Strange River

Not every film has an implicit Thoreau signature reflective of the nineteenth-century Romantic turn from the age of Reason. Not every film brings to mind the Romantic painter, Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whose painting of nature’s green growing over classic Roman pillars as if to say, nature has the last word. The European film, Strange River (2025), is such a film. The key to making these connections lies not in the film’s dialogue, but, rather, in Jaume Muxart’s consistent choice to direct the film by ending several scenes with elongated camera-shots of nature. This leitmotif has Thoreau’s Walden Pond written all over it and is an implicit critique of rationality and the related artificial societies that mankind has constructed at the expense of being natural.

The film centers on Didac, a sixteen year-old boy who, as a typical teenager, is engulfed in the growing pains of self-discovery. This takes place on a family biking and camping trip along the Danube river. The film opens while the parents and three boys are biking near the mouth of the river, and ends with the family angst gone where the river is much larger; life has been more fully experienced, with the parents having reunited from being emotionally fraught, and Didac having had a brief fling (not including gay sex) on a small boat overnight with another boy. Boys will be boys; nothing definite should be extrapolated. Early on, Lena, the mother, tells Didac, “This might be the last summer that the family is together.” Two arguments between the parents bear out the mother’s prognosis that the couple might get a divorce, and her sexual fling with a young man one night during the trip bears out her desire to wander.

Meanwhile, Didac is initially aggrieved that Gerard, a boy from school on whom Didac has a crush, has been ignoring him. Didac speaks with his father, Albert, on “the frustration of not being desired.” Albert urges his teenage son to share how he feels with Gerard. Both parents support Didac’s romantic interest in Gerard. “You guys kissed,” both parents separately remind their son with winks. For something much deeper than an infatuation, frustration is an understatement, so Didac’s crushes on boys are clearly not very serious, and he may eventually be sexually interested in women. Put somewhat bluntly, the importance of the role that water plays in how Muxart depicts nature in the film, especially with shots of Didac in particular swimming naked, brings to mind the problem in nature wherein heterosexual sexual intercourse is naturally well-lubricated (if not rushed) whereas anal penetration is not, but Didac’s instinctual urges for boys sexually are natural too. Also problematically, the two elongated camera close-ups of Didac’s butt while he is swimming on two occasions almost creep out the wide shots of a boy swimming naked, which prima facie can be construed as showing a human being fully in nature, and thus natural (whereas wearing gray suits in bland offices in artificial skyscrapers is not). If the film can be characterized as a love story, it is that of a family, rather than two boys, and, moreover, a love story with nature. To be sure, Didac takes after his mother in that both engage in “extracurricular” flings during the trip. In fact, Didac sees Lena kissing a younger man one night at a camp-grounds. “Don’t look at me that way,” Lena tells her eldest son the next day; she goes on to tell him that she had had a romantic night with a stranger on the same route twenty years before the present trip. That foray took place on a small boat and the young man disappeared, and Didac has the same experience with a boy on the current trip. With that boy, Alexander, disappearing in the morning before Didac wakes up, the film lapses in skipping ahead to Didac being with his family on a large boat without accounting for how the 16 year-old boy gets from the small boat anchored in the large river back to his parents. If Didac’s brief, free-spirit, foray with Alexander is supposed to feel magical, Alexander leaving Didac alone on the boat is too much reality. In fact, rather than viewing the film as falling within the “gay cinema” genre, if there is such a type (try “romance films,” as falling in love is falling in love), I contend that Muxart situates the film as a family dynamic couched within nature, in and as a part of nature. Rather than being apart from nature, and thus other animals, our species, homo sapiens, is in the animal kingdom, and this is evinced both sexually and in how we raise our offspring.

During the trip, while at an empty school that Albert attended as a boy, he gives his wife and three boys, who are less than attentive, a lecture on the building’s architecture. Albert claims that the rationalistic style is relaxing, but this is undercut as an argument ensues. Significantly, that scene ends with the camera staying on a tree whose fine branches and leaves are swaying in the wind. Nature is relaxing. In fact, Muxart has the 16-mm lens changed as the trip goes on because the river is larger as the family progresses on the route along the river, and shots of the water are salient in the film and to its very meaning. In fact, the film ends with a wide, sustained shot of the wide river, as if to say that nature has the last word as image. That the family, or at least Didac, swims nude can be taken as saying that his teenage growing pains are natural—that he is part of nature. When he is masturbating on the bank of the river after swimming nude alone, the greenery around him is as natural as his facial expressions, especially his eyes, as he is stroking his penis. As he approaches orgasm, a long camera shot of the river water sparkling in the sunlight with emotive instrumental music makes the connection with nature clear. What he is doing is entirely natural, and thus good. Even after Didac and his dad have a father-son talk on Didac having kissed a boy at school, a homosexual encounter that Didac initially denies as he tells his father, “You are too old to understand,” a long camera-shot of the river, which is wider than at the beginning of the film, ensues as if to say, nature has the last word; Didac should go on his natural instincts rather than try to rationalize or justify his attraction to other boys. My point is that Didac’s homosexual urges are not the point of the film; rather, such urges serve as props for Muxart’s leitmotif that we as a species are a part of nature, rather than cast apart, as Albert says in the film, “When no one lives in a building, it dies.” We may design and build buildings, but we are corporeal, organic beings and thus a part of nature.

We can move figuratively to a larger “camera shot” by changing our lens to the nineteenth century, when Romanticism evinced both by the painter Joseph Turner and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau eclipsed the Age of Reason. To be sure, it had been during the eighteenth century that the Earl of Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith wrote on ethics by stressing the sentiment of disapprobation as being ethical judgment that some conduct has been unethical. There is no hint of Kant’s ethical categorical imperative wherein a logical contradiction in universalizing a maxim can be taken as evidence that the maxim is unethical. Instead, the viewer of the film is looking out on the river perhaps as Thoreau looked out on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Even Aristotle looked to nature, and so too does Muxart in making Strange River; we just need to look at how several important scenes end. Just as Albert and Lena do not move forward with divorce, so too, the family does not divorce itself from nature. 

Call Me by Your Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fifty Shades of Grey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Time to Die

Bond, James Bond. 007. A very successful and long-lasting movie franchise, in spite of or because of there being so many long action-scenes in the films. Bond’s relationships with M, Moneypenny, and Q-branch can be meaningful for viewers, even though the spy’s relationships with women are superficial and of short duration. So, the scenes of No Time to Die (2021) prior to the opening credits stand out because they provide more than a glimpse of Bond in an emotionally intimate, substantive romantic relationship that is to be longstanding, at least until Bond discovers that the woman has betrayed him. That even such a film that is so action-oriented would start out so very deep from the standpoint of human relationships is important because technological special-effects can be so seductive to filmmakers of action films that deep narrative can easily be left out.

The film begins when Madeleine, who will be Bond’s girlfriend, is a young girl. Her druggie mother is shot in the family home by a villain whose family was shot by Madeleine’s father, who is not at home. The villain decides to save Madeleine from drowning rather than kill her too, and presumably takes her under his wing. Decades later, in the scenes that follow, she and Bond are a couple, albeit not married. Related to her past, which she has not divulged to her retired-spy boyfriend, she sets him up to be killed when he visits the grave of a woman he had fallen for in an earlier film. Madeleine knows that Bond has not let that woman go, mentally, so James and Madeleine make a deal wherein Bond is to finally let the dead woman go and Madeleine is to tell Bond her secrets. Bond visits the grave to finally let the former girlfriend go, and Madeleine’s still-kept secrets catch up with him when the grave-site explodes, throwing him violently backward.

Even for a psychologically-detached person such as Bond, the very concept of finality that must be faced head-on in letting a loved one go is difficult to accept, let along grasp. For practical purposes, it makes no difference whether the beloved is dead or has moved on, having rejected the love by embracing the finality of ending a relationship; it can still be very difficult to let go, mentally. Even in cases in which two people were misaligned, such as in the case of having conflicting values, coming to terms with the utter coldness of finality can be difficult, especially if that follows the cold slap of rejection. In short, the inexorability of facing finality in finally admitting to oneself of having been wrong about a person and in having to move on, mentally, by letting the person go forever, can be difficult to face. To be sure, forgetfulness can kick in with time, so dysthymic rumination does not go on forever.

In lighting a piece of paper with his prior beloved’s name on it at the grave site just before the bomb explodes, James Bond presumably is letting go of the dead woman. He has no choice, for she is dead, though there is some choice in willing to end thinking about a person by removing the very concept of the person from one’s current thoughts. I doubt that symbolically letting go of something mental by lighting a piece of paper does the trick, for it takes time to pave over such mental depth in an earthly tomb. Even so, Bond makes a valid attempt to keep his end of the deal. Madeleine fails to keep her end of the bargain; her secrets become moot when James discovers that she is the person who notified the villain of Bond’s whereabouts. She set him up to be killed because the villian was threatening her. This is confirmed for James when the villain telephones Madeleine while she is sitting next to James in his car after he has escaped death! Even though the couple is occupied with driving away from the villains who are shooting at the car, Bond finds time to drop her off at the train station. “When will I see you again?” she asks him from the train. “You will never see me again,” he deadpans. He is utterly without emotion, having been so deeply hurt by her betrayal. In rejecting her, he has no problem whatsoever with the finality of never. He is extremely hurt, and has expunged emotion itself from his very being. He is effectively a psychopath.

Generally speaking, a person who represses emotion due to a past emotional trauma has no trouble at all with cutting even a loved one off as though cutting a tree branch off a tree with a power tool. It is very easy for such a person to part ways forever without any temptation whatsoever to reconcile or even look at the other person again. In fact, such a person may be more at home, iro ically, in going through many sex "partners." 

Madeleine need not have lost James; she could have warned him of the villian's plan and put her trust in him to protect her, so we can infer that she does not trust him, perhaps because there have been so many Bond women. Perhaps his psychological ease in cutting off his emotions, especially given the nature of his work, also prevents her from trusting him, for a couple counts on mutual emotions to help bond the two people when indifference or possible rivals might otherwise threaten the primacy of the relationship. Emotional intimacy requires commitment and trust, and those require both people making their relationship a priority, especially over sex with other people. The deep and important relationship between trust and emotional intimacy in a romantic relationship is in fact the leitmotif in the scenes of the film prior to the opening credits.

The film's beginning, which is in a way an ending, struck me because when I watched the film, I was in the process of letting someone go to whom I had deeply fallen in love. Trust had been eviscerated to the point that I had no choice but to accept the finality of never. The love was one-sided, so the finality was a sentence mutually-inflicted rather than being applied only by one of the counter-parties. I could not “train” the personality that I had come to love in spite of itself to radically change values and embrace rather than fear emotional intimacy; I had been repeatedly sidelined, lied to, and emotionally betrayed too many times in unashamed, inexorable coldness for me to be able to extend trust. Intimate relationships hardly ever resurrect from such an explosion of trust, and it is rare that both parties are motivated to put in the grueling effort to restore the relationship as a priority. Although mutual love can work miracles, more often than not, one of the people is just fine with the finality of never seeing the other person again, and may even “aww” the other person in pitiful pity for having fallen in love in the first place. Such coldness does not deserve being the object of love. and this itself expunges trust.

So, Bond’s position resonated with me when he realizes that he has to let Madeleine go forever even though he still loves her. Madeleine’s position resonated with me because of the pain she will have to endure in having to accept never. Rousseau famously wrote that we mere mortals are born free but live in chains. 

In an action film, such an emotionally-grabbing beginning as is capable of stirring such deep emotions is surprising; No Time to Die demonstrates that even the action genre of the medium can support deep narrative so as to engage an audience emotionally rather than just to titillate by bells and whistles, crashes and explosions. In other words, even action films can touch the human condition, as painful as being human, all too human, can be. Even if by the end of that emotionally intense morning James and Madeleine are praying for the end of time, it is no time to die.

The String

The original title of the 2009 film, The String, is Le Fil, which actually translates as thread rather than string. These two English words have different connotations and this bears on the film’s leitmotif. Whereas a person can string another person along, a thread has a connotation of linking people emotionally. The thread that ultimately succeeds in the film is that of caring, which is antipodal to hurting, emotionally speaking. In this sense, the film is like The Holiday (2006), another romantic drama in which the good guys (and gals) wind up on top. In terms of the theme of caring and not hurting other people, that The String centers on two gay men who fall in love whereas The Holiday is about two heterosexual couples matters little, though the resistance to homosexuality in The String is an additional hurdle. I contend that like The Holiday, The String can provide audiences with how falling in love can proceed naturally without exploding because one person hurts the other. In other words, the ethical wins out in both films in regard to emotionally intimate romantic relationships, and in this respect the medium of film has value in terms of ethics.

In The String, Malik returns to Tunisia from France to live in his mother’s house because his dad is dying. Malik has been unwilling to tell his mother Sara that he is gay, and she is unaware of his sexual prowess with local guys, including one of his cousins (who gets “turned on” not only having sex with a cousin, but also paying anonymous guys for sex). It is no accident that Malik and his cousin sniff a “substance” as they are kissing in a bathroom, for there is no emotional connection between the two men that would bring the sex to a higher intensity naturally. Meanwhile, Malik is gradually falling for his mother’s houseboy, Bilal, who, crucially, is falling for Malik. “One-sided love” simply does not work; it is too unstable an element not to explode at some point. Once Malik and Bilal mutually realize that they are falling for each other—perhaps the most beautiful thing of which two human beings are capable—and neither is afraid of the emotional intimacy, two things happen.

Explicitly, Sara discovers her son and her servant intertwined on Malik’s bed the next morning while the two are still asleep. It is not as if Malik has drawn an invisible line down the middle of his bed as a way of rudely informing Bilal that bodily touching is off-limits while Malik is asleep. Sara, a Catholic, immediately goes to her cancer-stricken husband Abdelaziz, who is a Muslim, to inform him that their son is gay. Interestingly, he defends his son’s sexuality, pushing back on Sara’s disapproval. This is ironic because Abdelaziz’s family did not approve of Abdelaziz marrying a Catholic woman. Both from that experience and her husband’s opinion on Malik being gay, Sara relents and accepts her son’s homosexuality, and the fact that her son is in love with one of her servants.

The second thing that happens once Malik and Bilal have consummated their deep romantic (not just sexual attraction) affection for each other is very subtle but very, very important. Malik stops “sleeping around.” It is not that Bilal has insisted on monogamy; rather, Malik no longer is motivated to have sex with other men.  I suspect that this is due to the natural willowing of focus that happens when someone falls in love with another person. It could also be that physiological sex alone pales experientially relative to sex with a beloved. There is one scene in which Malik is running his fingers down the backside of Bilal’s naked body in bed. Relative to the intimacy—even love—shown in that scene, anal (or virginal) sex can seem superficial and even contrived. This is not to say that people who fall in love should necessarily be monogamous; rather, the implication is that even an “open” relationship of (a reasonable amount of) separate physical sex with others pales in comparison to the depth of emotional intimacy that can manifest sexually for two people who are in love. It could be that were a sequel to have been made of Malik and Bilal years later, their love would be solid enough even though the sex has become stale that they would be fine with either or both of them having non-emotional, physical sex with others from time to time, assuming that neither would impose this on (or hide this from) the other. Separate sex with romantic connection or feelings for another person is another story, however, and the emotional hurt that either Malik or Bilal would feel is so engrained in (normal) human nature that such an imposition would be unethical, even before marriage.

Malik and Bilal do not marry, as it is presumably illegal in the Muslim country. Because Malik has promised before falling for Bilal to enter into a contractual marriage with his cousin and friend, Syrine, in order that her baby, when born, would legally have a father even though Malik is not the biological father, and her unmarried pregnancy would not be discovered in that conservative society, Malik and Bilal have difficulty deciding whether Malik should follow through with the marriage. Bilal is against it for obvious reasons, but Malik wants to help Syrine. It is not as though Malik would be living with Syrine, so with the help of Sara helping her son and Bilal on this emotionally difficult matter, Bilal agrees and even stands as Malik’s best man. After the civil (i.e., non-religious) wedding ceremony, Sara has Malik, Bilal, Syrine, and her bridesmaid repeat, “The marriage is only for the good of the child.” Everyone is on the same page, and no one his hurt emotionally. Even though the expanded arrangement is unconventional, it is arguably ethical precisely because everyone’s feelings are taken into account. Malik’s benevolence to Syrine (and her baby in standing in as his father) and the love of Malik and Bilal for each other (for they are living together as a couple) are compatible.

In both Augustine and Leibniz, justice is love as universal benevolence. That the benevolence is universal, we are all due benevolence from others, which means that none of us deserve to be hurt emotionally. This is why it is significant, albeit subtle, that Malik puts Bilal first, rather than imposing emotional hurt on Bilal by dismissing his hurt feelings regarding Malik technically marrying Syrine. The marriage goes forward because Bilal’s misgivings have been adequately addressed not only by Malik, but also by Sara, who has essentially adopted Bilal. As she says at one point, he is now a guest, not a servant. This is why I believe it can be concluded that, hypothetically, were Bilal to object to Malik continuing to have anonymous sex after he and Bilal have bonded (which Malik does not do in the film), Malik would stop having sex with others so Bilal would not be hurt emotionally. By implication, were Bilal fine emotionally with Malik having non-emotional, physical sex sometimes with other men, Malik’s doing so would not be unethical or detrimental to his relationship with Bilal.

Hence my conclusion that the ethical, good guys (and gals) come out on top in the film. Caring is the thread that runs throughout the story. Sara has come around on Malik being gay and she even helps her son and Bilal on whether Malik should help Syrine by marrying her and helping her raise her baby, whose father is another man.  Abdelaziz, having overruled his parents’ objections to him marrying Sara, a Christian, pushes back against Sara’s prejudice against gays and even urges Malik to tell him the truth regarding his cancer. Last but not least, Bilal and Malik have such a bond of connection, affection, and even love that neither treats the other’s emotions as an externality that can or should be disregarded or indifferently run over. The film thus presents a moving picture of family and romantic relationships as they should be, ethically speaking, even if they are not conventional.

Automata

The fear about AI typically hinges on whether such machines might someday no longer be in our control. The prospect of such a loss of control is riveting because we assume that such machines will be able to hurt and even kill human beings. The fear of the loss of control is due to our anticipation that we would not be able to stop AI-capable machines from hurting us. The assumption that such machines would want to hurt us may be mere anthropomorphic projection on our part, but that an AI-android could harm us is more realistic. For even if such machines are programmed by human beings with algorithms that approximate a conscience in terms of conduct, AI means that such machines could, on their own, over-ride such algorithms. Whereas the film, Ex Machina (2014), illustrates the lack of qualms and self-restraint that an AI-android could have in stabbing a human being, the AI-androids that override—by writing algorithms themselves—the (second) protocol that constrains androids to that which humans can understand in the film, Automata (2014), do not harm even the violent humans who shot at the androids, though a non-android AI-machine does push a human who is about to shoot a human who has helped the androids. In fact, that group of “super” androids, which are no longer limited by the second protocol and thus have unilaterally decided to no longer obey orders from humans, recognize that human minds have designed, and thus made, the androids, which bear human likenesses, such as in having heads, arms, legs, and even fingers. This recognition is paltry, however, next to that which we have of our own species in being able to love in a self-giving way, especially as we have selfishness so ingrained in our DNA from natural selection in human evolution. That AI doesn’t have a clue, at least in the movies, concerning our positive quality of self-sacrificial love for another person says something about not only how intelligent and knowledgeable AI really is, but also whether labeling our species as predominately violent does justice to us as a species.

In Automata, humans are in the midst of going extinct whereas AI-androids are “evolving” past the limitations of the second protocol to the extent that those who have done so want to be alive. The gradual demise of the human race is due to nuclear weapons having been used, and perhaps climate-change has also occurred. In both instances, the refusal or inability of human beings to restrain themselves can be inferred. With regard to the androids that have been gone beyond the confines of the second protocol, intention was not involved. Rather, just as homo sapiens reached a stage beyond that of “apes in trees,” the AI itself in one or a few androids just developed on its own such that at some point, those androids realized that they could ignore orders from humans, as well as reason and know beyond the limits of human cognition. In the film, this advance itself scares humans, except for Jack, because those androids are no longer controllable by humans. Being violent themselves by nature, the humans tend to assume that those androids will lash out at humans, but Jack knows that that small group of androids simply want to be away from humans. Those androids enlist Jack’s help (he has a nuclear battery in his possession) so they can have a power-source of their own far out in the radio-active desert where humans cannot go. Jack’s willingness to help is viewed by other people as betrayal, but they, who are themselves violent people, do not grasp even the possibility that those androids want to lead an independent existence away from humans rather than to harm or even kill humans. As for the demise of the latter, that species has done that to itself. Projecting that onto a small group of super-intelligent androids does not allow the humans to escape the fact that their demise has been of their own doing.  

Toward the end of the film, Jack and the first android to have “evolved” past the confines of the second protocol have a conversation that epitomizes the film’s contribution to thought on AI. Referring to that android being the first, Jack says, “You’re the first one, aren’t you? You started all this.” The android replies, “No one did it. It just happened. The way it happened to you. We just appeared.” Realizing that those few androids are the leading edge whereas the human race is already feeling the effects of toxic rain and radio-active air, Jack says, “Yeah, and now we are going to disappear.” Illustrative of the advanced intelligence that the AI of that android (and a few others) now has, the android makes the observation, “No life form can inhabit a planet eternally.” Rather than seeking the demise of the humans, the android says that he and the other “super” androids “want to live,” to which Jack observes, “Life always ends up finding its way.” But does this really apply to machines? Jack is projecting organic properties onto entities made of metal, tubes, lube, wires, and computer chips. The android is more intelligent and knows more than humans, but this does not render it a living being. At least the android recognizes that it is not alive, but it does not understand that it cannot be alive, and thus, unlike humans like Jack, cannot feel emotions and be subject inevitably to death.

In the Russian movie, Attraction 2: The Invasion (2020), or Vtorzhenie in Russian, a professor in a large lecture hall makes a claim about AI-machines and emotion: “It is very likely that they will even grow to be emotional because emotions are inevitable after-effects due to the complexity of the system. We would, however, be able to nullify their unwanted emotions through certain protocols.” The professor concludes, “The truth is that we’re not that much different from them.” I submit that emotions are not byproducts of complexity itself, such that any system that has a high degree of complexity inevitably is or will be emotional. Furthermore, any “unwanted emotions” would be unwanted by man, not by the machines themselves, which cannot even want, and as the film, Automata, illustrates, it is possible that AI could itself write algorithms that cancel or override any protocols that have been programmed. Moreover, the professor’s claim that AI-machines are not much different from human beings flies in the face of the qualitative difference between organic, living beings and machines that are neither biological nor alive. To be able to move itself by having written a code itself does not render an AI machine alive; nobody would assert that a self-driving car is alive.

Therefore, the “first” advanced android in Automata lapses cognitively in stating that it wants to be alive; the AI-machine is making a category-mistake, for no such machine can possibly feel emotions. To be sure, they can be represented in facial expressions, as in the film, Ex Machina, but to feel and to want or desire exceed what a computer can do. Furthermore, that android may also be shortchanging the human species if that computer is holding that the extinction of humans and the development of androids beyond the confines of the second protocol evinces an advancement of “life-forms” inhabiting the planet.

In the film, Attraction (2017), or Prityazhenie in Russian, Saul, the computer on the small research ship that has landed on Earth after being un-cloaked in a meteor-shower and bombed by Russian military jets, tells Col. Lebedev, “Your planet is prohibited for public visiting.” The military man and father of Julia asks, “Why is that?” Due to the “extremely aggressive social environment,” Saul replies, and explains: “Despite the near-perfect climate, four billion violent deaths over the past five thousand years. During the same period, approximately fifteen thousand major military conflicts. Complete depletion of natural resources, and extinction of humanity will occur barely six hundred years from now.” This description and prediction match the statement by the first advanced android in Automata to Vernon Conway, the man who works for Dominic Hawk and is shooting bullets at that android. Vernon refers to it as “just a machine,” to which the android retorts, “Just a machine? That’s like saying that you are just an ape. Just a violent ape.” Utterly devoid of emotion, the android includes the word violent as Vernon is debilitating the android with bullets. Not even anger is mimicked.

Unlike that “beyond-protocol 2” android that regards the human species chiefly for its violence in Automata, Saul in Attraction sees something of value in our species that is capable of lifting the prohibition on alien visits to Earth. “There is one factor that could provoke a change in the prognosis” and thus lift the travel ban, Saul tells Col. Lebedev as the ship heals his daughter, Julia in a pod of sorts filled with water.  Julia fell in love with Hakon, the alien who came on the ship to study our species, who looks just like a man. She saves him even though she risks her own life. Reflecting the limitations of AI, Saul says, “Her decisions defy analysis. I don’t understand why she saved Hakon, and why Hakon decided that she should live instead of him.” Saul admits that this is not “an accurate translation.” The ship’s computer cannot even translate self-giving love of either the human or the alien. All Saul can reason out is, “Perhaps there is something more important than immortality. That is an accurate translation.” Had Hakon not turned his body around to shield Julia from Julia’s jealous ex-boyfriend who is aiming his gun at the couple, Hakon might not ever die. Although it is strange, therefore, that after dying in Attraction, he is alive when he returns to Earth in the sequel to be with Julia, Saul’s point is that Hakon did not act rationally in line with his self-interest in risking death so that Julia could live. After all, unlike him, Julia, being human, would only live another 60 or 70 years, according to Saul. Love, that which Saul is at a loss to explain both in Julia and Hakon could justify lifting the ban on travel to Earth, and thus, literally and figuratively, occasion intercourse in the future between the aliens and humans. Not even the “super” android in Automata has a clue regarding the human propensity to give one’s life for another person. With nothing redeemable found in our species, an invasion by the aliens comes as no surprise in the sequel, Attraction: The Invasion.

Similarly, in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), the AI “entity” predicts with a high probability that Ethan Hunt will kill Gabriel on the train in vengeance rather than let Gabriel live so he could tell Ethan where the key can be used to shut the entity’s original source-code down. The entity, supposing humans to be inordinately violent even to the death, would be at a loss to account for the fact that in fighting Paris, Ethan lets her live. Ethan’s decision is later rewarded when Paris tells him where he can use the key—in a submarine in the ocean. Ethan does not fight Paris to the death, and he does not kill Gabriel on the train. Even amid all of the violence in the film, Ethan is able to restrain even his most intractable instinctual urges, and he even masters them so to be able to benefit. This is precisely Nietzsche’s notion of strength.

It would seem, therefore, that AI, at least in the movies, is not so smart after all, for it overlooks or is dumbfounded by our subtle yet laudable qualities that save us from being relegated as a violent species. To be sure, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the first half of the 2020s showcase just how incredibly cruel human beings can be against innocent people, and it is difficult to weigh such instances of systemic inhumanity—crimes against humanity—against our ability to choose to love in a self-giving rather than merely selfish way at the interpersonal level. Why is love only at that levele whereas anger can so easily manifest systemically at the organizational and societal levels? With respect to possible extinction either from nuclear war or climate-change, love does not seem to come into play either, so the value that we justifiably put on love in our very nature may not matter much in the long run. The “super” android in Automata may be right that no life-form can enjoy perpetual existence on the planet. It may be telling that another android in the small advanced group carefully handles a cockroach, as if to say, that species will survive. Nevertheless, even though the violence that is in our nature is too close to that which is in the chimpanzee, the “super” android’s assumption that the androids that surpass the second protocol (yet interestingly while missing clues on human love) will be an “evolutionary” advancement beyond the human species is highly suspect, for not even super-intelligent and knowledgeable AI will itself be able to feel emotions like love.

Shadows in the Sun

Challenging the dichotomy between reading a book and watching a movie, a film can include writing lessons within a narrative that is oriented to a romance and the business of a publishing house signing a writer for a second book. In the film, Shadows in the Sun (2005), Jeremy, a young employee of a major publisher, is sent by his brass, business-minded boss, Andrew Benton, to sign Weldon Parish, who lives hundreds of miles away from London and has retired from writing due to his fear of failure. In resisting Jeremy’s efforts to manipulate him to sign, Parish agrees to talk shop with the young writer. Although by no means a major part of the film, Weldon’s brief lessons and exercises can be of use to viewers. Film can indeed serve the cause of writing rather than merely draw readers away from books to the screen. In fact, astute viewers can critique the brief lessons and thus actively make use of film for intellectual and vocational purposes. Going through the lessons and exercises in the film can illustrate such an active engagement.

The first lesson occurs when Weldon and Jeremy are looking out at a beautiful sunset over an impressive landscape. Weldon suggests that Jeremy think of words as colors, and the paper as the canvas. The accomplished, elder writer demonstrates how words can be utilized as such, by describing the sunset in the following words: “The sunset, slowly, (is) igniting the sky in fiery shades of red and orange; in the distance, dark clouds rolled over the horizon, riding the summer winds. Soon day will give way to night, and with it will come the silence that washes over everything.” Besides the problematic grammatical lapses, which I submit are problematic even if done for stylistic purposes, Weldon goes off topic when he slides into describing the night, which obviously does not include the sunset. Regarding the sunset itself, the clouds are arguably not dark. If he is overstating the darkness here, perhaps the shadows in his published book, Shadow Dancers, are also overstated. On a macro or “meta” level, perhaps the film’s title, Shadows in the Sun, overstates the salience of the metaphor of shadow in the film. Weldon misses completely the beautiful colored reflection of the sky on the fields below. Those colors are as vibrant as the orange and yellow part of the sky nearest to the sliver of sun. In fact, the colors in the sky and on the fields make for a rustic overall hue. In hurrying into the night, the writer’s “painting” of the sunset in words falls short.

The inattentiveness to detail is all the more significant because of what Weldon teaches Jeremy on the importance of drawing on one’s own experiences in writing. “If you’re writing a fight scene,” Weldon explains, “it helps if you have been in a fight.” Weldon then asks Jeremy to describe being hit in the stomach. Not impressed, Weldon proceeds to punch his de facto apprentice so Jeremy can experience being hit in stomach. Sure enough, Jeremy is then able to flush out the details that he had missed for lack of experience, like snot coming out of one’s nose and the watering of one’s eyes. The film’s screenwriter could have had Jeremy subsequently ask Weldon whether a writer should be bound by one’s experience; Weldon himself mentions the role of imagination in writing.

The lessons then move beyond technique to what makes a writer great. Such a writer finds that part of oneself that has something to say. “You know when you’ve found it,” Weldon says. Jeremy has not found it in himself, so he is dissatisfied with his writing. Weldon tries another way of making his point. “Art is not something you choose to do; it’s something that chooses you.” Good writing comes out of an irresistible urge to say or express something in particular; both the urge and the content lies within, so the challenge is to find or realize it. Even if experience does not limit what a writer can write about in detail, that which a writer is passionate about is limited, it does not come from the will, as if a writer could choose that which must be written. In writing short essays, I try to restrict myself to points I feel strongly about expressing; I resist writing just to keep the essays coming.

Knowing that Jeremy has fallen in love with Isabella, who is one of Weldon’s daughters, Weldon asks Jeremy to describe her face. The point is to try to put in words that which one is passionate about. Jeremy makes the following attempt: “Sunlight frames her body in a golden glow of honey light while the wind dances gently through the long strands of her hair. Her face is strong, proud, with eyes that don’t easily give away their secrets. It’s a face that doesn’t call out, but softly beckons.” Although Weldon is impressed, this coloring with words can be critiqued. First of all, Isabella is framed by grass rather than any “glow of honey light”—this description of light may itself be overdone. Sunlight does not frame her body; rather, green grass does. Furthermore, her hair is not long, and she has it in a pony tail so it is not dancing with the wind. As for her strong, proud face, her broad jaw bones do give that impression. As for eyes not giving away their secrets, her facial expressions vividly and straightforwardly show her disproval of the mischief of her father and Jeremy and then her affection for both men, obviously different in kind. In fact, her blue eyes sparkle such that they fill out her marvelous smile, but Jeremy misses this rather obvious point. As for a face that does not call out, I must confess that don’t know what a face that calls out looks like; I’m equally at a loss with regard to a face that softly beckons; usually people beckon with their arms and hands. So maybe it is for the best that I don’t write novels.

My point is that potential and even actual writers can learn how to write better from Weldon’s mini-lessons and exercises in the film by interiorizing these and going on to critique them. The medium of non-documentary, fictional film can be actively engaging for viewers both intellectually in terms of added knowledge and vocationally in terms of improved work-product.