Apocalypse Now

Imagine being an American soldier sent to Vietnam to fight the militarized Marxist Communists there. The Vietnam War provides many examples of such a plight. Now consider how much worse it would be to be sent into a seemingly constantly rainy, hot and humid jungle deep in Cambodia to assassinate an American colonel because he is a renegade Special Forces military officer who has gone insane. Just in case this is not dire enough, simply add in that he has the local village protecting their god with weapons. Surely safer secret military missions exist than to assassinate an insane former special-ops man with a small army of devotees. This is the central plot of the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who had directed The Godfather earlier that decade. Behind the plot of Apocalypse Now is a dichotomy wherein human nature itself is bifurcated into a dichotomy of good and bad. This is interesting because some of the characters may fall in between, suggesting that human nature has a gray zone in which most of us live.

Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando are in both films. All of the characters played by both actors in those films have both laudable and sordid qualities. In The Godfather, Dulvall’s Tom Hagen delivers the Godfather’s threats to innocent people on pain of death and yet evinces steadfast loyalty to the crime family that had adopted him when he was a boy. In Apocalypse Now, the actor’s Lt. Col. Kilgore loves the smell of toxic napalm gas in the morning and is loyal to the United States and brave rather than cowardly. Similarly, in The Godfather, Brando’s Don Vito Corleone gives orders to his henchmen to murder people and yet he strives for peace between the families in the wake of the murder by one of those families of his son, Sonny. In Apocalypse Now, Brando’s Col. Kurtz tortures and brainwashes people, including Capt. Willard, whom the U.S. Army has sent to assassinate the insane Kurtz, and yet Kurtz politely asks Willard to urge Kurtz’s son back in the U.S. not to judge Kurtz too harshly. Kurtz is as sensitive as he is insane and cruel; he even has a copy of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which traces historical shifts from cruel customs to moral and religious values. Interestingly, when Willard hacks Kurtz to death with a machete, the villagers are shown hacking a cow to death as a religious sacrifice; editing shows a back and forth between the two killings, and the villages then drop their guns and kneel to Willard, treating him as if he were a god for having killed another god, Kurtz.

The relationship between ethics and theology in the Abrahamic religions that is analyzed in Kierkegaard’s short text, Fear and Trembling, comes to mind in the interlaced camera shots of Willard murdering Kurtz and the villagers sacrificing a bull. To Kierkegaard, Abraham is guilty of being unethical in attempting to murder Isaac even though Abraham is faithful to Yahweh’s divine command to sacrifice Isaac, with a knife! The ethical verdict against attempted murder and the approbation of Abraham’s religious faithfulness to a divine command at great personal cost to Abraham are both valid. The co-extant validity of two different, albeit related, domains of human experience point back to the complexity of human nature itself. And yet, in the film, the depiction of humanity’s higher nature and brute cruelty, as well as its susceptibility to mental illness, in the Col. Kurtz character is set within a larger dichotomous framework in which people are either good or bad, and no one is in between. The complexity of Kurtz’s character itself suggests that the film’s dichotomous paradigm of human nature may be artificial, perhaps even imposed by the structure of the human mind along the lines of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

During what can be characterized in terms of Joseph Campbell’s notion of a hero’s journey, Willard (the film’s protagonist) is hosted for dinner and an overnight stay by a French family in Cambodia. The daughter, who treats Willard to opium and sex in her bed as if both activities were routine, tells him, “There are two of you. You kill and you love. You are a god and an animal.” We are indeed a species in the animal kingdom, but it is doubtful that we constitute gods, although generals on a battlefield may come close. In the film, Gettysburg (1993), Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who holds the line against charging confederate soldiers by flanking them while having to resort to bayonets, says, “Generals can do anything. There’s nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.” That film is based on Michael Shaara’s book, The Killer Angels,” the title of which comes from Chamberlain’s recollection of his father’s reaction to a speech that Joshua made as a student in which he quoted from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man.” Joshua’s father, as later recollected by Joshua, had remarked at the time, “Well, boy, if [man is] an angel, he’s sure a murderin’ angel.” In the film, Pvt. Buster Kirain replies to Col. Chamberlain of man, “Well, if he’s an angel, alright then. But he damn well must be a killer angel.” This line went on to become iconic. If we are angels, then surly we are killer angels. This line fits the overall paradigm of Apocolypse Now.

A line by the photo journalist, played by Dennis Hopper, to Willard also contributes to the dichotomous paradigm. “There is only love and hate. You either love a person or hate a person.” Even so, the fact that the demented photographer idolizes Kurtz as “a genius” and a “poet-warrior” even though Kurtz has threatened to kill the photographer if he takes another picture of Kurtz suggests that something in interpersonal relations exists between love and hate, or maybe both can exist together, besides like and dislike as gray areas. Similarly, Col. Kurtz tells Willard, “horror and ethical atrocities are your friends; if not, they are your enemies.” There is apparently no in between. Interestingly, the film ends with Willard’s voice-over, “the horror, the horror” in a tone of astonishment at the sheer extent of it that he has witnessed in human nature. Behind the gloss of assassination lies sordid murder, of which he is guilty. Even Willard is difficult to assess in terms of good and bad.

We mere mortals are quick to judge one another as either “good” or “bad.” The distinction between ethics and religion confounds such an easy categorization of people under the blanket labels of “good” and “bad.”  Apocalypse Now presents the dichotomy as artificial—even perhaps insane—ironically because Kurtz, and even perhaps Willard, are presented as having both laudable and not so praiseworthy qualities. Even in Kurtz’s insanity, are there not credible nuggets of insight of which he is capable? Willard does not dismiss Kurtz’s philosophizing outright; at least Kurtz can reason through his philosophical claims. The philosophizing of the photojournalist is so insane that no line of reasoning whatsoever can be detected. People are not always so bad that a person must vacate to Aruba to collect oneself before getting married (such a marriage may not be wise), and yet people are not so exclusively good that a prudent person would let down one’s guard. In assessing other people, a wise person takes into consideration the distortive mental impact of the dichotomous mental paradigm of the human mind that may go back to the brain’s dichotomous left-brain/right-brain physical structure.

Equals

The film, Equals (2015), presents a fictional story in which people in “the collective” are deemed healthy by the health and safety “police-state” as long as emotions are not detected. Being healthy is predicated on the assumption that emotion just gets in the way, not only of work, but in life more generally. To be sure, they can indeed be difficult for people who have suffered severe psychological and/or physical abuse, or have lost a loved one whether by a death or outright rejection. In the film, Silas voluntarily submits to a cure to the illness of having emotions coming through consciousness because he has been told that Nia, the woman whom he has fallen in love with, has just died. In a modification of Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Silas does not commit suicide; instead, he gets the injection because the emotional pain of having lost his loved one is simply too much. Anyone who has fallen in love only to be rejected would be tempted to have emotion itself blocked rather than to go on feeling. As a testament to just how deep love is as an emotion, Silas still feels something for Nia even after the injection as the couple travel on a train to escape from the totalitarian collective. He reaches out to put one of his hands on one of hers. Deep inside, he is fighting the “cure.” In actuality, the cure is the disease, foisted by an authoritarian collective on individuals.

Silas and Nia both work in the educational-books department of the collective. At first, he pays her no more attention than he does to the other coworkers, but such equality is based on no one having access to emotion. Rather than being healthy, as the collective claims, such an equality is artificial because emotion is innately part of human nature. A person who refuses to feel emotion due to past emotional/physical abuse actually suffers from severe psychological problems because “stuffing” natural emotions is actually repression. The quip, “emotions have never worked out for me,” is a cop-out that actually makes matters worse, psychologically. Rather than making a person fit for a romantic relationship, such wholesale repression actually inhibits any genuine relationship. A retired psychiatrist once told me that if a person has reached the point of refusing to feel emotion, that person has severe emotional issues that need to be addressed in therapy. In the film, such pathology is considered to be healthy, but Silas and Nia rightly reject the collective’s version of reality, which, by the way, is said to be found by investigating outer rather than inner space. Hence the book department's writers write on astronomy, whether as nonfiction or fiction. 

The assumption that the answer to the question of ultimate reality is to be found far away in outer space is itself problematic because astronomy and ontology are two different fields of knowledge. Put another way, perception and empirical study are bounded and thus cannot capture raw reality itself.

To be sure, astronomical science can be used as an analogy for human dynamics, through neither one gets us to an answer concerning ultimate reality. Even as deeply meaningful as loving another person is, the emotional intensity cannot reach reality in the sense of Kant’s “things in themselves.” 

The emotionless equality of humans that is espoused by the collective as a sort of dogma can be understood as artificial by looking at the cosmic background radiation “photo,” which shows areas of greater and lesser heat—the outer edge of the Big Bang’s blast is not internally equal. Similarly, Silas begins to look at Mia more than he looks at his other coworkers. He even stares at times, which she notices. She in turn begins to look at him more. The quality of increasing inequality can be discerned from the film in the gradual process of falling in love.

First, Silas’s eyes are increasingly drawn to Mia. He notices her facial and eye expressions, which take on greater meaning and significant for him emotionally, whereas the nonverbal expressions of his other coworkers are no more significant, and so a new inequality is evident, which is entirely natural, just as the cosmic background radiation of the universe shows unequal temperatures.

Second, certain statements made by Mia take on added significance emotionally for Silas. Whereas he could easily forget something that another coworker may say to him, Mia’s ideas are as though etched or engraved in Silas’ mind.

Third is touch. When Silas and Mia touch hands, the significance emotionally is greater than were either to touch a hand of another coworker. Inequality thus emerges in terms of touch, and this inequality expands as the coupling process moves toward and includes sex, which with emotional intimacy can seem utterly superficial as not being close enough.

Fourth is a subtle feature that comes about when the process of falling in love is a fait accompli. Silas gets to the point of telling Mia that he does not want her to leave. The continued presence of the other person is being earnestly sought. She complies because she is falling for him. In fact, when he gets his transfer to work in a garden because seeing her everyday and yet not being able to be with her for fear of being taken to a mental hospital for electric shock “treatments” to block emotion and thus “restore” him to “health, she desperately comes to his apartment because she wants to be with him.

As long as presence is maintained, emotion is not a problem in a mutual coupling, but if the love is unrequited or  two who have naturally coupled are separated, emotional hurt can be unrelenting—so much so, that it may in fact be a mental illness.  If so, the autocacy in the filmcauses rather than treats mental illness by trying to detect and separate the couple.  The fact that Silas prefers to feel nothing permanently once he is misinformed that Mia has committed suicide in the mental hospital may suggest that he would agree. With respect to falling in love, emotion can be a boon or a bust in terms of quality of life. The sheer intensity of emotion either way suggests a heaven or hell dichotomy. The collective’s claim that “social bonds help to alleviate anxiety” and thus are not of value in their own right is based on the erroneous assumption that interpersonally-related emotion can only make life a living hell. A person who blocks one’s emotions especially interpersonally operates under the same assumption, and is accordingly severely impacted by the decision psychologically because not only because repression can cause or worsen mental illness, according to Freud and Nietzsche, but also because positive emotions are given up. Therefore, people who have been the victim of abuse when young should see a psychologist to face the emotional hurt so it can naturally dissipate rather than refuse to feel emotion and thus miss out on falling in love while feeling lived by the other person.

The message of the film is that emotion is innate in human nature, so efforts to block emotion in a human psyche are unhealthy and thus counter-productive, especially in terms of interpersonal relations. I read that China considers a particular religion to be a case of mental illness. In the film, the collective authority considers S.O.S., Switched On Syndrome, to be a “debilitating disease.” When emotions are “switched on” in a person’s consciousness, the collective views that person as sick, and even as a threat.  The “treatments” are based on inhibitors that dampen the onset of emotion. If allowed to manifest unfettered, emotion is assumed by the authorities to lead to chaos, so the prime value of the collective is order. Emotion itself results in chaos, and chaotic individuals mean a chaotic, destabilized collective. Even two people falling in love is situated in a political theory as a political threat. That Mia becomes pregnant is therefore a red flag that gets her dragged to the mental hospital for an abortion and electric shock treatment.  

Jonas, a friend to Silas who helps him by arranging for Mia’s escape from the Den (i.e., the mental hospital), observes, “You two were in love; that’s clear. According to the collective, coupling makes the disease worse. But the inhibitors keep people from being “who they really are.”  Referring to falling in love, Silas tells Mia, “The truth is right here,” rather than in outer space as the collective claims. This statement is not far from Augustine’s claim that God is love. That deity can manifest as unconditional love and as wrath; so too, emotion can be a boon or bust depending on how the coupling process goes. To extract emotion itself from a person’s consciousness is one-sided and deeply problematic, given how we humans are “hard-wired” by nature. To “switch off” emotion wholesale in one’s psyche is itself very unhealthy.

In terms of political theory, the autocratic collective’s authority is totalitarian in a way that goes beyond George Orwell’s novel, 1984, if ridding people of emotion is more invasive than controlling what people think. Preventing group-think, such as is evinced in the film when Silas and Mia agree that the collective is backward-wrong in what the authority considers to be health and disease, is one thing; severing emotion so people can’t even feel is arguably more severe. Silas and Mia would doubtlessly consent to considering coupling to be harmful medically but they would (and do) refuse not to feel the love they feel for each other. “Love is like oxygen,” Christian tells his new friends in the film, Moulin Rouge! A government regarding falling in love as making a disease more severe and then that same government going further by preempting the process of falling in love by forcing ardous separations is therefore incredibly invasive; it is like ridding an inhabited room of oxygen. Furthermore, viewing coupling as a threat that would lead to political instability makes Hobbes’ Leviathan look like an instance of limited sovereignty, as if Hobbes did not go far enough in devising his totalitarian political theory to stave off civil war. A totalitarian, autocratic government delving into psychology—politicalizing disease and mental health—is much more of a danger to humanity than is people falling in love.  

The Professor and the Madman

The film, The Professor and the Madman (2019), is based on the true story of James Murray, the editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 19^th century, and William Minor, who contributed over 10,000 entries. Minor, who suffered from schizophrenia, was at the time a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for having killed Jack Merrett under the recurrent delusion of being chased. In the film, this narrative serves as the basis to explore whether even people who think they are unredeemable can nevertheless be redeemed, and thus freed, from their own guilt.

Once at the asylum, William Minor seeks to atone by making the injustice he has committed in committing the murder by making it up to the murdered man’s wife, Eliza, and her children by directing that all of his income go to them. Initially, Eliza refuses this offer, but facing crushing penury, she eventually accepts the income. Incredibly, guard Muncy of the asylum personally sees to it that the family is helped by the money. This generosity is a reflection of the goodness of Minor in spite of his unimaginable suffering from schizophrenia. Indeed, Minor even volunteers to teach Eliza how to read so she in turn could teach her children so they could escape from poverty. Although Minor is correct that he owes the widow and her kids money enough to survive, he is wrong that he also owes them the gift of reading. He is clearly going the extra mile.

Even so, he still believes he cannot be redeemed for his sordid act of murdering an innocent man, even though he has been found innocent by virtue of insanity. This verdict should be enough for Minor to let go of his guilt, for he is well aware of the role that his mental illness played in his heinous act. He is arguably too hard on himself, and Eliza comes to see this. In fact, she comes to love him for it. She writes down “If love…then what?” and hands the card to him. The open-endedness of the unknown expanse that opens up for a culprit and a victim once the latter has forgiven the former, who as gone the “extra mile” in making atonement, is, I contend, the most important message in the film. Minor’s 10,000 words that he donates to Murray pale in comparison; the matter of the heart is much more important, and I make this claim as an intellectual and scholar who loves words, especially when they are set in relation to each other.

It is ironic that a psychotic person goes so far beyond what the overwhelming number of “sane” criminals do in making amends to victims even to the point that a person who loved a victim comes to love the character and sense of obligation and contrition of the victimizer. Such atonement is so unusual that it is easy to feel empathy for Minor when he states that he still thinks he is unredeemable. It is not his mental illness that is responsible for his refusal to let himself accept that he can be free from his guilt, and thus redeemed; rather, it is the value that he places on being redeemed. No mention is made of a redeemer; Minor is faced with the heavy choice and responsibility of deciding whether he has atoned sufficiently to be redeemed. Indeed, his strength of character is such that he can be trusted, in spite of his mental illness, with the decision of redemption that God justly places on his shoulders.

So the movie ends with the open-ended question of where a victim and one’s victimizer go from hatred and fear, respectively. Where do they go in the freedom that the lack of vengeance and guilt open? In the film, Eliza even kisses William. Eventually, he is deported back to America, where he continues to supply Murray with words (through the letter v; Murray himself died when he was on the t’s). How far they get with the massive project is dwarfed by William Minor’s project of the heart by which he is redeemed even though he won’t accept it. Free-will, and what we do from using it, matters in terms of redemption, and "love thy enemy" is utterly transformative such that God, which is love, can be present even in the relationship between a murderer and the widow of the victim. This is perhaps the overriding message of the film.

Breaking the Waves

In what begins as a story about Bess, a mentally-ill (or cognitively challenged) woman who marries Jan, an oilman, Breaking the Waves (1996) is a film that ends on a distinctively religious note that is nothing short of miraculous. The viewer is meant to be skeptical concerning the authenticity of Bess's spirituality, especially as seems delusional in having two-way conversations with God. Even as one of her prayerful petitions seems perhaps of having been granted when Jan returns from the oil rig to Bess, albeit with Jan paralyzed from an accident, the overwhelming view of the characters in the story, including Jan, is that, as Bess's physician asks Bess, "Do you really think you have so much power?" Bess is blaming herself for Jan's serious medical condition. She could reply, "It's God's power, not mine," but she is slow. Yet she can love, unconditionally. When Jan urges Bess to sleep with other men then tell him about the experiences so he will have the will to live, Bess complies and is summarily kicked out of her church. Even Bess's mother, with whom Bess lives, locks the door. The church elders and the minister are judgmental hypocrites who presume that they can consign a person to hell. Even so, Bess's trust in God as a matter of faith continues, and she sacrifices her life by willingly submitting herself to a sadistic sailor so that God might then heal Jan. Meanwhile, the unbelievers are trying to get Bess to a mental hospital, given her "delusion." On the morning after Jan and his friends on the rig drop Bess's body into the sea, one of the friends wakes Jan to come outside and hear bells ringing even as radar shows nothing out there. The viewer now knows not only that God performed a miracle on Jan, for he is walking around and even back on the rig, but also that Bess's faith is vindicated as heaven's bells miraculously are chiming. The burial followed by bells ringing at sunrise reflects the story of Jesus' passion. The overall message seems to be that we mortals don't know as much as we think we do about God's ways, even if we do happen to have power in the governance of a church.

It is ironic that people so outwardly engaged in the religious domain can actually be so far from it and even, pathetically without realizing, attack the people who are religious. To put in Christian terms, as Christianity is the religion in the film, a person with power in a church can be oblivious to the fact that he or she is acting like the people who Jesus castigates in the Gospels. Astonishingly, an avowed Christian involved in the governance of a church can be oblivious to the fact that he or she is violating Jesus' preaching on neighbor-love, for example. To count oneself as part of the elect (i.e., predestined to be saved) does not give a "Christian" license to act contrary to Jesus' words and example. 

In the film, for example, the minister walks away from Bess when she is collapsed and unconscious in front of the church. Although he has stopped boys from pelting Bess with pebbles, the minister who excommunicated Bess then looks around to be sure he is not being seen as he walks away from her. He is the opposite of the proverbial good Samaritan, based in part on his presumed infallibility in excommunicating Bess from the church and community. At the end of the film, his arrogance is on full display as he consigns her to hell at her burial even though she has voluntarily sacrificed her life so her ill husband would receive a miraculous recovery rather than die. Her vindication comes in the form of another miracle on the early morning after her burial. Sound familiar? Not to the minister or the church elders. Their lack of compassion for Bess is all the more pathetic because at her wedding they recognized her for her faith as well as the many times she had cleaned the church. 

It is all too easy for the hypocrites in charge to view Bess as "slow" or mentally ill, and thus as delusional in prayer when she talks to God. Is not a Christian in prayer to listen for God's thoughts? Surely this form of prayer is superior to asking God for favors. To be sure, Bess is not perfect; she asks God to return Jan to her from the oil rig. This petition is answered, but not in the way Bess assumed. Also, she sins in going along with Jan's sexual fetish that she sleep with other men and tell him about the sex. The excommunicators, however, missed the fact that she complied out of love for her suffering paralyzed husband. 

When Bess willingly goes back to a sadistic sailor in hopes that God would miraculously heal Jan because of her sacrifice of her life, she wonders aloud at a hospital whether she is wrong because Jan has not improved. Her fallibility and humility amid sacrificial love is in contrast to the stern minister and church elders. It isn't until the miraculous sounds of bells at sunrise on the day after Bess has been buried that the viewer knows for sure that the minister and elders are actually anti-Christians and that Bess has indeed been talking with God in prayer, although it is possible that she has been delusional in what she said God was telling her in prayer and yet her sacrifice has prompted God to heal her husband, Jan. Surely the minister and elders would be appalled to learn that a retarded or mentally ill woman whom they expelled is in heaven whereas they are bound for hell. The lesson is that we mere mortals are not able to consign people to heaven or hell, especially in the case of a religion that privileges matters of the heart. That the minister and elders even miss Bess's fruits of the Spirit tells us that even people governing a congregation or serving as its clergy can be wrong rather than presumptuously infallible. 

We too, even as viewers of the film, can unwittingly accept the perspective of the minister and elders, and indeed Bess's own mother. This says something about us. The fact that the supranatural sound of bells does reveal the validity of Bess's relationship with God until the end of the film keeps the viewer in the wrong camp long enough for the bells to be a shock. "I sure got that wrong," I said to myself (perhaps God replied, "Yes, you certainly did). It was not that I agreed with the way in which the minister and elders treat Bess in the film; rather, I shared their assumption that Bess is crazy and so cannot possibly right about her relationship with God.  

At one point in the film, Bess addresses the men meeting in the church after someone emphasizes the need to keep the law. Bess is dismissed and excommunicated after she objects that words cannot be loved; only people can be. In reforming Judaism, Jesus says the same thing to the Pharisees. Loving even strangers trumps observing the strict Jewish law. The minister and elders are Pharisees who conceive of God as angry and judgmental at the expense of compassion, love, and forgiveness. The minister, elders, and even Bess's own mother have missed this fundamental point about Jesus and they stupidly and arrogantly presume themselves to be members of the elect. For all the importance they give to their religious identities, the hypocrites in the film do not internalize Christ's message of the humble love of self-sacrifice even for sinners.  

Proof

If you are not careful, you could come away from the film, Proof (2005) as a scientist, for the scientific method enjoys a starring role, albeit mostly in subtle undertones rather than in stark instructional flourishes in Technicolor. Essentially, the message is that confirming proof eludes the human mind and its scientific method. Yet interestingly, the film also captures genius, even if its source cannot be proven.

The film centers around Catherine, the daughter (played by Gwyeth Paltrow) of a brilliant math professor, Robert (played by Anthony Hopkins), who went insane and died; the story takes place just after his death. The dramatic tension is both in terms of relationships and questions of fact. Concerning the former, tension is most salient between Catherine and her visiting sister, Claire. Tension also builds between Catherine and her love-interest, Hal. In flashbacks, we feel tension also between Catherine and her father. Last but certainly not least, Catherine herself is riveted with inner tension, which comes to a major decision whether to go to New York to live with Claire taking care of her or to remain in Chicago to pursue Hal and mathematical notoriety and further advancement. In short, Catherine’s inner conflict lies in whether to buy into the paradigm in which she is deemed crazy or the alternative “story line” in which her apparent craziness is actually a natural reaction to having had to deal with her messed up father and sister.

In terms of questions of fact to be resolved, Hal and Claire seek proof establishing the authorship of the breakthrough mathematical proof written in a notebook locked in Robert’s desk. The handwriting seems to be Robert’s, but it is possible that Catherine’s own resembles his as the two worked closely together on mathematics. Also, it is not clear whether Robert was sufficiently sane to reason through such a momentous proof. Proof is therefore paramount, yet as Hal admits, the author cannot be proved. The film ends with him telling Catherine that in going through the mathematical proof together, the most he could do is prove that she could not have written it. This is none other than the scientific method in action!

In science, alternative hypotheses (i.e., propositions) are eliminated. The elimination can be known with certainty—that is, proved to be false. This is all that science portends; it cannot prove the hypothesis that the scientist asserts. In shooting down alternative explanations, the hypothesis is left standing, but this does not prove it. In trying to figure out who ate the cookies left out on a kitchen counter to cool off, we can eliminate the cat, sister Susie, fat brother Scott and even fat brother Jeff. This does not mean that Skip ate the cookies. That Skip has actually lost weight and is athletic would suggest that he is not the culprit, but this too is not proof. It is possible that the dog Skip (named after the brother) jumped up on the counter and chomped up the chocolate mistakenly taking it for another dog’s poop (this does not mean that the brother known as Skip has the same habit!). In short, eliminating alternative suspects does not prove that Skip is the culprit. Even so, science says we can have greater confidence that Skip is our man. Yet is such confidence warranted? We could be overlooking another alternative entirely. Suppose we are completely unaware that a friend occasionally stops by. The only person who knows is the mother, and she isn’t talking. She would gladly let her son Skip take the rap so she could go on leading a double life.

In the film, eliminating possibilities that Catherine could not have written the proof does not mean that she wrote it. It is possible that both she and her father could have written it. Yet the viewer is left with a distinct answer—that Catherine is indeed the author. In fact, we get to see the very instant in which she had the major insight, while she was reaching in her refrigerator. Seeing genius for what it is—a break-through of ideas past those that had been log-jammed or stymied—is perhaps much more revealing, not to mention satisfying, than whether Catherine actually wrote the proof. The flashback itself functions as proof, though even here this devise is shaky due to the salience of mental illness in the film. In other words, the viewer’s assumption that the flashbacks are meant to reveal what actually happened may be faulty, and thus hardly able to support proof. I submit, therefore, that the film is really about how limited the human mind is. Philosophically, the theme is on the epistemological limits of the human brain. We think we know a lot more than we do.