Angels & Demons

Although a sequel to The Da Vinci Code (2006) and also directed by Ron Howard and written in part by Dan Brown, Angels & Demons (2009) stands on its own as a narrative and thus as a film in its own right. Although the relationship between science and religion undergirds the film’s dramatic tension, the more fundamental leitmotif running throughout the film is the sheer ambiguity involved in whether a given character is more like an angel or a demon. An implication is that we mere mortals should not presume to judge the religiosity of other mortals; that’s God’s job, for we so lack the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence.

The film’s plot centers on the protagonist, Robert Langdon, a professor of religious studies at Harvard. Although an avowed academic atheist, he immediately heeds the plea of the Vatican police to come to Rome to help the Church.[1] A hired assassin seemingly of the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood that historically consisted of Catholic scientists including Galileo, has kidnapped four Cardinals, known as the preferati, for they are the favorites to be elected the next pope during the conclave soon to be underway. The kidnapping is only outdone in significance by assassin’s theft of a case of highly explosive anti-matter, which is somewhere in the Vatican and set to touch matter and therefore violently explode at midnight; the Vatican would be consumed in light. The irony of such evil as light is also in the film, The Ninth Gate (1999), in which bright light accompanies the presence of Satan as Dean Corso approaches the castle in which the demonic being is waiting, for Corso has figuratively and literally unlocked to door to being able to see Satan as it is, whereas Boris Balkan, an evil man, has ironically failed. Such irony and its associated ambiguity also apply to some of the principal characters in Angels & Demons, for it is not so easy for mortal viewers of the film to assess how angelic or demonic those characters actually are in the film.

To begin with a rather minor example, Vittoria Vetra, a physicist who is instrumental in the successful “creation” of a small but significant amount of anti-matter made in the CERN lab in Europe, is also seeking to discover the “God” particle, which gives mass its mass. The film was obvious made prior to the actual scientific discovery of the Higgs particle. In the film, the Caerlengo, the priest Patrick McKenna, scoffs at the scientific pursuit of something called the God particle—how audacious of humans to discover God in physics! Of course, the nomenclature itself is erroneous, for a particle that makes a bit of energy have mass can hardly be said to be God. A photon might as well be called the God particle, given that Jesus Christ is said to be the Light of the World (Phos tou kósmou) in the Gospel of John. Vittoria does not do herself any favors with respect to the Vatican when she rips off a page in a small booklet written by Galileo when she and Langdon are examining the page in the Vatican archives. Just as her scientific efforts to “create” anti-matter cannot be said to be “creation” and thus usurpation of God’s prerogative as the Creator, for the anti-matter is made rather than created in a religious sense, she rips the page from the pamphlet so she and Langdon can hurry to stop the assassin from killing the next Cardinal, for the page contains vital clues as to the location. As in all of the Dan Brown films, a veritable “treasure hunt” based on clues is in Angels & Demons. Vittoria is no demon, even though she has seriously breached Vatican rules in ripping out a page in a rare book.[2] In fact, she steadfastly stays with Langdon as both of them rush from church to church to stop the assassin from killing the kidnapped Cardinals ostensibly in retaliation for the Catholic Church having literally branded four Catholic scientists with hot-iron crosses and killing them for having violated religion by their scientific pursuits in the seventeenth century.

Another irony involving the Vatican archives is that Langdon has tried six times to get the Vatican’s permission for access so he could finish his book on the historical Illuminati by examining Galileo’s third pamphlet—the very one that he and Vittoria examine to find clues as to the probably locations of the upcoming murders. In his office, Commander Richter, whom Inspector Olivetti describes as “a deeply spiritual man,” rubs the six rejections in Langdon’s face as the professor, who is there to help the Vatican, requests permission this time not for his private benefit, but, rather, in order to find clues by which he can anticipate and thwart the murders of the four kidnapped Cardinals. Richter knows that Langdon, an atheist, is trying to help the Church, but rather than having compassion for his “enemy,” he makes fun of him! How “deeply spiritual,” not to mention Christian, is that? Later, speaking to Langdon, Richter brags that his Church helps the sick and hungry. “What does your Church do? Oh, that’s right. You don’t have one.” Ouch! That Langdon is there to help in spite of no being formally or officially Christian even amidst such vitriol renders him an anonymous Christian, whereas Richter’s conduct befits the Antagonist rather than the Paraclete.

Camerlengo McKenna is an immeasurably more interesting character than Richter. Officially the antagonist of the film, McKenna is behind the plot to kidnap the Cardinals and steal the anti-matter to make it seem like the Illuminati scientists are attacking religion. The payment to the assassin from the Isle of Man is an early, subtle clue that the Irish priest is behind it all. McKenna has poisoned the pope because the latter was reaching out to science to reconcile it to the Church, whereas McKenna saw science as needing to be held back—held in check—by the Church. McKenna makes it seem to everyone that he has literally saved the night for the Vatican by flying the ani-matter canister upward in a helicopter and then parachuting down to hopefully be unanimously pronounced the next pope by the Cardinals meeting in the Conclave. Richter has secretly had his altercation with McKenna recorded—with the latter admitting his central role in the criminal plot and then setting Richter up to be shot by Inspector Olivetti—and Langdon is able to find the video and share it with Cardinal Strauss, who is running the Conclave. Called to the Conclave thinking that he would be celebrated and asked to be the next pope. McKenna is instead greeted by the Cardinals as if he were an alien from another planet. True to Jesus’s teachings, they do not disparage or attack the new-found enemy from within, and Strauss even tells the Vatican police to be gentle in pursuing the fleeing McKenna before he burns himself up at Peter’s tomb.

As sordid, even evil as the demonic priest, the Camerlengo, is, a bit of the angelic is also revealed in the man as he questions Langdon before giving him permission to access the Vatican archives. “Christianity’s most sacred codices are in that archive.,” the priest tells the professor. “Given your recent entanglement with the Church, there is a question I’d like to ask you first, here, in the office of His Holiness.” He walks slowly but with determination to Langdon. “Do you believe in God, sir?” Langdon replies, “Father, I simply believe that religion—” The priest who is also behind the murderous plot counters, “I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believe in God.” The priest’s tone of voice conveys a sincerity and the high value he puts on the living God as transcending what people have said and written about the deity. McKenna’s distinction is valid, given Augustine’s likening of revelation coming to us as though through a smoky, stain-glass rather than lucid, transparent window. Even in terms of receiving divine revelation from the Source, it behooves us mere mortals to have some humility, rather than to presume to have knowledge rather than belief. That we are weak as judges of the souls of other mortals should go without saying, but the film makes precisely this point anyway.  

Even though McKenna is severely flawed in terms of his character and values and has clearly committed a mortal sin (that of murder), a respect for holiness that transcends us and our realm is also evident in the man; he is not abjectly evil, in spite of the horrendous nature of his crimes. McKenna’s piety is also palpable when Langdon returns to request access again to the archives. Langdon is wearing a lent black suit of a priest because the professor’s original short was bloodied when he and Vittoria were desperately trying to save the life of one of the Cardinals in Vatican Square. McKenna asks, “Professor, would it surprise you that those clothes suite you?”  Langdon answers honestly, given his atheism, while almost laughing at the thought of him as a Roman Catholic priest. “It would surprise the hell out of me,” he replies with a smile. The priest’s insight into the professor’s obvious benevolentia and related compassion in endeavoring unrelentingly to help the Vatican and its four kidnapped Cardinals is shared by Cardinal Strauss in the last scene of the film in which the Cardinal, Langdon, and Vittoria are watching the newly elected pope, the Cardinal whom Langdon has physically rescued underwater in a public fountain. That pope has selected the name Luke—the first pope to be so named—to symbolize the compatibility of science and religion. “The world needs both,” Strauss explains to Langdon and Vittoria, two intellectuals. McKenna has not succeeded in placing the Church as a skeptical check on the progress of science; ethical injunctions without express divine command are firmly in the ethical domain anyway, and the Church has more than enough on its plate theologically. Wisely, Strauss shifts the conversation from science to the theological matter of whether God has sent Langdon to help the Church. Putting a hand on one of Langdon’s shoulders, the Cardinal says, “Thanks be to God for sending someone to protect his Church.” Langdon demurs. “I don’t believe he sent me, Father.” Not missing a beat, Strauss says with a smile, “Oh, my son, of course he did.”  At that point, the new pope, now fully vested in liturgical garb, nods favorably to Langdon. Were the moment of being dressed to be presented to the world as the next successor of Peter not so august and hopefully even humbling, the new pope would doubtless be effusive rather than so reserved in thanking the atheist who had immediately jumped into the fountain to save that Cardinal’s life even though none of the other bystanders did so until it was almost too late.

The deluded paid-assassin and Commander Richter are portrayed in considerably less ambiguous terms than Langdon and even McKenna, yet even they are shown to evince some piety. Richter values the compassion expressed institutionally by his Church to the poor and sick, although such compassion is less important than that which is directed to a person’s detractors and enemies given the selflessness in such compassion. As for the utterly uncompassionate, callous, and even cruel assassin, at least he is aware that God will not be happy with what he is about to do—namely, brand and kill the four Cardinals. Even though McKenna is behind the squalid plot, at least the assassin does not have the hubris with which to commit his spirit to God after having branded and murdered three men. Just before setting himself on fire, McKenna prays to God, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” Good luck with that. That line doubtlessly works for Jesus in the Gospels, as his preached and demonstrated ethical compassion is rooted in theological agape, which is selfless love.

McKenna is not without piety, however, both in genuinely asking Langdon whether he believes in God and in valuing the role of the Church as a check on the hubris of Man; the priest’s delusion is in believing that his means justify this end. The reproachment of the dead pope, whom McKenna has poisoned, with scientists does not justify murdering that pope, and so it is fitting that the new pope selects the name of a physician (Luke). McKenna’s foiled plot to become the next pope in order to keep the Church as a check on, rather than an accomplice to scientific progress as if it were inherently at odds with the dignity of humanity—as if this were a religious rather than an ethical concept—is also unjustified both in religious and ethical terms (which are distinct).

McKenna is likely mistaken in assuming that God will accept his spirit, but such a matter is not for us mere mortals to know. Even though we can have more confidence that the assassin correctly anticipates rejection by God for what that man is about to do, we do not know how God would treat that man’s humble acceptance of being damned. The same attitude is expressed by one of the criminals being crucified alongside Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. We deserve our fate, the man says to the other guilty man being crucified, whereas Jesus has done nothing wrong. “We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.” (Luke 23:41) In the film, the assassin is in the likeness of the penitent thief, whereas McKenna, a priest, is the main culprit behind the murderous plot and yet presumes that God will take his spirit. Meanwhile, Langdon is an atheist whose compassion to a religious organization is unrelenting while Commander Richter is a “deeply spiritual man” who repeatedly insults Langdon even when he is pleading to help. “Hey, fellas, you called me,” Langdon says in utter astonishment at Richter’s formidable pushback. The film, by the way, is in color rather than black and white, as is the human condition itself.

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1. My use here of the word, immediately, is no accident, kein Zufall, for I am subtly alluding to the meaning and significance of the word as used in the Gospel of Mark. Immediacy in responding to the call of Jesus bears religious significance in that Gospel. In the film, the Vatican policeman who comes to Harvard to fetch the professor at 5 a.m. tells him as he is apparently thinking over whether to go, “Let’s not pretend you have not already decided to come.” This is one of the best lines in the film. That Langdon had been in an “entanglement” with the Church and yet he responds to the plea immediately to help qualifies him as what the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984), a Jesuit priest and theologian, labels an “anonymous Christian.” In contrast, the head of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard, who is said to be “deeply spiritual,” resents rather than is compassionate to Langdon, and therefore hardly resembles a disciple, at least as far as a human such as myself can assess. That’s the idea.

2. While back at Yale for a semester in my capacity as an alumnus auditing a seminar on Jonathan Edwards in the Beineke Library (rare books), I was stunned at not just the presence of so many security guards, but also their unnecessarily (and uncalled for) hostile demeanor towards even Yale professors, not to mention students and others. To be sure, the library contained some very rare old books. In the seminar, the excellent professor treated us to an original book by Newton, given to Yale by its author, a letter written by George Washington to one of Edwards’ sons, and Edwards’ own original writing of his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Nonetheless, the guards subcontracted by Yale were “over the top” in regarding Yalies and visitors alike as if we were criminals bent on ripping out pages at any moment. Were someone like Vittoria, the character in the film, to rip out a page of a pamphlet in the Beineke library, there’s no telling how savage the guards would be to her vocally and even physically, taking liberties as if they were vested with the police power to make an arrest. Yale has even been referred to by students (and even faculty) as having its own private police state, wherein even subcontracted security guards presume to act as if municipal police; the toxicity alone belies or undercuts an otherwise academic atmosphere on the campus.

Awake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[1] Col. 3:5 (NIV)

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).

Valkyrie

Claus von Stauffenberg was a Nazi army officer who attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on July 20, 1944. Stauffenberg was shot the next day as a result. The Nazis did not surrender until May 7, 1945, a few months shy of a year later, so Stauffenberg’s intent to end the war would have made a substantial difference in terms of the number of dead and wounded from World War II in Europe. The 2008 film, Valkyrie, chronicles the story in the genre of historical fiction, even though Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Wilkinson play Nazi figures (without even German accents), although Tom Hollander does play a suspicious Nazi quite convincingly. Viewers could still be excused for approaching the film as a “Wagner meets Shakespeare in the Park” production. The film gets its title from the Valkyrie in Wagner’s opus: handmaidens of the gods. The sparce religious nomenclature in a few scenes of the film is easy to miss, and, I submit, the interlarding of religion is ill-suited to the political drama.

Lest it be concluded that God is against political dictatorship itself, and thus divine favor rests instead with democracy, efforts to apply religion to politics evaluatively come rife with pitfalls because the two domains are distinct; I would even say that the religious domain is unique, given the nature of distinctly religious transcendence. In reference to democracies, lest they be supposed to represent the Kingdom of God on Earth, it is notable that the U.S. dropped the first two atomic bombs on inhabited cities, and Israel committed a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and in 2026 its sitting prime minister even announced that he would run for re-election! The human condition is indeed far removed from the gods and their Valkyrie.

In the scene in which Stauffenberg presents his revised Valkyrie plan to Hitler for his signature at Hitler’s mountain retreat, Hitler asks him, “You know your Wagner, Colonel? The Valkyrie: handmaidens of the gods, choosing who will live and who will die, sparing the most heroic from an agonizing death. One cannot understand National Socialism without knowing Wagner.” Perhaps the implication is that the Valkyrie save Nazi heroes on the battlefield from agonizing deaths, and, moreover, that the Nazi Party is geared to esteeming heroes as they were known to the ancient Greeks and Romans as strong, courageous conquerors, and, perhaps also by implication, riding society of the weak, whose very existence brings down the strong, if the statements by Joseph Goebbels and Hitler at the dinner table in the bunker in the film, Downfall (2004), accurately reflect Nazi ideology concerning strength and weakness: most notably, the eradication of the weak is necessary for the strong to be strong. Although seemingly drawing on Nietzsche, his philosophy merely counsels that a pathos of distance be maintained between the self-confident strong and the resentful weak who seek to beguile the strong. Nietzsche does not advocate that the weak be eradicated. Furthermore, unlike Hitler in Valkyrie, Nietzsche does not posit divine help via handmaidens for the strong; neither does Nietzsche claim that divine wrath is directed against the resentful weak who seek nonetheless to dominate even the strong. As for Hitler’s reference to heroes, it is not clear that Wagner’s Valkyrie would help Nazi “heroes” escape agonizing deaths because such a claim assumes that those heroes really were heroes rather than villains. The appropriation of religion is thus fraught with difficulties, given self-interest, ideology, and the limits of our ability to know the wills of the gods, especially as pertaining to political events. It is best to leave the gods out of our human internecine conflicts rather than conveniently assume that the Valkyrie favor one side or the other.

Given the horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis, the Christian motif of redemption is more difficult to avoid even in the political context. Speaking in a bathroom to General Erich Fellgiebel to enlist his help in the plot, Staffenberg reminds his compatriot, “You were involved in a crime against your country long before you met me. There may still be time to redeem yourself. Only God can judge us now.” Redemption would come by helping rid Germany of Hitler’s rule. Although redemption by killing Hitler seems obvious enough, is religious redemption—and the ensuing sentence regarding God as judge means that the redemption being referred to here is indeed religious in nature—really fitting with respect to a person having been unpatriotic? What about the unpatriotic protests in America when the U.S. was bombing Cambodia in the Vietnam conflict in the late 1960s through 1974? Because that conflict was premised on a lie involving the Gulf of Tonkin, unblinking patriotism may have been cause for redemption. In actuality, God may think little or nothing either way of our notions of patriotism and our political protests. Again, God may be quite distant from our notions of political good and bad, even if the Nazi and Israeli atrocities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively, seem pretty cut and dry as state-sponsored evil against people conveniently deemed “subhuman.” Perhaps from God’s perspective, we are all subhuman, or, in Nietzsche’s phraseology, human, all too human. Hence the political domain can be distanced from that of religion, in that the former reeks of human pride and thus presumptuousness, whereas the latter goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion and is thus not centered on us.

Ben-Hur

By 2026, the world hardly needed any convincing regarding the strident zeal for endless vengeance in the Middle East, given the genocide still occurring in Gaza against the Palestinian people. In 1945, the world had needed no convincing on just how severe, and at what tremendous scale, state-sponsored (and engineered) hatred against a people deemed “subhuman” could be. The 1959 film-version of Ben-Hur is saturated with the desire for vengeance, with the antipodal motive of forgiveness only being shown as a more powerful, and thus stronger, phenomenon at the end of the film when Judah Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are spontaneously cured of leprosy at the very moment in which Jesus dies on the Cross. Only in aiding Jesus with water on his arduous way to the Cross does the Jewish man, Judah, realize the value of the suffering man’s righteous, unmerited suffering, especially relative to the value of even satisfied vengeance. At the moment of his death, Jesus, freed of a mortal body, cures the two women as a result of Judah’s change of heart. The message is that forgiveness wins over resentment and vengeance from a spiritual standpoint.

Prior to the period shown in the film, the wealthy Ben-Hur family took in and raised the Roman boy, Messala. So, it is with a sense of utter ungratefulness that as an adult and a Roman official that Messala turns on Judah for refusing to divulge the names of dissidents by banishing him to work in as a rower in the Roman navy for five years and sending Judah’s mother and sister to prison and then to a leper’s colony. Fortunately, Judah saves a Roman general from drowning in a battle-at-sea and is rewarded by being adopted by the general and given Roman citizenship. Judah has the wherewithal to return to Jerusalem to challenge and vanquish Messala in a chariot race. Even after Messala dies from being injured by Judah’s chariot during the race, Judah is still not satisfied—still not free of his resentment. He walks by as people are gathering to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which causes Balthasar to remark, “You are choosing death.” This intriguing line can be unpacked.

Even vengeance satisfied, albeit with Judah’s mother and sister still suffering from leprosy, is death—of the spirit—whereas the qualities valued by Jesus in his sermon represent a freed up spiritual life. Interestingly, were Balthasar to deliver the line to Judah as Jesus is dying on the Cross, the allusion to death could be taken literally, given the soteriological meaning of the Passion Story. Specifically, the salvific meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection is that the vicarious, voluntary sacrifice pays off original sin and thus reconciles humans with God. Literally walking past Jesus on the Cross would connote the choice of death rather than eternal life. It is interesting that Balthasar remarks that Judah is choosing death in refusing to stay to hear Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. The death is figurative, in that Judah is still buried in resentment because his mother and sister are still ill as a result of Messala’s punishments. As for Messala, in turning on, in utter betrayal, the generous family that had raised him, he can be reckoned as spiritually dead, and his literal death occurs before he can let go of his chackles. Judah takes considerable time, but, unlike his adopted-brother, Jesus’s example of selfless agape-love even amidst severe suffering sinks in and softens Judah’s harden heart.

Before Messala’s death at the hands of Judah in the famed race, Judah is rebuffed in his zeal for vengeance by Ester, who, having heard Jesus preach, tells Judah that a young rabbi has said that “forgiveness is greater, and love is more powerful than hatred.” Later, just before the horse race in which Judah intends to kill M, Judah prays, “God forgive me for seeking vengeance, but my path is set. Into your hands I commit my life. Do with me as you will.” The request to be forgiven is a lie because Judah himself has decided that his path towards exacting retribution is set. Judah is not committing his life to God in any sense, and is again lying when he says God can do with him what God will. In actuality, Judah is very much in the driver’s (or chariot’s) seat concerning what he will do during the upcoming race.

Judah goes on to win the race and, in the process, he has killed his nemesis who has so unfairly subjected Judah to years of severe hardship and suffering simply because Judah would not betray his fellow Jews. The presiding Roman official remarks at the end of the race that the spectators have made Judah the victor their god, albeit just for the time being. Drunk with having exacted revenge, Judah is still of a hardened heart when he leaves the track and walks past Jesus, who is shown atop a hill in the distance—and not shown frontally in a close-up—just as he is just about to give his famed Sermon on the Mount. Judah is still hardened, nevertheless, because his mother and sister still have leprosy as a result of having been in a dank prison-cell for five years. As his dying nemesis says to Judah just before dying after the race, “The race continues.”

In witnessing Jesus struggling physically and mentally as he is being prodded and whipped by Roman guards no the way to be crucified, Judah is taken back. “What did this man do to deserve this?” Judah asks out-loud. That is the man who helped Judah with water when Judah was under extreme duress. It is not suffering itself that is given positive significance, but, rather, the willingness to take on the sins of others by suffering what they should by all rights suffer. The silent strength evinced by the suffering man who seems so weak suddenly is clear to Judah, who can now free himself from the chains of his own resentment. Ironically, letting go of resentment owing to the ongoing suffering of his mother and sister ends their suffering. He lets go of his resentment prior to the miracle healing that removes the ongoing reason for the resentment.

The miracle itself is important because it shows that in the story-world of the film, as in that of the Gospels, Jesus is the Son of God. Esoterically (i.e., the following is optional reading), the noetic significance of the religious title is dwarfed by the ontic significance of spiritual freedom over spiritual captivity, as evinced by Judah Ben-Her in the film as he offers Jesus water on the way to the Cross over having felt himself internally compelled to pass by Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.

Whereas the sort of explicit power evinced by Messala and the ship-galley task-masters, and, moreover, the Romans in Jerusalem even against Jesus on the way to the Cross, is quite visible, the power of letting go of vengeance and even offering compassion to detractors and even enemies is silent yet paradoxically stronger. The litmus test for Judah has finally to do with which of the two types of power he values more in the sense of which is stronger, and thus has more worth in itself. The relevant death is not physical, but, rather, spiritual, as per the human instinct for freedom, which Nietzsche ironically calls the will to life, or will to power, as ultimately felt best in overcoming (i.e., mastering, not repressing!) one’s most intractable instinctual urge, such as that of vengeance.  

All of Me

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

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

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

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

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

The Mephisto Waltz

In a retelling of the proverbial Faustian deal with the devil, The Mephisto Waltz (1971) plays out with the deal paying off, as Duncan Ely is able to live on in the body of Myles Clarkson. It doesn’t hurt that Ely is a master pianist and Clarkson has long, spry fingers (and that he has a beautiful wife, Paula). Even so, both Paula and the Clarkson’s daughter stand in the way of Duncan being able to get back to his own wife, and the film ends with Paula making her own deal with the devil so she can live on even though Duncan (and his wife) have already set about her demise. Because Duncan’s “after-life” transition is successful and even Paula, who has been opposing Duncan’s possession of Myles, ends up turning to the devil, the lesson of the film, Faust (1926) is effectively debunked. Besides The Mephisto Waltz, that God does not smite every case of injustice in the world—the genocide being perpetrated by Israel in the 2020s being a vivid and blatant example—may even further instigate interest in Faustian deals with the devil, even though that entity is known to be deceiver and thus not to be trusted. The allure of selfish gain can be worthwhile nonetheless for some people. For Duncan Ely, being able to go on living and gain even more fame as a performing pianist is worth the gamble, and it pays off. The medium of film is an excellent means of presenting the religious level, which is distinct yet interacts with the ordinary world that anchors the film.

As Duncan attempts to kill the Clarkson daughter and Paula, the latter’s dream-state shows the drama. After waking, Paula is horrified to find the blue dots that Duncan has put on both her daughter’s and her own forehead in the dreams. It really happened. Additionally, a bricolage of fleeting images highlighting symbols relevant to religion punctuate that part of the film. The duality or dichotomy of Paula’s dream- and waking-states is thereby set in a context in which the film itself has mythic qualities; it is not like a historical drama, for instance. At times, the audience may be overwhelmed visually by the quick succession of symbolic-oriented images, while missing the underlying point that the religious realm transcends the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion.

That idea comes from the 6^th century Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius. Such transcendence differentiates the domain of religion from all other domains of human experience. Even wondering how action in a dream could possibly “really have happened” as evinced in a person’s waking state—a phenomenon that is at least in part psychological in nature—does not go far enough in representing or inculcating the religious domain. In other words, religion does not reduce to the psychology of dreams and their relationship to a person’s waking state. I contend that the rapid series of symbolic images on the screen are meant to point to the limits of humans beyond which religious phenomena go and are based. A similar bricolage is used by Polanski in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) during the scene in which Satan rapes Rosemary. It is not just that we are seeing the effect of Rosemary being drugged, for she has not consumed much of the drug because she does not trust her next-door neighbors. Rather, the interaction between a mortal and a theological entity goes beyond our ability even to imagine because that entity is based in a realm unknown and inaccessible to us mere mortals. We only get a glimpse of Satan’s face as it is having sex with Rosemary. Similarly, we only get a glimpse of the face of the resulting baby when Rosemary finally accepts it as hers.

Perhaps film is best as a medium in capturing the liminal numen quality of transcendence when the normal “rules” of filmmaking are broken, or at least distorted. The viewers are not meant to grasp the bricolage of religious symbols that rapidly flicker on the screen when the transcendent and ordinary—the sacred and the profane—touch, or dance. Rationalistic questions of whether a person should make a Faustian deal with the devil seem superficial relative to the visualizations when an inherently transcendent entity or realm temporarily comes in contact with ordinary time and the world that we inhabit on a daily basis. Even if no other realm (or entity therein) exists ontologically, the experience of coming up against the inherent limits of our cognitive, perceptual, and emotional capacities as human beings may include elements such as mysterium tremendum et fascinans, given the numinosity of the transcendent, which Rudolf Otto associates with the holy in his book by that name. Visually, a rapid series of images containing religious-oriented symbols with discordant instrumentals is an effective way in which filmmakers can attempt to depict the heightened terrifying and fascinating emotions that the other-worldly, and thus numinous, mysterious power evokes. From such a vantage-point, in such an overwhelming experience, is anyone in a position to decide whether a Faustian deal is worthwhile?

Even narrative itself is transcended. Film can only go so far even in visually and auditorily pointing beyond the medium’s limits; but even in this respect the medium can effectively relativize the other domains of human experience from being conflated with the transcendent realm of religion. Efforts to comprehend the attributes of its innate entities, whether they are real or only posited, may be secondary to the yearning-experience for radical transcendence. Hence in the rape scene of Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary’s experience in being in close intercourse with an entity based in a transcendent, wholly theological realm, is given priority over images of that entity, and in The Mephisto Waltz, so much of Paula’s dream-waking-transcended experience of being manipulated by dynamics based in the religious realm is distorted visually. We may focus inordinately on the nature of the entities thereof rather than on the numinous nature of religious experience even though the entities are inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility.

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

Decades before dying while doing battle with the demon possessing Regan NacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), Rev. Lankester Merrin successfully extracts the same demon from a young man in Kenya. An African chief (or medicine man) tells Merrin at the end of Dominion: The Prequel to the Exorcist (2005) that he has made a rather bad enemy of the demon, which was not done with the priest. We know from The Exorcist that the demon will eventually kill the priest, but that is by no means the final word on a distinctively religious battle because in that domain, the human soul is eternal rather than necessarily tethered to a corporeal body. It is important, moreover, not to reduce religion to one of its aspects, or, even worse, to the stuff of any other domain, including the supernatural. Dominion reduces Christianity to one belief-claim and relies on supernaturalism to validate the religious phenomena in the film.

In the old church during at the film’s climatic event, Merrin incessantly repeats the identity of the Trinity to repulse and repel the demon from the young African man. Of itself, the very existence of the triune deity is abhorrent to the demon, likely because it, like Satan, is jealous of God’s pre-eminence and superiority. Even so, is repeating “Christ compels you” over and over sufficient for the demon to give up the possessed body? It seems realistic to assume that such an approach would reduce to a “No he doesn’t, yes he does, no he doesn’t” back-and-forth without a resolution. Adding potency, Merrin could preach the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels to the demon, which could be expected to reject in utter disgust the value of compassion as benevolentia universalis and especially to one’s detractors and even enemies. In addition to presenting the way into the kingdom of God to the demon, Merrin could try to convert the demon as a way of repulsing it enough to stop possessing the young man. Merrin could also point out that God is love, and what that means from a distinctly theological standpoint. For example, Merrin’s dialogue could include, “God is love—the sort that is self-emptying (i.e., agape) and this is superior to your puffed-up ego-pride by which you put yourself above Jesus’s voluntary sacrifice for us.” Besides being more distasteful than merely “Christ compels you” to the demon, the enhanced theological dialogue voiced by the priest would present the audience with a more substantive understanding of Jesus’s message in the Gospels than merely that he is the Son of God. Furthermore, that “Christ compels you” is coming from a “weak vessel” rather than from Christ himself means that the priest’s reliance on that line is not the best strategy for convincing the demon to give up the body. This is especially the case because Merrin had lost his faith and only recovered it because Rev. Francis had strongly asserted, “Satan is real.” If the basis of Francis’s declaration is not based in the religious domain—that is, is actually exogenous—then to the extent that Merrin follows suit, it is no surprise that the demon eventually—in The Exorcist—kills him.

Rev. Francis takes a long time to believe that the young African man is actually possessed. It is only when Francis sees the burn marks on the man’s forehead just after Francis has pressed a small crucifix on the man’s skin that that young priest believes that Satan is real. The religious faith of Rev. Merrin in God is in turn stimulated to return by Francis’s loud declaration, “Satan is real!” Whereas God as the Creator is like the condition for all that exists, and thus not an entity as we think of entities, Satan, and his demons are entities more easily recognized by the human mind. So it makes sense that faith in God could be derived from a declaration that Satan is real. The problem is that it is a supernatural empirical effect on young possessed man’s forehead that signifies and, even more troubling, validates the underlying religious phenomenon.

Even though such supernatural special-effects, including the fires that spontaneously start in the old church to provide lighting for Merrin and the demon, make for good cinema, the distinction between scientifically-valid empirical yet not-understood (and thus supernatural) happenings and religious phenomena is important. The supernatural is a subtype of natural science because the realm is empirical. Put another way, the supernatural can be thought of as being on the turf of science—just not (yet) explained. For the criteria and content of natural science to over-reach onto the domain of religion, even overriding the criteria innate to that domain, is to incur a category mistake. Basing the claim that Satan is real on burn-marks on a forehead treats empirical verification as determinative of the existence of a theological entity whose existence and basis transcends the empirical world rather than is based in it. This essence of religion renders it qualitatively different, and thus unique, from other, even closely related domains. Especially in a religion of the heart, such as Christianity, the validity of religious truth cannot rightfully come from seeing burn marks on someone’s forehead. Taking the latter as decisive gives a free hand to superstition.

Therefore, both Francis and Merrin depend on a non-religious marker to prove the existential reality of Satan, and, by extension, God. The meaning that God represents, which is theological love, which in turn is that which Satan rejects, is by implication not self-validating. This is deeply problematic from a religious standpoint. Depending on supernatural events or signs not only slights the distinctly theological meaning, but also remakes the theological into something else: the unexplained in natural science. The value of compassion being extending to rude people, for example, and even to detractors who disvalue rather than respect does not depend on unexplained observable phenomena. Either a person values agape love or not. Either such love is appreciated in one’s heart as being of great value, or as weakness. This judgment, rather than lines like, “Christ compels you,” captures what it means to internalize Jesus’s example and preachments in the Gospels. To a demon, those preachments may be more distasteful  than demands by a priest of Christ compelling obedience if the substance and essence of God is indeed love rather than domination to be served.

Devil’s Advocate

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The Vatican Tapes

After The Omen (1976), which was released just two years after the sardonic U.S. President, Richard Nixon, had resigned in utter disgrace from the presidency amid much economic and political pessimism in the 1970s generally, moviemakers got busy on stories involving demon-possession. The 2015 film, The Vatican Tapes, begins as an apparent demon-possession case and thus seems not to stand out among other such films, but towards the end of the film, when the demon-possessed young woman suddenly breaches the bounds of the sort of supernatural feats of which demons are capable, the true significance of her case emerges with stunning clarity. For that which possesses and kills the young woman is none other than the Anti-Christ, and that figure is in a wholly different league than demons.

The middle of the film is taken up by Angela, the possessed person, doing battle with the staff in a mental hospital. Even in that context, the powers of that which is possessing her are impressive. Beyond being able to speak in an ancient tongue, Angela is nearly omniscient with respect to the personal life of her psychiatrist, Dr. Richards, who undoubtedly begins to intuit that Angela’s case may not be psychological in nature. When Angela’s chants result in other patients killing themselves and each other, Richards, and undoubtedly the staff, have had enough; Angela must go, and quickly. The lesson for us is that religion is not simply a special case of psychology, as Sigmund Freud theorized. The domain of religion is distinct and unique—sui generis. Angela’s forced departure from the mental hospital makes clear that something other than mental illness is going on, and psychological treatments are not capable of redressing the distinctly spiritual dynamics of possession by a spiritual entity.

It is appropriate, therefore, that Cardinal Mattias Bruun takes the decision to house Angela on the premises of the archdiocese, and it is not long before Bruun, assisted by Father Lozano, performs an exorcism on Angela. At that point, both priests, Angela’s dad, Roger, and Angela’s boyfriend, Pete, as well as the audience of the film, suppose that all that is necessary is for the priests to extract a demon from the young woman so she could be free of it. When the Cardinal strangely becomes intent on strangling Angela if necessary to get the demon out and actually kills the young woman, which quite naturally infuriates her father, Roger, both priests, Roger, and Pete are stunned when they look around and see Angela not only apparently alive, but standing and very alert. “I am the Anti-Christ,” she explains. The Cardinal tells the other people in the room that Angela is no longer there; she is still dead. Then, when the Anti-Christ has the wounds of Christ and is levitating in the air with arms stretched out as in being on a Cross, literally all hell breaks loose, with that entity unleashing a mighty explosion that kills all of the men there except for Father Lozano, to whom the Anti-Christ tells, “Tell everyone that I am here.”  The Anti-Christ has arrived, so the end-times are not long in coming.

Then the film shifts to show the great publicity that the Anti-Christ is getting for performing astounding medical miracles on people, who are naturally very appreciative. Then a line from the Bible is shown, that reads in part that the Anti-Christ will be like a false-prophet, misleading many people. To lie is of course in the very nature of evil, and thus of the Anti-Christ, who appears to be compassionate. Also, that the entity has Angela’s body gives off the impression of being a beautiful young woman. Yet in a close-up, as the entity is being interviewed on television, no smile appears; instead, a sort of mischievous facial expression centered in the mouth’s look can be glimpsed by the astute viewer. A compassionate heart cannot be completely faked.

It is just such an expression, without any supernaturalism, that comes closest to evincing the entity’s evil nature. Like the other exorcism films, The Vatican Tapes relies so much on supernatural “tricks” that the viewers of the film could come away from the film with the faulty impression that the supernatural is endemic to the religious domain. Just as religion doesn’t reduce to psychology, however, so too religion is not the same thing as the supernatural. This distinction may be more difficult to make than that which exists between religion and psychology, for so much that is religious has been portrayed in scriptures as well as films as valid because of some supernatural event.

In the New Testament stories, for example, resuscitating Lazarus really gets people’s attention; Jesus must be the Son of God, it is realized, because he has done something supernatural. In a religion of the heart, however, in which the divine is self-emptying love, religious truth or meaning comes not in performing impossible miracles, but, rather, in preachments and compassionate acts, especially to rude people, detractors, and especially enemies. Samuel Hopkins, who was Jonathan Edwards’ protégé, wrote a book precisely to argue that the Kingdom of God “just is” such humane compassion. The powerful spiritual dynamic that is unleashed between two people when such compassionate love is acted upon is not supernatural at all. In fact, such difficult love can be viewed as an expansion of human nature, rather than anything supra-natural. So the various films involving the exorcism of a demon do us a disservice even as they entertain, and The Vatican Tapes pushes the supernatural happenings to such an extent as to sensationalize religion even at the expense of religion as a distinct, unique domain.

Dying

As a Jewish kid in Nazi Germany, Michael Roemer, a filmmaker who went on to teach documentary at Yale (I took Charles Musser’s seminar a semester after Roemer had left), had to lie in order to survive. In making the film, Pilgrims Farewell, he wanted to get as close to the truth as a human can. He didn’t want to lie anymore. He wanted to deal with the real thing. In making the documentary, Dying (1976), he realized that the people whom he documented as they were dying were more real that what he was going through in his family in New York. Artists and their families pay, he remarked decades later at Yale. “I neglected my family; I was always working. Once I started, I had to make the film,” he said after a presentation of the film on dying. “The people dying knew something we didn’t know,” he added. The prospect of death apparently makes things incredibly real, before they’re not.

In the film, Sally, who is dying, says that everyone dies, so “I have no fear of death.” Harriet, Bill’s wife, is relieved when her husband’s cancer recommences out of remission. “The longer this gets dragged out,” she complains to his doctor. Stunningly, she says, “I prayed that the chemotherapy wouldn’t work.” The physician reminds her that Bill’s feelings should be taken into account. “He has the basic right to make some of these decisions.” After the film, Roemer informed the audience at Yale that Bill’s wife had been abandoned by her mother. After Bill’s death, she married a man who had left his wife and had five kids. Harriet had had a bad life. Her attitude toward Bill’s prospect of dying was indeed very real—human, one might way, all too human. The question is perhaps whether she is culpable in the film for wishing that her husband would finish the job and just die. I contend that she is, regardless of her past, for as depicted in the film, she is his wife and so she should be supporting him as he faces the ultimate demise. There is a revealing scene in which the two of them are sitting together in silence. Is she waiting for him to die?

Also documented in the film is Rev. Byrant, an old Black man who is dying of cancer. “The only thing I can do is put my trust in God, and try to live as long as possible,” he says. In preaching a sermon at his church, he says, “Jesus tells the man, your daughter is sleeping.” She is dead. Later, he remarks, “Jesus died for me on the Cross; he will take me.” Such faith is laudable. With people like Harriet in the world, the Rev. Byrant can hardly be blamed for having such an other-worldly faith.

Whether in the midst of a troubled marriage or in hopes of being taken by Jesus, these stories in Michael Roemer’s documentary attest to people being honest regarding how they are approaching the prospect of death, whether that of a close relation or oneself. The medium of film has been said to ultimately be on the human condition. Even science fiction has something to say about us as we really are. For the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and the residents of Gaza during the Israeli genocide, the essentials of life were undoubtedly felt as very real. Living itself was doubtlessly made transparent in itself. Film can do this too. Even in portraying the brutal honesty of the Nazis and Israelis with regard to people they deemed as sub-human, the medium of film can help the rest of us to be more aware of the fullness of human nature, beyond our knowledge of ourselves and our immediate context.

The Scarlet and the Black

In the film, The Scarlet and the Black (1983), Gregory Peck and Christopher Plummer face off as Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and Col. Herbert Kapper at the end of the film when the Nazi head of police in Rome abruptly changes his tune in challenging the Catholic priest no longer by threats, but by appealing to the priest’s faith of humble compassion applied even to one’s enemies so O’Flaherty will extend mercy to Kapper’s wife and children, who would otherwise fall into the hands of the Allied troops advancing into Rome. Before that dialogue, O’Flaherty and Pope Pius XII subtly debate whether the pope had been right in compromising with Hitler in order to keep the Catholic Church intact in Nazi Germany. The film can thus be viewed in light of the potential of the medium of film to convey and even thrash out contending theological ideas.

Before the Nazi head of the SS in Rome faces off against the monsignor oddly in order to ask him a favor, that priest walks with the pope though a cellar hallway packed with rare documents and other treasures safe below the war, which the pope calls “the inhumanity of man.” The pope’s message is that the Church must go on, even in such times of war. “Conquers may come and go, but the eternal Church must remain,” the pope says as a way into his claim, “My greatest single duty is to preserve the continuity of the centuries, the heritage and existence of the Holy Church.” It is as though that goal were an end in itself, and therein lies that pope’s vulnerability. “I have been condemned by many for not speaking out against the Nazis, for making a concordat with Hitler, which guaranteed the life of the Church in Germany.” Speaking out against the Nazis could have turned enough Germans against the dictator that a coup may have been more likely. Also, making a deal with a man who is arguably caught up in evil is problematic from a Christian standpoint. The pope himself admits to the monsignor, presumably in referring to speaking out against the Nazis, “Perhaps I could have done more.” Determined to keep the church doors open in the Reich, the pope could be saying that he could perhaps have spoken out more without jeopardizing the Catholic churches in Germany, or that not having spoken out enough may not be enough to keep the churches open there. “I’ve learned that Hitler’s drawn up plans to invade us and to create a puppet Papacy in Lichtenstein under his control,” the pope informs the priest whose active involvement in hiding escaped Allied P.O.W.s and downed airmen could tip Hitler’s decision in favor of invading and closing the Vatican. “Any activities that give the Nazis an excuse to invade our territory must be avoided at all costs. All such activities must cease,” the pope says. The clear message to the monsignor is to immediately back away from hiding the 4,000 men in and around Rome.

One of the pope’s assumptions is that “the essence of statesmanship is compromise.” Even in politics, this claim can be disputed, for not all political differences can be reconciled; sometimes, a clear choice must be made wherein one option is chosen and the other is rejected. In religious terms, the relevant question is stated by the monsignor: “What is our duty when we come face to face with evil?” The pope instinctively answers, “We must fight it.” The implication is that compromising with Hitler’s regime was a mistake from a religious standpoint even if it worked politically. The monsignor closes the loop by asking the pope, “If we must fight, how can we compromise with it?” The pope answers with, “In the abstract, we cannot. In practical terms, it is sometimes necessary to proceed slowly and with caution.” But the monsignor’s question on how to deal with evil face to face is not in the abstract; it is an applied question. Also, in compromising with Hitler and not speaking out, the pope was not proceeding slowly; rather, his conduct was static rather than dynamic in order to keep the churches open in Germany. So, the pope’s answer doesn’t really work. The monsignor picks up yet another problem with the answer in asking, “But isn’t that the same as saying, it depends on the circumstances?” Sometimes it is necessary, the pope claimed. But any necessity bearing on political expediency would of course be extrinsic to religion, rather than from the nature of evil manifesting differently. What about “doing what is right, come hell or high water, and God will give you the upper hand?” This is the monsignor’s position. “Sanctus simplicitus, for some it is easier than others,” the pope replies. Holding to divine simplicity in the face of evil, the pope is saying, has not been easy for himself. It can be tempting to apply situational ethics instead of maintaining a religious true north. So, the monsignor asks, “Is it ever right to see innocent people in mortal danger and turn your back on them?” The priest informs the pope that 4,000 men in hiding are under his care, and the pope is visibly astonished at the number. “Do what you think is best, considering what I have said, and with God guiding your decision,” the pope advises. The monsignor’s questions have had an effect, as the pope has shifted from telling the priest to cease all such involvement so the Nazis will not invade the Vatican and set up a puppet Papacy. It is indeed a judgment call; even if compromising with evil is abhorrent to religious tastes, the pope was not wrong to see to it that the Catholics in Germany could still have Masses to attend in order to be spiritually fed liturgically, especially when the Allied bombing of German cities was underway. To say that the pope’s responsibility is only or even primarily to the institution whereas the monsignor’s is to God would be unfair; both men are trying to do what is right even though they favor different strategies. This commonality does not apply later in the film when Kapper has one of men fetch the monsignor from his bedroom for a private, informal meeting at the Roman Colosseum in the middle of the night. That dialogue between the antagonist and the protagonist represents evil pitting against holiness.

The sheer arrogance of evil is on display when Col. Kapper, who wants his wife and kids to be sneaked out of Rome to safety in Switzerland by means of the monsignor’s network, admits upon seeing the priest, “nothing would give me greater pleasure” than to shoot him. The monsignor is unfazed. “Well,” he says back, “when it comes down to it, a bullet is your answer to just about everything.” It’s “the only argument you’ve got.” Rather than deny this, Kapper replies, “I had my orders. I’m a soldier. I do my duty.” It is interesting that the head of the Nazi police in Rome views himself as having been a soldier in a war. The priest scoffs, “You can’t hide behind that, Kapper. Don’t debase the word duty.” Conflating municipal police with an army on a battlefield, Kapper replies that in a war, his duty includes “whatever it takes.” The duty to do anything a person likes lacks any constraint, and his thus not a duty. The priest misses this point, and instead goes after the defense of the duty to follow orders. “And you think that absolves you of any responsibility?” “Yes!” Kapper snaps back. “What is important is the Reich, not Rome.” At this point, the monsignor could have pointed out that Kapper was not following orders when he lied to the Jewish leaders that by paying him in cash and gold, the SS in Rome would leave the Jews alone. Just as Eichmann was not under orders to march Jews out of Hungary to an infamous concentration camp in Poland, in the film, no one ordered Kapper to trick the Jews. So, following orders doesn’t hold up as a defense, and neither does duty, for Kapper sought to enrich the Reich and likely even himself by giving the Jews to have an incentive to collect money and gold.

Regarding the importance of the Reich, the monsignor asks rhetorically, “How many murderous dictators have talked that kind of rubbish?” Regarding Rome, he says, “The Church is still here,” whereas in a few years, “a few broken stones” will be all that is “left of your Third Reich.” Because Kapper knows that the Nazis’ pull-out from Rome likely means that the Reich will likely fall, he does not dispute the priest’s prediction. Rather, he tries to treat both men as equivalent in being subject to superiors. The oddness of insulting the priest while wanting to ask for a favor comes up again when Kapper tells the monsignor, “You crawl to your pulpit, obey his orders, just as I obey mine.” Kapper is referring to orders from the pope, rather than God. The monsignor conflates the two in replying, “You compare obedience to Hitler with the faith a priest owes to his Church? You think that’s the same? In the name of God!” The priest’s reply can be criticized because faith to the Church is distinct from following orders from another person, including the pope even though the Papacy is believed by Catholics to hold a special position in relation to Christ (so it could legitimately be asked, by the way, whether Jesus would have compromised with Hitler as the pope did or stand on principle against the evil). Nevertheless, the monsignor is right to object to Kapper’s claim that following orders from a pope is normatively or in religious terms equivalent to following orders from Hitler. The monsignor is so utterly disgusted by the comparison as if both men were simply following orders that he begins to walk away before Kapper says, “Wait!” It is only then that, for a bit, Kapper’s tone softens; he must now ask for the priest’s help.

Picking up on Kapper’s reason for the informal meeting in the middle of the night, the monsignor asks, “What is it you want from me, Kapper?” The latter replies, “They say you [priests] can’t pass a beggar or a lame dog, but that you see yourself with some sort of obligation to look after anyone in trouble. You help British and American prisoners, Jews, Arabs, refugees, anybody. It’s part of your faith. Is that right?” “Well, I wouldn’t deny it,” the priest answers. “That’s why I became a priest.” Kapper has been told that the faith is one of “brotherly love and forgiveness.” Forgiveness “is the other half of what you believe, true?” “True,” the monsignor admits. “Well, I’m glad of it,” Kapper says almost warmly, “because I have three more for your mercy wagon.” Yet again, the odd strategy of insulting the person even while asking him for a favor is evident. Kapper notes that if the Partisans get a whole of his wife and children, they would be killed. Sounding like he is demanding mercy for his family, the SS man says, “I want them out of Rome and safe; that’s what I want from you, priest.” Again, this is not the politest way of asking for a favor. Astonished, the monsignor asks, “You’re asking me to save your family?” Kapper tries to manipulate the priest. “If you really believe what you preach, you’ll do it.” Still astonished, the monsignor says, “You expect me to help you after what you’ve done? You think it comes automatically, just because you want it?” Even the Nazi realizes that he has no right to ask for mercy for himself. “I’m not talking about myself,” he says. Even so, the priest is astonished. “You turned this city into a concentration camp. You’ve tortured and butchered my friends. You violated every principle of God and man! I can’t believe it, after all you’ve done, you want mercy?” Again, not denying the accusations, Kapper replies, “I told you, for my family.” But “they’re just part of you,” the monsignor replies. “Part of what you stand for. They’ve taken whatever they could get without a thought for the suffering all around them. And now, you demand that they be saved? I’ll see you in hell first!” The priest knows that Kapper is correct about the Christian faith, that Jesus says in the Gospels, forgive seven times seven, including enemies, so in refusing Kapper’s “demand,” the priest is willing in the moment to go to hell rather than help the Nazi’s family. Picking up on this, Kapper says to himself of the monsignor, “No, you’re no different from anyone else. All your talk means nothing. Charity, forgiveness, mercy? It’s all lies. . . . There’s no God. No humanity.”

So, when Kapper is caught and is informed while being interrogated that someone, perhaps with a network, has gotten the Nazi’s wife and children to safety in Switzerland, the hardened SS man is surprised. Although the film does not include the man’s eventual conversion, the beginning of his turning away from the Nazi ideology to the Christian faith begins when he realizes that the monsignor has not even taken credit for the act of mercy, which implies unconditional forgiveness for Kapper’s family even though they benefitted financially while other people suffered greatly.

That neither brotherly love nor forgiveness of one’s detractors is conditional is clear from the Gospels. Even when demanded by an enemy who has not turned from evil, God’s love can reach into the dark, for otherwise how will God vanquish evil in the end? Is this not the ultimate telos of faith in the three Abrahamic religions? As much as evil deserves to be punished, and of course can be subject to divine wrath, for “Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord,” it is up to us to pour love as humane, humble compassion where doing so is hardly convenient. To say that helping Col. Kapper’s wife and children is not convenient for Monsignor O’Flaherty is a gross understatement; after all, the monsignor risked being captured by Kapper’s SS men when he went, disguised in a Nazi uniform, to visit his friend, Fr. Vittorio, who was in jail and severely ill from having been recently tortured. The neighbor-love evinced in risking one’s own life to compassionately minister to a friend’s humane needs, as well as in hiding P.O.W’s who could otherwise be captured and killed by the Nazis instantiates the presence of divine love, but what many Christians do not realize is that an even richer presence of theological love lies in compassionately serving the humane needs of enemies and even people whom one dislikes or is disliked by oneself. What the monsignor does for Kapper’s wife and children, and thus really for the SS police chief himself by extension, dwarfs the religious significance, from a Christian standpoint, of hiding 4,000 men from the Nazis and ministering to Vittorio. In short, “love thy enemies” goes beyond “neighbor-love” in realizing the kingdom of God within. Compassion for one’s friends, one’s neighbors, and finally one’s enemies can be seen along a trajectory of decreasing self-interest.

As the film winds up, the penultimate scene centers on a brief dialogue between the pope and the monsignor. “No need to rise,” the pope says as he enters the room. “In this imperfect world,” he tells the monsignor, “you may never receive the honor that is due to you. But I wanted you to know that in my heart, I honor you.” Because the world would not honor the monsignor for getting Kapper’s family to safety, the pope must be referring to the monsignor’s role in running the informal network that hid thousands of men from the Nazis in and around Rome. Referring back to the discussion in the cellar, the pope said, “I talked to you once of the treasures of the Church. Perhaps I deceived myself. The real treasures of the Church, what makes it imperishable, is that every once in a while, someone comes to it, my son, like you.” That the pope is referring to the treasures in the cellar, which symbolize the value in protecting the institution from the Nazis, is another indication that the pope is referring to the monsignor’s role in hiding enemies of the Nazi state with whom he sympathizes rather than to the monsignor humbly acting in compassion, in unconditional forgiveness, by moving Kapper’s family to safety in Switzerland. It follows that the pope has more reason than he realizes to honor the monsignor. At an esoteric level of distinctively Christian faith, the monsignor, in using his free will to decide to have his network get Col. Kapper's family safely to Switzerland, Monsignor acted out of strength rather than weakness, and could feel the presence of the divine nature more deeply than from helping Vittorio and all of the men in hiding. In honoring the priest on the basis of the neighbor-love that the priest took risks to manifest in compassion to Vittorio and the 4,000 Allied soldiers in hiding, the pope can been understood as taking the Christian faith only so far.