Murder on the Orient Express

If viewers can get past Hercule Poirot’s extraordinarily long (and awful) mustache in the 2017 film, Murder on the Orient Express, listening closely to some of the detective’s choice observations on human nature and ethics can deliver philosophical dividends. Indeed, Poirot admits to being able to see the world only as it should be, which enables him to detect even small physical (and psychological) aberrations, even concerning eggs for breakfast, and so he has become, as he unabashedly states, the world’s best detective. After having solved the case on the stopped train, however, he realizes that even his “gift” at detection is not fully in line with how things should be, and so he compromises with his austere ethical standards because he finds himself in a “gray area,” ethically speaking.

At the end of the film, Poirot asks the man who is waiting for the detective to arrive, “Would you please straighten your tie?” The man does so. It is an odd, fastidious request that subtly confirms Poirot’s own admission early in the film that his sensitivity to even tiny deviations from how things should be is pathological, and yet very useful in detective work. So it is extraordinary as far as he is concerned that he says to the group of people on the train, “There are no killers here” even though he has figured out that all of them jointly savagely stabbed Rachett, who had kidnapped and killed (even after having received the ransom!) Daisy, the Armstrong young girl. Sometimes the scales of justice should not be in balance, Poirot tells the group. At the beginning of the film, he says, “There is right and wrong and nothing in between.” So, when Rachett sits at Poirot’s table in the dining car on the train, the detective instantly detects that the kidnapper/killer of the Armstrong child is not in line with how the world should be. Because, as Poirot says at one point, “Human nature is perverse in its complexity,” it is no surprise that he admits, “I am at my happiest when I am alone.” Applied ethics would be an alternative vocation for Poirot, and he would doubtless prefer to be alone than in the company of business practitioners, given their orientation to their self-interest and gain. To be sure, criminal justice is no small matter, given the heinous nature of murder. As the man who invites Poirot to travel on the train tells him just after both men discover that Rachett has been murdered in bed, “You are the only person who can bring justice.” Otherwise, the Black physician would likely be hanged “just because of the color of his skin,” which would be a grave injustice. So the detective agrees to take the case even though he is on vacation.

Rachett has not only gotten away with his horrible crimes against the Armstrong family, which ruined it, but has also caused 12 other people, who were either in that family or in various degrees of affiliation to it, to have their lives, according to Poirot, “wounded, deformed, ended.” This too “demands justice,” and so may justify the joint stabbing by the twelve of Rachett in his berth. In other words, Poirot sees the ethics of the vengeful act as being a gray area, rather than either right or wrong, because Rachett’s original crimes led to the additional crimes of having ruined twelve other lives. Hence, Poirot tells the group that sometimes the scales of justice should be unbalanced. The twelve seek revenge—vengeance—“for the life of an innocent,” Poirot says, “a life for a life.” But it is more than a life for a life, for Rachett has ruined the lives of the 12 emotionally aggrieved people on the train who stab Rachett; it is Rachett’s life for many more, and the criminal justice system has failed to bring Rachett to justice. In fact, the son of the prosecutor who wrongly prosecuted an innocent woman for Daisy’s murder is one of the twelve on the train!

To be sure, the twelve people, whom Poirot admits are not killers at heart, lie to him. “It appears that there is no end to the lies manufactured just for me,” Poirot observes after having spoken with them all. Even though lies violate Kant’s ethic (i.e., the Categorical Imperative), Poirot’s reflection that the joint stabbing may be justified ethically raises the question for us as to whether the end justifies the means (i.e., the lying). As for Poirot himself, he tells the group, “I cannot lie.” That he holds firm on the ethic of honest even as he considers the act of vengeance as possibly justified ethically—“I cannot just this,” he admits—directly contradicts his general perspective that there is right and wrong and nothing in between. His sensitivity to abnormalities from how things should be is clear from his discomfort looking at a man whose tie is not straight, hearing the conductor walking quickly to Rachett’s berth, and seeing the cracked glass of the picture frame of his beloved Catherine who has presumably died. Because, as he puts it, “crime is an anomaly” because it takes “a fracture of the soul” to murder another human being, he cannot resist man with the crocked tie who accosts the detective as he is finally leaving the train and states, “There has been a murder on the Nile.” Human nature is indeed perverse to a man who cannot help but see the world as it should be, and the motive to remove defects must indeed be strong in such a person. That he is confronted with a case in which the scales of justice should not be in balance is itself an aberration that must be intolerable to him, and to such an extent that he does lie to the police as to his theory on the murder on the Orient Express.

“There are no killers here,” the famed detective has said to the twelve when he announces to them that he has discovered their joint, premeditated crime. Linda Arden, aka Caroline Hubbard, the mother of Sonia Armstrong and Helena Andrenyi, and the grandmother of Daisy Armstrong, tells Poirot, of the eleven others on the train who participated in her masterminded plot to kill Rachett, “these are good people.” Poirot does not dispute that. They are not like the murderers whom he has known; they are not like Rachett. In Poirot’s extreme sensitivity to defects from how the world should be, none of the twelve are defects; rather, they are innocent victims of Rachett’s original crime. The sheer anger and emotional suffering in their “wounded, deformed” lives since the kidnapping cry out for justice; that it takes an act of vengeance to bring about such justice, and thus closure, even though the act is indeed murder, defies Poirot’s normative world-view. “I cannot judge this,” he tells the murderers. Perhaps moralists the world over could take a lesson from such humility.

The film raises the question of whether the vice of vengeance, or revenge, may be ethical in some cases. If so, should the biblical passage, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” be qualified? To be sure, that that very passage was so obviously disregarded in Israel in the mid-2020s in so exceeding what could conceivably be regarded as ethical revenge by committing a genocide in decimating Gaza and even intentionally killing even children (and for fun!) so the Arab people would not go on there does not justify qualifying the divine decree that vengeance belongs to Israel’s deity alone, rather than to the Israelis themselves. But Nietzsche’s claim that vesting the deity with vengeance discredits the very concept of Yahweh because it also contains omnibenevolence (i.e., perfect goodness, which Nietzsche claims is antithetical to any vice) may need to be reconsidered if Poirot is right that the murder on the Orient Express may be ethical even though it counts as vengeance. For if some cases of human vengeance are ethical in being just, then divine vengeance may not necessarily be inconsistent with perfect goodness. If so, then the attempt behind the biblical passage to get the Israelis to cease being so revenge-oriented may not be as problematic as Nietzsche thought, even though the attempt has been in vain. 

Awake

Although no overtly theological or religious material is in the film Awake (2007) because greed itself is the real antagonist, idolatry (self-idolatry actually) can be imputed, and in this sin the underlying sordid  foundation of the vice can be grasped. In in his letter to the Colossians, Paul ends his list of sins with greed, “which is idolatry.”[1] The easiest way to interpret this classification of greed being a case of idolatry is to assume that the idol is money (or wealth). The idolatry of wealth is enunciated and perhaps even personified by Gordon Gekko in the film, Wall Street (1987). No amount of personal wealth is enough. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” greed being the desire for more. Gekko delivers the line during his speech to Teldar Paper stockholders. Left unsaid in his speech is the tremendous toll that greed can take not only on other people, but also oneself, for a very circumscribed, as to benefits, selfishness goes along with greed and may even be its foundation. A greedy person would presumably think nothing of betraying a friend if doing so would increase the person’s wealth, especially if no future financial benefit is likely from the friend. To be sure, greed need not be oriented to more money; a selfish person addicted to sex (i.e., in the sense of being regularly driven to have more of it) would have no problem betraying a even a spouse, and even demand of him or her that the addict’s outside sex with others, even with a romantic connection, must and even should be accepted in order to stay. Such extreme, unrepentant callousness can apply to greed for money too, and this is evinced in Awake. The vice of greed as ultimately self-idolatry has an evil connotation, given how much pain and thus harm self-idolatry can easily inflict on other people. The virtue of self-sacrifice is farther than the farthest star from such greed, and the sheer pathos of distance between self-sacrifice out of love and self-idolatry as greedy selfishness is palpable in the film, which arguably intimates and may even stimulate religious sensibilities without being explicit or preachy.

The film’s plot centers on the billionaire young adult, Clay Beresford, and his girlfriend, Samantha Lockwood. She plays him like a fiddle under the subterfuge of love. Actually, she is conspiring with Jack Harper, a heart surgeon, and two other medical personnel because she knows that Clay has a weak heart and will need a transplant. She wants Clay to choose Jack to operate because Jack would kill Clay during the transplant operation and Samantha would inherit (and pay off the other culprits). Jack has been delaying a heart for Clay until he marries Samantha so she could inherit millions. Not by coincident, Clay marries her just hours before a heart is suddenly available. Jack is ready and waiting at the hospital; he assumes Samantha would follow through in sharing her inheritance with the other culprits if he kills Clay. Although greedy himself, he does not fully grasp the true nature of greed.

Fortunately, Lilith Beresford, Clay’s very insightful mother, discovers the plot, including Samantha’s complicity in it, during the operation. Lilith calls her friend, Jonathan Neyer, a famous heart surgeon whom she had been wanting to perform the operation anyway, and the good doctor shows up just in time to find Lilith dead in the hospital waiting room and then transplant her heart into Clay, who is being kept alive in the operating room artificially. Lilith leverages the requirement that her permission is necessary for the “plug” to be pulled on her son; she intentionally refuses to give her consent to play for time to give Neyer time to arrive and take charge. He does just that, and is able to save Clay’s life. Interestingly, Clay is awake during the operation and so he discovers the plot as it is unfolding in the operating room, but he is paralyzed by the anesthesia (but he can feel the pain from his chest being cut open; his inner dialogue and screams make that scene very skippable). Even though he has an out-of-body experience, it is his mother who is in a position to report the crime. In spite of that experience, and the dialogue in an august, dark living room between him and his mother when he is on artificial life-support and she is dead, no religious implications are in the film. Whether the metaphysics of the film allow for the afterlife is an open question. The main thrust of the film lies in contrasting virtue with vice, and differing relationships with selfishness that they have.

Clay lives due to the self-sacrifice of his mother, which is antipodal to the abject greed and selfishness of the culprits, who are arrested before they can leave the hospital. In the film, a second virtue besides self-sacrifice out of love is salient. A strong need for justice is implicit in the attention given to whether the culprits get away with their attempted murder for money. In watching the film, the human instinctual urge for greed almost can be expected to kick in. It is indeed a powerful urge in the human psyche, and the film presents the value for justice as being in direct conflict with greed, another powerful urge. In contrast to both of these urges, the intention to sacrifice oneself is hardly overwhelming and in fact may take considerable will-power. Justice that is actually vengeance is especially sordid; justice desired by third-parties who are unharmed can also go along with selfishness, but is less toxic, ethically speaking, due to the pathos of distance. In the film, Lilith reports the culprits not only as vengeance, but also because she does not want her son to die, but she is hardly a distant witness reporting a crime out of a sense of justice itself. Her self-sacrificial act in dying so Clay could have her heart ranks higher than her pursuit of justice, which, like greed, is consistent with selfishness.

Mercy can be interpreted as a higher, unselfish form of justice. How many husbands would urge a jury to be merciful to a rapist of one’s wife or daughter? In the film, were Neyer to be able to use the original transplant heart even after Sam (whose true identity is a nurse at that hospital) gave it a fatal shot, such that Lilith would not commit suicide, would Lilith be inclined to appeal for mercy for the culprits after having reported them? Perhaps mercy should replace justice in Aristotle’s four virtues, or at least be a fifth, which trumps justice. Under no circumstance should greed and vengeance be added.

Regarding the culprits in the film, Jack Harper is the least culpable because his conscience has considerable sway because he has gotten to like Clay even though the “friendship” was for Clay a means to convince Clay to choose Jack rather than another surgeon to perform the transplant operation. Even so, Jack took a liking for Clay, and so Jack came close to refusing to kill Clay on the operating table. Samantha, who is actually a nurse at that hospital, convinces Jack to go along; she grabs the needle and ruins the heart for Clay. After the operation, while police are searching through the hospital to arrest Jack, his assisting surgeon Puttnam, and nurse Carver, Samantha refuses to go with Jack. His reaction may suggest that he intends to marry her, and he exacts vengeance (not justice!) by showing her that he has kept the needle with her fingerprints on it. The police are then shown arresting her. Jack’s vengeance has been satisfied and we may even feel that she deserves it, for in her selfish greed, she has betrayed Jack romantically, and would almost certainly do so again by refusing to share her inheritance were he able to evade the police pursuing him. She severs ties with all of the other culprits as soon as she discovers that the police want to arrest them. To the extent that a greedy person can be trusted only by people who can still be used for more money, the close link between greed and selfishness is established. Samantha illustrates this link in how it can play out in promises being broken all too easily. How very distant her mentality is from that of Lilith’s self-sacrifice. 

To be sure, Lilith doubtlessly does not want to live in grief of her dead only son, but she gives her life, and this runs against the selfish urge of self-preservation, which Thomas Hobbes argues in Leviathan is fundamental to human beings. In fact, Christians may legitimately infer the leitmotif of the Gospels as being highlighted the film’s highest virtue of voluntarily laying down one’s life for another out of love, so indirectly, not just Clay’s out of body experience and the dialogue “somewhere” with his mother when he is unconscious and she is dead hint at a religious dimension in the film’s story-world. Subtilty can be more revealing than being preached at.

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[1] Col. 3:5 (NIV)

The String

The original title of the 2009 film, The String, is Le Fil, which actually translates as thread rather than string. These two English words have different connotations and this bears on the film’s leitmotif. Whereas a person can string another person along, a thread has a connotation of linking people emotionally. The thread that ultimately succeeds in the film is that of caring, which is antipodal to hurting, emotionally speaking. In this sense, the film is like The Holiday (2006), another romantic drama in which the good guys (and gals) wind up on top. In terms of the theme of caring and not hurting other people, that The String centers on two gay men who fall in love whereas The Holiday is about two heterosexual couples matters little, though the resistance to homosexuality in The String is an additional hurdle. I contend that like The Holiday, The String can provide audiences with how falling in love can proceed naturally without exploding because one person hurts the other. In other words, the ethical wins out in both films in regard to emotionally intimate romantic relationships, and in this respect the medium of film has value in terms of ethics.

In The String, Malik returns to Tunisia from France to live in his mother’s house because his dad is dying. Malik has been unwilling to tell his mother Sara that he is gay, and she is unaware of his sexual prowess with local guys, including one of his cousins (who gets “turned on” not only having sex with a cousin, but also paying anonymous guys for sex). It is no accident that Malik and his cousin sniff a “substance” as they are kissing in a bathroom, for there is no emotional connection between the two men that would bring the sex to a higher intensity naturally. Meanwhile, Malik is gradually falling for his mother’s houseboy, Bilal, who, crucially, is falling for Malik. “One-sided love” simply does not work; it is too unstable an element not to explode at some point. Once Malik and Bilal mutually realize that they are falling for each other—perhaps the most beautiful thing of which two human beings are capable—and neither is afraid of the emotional intimacy, two things happen.

Explicitly, Sara discovers her son and her servant intertwined on Malik’s bed the next morning while the two are still asleep. It is not as if Malik has drawn an invisible line down the middle of his bed as a way of rudely informing Bilal that bodily touching is off-limits while Malik is asleep. Sara, a Catholic, immediately goes to her cancer-stricken husband Abdelaziz, who is a Muslim, to inform him that their son is gay. Interestingly, he defends his son’s sexuality, pushing back on Sara’s disapproval. This is ironic because Abdelaziz’s family did not approve of Abdelaziz marrying a Catholic woman. Both from that experience and her husband’s opinion on Malik being gay, Sara relents and accepts her son’s homosexuality, and the fact that her son is in love with one of her servants.

The second thing that happens once Malik and Bilal have consummated their deep romantic (not just sexual attraction) affection for each other is very subtle but very, very important. Malik stops “sleeping around.” It is not that Bilal has insisted on monogamy; rather, Malik no longer is motivated to have sex with other men.  I suspect that this is due to the natural willowing of focus that happens when someone falls in love with another person. It could also be that physiological sex alone pales experientially relative to sex with a beloved. There is one scene in which Malik is running his fingers down the backside of Bilal’s naked body in bed. Relative to the intimacy—even love—shown in that scene, anal (or virginal) sex can seem superficial and even contrived. This is not to say that people who fall in love should necessarily be monogamous; rather, the implication is that even an “open” relationship of (a reasonable amount of) separate physical sex with others pales in comparison to the depth of emotional intimacy that can manifest sexually for two people who are in love. It could be that were a sequel to have been made of Malik and Bilal years later, their love would be solid enough even though the sex has become stale that they would be fine with either or both of them having non-emotional, physical sex with others from time to time, assuming that neither would impose this on (or hide this from) the other. Separate sex with romantic connection or feelings for another person is another story, however, and the emotional hurt that either Malik or Bilal would feel is so engrained in (normal) human nature that such an imposition would be unethical, even before marriage.

Malik and Bilal do not marry, as it is presumably illegal in the Muslim country. Because Malik has promised before falling for Bilal to enter into a contractual marriage with his cousin and friend, Syrine, in order that her baby, when born, would legally have a father even though Malik is not the biological father, and her unmarried pregnancy would not be discovered in that conservative society, Malik and Bilal have difficulty deciding whether Malik should follow through with the marriage. Bilal is against it for obvious reasons, but Malik wants to help Syrine. It is not as though Malik would be living with Syrine, so with the help of Sara helping her son and Bilal on this emotionally difficult matter, Bilal agrees and even stands as Malik’s best man. After the civil (i.e., non-religious) wedding ceremony, Sara has Malik, Bilal, Syrine, and her bridesmaid repeat, “The marriage is only for the good of the child.” Everyone is on the same page, and no one his hurt emotionally. Even though the expanded arrangement is unconventional, it is arguably ethical precisely because everyone’s feelings are taken into account. Malik’s benevolence to Syrine (and her baby in standing in as his father) and the love of Malik and Bilal for each other (for they are living together as a couple) are compatible.

In both Augustine and Leibniz, justice is love as universal benevolence. That the benevolence is universal, we are all due benevolence from others, which means that none of us deserve to be hurt emotionally. This is why it is significant, albeit subtle, that Malik puts Bilal first, rather than imposing emotional hurt on Bilal by dismissing his hurt feelings regarding Malik technically marrying Syrine. The marriage goes forward because Bilal’s misgivings have been adequately addressed not only by Malik, but also by Sara, who has essentially adopted Bilal. As she says at one point, he is now a guest, not a servant. This is why I believe it can be concluded that, hypothetically, were Bilal to object to Malik continuing to have anonymous sex after he and Bilal have bonded (which Malik does not do in the film), Malik would stop having sex with others so Bilal would not be hurt emotionally. By implication, were Bilal fine emotionally with Malik having non-emotional, physical sex sometimes with other men, Malik’s doing so would not be unethical or detrimental to his relationship with Bilal.

Hence my conclusion that the ethical, good guys (and gals) come out on top in the film. Caring is the thread that runs throughout the story. Sara has come around on Malik being gay and she even helps her son and Bilal on whether Malik should help Syrine by marrying her and helping her raise her baby, whose father is another man.  Abdelaziz, having overruled his parents’ objections to him marrying Sara, a Christian, pushes back against Sara’s prejudice against gays and even urges Malik to tell him the truth regarding his cancer. Last but not least, Bilal and Malik have such a bond of connection, affection, and even love that neither treats the other’s emotions as an externality that can or should be disregarded or indifferently run over. The film thus presents a moving picture of family and romantic relationships as they should be, ethically speaking, even if they are not conventional.

All of Me

The transmigration of souls is usually associated with reincarnation. In the film, All of Me (1984), at the moment of death, a person’s soul can be put “into” another person who is alive such that both people “co-exist” consciously and can control the same body. The comedy is at its best when Steve Martin, who plays Roger Cobb, into whose body the dying millionaire, Edwina Cutwater, is transferred, physically enacts an alternating struggle between Edwina’s feminine movements and Roger’s masculine movements. Martin’s physical talent is amazing. The tension within Roger’s (and Edwina’s) shared body is gradually resolved as the two “souls” become friends—attesting to the underlying goodness of Edwina in stark distinction to the sordid character of Terry Hoskins, who has falsely agreed to let Edwina share her body—two souls and one body—instead of Roger’s in exchange for $20 million. It is the goodness of Roger and the unfolding of Edwina’s goodness up against the absolute badness of Terry that underlies the film’s narrative. In the end, the good win out, and Terry’s soul is put into a horse when Edwina’s soul is transferred by a Hindu guru from Roger to Terry. With Terry’s body all to herself, Edwina is free to become romantically involved with Roger. The good souls win and the squalid one is put in a horse. The upshot is that justice does indeed apply to souls.

Terry’s arrangement to accept Edwina’s soul in exchange for $20 million is a rouse from Terry’s standpoint of disbelief in the transmigration of souls. When Terry realizes that Edwina’s soul has accidentally been transferred to Roger, Terry’s strategy is to send the Hindu guru back to India so Edwina’s soul could not be transferred from Roger; Terry could then enjoy Edwina’s fortune without paying the price by having Edwina as a “live-in,” permanent “roommate” of sorts. Roger, with Edwina in his body, Tyrone Wattell, a blind jazz-player, and Prahka Lasa, the Hindu guru, join forces to trap Terry into taking Edwina’s soul as per the stipulations in Edwina’s will. At one point, Terry resorts to a gun, which puts her in the position of wanting to make a deal: in exchange for not being turned into the police (for the third time), she would give her body to Edwina and have her own soul put into her father’s horse, in which Terry presumably could do no harm. The movie ends when this new agreement is exacted. The good people—Roger, Tyrone, Prahka, and even Edwina—are rid of the bad “apple,” Terry. Having led an unhappy life, Edwina is finally willing to enjoy life in her second body, which is much more beautiful than her first one.

The good/bad dichotomy that serves as the film’s leitmotif and basic framework is not as “black and white” as it may appear by the end of the film. During her first life, Edwina is nasty, especially to her lawyer, Roger. By the end if the film, Edwina seems to be another character completely. Both her very bad and good qualities belie a strict good/bad dichotomy regarding souls. This element of “grayness” fits the Roman Catholic notion of purgatory, a spiritual state after death in which a sinful soul can redeem itself by paying the price for having committed serious sins yet being repentant. The strict “heaven or hell” dichotomy is based on the false assumption that souls are either good or bad.

In actuality, most of us are probably in-between being saints or demons. Even so, a basic difference between people who are basically good and those who are nasty at the core level of their being cannot be ignored, and we may have an instinctual urge for justice as a means of placing a pathos of distance between us and the really bad guys. In the film, Terry will not repent; she will not change, whereas Edwina does. Even Roger becomes nicer to Edwina. Most of us are works in progress—some people seem to relax as they age whereas others become bitter. One of the few benefits of aging is having accrued enough observational experience of people to be able to intuit the difference and steer clear of the baddies.

In the film, Terry finds her place in a horse’s body, so perhaps in it she “turns over a new leaf” and becomes charitable at least to anyone who rides her. Perhaps rather than a “black and white” dichotomy, the entrenched bad souls just haven’t found their niche yet. Edwina finds her spot in Terry, and Terry finds hers in a horse. Roger finds his in being a musician rather than a lawyer. The afterlife dichotomy, which is arguably artificial, fails to incorporate this kind of trajectory of finding one’s own place. 

The Count of Monte Cristo

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is a Biblical saying that is perhaps as well known as it is typically ignored in the midst of passion. Even the advice that revenge is better served up as a cold dish rather than immediately when the grill is still hot is difficult to heed. The 1975 film, The Count of Monte-Cristo, can be likened to a “how-to” recipe book on how to exact revenge against multiple people, one after the other until the sense dawns on the avenger that one’s one life has been utterly consumed by the desire and then feels empty once the deserved suffering has been sufficiently inflicted. It is admittedly very difficult to walk away from a grievous injustice if the agent of the harm is allowed to evade suffering that is deserved. In the film, however, Abbé Faria, a Christian priest who has been unjustly held in an island prison for fifteen years, nonetheless urges Edmond Dantes, whose prison cell is connected to Faria’s tunnel, to resist the temptation to ruin the lives of the four men who had unjustly imprisoned Edmund, including De Villefort, Danglars, and General Fernand Mondego. In the end, Dantes, as the Count of Monte-Crisco, pays dearly for having gone down the road of vengeance. Even if the suffering inflicted on the unjust is deserved ethically, distinctly religious implications should be considered lest avengers are left existentially empty rather than as one might expect, finally at peace. The Christian notion of the Kingdom of God is prominent in this distinctly religious regard.

Edmund Dantes is a fervent believer of the religious significance of vengeance. It is, he says, a “holy remedy . . . an eye for an eye.” He also insists, “Revenge is a sweet thing to live for, or die for.” So Abbé Faria tells Dantes while both are in prison, “Vengeance belongs to the Lord, Edmund. Turn away from such unholy thoughts before they destroy you.” Nietzsche points out that ascribing vengeance to God carries with it the collateral damage of a contradiction being in a deity that incorporates a vice while still being omnibenevolent. That conception of God is discredited, and thus tot, or “dead,” precisely because of the contradiction, but could it not be argued that God is being benevolent to the victims of unjust harm by subjecting the culprits to harm? Even so, inflicting any harm, even if ethically deserved, can be said to exclude the peace that come with forgiveness even and especially enemies.

The distinctly religious question in the film is whether exacting revenge is a “holy remedy” justified by the committing of an injustice in the first place, or an unholy thought because revenge involves the intentional infliction of harm. The first claim is belied by the obfuscation of “holy,” a distinctly religious idea, with “injustice,” a distinctly ethical idea. Whereas inflicting harm can be justified ethically as deserved given the harm from an injustice, holiness itself can be said to exclude any infliction of harm. Instead, forgiveness goes with the holy. In fact, Jesus Christ’s conception of the Father’s kingdom can be said to be filled with compassion in the face of the pain of the human needs of a person’s enemies and even detractors. That revenge could ruin the life of an avenger may factor into a utilitarian-based cost-benefit analysis of whether to exact revenge, but any such negative consequence is not why a person seeking a taste of the holy via the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus in the Gospels would not engage in vengeance.

In the film while Abbé Faria and Dantes are digging a tunnel so they could escape, Faria gives Dantes the map to a treasure so Edmond could do good deeds rather than seek revenge. Faria’s strategy fails because although Edmund finds the treasure and promises himself that he would do good things with it, he actually uses his wealth and self-donned title of the Count of Monte-Crisco to take revenge on “four unjust, selfish men.” In fact, after the dual with the son of Mercedes, his former fiancée, Dantes says, “Providence again! I am the emissary of God. I’ve been spared to carry out his will.” In addition to engaging in the vice of vengeance, Edmund is guilty of the sin of presuming to know the will of God with the pride of claiming to be God’s emissary. It is interesting, therefore, that Edmund does not find peace after he has exquisitely vanquished the four men. This point is apparent in the final scene, when Edmund is trying to convince Mercedes to return to him rather than to move to Africa to be near her son. The religious existential toll that the series of vengeful strategies have taken on Edmund Dantes is finally revealed; the Abbé was right all along.

In trying to justify to Mercedes the vengeance taken on her husband, General Mondego, Edmund lies, “That was simple justice. Believe me, it gave me no joy.” It did in fact give him a feeling of satisfaction, which, by the way, if different than peace. Mercedes does not take the bait; instead, she replies, “Avenging angels may not ask forgiveness of their victims.” Even if the unjust deserve ethically to suffer, avengers would find asking for such forgiveness to be humiliating because of the suffering that they have undergone unjustly. Edmund replies, “I am no longer an instrument of God. I’ve been plunged back into nothingness. I’m searching for something lost. My soul; my self.” Unfortunately, she does not point out that he has been no such instrument and it is impious for him to hold onto that belief. Making this point would develop the distinctively religious element of the film. She could even say that even if her husband and the three other unjust men deserved to be punished for having inflicted severe suffering—ten years in prison!—on Edmund even though he was innocent, he should have transcended the ethical domain to act in a pious distinctively religious manner by forgiving the four culprits. That films shirk back from developing such theological and philosophical dialogue does not mean that the medium is not capable of doing so to get viewers thinking (but not to indoctrinate them).  Teasing out tension between the ethical and religious domains is a worthy task of the medium of film. In this film, however, Mercedes simply replies that he would never find the man he had been before being imprisoned. “That person died,” she laments. She tells him that she hopes he will find peace, but she does point out to him that he will not find peace because he has engaged himself so fully in exacting revenge, for satisfaction is not the same as peace.

I submit that presuming to know God’s will as if any human being could be omniscient (all-knowing), which is a divine attribute, and to being an instrument of God as if on a holy mission are sins, whereas vengeance is an ethical vice. That God demands that human beings leave the vice to God does not mean that the vice itself is thereby religious rather than ethical in nature. Moreover, that religion and ethics are related does not mean that the former reduces to the latter, or that the latter is itself religious. I contend that it is because vengeance involves the infliction of harm and that is exogenous to being in the presence of holiness that God urges us not to seek revenge. Put another way, that vice is antithetical to the humane compassion to an enemy in trouble and thus to Jesus’s conception in the Gospels of the Kingdom of God. An eye for an eye carried on and on, and the whole world would be blind because none of us act completely in line with what is just; only God is just from the standpoint of omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipotence. It is from this standpoint, that we should all give each other some leeway at least, that the Creator-Creature distinction is vital to keep in mind instead of merely applying the ethical principle of justice by which avengers legitimately claim that the unjust deserve to be punished. Religion and ethics are distinct domains even though they interrelate. Edmund Dantes may have a point that the four men deserve to suffer for having inflicted suffering on him, but he himself is left empty ironically from having presumed to have been on a holy mission even though inflicting harm is antithetical to forgiveness. Interestingly the name Dantes is very close to Dante, a philosopher and poet who wrote in the Renaissance on the rings of hell. Being plunged back into nothingness, in search of one’s self, and even one’s very soul, seems like a good description of what being in the state of hell must be like.

Lord of War

Lord of War (2005) is a film in which a Ukrainian-born American arms dealer, Yuri Orlov, and his brother, Vitaly, who works with Yuri when not in voluntary rehab for drug abuse, make money by selling military arms to dictators including Andre Baptiste of Liberia. Whereas Yuri is able to maintain a mental wall keeping him from coming to terms with his contribution to innocent people getting killed by the autocrats who are his customers, Vitality is finally unable to resist facing his own complicity, and that of his brother. This itself illustrates that moral concerns may have some influence on some people but not others. Yuri’s position, which can be summed up as, what they do with the guns that we sell them is none of our business, contrasts with Vitaly as he realizes that as soon as the Somalian warlord takes the guns off the trucks, villages down the hill will be killed. Vitaly even sees a woman and her young child being hacked to death down below. Yuri tries to manage his brother so the sale can be completed and the two brothers can get out of Somalia, but Vitaly has finally had enough and has come to the conclusion that he and Yuri have been morally culpable by selling guns to even sadistic dictators like Andre Baptiste. Even as Yuri ignores his own conscience, Vitaly finally cannot ignore the dictates of his own, and he takes action. Does he ignore his happiness, and thus his self-interest, in being willing to die to save the villagers by blowing up (admittedly only) one of the two trucks, or has he reasoned through his conscience and found that it coincides with his happiness? In other words, are the moral dictates of a person’s conscience necessarily in line with a person’s happiness, and thus one’s self-interest? This is a question that the filmmaker could have explored in the film.

Joseph Butler (1692-1752), a European, Anglican bishop, theologian, and philosopher, “explicitly upheld the claims of conscience against all rivals, especially interest”, otherwise known as self-interest, which Butler claims is interested in the happiness of the self.[1] To be sure, because “’the greatest satisfactions to ourselves depend upon our having benevolence in a due degree’”, “’even from self-love we should endeavor to get over all inordinate regard to and consideration of ourselves,’ and cultivate other-regarding desires.”[2] Even with this extension, Butler took it for granted that “the dictates of conscience and self-love coincide,” even though, when he considered “which is the real arbiter of virtue, he [always came] down on the side of conscience.”[3] In the “cool hour” passage in one of his sermons, he asserts, “’Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such; yet that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it’”.[4]  This does not mean that the ground of rightness is conduciveness to happiness, [and thus self-interest, and the passage] does not even mean that the motive of self-love is a good motive—the good motive is ‘affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such’—it simply means that as a motive to action, self-love is more influential than the dictates of conscience.”[5] Yet rational self-interest, which is based or premised on self-love, is coincident to matters of conscience, he insists, so why should it matter which is more influential? 

Firstly, Butler includes the happiness of heaven in self-interest, and so just looking at our embodied life here, even rational self-interest can give different results than conscience. "Butler believed, on theological grounds . . ., that virtuous behavior brings the greatest happiness in the end."[6] Secondly, Butler states that other-regarding benevolent motives (and acts) do not necessarily impact the moral agent’s mental state, and thus happiness. A person can indeed follow one’s own conscience to act benevolently such that the other person’s mental state will change without one’s own necessarily changing (i.e., being happier). So in terms of ethics alone, excluding theology, even Butler would admit that self-interest and the normative dictates of conscience can conflict. From this standpoint, Vitaly's ethic in the film can be analyzed. 

Vitaly was lost and unhappy both in being a cook in his parents’ restaurant and working for his brother Yuri. In fact, his desire to escape—to feel happy—had been so great that he resorted to cocaine and repeatedly went to a clinic without success. It is only in coming to terms with the immorality of what he and his brother were doing in selling arms to dictators around the world that Vitaly found meaning sufficient to act with purpose. In witnessing a man in the nearby village use a machete to kill a woman and her young child, Vitaly does not decide to destroy the weapons to keep the warlord from killing all of the people in the small village in order to have purpose; rather, he is overwhelmed emotionally by the severity of the harm to the two innocent people and out of this sentiment he reasoned that by destroying the guns in the trucks, he could prevent the deaths of all of the villagers. That Vitaly found purpose—essentially, found himself—is not his motive even though as he lays dying after being shot by Baptiste’s son for blowing up one of the trucks, Vitaly finally is at peace and then he dies. It is like in Jainism, where spiritual freedom from the material realm is only realized as a person lies dying without even relying on one’s heart.

Therefore, even though acting justly by honoring rather than bracketing the dictates of conscience may, and Butler would say, does coincide with the self-interest that stems from self-love, being motivated does not depend on the extra push from being happy as a result even though happiness may result. In other words, the film can be interpreted as contradicting Butler’s theory by showing that Butler depends too much on self-love and its interests (i.e., to be personally happy as a result) in motivating a person to follow one’s conscience. Other-regard, or benevolence, can be oriented to improving the mental states, and thus self-interests, of other people without being motivated by one’s own happiness being positively affected too. This is so even if the moral agent is happier as a result.

To be sure, Vitaly clearly is very troubled internally by Yuri’s instance that Vitaly not disrupt or impede the sale going through. Yuri is doubtlessly motivated by self-interest, but in terms of money and being able to leave alive. That he has no moral scruples does not mean that he is oblivious to how bad his customers are as people. Vitaly, I submit, cannot live with himself unless he blows up the sale, literally, so in this respect he can be said to be motivated not only because he does not want the innocents below to be shot after he leaves, but also because he wants to improve his mental state from being in such pain. However, his ethical/mental crisis is triggered by his having witnessed the horrendous double-murder with the murderer calmly walking away with impunity. Being so emotionally shocked —in Hume’s terms, judging morally by having a strong sentiment of disapprobation—is the basis of Vitaly’s motivation to follow his conscience even though that means betraying his own brother.

The operative motive is not Vitaly’s rational self-interest in being happy or at peace, as Butler would claim, especially as Vitaly undoubtedly knows that he would probably be killed. What people are capable of doing to other people can be so horrific that a moral agent may emotionally disapprove so much and be so motivated to forestall further harm that one’s own self-interest qua happiness is of no concern. Even if relieving one’s own internal angst is motivated by a non-rational, instinctual urge, and one may indeed be at peace afterward, the angst and peace can be effects of something else that is triggering the distinctly normative, or ethical, process that ends with a decision and an action. It is Vitaly’s strong emotional reaction in seeing a woman and young child hacked to death out in the open that is decisive in motivating him to try to blow up both trucks so nobody else in the tents below would be killed. It can perhaps even be said that he is willing to sacrifice himself, and thus his happiness, to save the lives of others. It is an odd, unfortunate, commentary on human nature itself that even if Yuri had also witnessed the violence, he would still be intent on completing the sale. Yuri’s ethical compass is extremely compromised—he even reasons that because eventually lies become the norm in a marriage, it is only logical to start one off by lying. His wife Ava leaves him, and his parents disown him, and Vitaly is dead. So much for self-love and even rational self-interest. Butler gave them too much credit. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t.

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1. Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons,” Philosophy 27 (1952), 329-44, p. 332.
2. Stephan Darwall, “Introduction,” in Joseph Butler, Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue. Ed., Stephen Darwall (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 7.
3. Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons,” Philosophy 27 (1952), p. 332.
4. Ibid., p. 337.
5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 340

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Diwali, or Deepavali, is one of the biggest festivals in India. More than a billion Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists in the world celebrate the festival of lights in which good triumphs over evil. “Despite its deep religious significance, Diwali today is also a cultural festival observed by people regardless of faith.”[1] In this regard, Diwali is like Christmas, which plenty of non-Christians celebrate as a day of giving complete with the secularized myth of Santa Claus, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Frosty the Snowman. To claim that Diwali is exclusively Hindu or Christmas is only a Christian holiday—and thus in resentment to ignore either holiday—violates the spirit that both share. The “Happy holidays” greeting is an oxymoron, given its underlying motive of resentment. Yet if this were the extent of human aggression, the world would be a much better place. The Indian documentary film, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), reveals much worse than the passive aggression of dismissing a national holiday as if it did not exist. The violence unjustifiably and wantonly inflicted by university police on students at several universities who are protesting caste discrimination and the politically partisan coup at the Film and Television Institute of India, goes beyond even the harm exacted by the discrimination by caste. A Diwali celebration is shown in the film, and this raises the question of whether we can of yet even assuming our species' “progress,” celebrate the victory of good over evil as long as human beings in power abuse their discretion with impunity.

The woman narrating the film reads from her letters to her estranged boyfriend, whose family has forbidden the relationship due to her lower caste. The film opens with a protest of students at the Film and Television Institute of India. The Hindu Nationalist Party had installed a second-rate actor as the director of the school, and students objected to the partisan nature of the appointment. Since the strike began, the school’s administration has responded by rule-making, doubtlessly as a means of tightening control. Five students were arrested in a midnight siege, undercutting the administration’s rationalist approach of rule-making.

The film then moves to a non-student woman giving a speech. She reports that police at Hyderabad Central University have been raping and beating students amid protests. That university’s upper-caste administration went after a Ph.D. student for protesting how untouchables were being treated in India. Prime Minister Modi’s government labeled the student an extremist. Other students were barred from the library (which reflects an administration’s lack of academic values) and their dorms. According to the speaker, “The students are on the front line against the fascist government.”

The woman narrating the film is left wondering about the victory of good or evil being celebrated at the festival. “I’m not sure which is which,” she says, doubtlessly referring to the caste system being used as a weapon by her ex-boyfriend’s parents. This line is like that by Gandhi in which he remarked that he used to think that the Vedas were truth but came to realize that truth itself is divine so unjust customs are not divine even if they are in the scriptures. I used to think that truth was God, but came to realize that God is truth.

The film then moves to New Delhi, to a student protest at Jawaharlal Nehru University. A speaker at a rally claims that for Lenin, democracy is necessary for socialism, and that social and political change are both needed. The presumption of egalitarianism in Soviet Communism is debatable, especially in practice, so the inclusion of socialism at an anti-caste protest may be problematic. What about the students who were against the injustices of the caste system but were not supporters of Lenin? It is perhaps not easy to keep a protest focused on its main point. The speaker is on firmer ground who argues that a low-caste person should be able to get a doctorate. Students chant, “Stop the violence against students.” The need for this slogan becomes clear when the film turns from the narrator’s empathy for the women police who are doubtlessly not wealthy. Are they really so different from the students? The narrator doesn’t think so, but then images of the police getting violent, even being joined by the military, saturate the screen as students chant, “A government of violence.” The narrator remarks that any ideology that opposes that of the Hindu nationalist government’s ideology is not allowed to exist. Campus police at JNU go on a rampage, behaving like wild animals under the cover of government. If the beatings and raping are to teach the protesting students a lesson, then what exactly is the lesson that is actually being “taught,” and how presumptuous is it for thugs to teach university students a lesson! 

The policemen on the right and left, respectively, are beating students. Actual footage!

The policeman in the foreground is about to destroy the security camera. From that act, it can be inferred that he knows that what he is doing is wrong. 

Clearly, university police are not members of a university community. I contend that the students should have shifted to protest universities having police at all. Organizations properly have security guards, who protect the property, whereas governments have police power. Indeed, the basis of a state is its monopoly of violence.

At Yale, a police state on steroids, on one corner on the night I saw the film on campus in 2023. An academic campus is no place for non-academic employees to impose passive-aggressive intimidation as a primitive and flawed deterrent through maintaining a saturated presence on campus (and even off campus!) on a routine rather than an as-needed basis. Amid such encroachments, Yale students knew that the campus had become a police state, and that the university administration was paranoid (or had succumbed to hyper-protective parents). 

Perhaps police who beat and rape students should be beaten and raped themselves; perhaps that would teach them a lesson. That goes for the government officials who give the orders in cases in which abuse of discretion by police employees does not account for all of the violence.

In the film, a student speaker claims that filmmakers should not think in black and white stark terms, but rather, in nuanced terms. Raping and beating another human being is hardly nuanced, however, and fortunately the film does not approach the heinous human beings who perpetrate such acts as such. Furthermore, given the government-sanctioning of the violence against non-violent students without the government being held accountable, can Diwali’s claim that good is victorious over evil be believed merely because it is so in myths? The violence shown in the film of police beating students and even taking out a security camera—hence evincing the arrogant presumption of being above being held accountable—makes clear that something more than protests is necessary for good to triumph over evil. It bears remembering that Thomas Hobbes asserts in his famous text, Leviathan, that a person can still act to protect one’s self-preservation even against the state. That right is not based on a state, but is inalienable because the instinct for self-preservation is for Hobbes the main human motive. In the film, the students should have had the means to protect themselves bodily, though of course Gandhi would rebuke this claim, pointing to the moral force in non-violent civic disobedience. Indeed, the moral depravity of the police (and the government) in the film, even more than the injustices of the caste system, should arguably have been the main point of the protests as they went on. The film makes this shift very well, and perhaps this is the main lesson from the film.

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1. Harmeet Kaur, “What to Know about Diwali, the Festival of Lights,” CNN.com, November 11, 2023.

Oppenheimer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding.

The prosecutor, Tad Lawson, having liberated death camps, rebuffs the General Matt Merrin’s pressure, and the four defendants get life sentences.  Whether Merrin’s claim that the U.S. needs the support of the German people in the Cold War is valid or not, pressuring a prosecutor is clearly depicted as unethical and so Lawson comes off as virtuous in resisting the exogenous pressure even though he is in the American military. It is certainly ironic that the victor army would push for lighter sentences for the vanquished; typically the question is whether a trial by the victors can be fair. Israel’s kidnapping and subsequent trial of Eichmann brought this question to the forefront. A trial in Germany would have also brought up this question. Britain would have been a good choice that would have avoided the conflict of interest.  In the film, Lawson successfully resists exploiting a conflict of interest by deciding not to curry favor with the general by urging the judges to go light in sentencing the defendants.

To be sure, chief judge Haywood has an opportunity to give a light sentence to one of the defendants. Ernst Janning, an expert jurist before the NAZI period and the Minister of Justice under Hitler, is the only one of the defendants who should have known better than knowingly convict innocent people, including Irene Hoffman for having sex with a much-older Jewish man, and sterilizing others, including Rudolph Petersen for being mentally impaired. Janning gives an impassioned speech to the court in which he admits his guilt, and that he should indeed have known better. Haywood holds Janning responsible for the latter’s use of the judicial system to send Jews and Poles to the death camps anyway; the crimes are simply too heinous for justice to be ignored. In the final scene, Haywood tells Janning that he should have known that it would come to such crimes the moment he convicted a person Janning knew was innocent. Using the gutted-out infrastructure of a judiciary to enable the state to engage in mass murder seems to particularly bother the chief judge. That is to say: a jurist who has written juridical books has no excuse in making a mockery of a judiciary.

After the last scene, the film indicates that none of the actual defendants of the American trial of jurists were still in prison as of 1961, when the film was made. Janning is loosely based on Louis Schlegelberger, who was State Secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice. He got a life sentence for conspiracy to perpetuate war crimes and crimes against humanity. He instituted procedures for the persecution of Jews and Poles, and thus played a vital role in the mass extermination. As much as such severe harm deserves harsh justice, he was released just a few years after having been convicted for “health reasons” even though he died in 1970. Similarly, Rudolf Oeschey had his life sentence commuted to 20 years, but he was released in just 8 years. Guenther Joel, chief prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice, got a 10 year sentence but was released in 1951. The same for Ernst Lautz, the Chief Public Prosecutor of the People’s Court. Herbert Klemm, State Secretary in the Ministry, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released after just 10 years. Oswald Rothaug, a senior public prosecutor in the People’s Court and Chief Justice of the Special Court, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released in just 9 years. Justice was clearly not served, and the film acknowledges this frailty of justice “in the real world.” The implications are that none of the fictional defendants would actually serve a life sentence, and the American military, which had tried and failed to get its way in the sentencing, ultimately gets its way. Any relief from Lawson resisting the pressure to urge light sentences such that justice wins the day is short-lived as the viewers read the film’s caveat at the end that in the end, all of the actual defendants of the jurist Nuremberg trial were still in prison as of 1961.

Interestingly, Maximilian Schell, who plays Hans Rolfe, the German defense attorney who applies NAZI thunder in severely questioning Irene Hoffman—such zeal being objected to by Lawson but allowed by the chief judge—beat out Spencer Tracy, who plays the chief judge who comes down on the side of justice (and is fair in ruling on the objections during the trial) and thus resists manipulations by “friendly” former NAZI civilians and the American military and a U.S. Senator, to get the Best Actor Oscar in 1961. Spencer Tracy is so mild-mannered throughout the film that his acting was typical rather than exceptional, whereas Richard Widmark, who plays Lawson, should have been in contention with Schell for the Oscar. Both actors are impassioned and frustrated, hence they both drew on strong emotions in playing their respective roles. Perhaps both should have gotten the award. The world, however, is not so just, as the movie makes clear in the end even if justice momentarily has the upper hand.

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.