remain for at least four years, working seven days a week to repay the Abbey. The woman could see their children only an hour a day. The nuns sold them to Americans, and had the girls sign away any rights to know of their respective children’s whereabouts. The girls willingly signed, the nuns having convinced them that they did not deserve the pleasure of seeing their kids on account of the dire sinfulness of having had sex outside of marriage. Even into adulthood, the women did not realize that a contract with a minor is unenforceable, as is a contract made under pressure.

In a flashback, with one of the younger sisters screeching for a physician as Philomena is about to give birth, the older nun in the room replies, “It’s in God’s hands now. The pain is her penance.” Later on, Philomena stands crying, looking out from a courtyard—clutching at metal bars—as a rich American couple drove her boy away, an old nun stands out in front, waving goodbye to the car and ignoring Philomena’s arduous cries, as if the pain of separation were part of the penance. Meanwhile, the Abbey profited from such sales, as well as from the work of the young mothers.

“I think what they did to you was evil,” Philomena’s daughter Jane remarks after hearing her mother recount the events.

“No, no, I don’t like that word,” Philomena replies, rebuffing Jane’s judgment.

“No, no. Evil’s good,” Martin, the journalist, says as he is still writing, “story-wise, I mean.” Yet later, in confronting one of the old nuns who had kept Philomena’s son from finding her, Martin would admit that he just couldn’t forgive the nuns. For not only had they refused the son visiting from America any information on Philomena even though he was dying of AIDs, the nuns had also burned the records listing the adoptive parents while conveniently retaining the contracts that the young women had signed. When Philomena approached the nuns later in life for information on her son, they lied to her, saying they would try and trace his location—knowingly giving her false hope.

While it is easy to find much evil in such cruelty and lying, the evil in the anger that keeps forgiveness at bay is much less transparent. That Philomena would forgive the sisters is anticipated in her response to Martin. “Some of the nuns were very nice,” she said as she put her hand on Martin’s wrist. Perhaps believing that her mother was letting the nuns get away with too much (she was, after all, too gullible in respect to them), Jane informs Martin that the nuns had refused to give her mother any painkillers in what was a breech birth—the nuns having decided that the pain was penance.

Rather than enabling the nuns, Martin confronts one of the culprits, Hildegarde, who is then an old lady. As he does so, the priest in the room tells Martin, “I think your whole manner is absolutely disgusting.” In protecting the other “religious,” the old priest presumes the nuns to be innocent and Martin to be culpable. “I’ll tell you what is disgusting,“ Martin replies, “lying to a dying man.” It is up to Martin to get at the truth—to train a light where the “religious” conveniently refuse to look. Looking directly into the old nun’s eyes, Martin asks her, “When you knew [Philomena and her son] were looking for each other, why did you keep them apart? You could have given him a few precious moments with his mother before he passed away, but you chose not to. That’s disgusting. . . . Not very Christian, now is it?” The old woman could not let that one go! Martin had just called her a hypocrite concerning the domain that was ostensibly most important to Hildegarde.

“I have kept my vow of chastity, my whole life,” the old nun replied. “Self-denial and mortification of the flesh, that’s what brings us closer to God.” Those girls have nobody to blame but themselves and their own carnal incontinence.” These last two words are riveted with anger and resentment that spew out like darts of spit. So sure of her knowledge of God, Hildegarde doubtlessly assumed she could not be wrong. No other ways exist. The girls had sinned such that they are unredeemable. Such is the mind of God, rather than a mere mortal. Yet there was Hildegarde, standing vicariously for us all in our various religious convictions. God wants this. That guy is going to hell. I’m here to save you. That’s just an opinion you have there.

Hildegarde is assuming, problematically, that the vow taken by every monk and nun in a Catholic religious order implies that a layperson having sex outside of marriage evinces carnal incontinence. The sister is forgetting that different standards pertain to religious orders and the laity. To understand this, a little history is necessary. Part of the price Christianity paid for being legalized then favored by Rome was the infusion of nominal Christians who were going alone to get along, rather than out of any specifically Christian or even religious fervor. The monasticism of the fourth and fifth centuries came as a reaction against the lower standards of discipleship being acceptable to the Church. Based on a bifurcation or split of Jesus’s ethical preaching into those that are necessary for salvation and others that are oriented to perfection, only the religious orders oriented themselves to both.[1] The laity, including the young women under Hildegarde’s care, are thus not duty-bound to comply with the more exacting measures geared to religious perfection. Hence the nun’s association of sex outside of marriage with breaking a religious vow is erroneous from a Catholic standpoint. Put another way, Hildegarde and the other sisters have been too exacting on the girls—even punishing them for not measuring up!

Concerning the presumed value of self-denial, Nietzsche argues that making oneself weak voluntarily is to reduce the strength a person needs to overcome the hegemony of one’s most intractable urge. Hence Hildegarde cannot overcome her hatred, or even her sense of omniscience. Furthermore, the place of penance in Christianity as it has come down to us may be exaggerated. The Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla has pointed out that “the summons with which the preaching of Jesus began did not say, as medieval misreading had supposed, ‘Do penance [Poenitentiam agite],’ but ‘Repent,’ that is, ‘Turn your mind around.’”[2] Hildegarde is quite resolute in respect to holding her mind firm where it is, putting insufferable penance above all else in her religion.

Martin, rather than the victim herself, demands an apology from the old nun, but none would be forthcoming from such a cold heart. In fact, the nun goes on to say that Philomena’s suffering, and that of the other mothers, “was atonement for their sins”—for having had sex once. At this, Martin has heard enough. “One of the mothers was 14 years-old!” Rejecting Martin’s criticism, the nun announces, “The Lord Jesus Christ will be my judge, not the likes of you.” Not only did the old woman know this, she also doubtlessly knew how He would judge her. Cruelty, in other words, defends itself with assumed omniscience, or self-idolatry.

Interestingly, it is not Martin’s anger at the Church that succeeds in stopping the old nun in her tracks; rather, her stupefied quandary comes from a surprising, and indeed very ironic direction—from her own religion, as evinced in Philomena’s instantiation of Jesus’s basic preachment to forgive one another. Taking the initiative, Philomena looks down at the nun in a wheelchair and calmly yet with active determination says, “Sister Hildegarde, I want you to know that I forgive you.” Suddenly it is Philomena who exhibits religious perfection, and the sister is like a layperson—and a nominal Christian at that. I don’t see an expression of “how dare you;” rather, Hildegarde may actually look a bit vulnerable—at least the anger is gone (likely replaced by astonishment).

As the nun sits in her wheelchair stunned, looking up at the inferior laywoman now somehow in unfamiliar territory above, Martin misses the subtle spiritual dynamic entirely at first; he assumes that Philomena has unilaterally disarmed in letting the old woman get away with all her past atrocities. Philomena meets this criticism that she would let such words suffice by arguing that forgiveness is not just words, “That’s hard; that’s hard for me.” Forgiving cruelty that refuses even to apologize is indeed hard, for the injury from the emotional abuse stings long after the infliction and forgiveness is unmerited. Yet in the long scheme of things, anger is harder, and mortifies the injury as if poking at the wound.

“I don’t want to hate people. I don’t want to be like you,” Philomena adds—with Hildegarde obviously witnessing the push-back against the secularized critic. Indirectly, this enhances the credibility, and thus force, of the forgiveness.

“I’m angry,” Martin admits. I would be too.

“Well, it must be exhausting.” With this, Philomena asks a younger nun to escort her to her son’s grave. As a viewer, I find myself reflecting on how exhausting even righteous causes against injustices are.

As Martin then leaves the room, he looks back at the old woman and says almost in a defeatist tone, “Well, I couldn’t forgive you.” Owing to Hildegarde’s hatred even years after having refused the dying son his wish, Martin’s line even now resonates with me, even as I side with Philomena.

Interestingly, before leaving the building, Martin buys Philomena a small Heart-of-Jesus plastic statue. In this gesture, Martin acknowledges his newly found respect for the true religious standpoint, which is far more valuable and powerful than either his anti-religion banter or Hildegarde’s brand of Catholicism.  Generally speaking, the best critique of so-called religious practice, sentiment, or belief is from religion’s own unearthed and forgotten spirit, rather than from an extrinsic or exogenous standpoint. Philomena represents the former whereas Martin instantiates the latter. In the end, although Martin still refuses to forgive the nuns (and Catholicism more generally)—and indeed they are not worthy of it—yet he does pivot 180 degrees regarding Philomena’s faith, going from sarcastic put-downs to pro-active respect. Like Francis of Assisi, Philomena is one who I suspect Jesus would resolutely say, “She is one of mine.”

I suspect that Hildegarde came away from her encounter with Philomena feeling less sure of herself with respect to Jesus Christ being her judge; perhaps she would fare better under Martin’s wrath. Lest we be too harsh on the old gal, I suspect that the human brain itself contains an over-reaching proclivity when it comes to what we assume we know for sure concerning religious matters. None of us are immune, and yet the inexorable denial in this brain sickness tells each one of us that we are.

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1. Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (Harper and Row: New York, 1987), p. 114.

2. Ibid., p. 153.See Valla’s text, Annotations on the New Testament.

Citizen Kane: A Virtue Hearst Never Had

In Citizen Kane (1941), Charles Kane is not a replica of William Randolph Hearst. As a young, wealthy man running a newspaper, the character embodies a politico-economic ideal in both word and deed that Hearst only used as a campaign slogan. As per Kane's Statement of Principles, the young publisher is willing to diminish his own wealth held in stock in other companies in exposing the exploitive and corrupt money-bags in big corporations and trust who prey on the otherwise-unprotected working poor and presumably consumers too. For his part, Hearst merely published a daily oriented to the poor man.  As Kane's early ideal is a principle recognizable to, and even resonating with, virtually any audience, Welles' inclusion of the ideal in the film contributes to its endurance as a classic.

Hearst papers twice called for someone to put a bullet into William Mckinley.  When the U.S. president was fatally wounded on September 6, 1901, the American people turned on Hearst, even burning him in effigy. He ran for mayor of New York City, Governor of New York, and even for president, and lost all of those races. He did get elected to serve a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, but hardly ever showed up on Capitol Hill. His passions lied elsewhere than in listening to floor speeches, attending roll-call votes, and questioning witnesses at Congressional hearings. He found he had more power using his newspapers to shape public opinion.[1] I suspect he had very little regard for the public good, and thus any true interest in politics as a means.

Even though Hearst advocated the eight-hour work-day and an income tax, his purported intent to be the servant of the immigrants and working poor would be discredited by his vehement opposition to unions, including firing his employees who were members of the guild, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt raising the income tax rate on incomes over half a million. Antipodal to his earlier support for an income tax, he called the income tax system “intrusive, despotic, discriminatory, and perhaps revolutionary.”[2] Repealing the tax would be better for “the honesty, the industry, the wealth, and the welfare of the whole [population] of Americans.”[3] Facing demands from his creditors at the time, Hearst was actually looking out for the wealth, his appeal to the public good being a mere prop, or trope.

Charles “Citizen” Kane, on the other hand, was willing to use his papers to attack corrupt companies even in which he himself held stock. Speaking with his ex-guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the paper’s crusade against the Public Transit Company, in which Kane is one of the largest individual stockholders, the newspaper editor/company stockholder delivers the following as an explanation for his apparent willful disregard for his own financial interests.

“Mr. Thatcher, the trouble is you don't realize you're talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who owns eighty-two thousand three hundred and sixty-four shares of Public Transit prefer, you see, I do have a general idea of my holdings. I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel, his paper should be run out of town and a committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars.”[4]

In other words, Kane knows that he is doing real damage to his financial position in going after the company. This point is essential, and warrants an explanation. So he continues,

“On the other hand, I am the publisher of the Inquirer. As such, it is my duty, I’ll let you in on a little secret, it is also my pleasure—to see to it that decent, hard-working people of this community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates just because they haven’t anybody to look after their interests! I’ll let you in on another little secret, Mr. Thatcher. I think I’m the man to do it. You see I have money and property. If I don't look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without any money or property and that would be too bad.”[5]

Kane is wearing two hats, one of which he readily admits can indeed work against the other. He appeals to his duty as a journalist (and a wealthy man)—a duty that he enjoys (which is Kant’s ideal)—to, as Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) was fond of saying on the floor of the U.S. Senate, “fight for the little guy.” I suspect that the secret behind Kane’s motive here lies in the powerlessness that he had as a boy when his mother made him leave her and his beloved sled, Rosebud. As his dying word attests, Kane never got over being forced to leave his boyhood home; but he could get some vicarious satisfaction exposing commercial cases of exploitation and corruption at the expense of the powerless. The virtue, Nietzsche would say, is actually the instinct to power overcoming obstacles in order to feel the pleasure of power. Poised against the robber barons, Kane thus has a passion for going after corruption at the expense of the innocent even if Kane’s own stock portfolio takes a hit in the process. His passion for justice is greater than his greed. Translated by Nietzsche, the will to power the main human instinct, and thus motive.

To be sure, Kane doubtlessly wants the power in politics; after all, he runs for governor (as Hearst did).  Even so, not many candidates for public office actually go after corrupt fat cats who scrape off even more off hardened sweat off the backs of the hard-working laborer, or knowingly rip off consumers. Precisely for this reason, the practice is not a bad political investment. Had Hearst actually watched the film (he claimed later he had not), he might have learned a valuable political lesson. Sacrificing one’s private interests for the public welfare can reap tremendous political benefits. Not many wealthy individuals are willing to expose injustices by speaking truth to power. Typically, they conclude that they have too much on the line to risk going after the bad guys. Hence, being one of the few to do so—knowingly taking a financial hit in the process—is a valuable political commodity.

In cinematic terms, putting an ideal such as justice above the vice of greed, a feat that even a flawed person like Charlie Kane can accomplish, is a timeless principle audiences through the centuries will be able to appreciate.[4] Hence, like Rick’s willingness in Casablanca to sacrifice personally not only for Elsa, but also for the larger anti-Nazi cause, Kane’s principle can be expected to contribute to Citizen Kane continuing on as a classic.

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1 For this and the preceding points in the paragraph, see “The Battle Over Citizen Kane,” The American Experience, WGBH Educational Foundation, 1996.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Script of Citizen Kane.

5. Ibid.

6. To be sure, the virtue in a person being willing to diminish one’s overall financial position by using it for a larger cause necessitates having sufficient assets. In this sense, this virtue is like munificence, which differs from liberality in that the amount of money given is much larger. Even though not every viewer of Citizen Kane will not be able to identify with such virtues personally, everyone can value the sacrifice of private interest for public good, and thus have an emotional connection to the movie. 

Breaking News: The Wizard of Oz is ONLY in The Matrix

In penning the 1976 iconic film, Network, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky anticipated Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the two founders of the Fox News network, personified in the film as Arthur Jensen—the “man behind the curtain” turning the news department over to programming (i.e., marketing). Chayefsky’s observations in broadcast newsrooms were sufficient to reveal the trajectory, then only in its infancy, that would eventually fuse tabloid “news” and political ideology together at 24/7 news networks. Astonishingly, Chayefsky anticipated even Glenn Beck and Pat O’Reilly of Fox News. In the mid-1970s in which the film takes place, the two media stars are prefigured or personified as Howard Beale, a news anchor who goes crazy.[1] Thirty years later, Beck and O’Reilly (as well as Keith Oberman on MSNBC) would enjoy years proselytizing on air before the American public finally realized that the three men behind the curtain “had issues.” Glenn Beck self-destructed, having hanged himself by the verbal freedom he had given himself to spout his dire apocalyptic predictions, and Keith Oberman had “authority issues” with bosses. Meanwhile, the public allowed O’Reilly to go on as if he were the kooky uncle who raves after a few drinks yet is all too clever and calculating (i.e., self-serving) underneath.

 Generally speaking, Chayefsky saw the future of broadcast “journalism” as something rather more baleful than a Glenn Beck self-remade as a bespectacled pseudo-intellectual in tweed.  The screenwriter had an innate sense of just how news personalities would arouse the silent majority into living vicariously through the 24/7 news-cycle slanted gravitationally by the sheer mass of corporate and political capital.

Similar to how Neal is a threat to the machines who operate the matrix, Beale becomes a threat to the vested powerful interests in business and government as soon as his preachments turn against them. Beale the prophet tells his viewers that they have fallen into a stupefied daze as “programmed humanoids,” creatures who are unknowingly manipulated even as they think they have free-will and are individuals whose lives are not scripted or pre-programmed. Democracy is a fraud perpetuated by corporate interests that really pull the strings, both in terms of what the viewers see on television and what is put into the empty real lives. In other words, we are ensconced in a matrix built and maintained by the real entities—corporations—that manipulate and prostitute us even while telling us that we like it.

No one is to say publically what Wall Street and K Street are doing to America, not to mention the medium by which the citizenry are informed. Beale’s mad vision of restoring true democracy and the intellectual freedom of individualism reveals the “man behind the curtain” (Arthur Jensen, the chairman of the board) to be something less than a wizard. Rather than squeezing the attention-getting “oracle” as if Beale were a distended or bloated melon to be held in a tight vice until he either capitulates or bursts, Jensen coöpts the prophet himself—not by money though; rather, Jensen feeds Beale’s lunacy. Unfortunately for Beale, his new direction loses viewers; he thus becomes a threat to Jensen’s own network. Through all these twists and turns, the news is quietly absent—presumably truncated by the “media circus.”

The core message in Network is not merely that journalistic integrity and quality lose out all-too-easily to sensationalism (i.e., an expansive profit-motive), the business interest, and political advocacy. Rather, the true insight is paradoxical in nature, prefiguring the solipsism (i.e., your brain is really in a vat even as you think you are eating or running) that is illustrated so well in The Matrix trilogy. What we think is real life—the “drama” and edited “news” on television (even “reality television” shows)—is anything but, while absorption in this fake world saps viewers of any real emotive investment in their actual lives. In other words, what t.v. addicts take as the real world is anything but, while what they assume is dull and meaningless is actually real life. One problem with this metaphysical inversion is that commercial and governmental powers can have their way all too easily in the false world of “reality television” primped up as news. The first step out of the closed system of manipulation is to wake up (as in the Buddhist sense, I suppose) and fall from the matrix as if a sludge of entrails going down the tube. Such “waste” is of course premised on the vested interests (and related values) in the Matrix only. Hence, the individuals awakened are not really discarded waste products; rather, the unprogrammed human beings are of infinite value, according to Kant, in exercising reason to assign values to things rather than be assigned a (conditional) value by them (i.e., the machines).

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1. Jim Edwards, “SPOOKY: The 1976 Movie ‘Network’ Predicted YouTube and ‘Two And A Half Men,’” Business Insider, February 15, 2012.