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.
