Golda

In introducing a screening of Golda (2023) at Yale, Shiri Goren, a faculty member in the university’s Near Eastern Languages department, told the audience that “the non-Israeli, non-Jew Helen Mirren” plays Golda Meir in the film. Rather than evincing gratitude that the excellent actress would play an ugly character, the implication is that an actor can, or even worse, should only play characters of the actor’s own background. Goren’s basic ignorance of the craft of acting belies her credibility in teaching a course called Israeli Society in Film. That another of her courses was Israeli Identity and Culture may explain why her knowledge of film was eclipsed, namely by an ideological agenda or orientation. I contend that underlying her delusion concerning acting (and film, moreover) is a much larger problem: that of the artificial monopolization by one group identity. In actuality, each of us has more than one group-identity, so to allow one to envelop one’s very identity is problematic.

The craft of acting lies precisely in being able to inhabit a character in spite of the fact that its background is other. Hence actors do research in advance on a character to be played, whether it is fictional or nonfictional. Such research includes, for example, the character’s occupation and even the location where the character lived or is set to live in the film. Emotional work is also involved as an actor considers what within oneself can be drawn on in playing a given character. Johnny Depp, for instance, said in an interview that he regularly draws on more than one person (or character) in coming up with how to embody a character. To claim, therefore, that an actor can only inhabit characters having the actor’s own background is to deny what acting is, namely, inhabiting someone else. No one would criticize Depp for not having grown up in a crime family in Boston in playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). In fact, quite the contrary. That I realized that Depp was the actor playing the role only well into the film attests to the actor’s skill precisely in inhabiting a character of a personality and background so different from Depp’s own. Moreover, that Depp had such versatility as to be able to play a pirate, the owner of a chocolate company, and a serious mobster demonstrates just how wrong it is to claim that an actor can only play a certain kind of character—one in line with the actor’s own background. This is such an obvious point concerning acting that that any claims to the contrary must surely involve false-belief and even delusion: qualities that ideology can have, according to Raymond Geuss in his book, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School.

An ideology, such as one stemming from a suffocating group-identification that seeks to foist itself over a craft such as acting, can be “dependent on mistaking the epistemic status of some of [the ideology’s] apparently constituent beliefs.”[1] In other words, an ideology may hinge on a false-belief. Indeed, the human mind seems to be vulnerable to circuit-failures as an ideologically important false-belief is presumed to be true as if it could not be false. In other words, the mind doesn’t seem to do a good job at flagging its own false beliefs especially if an ideology being held is dependent on them. Hence, a group-identification ideology can get away with utterly misconstruing the craft of acting. Geuss even includes delusion as pertaining to ideology pejoratively.

I contend that delusion pertains to an ideology in which one group-identification is established monopolistically for an individual. To be sure, Geuss insists that “(h)umans have a vital need for the kind of ‘meaningful’ life and the kind of identity which is possible only for an agent who stands in relation to a culture.”[2] The kind of identity is here that which is informed by a person’s relationship to a culture. Each of us is connected to more than one cultures, and, relatedly, more than one group-identity applies.

I’m a Midwesterner; that’s my ethnicity. Identifying as an American in terms of culture is a looser or more general and even secondary ethnicity for me, whereas my group-identity as an American is foremost politically. My vocational group-identity as a scholar goes beyond vocation, and I have more than one religious group-identifications informing my religious identity. Other group-identifications apply to me as well. My racial group-identification as a Caucasian, or “White,” is actually not one that I an conscious of very often, so other people who are constantly referring to themselves and others by race strike me as unnaturally obsessed with the racial group-identification at the expense of others.

Seldom do we realize that one’s group-identification and that of another person may be different not only on the same axis (e.g., being of different racial groups), but also in emphasizing different types. One person might say, “I’m a Black person,” and the hearer might reply, “I’m a Catholic.” The types, or bases, of the two group-identifications are different: race and religion, respectively. This essentially relativizes a person’s favorite basis because others could alternatively be the person’s favorite. The choice seems arbitrary. The hearer could have replied, “I’m an American.” It is not self-evident that a Black person should view oneself primarily in terms of race rather than nationality (or religion or ethnicity, which is yet another category rather than isomorphic with race). More than one Black person has told me that only in leaving the U.S. and living in the E.U. has that person been able to de-prioritize his race-identity to other bases on which to self-identify. It seems to me, however, that a person has more control over which basis upon which to predominately group-identify, even if one basis is foisted upon oneself by a group to which one is accustomed to identifying with primarily.

Because each of us has several group identifications, any one of which a person could perceive as primary, allowing one to monopolize one’s group-identity temporally or geographically can be seen as dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In getting into character, a good actor does not ignore the subordinate group-identifications. In the case of Golda Meir, she was actually from the Ukraine in the Soviet Union, so the claim Helen Mirren’s portrayal suffers because the actress was not Israeli can be understood to be fallacious. In the film, Golda tells Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Secretary of State, that during her childhood in the Ukraine, people would beat up Jews in the streets with impunity. The character doesn’t even identify mostly as an Israeli. Furthermore, her ethnic and religious group-identity as a Jew, while salient, does not monopolize her self-identity.

In fact, the film shows actual television footage of Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat in which Golda says, “As a grandmother to a grandfather, . . .” She could have said, “As a Jew to a Muslim,” or “As an Israeli to an Egyptian,” or “As a politician to a politician,” but her group-identification as a grandmother is on top at that moment. I submit that in her depiction of Golda Meir, Mirren draws significantly from her own group-identity as a woman and a mother.

Three times in the film, Golda empathizes with the typist whose husband is fighting in the war. It is clear from her facial expressions that Mirren is having the character react as a woman to another woman’s experience. Golda is even crying when she watches her assistant inform the typist that her husband has been killed. In listening to a soldier being attacked in battle, Mirren has Golda react as a mother would: to the boy’s anguish. Even in urging Henry Kissinger to eat borscht, a Ukrainian soup, Mirren portrays Golda as a mother—admittedly, as a very Jewish mother. But even in that scene, Golda’s Jewish group-identification is not the only one in play.

To be sure, Mirren does a great job in playing Golda’s specifically Jewish group-identity.  In a scene in which Golda is talking with Ariel Sharon, then a general, she tells him that all political careers end in failure. She even adds fatalist, “huh,” at the end of the sentence. Mirren portrays Golda’s Jewish ethnicity most stridently and explicitly along with Golda’s identification as a mother in the scene in which Kissinger is eating the soup.  As an immediate context, Golda makes explicit the primacy of being Jewish in Israel to Kissinger (e.g., “In Israel, we read right to left”) and even says that her cook is a survivor (i.e., of the Holocaust. It is the posture that Mirren adopts while watching the Jewish American eat the Ukrainian soup that may be Mirren’s most Jewish statement, and, given her skill as an actress, she didn’t need to be Jewish herself.

So, the rather pedestrian, non-intellectual comment of the faculty member at Yale that the non-Israeli, non-Jewish actress would be playing Golda Meir in the film says more about the sordid motive to impose an ideology containing a false-belief (and a delusion) as a weapon than it does about the actress or her (ability to play the) role. The group-identifications of Golda Meir that Helen Mirren uses most are actually as a woman and a mother. Even in this respect, whether Mirren was a mother at time of filming is not terribly important because her craft would have included the ability to play a mother regardless. To be sure, being able to draw on a common background or group-identity is an asset for an actor, but the viability of the craft does not depend on having a common background. That any given character has more than one group-identity makes it more likely that an actor can draw on personal experience in some respect and thus have an experiential connection with the character. This is not to say, however, that such experience is necessary, and even less that experience in one of the several group-identifications of a character is necessary. Besides, the most obvious group-identification of a character to an observer may not actually be primary either to the character (or the historical person on which the character is based) or to the actor in portraying the character. Part of Mirren's talent may be to assess which of a character's group-identities really drives the character, and, relatedly, which is decisive in pulling off the role. As observers, we bring our own ideological agendas, and this is especially problematic if we allow one of our group-identities a monopoly over our self-identity.

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1. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 22.

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.

The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) hinges on the root meaning of passion, which is suffering. In fact, Jesus’ body is reduced to a bloody pulp after being brutally tortured by the Roman soldiers going beyond Pontius Pilate’s order to teach Jesus a lesson but keep him alive. At least there is an order to whip Jesus; the Jewish Temple’s guards earlier took it upon themselves to repeatedly hit Jesus with fists and even with chains, and almost strangle him with a rope while arresting him. That guards, or police, especially of a religious institution, are actually garden-variety thugs might resonate with viewers who need only recall the latest news story about police brutality. The implication is that such police employees who are actually thugs are delusional if they consider themselves to be Christians. In fact, such official thugs can be understood through the prism of the film as beating Christ himself, for what you do to the least of these, you do to me. In the Gospel story, Jesus is an innocent victim, and so too are even criminals who do not warrant being attacked. As in the film, police brutality tends to occur before the victims of the abuse are convicted, and thus presumed guilty before the law. For a human being to make oneself the law incarnate or to presume oneself above the law is nothing short of impious and self-idolatrous. In short, the human nature that is on display in attacking Jesus in the story is the same as contemporary innocent victims are forced to confront in corrupt, pathological employees of police departments.

The film brutally dramatizes the price that Jesus pays in the Gospels to make up for the sins of humanity so that the chasm between God the Father and mankind can be narrowed, or even eliminated at least when the son of man (i.e., Jesus) comes on clouds to redeem the living and the dead of the faithful. I include the possibility of narrowed because even if a person’s accumulated debt has been paid off by someone else, it is possible to take on new debt as time goes by. That a Christian is to ask God for forgiveness suggests that on-going sin can widen the gap between a Christian and God. As Paul writes, faith is for naught if there is not love. Sin is the absence and antithesis of love, and thus renders faith for naught. Justification and sanctification are both necessary, according to Christian theology. In the film, the question of whether one man can pay for everyone’s sins is made explicit, and the implicit answer is that this is possible provided that the one voluntarily submits to a lot of severe suffering. Gibson brings the lofty soteriological (i.e., salvific) story in the Gospels down to earth in perhaps even overdoing the violence that is inflicted on Jesus from his arrest to his death. In so doing, Gibson makes it possible for us to relate the violence in the film to that which occurs all too often, as reported in the news. I have in mind the parallel between the aggressiveness of the Jewish and Roman “police” against Jesus in the film and the problem of police brutality even in the twenty-first century, which is supposed to be so modern and advanced in large part though due to technological advances rather than any change in human nature. Primal urges are still with us, so the need still exists to hold them accountable when they lash out against other people. In short, the film is more about human nature than Jesus’ identity as the Messiah and Son of the living God, which in turn, however, is salient enough that Gibson largely omits Jesus’ teachings altogether, and thus how a person can minimize incurring new debt by getting closer to the Kingdom of God by forgiving and even helping rude people detractors (i.e., “enemies”) on a daily basis by taking on the perspective of God in viewing even such people as creatures wholly dependent existentially on God. In other words, Gibson’s focus on the most important event in the Gospel (Passion) story comes with a cost even though highlighting the violence against Jesus by the Temple guards and the Roman soldiers can give us a template by which to perceive the unjustified violence in the world in a new light. 

In the film, the Temple guards manhandle Jesus in arresting him even though he clearly shows no indication of resistance. In fact, he has just healed a soldier’s ear, which Peter had sliced off with a knife. Jesus tells Peter to drop his knife with the adage that all who live by the sword also die by it. Just after Peter drops his knife, a Temple guard hits Peter on his face. The guard slugs like a thug in a one-sided street fight, rather than being ordered by superiors to do hit the “culprit”; thus, the guard’s act cannot be justified by appealing to his official duties. Then he joins two other guards in roughly approaching Jesus as if he were resisting arrest. He is stationary, yet the guards grab him as if he were a violent criminal trying to evade capture or even attack them after healing another guard! One of the guards even puts a rope around Jesus’ neck and yanks back severely on the rope in an aggressive fit that can only stem from personal, unsanctioned anger. On the way to the Temple, besides punching Jesus, the guards even throw Jesus off a bridge on the way to the Temple. Jesus is literally hanging by a rope when he sees Judas who is near the small bridge. I submit that Gibson goes overboard with the violence here, for throwing someone off a bridge is quite a leap from violently subduing and hitting a person under arrest. Yet considering how aggressive contemporary police at least in the U.S. can be in arresting people still presumed innocent, we should not minimize by imposing our normal sense of normalcy on the pathologically violent.

On July 4, 2023, a police patrol employee in Ohio released a K-9 dog on a driver who was standing with his hands up. The man had been pulled over after an admittedly too-long chase because of a missing “dirt tag” on his truck on a highway. The employee ignored another police employee who shouted for the dog not to be released. According to NBC News, Rose, the Black truckdriver, “can be seen on video . . . standing in front of troopers with his hands in the air. A Circleville police officer who has a dog can be heard telling Rose to ‘go on the ground or you’re gonna get bit.’”[1] This sounds more like punishment than anything practically necessary in making an arrest. The police employee primped himself up as judge and jury, as well as executioner. It is then that a trooper can be heard yelling multiple times to the trooper with the dog, “Do not release the dog with his hands up!” The trooper with the dog let it go after Rose anyway.

It is interesting, therefore, that the police employee who felt the need to punish Rose for not complying on a minor point did not feel the need to comply. Clearly, releasing the dog could not be legitimated by procedure, but, rather, pointed to a psychologically pathological intolerance for being disobeyed. Anyone who is or has been a parent knows that losing one’s temper just because a child does not immediately comply is pathological. Perhaps Rose was afraid out of his mind precisely because of the sordid, well-deserved reputation that too many police departments in America have of a thirst for inflicting violence and a lack of accountability in a sort of “brotherhood” of what are actually city employees.

Also in 2023, an off-duty Chicago policeman in Illinois violently subdued and put a knee into the back of a child whom the aggressive “adult” assumed had stolen his son’s bicycle. The kid was innocent, and the policeman’s personal anger clearly motivated the attack. It is ironic that such a man would assume so infallibly that a kid walking by a bike had stolen it. God-like powers of omniscience would hardly be deposited in a thug.

In the film, once Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin (i.e., the religious council of the Jews), a Temple guard takes it upon himself to judge Jesus as arrogant and disrespectful towards the high priest, Caiaphas, and, furthermore, the guard takes it upon himself to punish Jesus by hitting him in the face. Jesus asks why the Temple policeman hit him even though Jesus had not done or said anything evil in suggesting that the council members ask people what Jesus had taught rather than ask Jesus himself. Tightening fingers into a fist to hit a person in the face is typically done in “street fighting” by thugs and bullies, rather than being indicative of any police policy that would justify the tactic, so Jesus asks the guard why he hit Jesus. Earlier, when a Temple guard tied Jesus’ hands behind his back in arresting him, Jesus did not ask why precisely because tying hands together is procedure (both in the story and in our world). Jesus could have asked why another guard almost strangled Jesus with another rope, as such an action is not procedure and thus points to personal anger and perhaps even sadism.

Back to 2023 in the U.S., a sheriff deputy angered because an elderly black woman was recording another deputy being rough in arresting her husband for stealing a cake from a grocery store was not following procedures when he slapped the woman’s phone out of her outstretched hand, put an arm around her neck to throw her down to the pavement, and then asked her if she wanted to be hit in the face. She was not resisting the attack; she was merely telling him not to hurt her because she had cancer. His official badge and position should not blind us to the man’s motive: In first reaching to slap the phone out of the woman’s outstretched hand, it is clear that he was angry at the woman for recording the other policeman, who was also being violent in arresting a non-violent man.

At the very least, the man who threw the elderly woman to the pavement just for recording clearly had a pathological anger problem (and thus should never have been hired). He also presumably believed that he was above being held accountable, especially by the wife of a shoplifter recording the arrest of her husband.  

The woman was smart, and justified in recording the arrest of her husband. Lest it be assumed that the cameras that police in the U.S. must wear on their chests are sufficient to keep the holders from taking advantage of their weaponized position, such footage can conveniently go missing, or be blocked by other police at a scene. In 2023, for example, a police employee's camera was conveniently blocked from showing another employee hitting a Black woman in her face while she was holding her three-weeks-old baby. Her crime? She had been a passenger in a car that had a tail-light out. The police unreasonably demanded that she give her baby to them. Given the aggressiveness of those police employees, the woman's maternal instinct was appropriate. 

The arrogance of the police is evident even in the attempt to hide their own bully from view as he hits a defenseless mother because she would not give up her baby to people shouting at her. If the bully, or the two deputies who took down the elderly Black couple, thought of themselves as Christians, such a fanciful delusion itself would be enough to furnish a glaring example of cognitive distortion and dissidence and thus psychological pathology.

The police can be viewed through the prism of Gibson’s movie as attacking Jesus because of how similar the attacks by the police are to those of the Temple guards in the film in attacking Jesus who is has, as Pontius Pilate tells the Sanhedrin, has done nothing to deserve the brutality. It is not necessary to the similitude between the actual world and the story-world of the film that only in the latter is the innocent victim the Son of God. Such an equivalence is not necessary for the point that I’m making.  The dynamic of the respective brutalities is the same, crossing between screen and the world in which we live. 

The sadism of the Roman soldiers who are to whip Jesus yet do much more is on display in the film, as is the sadism of the members of the Sanhedrin who are watching. The extreme lengths to which the centurions go and the presence of supposedly pious clerics raises the question of how much punishment should be met out to someone judged by fallible human beings to be a blasphemer.

In his pontificate, Pope Francis said to journalists, “Who am I to judge” regarding gay couples. This infuriated more conservative Roman Catholic bishops and priests. Even a vicar of Christ is a human being, so any claim of infallibility can only be impious and presumptuous; the Holy Spirit works through not apart from human nature, even in the selection of a pope. Similarly, police employees are human beings, and thus not infallible in judging guilt, so doing so and then pronouncing a punishment and executing it themselves is toxic, given human nature. Such employees are not divine, and thus omniscient and omnipotent. In the film, Jesus tells Pilate that he has no power over Jesus that has not been given from above. Jesus then says that the real sinners are the members of the Sanhedrin, who sent Jesus to Pilate. These two sentences constitute an interesting idea: that the Jewish clerics went too far out in personal anger whereas Pilate is acting within a governing authority, which God establishes according to Jewish theology. It took me quite a while to understand how the two lines go together.

Caiaphas, the chief Jewish priest, is visibly enraged by Jesus’ admission that he is the Messiah and Son of the living God. Even in viewing Jesus as arrogant and impious—a perspective that assumes infallibility in knowing whether Jesus’s identity-statement is true or false—Caiaphas considers the Roman brutality in ripping Jesus’ skin to the point of him being covered with his own blood to be justified. Both the infallibility and judgement of the high priest belie any presumption he might have that he is worthy of being cleric, let alone the high priest. It is ironic that the sanctimonious, presumably divine chief priest is so angry at Jesus for claiming a divine nature along with human nature; perhaps Caiaphas is so angry at Jesus’ claim in part because he knows deep down that his own presumption is not only arrogant, but also impious, given that he is sordid, manipulative, and angry, blocks him even from asking Jesus what he means when he says he is the Son of God.

In the Gospels, the Pharisees similarly have a petty perspective in which they are fixated on quibbling over Jewish laws while missing the salience of the sort of love that is (in) God. People were not made for the laws; rather, the latter were instituted for us, Jesus says. Is helping someone, especially someone who is weak or an enemy, so bad just because the action is done on the Sabbath? In fact, such helping even on the Sabbath brings one closer to God, (by metaphor to the Kingdom of God). Similarly, does the law against blasphemy, assuming Jesus is blasphemous in claiming to be the Son of God as Caiaphas (omnisciently) concludes, justify such cruelty as is depicted in the film? In not believing that Jesus is divine, Caiaphas may think that Jesus is delusional in thinking he is the Son of God, will come on clouds to judge the living and the dead, and will sit at the right hand of the Father. Watching, and perhaps even getting satisfaction out of someone with delusions (even religious ones) being tortured can be deemed to be not only petty and vengeful, but also sadistic.

In the film, Pilate does not consider Jesus to be a threat even as a king, for the Kingdom about which Jesus preaches is not of this world. Perhaps Pilate views Jesus as a harmless dreamer, and maybe even delusional. Pilate is displeased that his soldiers have tortured Jesus so much, and pleads with the Jews that Jesus has not deserved to suffer so much. Caiaphas’ attempt to manipulate Pilate by presenting Jesus’ offense as a claim to being a king (rather than the Son of God) not having worked, the hardened heart the chief priest insists that Pilate have Jesus crucified anyway; Jesus’ suffering has not been enough!

So too, witnesses to the savage beatings of black men by police in the U.S. might say, how much suffering is enough to satisfy your lust for blood? How many bullets are needed in the body of a man who did not resist arrest? Such beatings demonstrate the endurance of primitive human nature, which, I submit, is inconsistent and incompatible with the legal power that governments at least in the U.S. give to their police employees. Only a delusional city executive or legislator would rely on Internal Affair offices in police departments, as can be seen by how flagrant the abuses are and likely were before the advent of phone cameras. Viewing the primal acts of aggression through the prism of The Passion of the Christ demonstrates just how contrary to Jesus’ example and preaching such “modern” police employees are who take advantage of their positions and society’s indifference and even enabling. The arrogant bullies will be surprised to learn that repentant innates still in prison are closer to the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately, as Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film, it “is superficial in terms of the surrounding message . . . we get only a few passing references to the teachings of Jesus.”[2] To be sure, a focus on the “central event in the Christian religion”[3] has benefits, including in being able to see police even in the twenty-first century as vicariously attacking Jesus. Actually entering the Kingdom of Jesus’ Father requires more, as another Christian film, Mary Magdalene (2018), makes clear in making that kingdom, rather than an event, the focus. Police who take advantage of societal slippages of accountability and the enabling pro-police ideology to inflict pain on others for petty, ego-bruising “insults” and yet are certain of being saved by having faith in Jesus should ponder Paul’s point that faith without love is for naught. Furthermore, faith with aggression can only be hypocrisy. Blindness might excuse such bullies, but they see and so their sin remains.

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[1] Mirna Alsharif and Ava Kelley, “’Do Not Release the Dog With His Hands Up!’ Black Man Mauled By Police Canine After Ohio Pursuit,” NBCNews.com, July 23. 2023 (accessed July 24, 2023)
[2] Roger Ebert, “The Passion of the Christ,” RogerEbert.com, February 24, 2004 (accessed July 24, 2023).
[3] Ibid.

I Am Cuba

The film, I Am Cuba (1964), consists of four vignettes that depict what Cuba was in its pre-revolutionary day beyond the wealthy gloss of the American-owned casinos. Sugarcane is sweet, but it is also of tears.  Furthermore, the film explains the revolutionary ground-swell in the individual lives of Cubans whom the American tourists didn’t see from their luxurious perches near the beaches. The film proffers a glimpse of the extreme poverty and oppression so raw that it could (and did) foment a revolutionary change of regime through amassed violence against the police-state. The abstract message ripe for political theory is that once regime-change is on the front burner at the macro, or societal level, strong interpersonally-directed emotions that stem from particular cases of injustice will have had a lot of time to build up. Indeed, the latter is the trigger for the former. Abstract political principles on governance and macroeconomic policy on the distribution and redistribution of wealth, and even principles of distributive justice are not divorced from the interpersonal level, especially as between citizens and individual police or military employees of the state. Indeed, those philosophical abstractions gain traction in a revolutionary context through the sweat and tears of individual people.

In the first short story, the exploitation of a Cuban prostitute is evinced not only in the act itself, but also, and more so, in the fact that the businessman takes the woman’s cherished crucifix for a few dollars without her consent as she is watching. The man’s disorientation as he leaves her hut to discover in daylight the squalid living conditions of the Black, poor Cubans suggests that exploitation of labor is likely endemic and hidden from the view of Cuba as the land of nice, Americanized hotels.

In the story of the sugarcane farmer, the utter precariousness of economic position is most salient. The line that there are so many tears in sugar cane even as it is so sweet reflects the arduous labor that goes into cutting the stalks. That the landowner could refuse to pay the farmer who is harvesting a crop because the landowner has presumably just made a lot of money selling the land to United Fruit company demonstrates just how unfair economic laws can be. The sheer unfairness translates into radical, emotion-laden reactions, such as the farmer immediately ceasing his work and instead burning the crop so the land owner won’t profit from the farmer’s work. The depth of the unfairness, more abstractly, is capable of triggering radical (rather than “reform”) economic and political actions, including armed revolution. That the farmer dies of smoke inhalation gives the viewer an understanding that it is possible that both interpersonal and structural or systemic power and economic dynamics may be so unbalanced, and thus unfair, that a person on the losing end may choose to end one’s life rather than go on in such a condition. Abject humiliation alone can give prompt oppressed people to risk everything to “just say no” or hit back. The attacks from Hamas against Israel on October 8, 2023 can be understood, for instance, as a people pushed against a proverbial wall with nowhere to go to the point that they were willing to take rash steps to upend the status quo. This is not to say that violence is excusable; only that it is explainable.

The indiscriminate arial bombing of another farmer’s mountainous dwelling is unfair to him and his family, especially since one of the bombs kills one of his sons. The sheer unfairness, I submit, completely changes his political position from that of non-involvement with the revolutionary army near his hut to joining up to fight. He is not fighting to improve his economic lot; he dismissed such a motive when he talks with a soldier before the bombing. He is also not fighting to avenge the loss of his son, for the tone he adopts in telling his wife that he has to go has more of a sense of duty than anger to it.

The next story naturally transitions the viewer to the macro, political level of what is based on the economic struggles and hardship of individuals such as the people living near the prostitute, the sugar-cane farmer, and the subsistence-living mountain farmer. Out of the dire economic conditions of such people, who are also part of Cuba, emanates the political conflict between a regime and a revolutionary army. By this time, as the man sings, “It’s taken you too long; I can’t forgive.” The revolutionaries will not turn back; the ferment has gone past compromise and reconciliation. The injustices have been too harsh and have been allowed to go on too long for any signs of contrition to be credible. Slaves, once having made the determination to be stars, cannot put the new wine into the old bottles. The revolutionaries are firing at the past; not to kill. But is this really so when economic injustice is so harsh that strong emotions flash quite naturally in human beings?

Enrico on the left is furious at the policeman on the right for having murdered Enrico's friend and compatriot handcuffed in police custody. The intense emotions naturally triggered by witnessing an aggressor abuse his authority are the root cause of regime change by armed rebellion. 

Enrico, a young revolutionary from university, is clearly furious at the policeman who murders a friend who is already handcuffed and in custody. The agent of the state cannot tolerate even a prisoner making political statements in public. Enrico had resisted pulling the trigger on the chief of police because the man was with his wife and kids at the time; unlike the police, Enrico has a conscience and is flexible. Although Enrico understands that the struggle is against the system, which in turn can be viewed as the past, his rage is  against a particular agent, the policeman, of the unjust and violent regime that protects the exploitation by the rich of the poor. When the policeman who shot Enrico’s compatriot shots Enrico himself, he continues on as a walking wounded not because “to die for your homeland is to live,” but, rather, out of sheer rage against the unrepentant bully-policeman. It is personal. The source of a revolution is personal.  Abstract revolutionary slogans are too abstract to motivate a person in exacting retribution, or vengeance. Enrico is finally raw rage as he walks towards the armed policeman with only a block of concrete held up in the air. Enrico's pent-up anger has finally surpassed his conscience. The audience is surely rooting for him and against the policeman. Even viewers such as myself who oppose Socialism and Communism are rooting for him, for empathy naturally sides with the victims and their allies rather than with the bullies and predators. 

In summary, I Am Cuba is not just propaganda for Socialism and Communism. All that on a human level goes on before an armed revolutionary army is formed is visualized in four short stories. So much emotional pain built up over such a long time is packed into a radical political movement that seeks to completely up-end the status quo that once such a movement has begun on the macro level, the partisan movement is very difficult to reverse. The lesson for government officials is perhaps that there is time to stave off such movements because they do not pop up overnight. Moreover, preventing agents of the state or wealthy land- or company-owners from abusing their authority and holding those who do accountable is very much in the interest of a regime, lest it eventually fall all of a sudden by armed unrest. The lesson for revolutionaries is that the shift from the particular economic/power injustices that are interpersonal to a revolutionary party or army includes adopting a broader, more abstract perspective beyond the killing to fighting against the past as represented in the ongoing status quo.

Human nature is of course an indelible part of political and economic paradigm shifts via revolutionary movements, and the abstract political platforms are rooted in interpersonal emotions from particular cases of injustice. Revolutionary politics, including abstract slogans in the film’s dialogue, such as slaves and stars, firing at the past, struggle against the system, and To die for your homeland is to live, function along with an extant revolutionary army as landing pads for individuals who, had they not been the victims of particular agents of the state or the wealthy, would have resisted joining any army and not felt the slogans, being content instead to live life as it comes in poverty.

Rainbow

Rainbow (1944) is a Soviet patriotic propaganda film about the brutal Nazi-German occupation of a village in Ukraine. Filmed in 1943 while Ukraine was still occupied, the film was shot in the U.S.S.R. in central Asia rather than in Ukraine. The plot centers on the efforts of Nazi captain Kurt Werner to get a resistance (partisan) fighter to reveal where her group was heading. The woman is stark (strong), for she does not budge even as the Germans torture her both mentally and physically. I contend that the film pivots on a few lines spoken by an old Russian man in the village on the nature of power itself. Those lines stand out for being the only philosophical abstractions in the dialogue of the film. The film is about the nature of power.

The ubiquitous presence of German troops holding guns sends the audience a clear message that the basis of government is raw force: the ability to kill. A preponderance or monopoly of the use of force is decisive. Although the villagers vastly outnumber the German troops, both use of the guns to kill many people in succession and on the other side the (irrational?) psychology of passivity engraved in the Russian psyches and perpetuated by the decentralization of a village population (mass meetings being controlled by the Germans) maintain the status quo as if the village were a closed system until the Russian army liberates the village from the outside. Although it seems that if the villagers turned on the guards all at once, the German regime in the village would quickly fall, the Hobbesian instinct of self-preservation and the lack of a selfless ethic of sacrifice prevent what would be necessary: a group of villages to start “the ball rolling” in anticipation that an onslaught of villagers inside their houses would quickly join so the troops would be overwhelmed.

So we tend to equate power with actual brute force or the threat thereof. The real foundation of a government (i.e., a “state” in political realism) is its ability to kill threats to its very existence as well as its presumed entitlement to tell people what to do and thus be obeyed. Locally, this means that the last-resort basis of a city government is actually its police force, rather than its mayor or city council. The ability to shoot or arrest a person is the foundation of government. From this foundational vantage point, lofty speeches by heads of state seem peripheral and perhaps even luxuries.

The film, which is actually misnamed Rainbow because in extreme cold where ice-crystals are in the air, the sun’s rays hitting those crystals actually create “sun-halos,” proffers a different conception of power. In the few lines on power itself, an old Russian man tells a few other villagers in a basement that power is not holding a gun; rather, power lies in not saying a word when the Nazis want information. To resist even torture by not giving in so the aggressor gets what one wants is power. I contend that such power is internal, which admittedly can have external effects (e.g., the Nazi captain is not told where the partisan group is based), whereas holding a gun can be external power (i.e., getting another person to do something, or not to do something).

The interaction effect is significant. Holding a gun does not in itself give the holder power over another person; the interior power to resist temptations (e.g., to talk to save oneself or one’s child) can be sufficient to render the power inoperative. In the film, the villagers withhold bread even though the Germans have taken hostages. High external power and low internal power render the external power effective (i.e., power). The combination of low external power and high internal power is a worse-case scenario for an aggressor. High external power and low internal power is what an aggressor counts on in being able to gain or maintain power over another person.

Therefore, I contend that the old Russian man was only partially correct. Holding a gun is a case of power, assuming that the other person has weak or low internal power in being willing to resist temptations. Having the self-discipline or control sufficient to not say a word when an aggressor (bully) is using (the threat of) force to get information, as in the film, is also power. The Russian village is largely in a stalemate because no one is giving up bread or speaking to the Nazis and the latter have the guns (the ability to kill the villagers). Captain Werner kills (and has his troops kill) mostly out of frustration. The nature of power is not as one-sided as it appears; the force of will of the partisan villagers is strong as is the force of the German guns.

Valley of Peace

In Valley of Peace (1956), a Black American pilot and two Slovenian children head towards a valley in which the boy’s uncle lives—a valley of peace. In military terms, the valley has been designated as a “no-man’s” land, which means it is off limits to both the Nazi army and that of the Slovenian partisans.  As such, the peace of the valley is something more down to earth than the Biblical Garden of Eden. Even so, this ideal is a leitmotif in the film. For one thing, the two children repeatedly characterize that valley as not just where the boy’s uncle lives, but also as a utopia. I contend that the film makes a theological statement regarding the fallen world and the Garden of Eden. While only implicit, this statement is still more central to the film than is the significance of the race of the American pilot. I turn first to the fact that the American pilot who survives parachuting from a shot-up plane is Black.

The pilot’s name is Jim, which also happens to be the name of the escaped slave in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939). Both Jim-characters are fleeing violent people: Nazi troops and Southern slave hunters, respectively. Both characters are seeking freedom, so liberation is indeed a theme in The Valley of Peace. Even so, the Jim of this film, which was made after Huckleberry Finn, differs significantly from the ex-slave, who although moral did not show the strength of leadership and fight that the American pilot shows. The latter, for instance, fights along with a White partisan (Slovenian) soldier on an equal basis, whereas the ex-slave is never portrayed as commensurate with the Caucasians. So I think the emancipation theme is muted in Valley of Peace. Moreover, that theme is not central to the film, so claims to the contrary may be more about advancing an ideology than in being true to the film on its grounds.

More salient than the race of one of the characters is the contrast of the world of aggression in which the two children and Jim are trying to flee and the idyllic valley of peace that seems so utterly beyond strife that war could never interlard the serene mountain scenery shown in the last scene. The war-torn lives of the two children does not exhaust the aggression; even a dog bites the head off of the girl’s doll. This expansive application of aggression in an already war-torn film-world is more important than Jim coloring a doll-head black for the White girl. To be sure, the fact that she hugs that doll sets off American society by contrast, as does the fact that a partisan soldier quickly, almost instinctively welcomes Jim to the fight, in a “Hi . . . hi” quick exchange. But such cultural differences should be seen as being within the same paradigm: that of a fallen, deeply aggressive world where violence extends to other species (i.e., the dog decapitating the girl’s doll).

Step back from the internecine conflicts within cultures that themselves can be characterized as aggressive, and the wider chasm can be seen in the valley that lies between the fallen world and the mythic Garden of Eden. The film makes the point that the aggressiveness in the fallen, war-prone world that is populated by human beings is so strident that not even a valley of peace can withstand it and hold on for long. For the two armies do battle at the uncle’s farm in the valley of peace. The German commander says that the valley was merely a no-man’s land and, just like that, it is no longer off limits. The caprice of a mere decision can open the flood-gates of war over the hills into the valley of peace. 

The human instinctual urge of aggression must surely be salient in human nature, whereas any instincts supporting religiousity, which studies have shown are impacted by genetics (e.g., studies of biological and adopted kids), must sure pale in comparison. The Garden of Eden is itself just a no-man’s land in the film except to a child’s imagination. That archetypal emotion (peace)/image (fecund garden) is no match for the human propensity for violence. This, I submit, is the underlying message of the film. The valley of the (decapitated) doll dominates the valley of peace, which, it should be noted, is desolate. The horse is alone, and the uncle is gone. 

The implication is that peace is only possible where human interaction, and thus society, are absent. But it is not a case of moral man, immoral society, for the human being is an aggressive species, closely related to the chimp. Even within society, people can be isolated due to it. 

In Fassbinder's film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Emmi and Ali are isolated by the hostility of their neighbors, friends, and even family due to auslander (foreigner) prejudice (he is Turkish), agism (she is older than him), and racial prejudice (he has dark skin). In that film, the nature of prejudice does play a major role. The passive aggression from all sides gets to Emmi, whose adult children won't even speak to her upon hearing of her intermarriage to a much younger man, so the couple vacation to get away from all of the anger surrounding them yet at a distance. 

Being alone within society is not like being alone in the valley of peace, yet in both cases the verdict runs against our aggressive species. If our species is a social animal, then perhaps only within a narrow compass. Whether we like it or not, strife is the human condition, as constituted by 1.8 million years of hunting and gathering and populating, over whose vast expanse natural selection gradually adapted our species to an environment not at all like our modern society with its artificial institutional security.

Subordinate plotlines and depictions of characters should not be hyperextended at the expense of the central leitmotif of a film. In the case of Valley of Peace, an ontological truth regarding the human condition transcends emancipation. Of course, as far as the human race is concerned, Christians insist that the stain of original sin mutes or limits any real liberation but for salvation in the risen Christ. The film obviously does not venture that far, but stays with the leitmotif of an aggressive world and a valley of idyllic peace that eludes the two children and us. We will never (again?) enter into the mythic Garden of Eden.

Even contending ideologies on race, which can stimulate the illusion that race is the central theme or intent of a film, are and have been mere fodder for the human instinctual urge of aggressiveness. That urge itself, plastered on the walls of a paradigmatic world known as the fallen world, can be juxtaposed with the calmer, peaceful inclinations that project a mythic place, whether that be the Garden of Eden or Oz, but the latter elude us as if separated from us by, as Augustine wrote of revelation reaching us, a darken church window made of distortive colors. I once looked up at golden angels in a high stained glass church window as the sun shined one Sunday morning, but then I looked down at the other people in the choir. 

In the last scene of The Wizard of Oz (1939), Dorothy wakes up back in Kansas, shown in black and white rather than in color. The witch has been melted in Oz, so peace is presumably permanent there, but Miss. Gulch is presumably still alive in Kansas and she will most likely bike over again to take Dorothy's little dog, Toto, to the sheriff. Once when I was young, I saw the actress in person sitting on a giant rainbow chair on a lawn. Margaret Hamilton looked like any grandmother—no hint of Oz even in its dark side. The Emerald City was of course nowhere to be seen. 

Oppenheimer

An artificial sun rose on an otherwise dark night when the nuclear-bomb test named Trinity ushered in the era wherein our species’ aggressive instinct could render homo sapiens extinct. Given the salience of that instinctual urge—for we are related to the chimpanzee species—the wise (i.e., sapiens) species can be its own undoing. For it took a lot of intelligence in sub-atomic physics to invent the nuclear bomb, yet very little smarts went into deciding to use it against Japan, an enemy that would have lost anyway, in order to save American lives from having to invade the mainland (as if conventional bombs could not have reduced the casualties). Even less thought was put into the need to contain the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Expediency without heeding long-term risk is not a virtue. Kant wrote that even if our species were to institute a world federation, presumably having nation-states that would be semi-sovereign as a check against global totalitarianism, peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. This does not speak well of human nature, and this in turn renders the Trinity test something less than redeeming. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” In the film, Oppenheimer (2023), Robert Oppenheimer reads from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as a woman is on top of him in sexual intercourse. The irony of him being an instrument of mass destruction as director of the Manhattan Project and yet being engaged in potentially reproducing life with a woman is doubtlessly the point of that scene. Hindus who leap to the conclusion that Nolan is insulting their religion miss this point. Had the director included a scene in which Oppenheimer is praying, for example for the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time, a quote from the film, Gettysburg (1993) would have been similarly fitting. In that film, Col. Chamberlain of the Union army remarks, “What a piece of work is man . . . in action how like an angel!” Sgt. Kilrain replies, “Well, if he’s an angel, all right then . . . But he damn well must be a killer angel.” In the nuclear age, killer angel takes on added significance. The question is perhaps whether we have left angel behind as our species’ intelligence outdoes our species, whether in terms of nuclear war or rendering a climate unsuitable for us.

Even though Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, said that he had been unconcerned with whether people leave the theaters with something to think about, such as the ethical and political implications of nuclear weapons, including whether Truman should have used two such bombs against Japan; rather, the viewers are to be engaged emotionally in dramatic tension between the characters in the film. I consider this stance to be short-sighted, as it does not take advantage of the potential that the medium of motion pictures has to stimulate philosophical thinking, such as in ethics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. This benefit of films is why I write essays on films.  Even in spite of Nolan’s intention, Oppenheimer is a good example of the salience of ethics and political thought in film.

Although Nolan overdoes too many and too brief visuals of quantum mechanics from Robert Oppenheimer’s imagination, no doubt because he used the giant-screen “IMAX” film, and jumps around too much from scene to scene in Oppenheimer’s life, the emotional engagement of viewers in the dramatic tension between characters, especially between Oppenheimer and his antagonist Lewis Strauss, is formidable. Especially given the salience of Oppenheimer’s emotional wrestling with the ethical and political significance of the bomb, it is easy for viewers to hate Strauss, and Nolan satisfies our instinctual urge for justice by providing scenes in which Strauss is denied Senate confirmation to serve on Eisenhower’s cabinet and Oppenheimer’s “contribution” to the U.S. in World War II and his hacked reputation are recognized as President Johnson gives the protagonist an award. In being able to stimulate strong feelings of anger and relief in the viewers, Nolan is a master story-teller. Nevertheless, the film offers so much more. Nolan has outdone himself, even if it was not his intent.

The debate on whether President Truman should have used nuclear weapons against Japan is well-known in both Japan and the United States. The film would have been deficient had Nolan excluded that question. Because Truman comes off as dismissive and rude in his meeting with Oppenheimer, I suspect that Nolan wanted the film to have a pessimistic attitude on Truman’s decision, especially given the air-time given to Oppenheimer’s concerns. His motive in getting involved in the Manhattan Project is originally informed by his Jewish identity and geared to stopping the Nazis. The Japanese come off as an ordinary military foe relative to the Germans, so Oppenheimer naturally concludes that the rationale for the bomb has passed by the time of the Trinity detonation. Even in the nuclear age, “regular” wars, such as the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and Russia’s war against Ukraine, have been fought without resort to nuclear weapons. Once Germany had been defeated and the horrific, mass-scale atrocities stopped, World War II could have been viewed as reverting to a “regular” war. If so, the use of extraordinary weapons could have been viewed differently—as expedient.

Indeed, even the value of saving American lives (admittedly at the cost of many Japanese civilians) pales relative to being the first country to use a nuclear bomb and, the “genie being out of the bottle,” risking an arms race to the bottom. I am the destroyer of worlds is not a scriptural passage to be taken lightly. As evinced by that line, the film raises fundamental ethical and political questions beyond that of Truman’s decision.

By the 21^st century, Israel, a small country surrounded by Islamic countries, had already acquired nuclear weapons, and in 2022, the president of Russia repeatedly threatened the West that he might use such weapons against Ukraine. The world took notice at Putin’s attempt to normalize the use of the atomic bomb in a regular war, but even so, the warning of a shot which would be heard around the world in its dire significance of portended ruin did not stir any political discussion between world leaders, at least publicly, on the more urgent need for global safeguards.

In Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer’s concern is valid that, given human nature, large-scale nuclear war is almost inevitable at some point unless nuclear powers agree to mutually give up the bomb. Even in this respect, Oppenheimer—both the character and the movie—are too optimistic, for an international power to enforce the treaties would be necessary, again, given human nature. Among combatants in a war, the first casualty is truth-telling. If our species is indeed the wise, or sapiens, species of the homo genus, then it should be capable of not only uncovering quantum mechanics, but also self-regulating our most sordid and destructive instincts. We are animals, after all. If we are angels with a biological instinctual urge capable of sensing the presence of divinity, then alright, it must also be said that our death instinct can now also be fulfilled.