Apocalypse Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment, is not a documentary of the experiment on power aggrandizement that took place in 1971; actors play the supervising professor s well as the 24 students who were the subjects—12 randomly being assigned as guards and the other 12 as prisoners. The film can be characterized as a psychological drama on human nature, and in particular, on the salience therein of the will to power, especially when a power differential exists. Had Nietzsche been alive to watch the film, he would have been engrossed, finding much to confirm his theory that not only the will to power is the basic human motive, but also the weak too easily resort to cruelty (and pettiness) to feel any pleasure they can out of the exercise of whatever power they can muster, given their innate weakness.

In the film, professor Philip Zimbardo, who lets the experiment run on too long, given the violence being committed by the students who are playing prison guards, initially tells all of the students that touching (let alone hitting others) is against the rules of the experiment. Due to just the potentialpower differential in the experiment's scenerio, it isn’t long before one guard, and then another, presumptuously break that rule, and the guards’ violence only gets worse. To be sure, Zimbardo does not intervene to give a disincentive to the guards who have violated the rule because the professor wants to see how the psychological dynamic of power naturally unfolds. That the subjects are actually students who know that the “prison” space is actually on campus, and thus is not a real prison and they are not really guards and prisoners renders the increasingly guards' increasingly encroaching power aggrandizement by the guards on the prisoners and the natural resistance of some of the prisoners, due to their will to power, all the more amazing. By increasingly encroaching, I mean that human beings naturally seek to pick at at least some differential in power in order to increase the gradiant. Like picking at a scab, the urge is hard to resist. The film accurately depicts this vital finding.

The implications are huge, especially in terms of the value in having formidable institutional checks on prison guards and municipal (and university) police employees. Their tendency to “take liberties” even in easily turning to unjustified violence to impose whatever power they presume is justified psychologically should be assumed, rather than merely hypothesized, by government officials and city (or university) residents in a position to design, pass, and implement checks on the aggrandizement. The case of university police in the United States, the federal constitution of which reserves  police power to the state and federal governments exclusively, is especially dangerous, given the tenuous link of accountability from the standpoint of representative democracy. In fact, university police managers are subject institutionally to a conflict of interest in that their bosses in university administration may be one party to a dispute, such as in the case of student protests. At Yale, for example, during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the university’s police arrested 46 students—the remaining protesters went immediately to sit in a street intersection so they would be under the jurisdiction of the municipal police department, which in turn is accountable to a local government rather than a private, non-profit corporation.

As the case of Israel in Gaza dramatically shows, even a democratically elected government can perpetuate crimes against humanity, so it is incorrect to claim that such crimes are committed only by dictators. In the case of the Putin administration in Russia and its multi-year invasion of Ukraine, the Stanford prison experiment is very relevant in explaining the “widespread, systematic torture and ill-treatment of both Ukrainian civilian detainees and prisoners of war, including cases of sexual violence,” according to Claudia Julio, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, who spoke at an informal session of the UN’s Security Council on August 11, 2026.[1] “More than 95% of the Ukrainian prisoners of war and 85% of the civilian detainees reported being tortured or ill-treated, often repeatedly. They also reported being subjected to sexual abuse and food deprivation while being held in inhumane conditions and not being provided adequate medical services.”[2] After watching The Stanford Prison Experiment, anyone could readily grasp how such horrendous treatment can come about in conditions in which such a stark power-differential exists. Even just the natural human reaction to being unjustly subject to abuses of power can be expected to result in more violence as if to retaliate in enforcing the presumed entitlement to the unjustified power. Rules or laws against such violence are easily obviated mentally, and even more violence is inflicted as if to say, how dare you resist my over-reaching! You will pay dearly! Countering externally the sheer presumption to exercise such power is two degrees of separation from the squalid mentality. In the film, were the professor to directly confront the guards in real time for having unilaterally violated the rule against even touching the prisoners, let alone hitting him merely for resisting the unjustified violence, the guards would have been shocked in realizing just how out of line they allowed themselves to go. The human mind can go on and on in taking liberties without checking itself by thinking, Have I gone too far? In other words, the human brain short-circuits itself in terms of is presumption to power-aggrandizement. This is the idea from the film that has been so overlooked.

Whether examining the conduct of the Russian prison-guards or the Israelis soldiers in Gaza with regard to people they view as sub-human, a sordid perspective that also can be gleamed from the sheer violent presumptuousness of the student-guards in the film, the conduct and its psychological underpinnings are no accident. The innate tendency to go too far in terms of power is not limited to cases of mental illness, but is in human nature itself, so rather than treat violent over-reaches even in violation of law as aberrations, they should be expected and thus fortified against, institutionally.

In terms of local and private police departments, an implication is that those departments’ internal affairs offices should not be relied upon as sufficient to ensure accountability on abuse police employees. In terms of governments committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, an implication is that a global order treats national sovereignty as absolute is insufficient; international adjudication and enforcement of international law is necessary. Treating abuses of power, whether by prison guards or police employees, or by government officials, as exceptions to human nature rather than as very likely ignores the vital lesson that the film can provide to humanity. In other words, human nature is very susceptible to getting carried away with power even to the extent of unilaterally resorting to violence to enforce on other people the power that one presumes the right to inflict on others. The sheer presumption of power that is dubious and the use of vocal and even physical violence to enforce the presumption reveal just how pathetic human nature is with respect to wielding power over other people. Were more people to take the real message of the film seriously—and it is astonishing that the film has not had more impact—much more would presumably be done legislatively to hold police and even governments accountable. The assumption would change from treating abuses of power as exceptions to being the rule, and thus as being in more need of being checked institutionally and legislatively. Even taking national sovereignty as absolute could be subject to amendment so as to allow for the enforcement of international law.

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1. Jerry Fisayo-Bambi, “Over 16,000 Ukrainian Civilians Remain Detained and Tortured by Russia, UN Says,” Euronews.com, 12 August, 2026.
2. Ibid.

A Ghost Story

As if the macabre specter of a ghost, albeit in a white sheet with two black eye-holes, were not enough for a spooky film, David Lowery endeavored to shoot and edit his 2017 film, A Ghost Story, using a relatively fast 33 frames per second in shooting the ghost moving, and editing without music so the story-world’s supernatural element would be subtly apparent. Although a prognosticator delivers a long philosophical monologue at a party somewhere in the middle of the film, Lowery does not characterize the meaning of the film in terms of that monologue’s point that the universe will eventually end so a person should live each day as if it were the last day of one’s life. Of course, none of us need worry about the universe burning up any time soon, so from that standpoint we can expect to live full lives without being nihilist on a daily basis. Fortunately, the meaning of the film, Lowery states in an interview, is not to live each day as if it is your last day. A more interesting question is whether the film is an exponent of nihilism as the real, ontological state of existence, or whether human fulfillment can fill human hollowness with the fullness of experienced life. Moreover, does a supernatural dimension, such as a heaven, exist such that human souls can depart from the human condition and even loved ones while still existing (after death). In other words, does holiness transcend hollowness? The latter may pertain more to the phenomenal realm of lived human existence than to the noumenal realm of things as they are in themselves, and thus what each of us really is.

The film’s plot centers around a young married couple, unnamed, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. The husband dies early on in the film in a car-crash in front of the couple’s house in the country.  He bypasses going to heaven and instead returns to their house as a ghost. His widow does not lose time in moving out, however, and it is clear from his anger (as a ghost!) that he is not at all happy about her leaving. Eventually, he gets the message, literally and figuratively, that she will never return. Not showing the crash—only smoke from his car leading the camera-shot slowly to his head resting on the steering wheel—or the funeral singles Lowery out as a film-maker who thinks outside the box in movie-making rather doing things the usual, formulaic way; there have certainly been too many of those movies. Relatedly, the philosophical dimension that he brought to the film goes beyond even what he consciously intended, and is in sync with his efforts to subtly convey the atmosphere of the film.

For example, in subtly elongating camera shots at the end of a few scenes and thus holding the viewers to a fixed picture within which nothing is happening, Lowery makes us uncomfortable because he breaks the “rule” on camera-shot length, which on average had been getting shorter perhaps to appease the proclivity of audiences from the mid-1970s for titillating, quick-action disaster flicks as if they were displays of fireworks in constant finale. Lowery challenges audiences to “sit still,” which, if it triggers psychological discomfort, is the fault of the viewers rather than the filmmaker. This was not Lowery’s intent, however. Rather, holding a camera-shot at the end of a scene long enough for the holding itself to become transparent to viewers allows them to feel the emptiness and lonely isolation of Rooney Mara’s character in the house. Perhaps that her husband, while alive, is emotionally stunted or unavailable contributes to her day-to-day dreariness. The stationary shots also point a spotlight on time itself, not only as it is perceived by the bored wife, but also that time is different for a ghost than for us. Both the young wife’s loneliness and the ghost’s expansive sense of time can be thought of as nihilist. Her boredom itself can be expected to feel like emptiness. Regarding the ghost, from our standpoint, the length of time that the ghost stays in the house, even far into the future and going into the past, would be intolerable. Although the ghost may experience the long expanse of time spent in the house, especially when it is empty, as fleeting, from our standpoint so much time without any action would be intolerable. Likewise, movie-viewers looking at a very long, non-moving camera shot of a scene in which nothing is moving may feel a sense of suspended animation, as if becoming were necessary for being and so just being without becoming is merely nihilist nothingness. A narrative must have a strong sense of becoming or people will lose interest in following the story and move on to do something else. We are doers even if our very being is not based in functionalism.

To the ghosts in the film, time not only is perceived differently, but also is fundamentally different in that time-travel is possible. Even in filming the husband-ghost at a different film-speed so to show a supernatural quality to what otherwise looks like a child’s Halloween ghost-costume, Lowerly didn’t fully grasp the implication that time itself is different to a ghost. This idea, Lowery said, “plays into the thematic parts of the movie so thoroughly, I should have realized that on set. I’m always surprised at how many of these things are just completely—there are amazing details in every movie that you would expect to be conscious decision, but are purely happy accidents and unconscious inspiration.”[1] Such inspiration applies here to a director’s own thinking on philosophy—in the case, of time—applied to his film. Philosophically, a different metaphysic has implications for time itself as well as how it is perceived. Accordingly, a philosophical analysis of a film can and should go beyond a filmmaker’s own intentions and even thinking on philosophy as it bears on the film. Because the story-world of a film, whether in a director’s head or on the screen, is wholistic in supporting a narrative, everything that contributes to philosophy in a film may not be consciously thought out by a film’s filmmakers and yet be valid.

By philosophy, I do not have in mind mere (i.e., unphilosophical) psychology, such as applies to characters in a film. For example, the husband-ghost in the film is only rarely a doer; he periodically “plays” with the lights, pounds on a piano when he goes back in time by falling off a skyscraper in the future, and throws dishes on the floor of the kitchen to scare off the new family that moves in after his widow moves out. Even though he is in a supernatural dimension that is separate from our mundane dimension, the ghost can have physical, or empirical impact in terms of physics. We can thus go beyond the fact that ghosts can apparently feel emotion in the film to grasp the metaphysical relationship between the realm of ghosts and of living people.

Going further, perhaps the rareness of the ghost’s functionality empirically is related to why time is different for the ghost. Doing, or function, hardly captures what it is for a ghost in the film to exist. Functionalism falls short in capturing existentialism. The very human notion of living so to work rather than working so to live is refuted, or simply does not apply to ghosts in this film because they spend so much time “standing” around even if the passage of so much time eludes their notice because time passes differently for ghosts. Time may pass quickly when we are having fun (or are busy at work), but for ghosts in the film, the speed of time may be different, as well as the ability to change time-frames (i.e., jump far into the future instantly and then go back in the past). That we easily get bored, even when a camera-shot is held longer than usually to end a scene, does not necessarily mean that the husband-ghost was bored in the empty house because of the sheer amount of time involved. Yet from our standpoint, we posit boredom onto the ghost because it is difficult for us to get beyond our vantage point to grasp the otherness of another. Feeling like life is empty—that it is really nothingness—may be partly why the wife/widow perceives days going by so slowly; such a sense of nihilism may even result in suicide, which, absent any heaven or hell, can be thought of as a fast track to nihilism sans even one’s own being, or existence. Suicide obviously does not apply to ghosts as they are already dead (yet they seem to feel emotions, have intentions, and can even throw dishes!). Existence after death may be an oxymoron.

In addition to existentialism (ontology), however, philosophy of religion and even a bit of theology makes its way into the film, for we (and the ghost) get a glimpse of heaven, or at least its gateway. This has major implications for the nihilist, dank atmosphere that runs throughout the film and thus seems absolute but is actually not foundational to human existence. A few minutes after getting up from the physical body in the hospital’s morgue, the ghost walks down a hall and pauses upon seeing a brief opening to heaven, a portal that is represented as a very bright, home-film-screen-sized square of light that opens momentarily on a wall. The ghost passes on heaven, and instead heads to the house, presumably to be with his widow. Although not explicitly or even implicitly linked, that heaven exists relativizes the isolation of the wife/widow, whose nihilism may not have the last word in her existence. That the portal opens as if “on cue” suggests furthermore that some “intelligence” or being having intention and thus a will exists as a common denominator with respect to the realms of ghosts and living persons. Already in the film, the widow, whose desire to move is clear at the film’s beginning, hires movers, packs up, and drives away, with her satisfied facial expression being shown in the translucent sunlight. She is headed to a brighter future and will not miss that house, and maybe not even her dead husband for long as he had evinced the emotional absence of a ghost even during the marriage. The husband’s ghost is not happy about her decision to move away, but it is only when he finally opens a note that she has sealed in wood paneling in the house that he “gives up the ghost,” and the sheet collapses. The ghost next door had just done the same thing when that ghost finally realized that the person being waiting for would never return, for the house had just been torn down. Therefore, the note left by the widow was probably one of closure—of saying farewell to the house, and thus to the ghost in it. Indeed, she would never be back; we know this because the ghost remains in the house far into the future, beyond even the time when the house is torn down and is replaced by a skyrise office building. We can conclude that the continued existence of ghosts here among the living, rather than being in heaven, is predicated on the hope of continuing on with a loved one. But lest it be forgotten, wedding vows include the words, till death do us part. The husband-ghost is suddenly faced with having to accept the finality of the end of a relationship, and thus he “gives up the ghost” and presumably takes heaven up on its offer. In reading the note, he lets go of the hope he has had in seeing her again, but the resulting nihilism may be replaced with the fullness of heaven. The ghost presumably finds peace in finally accepting the finality of the end of his relationship with his wife (now widow). If so, then nihilism does not have the last word not only for his widow, who may remarry but has at least moved on from the emotional isolation that she has known in that old house with her husband, but also for the ghost, who has finally given up the ghost by accepting the finality of a relationship that wasn’t very intimate anyway.

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1. Tasha Robinson, “A Ghost Story Director David Lowery on How Technology Fixed His Lonely Ghost,” The Verge (theverge.com), July 14, 2017 (accessed July 22, 2026).

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.

I Want Your Sex

The 2026 film, I Want Your Sex, is ostensibly about sex, for the film is saturated with that leitmotif, but the narrative is actually a critique of California culture, with European culture playing a minor role to provide a contrast. Generally, comedy can be used by screenwriters as a means by which audiences can accept, or at least acknowledge criticism that would otherwise be met with ferocious denial befitting a drug addiction. In 2026, the sheer dogmatism of ideologically-soaked imposing at will, as if with facts of reason rather than the gloss of merely subjective opinion, was the mentality of the day afflicting (young) adults under 40 years-old in California. Film can expose such banality to the light of day and thus serve as a self-correcting agent for a societal or sub-societal culture, for the human brain, standing on its own as arrogance on stilts, may be woefilly and unretrievably vulnerable to purblindness when beliefs and values are in the grip of ideological idolatry.

The film’s plot centers around Elliot being hired by Erika Tracy, a commercial artist. Her art’s theme is sexual in nature, and it is not long before she enlists all-too-willing Elliot in sadistic-masochistic sexual fantasies, for Elliot’s girlfriend, Minerva, is cold as ice in bed—even going so far as to fake enjoying sex with Elliot. As the film’s narrative unfolds, Erika and her pretentious (and violent) assistant, Vikktor, temporarily frame Elliot for murder (of Tracy!) in order to raise the asking prices for the art. The two come to a working-agreement wherein both profit from business dealings with the other, and the film ends with Elliot and Erika separately having the same dream in which they get married and she finally reveals herself as a self-imploding demon, which may refer to the true nature of the culture being critiqued by the film.

Erika, Vikktor, and the film’s gay trope/slut, Zap, another of Erika’s employees, are so intensely narcissistic that even their external mannerisms come off as pretentious. Erika even tells Elliot, “People think only about themselves.” She also tells him that most people are idiots and cowards, so don’t worry about what they think. Arrogant self-vaulting, as if on stilts during a flood, looks down on the pathetic losers below. According to M. Scott Peck’s book, People of the Lie, however, a sense of inner emptiness lies behind such pretention and narrow, selfishness along with a callous indifference to whether other people are suffering. Erika’s inner emptiness can be grasped in Erika’s statement to Elliot, “Sex is everything and nothing.”  She even makes fun of her European acquaintance for having told Elliot that sex is a dance and a language of touch, and thus of even emotional intimacy. “That’s why I hate Europeans,” Erika says when Elliot recounts what the European woman told him in her hotel room. But in reducing sex to impersonal S & M, which highlights pleasure from the inflicting of pain, Erika can be critiqued on her judgment on the European’s interpretation of sex. For according to Erika, “Sex is a drug, like every other addiction,” so a person has to “learn how to control it or it will control you.” Because sex is Erika’s life in terms not only of her art, but also relationships that might otherwise be romantic, the implication is that her life, and even her sense of self, is actually empty, encased in an addiction to inflicting pain through impersonal, and mechanical sex. Her admission to Elliot, “We’re both emotionally stunted and suck at communicating” actually applies only to herself, for Elliot is the proverbial adult in the room.

Erika’s superficial toughness does, however, have a benefit, in that she is able to criticize the young-adult generation that has been so coddled by parents that ideological discomfort itself is a trigger. Anything uncomfortable is attacked even though discomfort can spur psychological development—something the “woke” generation sorely lacks. Erika recounts to Elliot that a young adult using social media (Tic-Tok) complained in a comment because the person had not given consent to see a photo of two people holding hands!  The sheer presumptuousness evinces a puerile stage of psychological development and thus a proclivity to throw a temper-tantrum when “accosted” by the discomfort of a hated ideological stance held by another person as if such a stance were unlawful and incorrect. It is no wonder, Erika says, that 30 percent of that generation play video games rather than have sex.

The film’s director and writer, Gregg Araki, told an audience in person in 2026 that the 30 percent line is important to the film. What he did not make explicit is that a generation of emotionally-stunted and isolated judgmental people is not of benefit to a society. The sheer ideological intolerance and presumption exclusively to truth, which in the 1980s had been associated with evangelical Christians, had come to characterize “politically-correct” children-adults in California by 2026. To such enraged intolerance, the rest of us can be said to have a duty to reply to such primped arrogance on stilts, Deal with it. But as “woke” as the “politically correct” were in 2026, they were actually asleep in their presumption and abject, narrow selfishness, which pathetically defines truth itself from such a standpoint and regards differing people as capable only of mere opinion. How convenient. A person can be addicted to an ideology too.

 

Iván & Hadoum

As the protagonists in the film, Iván & Hadoum (2026), neither Iván nor Hadoum, who fall in love, are heterosexuals even though by all appearances, save the long surgical scares under Iván’s former breasts, the couple is a man and a woman, and indeed Iván psychologically identifies himself as a man and Hadoum is a woman both biologically and in how she sees herself. To claim that Hadoum is heterosexual simply because Iván views himself as being a man, even though Hadoum is sexually attracted to Iván’s vagina, would be utter ideological nonsense. Besides being gay or bisexual, and thus easy targets for discrimination by agriculturalists in southern Spain, the two people are of different national origins, for Iván was born in Spain whereas Hadoum’s family hails from Morocco. Additionally, Iván is Caucasian whereas Hadoum is an Arab, and Iván is Christian whereas Hadoum is Islamic. Even in terms of labor-management relations, the couple is ripe for division by other people, for Iván is on a management tract—the warehouse being still owned by his uncle Manuel—whereas Hadoum is a greenhouse/warehouse worker, and a disgruntled one at that. It would seem that Ian de la Rosa has written and directed a film in which many ethical tropes are in play; which one is subject to the most unethical harm goes unanswered. Even so, by including unethical conduct on all of them, the film takes a step in the direction wherein audiences can think philosophically in weighing the ethical harms relative to each other.

Iván is a fork-lift driver in the warehouse when the film begins, and Manuel promotes him to being a line supervisor with an eye to possibly making him the warehouse manager. Iván wants the position because he needs it in order to get a loan. Meanwhile, Hadoum sorts vegetables on a line alongside other non-supervisory employees. Manuel’s attitude and labor practices incur resentment, and even resistance, from the line-employees, including Hadoum even after she has fallen in love with Iván. Perceiving that the two are “thick as thieves,” Manuel becomes suspicious of Iván and even uses him to manipulate Hadoum into stopping the workers from undermining Manuel’s efforts to sell the warehouse to an interested buyer. Iván reluctantly agrees, on condition that Manuel not fire Hadoum, but Manuel does not keep his side of the bargain and Iván confronts Manuel in front of the buyer at the warehouse. Hadoum, already fired by that point, learns of Iván’s valiant act in defense of her and the trust requisite for genuine emotional intimacy is achieved in spite of the efforts of other people to separate the pair.

Besides being on opposite sides of a tense labor-management situation, Iván is a “female-to-male” transsexual who has been taking estrogen and is breastless, though still a woman in having retained the reproductive organs. Regardless, Hadoum and Iván have a lesbian sexual relationship because both have vaginas, even if the denial ensuing from a contemporary ideological agenda fights like hell against such a claim, even labeling it as incorrect. Even though a person’s psychological stance towards one’s gender need not be in sync with one’s genitalia, two people who are sexually attracted to the other’s vagina are not heterosexuals. That the homosexual relationship (or Iván being a transsexual) faces prejudice in the film is evident when Iván’s mother says that that Hadoum’s parents would never accept Iván. Also, Manuel’s son threatens Iván with violence if Iván were “a real man.”

The film also contains allusions to the fact that Hadoum’s family is Moroccan rather than European. Again, Manuel’s son is an antagonist, referring to Hadoum’s family as “different,” rather than one of us here in Spain. To be sure, Hadoum feels no emotional attachment at least to the region, for she wants to move on even though she has fallen for Iván by the end of the film. She is indeed a nomad, and in this regard she may reflect the indigenous culture of her native land in Northern Africa.

Over all, the most ethical deed in the film is Iván’s standing up to Manuel for having fired Hadoum. Even if the firing were justified, for she had deliberately removed the required cap while the interested buyer was present with Manuel, Iván’s self-sacrificial act out of love for Hadoum is laudable. Another worker informs Hadoum of Iván’s unexpected heroic act, and Hadoum goes from only having fallen in love to something even deeper.

As for the most unethical act (or comment) by any of the many antagonists in the film, this question is much more difficult to answer, and arguably the film does not go far enough in this regard even though providing an answer as a fait accompli would be counter-productive to fostering philosophical thinking in viewers during and after viewing. Of course, the particular controversies—labor-management, nationality, sexual orientation (which is tied to genital-attraction even if “gender”-“identity” is not), and transsexuality—were in the West so steeped in ideology in the West by 2026 that ideological hubris could also be expected to be triggered by the film. So perhaps in addition to going a step further in providing some stepping stones to comparative ethical analysis, Rosa could have included dialogue wherein ideological prejudices or biases are made transparent so viewers could exculpate them from thinking philosophically in assessing which unethical statement is “worst” ethically speaking. A character, whether a protagonist or antagonist, could be made to state an opinion and then insist that it is a fact, and thus that anyone who disagrees is incorrect rather than just wrong. “How arrogant! My opinion is just as valid as yours!” The spreading category mistake wherein some ideologically-soaked opinions are misconstrued (and misproclaimed) as fact could thus be taken on, head-on.

As for comparing the unethical, prejudiced “slaps in the face” waged by antagonists in the film, one argument, for example, could be in favor of the anti-transexual statements being the most unethical. It could be argued, for example, that whereas nationality and union-sympathy are de-personalized, Iván’s breast-removal operation and treatment of female hormone is intensely personal as both pertain to Iván’s body. In other words, being said not to be a whole man could hurt Iván more deeply than Manuel’s anti-labor comments to Hadoum and other comments that she is a foreigner (which is only vaguely hinted at in the film). Generalizing, even disparate unethical statements can be compared along the axis of how deep the resulting emotional hurt is felt. Perhaps a utilitarian argument would come to the opposite conclusion, with aspersions against a nationality doing the most harm to the most people, even if only as generalized to a population from comments made to one person such as Hadoum. Manuel’s firing her could be found to be most unethical from Kant’s principle wherein rational beings should be treated not just as means, but also as ends in themselves. Manuel is far from treating his workers as ends in themselves, which is why Iván is advised to remember as a line supervisor that the workers on the line are human beings. At a well-managed workplace, such a reminder would not be necessary. In short, different ethical theories or principles can lead to different answers. So it is important that a filmmaker not impose one, for that would be dogmatic in the sense of arbitrariness. The objective should instead be to prompt audiences to think. To the extent that ideology has tended to override rational thought in the world, stimuli to rational, philosophical thinking are of particularly great value.

Call Me by Your Name

The medium of film has the potential to not only to move audiences emotionally, but to speak to fundamentals in the human condition so that we may know ourselves (and each other) better on the subterranean level of essences. The 2017 film, Call Me by Your Name, is not “gay cinema” even though 17-year-old Elio falls in love with Oliver, a 24-year-old beginning doctoral student when the latter is staying with Elio and his parents at their villa in Italy during the summer of 1983. Falling-in-love, so unmistakable once it has hit, is so utterly human at the gut-level that the twists and turns in a narrative are but superficial in comparison, and even the gender of the beloved may come to matter less than would typically be assumed. In fact, both Elio and Oliver are attracted to women, and after his summer stay Oliver calls the Perlmans during a winter Jewish festival to announce that he is engaged; for even though Elio fell for Oliver, Oliver is not in love with Elio. Elio must take the unrequited love as a given, as about as hard as reality can be felt, and so Elio has the choice of whether to suffer the loss or "stuff it" emotionally by burning emotion itself from his very being.  Precisely this decision is the subject of a father-son talk that he has with his dad after Oliver has left. It is the substance of that talk that anchors the film firmly in the human condition, such that even the narrative, not to mention the fact that Elio has fallen for a man, is transcended. It is just such a transcendence that renders the medium of film so substantial, even meaningful, even if mostly just potentially. Parsing the father-son dialogue will lay bare this thesis.

At the commencement of the talk, it seems as if Elio’s dad does not grasp that his son has fallen for Oliver. “You two had a nice friendship,” his father says. “Yeah,” Elio wantonly replies. But his father is coy: “You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special what you two had was.” Falling in love with another person, unlike friendship—interiorizing another’s personality rather than merely liking it—is indeed rare, especially if such love is not overlaid by sexual attraction. Nor is falling in love just or primarily a matter of two intellects bonding. Accordingly, Elio’s dad says, “Oliver may be intelligent, but he was more than intelligent. What you two had had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. It was good. You’re both lucky to have found each other because you too are good.” Everything and nothing to do with intelligence—intriguing! It is the goodness of the two men, rather than their respective intelligences, that is so important in terms of achieving emotional intimacy without being eclipsed by fear (e.g., of infidelity or, even deeper, emotional betrayal as in abandonment). For trust is destined to be lacking between two bad people as well as between a good and a bad person, whereas emotional trust is naturally extant between two good people. Are people really so dichotomous, however, as being either “good” and “bad”? Has not humanity gotten beyond the stark division between heaven and hell, with nothing (but purgatory) in between? Would it not be more accurate to speak of a spectrum on which we all lie? Nietzsche would say definitely not.  

In regard to sexual “cheating,” for example, and lying in general, dichotomous categorization fits, according to Nietzsche, who asserts: “it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie. ‘We truthful ones’—thus the nobility of ancient Greece referred to itself.”[1] Regarding the “most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank,” the designation of “good” included a character trait: “They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’; this is so above all of the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phrase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of ‘noble,’ as distinct from the lying common man, which is what Theognis takes him to be and how he describes him . . .”[2] It is “above all the liars” whom the strong regard as bad. “While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself (gennaios ‘of noble descent’ underlines the nuance ‘upright’ and probably also ‘naïve’), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naïve nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment.”[3] In terms of being in—and even beginning—a romantic relationship, the weak person who is a slave to momentary desire, who is not constitutionally strong enough to master whichever instinctual urge happens to be most powerful internally at a given moment, lacks being in being so expediently mendacious, so the weakness is more fundamental than merely being loosely tethered to truth. Behind the problem of achieving emotional intimacy with such a sordid creature is the fact that he or she is not fully there, hence not really with. To step closer to a person, look him or her directly in the eyes, and speak directly, meaning spontaneously and therefore honestly, is rarely achieved with such a person as one who lies as a matter of course. Such a weak, slavish person may even wonder aloud to a prospective romantic partner, I’m afraid I will be unfaithful and hurt whomever I am with. With? No trust, and thus no genuine emotional intimacy can be had with such a person, hence, no with. Accordingly, an abyss of pathos of distance ought to separate good people, such as Elio and Oliver, from such a sordid creature whose nature it is to hide in dark recesses of the soul rather than stand boldly, eye to eye, with another person.

Neither Elio nor Oliver would get involved with a trophy whore, for instance, who imposes his slave-holder’s openness to the trophy having separate sex even with romantic attachment onto a prospective real relationship characterized by genuine emotional intimacy. Such a promiscuous, narcissistic bad person is actually in dire need of therapy. A societal norm that eschews commitment and thus responsibility by imposing such a demand for one-sided promiscuity onto what would otherwise be a genuine relationship, even if such a norm is collectively proclaimed by the neurotic narcissists as legitimate and even “good,” and thus rightly to be imposed, actually violates human nature and is thus highly unethical. Yeah, I would feel uncomfortable if my partner told me he would be having sex with someone he has feelings for but knew before he knew me so I am supposed to accept it, a healthy, well-adjusted human being even in an open relationship would reluctantly admit, if only to oneself. Slaves to momentary instinctual urges simply cannot be trusted, and are thus incapable of emotional intimacy with a romantic partner. They cut themselves off from good people, and thus ultimately detest themselves, for even amid lots of sex, people who thwart commitment are alone. Even if they are formally in a romantic relationship, even if merely in being deluded so by their respective trophy-holders, they are alone. For only genuine emotional intimacy can bring relief from that plight, and refusing to master seemingly intractable momentary instinctual urges eclipses real connection and genuine emotion intimacy. Faced with life without these things, a person might as well pray for the end of time. 

Even though Nietzsche emphasizes that weakness and strength are inherently antipodal, a roadmap can be discerned or extrapolated from his writing even if he did not believe that the weak could become strong. For any weak-willed people who are interested in, or already in a romantic relationship with a good person whose will’s dominant instinctual urge is sustained rather than episodic promise-keeping even in the midst of momentary temptations, the following passage can offer clues on how a will can be strengthened from within.

To have “an active desire not to rid oneself [of an impression], a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will: so that between the original ‘I will’, ‘I shall do this’ and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will,” a person “must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance events, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute. [The person] must first of all have become calculatable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!”[4] The impression not to be rid of is that of a promise made, and the continuance of something is precisely that promise being kept by an extension of will even through tempting forests. In other words, a promise-kept is retained in the memory of the will rather than forgotten as soon as a sensual temptation walks by and winks—as such a tempting fruit is a strange new thing that is fleeting, whereas a promise well-kept can indeed be long-standing in a human will and thus of great value. Parsing the quote further, a necessary event is one that sustains a promise-made whereas a chance event is like meeting an enticing stranger at a bar. To think causally is applicable in realizing that going home with a seductive temptress would cause a promise not to be kept, and thus to no longer be able to feel self-confident strength of will and be taken as such. To see the distant eventuality of one’s promise-breaking being discovered as if it were being found out in the present, and for such a disappointment to have more instinctual force in one’s will than does the pleasure of momentary pleasure, a person must be clear on how means are related to their goals (i.e., such as being taken by others and oneself as capable and actually reliable in promise-keeping), and in this way to be taken as regular, even calculatable in one’s conduct by others and oneself! In other words, rather than be engulfed by the present in a bar, a person whose will can support promise-keeping must be sober enough—serious enough—to keep in mind the distant eventuality of being dumped for having had momentary sex that counts as promise-breaking. The causation in this is clear.  By implication, cheaters (and promise-breakers more generally) need to practice thinking out causation practically. To be regular, even calculatable by others and oneself is to sustain a long-chain of will such that promises once made are kept. Practice being regular, and calculate out what effects can be expected to be caused by certain actions that are relevant to promises-made. If getting drunk or high put such regularity at risk, and give momentary pleasure with whomever more power than the instinctual urge of promise-keeping, for example, a person can practice limiting one’s intake. This is why active alcoholics and drug addicts cannot be trusted to be promise-keepers, for they are very susceptible to going with the flow in having a “moment” in preference for momentary pleasure in the present as itself being absolute. This is precisely what scares people whose feelings of endearment are oriented to a questionable promise-keeper, who too easily and conveniently loses sight of distant eventualities in the present.  

The typical constraint imposed on such a person is moral in nature, but Nietzsche does not advocate such a remedy. Societal cages are not compatible with self-confident strength (of will). Instead, his ideal is paradoxically the sovereign-willed individual who is not constrained by external ethical norms; instead, the constraint lies within a strong, independent will. The “ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral (for ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ are mutually exclusive), in short, the man who has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises—and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion. The emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man—how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he ‘deserves’ all three, and how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures?”[5] To be able to credit oneself rather than any external moral scaffolding in keeping one’s promises is to interiorize even as an instinct a sustained urge to keep promises that is more powerful than the desire to act on some momentary pleasure that would cause a promise not to be kept. The consciousness of self-confident inner strength, which I contend can result from practicing being regular, even calculable, is more powerful than the constraining power of external morality and even the resisting temptation. After all, it is the weak who seek to dominate who try to beguile the strong into voluntarily renouncing their innate strength by saying, “Thou shalt not!”

Ironically, a sovereign, self-confident will wherein the instinctual urge to keep one’s promises dominates urges to break one’s promises in slavish attraction to momentary pleasure can voluntarily bind itself to a beloved through promises that the beloved can trust. Although Nietzsche characterizes such a will as the completion of mankind, I contend that along with such a will, love that can be trusted represents and instantiates us at our highest. Hence Augustine wrote that God is love. Love that is not feared (e.g., as being betrayed) is sacrosanct. Figuratively, such love can bend even the time-space fabric, at least in the very perception of a person who is in love with a promise-keeper, given the density of unafraid love and thus unshakable faith in a beloved. Rather than being idyllic utopian dribble, such an ideal can indeed be actualized as the completion of humanity.

The reality of an authentic, close emotional connection between two people gives rise to the tragedy that is in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, both of whom can be viewed as being sovereign individuals putting their respective promises of love above their petty feuding families that are at odds. Like Elio and Oliver, Romeo and Juliet are good people. How dearly such a connection lost is mourned, as if life itself were no longer deemed worth living without the very presence of the beloved. Indeed, such presence itself can be saturated with meaning. Relative to such a connection of unafraid presence, or being, mourning the loss of a bad, promise-breaking person is actually a blessing in disguise, and can come to be recognized as such in utter relief, as in, I actually dodged a bullet, with the ungenerous help of the beloved, whose heart is nonetheless as cold and unbendable as a hard rock in winter. A pathos of distance, as if over the dark oceans of time in the Book of Genesis, naturally separates such a cold, dispassionate person, who so easily severs oneself off emotionally even in the face of another's suffering, from Elio and Oliver, whose mutual warmth doubtlessly deserves the refreshment that swimming outside can provide on those long, meandering sunny days that summer in northern Italy.

So, I think Elio’s dad is on firm ground in highlighting how special it is that his son, a good person, has fallen for another good person. The goodness is evinced not only in that trust was a given for the two, but also by Elio saying of Oliver, “I think he was better than me,” to which his father replies, “I’m sure he’d say the same thing about you.” Elio in turn replies, “Yeah. He’d say the same thing.” With his assertion of mutual goodness demonstrated, his father observes, “It flatters you both.” How rare—how very special—a romantic relationship is between two good, emotionally well-adjusted people.

But unlike Romeo and Juliet, whose love is mutual (hence the tragedy!), Oliver does not fall in love with Elio during the summer, so even though the two young men are good, no lasting romantic relationship can, or even should, ensue. Ultimately, this asymmetry undermines emotional trust, and the movie ends with Elio suffering the consequences after Oliver phones to announce his engagement to a woman. Even between two good people, genuine emotional intimacy, and the trust that is requisite, require that each person loves the other; otherwise, the relationship is doomed in terms of intimacy and trust. Most likely, the person who is not in love will leave the person for another. The person left standing can either stuff emotion itself, which Elio’s father wisely warns his son against, or grieve the loss (for even love that is not reciprocated is real and the loss of the beloved must be grieved in emotional pain that, as shown in the final scene, is longstanding rather than episodic).

Therefore, we can say, how very rare, and how very, very special a relationship of mutual love between two good (promise-keeping) people surely is! Holding such a rarified gem between them, two people who are in love should move mountains to be and stay together. No job is worth separation. I would flip burgers, one person might say to the other in following him or her to another city. That Elio and Oliver could have been together permanently were they both in love with each other is implied in the film by the fact that an older gay couple comes to visit the Perlmans. The sad fact is, Oliver has not fallen for Elio, and Elio must intellectually and emotionally accept this reality. With respect to Elio, Oliver cannot be relied upon as a promise-keeper. Recognizing this, Elio’s father observes, “And when you least expect it, nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember, I am here.” Falling in unrequited love exposes us to human nature such that it is felt at its weakest, perhaps most painful, spot.

Here again, Elio’s father again brings up the dichotomy of good and bad people in how a person in Elio’s position choses to deal with the emotional pain—and it is the sort of pain that comes back unrelentingly every morning rather than quickly dissipates as soon as the wind changes. “Right now, you may not wanna feel anything, maybe you never wanted to feel anything,” Elio’s father says. “And maybe it’s not to me you’d want to speak about these things, but feel something you obviously did. Look, you had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. . . . We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster, that we go bankrupt by the age of 30, and have less to offer, each time we start with someone new, but to make yourself feel nothing, so as not to feel anything. What a waste.” 

Indeed, what a waste, for a sensitive heart that has not rashly eviscerated emotion itself due to past emotional pain is among the most precious gems that can be loved. Elio is sensitive, so his dad is worried that his son may flee from emotion altogether and thus be emotionally unavailable for future relationships; after all, Elio is only 17 years-old. Elio's father acknowledges something emotionally more than a friendship has gripped his son, and that that something is of such emotional depth that sensitive person could rashly decide to rip out emotion from one’s very being in order not to feel such pain. The dichotomy between good (meaning healthy) and bad (meaning weak) lies in the choice that the person makes: caste out emotion itself or accept the feeling of emotional pain as part of being fully human. I think it is at this point that the film becomes significant. Elio, being good, allows himself to feel the pain, and in fact the last scene of the film depicts him in a sustained camera shot looking into the fireplace utterly hurt because Oliver has just called to inform the Perlman’s of his engagement. That the camera-shot is very long is ingenious, for such is the nature of that hurt. A dull soreness can even come to be felt from the emotional grooves that form from ongoing hurt before time can act as a thickener, or, as Nietzsche would say, until forgetfulness can set in. Indeed, he states that forgetting is key even to be able to love one’s enemies, and is not rejection an enemy?

One implication from the film’s last scene in which teary-eyed Elio stares into the fire in a fireplace is that he will be able to be fully emotionally available when he falls in love again (he is just 17 years-old), for he has not severed his emotional life as if feeling emotion were somehow toxic and thus to be expunged. He deserves to fall for a person who is also good in the sense of being willing to take hard choices in not conveniently forgetting promises made in favor of momentary urges. Drug addicts and sex addicts need not apply, for they are slaves to momentary desire and thus do not mature. Elio can offer genuine emotional intimacy wherein emotional trust is a given rather than felt as a vulnerability as is the case when the other person is weak. Beyond the last scene being able to serve as a lesson, or guide, on how to deal emotionally with the loss of a beloved, the father-son talk plus Elio’s decision not to repress emotion itself gets at a fundamental in what it means to experience being human. It isn’t all roses, for sometimes we feel even excruciating emotional hurt from unrequited love—the point being that it is a very good decision to be willing to feel rather than repress the feeling even though it comes back day after day until finally time, acting as a thickener, allows for moving on naturally.  

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Sect. 260 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 395.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sect. 5 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), pp. 465-66. Theognis of Megara lived in the sixth century, BCE. Nietzsche’s first journal article, written while he was still a doctoral student at Leipzig, was on the collection of Theognis’s maxims.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Sect. 10 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 474.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 1 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 494.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 2 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), pp. 495-96.

Fifty Shades of Grey

A sadist is a person who feels pleasure in inflicting emotional and physical pain on another person. For the sadistic personality, the emotional pain that is inflicted on another person for the sadist’s own pleasure need not be associated with sex because emotional or physical pain is broader than that which can be inflicted sexually. Hence, the bottom-line for the sadist psychology is that pleasure that is felt by harming another person, who thus feels pain as a direct result of the sadist, lies in the making suffer. A sadist who does not permit oneself to feel emotion is particularly dangerous because no sympathy or compassion operates as a constraint on how much hurt is inflicted. In such a case, the sadist is like one of the androids in the film Ex Machina as the knife is coldly inserted into the torso of the programmer who built the intelligent machines. Indeed, the narcissistic sadist can be very intelligent in knowing precisely how to inflict emotional pain especially in an emotionally vulnerable victim. Once discovered, such a sadist will endeavor to avoid such a victim, but not because such an unemotional sadist has a conscience and feels guilty. In the film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Anastasia Steele’s life changes forever when she meets the emotionally-tormented billionaire, Christian Grey. She falls in love with the sadist, and, because she wants to be with him, at some point she willingly assumes the masochist role even though she does not feel pleasure from physical (or emotional) pain being inflicted on her person. She loves him so much she wants to enter his deviant world; she even embraces that world. I could see myself doing that were I to fall deeply in love with a sadist, for accepting a person even in spite of that person’s flaws is part of love— unless, of course, lies, sidelining, and emotional betrayals are too much for any trust to be possible. Anastasia may come to treat Christian’s dungeon as a playroom of sorts in which she is his so they can be a couple with an opportunity to connect even more, rather than as a place where he acts out his severe emotional issues in which violence and sex are too closely related in his brain, whether psychologically or physically. Love is to a certain extent blind, or at least purblind. Given how toxic and unpleasant life can be, can we be blamed for valuing deep connection so very much even in cases in which meaning-from-personality comes with such a high cost?

Absent from the movie is the point that sadists also get pleasure from inflicting emotional, nonsexual pain, such as in taking advantage of a girlfriend’s emotional vulnerability that is simply part of being in love, so in real life there is more of a cost to being in love with a sadist than merely consenting to playing games in a home-dungeon even though pleasure is not obtained from having pain inflicted by even a loved one (i.e., a sadist boyfriend). As an example of a non-sexual infliction of pain that is not in the film, she could really need him to be with her because she does not want to be alone and feels emotionally vulnerable because she has just opened up to him emotionally in telling him that she has fallen for him. Nevertheless, feeling nothing emotionally, he could dismiss her request and even leave her to join some friends at a bar as if they were more important. Refusing to allow himself to feel emotional caring, he would not feel culpable for having humiliated her; instead, the narcissist sadist would gladly feel the pleasure from having hurt her emotionally, as well as the guiltless pleasure in socializing with his friends at a bar without even a thought of her, except that she is suffering. He might even go home with another woman for sex and even brag to his girlfriend the next day that the woman “was cute.” In the future, he might even flaunt being with that woman at a bar at which he knows his girlfriend is present! His motive would not merely be to disrespect her, but also to inflict still more pain on her for even more pleasure! Even were he merely “seeing” (i.e., dating) her, such behavior would arguably—at least according to a retired psychiatrist I informally interviewed for this essay—indicate severe emotional issues, and thus be more than enough cause for her to bolt. In Avatar (2009), Jake is suddenly the target of a giant beast. He asks Grace, the head scientist on Pandora, whether he should face down the animal (as he has just done with another animal) or run. “Run, definitely run!” she exclaims. It is not as though the beast has a conscience. A sadist can do real damage, emotionally, and without having any feeling of remorse; instead, pleasure is felt in having inflicted pain on another person. Can a sadist truly love? This seems doubtful. Such a narcissistic mentality can only know self-love, and not in the sense that Augustine lauds as loving the image of God within. In Fifty Shades of Grey, Anastasia loves Christian’s personality (other than the sadistic element) and thus merely accepts (in disagreement) that his sexual pleasure is aroused by inflicting pain in her.

I turn now to applying Nietzsche’s theory on the forgotten origins of punishment so to dig deeper into the sadist’s psychology. To be sure, because psychology is not one of my academic fields, I am merely able to present Nietzsche’s account of how punishment arose in our species and relate that to sadism as it is commonly understood. Before turning specifically to punishment, I want to sketch and apply Nietzsche’s overall system of strength and weakness, which is not based on moral disapprobation or responsibility. In fact, the latter function as weapons, according to Nietzsche, that are used by the weak against the self-confident powerful strong out of resentment, or ressentiment. A sadist is undoubtedly weak in this distinctly Nietzschean sense.

Not being able or willing to overcome an intractable instinctual urge, a weak person cannot be trusted and thus should (and does!) avoid commitment. A person who succumbs to whatever instinctual urge (or desire) is felt most at a given moment is untrustworthy because such a person disregards the memory of having made a promise and thus does not value promise-keeping relative to whatever in closest proximity is most in line with instant gratification. A weak person is more motivated than a strong person to inflict pain on another person to compensate (or as recompense) for having been injured or suffered a loss, such as of money or property. Whereas a strong person says with an overflowing, self-confident feeling of power, “What are those parasites to me?”, a weak person is oriented to striking out, as if a master, out of ressentiment, to redress his injuries or loss as if the pain inflicted in another person were an equivalent and thus as a remedy. For example, is pain inflicted on a debtor who has failed to repay a loan equivalent to the money lost? In Shakespeare’s play, Merchant of Venice, Shylock insists on a pound of flesh in “payment” for the loss of the money that he lent, though by the end of the play, when a pound of his flesh is demanded, suddenly he no longer believes in the equivalence of physical pain and a monetary loss! Such an equivalence Nietzsche states is “strange.” It is deeply rooted in primitive, prehistoric humankind, but even so, the equivalence is artificial. To the extent that a sadist’s pleasure from inflicting pain is felt to pay off an earlier, perhaps even childhood (nonsexual or sexual) trauma, the equivalence is further strained because the masochist is not even the same person as had injured the sadist! The vicarious satisfaction may be felt as reducing the hurt from the injury, but I suspect the effort to do so is in vain. A strong person accepts the fact of the past injury and the resulting emotional harm, and moves on. A weak person festers in resentment and from this motive, pain is sought even in a person who had not committed the injury. Such pain cannot fill a hole from an injury caused by another person. Even inflicting pain in the same person is not equivalent to the loss from the injury, according to Nietzsche.

Having anticipated Nietzsche’s own words, it is time to turn directly to them for support for my claims. Filmmakers, including screenwriters, could do worse in reading his words than ponder how some of his ideas could have been inserted into the dialogue between Christian and Anastasia in Fifty Shades of Grey, for my overall thesis is that film has great potential as a medium for philosophical discourse through dialogue within a narrative.

We associate punishment with moral responsibility, free will, and accountability, but Nietzsche claims that “’the criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted differently’—is in fact an extremely late and subtle form of human judgment and inference: whoever transposes it to the beginning is guilty of a crude misunderstanding of the psychology of more primitive mankind.”[1] Free will came before the notion of moral responsibility and hold holding the culpable accountable. The genealogy of punishment shows quite another dynamic at work—one whose primitive origin shows up not only in why immature parents punish their children, but also, I contend, in sadists! “Throughout the greater part of human history punishment was not imposed because one held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, thus not on the presupposition that only the guilty one should be punished: rather, as parents still punish their children, from anger at some harm or injury, vented on the one who caused it—but this anger is held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid bac, even if only through the pain of the culprit.”[2] Although Nietzsche’s empirical claim, presumably unsubstantiated by any scientific evidence, that parents during Nietzsche’s life in nineteenth-century Europe were still punishing their respective children out of anger in order to inflict pain as a sort of requital for the injuries inflicted on the parents by the disobeying children is questionable, Nietzsche’s focus in the passage is on the “idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit.”[3] Nietzsche describes the “idea of an equivalence between injury and pain” to be strange.[4] How is it that the pleasure obtained from pain inflicted on, and thus felt by, a person who has caused pain in the initial aggrieved pay back latter such that one’s own initial pain from the initial injury is lessened? Wouldn’t one’s own hurt from having been injured last until either the loss is made up in kind or until the natural process of emotional healing has run its course? Nietzsche seems to be skeptical that the pleasure from inflicting pain on the culprit can facilitate the natural healing process, though perhaps by such pleasure it is easier to let go of the hurt from the injury or loss. To the extent that the medium of film is ultimately about the human condition, the dynamic that Nietzsche viewed as strange could be made explicit for audiences, who could then look at themselves in the mirror and ask whether they truncate the natural healing process of emotional hurt by making use of the equivalence. In a modern, anti-Nietzschean vein, it can even be asked whether it is ethical to derive pleasure by inflicting emotional or physical pain so as to diminish one’s own injury or loss.

The equivalence that lies at the root of the origin of punishment according to Nietzsche looks so strange to him due to his claim that the ‘primeval, deeply rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable idea” drew its power “in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the idea of ‘legal subjects’ and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade, and traffic.”[5] Especially relevant for the case of the modern sadist, in the ancient world a “creditor could inflict every kind of indignity and torture upon the body of the debtor; for example, cut from it as much as seemed commensurate with the size of the debt” that was not paid back.[6] “Let us be clear,” Nietzsche states, “as to the logic of this form of compensation: it is strange enough. An equivalence is provided by the creditor’s receiving, in place of a literal compensation for an injury (thus in place of money, land, possessions of any kind), a recompense in the form of a kind of pleasure—the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire,’[7] the enjoyment of violation.”[8] That such pleasure could make up for the loss of money is an odd assumption, especially if some asset, such as land or even useful equipment, could instead be taken by a creditor to make up for the money lost. To treat pleasure as equivalent to, and thus as making up for, a monetary loss, is strange and yet the equivalence was taken for granted during the (pre-) history of humanity before moral scruples rendered such a transaction as unsavory.

Of course, a sadist would easily recognize pleasure in being allowed to vent one’s power on a person who is powerless—perhaps tied up or held to the floor—by inflicting pain on that person. What, therefore, is the pleasure meant to be equivalent to, and thus in recompense of what loss or injury? Clearly not one in which the person being tied up sexually is the culprit, for the inflicted pain is not deserved—hence the power is vented freely, irrespective of desert (i.e., whether the pain is deserved). Is the pleasure desired by a sadist only for the sake of feeling the pleasure itself, especially if it is sexually arousing, or is it unconsciously sought as recompense to make up for a past injury or loss? If the latter, can the pleasure from the pain of a person who did not cause the injury or loss be said to be equivalent to the injury or loss such that the pain from the injury or loss can be removed by the pleasure from inflicting pain on an innocent person? If these questions are on target, then perhaps psychologists treat sadists by helping them to deal with pent-up emotional hurt from having been subject to abuse of some sort. Perhaps unblocking the natural psychological healing process would leave a sadist no longer motivated to feel pleasure by inflicting pain on a person. Cleared of the sordid pleasure, perhaps a more emotionally intimate sort of pleasure that comes with making love (i.e., sex with a beloved) could see the light of day. Once tall weeds are cut in a garden, disinfectant sunlight can directly reach the native fauna beneath.

What Nietzsche has written about cruelty is also relevant, not only to sadists, but also masochists. We moderns err, he claims, in presuming that our species is no longer of the “’savage cruel beast’ whose conquest is the very pride of [the ancient] more humane ages.”[9] Here again, strength must be distinguished from weakness, for the strong conquerors are not cruel by design or intent, as their intention is to win, whereas the weak, who are not able to realize such self-confident power, must turn to the cruelty that is in dominance to feel any pleasure from power. Nonetheless, the modern moralist is ashamed of the strong noble conquerors of ancient Rome and the Greek city-states, especially Sparta. Yet delight in cruelty has not been mortified, for “(a)lmost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound,” so that “’savage animal’ has not really been ‘mortified’; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine.”[10] Plays that are tragedies, for example, contain the “admixture of cruelty.”[11] Audiences enjoy the very sad tragedy of love ended by a misunderstanding in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Is it not sadist to be drawn to pleasure vicariously by the infliction of pain on two lovers? Also lost to our collective memory is the “abundant, over-abundant enjoyment at one’s own suffering, at making oneself suffer.”[12] The weak among us have for ages been “secretly lured and pushed forward by [one’s own cruelty], by those dangerous thrills of cruelty turned against oneself.”[13] This weakens oneself, as in the case of a Roman Catholic priest who cruelly denies himself his innate sexual urge as if it were sinful in itself. In agreeing to feel pleasure from pain inflicted by a sadist, is not a masochist self-weakening oneself just as a self-mortifying Christian priest is on account of guilt? Even if a person who has fallen in love with a sadist refuses to play the role of masochist because cruelty against oneself is neither sought nor acceptable, offending the sadist in order that that beloved would be self-motivated to stay away involves love being cruel to itself—much more so than it is being cruel to the beloved. To push a beloved away due to unrequited love, for example, the love must be like steel and thus turn on its own nature, which wants nothing more than to be with the beloved, unconditionally. Perhaps alluding to himself, Nietzsche writes “that even the seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to recognize things against the inclination of the spirit, and often enough also against the wishes of his heart—by way of saying No where he would like to say Yes, love, and adore—and thus acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty,” and, I would add, turned really against himself rather than the beloved even though the latter sees nothing of the interior artist and cruelty turned inward.[14] Instead, the beloved takes the insult at face value and flees on that account. A sadist would be hard-pressed to act in compassion anyway (assuming that sadists cannot love the objects of their cruelty) if the self-cruelty of the non-masochist is grasped as a manifestation of love.

In Fifty Shades of Grey, Anastasia initially bolts but without feigning an insult so Christian will move on and never want to see or speak with her again, and so she goes back and plays the role of accepting cruelty from him not because this gives her pleasure, but, rather, because she really loves him in spite of himself. She is thus not weak in Nietzsche’s sense. In fact, in mastering her instinctual urge against having cruelty turned on her, she can be understood as strong. I submit that she would be even stronger were she to make a deal with Christian by saying, I will let you inflict pain on me for your sexual pleasure, but you must see a therapist every week. Because she is not a masochist, her role-playing as one (i.e., accepting the pain from his cruelty) would perhaps not be longstanding if Christian would the therapy seriously rather than just a requirement to keep her. A narcissist sadist would manipulate both the girlfriend and the therapist, and only seem to be recovering so to continue having it both ways—retaining his girlfriend while satisfying his instinctual urge to feel pleasure by inflicting pain on innocent people. At least in the case of the ancient creditors, the pain was inflicted on culprits. Sadism can thus be thought of as a distortion of the origin of punishment rather than as a direct modern manifestation of it. Rather than being viewed as a legitimate sexual practice, sadism can be viewed as a manifestation of severe emotional issues that have not been properly processed psychologically. Unclog the drain, as it were, and the strange equivalence, which is even more of a stretch than that which arose with ancient creditors and debtors, will naturally dissipate. In its place, the emotional intimacy of being in love mutually can deepen such that even making love in terms of two bodies may be viewed as not close enough, and thus as only on the surface. In contrast, a sadist does not transcend sexual pleasure and thus is incapable of true love. Ironically, amid such pleasure, a sadist is alone, without real connection, and thus is utterly unhappy. In Fifty Shades of Grey, the sadist is fortunate indeed that his girlfriend loves him. The unasked question is whether he can actually love her even as he is motivated to feel sexual pleasure by making her feel pain. If he cannot, perhaps she loves him in spite of himself.

But what do I know about sadism? Had I inadvertently crossed paths with an actual sadist bent on inhaling pleasure by inflicting emotional pain, even fallen in love with such a person, she may still have coldly carved a line down the middle of her bed to keep me at a distance, as a remote acquaintance at best, and I, in turn, may have instituted a pathos of distance from such a creature lest my love for her be infected by all the inhaling and inflicting. I may have enlisted her in enforcing the distance by insulting her because separation from a beloved is so very difficult for a person in love. “What are needy parasites to me?” she may have gone on to coldly remark with an air of primped superiority in briefly alluding to me to her countless lovers after me, as if I had been a needy parasite; she would have done so out of spite under the superficial assumption that I had meant to gravely insult her rather than found myself to be too weak to walk away for good. This hypothetical involves me being cruel to myself and thus as weakening myself in order to protect myself emotionally and physically from an emotionally-inert sadist. In instituting a pathos of distance, I would have turned the love against itself—denying, in effect, the strength of my love for another human being. Were I to have agreed to play the role of masochist as Anastasia does in the film, I could also be viewed in Nietzschean terms as weak for being willing to be the object of cruelty turned on myself, even if to retain a connection based on love of the other’s personality. In seeking pleasure by causing me to feel pain, the sadist too can be seen as weak because the pleasure from the power obtained cruelly is scant as compared with that of self-confident power that need not resort to cruelty. Neither the sadist nor the masochist can fit within Nietzsche’s conception of self-confident, powerful strength. It is a pity that a sadist and one’s masochist could not commiserate in compassion for each other’s weakness, rather than continue to inflict and be inflicted upon for what is in actuality inferior, low-grade pleasure.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 499.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 500. Shakespeare drew on this practice in writing his play, The Merchant of Venice. The common modern expression, a pound of flesh, comes from that play.
7. Of doing evil for the pleasure of doing it.
8. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, pp. 500-1.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), Sec. 229, p. 348.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 348-49.
12. Ibid., p. 349.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.