Lolita

In being able to engage an audience both visually and audibly, and to do so at close range—something we don’t get from watching a play on a distant stage—the medium of film is capable of resonating with, challenging, and rebounding from both heart and mind. That is to say, the medium can engage us at a comparatively deep level and even touch us profoundly. The medium can tug at our ethical strings and even provoke uncomfortable thoughts and feelings precisely because sound and image can conjoin at close range such that we are brought closer to an ethical harm than is likely in our own daily experiences. Some ethical harms, such as that in a young woman not being able to stop a rape by an older man abusing a stark power differential, may simply be too horrific up close to experience even vicariously. A filmmaker can use devices, whether photographic, audio, or narrative, to moderate our exposure without sacrificing the depth at which the harm and its sordid scenario can reach in us. Such exposure to ethical problems or even to situations in which the ethical verdict is debatable can give to an audience a better realization of the ethical dimension of the human condition and improve our ability to render ethical judgements on specific issues and generally. Writ large, the medium of film can do these things for a society, reflecting and even provoking it with just enough directness to be palatable and grasped. The genre of science fiction in particular has been used to serve this purpose. Even by contrasting an original film with its remake decades later, a society’s changing nature can be glimpsed by an audience, especially as censorship guidelines are loosened as per changing social mores and ethical sensibilities of a society. The fictional film, Lolita (1962), and its remake, Lolita (1997), provide us with an excellent case study not only of changes in twentieth-century American society, but also of how powerful the medium of film can be in its treatment of the ethical dimension of the human condition.

Both the original film and the remake center around the ethical problem of incest. That it is wrong ethically is beyond dispute in the films. That this message is easily received even as the respective filmmakers use various techniques to dilute the intensity of the harm is a credit to the filmmakers. Make the presentation of an ethical harm too intense and audiences will bolt. On the other hand, the salient role of censorship on the original film risks that the harm is too distant to be grasped by audiences.

In terms of the narrative, both films, and especially the remake, mollify the audience, as if diluting whiskey so it doesn’t sting “going down the hatch.” In both films, the harsh atrocity of the incestual relationship would be harder to take were Prof. Humbert Lolita’s actual father rather than her step-father, and if he were that even before he marries Charlotte, Lolita’s mother, when he is merely renting a room in the house. Also, that the incestual sex between Humbert and Lolita begins midway through the film, when Humbert is no longer married to Charlotte and thus not technically her step-father and he and Lolita no longer even live in Charlotte’s house, makes it easier for an audience, which can view the relationship more from the standpoint of the difference in ages, which is still problematic because Lolita is fourteen years old, than from that of a biological father having sex with his daughter. To be sure, the ethically problematic co-existence of the parental and sexual roles by Humbert is obvious, as is the fact that Lolita is a minor whereas Humbert is a middle-aged adult, and both of these elements can be expected to make the typical viewer uncomfortable.

The remake makes a significant departure narratively from the original film in lessening, albeit marginally, Humbert’s blameworthiness. The story begins with Humbert as a teenager when he has a beautiful girlfriend who is not coincidentally also (i.e., like Lolita) fourteen years old. They are so in love, but she tragically dies of typhus. We sympathize with the teenage Humbert as he cries over his lost, beautiful love, and perhaps even feel that he deserves another such love. Tempering and adding complexity to the ethical issue of incest is the adult Humbert’s very human desire to get back a lost love, even if vicariously. The resemblance of the actresses playing Annabel Lee and Lolita is likely no accident. The sympathy dissipates, however, when Humbert crosses a line with Lolita by letting her perform sexual acts on him during their first hotel-stay.

Paradoxically, even as the remake, relative to the original film, makes the offence more palatable to us by adapting the narrative even more, we are brought closer to the sexual act both directly and by the story-world seeming more sensual. This is accomplished by both zoomed-in visuals and selective magnification of some ordinary sounds of things that we usually don’t notice in our daily lives but that, were we aware of them, could provide empirical experience with added depth. In fact, the medium of film moreover has great (generally unappreciated) value in being able to make us aware of the depth that experience is capable of, and thereby enrich our experience of living.

The original film, released in 1962, lacks sensuality and the references to sex are only indirect. Not even the word “pornography” is mentioned; it is instead artfully referred to as “art film,” as if every “Indie” film were pornographic, by Lolita when she tells Humbert that she refused to be in such a film. Neither Humbert nor Lolita visibly show much physical affection generally, Humbert even being physically revolted by Charlotte. Even when Lolita runs upstairs to say goodbye to him before she leaves for summer camp, she merely hugs him, with the camera doing a quick cut-away so not to show her kissing him on a cheek. In the same scene in the remake, Lolita literally jumps up on him, wraps her legs around his waist and gives him a big wet kiss on the lips. From such an exact comparison, we can infer that a shift in cultural attitudes in American society occurred between when the original film and the remake were made. The only time Humbert embraces Lolita is when she is mourning her mother’s death, and the contact does not imply anything sexual. For it is normal, and even expected, that a parental figure would hug a crying child.

In the remake, touching is a staple between Humbert and Lolita even when he is just a boarder in the house. In fact, Lolita’s legs and arms touch him so often that the girl comes off as uncoordinated. Interestingly, she sits in his lap early on when he is working at the desk in his room, and then again later in the film when both are naked and his dick is obviously inside her. In both cases, neither person is complaining. Although the first sexual episode between the two is not shown, three subsequent episodes are shown—two of which are not enjoyable for Humbert, as Lolita has learned how to use sex with him to get things, including money. All the touching, complete with its sound, makes the incest more real for the audience.

At the same time, that Lolita entices Humbert when he is a boarder by touching him even while sharing a porch swing with him and her mother, and kissing him goodbye, and then offers to give him a blow-job (and likely more) on the first morning of their first night at a hotel after Charlotte’s death moderates the ethical harm of the incest because she is willing even when she eventually realizes that she can get money from him from having sex with him. In one scene, both are naked in bed, obviously having sex, and she is trying to collect the various coins that on the sheets. “You’re demanding that I pay more in the middle?” he asks her. She smacks him with a hand for obstructing her collection effort.

To be sure, and this point should be made perfectly clear, an adult is ethically bound to refuse the sexual advances of a child, but at least in the remake the sex is not forced, and thus rape in that sense. The ethical harm is more in how Humbert’s monopoly of her in terms of dating and sex ruins the rest of her life than being only in the sexual act itself.

When we first see the 14 year-old Lolita in the remake, she is a smiling, carefree girl enjoying summer in her backyard. Lying on the grass, she is even enjoying the water from a water-sprinkler falling on her as she looks at pictures in a magazine. Her innocence can be seen in her beautiful smile, and this seems to be what catches Humbert’s gaze, but in retrospect it is clear that he is sexually turned on by the sight of her body even though she has not yet even developed female breasts. In her last scenes in the remake, she looks terrible, wearing a cheap dress and glasses and living in a shack with her new, impoverished husband. Significantly, she is no longer smiling. In his last scene in the film, Humbert laments that she is not among the children laughing in a distant village. “Can you forgive me for what I’ve done to you?” he asks her as he is leaving her small house after giving her what can only be guilt-money.

Lolita’s relationship with Humbert is clearly dysfunctional. Even though this takes place after Charlotte’s death, so strictly speaking, he is no longer Lolita’s step-father, he refers to himself as such to her and takes on a parental role. She is, after all, a child and behaves as such, and is in need of parental supervision. The power differential is uncomfortable for her, and us, though not for Humbert. She naturally bristles at his totalitarian control over her life, including her sex life even when she is attending a school while living with him as he teaches at a college. Anger and even violence result. To escape from him, she secretly plans to live with another pedophile, Clare Quilty, whom she claims to be attracted to, though he kicks her out after she refuses to be in a pornographic, or “art,” film in which she would have to “blow those beastly boys.” She is left alone with no money and with no previous normal sexual relationship. Due to his possessive selfishness and his refusal to respect the proper sexual distance between a child and an adult, Humbert clearly acts very unethically with respect to Lolita. Out of all the ethical theories promulgated historically, one in particular is especially applicable to this film, and to the nature of the medium in being able to provoke visceral emotional reactions.

David Hume theorized in the eighteenth century that the sentiment, or feeling, of a gut-level disapproval triggered by a moral wrong is essentially moral judgment itself. As one of my professors used to say, if you walk by a dead body that has a knife in its back, you are going to have a negative emotional reaction, unless you are pathological. This feeling is your ethical judgment that something unethical has happened. By engaging both our eyes and ears, film can reach down deep and trigger such a sentiment of disapprobation, and thus trigger ethical judgments in an audience during a screening. This is much more powerful than merely having an audience told that something unethical is happening in a film. Although hearing a neighbor tell Humbert in the original film that “the neighbors are talking” about Humbert’s relationship with “his daughter” and even seeing the concerned look of the drug-store clerk who serves Lolita an ice-cream shake in the remake provide subtle and thus believable indications of just how ethically problematic the “father-daughter” relationship really is, actually feeling a sentiment of disapprobation while watching and hearing Humbert and Lolita having sex is much more powerful in giving an audience a sense of the ethical dimension in the human condition.

Playing a “supporting role” in making the ethical problem “real” for an audience watching the remake are the means in which sensuality in the story-world is brought out by close-ups and the magnification of particular sounds. The remake is hardly alone among films in being able to bring taken-for-granted ordinary sounds to our notice, and thus giving us the opportunity to sense the depth of experience that is possible even in our banal daily lives. The sound of shoes walking on a hard floor, the sound of air-pressure from the car-door of a new car being closed, and the sound of a pen or pencil being used on paper are just a few examples of sounds that we typically overlook and yet can be made aware of in a film. Even the sound of rain can be made to stand out. One byproduct of this cinematic experience is that we might then notice more sounds in our daily experience, and thus have a fuller, or deeper experience of the world in which we live.

In the remake, not all of the heightened sounds are related to or intimate sex; sensuality as sensitivity in experience goes beyond the sexual. The lazy tires of Humbert’s car in the first scene, for example, bring us into the story-world without any suggestion that sex will be a salient feature of that world. The magnified sound of moths being electrically zapped on the hotel porch, where Humbert first meets Quilty, is likewise devoid of sexual inuendo; the point of that exaggerated sound is perhaps that both men are living dangerously in having sex with children. The sound of chocolate syrup shooting into Lolita’s glass, followed by the sound of a scoop of ice-cream being released, however, conveys more of a sense of sensuality, though still not as sexual as the sound of Lolita’s body moving under a sheet in a hotel bed that she will soon share with Humbert during their first night at a hotel (in the original film, he sleeps on a cot at the foot of the bed). That the sound of the two kissing even back when Humbert is a boarder can be easily heard is no accident. Even when Lolita’s disjointedly throws a leg or arm in Humbert’s direction when he is a boarder, the sounds can easily be heard and suggest a story-world in which touching is real. I submit that such use of sound ultimately brings the audience closer to the incestual act as being real in the story-world.

Film can employ both sound and visuals to enhance sensitivity to particular things in a way that leaves the audience itself more sensitive during the screening, and thus open to the ethical dimension, which is then more likely to stay with the viewers after the movie. In other words, by heightening experience, a filmmaker can prepare an audience to be brought closer in without feeling threatened or revolted. Hume’s sentiment of disapprobation can accordingly be really felt, rather than just thought about. In this way at least, the medium of film can get “inside” of people ethically and thus enhance our understanding of the human condition from an ethical standpoint.

In fact, the ethical dimension overshadows the dysfunctional psychology in Humbert’s obsession over Lolita even though James Mason’s Humbert in the original film is clearly shown as pathological in his reaction to the final rejection by Lolita when he visits her and her husband near the end of the film. We are perhaps more accustomed to film being used, as by Alfred Hitchcock, for psychological effect than to focus on the ethical dimension of the human condition by means of particular ethical problems or dilemmas.

The ethical dimension also overshadows the religious implications. In the original film, Charlotte asks Humbert if he believes in God. “Does he believe in me?” is Humbert’s telling reply. But nothing more is said or suggested of religion in the original film. Humbert is more interested in the state of his soul in the remake. As the narrator, he admits that having sex with Lolita is a sin, and furthermore that it has played a direct role in ruining her life. In asking her, “Can you forgive me for what I’ve done to you?” it is clear that he is thinking about forgiveness. He is explicitly interested in his redemption, for he says that Quilty prevented it by taking Lolita away. Perhaps the implication we can draw from this is that Humbert thought at least at one point that he could eventually make Lolita happy. That he is delusional in this is clear as he asks her to leave her husband and return even though she has just told him that Quilty is the only man she ever liked romantically. In short, Humbert’s understanding of his redemption is clouded by the delusion in his sexual obsession.  Even so, it is the ethical dimension rather than the religious and psychological explanations that stands out in Lolita.

The Private Life of Henry VIII

The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) is on the surface a partial chronicle of the marriages of King Henry VIII of England, but, underneath, the film is on the human instinctual urge of aggression. With unchecked power, such as in the case of an absolute ruler or in the international arena, the instinct can be quite dangerous. In other words, the film demonstrates just how unsuited human nature is to the political type of absolute ruler and a world of sovereign states sans something like what Kant refers to as a world federation that could provide some check and balance to wayward, aggressive states, which in turn are really just human beings.

As Henry VIII, Charles Laughton acts out the foibles that absolute power can render particularly pernicious. When Henry’s privy council informs the king that Katherine Howard, his fifth wife, has been unfaithful in having an ongoing affair with Thomas Culpeper, Henry physically attacks the messenger. At another point in the film, Henry wrestles one of the two wrestlers performing at a banquet just because his wife has just told Henry that one of the wrestlers is the strongest man in England. The cinematography provides a link to the aggression that is the stuff of war, as the shadows of Henry and one of the wrestlers are shown on a wall tapestry of an army.

The attitude of the film toward Henry is one of sympathy, for he is portrayed as a lonely man who feels that he has never had a wife who has really loved him. He says at one point that he would rather live the life of a man above a carriage house with a wife who loves him than that of a king who must remarry for reasons of state. Unlike most accounts of the king, this film portrays him as a victim of a political system in which the ruler must give up so much of a personal life for the state. Although on a constitutional rather than an absolute monarch, the series, The Crown, on Queen Elizabeth II emphasizes how she must sacrifice so much in putting the interests of the Crown above what she wants. Is even a limited monarchy fair to the inhabitants of the role, given how subservient their personal lives must be to the interests of the office?

In The Private Life of Henry VIII, a title which if taken literally is an absurdity, for an absolute ruler, in this case, a king of 3 million subjects, can have no private life, Henry laments there being so many “cooks” in his court who treat him as a breeder. “Refinement is a thing of the past,” Henry tells members of his court at one point. “I’m either a king or a breeding bull.” He asks Cromwell, “Would you make me a false marriage?” Although Cromwell’s reply, “we need more heirs” so as to reduce the change of a power-struggle (i.e., aggression) when Henry dies, Henry’s planned marriage to Anne of Cleves, a German, is to keep the warring Germany and France from involving England in war. Later in the film, Henry remarks that both Germany and France have offered new lands to England in exchange for siding with the one or the other in their ongoing wars. “What’s the use of new territories if it means war, war, war.” Henry wants peace in Europe, and fears that the fighting between Germany and France would someday leave the continent in ruins, but there is no one to help him to stop the aggression.

From the shadows wrestling on the cloth tapestry of an army to having to marry an ugly foreigner to stave off war from spreading to England, to having to keep marrying to get a male heir, the prominence of aggression is highlighted in the film. For much of the film is either showing angry fits of an absolute ruler or what he must give up for England to avoid aggression in the political domain—both in the matter of succession and in international relations. It is no wonder that Henry says to his infant son, “The crown is no smiling matter.”

It is ironic that the film skips over, in ellipses, the (aggressive) beheadings of two of Henry’s wives. Perhaps the narrative’s extension to cover even Henry’s last wife in a reasonable playing time is the reason, but the audience is left only with the sharpening of the sword to intimate the missed state-sponsored acts of aggression against two women (though one of whom was not innocent).  Even in the twenty-first century, executions under state auspices occur. How much more so that must have been the case when absolute rulership was common. Even in the time of Queen Victoria, when British sovereigns were no longer absolute monarchs, Lord Acton famously wrote to an Anglican bishop, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  By 1887, Parliament could act as a check on a monarch, but the titans of industry could still operate as absolute rulers over their workers in demanding very long hours and refusing to improve harsh working conditions. 

We moderns look back at stories of ancient and early-modern kings like Henry VIII as if the problem of abuses of power has since been solved, yet we watch citizen-videos of horrendous police brutality against unarmed innocent people. Human nature has not changed even as political theory has made some progress. It is still true that if we are angels, then surely we must be killer angels. This line comes from Gettysburg (1985), an epic film about the bloody battles at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1863 as the Confederate States of America warred against the United States of America in what is more commonly known as the U.S. Civil War. More than seven thousand men died at Gettysburg and 33,000 were wounded. A total of 1.5 million casualties were reported in that war.  This is nothing compared to the casualties in World War II during the “modern” twentieth century, and many more people died from Hitler and Stalin outside of battle.  So I put to the reader, how significant really is the development in political theory since the time of Henry VIII? Have our great minds really come to terms with the salience of the aggressive instinctual urge in human nature in developing types and processes of political organization that take account of our intractable penchant for aggression? 

The Private Life of Henry VIII would have us believe that much of what obligated that king was the need to forestall or obviate fighting. This points both to the salience of aggression in our “social” species and whether ethical obligation (i.e., a duty to the state being put above personal desires) should be relied on as a corrective or constraint.

Rainbow

Rainbow (1944) is a Soviet patriotic propaganda film about the brutal Nazi-German occupation of a village in Ukraine. Filmed in 1943 while Ukraine was still occupied, the film was shot in the U.S.S.R. in central Asia rather than in Ukraine. The plot centers on the efforts of Nazi captain Kurt Werner to get a resistance (partisan) fighter to reveal where her group was heading. The woman is stark (strong), for she does not budge even as the Germans torture her both mentally and physically. I contend that the film pivots on a few lines spoken by an old Russian man in the village on the nature of power itself. Those lines stand out for being the only philosophical abstractions in the dialogue of the film. The film is about the nature of power.

The ubiquitous presence of German troops holding guns sends the audience a clear message that the basis of government is raw force: the ability to kill. A preponderance or monopoly of the use of force is decisive. Although the villagers vastly outnumber the German troops, both use of the guns to kill many people in succession and on the other side the (irrational?) psychology of passivity engraved in the Russian psyches and perpetuated by the decentralization of a village population (mass meetings being controlled by the Germans) maintain the status quo as if the village were a closed system until the Russian army liberates the village from the outside. Although it seems that if the villagers turned on the guards all at once, the German regime in the village would quickly fall, the Hobbesian instinct of self-preservation and the lack of a selfless ethic of sacrifice prevent what would be necessary: a group of villages to start “the ball rolling” in anticipation that an onslaught of villagers inside their houses would quickly join so the troops would be overwhelmed.

So we tend to equate power with actual brute force or the threat thereof. The real foundation of a government (i.e., a “state” in political realism) is its ability to kill threats to its very existence as well as its presumed entitlement to tell people what to do and thus be obeyed. Locally, this means that the last-resort basis of a city government is actually its police force, rather than its mayor or city council. The ability to shoot or arrest a person is the foundation of government. From this foundational vantage point, lofty speeches by heads of state seem peripheral and perhaps even luxuries.

The film, which is actually misnamed Rainbow because in extreme cold where ice-crystals are in the air, the sun’s rays hitting those crystals actually create “sun-halos,” proffers a different conception of power. In the few lines on power itself, an old Russian man tells a few other villagers in a basement that power is not holding a gun; rather, power lies in not saying a word when the Nazis want information. To resist even torture by not giving in so the aggressor gets what one wants is power. I contend that such power is internal, which admittedly can have external effects (e.g., the Nazi captain is not told where the partisan group is based), whereas holding a gun can be external power (i.e., getting another person to do something, or not to do something).

The interaction effect is significant. Holding a gun does not in itself give the holder power over another person; the interior power to resist temptations (e.g., to talk to save oneself or one’s child) can be sufficient to render the power inoperative. In the film, the villagers withhold bread even though the Germans have taken hostages. High external power and low internal power render the external power effective (i.e., power). The combination of low external power and high internal power is a worse-case scenario for an aggressor. High external power and low internal power is what an aggressor counts on in being able to gain or maintain power over another person.

Therefore, I contend that the old Russian man was only partially correct. Holding a gun is a case of power, assuming that the other person has weak or low internal power in being willing to resist temptations. Having the self-discipline or control sufficient to not say a word when an aggressor (bully) is using (the threat of) force to get information, as in the film, is also power. The Russian village is largely in a stalemate because no one is giving up bread or speaking to the Nazis and the latter have the guns (the ability to kill the villagers). Captain Werner kills (and has his troops kill) mostly out of frustration. The nature of power is not as one-sided as it appears; the force of will of the partisan villagers is strong as is the force of the German guns.

The President

Religion and political power can be dangerous if combined and aimed at people deemed to be apostate or heretical. In calling for the Crusades, our Roman Catholic popes put their political power behind the theocratic and political goal of taking back Jerusalem and Constantinople/Istanbul “for Christ.” Those popes and the kings and soldiers who went to war with the Muslims there wittingly or unwittingly violated Jesus’s preachment to love rather than fight enemies. Christianity and political power have not mixed well, historically. The U.S. Constitution forbids the federal government and, presumably, the states, to establish or sponsor a religion or even favor one. Theocracies, such as those in the Calvinist colonies in New England (except for Rhode Island, which allowed freedom of religion), would be excluded as a political form for the Union as well as its member-states. Rather than meaning “sub-unit” or “province” as in Normandy in the E.U. state of France, the American Continental Congress has applied “state” in the generic sense of a polity with a yet-to-be-determined political system. Hence while the Articles of Confederation were in force, before the U.S. Constitution, the states could legally form theocracies. The film, The President (2014), is fictional, but this doesn’t stop its portrayal of a toppled president in hiding from looking realistic, given the cases of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The character arc of the president while he is in hiding, or “on the run,” captures a generally unknown way in which Jesus’ preaching on how to enter the unknown Kingdom of God can apply to political power in a good way. This is not to advocate theocracy, however. Rather, individuals who wield power, whether in government or business, can come to see the very nature of power differently and gain new insight into the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus.

In the film, the toppled president and his grandchild travel mostly by walking and in the back of a pickup truck (and even horse-led cart) to reach the sea, where someone is presumably to meet them and get them out of the country. By the time the two reached the beach, the United Opposition had a million-dollars bounty on the president’s head, dead or alive. Carelessness on the part of the president led a farmer to discover the president’s true identity; it wasn’t long before the farmer led opposition troops to the “traitor president.” The mob-mentality on the beach would have hanged or beheaded the former president were it not for one of the troops, who warned that killing the old would merely continue the despotic cycle. The United Opposition in turn would torture its way to the false dream of unanimous support from the people, just as the president had. Ending the cycle would be necessary, the soldier told the others, for democracy to have a chance. “Let’s make [the president] a voice for democracy,” the solder urged.  

Unknown to the soldier, the president may have already been convinced of the value of democracy because in fleeing, he had discovered the extent of injury that had been inflicted under his rule. He and his grandchild joined with a group of recent political prisoners who were on their way to their homes—one man after five years of imprisonment. That man, plus one other, both had a still-bloody foot and had to be carried. The president carried one, which is itself indicative that the former president felt some responsibility for the torture.  Power looks different on the ground level. The man being carried by the president said it was a good thing that the torturers had not discovered that he had been part of a group that had killed a brother of the president. At this point, the president weighs whether to throw the man down and kill him, but this could compromise his alias. This is shown to the viewer as an alternative vision of what could be.

Even though the president could have stopped carrying the man (e.g., out of staged tiredness), the president, an old man, astonishingly continues to carry the man who could not walk. Even some sympathy can be read on the president’s face. The image of the impoverished president in rags carrying his now-discovered enemy who had been wounded by the president’s men fits extraordinarily well with Jesus’ teaching to not just turn the other cheek (as when the president learned what the man had done), but also help. Whereas not fighting back tilts the world to one side, willingly coming to the aid of someone who, as in the film, wants to kill you or have you killed, turns the ways of the world upside-down. In this sense, the Kingdom of God is radical; it is so contrary to what people typically do in the world and what even society says is justified (e.g., public legal justice, which resonates with revenge).
It should be no surprise that the dictatorship form of government would be at odds with how Jesus says a person can get into, or, even better, instantiate the Kingdom of God. Facing no earthly constraints, according to Thomas Hobbes, a tynt who dies in office only faces divine judgment. A tyrant anticipating that he or she will hold onto power can feel free to direct severe torture and depriving the people of even sustenance for want of taxes. Those officials implementing such directives really face no choice, for disobedience could easily cost them their respective lives. 
In the film, the movement for democracy is in line with adopting Jesus' suggestions. This may be because such a movement does away with dictatorship. Yet this does not necessarily mean that democracy itself is in line what it takes to instantiate the ways of God to the Christian. 
In Iraq, Abu Ghraib prison was an American detention center for captured Iraqis from 2003 to 2006. Graphic photos depicting guards abusing  detainees were discovered in 2004 and yet the torture went on. 

Ironically using dogs to dehumanize a person. 

Acting contrary to instantiating the Kingdom of God. Justified by following orders?

Is "the ends justify the means" inherently contrary to instantiating the Kingdom of God?

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (John Acton)

This photo suggests that not every torturer was reluctantly acting on orders. (source: Wired)

The George W. Bush administration's claim that Iraq had been involved in the demise of the World Trade Center in New York did not stand up, so the decision to torture was not justified by the claim. The horrific extent that the torture violated human rights is enough to strike down the thesis that democracy is in line with the Kingdom of God whereas dictatorship is not. Perhaps it can only be said that government officials in a democracy (i.e. with checks and balances) may have more freedom (i.e., without facing death) to refuse to torture and--even more of a stretch--to go on proactively to reduce an enemy's suffering. In other words, perhaps democracy can give enough space for government officials, including soldiers, to act on conscience. Even here, a religion's ethical teachings (i.e., in line with reducing suffering) can be distinguished from dogma, which can be used to legitimate suffering, especially of enemies, political or religious. 

See Christianized Ethical Leadership: The Servant, Shepherd, and Steward, available at Amazon. 

Schindler’s List

In German-occupied Poland during World War I, Oskar Schindler spent millions to save 600 Jews from the death camps. In the 1993 film, Schindler’s List, the gradual transformation of the luxuriant capitalist is evident as the film unfolds. At the end,  he comes to an emotional realization as to the worth of money as compared with human lives. He realizes that had he not spent so lavishly, he could have saved even more lives. He realizes, in effect, his selfishness that had blinded him even to the obvious severe suffering of the Jews around him. The story is thus not simply that of greed giving way to compassion. 

In the film, the greed of the capitalist is in tension with the power of a labor-camp director, Amon Goeth. The latter luxuriates in shooting the Jews almost wantonly, while Oskar Schindler luxuriates in spending the surplus profit made off slave labor in his factories.  Simply put, shooting such cheap laborers harms the efficiency of the plants and thus reduces the profits. So Schindler attempts to convince Goeth that real power is exercised “when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.” 

For example, when a Roman governor pardoned a man guilty of stealing, real power was applied.  It is easy to shoot a defenseless Jew in a labor camp in which the state sanctions such an act de facto and de jure, but pardoning evinces power because the granter goes above, or contrary to, the law. In another sense, Goeth needed little self-discipline to shoot a Jew for screwing up on a task, but, given Goeth’s pleasure from killing, he had to draw on self-restraint in pardoning a boy for not having cleaned Goeth’s bathtub enough. As Nietzsche points out in his philosophical writings, the richest pleasure from the exercise of power comes from overcoming urges within. There is more power, in other words, in resisting an intractable urge than in overcoming a foe on a battlefield.

In one scene, Schindler attends Mass. His faith, which is barely touched on in the film, is in a sort of power, that of meekness, that turns the typical notion of power on its heels. Not only are the last, first, and most of the first, last; the very notion of a suffering servant suggests that standing up especially for unjustly suffering servants such as the Jews in Nazi Germany, partakes of power more than does putting those Jews to death. This comes through in the scene in which Goeth and other Nazi officials watch in bewilderment as Schindler takes off his nice suit-coat in order to help shoot more water through an expended hose into the train-cars, which are filled to the brim with Jews heading to a death camp. People drunk with the power esteemed in culture like that of the Nazi Germany are at a loss, even stunned, in witnessing another, qualitatively different, sort of power. The two powers are that different. Accordingly, the world would be much different were the predominant sort of power relegated and the more subtle power highlighted.

Whereas for centuries money or wealth was assumed in Christianity to be indicative of greed, Christian writers during the Italian Renaissance wrote of good use. If wealth is spent on good causes, the wealth itself that is spent is surely not of greed, for the heart is in a good place.[1] At the end of the film, Schindler realizes that all his wealth had been of greed because he had not used it on good causes, such as in saving people even of a different faith. Facilitating the exercise of another faith—as in Schindler encouraging one of his workers, who is also a rabbi, to say a prayer at sunset on a Friday at the plant—evinces the deeper, more ultimately satisfying sort of power, whereas acting to enrich one’s own religion can be said to be too convenient, or easy, to do so. Using wealth can thus be in sync with the sort of power that so perplexes the Nazis in the film.

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1. See Skip Worden, God’s Gold, available at Amazon.

The Big Short and Concussion: A System on Sterroids

Watched one after the other or, more realistically, a day or two apart, "The Big Short" and "Concussion" provide an excellent picture of American business and society. As much as the revelations in the films are shocking, I'm more shocked that the American people just take things as they are. "Oh, that's just the way things go in the world," they might say as if this serves as a defense. In other words, we will doubtless get "same old, same old," at the ballot box in November. The disjunction between people's reaction to the substance of the films and the way the people vote is nothing short of astonishing to me. How can people be so shocked at Wall Street and the NFL, and yet continue to vote for the same epigones? We continue to use the same big banks and watch football as if the films were somehow really fictional. I suppose we get what we deserve. 

The key to understanding both films is actually made transparent in another film of the same sort. If you see "Spotlight," pay attention to the chief editor's point that the system, including all the parts..meaning people doing their jobs...was at fault...not just Cardinal Law. Hence, in "The Big Short" and "Concussion," we can reasonably extend the culprits even to the business ethics scholars who said nothing at the societal level about the rating agencies and the conflicts of interests in the big banks, as well as about the NFL. When you have a system wherein everyone is just doing his or her job, and yet is an accomplice, assigning blame to a particular part becomes artificial. It is the system itself--of business, government, and society--that is deeply flawed and thus in need of fundamental change. 

The Last Emperor: A Curious Case of Limited Absolute Power

People either obey a powerful government official or rebel. A rebellion does not typically include continued loyalty to the sovereign. The French Revolution demonstrates this point. Yet in China in the 1910s as the Qing dynasty lost power, the authority of the emperor became more complex—or maybe it had been so throughout the dynasty.

Early in the second act of the film, The Last Emperor(1987), the Manchu boy-emperor can do whatever he pleases in the Forbidden City. Behind the massive red walls, he orders one of his eunuchs to drink ink. The man dutifully complies, knowing that he will die from the poison. The boy gave the grave order simply to prove to his emperorship to his younger brother, who had been shouting, “You are not the emperor! You are not the emperor!” The order instantiates absolute power on a human scale—the sort that Thomas Hobbes prescribes for a sovereign king or assembly in the bloody seventeenth-century Europe. Even in being the final say on theological interpretation, Hobbes’ ruler, or ruling body, has absolute sovereignty.

For the last emperor—the last Manchu ruler of the Qing dynasty, which began in 1644—sovereignty is limited to the Forbidden City. Even as he is master of all therein, the Ming dynasty falls to a series of two brief republics—representative democracy in China—and a chaotic period in which warlords contended for greater influence. The teenage emperor cannot very well leave the confines of his city’s walls under such circumstance; his absolute sovereignty is thus limited.

In the scene in which the emperor makes a run for the exit, his own guards beat him to the outer door and close it before him. He orders them to open it, but they do not. Interestingly, they kneel to him and bow their heads in obedience—yet with their swords held upright in front of them. This strange mix of loyalty and refusal may strike the Western viewers as odd. In Mutiny on the Bounty, the rebellious crew-members to not pay captain Bly homage as they ignore his orders. Such a stark “black and white” dichotomy concerning power does not fit The Last Emperor. On the one hand, the very young emperor orders a servant to drink ink, yet five or ten years later the emperor’s guards refuse to re-open the outer door as per the emperor’s order. This strange comparison suggests how artificial human power can be. That is to say, sometimes the authority that some people say they have is exaggerated, even false, yet in having their way those weak birds of prey may exercise their presumed entitlement nonetheless.

For the emperor’s servant to actually drink ink just because a six or seven year-old boy gives the order as some part of a puerile sibling-rivalry suggests that the servant takes human institutionally-dependent authority too seriously. An adult of sound mind would never agree to die as part of a child’s game; yet if other adults are bent on enforcing even such an absurd manifestation of power as coming from legitimate authority, the servant may have died anyway. In other words, when the ludicrous is taken seriously by some adults, the real adults—the stronger ones—may find the lunacy all too real, for practical purposes. Hence, a kid can get away with telling a servant to drink ink even as the guards pledged to obey the emperor refuse his more substantive order to let him through, out of the world of make-believe. Sadly, that world can be all too real.