Emilia Pérez

In handling social ethics, especially if the topic is controversial, film-makers must decide, whether consciously or not, whether to advocate or elucidate. Whereas the former is in pursuit of an ideology, the latter is oriented to teasing out via dramatic tensions the nuances in a typical normative matter that move an audience beyond easy or convenient answers to wrestle with the human condition itself as complex. This is not to say that advocation should never have a role in film-making; The film, Schindler’s List (1993), for example, provides a glimpse into the extremely unethical conduct of the Nazi Party in ruling Germany. I submit that the vast majority of ethical issues are not so easily decided one way or the other as those that arose from Hitler’s choices regarding communists, Slavs in Eastern Europe, intellectuals, Jews, homosexuals and the disabled. In relative terms, the ethical controversy surrounding transsexuals is less severe and clear-cut. The value of elucidating is thus greater, as are the downsides of prescribing ideologically. One such drawback to indoctrinating on a controversial issue is that the ideological fervor in making the film for such a purpose can blind a film-maker to the cogency of the arguments made in favor of advocated stance on the issue. The film, Emilia Pérez (2024), illustrates this vulnerability, which I submit is inherent to ideology itself.

The film centers on the decision of a Mexican drug-kingpin to get surgery to “become a woman.” I am using quotes here because the statement itself strikes at the controversy itself. Can a biological man become a woman? If so, is it sufficient that the man’s penis be removed, or must a vagina be made?  Or does the making of a vagina out of the skin of a penis constitute a vagina? This seems not to be the case, and, furthermore, ovaries are typically not implanted. Yet the removal of the penis and testicles can be interpreted as the loss of manhood in the literal sense. Is the patient in gender-limbo? In contrast, there was no ethical limbo for the Nazis who murdered millions of people in Europe. It is no accident that Spielberg made Schindler’s List in black and white. Emilia Pérez is in color, and thus flush with the nuances of the world that most of us inhabit in our daily lives.

Lest it be contended that gender is separate from the biology, such that a man can be a woman without even penis-removal, then the contention itself can be reconceptualized and presented as a nuanced question rather than as a fact of reason that has already been established as in a fait accompli to be merely (but importantly!) ingested and promptly digested by audiences. When Emilia, after her operation, insists that she is just as much a woman as any other woman, another character could turn this statement into a question by asking, “But you don’t have ovaries, do you? Or eggs?” Similarly, when Emilia reverts to a man’s voice in expressing outrage upon discovering that her ex-wife has taken the children, the statement of being just as much of a woman as any other woman could be revisited in dialogue.

Moreover, film-makers need not shy away from making relevant philosophical issues transparent and even exploring possible lines of reasoning. For example, the assumption that in an alleged dispute between the body and the mind, the mind not only trumps the body, but is immune from the conflict of interest that is inherent in having one party of a dispute being the arbitrator is frequently passed over in sex-change decisions. Emilia Pérez lapses in not challenging this assumption. She assumes that her mind is right and her body is wrong, but she is using one of the two to make the decision, and thus pass judgment on itself.

Emilia’s decision to undergo a surgical operation is already decided when she meets with Rita, the lawyer who agrees to handle the logistics of Emilia’s operation (and subsequent hiding in plain sight as a woman) for a lucrative fee. Wasserman, the Israeli physician who performs the operation, tells Emilia beforehand that the soul of a person remains the same even if the body changes. Emilia disagrees: the body can change the soul, which in turn can change the world. Unfortunately, the film does not go further in unpacking either of these affirmations. That the human soul is notoriously difficult to conceptualize, much less define as to an essence and attributes may be why two statements are allowed to stand on their own—but are they really? The attitude of the film is clearly in favor of Emilia’s ideological belief even though it is hardly an established fact that by removing an organ or two, the soul itself changes appreciably. Emilia is on firmer ground in claiming that the world can change if enough souls change, but even here, the relevant change is arguably more from self-love issuing out in selfish self-interest to an enlightened self-interest manifesting benevolence, than in terms of gender. Does a soul even have a gender? The Christian Apostle Paul asserts in his epistle to the Galatians (3:28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” In terms of souls, gender can be transcended. Perhaps both the physician and Emilia should stay clear of religious language altogether; psychology may be more relevant anyway. If the body changes, what would be the impact on the person’s psychology? Self-love in the psychological sense is different than self-love as a sin.

What about the world part of the tripartite linkage? Does removing a few organs relevant to gender render the world a better place, assuming enough people whose psychological state would be improved thereby undergo operations? More people who are comfortable literally in their own skin could indeed be expected, other things equal, to result in a happier world. Perhaps nothing is more destructive of a society than is the self-hate of some people at the expense of the many. In the film, Emilia turns from drug-dealing to founding a non-profit charitable organization geared to helping families of murder victims find some peace from the recovery of the bodies. Her newly-found self-acceptance clearly results in a better world; other people benefit from her new-found psychological relief in her externals finally reflecting her inner-self, which is a psychological rather than a theological concept. As for her soul, and what it might experience after her mortal body—whether male or female or neither—has died, God’s eyes might be more on the residue remaining Emilia’s soul from the killing of people for drug-profits than on any residue remaining from gender, whether psychological or biological.  

Approaching a controversial, and thus perhaps a not-easily-resolvable ethical issue as a question rather than as in the form of a premeditated ideological answer saves an audience from feeling that it is being viewed only as a means of furthering an ideology (whereas Kant’s ethic insists that we be treated as ends in ourselves rather than just as means) and a screenwriter from overlooking logical lapses occasioned from a fervent ideological agenda. Emilia’s insistence that changing a body changes a soul, which in turn changes the world may be a good line, but it seems more infused with ideological bent than having been thought out. It is better, I submit, not only to elaborate as the narrative unfolds on both of the contending claims, but also to open the viewers up to other, larger questions, such as raised here. Just as film can present the nuances in a tone of voice in a line excellently delivered by an actor, so too film can enunciate and enumerate on the nuances that typically forestall easy solutions to ethical problems. 

Moreover, both in enunciating abstract philosophical and theological points and exploring them, including pointing out where they clash, the medium of film has unrealized potential, as evinced in this analysis of Emilia Pérez. Against this potential, using film to advocate ideologically pales utterly. The hidden gravitational pull of ideology can render a producer, director, and screenwriter unwittingly susceptable to hasty and faulty reasoning in coming up with statements for dialogue that are nonetheless likely to be delivered by actors in a defiant tone of infallibility. I am just as much a woman as every other woman! If you say so, Emilia. A film can and should subject such ideological declarations to scrutiny as questions.

Lolita

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dangerous Method

The method being referred to in A Dangerous Method (2011) is psychoanalysis, as pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The danger referred to is that of freeing people from their sexual repressions. The film revolves around the relationship between Freud and his younger colleague, Carl Jung (1875-1961), and the relationship between him and Sabina Spielrein, his former patient and eventual lover and colleague. She also had an affair with Freud, but it was not shown in the film. Keira Knightley plays the Russian woman a bit too strongly in the first few scenes. In terms of the acting, Knightley exaggerates facial contortions as if fishing for an Oscar out of sheer emotionality. In terms of the narrative, Spielrein’s “transformation,” or cure, is hard to take as credible because it is so drastic within a year or two. Before long, she is behaving completely normal and even attending medical school. The film’s merits lie not with the acting, but, rather, with the intellectual content, whose salience and integration into a good narrative is rare in Hollywood. It is due to this feature that the film is apt to stay with a viewer for some time.

For example, the Russian woman had been beaten by her father when she was a girl. She tells Jung that the experience of being beaten used to excite her sexually. When she and Jung began their affair, she told him to punish her, which he dutifully did (though he did seem to enjoy it, as the sex with his wife was always “tender”). Perhaps Jung’s own animus and anima had each found a home. One of the issues explored in the movie is whether freeing up the woman not to repress what excited her constituted progress toward mental health. A rather free-spirited colleague of Freud and Jung provides the affirmative argument, while Jung is more hesitant (even as he moves from spanking to a belt).

I was surprised that none of the psychiatrists in the film voiced the view that the woman’s “excitement” in being beaten might be a misdirected or misinterpreted desire to recover her father or have the father she never had, emotionally speaking. In other words, the feeling of being hit represented that of her father that she had, so she was drawn to it. If I’m right, the underlying desire was not sexual.

How many women are “attracted” to “bad boys” without realizing that the desire is to recover a father by means of the only thing “father” had meant? Ultimately, the alley is a dead-end. The woman does not get her father back, or even the feeling of having one, emotionally-speaking. Is freeing up a woman from repressing a dead-end a good thing? Does it help her get what she really wants? I think the answer is rather obviously no.

Aside from the questions revolving around Jung’s former patient and lover, the film discusses the interesting question of whether a new field can afford to “take risks,” such as in Jung’s interest in parapsychology and religion. His contribution to the psychology of religion is significant—more so than Freud’s Totem and Taboo. However, Freud voices a legitimate point that the emphasis on sexual explanation in psychoanalysis would be than more than enough scandal in the second decade of the twentieth century, so soon after the Victorian era. At about the same time, or a decade or two earlier, Nietzsche’s controversial writings had been very controversial, particularly on religion. Adding a plethora of sexual interpretation to dreams would indeed arouse plenty of resistance. This debate played out as relations between Freud and Jung became increasingly strained before they parted company altogether.

Both with regard to the question of repression and a “cure” and that of how a new firm should develop, the filmmaker did an excellent job in grounding the ideas to characterization. While I would have enjoyed a PBS special on the ideas themselves, integrating theories around narrative and characters is useful both in terms of understanding and as a fruitful avenue for Hollywood, which could be accused of putting out too many mindless action flicks that catch the biggest market segment and allow for merchandizing. Another film from 2011 that effectively integrates theory with narrative and characterization is Hugo.