Eichmann

There comes a point in the film, Eichmann (2007), which is based on Avner Less’s series of interviews with Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli jail, when the man who was in charge of transport to the Nazi death camps realizes that he will lose the upcoming trial and be hanged; the hitherto unemotional Eichmann instantly tears up in front of Avner Less in the small, windowless room and laments never being able to see his children again. Less points out that Eichmann has sent many children to their deaths, “but they were Jews,” Eichmann counters. The inroads into the psyche that Nazi propaganda reached was suddenly obvious, even odd. Ideology with the machinery of state as a proponent and enforcer can short-circuit the human mind without the mind being aware of its own cognitive distortions. Eichmann states, “but they were Jews” as if anyone would understand because he takes the validity of the statement as a given. Translation: Jews were not only enemies of the state; they were also subhuman. In an earlier interview, Eichmann disclaimed being antisemitic with a tone that conveys to the audience that he really believes his statement. At the very least, the mental pathology of disassociation seems to have been caused by the earlier Nazi propaganda. State ideology can indeed be mentally invasive, and this may say as much about the vulnerabilities of the human brain as the danger latent in political power than can manifest in massive states as not only war crimes, but also the more severe crimes against humanity.

Ironically, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Israelis would adopt the same subhuman stance (the stance itself being subhuman as well as regarding people deemed to be subhuman) towards the Palestinian people living in Gaza especially, but also in the West Bank (and Lebanon). Can the infliction of one holocaust be understood as an instinctual aggressive reaction on an intergenerational collective basis to an earlier one that has been inflicted on ancestors? The misfiring is obvious because the Palestinians and Germans are two different peoples, so the adage, two wrongs don’t make a right applies. Another adage reads, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” The biblical intent is to keep vengeance out of the hands of (God’s?) children. But whose Lord is that?  

Eichmann was evidently an atheist; the Nazi party was officially so. Had Eichmann regarded himself as a Christian, the man’s cognitive dissidence would have been too much even for him to ignore and manage, though admittedly the Crusades were committed by “Christians” in the name of Christ without enough dissidence for them to turn back and go home. Ironically, Eichmann had studied Hebrew, which is why, according to Avner Less in the film, Eichmann was selected to head his department that was oriented to the Jewish problem in transportation. Even though Eichmann repeatedly insists in the interviews that he was just a cog in the massive Nazi state machine, and therefore wielded no significant power of his own for which he should be held morally responsible, being the head of all the transportation to the death camps came with too much power to be labeled merely as bureaucratic.

In fact, the narrative’s pivot, or inflection point, is on Eichmann’s own abuse of power, which is to say, an abuse that he cannot claim to have been merely following orders on pain of death. He was sufficiently high in the Nazi hierarchy to have wielded power of his own and thus to be held responsible for any consequent suffering and death. Whether the latter two can become so massive and severe that even just following orders even on pain of death cannot obviate being morally responsible is an interesting ethical question without an easy answer—perhaps answering the related question of whether self-sacrifice is not only a virtue, but also a duty if many people would suffer severely and unjustly die otherwise is prerequisite. In suggesting that Indians stand up to invading Nazis were they to invade India, Gandhi advocated such a duty and even claimed that it has much moral power in resisting evil.

Although Eichmann strangely volunteers to sacrifice his life as a lesson to anti-Semites, Avner Less dismisses the offer as disingenuous. As a policeman, he is savvy. Crucially, anticipating the film’s pivot, it is clear that he is clever in detecting the nuance in Eichmann’s pattern of minimizing the fact that he took orders directly from Himmler rather than from Hitler himself. Eichmann is hiding something, and Avner Less senses this, so he immediately has his staff focus exclusively on pulling all of the written correspondence between Eichmann and Himmler that the department has. Avner Less’s abrupt shift in his investigative strategy is in line with having realized the utter futility in getting a confession from the devoted, high-ranking Nazi. Having been in the SS, Eichmann too is savvy to say something self-incriminating. Avner Less too is savvy; he notices that Eichmann covered his tracks well by having retained written documentation of the orders he was obeying. No one is perfect, however, and in giving the order that over 70,000 Hungarian Jews walk from Budapest to a death camp in Poland, Eichmann actually defied Himmler’s order that such a march not take place! Visually precise for viewers, Avner Less places the papers of both orders side by side on the desk in front of Eichmann. The two orders contradict each other—crucially with Himmler’s order having an earlier date. Eichmann, being a firm believer in the value of written documentation, can only slump silently in his chair, knowing that he had not sufficiently covered his tracks as an SS man, and therefore he would be convicted and put to death. Given the historical accuracy of the film, this means that during the entire trial, which is not depicted in the film, Eichmann knew he would be convicted and die.

The film ends with Avner Less mailing the letter than Eichmann had begged be mailed to his family. That Avner’s own father died in a Nazi camp makes the generous nature of the gesture all the more astonishing, especially given the violent protests by Israelis of the interviews happening at all, and thus of Avner Less’s involvement, on the grounds that Eichmann does not deserve even a trial, given the monstrosity of the crimes against humanity—a label that was coined at the famous Nuremburg trial.

In the film, and perhaps in the historical record too, Avner Less does not ask Eichmann why he violated Himmler’s order and gave the order to proceed with the march anyway. Perhaps Eichmann was more realistic than Himmler and Hitler that time was limited for the Nazis in November 1944, given the military progress of the Allies, so desperate means were needed to quickly kill as many Hungarian Jews as possible.  Perhaps Himmler (or Hitler) was worried so late in the war that the evidence of thousands of bodies left along the way could be used by the Allied victors after the war to prosecute the Nazis. Eichmann was likely frustrated with the slow pace with which his superiors were ridding Europe of Jewry. This is precisely why it is so strange that he repeatedly resists the label of anti-Semite in the interviews with Avner Less. Impatience with ridding Europe of the subhuman “race” is of course highly anti-Semitic, but, strangely, and here the nefarious, dangerous power of a state-sponsored ideology should be flagged for future reference, Eichmann does not appear to “connect the dots” in his (brainwashed?) mind. “But they were Jews.”

In The Reader, released in 2008—a year after Eichmann—Hanna Schmitz, a former death-camp guard on trial in Germany, astonishes the chief judge with just such a line. To the judge, Hanna’s rationale is astonishing to the point of utter disbelief that anyone could use such a warped justification for standing by while other people needlessly die. Meanwhile, to her, the justification is something that presumably anyone would simply take for granted as being entirely reasonable. The pathos of distance is incredible. To paraphrase her rationale: Of course, we let the Jewish prisoners burn in the locked church; they were our prisoners; we were responsible for them; we couldn’t just open the doors and let them escape. This line, plus Eichmann’s, reveal the visceral depth with which the propaganda of a state can insidiously damage the human mind without it having a clue as to its own warped condition. Therefore, it behooves each human being to routinely self-check for having gone too far in one’s own ideological commitments, as well as to critique the ideology itself with the understanding that no human ideology is or can be perfect, for we are human, all too human.

The Reader

The film, The Reader (2008), captures a frame of mind that may be so frequently overlooked when it is observed because it is so bizarre in its impact on reasoning that it difficult to explain, let alone grasp for what it is. The phenomenon is not of artifice; rather, it is a natural vulnerability of the human mind, or brain, due to its susceptibility to ideology that is highly unethical in its content, including a circumscribed and even warped mental framework and very unethical prescriptions for conduct. The ideology at issue in the film is that of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1933 to 1945.  The truism that absolute power corrupts absolutely does not fully account for the cognitive warping that is evinced by Hanna Schmidt during her trial in the film.

The plot centers around a sexual-relationship between Hanna Schmitz and Michael Berg during a summer more than a decade after the end of Nazi Germany. Because Michael is only 15 years old when Hanna, a middle-aged adult, seduces him sexually and gets him to read stories to her, she starts off the film as being culpable criminally, assuming that sexual intercourse with a minor is illegal in the film. To be sure, not even astute viewers would predict that her seduction of a minor means that she had worked as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp from 1943 until the death-march from Hungary in 1944, especially because Michael willingly returned to her apartment several times to read to her and have sex with her. As the film goes on, viewers quickly realize that her sexual crime is dwarfed by her crimes as a guard in Nazi Germany.

A portion of professor Rohl’s lecture in his law-school class in which Michael is enrolled as a law student years after his summer of sex is a useful way to contextualize Hanna’s Nazi crimes. Rohl begins by noting that out of the 9,000 people who worked at Auschwitz, only 19 have been convicted, and they were convicted according to law rather than morality. “The question was not, was it wrong, but was it legal, and not by our laws, no, by the laws at the time” and “intent must be proved.” One student observes that the law is narrower than is holding people to the dictates of morality. Professor Rohl readily agrees. To be convicted, Hanna and the other five guards with whom she worked must be found to have violated the relevant laws of Nazi Germany. So just following orders, which count as laws, is a viable defense.

In his trial in 1961 in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was convicted precisely because he had violated Himmer’s order not to march Hungarian “enemies of the state” to Auschwitz. Eichmann violated the laws of Nazi Germany knowing that people would die as a result, so he could be convicted and even sentenced to death.  The film, The Reader, refutes Israel’s claim that former Nazis could not get an unbiased trial in West Germany. Both the Israelis and the Germans could be expected to hold biases regarding the Germans who were, or worked for, the Nazis, yet in the film as well as in Eichmann’s historical trial in 1961, jurisprudence passes the test in maintaining its narrow, and thus rigorous standards even against biases one way or the other.

In the trial in the film, Hanna admits to having been one of six female guards who selected 60 prisoners each month to be sent from their camp to Auschwitz even though the guards (and the prisoners) knew that the 60 people sent would be killed. Unlike the other women on trial, Hanna is honest in her testimony. Answering the chief judge’s question on why she selected 10 prisoners each month to be killed at Auschwitz, she answered, “but there were new arrivals arriving all the time, so the old ones had to make room for the new ones. We couldn’t keep everyone. There wasn’t room.” In Hanna having been oriented to the flow of prisoners being optimal, Hanna Arendt’s description of the Eichmann trial as showcasing the “banality of evil” in the bureaucracy of the Nazis applies here too. In the film, the chief judge is astonished at Hanna’s lapse concerning the obvious ethical problem: “But you knew you were selecting people to be killed.” Hanna replies, “What would you have done? Should I have never signed up at Siemens?” meaning to be hired by the SS. Hanna’s answers are themselves worthy of reflection, for they evince an absolute indifference to the plight of the chosen prisoners. In fact, she puts space-limitations at her camp above, as if justifying, the (necessary) plight. It is not as if she seems to have been wallowing in the power she had at the camp; she seems to have viewed herself as a manager working as if a hotel manager oriented to managing vacancies so no one arriving would be turned away, as if that were ethically more objectionable than sending prisoners to their death at the death camp in Poland.

Any such managerial excuse is belied when the judge turns to Hanna’s role in the march of all of the prisoners to Auschwitz when the camp in Hungary was closed. Hanna and the five other SS guards with whom she worked locked the doors of a church where prisoners were sleeping one night on the journey even though the guards knew that that church was on fire from a bombing raid. The chief judge asks Hanna, “Why did you not open the doors? In the written report, which you all signed, you claim you didn’t know about the fire until after it had happened. But that isn’t true, is it? . . . Why did you not open the doors?” Hanna quickly responds in a way that suggests that she thinks the judge has just asked a stupid question. “Obviously,” she says defiantly. “For the obvious reason. We couldn’t. We were guards. Our job was to guard the prisoners. We couldn’t just let them escape.” Her judgment that keeping the 300 people in the church, in which case they would all, except for one girl, die, was better than letting them out even if they would try to escape evinces something more than a warped moral compass. To be sure, letting prisoners escape is ethically preferrable to keeping them from evading death, but her reasoning too is flawed. The job of guarding prisoners does not in itself include playing a role in their respective deaths.

The judge next wants to assess whether Hanna and the other five guards feared for their lives should the prisoners have escaped from the burning building. “And if they escaped,” he asked Hanna, “you’d be charged? You’d be executed?” Hanna, hardly a defense attorney, answers emphatically, “No! If we’d opened the doors there would have been chaos. How could we have restored order? . . . and if they had all come out, we couldn’t just let them escape! We couldn’t! We were responsible for them!” That being responsible for prisoners could include deciding to let them die when they could be saved is, I submit, not just a moral lapse as if contributing to the death of 300 were morally better than letting them escape. Perhaps equally of concern, her reasoning—her cognition—was infected as if with computer malware. This can be more easily grasped from following statement, which is similar to what Hanna answers: We let the prisoners die because we were responsible for them! Her premise that the guards’ responsibility as guards is only to forestall escape—meaning that the responsibility of the guards was to the Nazi regime rather for the prisoners—even if that responsibility meant forcing the prisoners to be burnt alive is unsound and narrow; hence it may be the product of brain-washing.

It is not that being willingly enveloped by a political ideology spares a person from culpability. So, the judge tells Hanna, “So you did know what was happening. You did know, you made a choice. You let them die, rather than risk letting them escape.” She was neither forced nor insane; she knew what she was doing in keeping 300 people in a burning church. Hanna’s problematic mentality goes beyond the ethically problematic hierarchy of escape as being worse than being burned live. Even though she had obviously been “supercharged” into focusing narrowly in her job on escape being the worst thing possible, she was once again indifferent to the severity of the plight of other people. Both the narrowness and the sociopathic indifference were part of Nazi culture. In fact, the strong preference for order and aversion to chaos has arguably remained a salient part of German culture even though the Nazis’ ideology has been refuted. In the film, the judge does not question Hanna on her aversion to chaos or the high value she puts on order. This lapse is odd, considering that the judge may be guilty of scapegoating Hanna with a life sentence while giving the other five guards only four and a half years in prison. The other five guards contributed to the scapegoating, but the judge seemed not to realize this point.

Even though Hanna has answered the judge’s questions with an amazing forthrightness, the judge does not believe her when she denies that she wrote the report on the church fire. He even ignores her valid point that it doesn’t matter who wrote the report because all six women signed it. None of the six opened the church doors as the building burned, and there was no evidence that Hanna was in charge of the other guards. He should have relied more on Hanna’s testimony regarding the other defendants rather than say that it is easy to spread the crime to include other culprits. Furthermore, that Hanna does not give the convenient answer that she feared that the SS would execute her for letting the prisoners escape and that she answers honestly goes to her integrity, when supports my claim that she had been indoctrinated by the Nazis when she was hired to believe that the lives of the prisoners do not matter, especially as against them being able to escape (even from a burning building).

Lest it be concluded that only Nazi ideology could be so severely warping in terms of morality and reasoning, the claim of the Israeli army late in 2025 that a 3 year-old Gaza resident had to be shot because the child walking from a tent to an Israeli tank nearby was a security threat. So too, the claim by officials in the Israeli government, including Israel’s president, that all residents of Gaza were culpable of the attack inside Israel proper by Hamas is warped, both morally and cognitively. Israeli soldiers playing the game of who can shoot the most kids in Gaza, soldiers raping 6 year-old boys (and doubtlessly numerous Gaza women) in the name of security, and the Israeli government’s presumptuous and erroneous accusation of collective responsibility of everyone in Gaza for the attack carried out by a political group such that more than a million people were intentionally subjected to starvation, no medical care, and even homelessness all evince the toxic mental imprint of a sordid ideology of hatred every bit as sordid as the Nazi ideology had been. Shooting babies who had not even been born in 2024 demonstrates the utter irrationality in the statements of some senior government officials that all of the residents of Gaza deserve to suffer—that not even death is good enough for them. I contend that this last part renders the mass atrocities a holocaust rather than just a genocide. Subjecting over a million people to severe deprivation and thus horrid suffering, and killing over 60,000-75,000 residents outright through 2025 mean that the statements were not merely rhetoric. That the deaths of less than 1,500 Israelis in the attack in Israel in 2023—an attack of utter frustration contextualized by decades of being subjugated and occupied by an enemy state—could justify so many more deaths and the starvation of many, many more people in Gaza demonstrates not just severely flawed ethical judgment, but also corrupted reasoning as if such an imbalance could possibly be justified even in terms of state security. Were the Israeli officials intellectually honest, they would simply admit that they were simply unleashing their hatred of a “subhuman” people who are like dogs. Similarly, Nazi propaganda films portrayed Jews as rats infecting Europe. It is perhaps out of a global sense of guilt about the first holocaust that the unbalanced Israeli application of collective “justice” did not trigger a coalition of the willing among nations to rid Gaza military of the Israeli army, and that the equivalence of the Netanyahu and Hitler administrations has not been recognized and acknowledged. Ideology can indeed warp moral judgment and even cognition/reasoning as well as perception of world events.

That susceptibility of the human mind can operate “beneath the radar,” especially in regard to the severity of the depravity. The judge in the film tells the court that Hanna is in another class of criminality even from the five other guards. I submit that he is wrong about the five other guards, for they are just as culpable criminally because none of them were willing to open the church doors and thus were fine with 300 people being burned to death. Nevertheless, the judge aptly perceives Hanna’s “reasoning” as partial at best and her values as deeply problematic morally. They were our responsibility; we couldn’t just let them escape, so we decided that they would have to die. The 300 prisoners in the church did not have to die; they died because the six SS guards chose not to open the doors. It is conceivable that those guards could have opened the doors and maintained order while minimizing escapes by surrounding an open space and shooting the first person trying to flee.

Contemporary implications of the film include the point that the recognition of the subjectivity-based warping of the human mind by ideology means that the world needs more than the impotent UN and International Criminal Court (ICC) to hold back aggressive regimes such as those of the Nazis and the Israelis. Although not so ideological, the foray into Ukraine by President Putin of Russia based in part on a vision of a resurrected Russian empire (not the USSR) also deserved to be turned back by more than an imagined coalition of the willing in Europe. To the extent that the Russian officials viewed the Ukrainians as subhuman, thus justifying women being raped by Russian soldiers and children being sent deep into Russia, the ideological culprit at work in the Nazi government in the twentieth century and the Israeli government in the 2020s can be detected yet again. The vulnerability of the human mind is thus no accident, but is intrinsic. Therefore, the admixture of human hatred with political (and religious) ideology comes with a such steep toll that the ongoing system of international relations based on absolute national sovereignty can be deemed to be wholly inadequate. International means with military-enforcement power have been needed at least since the 1930s to restrain toxic regimes from inflicting severe harm on people presumed ideologically to be subhuman. 

The underlying problem is not merely humans being drunk with power; even though absolute power corrupts absolutely, and thus institutional checks and balances are advisable both within a government and between every government and the international community institutionalized in an organization or government with real enforcement power, the subjective human mind is too vulnerable to being brain-washed by ideology and this itself is a problem especially because the warped mind is typically impervious to correction both morally and in regard to its own faulty reasoning. In the film, there is no indication whatsoever when Hanna is imprisoned for 20 years that she comes to grips with how wrong she has been ethically and how flawed her reasoning was in her choice not to open the church door. During the trial, the limits of her ideologically-constrained reason are clear when she draws a blank and asks the judge, “What would you have done? Should I not have signed up at Siemens?” The significant imprint of a flawed ideology can readily be inferred. The system of international relations can and should be informed by just this inference that the film astutely provides.

Dorian Gray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L'Argent

The film L’Argent (1983) is about how far people will go to get money (l’argent en francais). One major problem with greed is that people who are enthralled by it will go to virtually any length to get money. Even a religion can unconsciously warped to separate greed from earning and having wealth. Historically, Christian thought on greed and wealth has shifted from anti- to pro-wealth. Whether enabled by their religion or not, greedy people will think nothing of other people being hurt in the process. Hence, greed can be reckoned as selfishness incarnate. To claim that money is God not only puts a lower good above a higher one, but also manifests self-idolatry.

“Well, I’m not waiting around for universal happiness which, believe me, will be boring as hell. I want to be happy now, in my own way. O money, God incarnate, what wouldn’t we do for you?” says Yvon’s prison-roommate. “Given how corrupt the world is,” he continues, “and the impossibility of it changing, they who tell us to obey promise a future happiness.” Is money truly God incarnate? Does it even make sense that that which transcends the limits of human cognition, sensibility, and perception, as St. Denis maintained back in the sixth century, can be incarnate as material things? Is this not an oxymoron? “What wouldn’t we do for you?” follows from money being God incarnate, for no limits exist consistent with following that which is God; everything else is of a lesser priority as only God is sacred. Lastly, would universal happiness really be boring? Compared to a world in which people are rude and aggressive, I would take the inherently satisfying luster of happiness. Perhaps the prisoner likes a world of disagreements and even fighting. In other words, we must consider the source—a prisoner.

How does Yvon come to find himself in prison? He has violently killed a family in order to rob them. A perfect example of the wanton disregard for other people’s welfare in following money as God incarnate.  To the family’s hard-working woman, who is willing to be task-oriented but not inordinate in the pursue of money as criminals are wont to be, Yvon asks, “Why not just throw yourself in the river? Do you expect a miracle?” She replies flatly, “I expect nothing.” Money is not her God incarnate.

The filmmaking reflects the woman’s task-orientation. Conversations are monotone, direct, and purpose-economized without any small talk.  Hence, a lot of silence exists, which gives that film-world a harsh quality. When people interact, they do so like robots. Movements are precise, limited to purposes. The sound also is precise in emphasizing tasks, such as that of closing a door fully. Human beings are purpose-driven, intentional, beings.

After killing all of the family except the woman, Yvon asks her for money. There is none, so he kills her. What wouldn’t he do for money? In a twisted sense, he turns himself in as if redemption were in the confessing. In that story-world, the good lies in confessing rather than not viewing money as God incarnate in the first place. In spite of his confession, he is still legally, moral, and religiously on the hook for having gone too far in killing for money. Confessing is the least that he could do, once having committed such a violent crime. The latent self-idolatry in the selfishness that lies at the root of greed is protected by denial concerning the self-as-god assumption. Similarly, the God-incarnate status of money—that is, God as sourced in our human realm rather than transcendent—blinds Yvon from the fact that he goes too far in the pursuit of money, for it is merely a measure of economic value in our realm.

See God's Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of  Christian Thought on Profit-seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon. 

Forsaken

In an interview on the film, Forsaken (2015), Kiefer Sutherland remarks that the film is black and white in terms of the bad and the good guys. In other words, the film is a classic western. James McCurdy wears the “black” hat, while Rev. Samuel Clayton, played by Donald Sutherland, wears the “white” one (even though his clergy-wear is entirely black).  However, Samuel is hardly very nice, or forgiving, to his son at first. On the other side of the dichotomy, Brian Cox, who played McCurdy, said in an interview that his character has the virtue of business sense in that the man buys up area farms, albeit by ruthless means, because he anticipates that the anticipated railroad would drive up land prices. Nevertheless, that McCurdy is willing to take the risk does not justify killing farmers who refuse to be bought out. Michael Wincott, who played Dave Turner—McCurdy’s hired hand, said in an interview that he didn’t see McCurdy as at all grey; rather, his own character and John Henry Clayton, the reverend’s son, are grey in that both try to resist killing; they both know better and attempt to resist the temptation. Even such nuances from the traditional “black and white” western do not go far enough in describing the de facto religious complexity in John Henry. In fact, the screenwriters did not go far enough to capture a truly Christian response to even one’s enemies. Hence I submit that the film gives a superficial gloss that belies just how far a Christian much go to follow the teachings of Jesus.

John Henry Clayton admits to atheism to his father, who of course is a Christian minister. The latter explodes at the statement, which is made on the assumption that a benevolent God could not have allowed for the horrendous suffering in the U.S.A.-C.S.A. “civil” war in which John Henry fought. Why does God allow the innocent to suffer? Perhaps because they were fighting? Perhaps the very question is faulty in that it anthropomorphizes God. Soon it is apparent in the film that John Henry does believe in God and values Jesus’s advocacy of “turning the other cheek.”

John Henry does indeed resist the taunts and then physical attack by Frank Tillman, who works under McCurdy and Turner. John even does as Tillman orders in the midst of the one-sided fight. Viewers might harken back to the scene in Gandhi (1982) in which Gandhi continues to throw Indian-identity cards into a fire even as South African policemen repeatedly beat him for doing so. In both instances, the resistance is active rather than passive because of the restraint needed not to hit back. This sort of restraint can be considered a moral sort of strength. In terms of Jesus’s teaching and example, it doesn’t go far enough, and in this regard the screenwriters of Forsaken fell short in terms of their knowledge of Christian teachings.

In Paul: Apostle of Christ (2018), both Paul and Luke (with Paul’s urging) agree to help the sick daughter of Mauritius Gallas, head of the prison in which Paul is being held prior to execution. Gallas has had Paul whipped repeatedly, and yet when Paul hears of the worsening health of Gallas’ daughter, the apostle urges Luke, a physician, to heal her. Luke is at first very reluctant (to put it mildly), but Paul tells him of Jesus’ teaching that God’s love is for everyone, and a follower of Jesus is called to this even in cases of helping enemies (or even just one’s detractors and rude people). Whereas self-restraint from hitting someone back is admirable ethically, Gallas’ reaction to Paul and Luke having cured the daughter is something else—something more than mere respect of their morals. Gallas begins to ask them about their faith. That is to say, going a step further here crosses from morality into the domain of spirituality. Jesus’ teaching to help even those people who have caused much suffering and harm is so far from the dictates of the world that something more than moral force must be involved. Such is the Kingdom of God, according to Jesus; it turns the world on its head, rather than merely being more moral strength in the world. Turning the world up-side-down is so radical that it implies an orientation beyond our realm; that is, a transcendent orientation that relativizes the world. Herein lies the difference between “merely” turning the other cheek and proactively helping one’s enemies or detractors. In the latter, it is not sufficient for one hand not to know what the other hand is doing, for the full intention must be to help in spite of the hurt felt and the injury incurred.

Forsaken aptly depicts the moral strength of resisting to hit an attacker back, but no hint is given of going a step further that would evince spiritual strength in line with Jesus’ teaching, which is more difficult to put into practice. Interesting, Rev. Samuel Clayton makes no mention of this teaching in preaching at church even though he does advocate resisting the temptation to kill the bad guys. Hence I look toward the screenwriters as having fallen short. The problem here is that viewers can come away from the film with the misunderstanding that Jesus’ teaching is less than what it really is. Moreover, the teaching and thus the religion could be viewed as moral in its essence. Rather than transcending our relations with others, the religion is thought to be of conduct between people. Is God the referent point, or is conduct between people? I submit that having a referent that transcends the human realm—beyond even the limits of human cognition, sensibility, and perception—distinguishes a religion from a moral principle.

On transcendent experience applied to human relations, see Spiritual Leadership in Business, available at Amazon.