The Irishman

Although Scorsese’s 2019 film, The Irishman, is a fictional crime story, it is based on Charles Brandt’s book, I Heard You Paint Houses, which incorporates interviews that the lead character, Frank Sheeran, who was in real life a close friend of James Hoffa of the Teamsters labor union, gave. Even so, viewers should not make the assumption that Scorsese’s intent was to represent contestable explanations of historical events, such as the disappearance of Hoffa. Similarly, it cannot be assumed that the actual writers of the four Christian Gospel faith-narratives intended to write historical accounts; in fact, it is perfectly legitimate to adapt historical events in making theological points. In making The Irishman, Scorsese no doubt wanted to present viewers with a problematic sketch of how weak the human conscience can be in certain individuals. In his book on Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill begins by lamenting that no progress had been made over thousands of years by ethicist philosophers on the phenomenon of human morality. Scorsese’s film supports Mill’s point.

Scorsese brought out the big guns to act the main characters, and his arduous efforts to bring Joe Pesci out of retirement to play Russell Bufalino arguably made the film what it is. To be sure, Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran and Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa also paid off, but the verbal and non-verbal subtlety that Pesci brought to his character provide not only that character, but also the film itself with depth. This is exemplified by Russell’s way of telling Sheeran that the mob had lost patience with Hoffa to the extent that not even pressuring the latter to retire on his Teamsters’ pension would be enough. It never pays to make enemies, especially if they are mobsters. Especially revealing, though not in terms of a historical fact, is the scene in which Pesci has his character lean forward in a chair to whisper to Sheeran, who is skeptical that the mob could kill a man with as much of a public persona as Hoffa: “We didn’t like a president. So, we can not like a head of a (labor) union.” The first sentence intimates what the real-life mistress of President Johnson revealed in a local television interview when she was too old to care about retaliation from anyone—the mob or the U.S. Government: The Giovanni crime-family of Chicago played a role in the assassination of President Kennedy. Pesci delivered the line so well that viewers can easily grasp that the mob could have kept such a secret, and that such a role could indeed have been the case, historically. Sometimes subtly reveals more than simply stating a historical fact can. Supporting the mentality intimated by how Pesci delivered the line is the way in which Sheeran’s conscience, or, rather, lack thereof, is presented.

Although both Russell and Frank lament the unspoken decision that the higher-up mob bosses had made that Hoffa would not be long for this world, Frank, in spite of being a close friend of Hoffa—even socializing his family with Hoffa’s—not only kills Hoffa but calls the widow to express his sorrow and to comfort her. At the end of the film, Frank asks a priest, “What kind of person makes such a call?” Even Sheeran himself is stunned by his own behavior, and he is mystified as to why he feels absolutely no guilt. Evidently, it is not as though he has any ability to will himself to have a conscience, so it could be that he is mentally ill, and this enabled him to transition so easily from killing combatants in World War II in Europe to being a hitman in New York.

A sociopathic mental illness in which a person has no conscience, is a counter-example that qualifies the typical assumption that anyone can will oneself to behave ethically. To an appreciable degree, human society is predicated on the assumption that people can will themselves not to harm other people because doing so would be wrong. Whether by reasoning, moral sentiment, or a traditional cultural norm that is unquestionably followed, a person is typically assumed to be able to be a moral agent, but this is not always the case. To the extent that human society depends on the assumption and it has holes, police action is necessary, even though it typically catches criminals rather than prevents sociopaths from harming innocent victims. Therefore, there is still a hole, in terms of how a city can protect its residents. In other words, do we rely too much on the typical assumption that people are moral agents, at least that everyone can be one?

From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza

The uniqueness of the film, From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza (2024), goes well beyond it being a documentary that includes an animated short made by children and a puppet show. Footage of a Palestinian being pulled from the rubble twice—one with the head of his dead friend very close to him and the other with his account that he could see body parts of his parents near him—is nothing short of chilling. Perhaps less so, yet equally stunning, are the close-ups of the legs and arms of children on which their respective parents had written the names so the bodies could be identified after a bombing. That the kids had dreams in which they erased the black ink from their skin because they refused to fathom the eventuality of having to be identified is chilling in a way that goes beyond that which film can show visually. Moving pictures can indeed go beyond the visual in what film is capable of representing and communicating to an audience. The same can be said regarding the potential of film to bring issues not only in ethics, but also in political theory and theology to a mass audience.

The movie is a collection of 22 short films made in Gaza by 22 filmmakers there who wanted to inform the world of the atrocities being committed there by the Israeli government. Interestingly, in none of the short stories is Israel mentioned by name. Only once is there a mention of “the occupier.” This may point to the depth of the hatred once the infliction of suffering and even death has reached a threshold of sorts. In the short story, “Out of Frame,” a woman says, “There is no longer a possibility of peace.” Not even a possibility. This may mean that a significant number of Gaza residents would rather die than make peace with Israel. This could also mean that in over-reacting in punishing a collective so much, rather than just the individuals who had taken hostages on October 7, 2023, the Israeli Netanyahu misjudged out of hatred and thus unwittingly triggered much more hatred against Israel. The prime minister obviously had not consulted with the European philosopher, John Locke, who had written that one rationale for government is that victims cannot be trusted to use fair judgment in acting as judge and jury in sentencing the victimizers.  Indeed, the descendants of victims of another century can themselves become victimizers, and the cycle can indeed intensify rather than dissipate, even for seven generations.

Two other ways in which ethics, political theory and theology can be discerned in the film also relate the two domains. In the short story, “No Signal”—this title itself resonating with the filmmakers’ intent to inform the world of what was really going on in Gaza—someone says that “martyrs” were being dug out of a collapsed building nearby. Throughout the 22 stories in the film, the dead are repeatedly referred to as martyrs. The sheer consistency may mean that the residents of Gaza were viewing the atrocity as being committed by Jews against Muslims, rather than as a secular political conflict between an occupier and the occupied. Mirroring the helplessness of a subjugated people not allowed to have weapons even to defend themselves from rogue (or organized) military commanders, the film reveals a sense of fatalism among all the fatalities. In the story, “Echo,” a woman on a phone says in the midst of bombing, “Get in a house; any house!” The other person replies, “God will protect us.” Well, obviously that was not true, considering the number of fatalities, so the insistence itself may reveal a sense of utter helplessness. Ironically, in his book on the human need for meaning, Victor Frankl provided as support the search for meaning by Jews in Nazi concentration camps in the mid-20^th century. So in the film’s short story, “24 Hours,” the man who had been dug out of debris three times, and had been stuck for hours near the dead bodies of a friend and his parents, could only say, as if in utter futility, “It’s God’s will.” The filmmaker could have gone further on that point—thus showing the potential of film to stimulate viewers to think theologically without being indoctrinated—by bringing in the obvious question of theodicy: how is it that a benevolent deity allows the innocent to suffer? A friend of the man could have said, “If it is Allah’s will, then how could it be said that Allah protects us from evil?” Contrary to the claim made by Israel’s president, I am assuming that not every resident of Gaza was culpable in the October incursion into Israel proper to kill Israelis and take hundreds of hostages. The intent of the filmmakers to show the world the physical and mental suffering being inflicted by the Israeli military for more than a year renders the theological question especially salient, especially as the recurrent use of the word “martyr” evinces a distinctly religious interpretation by a significant number of the residents of Gaza (though perhaps not all of them, as glossing over an entire collective is often contrived and thus artificial).

The psychological toll itself begs the theological question. In the first short story, a Gazan refugee in a camp near Egypt has a sense that her life is over. Her father had been killed by the Israelis in 2014, and more recently her sister’s entire family was killed in a bombing. In the short story, “Sorry, Cinema,” a filmmaker who was barred from leaving Gaza to receive a film award at a festival says, “Time has become my enemy.” In “Flashback,” a young woman says she keeps a bag packed because she might have to leave her house at a moment’s notice. “My mind stops because of the drones,” she says. In “The Teacher,” a man waits for his phone to be recharged but there are no unused sockets, water has just run out when he is next in line for it, and the same occurs when he is in line to get food. In “Overburdened,” a woman admits, “I am very surprised that we survived” walking north to get out of Gaza. In “Hell’s Heaven,” a man sleeps in a body bag that he took from a morgue because he has no blanket and it is cold in his tent at night. “Nothing remains of this city except the sea,” he laments. In “Offerings,” a writer says of infliction of suffering and death, there is “no recognition of human beings.” This resonates with statements in the media by Israelis referring to the Palestinians as dogs. Such dehumanizing sentiment had ironically been inflicted on the Jews in Nazi Germany. In fact, in the short story, “Fragments,” one of the charcoal drawings could be assumed to be of Nazi concentration-camp survivors being liberated. The psychological toll and the natural reaction of intense hatred may go beyond the comprehension even of psychologists.

The physical, psychological and even spiritual toll being inflicted by human beings on other human beings could bring victims to question whether God exists as a personal being rather than there being what in Hinduism is called brahman, which is impersonal ultimacy as conscious infinite being. In terms of political theory, both the human toll and the extent of bombed, collapsed buildings shown throughout the film may mean that the residents of Gaza were living in something akin to Hobbes’ state of nature, in which life is short and brutish. This state, however, pertains to the relation between Israel and Gaza, rather than between the residents of Gaza, as a sense of solidarity among them is evinced throughout the film. For example, the bread-lines filmed were orderly; people were not fighting each other for food.

In spite of Jeremy Bentham having written that the notion of natural rights (i.e., in a state of nature) is ridiculous, and Hobbes’ social-contract theory being short an explanation for why people in a state of nature would feel obliged to enter into a social contract instituting a government before it is up and running, the scenes of order documented by the film even though the people in line may be close to starvation may point to the natural fellow-feeling of which humans are capable even when a police presence is lacking, though the threat of an onslaught of Israeli troops may be a sufficient motivator to keep the peace while standing in line for food, water, and medical care. The filmmakers could have explored the peaceful atmosphere in the cities in Gaza—whether it was due to a shared sense of camaraderie from having lost martyrs, and thus a shared “brotherhood” as Muslims, a psychological or religious sense of futility and even numbness, or a fear that disorder would incite even more ruthlessness from interlarding Israeli soldiers. The question of whether Gaza resembled the Hobbesian state of nature could also have been explicitly asked and explained without viewers being lost in the midst of philosophical jargon and a de facto mini-lecture.

 

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

The film’s title, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” (1975) is nothing but the name of the principal character, a widowed single mother of a teenage son, Sylvian, followed by her mailing address, complete with the zip-code 1080 and her apartment number 23. Her mundane daily life matches the generic title being her name and full address. To be sure, Dielman’s apartment is a ubiquitous fixture as the film’s setting, and the object of the lead character’s daily household chores, which she does so dispassionately and so often that the film can be reckoned as a statement on the utter meaninglessness than can come to inhabit a solitary person’s life when it excludes interpersonal intimacy and even God.

Even though meaningless and boredom can easily be felt in watching the film for 3 hours and 21 minutes, and seen on the screen as Jeanne Dielman goes from task to task, the film hints of going beyond the banality of the mundane when Sylvian admits to his mother that he no longer believes in God, and when he did, as a kid, he thought the sexual act of penetration must be so hurtful to a woman that the act evinces God’s wrath. He adds that he does not understand why a woman would have sexual intercourse with a man whom she doesn’t love. Jeanne replies, “You don’t know what its like to be a woman.” Indeed, kept secret from her son, she regularly prostituted herself in the apartment during the afternoons for extra cash. The dialogue here relates an angry and then an absent deity to sex without love. Given the potential of the medium of film to elucidate theological and ethical thought, the filmmaker could have had the film elaborate on the dialogue as it relates sexual ethics and theology.

Moreover, even though the lack of meaning in watching Dielman cook, clean, and go on errands can be felt by viewers, the instinctual urge for meaning, as described by the scholar, Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, could be discussed in dialogue, and related explicitly to theological questions, such as why a benevolent and omnibenevolent deity would create a species that could wallow in meaningless. Is not a person’s life to have purpose? To be sure, the lack thereof can be inferred in Sylvian and his mother, Jeanne. Furthermore, if God is love, as Paul and Augustine explicitly state in their respective writings, then doesn’t it follow that emotional intimacy is part of the human condition? Of course, both a sense of meaning in life and purpose can, with free will, be denied oneself, without thereby implying any wrath of God or blight.

The scant dialogue between Jeanne and Slyvian when they are in the apartment at in the evenings plays into the lack of intimacy and meaning in their mother-son relation, and the same is likely so in their respective relationships with other people. There is not even a television set in the apartment even though the film takes place in 1974. They do have a radio, but it is not on much. Even in the rigid way in which Sylvian sits on the sofa-bed in the living room after dinner, it is clear that the apartment is not much of a home.

Therefore, it would admittedly be out of sync to have the two have a sustained dialogue on ethics and religion. It is almost as if both characters were robots. In fact, after Jeanne is uncharacteristically lively, including with facial expressions, as she has an intense orgasm with a man who pays her for sex, she quickly returns to her automaton condition of expressionless action and even staid, cold inaction. It is from that condition, rather than out of passion, that she nonchalantly stabs the man with scissors and calmly walks away and sits motionless and expressionless at her dining-room table. The viewers are left to figure out why she murders the man, and the film ends before Sylvian returns so even that “payoff” is denied the film’s viewers, who are thus left without a sense of meaning. Perhaps in returning to her mundane, meaningless, and godless daily life, Jeanne Dielman essentially commits suicide in that she would undoubtedly be in prison for a long time. That she sometimes sits in a chair motionless and expressionless in the film would fit with being in a prison cell and connotes death.  

Not even functionalism can save Jeanne Dielman from her plight of inner emptiness. Is this the denouement of insular secularism? If the need for meaning is engrained in our very makeup, does the refusal or inability to meet that need end in self-destructiveness? This is not to say that a person must believe in a deity to escape the black hole of meaninglessness, for humanists can surely find meaning that does not have a transcendent referent. Even so, the message of the film may be that meaningfulness, as well as emotional intimacy, is not to be found in a life of functionalism as a series of work-tasks and even in identifying oneself by one’s job title, whether that be a plumber or a house-maker. This is not a story of oppression, as Jeanne tells Sylvian that she had wanted to be a single mother. Nor was anyone, or society, forcing her to be a prostitute; it was not like she could not enjoy the sex with men whom she didn’t love. Yet she seems somehow trapped, internally, in a meaningless and loveless life.

Return to Haifa

Return to Haifa (1982) is a film in which the political element of international relations is translated into personal terms on the levels of family and individual people. The establishment of Israel by the UN is depicted in the film as being accomplished not only incompetently, but in negligence of likely human suffering. In fact, the suffering of the indigenous population may have been intended, given the operative attitude towards those people as animals. That the human being can be so dehumanizing in action as well as belief ultimately makes victims of all of us, even across artificial divides. This is precisely what the film depicts, with the victims being the active characters while the real culprits remain for the most part off-camera. The viewer is left with a sense of futility that can be undone by widening one’s view to include the antagonists, who are not passive. It is not as if fate inexorably brought about the Nakba (or even the scale of the atrocities in Gaza in the next century, which, as the film was made in 1982, cannot be said to be anticipated by the filmmaker—though perhaps it could have been).

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya, a Palestianian couple expelled from Haifa in the Nakba that took place in 1948, return in 1967 to what had been their house in Haifa. Recognizing that furniture does not make a home, Saeed and Safiyya are particularly interested in whether their now-grown son, Khaldun, whom they abandoned when they fled from their house in the Nakba, would now want to live with them in the occupied territory or remain with Miriam, the Israeli who lives in the house and adopted Khaldun. To the twenty-year-old Khadun, whom Miriam had named Dov, Saeed and Safiyya are strangers. All of them are victims.

That Miriam had survived the Holocaust and is empathetic to the Palestinian couple having lost their house keeps her from being the film’s antagonist. That, in a flashback, she criticizes the Israeli soldiers for throwing a dead Palestinian boy like a piece of wood into a truck during the Nakba also goes to her character, especially given that, in a flashback further back, she witnesses Nazi troops shooting her own son. Moreover, not only is it inappropriate to blame her for leaving Europe to live in the Jewish state after the Holocaust and even for moving into the empty house in 1948, she is worthy of praise for adopting an infant and raising him. To be sure, she is blameworthy for having lied for years to Dov about the circumstances of his infancy, and Saeed rightly makes this point. Even so, Saeed, Safiyya, and Miriam, and even Khadun/Dov, share the experience of victimhood even if the son is not aware of his own and he lacks empathy for his birth parents, who had lost not only their house, but their son too. In fact, he blames them for having abandoned him in the house when they (and everyone else in the town) was fleeing gun-fire without notice. Lest it be thought that he, or even Nazi Germany is the prime antagonist, I submit that squalid role goes to the nascent state of Israel, with the UN as the negligent accomplice.

With home, belong, and return arguably being the three concepts that underlie the film’s narrative, the thesis can be described in the following terms: Macro-political decisions and resulting societal-level events have social and psychological impacts that are destructive and even ruinous to individuals and families. The film’s thesis resonates with Israel’s disproportionate reprisals against Palestinians in Gaza—rendering over a million homeless and short of food for months on end as of early 2025, when I saw the film. It is one thing to read that 55,000 Gaza residents were dead or missing and to look at photographs of the demolition of cities in the occupied enclave, and quite another to be there and see the horrendous impact on individuals there. Put another way, it is one thing to read of Israel’s president claiming that every resident of Gaza was guilty (and thus deserved to suffer) after Hamas’ foray into Israel proper in October of 2023, and quite another to comprehend the scale of the subsequent devastation in Gaza. Upon assuming office in 2025, U.S. President Trump characterized Gaza as a demolition zone. Relative to that, the Nakba that is portrayed in the film can be regarded as tame.

In the film, Saeed and Safiyya arrive by ship with other European Jews in 1948. In spite of having suffered atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the human beings arriving in the new state of Israel felt empathy for strangers. “All we know,” one migrant says, “is that we are going to homes owned by others.” Not even having suffered in Nazi Germany gives those new arrivals any presumption. I submit that this attitude is in start contrast to Israel in how it needlessly aggressively managed the Nakba in 1948. Even the UN, which left it to the Israelis to uproot the indigenous residents, can be blamed, especially considering the reference in the film to the Israeli attitude in which Palestinians are regarded as though animals to serve the Jews. From such an utterly dehumanizing attitude, not only the Nakba, but also the huge atrocities in Nazi Germany, almost a century later, in Gaza, are all to easy for the aggressors to justify to themselves. Furthermore, if indeed the attitude was held by the new government of Israel in 1948 and its military, the UN can be reasonably judged as woefully negligent in failing to supervise on the ground the transfer of land in the process of the creation of the state.

Such a momentous political decision as creating a state in a territory which is already populated and the indigenous population has not consented has the potential for abuse against families and individuals, as the results of the Milgram and Stanford psychological experiments confirm; humans given power have an excessive inclination to harm others. This fact is hardly limited to the Nazi and Israeli governments, and international governmental infrastructure should be up to the task of being able to safeguard our questionable species from its own nature. Return to Haifa can be viewed as making the point through narrative that people across divides can all be regarded as victims from political decisions being taken without considering the possibility (or probability) that one group might view another as consisting of service animals rather than as other human beings, who having a rational nature (Kant) and sentiments (Shaftsbury), are worthy of being treated as not merely means, but also ends in themselves.

Far from Heaven

The film, Far from Heaven (2002), centers around a woman whose husband turns out to be gay. That this is set in 1957-1958 in socialite Connecticut is all the more telling, as the Caucasian woman finds her groundskeeper, who is a Black man, to be “beautiful.” The film is arguably a remake, or at least informed by, the film All that Heaven Allows (1955), in which a widow begins dating a younger, muscular man who tends to her trees. Although race and homosexuality are not issues in this earlier film (which, after all, was made in the 1950s), that a woman who socializes with friends who belong to a country club in New England would dare to date a younger man of a lower economic class—albeit not as low as the woman’s son and friends stereotypically suppose—was scandalous enough in the 1950s to furnish a tantalizing plot. That a filmmaker in 2002 could get away with portraying an interracial extra-marital sexual interest and a gay or bisexual husband having anonymous sex with men (even showing the husband kissing one of the men), whereas a filmmaker in 1955 would not have been able to get away with including such taboos (much less making them central), says something about the cultural trajectory of western civilization temporally.

By 2002, American society had changed markedly since the late 1960s, which ushered in the Black, women, and gay rights movements. Also, film censorship had let up appreciably since 1955. From the standpoint of the early 2020s, even American ideological culture in 2002 could be looked back at as antiquated. As one indicator, gay sex had increasingly come to be shown in film. The European film, Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016), for example, begins in a gay bathhouse and shows the two men with frontal and back nudity having anal sex. Such a film would have been unthinkable even in 2002, and without a doubt back in 1955. In 2023, it was not clear whether such explicit displays were at the forefront in an evolution of freedom or a manifestation of lude displays going too far.

To be sure, American society as a whole cannot be said to have shifted so dramatically. This is evident because after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the court’s Roe v. Wade (1973) decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), restrictions on abortions were enacted in several member states. Regarding state-level legislation pushing back on gay rights, at least 417 bills had been introduced in state legislatures as of April 3, 2023 for that year, with a focus on banning access to gender-changing health care for minors and regulating curriculum in public schools.[1] Because discussion of sexual identity has been subject to bans, significant resistance to pro-transsexual material in films would exist even twenty years after Far from Heaven was made.

To homogenize the U.S., moreover, is to ignore the very different centers of gravity geographically in the various states in regard to the ideological “culture wars.” The “woke,” or identity-politics ideological movement, was also getting some push-back in the early 2020s. The resistance objected especially to the restriction of freedom of speech that ironically undercut the progressive claim of a Hegelian expansion of freedom since the 1950s in America. Indeed, the hegemony of group-identity ideology could be said to have become oppressive by 2023, dominating interpretations of cultural objects, including films.

Notwithstanding the politically-correct topics of race and sexual orientation in Far from Heaven, I contend that the film’s message transcends identity-politics to something about the human condition regarding emotionally intimate human relationships. Cathy and Frank Whitaker do not exactly present a loving marriage, and he does not seem to enjoy his work. In contrast, Raymond Deagan, their Black gardener who actually owns his own business and is educated at least in art-culture, is at peace enough that he ventures out to Cathy in friendship and perhaps more. Her sexual attraction to him is more apparent, and she becomes the driving force for any romantic relationship after Frank leaves her to be with a man. Before then, Frank is having sex with men anonymously, and rather than being comfortable with his homosexuality, it is a cause of mental anguish—especially since a psychiatrist advocates “conversion” therapy as if it were medical science. Cultural convention, including even ideology, thus makes use of natural science albeit without the latter’s empirical basis. Frank is in inner turmoil, and, meanwhile, that both Cathy and Raymond are the targets of mean stares and worse in public renders even a platonic relationship problematic. In a drunken rage, Frank angrily forbids his wife from having anything to do with that black man even though Frank’s homosexuality is perhaps even more societally taboo at the time. To be sure, in the 1950s, Connecticut law forbid both miscegenation (interracial marriage) and homosexuality. Even birth-control was illegal! In fact, it was not until 1965 that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Connecticut law that criminalized the use of birth control.

Bracketing the taboos of miscegenation and homosexuality (especially as adultery), however, we can zero in on the human relationships involved in terms of emotional intimacy. Just before Frank and Cathy break up, she indicates the emotional toll on her from Frank’s pattern of secrecy. Regardless of the specific content of the secrets, secrecy itself decimates the emotional intimacy of a relationship. Trust is absolutely fundamental. Even the relationship—even just in terms of friendship—between Cathy and Raymond can be critiqued on the basis of trust. Race is the context rather than the content here. Neither Cathy nor Raymond trusts the other enough to feel protected in the other’s world. To be sure, both worlds are segregated, but the matter can be generalized to that of trusting the other person to stand up in the midst of push-back from the other person’s social acquaintances.

In All that Heaven Allows, the younger man, Ron, does not trust the widow, Carie, not only to fend off her judgmental socialite acquaintances, but also to not care what they think or say. Ron doesn’t care what people think about him; he is comfortable in his own skin. Carie capitulates to the prejudice of her country-club friends and even her college-aged son and daughter, and thus justifies Ron’s lack of trust. Race and homosexuality are not in the picture, literally! Even the “younger man” and economic prejudices, which are salient in that film, pale in comparison to whether Carie and Ron trust each other enough to commit to starting a new life together. For Carie, that means leaving the house that she had had with her husband and kids, and all the security that a familiar surrounding offers even after the others have lived there. Ron, his friends, and his country house are so different from the life that Carie knows that she has trouble trusting Ron enough to make the leap. In short, the issue is trust, which is necessary for emotional intimacy, rather than age or economic class.

Race, homosexuality, age, and money are each capable of stirring up angst and prejudice, but more fundamental is the question of whether two people trust each other enough to have emotional intimacy. For without that, any relationship, of whatever color and stripe, is doomed or otherwise just a perpetuated shell within which two people escape life. Frank lies to Cathy in continuing to have sex with men. What is striking is that as he does so, she senses that he is keeping secrets. As Rose Castorini, Loretta’s mother in Moonstruck (1987), says of cheaters, eventually the other person in the relationship finds out. Her husband, Cosmo, a plumber, has been having an affair with Mona. “I want you to stop seeing her,” Rose tells him at the breakfast table with the rest of the family present. Cosmo “comes clean”—all he needs to say is, “Okay!”—because he knows that Rose really knows him, and therein lies the intimacy. In contrast, Cathy does not know Frank, and he does not know her. In bracketing identity politics, we can directly contrast the two couples without getting distracted and thus get a snapshot of what is essential for human relationships. Life without emotional intimacy is like living in a hollow shell far from heaven. So in the end, it doesn’t matter that Raymond is Black and Frank is gay; to get caught up on these attributes of the characters is to neglect the more fundamental point that trust is vital to any emotionally and physically intimate relationship. To borrow Nietzsche’s expression, we are all human, all too human.

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1. Annette Choi, “Record Number of Anti-LGBTQ Bills Have Been Introduced This Year,” CNN.com, April 6, 2023 (accessed December 13, 2023).

All That Heaven Allows

Film is an excellent medium for displaying and wrestling with practical philosophy, which includes ethics, political theory, and philosophy of religion (as well as aesthetics, which is a rather obvious topic for film). A film that has a character personifying a particular philosopher’s thought and antagonists rejecting that philosophy, and goes so far as to have a character read on-screen from a philosopher’s book, is the epitome of film doing philosophy. The film, All That Heaven Allows (1955), is such a film.

In the film, a widow, Cary, dates Ron, who is younger and, to her country-club socialite friends and two adult children, a working-class man. Ron’s circle of friends is hardly of the country-club sort, for his friends are lower rather than upper middle-class, and his tree business includes manual labor. However, he owns the business and is free of any time-clock, so he is not a man in the working-class. Although more difficult to spot in the film, the resistance may actually be to Ron’s living out of Henry David Thoreau’s (1817-1862) philosophy. Douglas Sirk, the film’s director, relates this philosophy to nature, as it is on display from inside Ron’s living-room window of his newly renovated country house next to a stream. To what extent a return to nature is necessary in living out Thoreau’s philosophy is one question Sirk may have intended to raise with viewers. Even Thoreau himself did not view nature in idyllic terms; nor did he advocate having to be perpetually in it to be recharged from it. Indeed, living amid nature presents our species with challenges, as it does Ron in the film when he falls off a cliff on his property. In the film, this question is set through the lens of whether Ron could be content leaving his country house to live in Cary’s house in town.

Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) was a German (though of Danish parentage) film director who left Nazi Germany after his Jewish wife was prosecuted for being Jewish. At Hamburg University, he studied philosophy and history of art. Out of this background, it is no surprise that he would Jane Wyman to hold up a copy of Thoreau’s book as Cary in full view of a camera and read aloud in a scene. In his films, Sirk portrayed characters trapped by social conventions sympathetically. His genre was thus melodrama. Perhaps it was his rejection of Nazi social conventions that gave him such sympathy for characters who suffer from such conventions; indeed, once in Hollywood, he directed the anti-Nazi film, Hitler’s Madman (1942). Perhaps also his move from Germany to California showed him how artificial social conventions are—not only because they can differ so much from culture to culture, but also because those in “tinsel town” can be so utterly petty and fake. In any case, Sirk’s antipathy toward social convention does not necessarily mean that he favored a return or escape to nature, and thus the sort of life that Thoreau lived in New England.

In the film, Thoreau’s nonconformist individualism is made explicit as Cary reads from the philosopher’s book, Walden at the house of two of Ron’s friends, a married couple, who also live in the country. “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,” Cary reads out loud as Alida listens attentively. “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it’s because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears however measured, or far away.” The desperation is quiet because the masses repress their expressive urges in order to conform to societal standards, which in turn is presumed necessary to achieving and maintaining position. For example, large companies in the 1950s favored managers who were married over than single for promotion.

After listening, Alida says in reference to Thoreau’s book and her husband, “That’s Mick’s bible; he quotes from it constantly.” Cary asks about Ron, and Alida answers, “I don’t think Ron’s ever read it; he just lives it.” The audience is left with the impression that this is clearly superior. Elaborating on her husband, Alida then says, “Mick thought, well, like a lot of people, that if he had money and an important position, it would make him secure. Ron had neither one and didn’t seem to need them. [Mick] was baffled. The answer? To thine own self be true. That’s Ron. Ron’s security comes from within himself, and nothing can ever take it away from him. Ron absolutely refuses to let unimportant things be important. Our whole life was devoted to keeping up with the Joneses. [Mick] decided to get off that merry-go-round.” Outsourcing self-esteem to be determined or even conditioned by what other people think or say does not bring the sort of psychological stability that is based on self-acceptance “as is.”

As for external crutches like wealth, position, and societal status, such things can be fleeting and are thus not really reliable. Furthermore, a person can always have more money, higher office, or societal status, so the “rat race” goes on and on. In his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson refers to such maximizing variables, which increase without an internal limitation, as schizogenic forces, which he distinguishes from the homeostatic ecologizing forces that seek an equilibrium instead. The two types of forces are fundamentally different—qualitatively so, differing in kind. An equilibrium, as in perpetually feeling content in one’s own skin as Ron does, is a much better foundation for being at peace with oneself than is a maximizing approach to external assets, whether they be money, position, or societal status. In the film, Wall Street (1987), Bud asks his sordid mentor, Gordon Gekko, “How much is enough, Gordon?” The Wall Street investor replies, “It’s not a question of enough.” A person can never had enough money to satisfy the schizogenic desire for more. Were Ron asked that question in All that Heaven Allows, he would probably just shrug. Ron is unphased when Cary’s son, Ned, asks, “Is there any money in trees?” Ron owns a tree business.

Ron absolutely refuses to let unimportant things be important. Being true to himself and not trying to be someone else to please other people are important to Ron. Cary tells her daughter Kay, “Ron has no intention of fitting in; he’s content the way he is.” To the social-conformist, externally-oriented mother and her two grown children, Ron might as well be on another planet. Such different orientations to social reality and selfhood placed in contact can spark conflict out of fear (of the otherness of the other, as if it were inherently a threat), jealousy, resentment, and outright anger. Ned exclaims to his mother about the possibility of her marrying Ron. “The whole thing is impossible!” Although Ned incorrectly assumes that Ron is working class, and objects to that, and that Cary is only interested in Ron’s muscles, and objects to that, I submit that the real basis of the rejection by Kay and Ned is that Ron’s center of gravity is inward, and that is radically different than an outward, societally-oriented focus. Kay realizes how fundamentally different these two orientations are. “Mother desires group approval,” and she is conventional,” Kay explains to Ron. Such a fundamental difference dwarfs differences in wealth and age. Ned’s explosive threat to his mother evinces an eruption of strong emotion too disproportionate to be accounted for by an objection to Ron’s relative economic condition. “Don’t expect me to come visit you! How could I bring my friends,” Ned nearly shouts, “I’d be ashamed!” The age difference between Cary and Ron, and Ron’s financial situation are not so obvious that Ned’s friends would be embarrassed. Something more is going on: two fundamentally different orientations to self-worth are put in contact and are clashing.

Unwilling to adapt, emotionally stunted, and trapped as if in a tomb, Cary, Kay and Ned unconsciously may feel envious, threatened and perhaps even inferior standing next to Ron’s inner peace. Even Cary rejects Ron, and in so doing, the philosophy that he lives by. “The only thing that matter is us,” Ron pleads with Cary as he sees her being pulled by the gravity of the egos around her. Things that happen in the past are unimportant, Ron assures her. Which car the couple takes to the socialites’ party at Sarah’s house doesn’t matter. That a woman at the party says with disdain in seeing Ron’s car, “Just look at that car!” doesn’t matter. That a man says, “So that’s Cary’s nature boy” doesn’t matter. That Cary accidently breaks the tea pot that Ron has fixed does not matter. Finally, that Cary is staying late at Ron’s doesn’t matter. Ron’s ability to put things in perspective comes from the fact that he is true to himself and thus doesn’t not feel the need to become someone else to please others.

To people oriented to people-pleasing in order to feel accepted, and thus of value, Ron’s dismissiveness of the truly unimportant could be annoying. People do argue about what is important. Even though Ron and Cary can start a new life in the mill that he has renovated to create a home for him and her, I think Ron would move in with Cary at her house were she to insist. To live among people who are alike in how they are fundamentally different from oneself cannot be easy, even for someone like Ron whose sense of inner-worth does not depend on what others say or think about him. To be sure, being comfortable in his own shoes, whether boots or slippers, Ron doesn’t have to live in nature, and Thoreau would agree that it is not necessary; periodic refreshers are sufficient. However, socializing with Cary’s friends would be difficult. The only time Ron’s anger flares is at the party at Sarah’s house, which is filled with the wealthy socialites who know Cary. Those guests blame Ron for scolding Howard for kissing Cary against her will. It is actually Cary who pushes Howard back, so Ron is quite obviously being scapegoated. Whether caused by fear, dislike, or jealousy in others, being scapegoated can take a hard psychological toll on anyone, even someone such as Ron whose emotional stability does not rest on external acceptance. A person can take only so much, and Ron’s flash of anger at the party may suggest that Ron would ultimately leave Cary’s world, with or without her. There are limits even to what self-acceptance can tolerate in a hostile environment.

In the movie Animal House (1978), a “nerd” and a fat guy go to a rush party of a college fraternity; they are quickly directed to sit with the other “losers” while the actual potential pledges are allowed to socialize with the head of the fraternity and other members, which includes the editor of the student newspaper. The two guys would never be accepted in that fraternity; in fact, they would be teased and ultimately rejected where they to stay. Fortunately, they find a frat where they fit.

Fortunately, Cary enjoys herself at the party given by Ron’s friends even though she knows she is different. Yet unlike Cary’s friends of Ron, Ron’s friends are tolerant and include her in the fun. Furthermore, Ron and Cary can be a couple at that party. So even though Cary is scared and emotionally beholden to her children and socialite friends, she is attracted to Ron’s world. After all, it is her who reads Thoreau. Philosophy can indeed play a salient role in film.

Breathless

Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Breathless (1960), is according to many film scholars difficult to classify in terms of genre. Relative to uncovering the philosophy espoused in the film, genre-classification looks superficial at best. The film becomes a crime story early on as soon as Michel shots a policeman for no apparent reason, and Godard seems more interested in highlighting the film noir stylistic features, such as when Michel repeatedly mimics Humphrey Bogart in running a thumb across lips and perhaps even incessantly smoking, than in constructing a gripping crime-story. Godard deviates from the crime genre as most of the middle of the film is centered on Michel and his love interest, Patricia before fusing the romance with the crime plot. I contend that the “hole” in the middle of the film is actually full of Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism, which is based on human subjectivity and the choices that are made out of it (and no other basis).

The film’s large middle section is not an enigma, even though the narrative is more or less suspended, and neither is Patricia. She represents the problem of twentieth-century modernity as described and explained by existentialism in that she is too weak to make a choice regarding whether to accept Michel’s romantic overtures to be a couple. She has only her own subjectivity on which base her choice, but the weight of the choice is too much for her as she struggles in fear. In contract, Michel steps up to the proverbial baseball home base and definitively choses her. In terms of Sartre’s philosophy, Michel is strong and Patricia is weak. This is not to say that Michel is immune from her weakness. Nietzsche, after all, explains why the strong can be beguiled by the weak and thus made vulnerable in spite of being stronger.

Patricia is the femme fatale precisely because her subjective take on whether she is free—the most important value, according to Sartre—is so mixed up or boggled in her mind that she winds up sacrificing Michel so as to be able know her own subjectivity enough not to be afraid (of it?) and to make a definitive choice regarding them becoming a couple. Her subjectivity is hardly strong enough to be the basis on which she can make a definitive choice. Pathetically, she backs her awareness of whether she has feelings for him out of her decision to turn him into the police. I must not be in love with you because I just decided to report you to the police. I submit that falling in love with someone can be likened to catching the flu rather than being slightly hungry. When a person has fallen for someone or has come down with the flu, one's experience is itself so impacted that it is rather obvious that one is down for the count, even allowing for some lag time in which the person is under the illusion that life will go on as usual. It's not like, Oh, I think I may be hungry. 

Patricia’s subjectivity is hardly strong enough to be the basis on which she can make a definitive choice because she is so unaware of her own consciousness of herself, and yet according to existentialism, such consciousness is the only possible basis on which a human being can make choices, and, in acting on them, invent oneself ex nihilo. “The problem is that I don’t even know,” she tells Michel concerning what is wrong. This alone can furnish her with existential fear, or angst. “I’m not unhappy,” she tells Michel, “but I’m afraid.” In perhaps the best line in the film—a line that suggests that Godard has split the crime narrative in the film in two in order to open the middle up for philosophy—she says, “I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy.” She doesn’t even know if she is happy or unhappy! It is thus not possible for her, at least while in that condition of such limited self-awareness, to be authentic in herself and towards Michel. It is no wonder that he is frustrated with her state.

Heidegger would say that Michel is authentic. “Do you think of dying sometimes?” he asks Patricia. “I do,” he continues. “All the time.” He is not afraid to face the truth that he, like the rest of us, will eventually die. In what can be taken as a premonition, Michel blurts out, “I’m tired. I’m going to die.” In what can be taken as an indication that she has not faced the fact that she too will die one day, Patricia tells him, “You’re crazy.” He is actually well-grounded, and thus authentic, according to Heidegger. To avoid the realization—to hide from it—that death is inevitable is to lead an inauthentic life. In answer to Patricia’s question during an interview at an airport, a novelist says his greatest ambition in life is, “To become immortal, and then to die.” Of course, to be immortal is to not be able to die, so the answer just shows that the writer is evading his own realization. It is no wonder he is a sexist.

Michel is actually a stronger person than Patricia. He even tells her, “I’m more advanced than you.” Why? He has come to terms with his existence as finite, and this thus no longer afraid (as he was when he shot the policeman). As such, he can make an interesting choice that seems absurd or counterintuitive. Patricia reads Michel a line from William Faulkner, a novelist: “Between grief and nothing, I will take nothing.” It’s not clear whether nothing refers to not having any feeling, or not existing at all. Nevertheless, she asks Michel to choose between grief and nothing. At first, he demurs, and thus evinces momentary weakness in not being up to choosing based on his own subjectivity. “Grief is stupid,” he finally blurts out. “I choose nothing. Its no better, but grief is a compromise. You have to go for all or nothing. I know that now.” You have to go all in, rather than make half-baked choices. It is ironic that in being strong enough to choose based on his own subjectivity alone, his choice is for nothing rather than to feel something. It takes incredible strength of will to choose nothing rather than something. Perhaps it is in a human being having come to the realization that someday death will deprive oneself of existing (and out of this, an essence) that one’s choice can be nothing (i.e., either not feeling anything, or not existing) rather an uncomfortable emotion without freaking out.

 In contrast, Patricia does not go “all in” because she demurs on making a definitive choice until the end of the film, and even then, she backs into her choice by choosing indirectly by calling the police to report Michel. Until then, in not choosing, she is nothing because, according to Sartre, we are nothing but the choices (plans) that we make. It follows that Michel is in love with nothing, and yet he goes all in anyway. Put another way, it is not clear that he can be in love with her when she is virtually cut off from her own subjectivity. If she doesn’t know whom she is, and what she feels, and if she is incapable of making emotional choices, how can he love her? How could he trust her?  Well, this is perhaps his fatal flaw, at least in regard to the femme fatale. Even a more advanced, or stronger person is vulnerable. This is clear both to Hobbes and Nietzsche. Hence the latter recommends that the strong maintain a pathos of distance from the weak, lest the sickness, or bad odor, of the latter infect the stronger. Michel misses the “red flags” in Patricia’s indecision and her underlying emotional instability (e.g., her not knowing whether she is happy or unhappy), and thus misses the opportunity to walk out on her to protect himself from her possibly turning him into the police for the murder.  I submit that being in love is an existential space in which a person’s perception of one’s freedom drastically narrows.

Patricia, in Godard's film, "Breathless," is overcome by existential angst.

Patricia is dangerous to Michel because even though she knows that she is free to take or leave (or turn in) Michel, she has not come to the realization that she is indeed free. This is qualitatively different than having a sense of a de facto narrowing of freedom. She doesn’t know if her lack of freedom is causing her unhappiness, or whether her unhappiness is responsible for her lack of freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre would tell her, of course you’re free, for “there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.”[1] Drawing on Nietzsche’s famous yet typically misinterpreted line, “God is dead,” Sartre concludes as an atheist (whereas Nietzsche had been a theist) that there are no divine commands to ground ethical decision-making and thus “legitimate our conduct.”[2] The only thing a person has upon which to base one’s choices (i.e., plans and actions) is one’s own subjectivity. We are “condemned to be free,” Sartre writes, because the only basis of our choices, and our very essence, is our subjectivity.[3] We can’t get divine decrees from a god who is dead.

Lest we succumb to Patricia’s paralysis of indecision, Sartre wants to assure us that his existentialist philosophy is optimistic, for it “leaves to [mankind] a possibility of choice” because we can invent ourselves through our choices without being tethered to an external authority or tradition.[4] More abstractly stated (by Sartre), “there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept.”[5] In making choices, we can’t rely on a pre-conceived notion of human nature as good or bad. Therefore, subjectivity “must be the starting point.”[6] This spells trouble for characters like Patricia whose subjectivity is elusive, and yet amazing freedom to characters like Michel for whom subjectivity is like a rock on which to invent oneself without being tethered to antiquated crutches.

Drawing on Sartre’s existentialism, we can go further, underneath or beyond (i.e., transcend) the movie’s dialogue, to more fully take account of Patricia’s difficulty in deciding on whether or not to be Michel’s girlfriend. Generally, a person whose choices are based in one’s subjectivity must surely feel a sense of responsibility for those choices once taken. We are responsible for what we are as individuals, and this is in terms of the choices we make. “Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every [person] aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.”[7]  As if this is not enough weight on one’s shoulders, Sartre goes on to insist that the person is “responsible for all [people].”[8] This is quite a leap; whereas it is easy to accept that Patricia feels responsible for calling the police to report Michel’s whereabouts because her decision comes from herself—no god has decreed that she do so—that she is responsible for everyone as a result seems more tenuous to me unless I have missed dialogue in which she tells Michel that she made the choice not just for herself, but also to show herself as a normative, or model, type of person for others to emulate. Absent such dialogue, such a sense of responsibility from playing a role in the ongoing invention of our species is either absent in her case, in which she falls short of illustrating Sartre’s philosophy, or she is unconscious yet moved by the role-model responsibility.

Sartre maintains that how other people regard a person is important to how that person views one’s own subjectivity. So how one presents oneself—what sort of person one is—is important. The “absolute character of free involvement” enables everyone to realize oneself “in realizing a type of mankind.”[9] In choosing whether to accept Michel as her boyfriend or leave him, Sartre would insist that she has a sense that she is choosing what type of woman she wants other people to see in her. She and Michel have had sex. He very much wants to have sex with her again; in fact, he seems obsessed with several parts of her body at more than one point in the film. She surely realizes that having sex again if they are a couple reflects on her as a type of woman. Sartre would go further in contending that that being that type of person (for others to see as such) and not another type (sex without being his girlfriend) plays a role in the realization of mankind of a certain type.

According to Sartre, “(I)n creating the [person] that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of [mankind] as we think [it] ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose. As a result, my action has involved all humanity. . . . Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of [mankind] of my own choosing. [The person] who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility.”[10] Each choice contains normative content in that a value is being created or invented that in turn reflects how our species should be. It is as if each choice of each person is reflected in everyone else and in the whole, and, furthermore, that these are reflected, as in a gaze, back on the respective choosers and thus informing their respective subjectivities. In short, an individual person’s choice, even in whether to accept someone as one’s boyfriend or girlfriend, carries with it a profound sense of responsibility even if the person is not aware of it. Patricia seems not to be aware of it, even in terms of what sort of woman she would be morally.

Perhaps the species-formation “macro” aspect of the responsibility lies in what Jung calls the collective unconscious. Even just economically, Adam Smith held that in a competitive market, both buyers and sellers are fixated on their own respective self-interests and are thus oblivious to the unintended “macro,” or common good. Even as inventors of values from clean slates as Sartre contends, we don’t see how the typical choices we make even in a day play a role in the type of humanity that we collectively are inventing. Whether mankind is good or bad is not preordained, and thus can only be the product of individuals making plans and acting, for these in turn are essentially what we are, which presupposes only our existence.

In conclusion, I contend that Godard suspends the movie, at least as a crime narrative, to present us with two distinct paths open to each of us as envisioned by existentialism. Michel is not afraid to choose, even though his decision to accept Patricia as his girlfriend (and wife?) is based on nothing but his own subjective opinion, which he must know is biased because he knows he is in love with her. Yet he does not waver once he had made the choice. This character provides modernity with a solution to the problem of the death of God. In contrast, Patricia unwittingly succumbs to the crisis of modernity in essentially being lost without external supports like religion or a moralist state. She is thus unable (or unwilling) to reach down into her subjectivity and pull out an answer. She doesn’t even know whether she is happy, and she does not realize her freedom. She can invent values, and thus the type of person that she presents to the world and can even impact the sort of species that humanity is becoming, but all of this eludes her. She is not an enigma; rather, she is a casualty of modernity’s casting away the past—the good as well as the bad. She is explainable as a character in terms of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy. If we have nothing but ourselves to fall back on in inventing ourselves from nothing, and knowing that the world is watching and may copy (or reject) us, making choices may scare the hell out of some people, while others, perhaps a few, may have the determination and guts to go forward boldly into that night of nothingness, which is ultimately death anyway. At the end of the movie, Michel pays the price of Patricia’s unmoored subjectivity and her resulting fear and unhappiness. He is not afraid even of death, and in fact he may bring it on by running away from the police. That his death is his choice may be reflected in the fact that he closes his own eyes. Yet even so, he is stronger than Patricia, and he, not she, can be taken as a role model playing a role in the type of humanity that our species should be.  

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[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1957), p. 22.
[2] Ibid., p. 13.  Sartre may be misinterpreting Nietzsche here, for he was no atheist. Rather, his claim was that in admitted vengeance into a being of perfect goodness, that concept of God is discredited. This is not to say that the divine itself does not exist (i.e., the living God). Sartre might reply, however, that without a viable idea of God, we have nothing to fall back on.
[3] Ibid, quoted material.
[4] Ibid, p. 12.
[5] Ibid., p. 15.
[6] Ibid., p. 13.
[7] Ibid., p. 16.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., p. 41.
[10] Ibid, pp. 17-18

Anatomy of a Fall

The medium of film literally consists of “talking” pictures in succession; that is to say, sound and image. Amidst astounding technological improvements, audiences in the twenty-first century could not be blamed for losing sight of what the medium actually is. It is easy to get lost in the “bells and whistles” and miss the power simply in relating sound and visual images. It is perhaps less forgivable when directors allow themselves to get lost in the rarified computerized air at the expense of realizing the potential in relating sound and image. A strong narrative is of course also essential, and it is easy to find examples in which an orientation to creating visually astonishing eye-candy comes at the expense of creating a deeply engaging narrative. Nevertheless, here I want to focus on the power that lies in relating sound and image, both of which “move” in a motion picture (after the silent era, of course). In the film, Anatomy of a Fall (2023), the theory that sound should extenuate image to form a more wholistic unity in service to narrative meets with a counter-example. At one point in the film, the loss of an accompanied visual that goes with the sound (to be replaced by another visual) renders the continuing sound more powerful in triggering raw emotions. The point being made by the film at that point regards the viability of close-contact, long-term human relationships, given our species’ innate instinctual urges to be aggressive. After all, our closest relative is the chimp. It is possible that the “civilized” conception of marriage that became the norm presumably only after the long hunter-gatherer phase in which the vast majority of natural selection has occurred is not as congruent with how our species is “hard-wired” than we might think.

In Anatomy of a Fall, the word fall refers to not only a physical fall—that of a husband from either a balcony or an attic window (i.e., suicide or murder)—but also the decline of a marriage. As the multilevel meanings of fall hint, the film is deep both intellectually (as a mystery) and emotionally. Beyond the superficial yet gripping question of whether the wife kills her husband or whether he commits suicide lies the larger human matter of whether our species’ instinctual aggressive urges are compatible with long-term relationships in which two people are in prolonged close contact.

Having never been married myself, I have been astounded from time to time in hearing about married couples who do everything together, including in their work lives. My mother had a law practice with her second husband, and of course they lived and socialized together. When they married and announced that they would be partners of a law firm (with one poor guy as the third partner, or “wheel”), I thought even as teenager that it would involve too much “together time.” As the years passed, long after I had left home for college, I noticed my mother increasingly wanting to take solo daytrips to a nearby large city to “get away.” It was clear from her tone of voice that too much “togetherness” had taken its toll on her. He likely felt the same way, especially if I am correct that our species is not “hard-wired” to spend so much time with one person over a long period of time. On one visit, I got a glimpse of the real condition of the marriage. Nearly constant contact had seemed to extenuate arguments. After I showed the couple the long version of Cinema Paradiso (1988), in which the budding romance receives more emphasis, my mother thanked me, saying in a revealing tone, “We really needed that.” Her husband was silent, but they were sitting close together on a sofa.

It is no secret that romance, being “in love” with someone, is typically short-lived; fewer people investigate whether the residue of the desire for constant contact is consistent with human nature. Too much contact with another human being may be incompatible with our more unsavory instincts that can sometimes overwhelm us. Doing everything together is a romantic notion for people who have just fallen in love, but the reality of so much contact with the same person is quite another thing. Of course, some married couples doubtlessly really love each other, and perhaps some of these remain in love for decades. I am not contending that the instinctual aggressive urge in our biology overwhelms the instinct for emotional intimacy in every case. Constant contact, though, can try even cases in which a couple were in love at some point.

The wife in the film may never have been in love with her husband. She tells her lawyer that she married her husband because she believed he understood her by what he told her. She admits to the court that she has cheated on him, and, interestingly, she shows little empathy when asked if he was hurt when she told him. The lack of empathy is perhaps a hint as to whether she is guilty. The film highlights her lies instead.

Now we get to the crux of the matter concerning the film and human nature in the context of close relationships. In the trial, an audio-tape is played of an argument that the couple had not long before the husband’s death. A visual flashback back to the argument accompanies the tape until—and this is important—the violence begins, or, rather, the talking leaps to shouting. The sudden shift back to the courtroom matches this leap as well as that from the shouting to—just as abruptly—violence. Not being able to see it renders the incident more vivid and even real to the audience. Although less wholistic for the viewers, the effect on emotions, including fear, is greater. Hearing violence without being able to see it may trigger the primitive (reptilian) part of the brain of “fight or flight.” Seeing the source of violence may give us a greater sense of being in control of the violence; it is out there rather than possibly so near to be a threat.

At that point of the film, I noticed that the 250 people in the theatre were completely silent as we heard enraged shouts, glass breaking and a series of hard punches. Once the couple becomes violent, they are silent. Persuasion has given way to might, as if force itself could persuade. Hearing the deep thuds of the punches and claps of the slaps left me emotionally raw. It was as if the microphone were placed very near the points of contact. Seeing the violence as well as hearing it would have allowed the audience to situate the violence in space, thus eliminating the fear that the violence is indeed as up-close as it seems and therefore could encompass the viewer. Matching the visual images with the sound of the violence within a scene would normalize the violence in the context of watching any scene of a movie in which there is action and diegetic sound. The violence would be seen to be at a distance, even in spite of the up-close deep sounds of the slapping and punching.

The abrupt cessation of the visual of the argument as the sounds continue and then the coordinated end of the shouting with the beginning of the violence as if on cue demonstrates that the management sound and image is a powerful device by which raw emotions of an audience can be engaged at a deep level. Perhaps too often directors become consumed with the calls for more “eye candy” afforded by computer graphics and in so doing overlook the possibilities from cleverly relating audio to image. In other words, the basic level of the medium of “talking” pictures warrants attention.

The scene of the couple’s argument plays an important role in the narrative too, and is thus powerful intellectually. When the wife tells the judge that her husband was hitting a wall (rather than her hitting him), I was surprised that the prosecutor does not point out that the audio itself of muffled thuds hitting flesh is inconsistent with a human fist hitting a hard surface. The wife’s convenient claim is yet another hint that she is guilty, as is her lie that bruises on her arm are from brushing against a counter’s edge in the kitchen. If her husband was not hitting a wall during the argument (and hitting a wall during a violent fight seems implausible or odd even for someone considering suicide) and the counter cannot account for the bruises, then the evidence of prior violence could be taken as such by the jury.

Relatedly, I was also surprised that the prosecutor does not point out to the court that the son’s sudden realization that his father’s comments about making do once the family’s dog has died are actually made to prepare the boy for his father’s suicide. I could not find in the audio and visuals of the flashback of the boy riding in a car with his father anything that could be taken definitively to point to an intention to commit suicide. The prosecutor lapses, therefore, in failing to flag the son’s conflict of interest in wanting to protect his mother from going to jail—an event that would presumably throw the son into foster care or a group home.

Also subtly revealing is the fact that the wife is happy rather than in mourning while eating and especially drinking with her attorney at dinner after the non-guilty verdict. In fact, the two nearly kiss at one point. Back when she walks outside and sees her husband’s dead body in the snow near the house, she does not wail; in fact, she seems rather self-composed.  

The film does not reveal at the end whether the wife has murdered her husband. Nor does the audience get any indication of whether the husband repeatedly hit a wall during the argument. These “loose ends” are disconcerting, as is the chaotic music that the husband plays in the attic while his wife is attempting to be interviewed on the house’s second floor. The harsh, chaotic diegetic (sourced in the scene) sound is consistent with the out-of-control quality of human violence, and may even excite the wife enough to a physically attack her husband. This music is also consistent with the speechless audio of the violent stage of the argument. The emotional discomfort from the music pales in comparison with the emotional shock from listening to the savage violence.

That even a husband and wife can inflict on each other such violence as surpasses verbalizing a disagreement raises questions about marriage, given human nature, and, moreover, whether a person can really know another. How can a person be sure that something really is as it appears? In the New Testament, Jesus says of a couple to be married, “the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh.”[1] Does unity imply being of one nature, and, if not, can two natures who don’t really know each other be one flesh? The Council of Nicea (325 CE) decided that Jesus has one essence (ousia) and two natures (hypostasis). Those natures are distinct, yet of the same essence. Can spouses be of the same essence if they can’t really know the other’s underlying nature?

Anthropologically, we can ask whether our notion of marriage is an artificial social-construction that is not fully compatible with human nature. If we cannot completely know another human being, perhaps an all-inclusive (i.e., constant) long-term relationship that monopolizes a person’s interpersonal relations is dangerous. Even if one person could truly know another, perhaps the strictures of social convention result in pent-up emotion that at some point explodes. A couple is suddenly in the “state of nature,” where the repressed aggressive instincts can be expressed. Perhaps they can be over-expressed from all of the pent-up pressure that has built up.

The film seems to marvel at the depths to which a marriage can fall, or deconstruct. This is not to say that the film is an indictment on marriage itself. Couples who fell in love and are still in love decades later can be differentiated from couples whose loveless marriage never knew love and continues “for the children.” Even so, it might be useful to investigate the extent to which the modern social-construction of marriage is consistent with marriage during our species’ formative “hunter-gatherer” period. Has marriage become too totalitarian for our nature? By this I mean both in terms on monogamy and spending so much time together, especially if this is at the expense of doing things with other people.

So it can be asked whether monogamy was pre-historical convention. Is monogamy over decades natural, given human instincts and even reason? In their argument, the couple in the film argue over sex—one person is depriving the other of sex. As Freud pointed out, repressed eros can suddenly explode in violence. Perhaps early humans in such a situation did not have a moral or legal inhibition against getting sex from a third party, as marriage certificates and churches did not yet exist. Furthermore, perhaps the hunter-gatherer couples did not spend so much time together. The lack of modern conveniences meant that more time was taken up with work. So it can be asked: Did couples spend so much time together, especially if exclusively, during the hunter-gatherer period?

To the extent that constant, long-term contact up close with a particular person is artificial, and thus contrived as an ideal or as normal, the social construction of the modern marriage may go too far. Why do so much together? Is it wrong to take breaks by doing things with other people? Are friendships naturally (assuming that married couples are friends) so monopolistic? These are questions that the film’s example of a marriage gone so badly wrong can raise. If sound and image are managed with sufficient foresight by a screenwriter, director, and actors, then the message as regards the human condition can be felt on a deep level in addition to be reflected on. The modern conception (and praxis) of marriage in the West may be ahistoric and ill-conforming to the human being. Perhaps we do not pay sufficient regard to the social distance that our human instincts require at times. Our closest relative, after all, is the chimp. We are animals, and though social, were are more than rational beings.

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1. The Gospel of Mark 10:7-8.