Passengers

In line with the films, The Sixth Sense (1999) and The Others (2001), Passengers (2008) centers on the (hypothetical) question of whether the walking dead have to be convinced that they are indeed dead rather than still living. In all of those films, and even Ghost (1990), the dead who stick around as ghosts rather than immediately pass on to another realm have something to come to terms with, or work out. The astute viewer of these films is apt to wonder whether in the story-worlds of the films, as well as in real life, all that is going on is really just in the dying brain of the dead person, which is the case in Jacob’s Ladder (1990). We know that a dying brain secretes a hallucinatory hormone. As for whether there is even an actual afterlife, such a question is still beyond our reach, at least before death. I contend that Passengers hinges on whether the entire movie takes place in Claire’s mind. The answer hinges on the nature of the existence of the other characters who are dead. If they have their own agendas rather than are around to help Claire come to terms with the fact that she is actually dead—that she was on the plane that crashed with no survivors—then the film posits the existence of ghosts in our world rather than just in dying brains. The issue, in short, is existential and metaphysical.

Passengers centers around Claire and her love interest, Eric. Initially, Claire thinks she is a therapist called in to do group counseling with the few survivors of the crash. The mystery of whether the airline is spying on the survivors and Claire to make sure than none of them reports that an engine had exploded, rather than that the crash was conveniently due to just pilot error, is actually a red herring or diversion designed to keep the film’s viewers from figuring out that Claire is really dead before she realizes it in the film. The strategy is ingenious.

Arkin seems to be an executive at the airline, but he is really the dead pilot of the plane. His agenda—what he is being held back from heaven or hell for—is to come to terms with the fact that he had not even been in the cockpit when the engine initially caught on fire; perhaps he could have put out the fire before the explosion. Talking with Claire, he keeps insisting that there was no explosion; it was just due to pilot error. We don’t suspect that the error was actually his own. His coming to terms with this does not fit with the reason why Claire is being “held back,” so his existence as a ghost cannot be just in her brain’s working out of her own death.

Similarly, Shannon, one of the crash survivors who is in Claire’s therapy group, does not help Claire. Rather, Shannon is obviously disturbed apart from anything going on with Claire, and it is only when the ghosts of her relatives come to her aid that she no longer attends the group; she has moved on. This is yet another “data point” supporting the theory that in the film’s story-world, ghosts do exist rather than merely being figments in dying brains.

Not every dead character adds support for the contention that ghosts do exist in the story-world, however. Toni, the excessively helpful older woman who lives in the same apartment building as Claire does, and Perry, who ostensibly is Claire’s boss, do not have their own agendas and thus can exist only in Claire’s brain, or as ghosts, as they are there to help her rather than come to terms with their own dilemmas. Toni is actually Claire’s aunt and Perry is one of her elementary-school teachers who have come back as ghosts (presumably from heaven) to help Claire realize that she is dead.

Eric is an interesting case; he has his own issues, but he knows he is dead and he patiently waits for Claire to come to the same realization about herself. His brazen recklessness in front of a car and then on the tracks in front of a train may be geared to helping Claire realize that he, and thus herself, are actually dead. “You had to realize it on your own,” he tells her as soon as she realizes that she had been a passenger too, and thus is dead. She is at peace as she goes sailing with him, and, as in Ghost, the screen turns to white, suggesting perhaps that her existence in the world has ceased or that her brain is finally completely dead. Whereas in Jacob’s Ladder, the soldier has been dead on a slab all along, the independent agendas of Arkin and Shannon are strong evidence that the dead do not exist in the film only in Claire’s mind.

Unlike “mind in a vat” solipsism, which is evinced in The Matrix (1999) albeit not involving dead people, the ontology of ghosts in the world, or in another world with some vague, tenuous ties to the world of the living is a metaphysical point that we continue to exist after the death of our respective bodies. The materialist death of the human brain is distinct from positing the reality (i.e. ontology) of ghosts, and the astute viewer of Passengers may pick up on this subterranean question after having watched the film. That the medium of film can trigger such a fundamental question is my underlying point as to the potential of film to “do” philosophy, and with a greater reach than any book on philosophy can have in a non-studious culture.

The Seventh Sign

Carl Schultz’s film, The Seventh Sign (1988), centers on the theological motif of the Second Coming, the end of the world when God’s divine Son, Jesus, returns to judge the living and even the dead. In the movie, Jesus returns as the wrath of the Father, which has already judged humanity as having been too sinful to escape God’s wrath. David Bannon, who is the returned Jesus in the film, is there to break the seven seals of the signs leading up to the end of the world, and to witness the end of humanity. Abby Quinn, the pregnant wife of Russell Quinn, asks David (an interesting name-choice, given that Jesus is of the House of David in the Gospel narratives) whether the chain (of signs) can be broken. How this question plays out in the film’s denouement is interesting from a theological standpoint. Less explicit, but no less theologically interesting, is what role humans can and should have in implementing God’s law. The film both heroizes and castigates our species.

The lamb of God now returned as God’s lion, the second person of the Trinity (i.e., the Logos incarnated), tells Abby that God has already judged against humanity due to too much killing of humans by humans. A quarter of a century into the twenty-first century, David would only have to point to the Russians in Ukraine and (especially) the Israelis in Gaza as more than enough support for God’s wrath. That the Israelis atop Israel’s government and military even enjoyed the mass killing, including by starvation, of hundreds of thousands while more than a million residents of Gaza were being made homeless (and even bombed in temporary camps), all in the Hebrew deity’s name could easily excite the deity’s wrath because the residents were not worshipping another deity. Jesus’s notion of God, which is primarily mercy because, as Paul and Augustine wrote, God is love—a statement that applies even to God’s love for people who intentionally offend and even reject the Trinity—would be, from at least my limited, human, all too human, perspective, utterly shocked by the atrocity unleased by the “chosen people” against innocent civilians as if they were subhuman. The Zionist biblical claim that Yahweh gives the lands of Gaza and the West Bank to the Hebrews translated into public policy evinces a category mistake in conflating religious narrative, or myth, and empirical public policy. Ignoring this category mistake, we could look at the Old Testament to find Yahweh punishing the Hebrews for willfully disobeying the deity and conclude that it would support a government’s military conquering and clearing out Israel. Ignoring the category mistake, more than one scriptural precedent could be found.

In the film, the presumptuousness of humans applying God’s law to other humans and even executing punishment is personified in Jimmy, a young adult who even has Downs Syndrome and yet thinks he is able to decide against his parents because they were brother and sister before he spread gasoline on them in bed and burned them alive. If such a severe punishment fits such a sin, then even more severe punishments surely befit greater sins. Clearly, the execution of Jimmy hardly qualifies as the death of the last martyr. That David (i.e., Jesus) comes to Jimmy’s cell and pats him on a shoulder is perhaps the filmmakers’ greatest blunder. Sympathy with a person with Downs Syndrome would be appropriate were one a victim, but Jimmy is no victim; in fact, the name Jimmy applied to an adult who has Downs Syndrome can be considered to be a pathetically patronizing puerile appellation.

The execution of the Word of God killer is one of the signs of the apocalypse: the last martyr. Therefore, Jimmy’s death is very significant theologically, for if he is not killed, the series of signs is interrupted and the world does not end. Jimmy’s excuse for killing both of his parents so grotesquely is, “It’s not murder if it is God’s punishment,” but if it is God’s punishment, and, notably not even specified in the Hebrew Bible, then it is presumptuous of any human to decide what specific punishment fits the violation of the sin, and then to go on as the executioner adds presumption on top of presumption. Jimmy’s certainty may even evince self-idolatry. Only a deity with Downs Syndrome would think such a heinous punishment fits a brother and sister who marry because they have fallen in love. To be sure, I am not advocating such a marriage. Rather, as Lyle and Erik Menendez found out in the twentieth century, not even having been psychologically abused and repeatedly molested by one’s own father justifies killing him, and those two brothers were better equipped cognitively than is Jimmy in the film.

That in history so many people have unilaterally presumed an entitlement to know and execute God’s law makes clear the serial, recurring lapse of which the human brain is all too prone commit, wherein theology (as in scriptures) is treated as the same type as are history, politics, and even science. Religion is a qualitatively different domain, so it is worse than unfortunate that the human mind seamlessly goes from a theological tenant to empirical criminal justice; presuming that a scripture is also a historical account (rather than making selective use of events in history) also evinces the cognitive vulnerability.  

It is no wonder that the proverbial “public square” in many societies has become secularized; the cleansing of religious activities and artifacts may have been due at least in part to too many people applying their religious beliefs in objectionable ways to other domains, such as politics and society. The core of the mental problem may be that the self-check function of the human mind tends to be turned off or dismissed as irrelevant in the domain of religion (and that of political ideology too). A brain could do worse than to periodically keep the need for self-checking in mind whenever anything religious (or political) is being thought. Furthermore, keeping in mind that theology is a distinct domain, or discipline, would be a good addition to a person’s spiritual exercises. Even if a deity is not finite, the human mind is, and thus the latter is inherently limited, and thus hardly omniscient. Epistemological humility applied to religious thinking can go a long way, given the salience of subjectivity, which includes ideology, inherent in human nature.

In the film, Jimmy connects a passage that he has read in the Old Testament with the fact that his parents deserved to be burned alive. In the Euthyphro, Socrates points out to Euthyphro that the prosecution of his father for having left a murderous slave in a ditch overnight (such that the slave died) does not count as piety to the gods; for one thing, the son has violated his duty to his father. That filial duty has not even registered indicates that Euthyphro is too certain that he knows what piety is. In the film, Jimmy commits the same sin, and yet is treated as a martyr even by Jesus.

Given the propensity of humans to implicitly lapse into wanting to be gods—a motive anathema to Augustine and yet urged on by Marsilio Fincino during the Renaissance—the motif of the individual hero in Christian theology may seem to be paradoxical, or else as saying that we can be awesomely good even in our weakness and yet we can be horrific creatures. The sheer distance between these two poles is astounding; human nature is indeed complex rather than isomorphic.

In the film, Jimmy, motivated by his religious beliefs that he misconstrues as facts, has burned his parents alive; his execution, as a martyr, even has apocalyptic significance. On the other end of the spectrum, Abby, who has attempted suicide, is in a position to bring life not only to her baby, but also to the whole world. Strength out of weakness is perhaps the motif of Christianity, epitomized theologically by God’s agape love in emptying Himself by incarnating in lowly flesh. God loves our species even before Creation by the unincarnated Logos of God, and such spontaneous, unconditional love is very, very different than any love that a human being can have and extend to others. So that God reverses judgment on the species because of the use of free-will by one person makes sense even though it can be asked why should humanity’s fate depend on just one person? In the film, that person is not David (i.e., Jesus in the Second Coming); rather, Abby is decisive, for her infant is to be stillborn without a soul unless she gives up her soul for her child.

Earlier in the film, before the birth, Abby asks David whether she can do anything to break the series of the apocalyptic seven signs. David points out that it would require her to have hope, and yet in attempting suicide she had none of that; she had given up not only on the world, but also her own life. “How can someone who cared so little for life give life to the world?”, David asks her rhetorically. She could stop the sign of the soulless birth of her child—souless because the hall of souls in heaven is now empty—but she would have to die for her child, and in so doing she would give humanity a second chance as her self-sacrifice would be enough for God to freely reverse His judgment on the sinful species.

“Will you die for him?” is the line that she hears repeatedly in dreams. The voice is that of Cartaphilus, the gatekeeper of Pontius Pilote fated to live until the Second Coming for having hit Jesus on His way to the Cross for going too slow (as if the Romans were justifiably in a hurry). In the film, Cartaphilus is Father Lucci, the Roman Catholic priest who shoots Jimmy before the execution to make sure that he dies so the series of signs does not end part-way because the last martyr is not martyred. Lucci is in a hurry to die because he has become tired of living for so long; death is the only redemption that he can have, for he is not sorry for having struck the definitive, soteriological martyr whose death is believed by Christians to be redemptive. Yet apparently not enough, for just after Abby declares while giving birth that she will die for him—her soulless baby—Jesus aka David Bannon enters the operating room and declares “The hall of souls is full again. It was you, Abby, with hope enough for the whole world.” He addresses Abby’s young Jewish friend, who is presumably now Christian, “Remember it all, write it down, tell it, so people will use the chance she has given them.” Out of her weakness—her utter lack of hope—she has mustered enough hope to give humanity another chance. 

With the twentieth century as the bloodiest century, to be followed by so many killings of innocent people in Ukraine and Gaza after two decades in the next century, it is hard to argue that the Christian message has made much of a difference. As beautiful as “strength out of weakness” is, too many people still value “might makes right.” So, I think the film hits a nerve in that a second chance is needed; the Christian Passion Story has not been sufficient to change how people, especially those in power, behave. The high are not made low. Corporate CEOs give only lip-service to “servant leadership.” Too many universities in the U.S., even private elite ones, had by 2025 been intentionally made into virtual police-states, with Yale even inviting the FBI in to train the university’s private police force in counter-terrorism tactics that could used on even paying students. Even university administrations can be seen as being visibly backed up ultimately by their own hired guns. But it is perhaps the engineered genocide of Gazans for two years without the world coming to their rescue that damns the species. 

At the very least, the notion that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ had redeemed the species could be viewed as having been debunked (and rejected) by the species as a whole, for the value in kindness and compassionate help being directed to enemies clearly has not taken hold of humanity. On an interpersonal level, responding compassionately to human needs of people whom a person dislikes or are disliked by the person is so rare that we can declare after two-thousand years that Jesus’s message has been de facto rejected by the species as a whole even if the preachment has made a dent in some people. The leitmotif of the film, that our species is in need of a second chance, is as much an indictment on historical Christianity as it is of our species. Perhaps with less hero-worship and more attention to the substance what it takes to enter the Kingdom of God before physical death, our species could have that second chance.

Flight

With utility and consequences valued so much in Western society at least as of 2012, when the film, Flight, was released, the story-world of the film may seem odd in that doing what’s right comes out on top, even at the expense of knowingly losing benefits and incurring costs personally. In other words, deciding on the basis of conscience even at the expense of good consequences for oneself is possible even in a culture in which “saving one’s skin” rather than doing what is right is the norm. By immersing viewers in a story-world, a narrative with well-developed characters can highlight a societal blind-spot, and thus potentially result in a better society in which people make the effort to re-value their ethical values to the extent that their dominant values support consequentialism above standing on principle even though bad consequences for oneself can be anticipated. In the film, 96 out of 102 of the people on board survive the plane crash even though the metal bird had been in an uncontrolled vertical fall from 30,000 feet. How could the captain not be seen as a hero? If all that matters are results, 96 out of 102 is not bad at all, and being able to get out of a dive even as the tail stabilizer keeps pointing the plane downward is extraordinary.

The captain, together with one of the stewardesses, had been drinking alcohol and sniffing cocaine not only the night before the flight, but also within a few hours of take-off—on the theory that the cocaine would counter the drunkenness and thus render his brain fit to fly. Whip Whitaker is an active alcoholic and drug addict, and yet he had somehow managed to reach the rank of captain. His extraordinary flying techniques tell us that he is a very experienced pilot, and society, like the ancient Greeks, values excellence even as being a virtue in itself. In a flight simulator after the crash, no other pilot could safely land the plane, and yet Whitaker has done just that, in an open field—even having managed to keep the plane in the air through a populated area. So the ethics of him being drunk and high may seem to be moot, given his skill in being able to make up for any negative impacts. Even if there are no such impacts, there is concern that he was drinking vodka even during the flight. It is not just a matter of breaking rules. That he could have put the passengers’ lives in jeopardy may be enough to find him ethically culpable.

I contend that the captain did indeed contribute to the mechanical failure of the vertical stabilizer in the plane’s tail section, and thus to the crash itself. Although not causally related, that he slips on the first step of outdoor stairs, admittedly in the rain, on his way to the plane’s main door tells us that he is not as smooth as he pretends to be. More significantly, to get out of the admittedly severe turbulence while climbing to 9000 feet, he accelerates the plane faster than it should go in turbulence, and then just before “punching through” to smooth air, he accelerates even more, causing passengers to involuntarily lean forward in their seats. The ingested cocaine may be behind his excitement while the plane is climbing while still in the very rough air. Everyone else is in fear, but he is saying, “Ride em cowboy!” He is definitely high in more than one sense of the word. Pushing the plane beyond its mechanical limits may very likely be why the vital screw in the vertical stabilizer broke when the plane was stable at cruising altitude. So the fact that he was high (and drunk) may be very relevant indeed to why even just six people died (and others, including the copilot, were seriously injured).

The series of flying maneuvers that the caption puts into effect during the free-fall is extraordinary; even the co-pilot is not able to grasp why they could work, but they do. The result is an inverted, or upside-down plane flying at a low altitude horizontally until the captain has the copilot reverse to maneuvers to roll the plane around so it can land in a field. This reverse roll is excellent, and the captain even gets the pitch of the plane right. The film can be understood as intentionally presenting the viewers with an ethical problem wherein the captain’s violation of his duty to fly sober and his related choice to fly the ascending plane faster than its limit in turbulence, which, after all, was only severe for a moment and otherwise merely rough may have stressed the vertical stabilizer in the tail to the point of breaking are to be weighed against his masterful flying out of a dive and the consequence of only six people onboard dying. It is admittedly very difficult even for an ethicist to weigh such different factors, especially because good consequences are being put in relation to violating an important ethical duty for pilots. It is not as though religious belief can obviate coming to a verdict in terms of ethics. For centuries at least, the assumption that a person must be religious to be moral held up, though with the rise of secularity and humanism in the twentieth century in the West, ethics has to be taken seriously in itself.

The attitude of the film towards religion is equivocal. On the one hand, when a wing slices a church steeple in half, both the captain and the copilot seem to take the event as a sign having more meaning than would merely ruining part of a structure. That the reactions of both pilots are shown in slow motion suggests that a statement is being made about religion is intended by the filmmakers. In risking the lives of all 102 souls on board by drinking and snorting cocaine not only the night before, but also a few hours before take-off, Captain Whitaker is, as it were, offending the deity. The serious undertone of this is in contrast to the way in which organized religion is viewed through the film’s eyes. After the crash, the copilot, whose legs are crushed so he will never walk (or be able to fly) again, is at first furious with Whitaker, whose drinking the copilot had smelled before takeoff. Strangely, the copilot apparently forgives the captain and even asks him to pray in the hospital room along with the copilot’s wife. The religiosity seems too fake to be genuine; in fact, the copilot is probably using religion to repress his anger at the captain. Also after the crash, we are informed that the small group of Christians who had been outside their church whose steeple was smashed by the plane have been meeting outside every Sunday since that eventful day with the implication being that the field or the parishioners at the field has some kind of ongoing religious significance; the church itself is fine even though it is missing a steeple.

At the end of the film, Captain Whitaker is testifying before aviation regulators on the crash. Even though he is praised for his flying talent and his statement that he had not been drinking or inhaling cocaine was believed even by the chairwoman, he cannot bring himself morally to state that one of the stewardesses who died in the crash must have been coming to work intoxicated. Unknown to the pilot, that stewardess lost her life because she had unbuckled herself from her chair during the inverted part of the flight to save a boy who had fallen to the ceiling of the cabin. She, rather than the copilot or the church-goers who keep returning to the field to worship, represent genuine Christianity of the heart by evincing selfless compassion as if it were a basic human instinct. Whitaker has compassion for her memory and reputation and is thus finally willing to stand on moral principle even though he knows that the consequences will include years in prison.

Consequences, especially those that are beneficial to oneself, do not rule ethics; there are normative principles worth putting before positive consequences. The worth of such principles does not come from merely their function as a constraint on good consequences, for that would be a reduction to functionality. Even the captain’s excellent flying out of a vertical dive (after having flied badly in exceeding the plane’s speed limit for turbulence) does not outweigh even for him the worth of the ethical principle of telling the truth, especially in owning up to one’s own malfeasance and negligence. Film can indeed place an audience in an ethical quandary from which much can be learned as well as experienced about ethical theory. In the present case, deontology (e.g., duty) is not merely a constraint on how much benefit can be ethically sought and enjoyed.

The Aryan Couple

The matter of group-identity is salient in the film, The Aryan Couple (2004), which actually centers around two couples: Joseph and Rachel Krauzenberg, and Hans and Ingrid Vassman. The Krauzenbergs contract with Himmler, the man whom in Nazi Germany was tasked with riding the Reich of its Jewish population, to exchange the Krauzenbergs’ asset-rich and sprawling conglomerate for safe passage of the entire Krauzenberg family out of Germany to Palestine instead of being sent to a concentration camp. Joseph and Rachel are Germans, and yet, quite artificially, they refer to Germans in the third person, and to themselves as Jews. It is precisely this error that I submit may have contributed historically to the ostracism of the Jews in Germany even before Hitler’s rise to power, hence contributing to setting the stage for a final, horrific solution. Film can thus be used to widen people’s thinking on historical and political events, and thus play a deeper role than merely to entertain.

Joseph Krauzenberg is a good man; he is good to his employees and, moreover, is very empathetic as seen in his facial expressions, especially his eyes, which Martin Landau uses expertly to do a significant amount of his acting in the role of the rich industrialist whose assets Himmler is so motivated to get. “Even Hitler cannot override my orders,” he brags at one point regarding his guarantee of safe passage. Himmler’s concern is rather than Eichmann might ignore that order and send the entire Krauzenberg family, which includes extended relatives, to Auschwitz.

In spite of the appearance of orders being valued by Nazi officials, that many were essentially thugs accounts for the fact that a significant abuse of discretion even in violation of orders was not uncommon. In fact, Eichmann was convicted in a court in Israel in 1961 because he had violated an order by Himmler in sending many Jews in Hungary on a march to a camp in Poland; Eichmann’s defense that he was just following orders thus blew up in his face.

So, in the film, Himmler even orders Eichmann to coffee after the dinner at the Krauzenbergs’ art-filled mansion so to assure the couple that Eichmann would indeed be following Himmler’s order of safe passage. Cleverly, Joseph Krauzenberg negotiated with Himmler a clause that gold would be transferred to Himmler only once the Krauzenberg family has set foot on Swiss soil; otherwise, it would be very naïve to think that the Nazis would allow the Krauzenbergs to fly to Switzerland once Joseph and Rachel have signed the contract. Even the other couple in the film, Hans and Ingrid Vassman, the two remaining household servants of the Krauzenbergs, fear remaining in Germany after the dinner in which Himmler is a guest. The Vassmans are actually Jews even though Rachel believes them to be Aryans. It is precisely the dialogue between that couple and Rachel that can reveal so much about the salience of group-identities in Europe.

Even though Rachel tells Hans and Ingrid that she feels that they have shown love to the elder couple, Rachel maintains a mental wall between herself and the two Aryans until Ingrid tells Rachel and Joseph that she and Hans are actually Jewish and want to go to Palestine with the Krauzenberg family. At once, Rachel literally embraces Ingrid. That both couples are German is ignored especially by the Krauzenbergs, who incessantly refer to Germans as if they were another tribe. Rachel refers to the Vassmans both as Aryans and as Germans, which is strange because Joseph and Rachel are also German. In this mix, nationality, cultural identity, and even religion are conflated as if, for example, a cultural identity excludes a nationality. Making such vagrant category mistakes can be accounted for by ideology, and even as a manifestation of passive aggression. Rachel even makes light of one of her own category mistakes by referring to Hans as her “little Nazi,” as if “German” and “Nazi” were synonymous and, moreover, both mutually exclusive with “Jewish.” It would have been strange to find a Jewish Nazi, but I contend that Jews born and raised in Germany were Germans.

When I was a student at Yale, a woman I dated said once that she was a Jew who happened to be an American. She was born and raised in Pittsburgh, so she did not just happen to be an American. Her subordination of her nationality struck me as artificial. I would never say I’m a Midwesterner who happens to be an American even though I identify culturally as a Midwesterner. Were I to go around referring to Americans in the third persons, my compatriots would rightly take offence. I’m not one of you, I would be saying, in effect, even though I am. My passive aggression—a virtual slap in the face—would be palpable. Similarly, Germans who happened to be Jews in the first half of the twentieth century but referred to Germans in a way that excluded themselves even while they remained in Germany would not exactly be making friends and influencing people on the street. In fact, other Germans would rightly take offence. In short, the arbitrary decision to manifest passive aggression can trigger anger and even ostracism in people who resent the arbitrary self-exclusion from being a compatriot.

In the film, Rachel’s mentality belies her statement to Hans and Ingrid, “You’re Germans and I’m a Jew, but above all we’re all human.” Earlier, Rachel distinguished Aryans from Jews; unlike the German-Jewish mutually exclusive distinction, Aryan and Jew are indeed mutually exclusive terms because they are on the same dimension, or category, whereas German and Jew pertain to different categories and are thus not mutually exclusive. Were a Hispanic person, or a Catholic person, born, raised and still living in Chicago, Illinois to refer to Americans in the third person would sound strange to an American; we would even wonder if such a person were not of sound mind, and yet in the film, Rachel’s category mistakes are accepted by the other characters as if normal rather than as manifestations of passive aggression. The lesson is perhaps that when we act out in passive aggression, we should not be completely surprised when other people cease at the very least to be polite to us. From the standpoint of us all being human beings, the group-identities that we foist on each other as virtual walls of separation are artificial at best. Accordingly, such identities are best (and most accurately) viewed in relative terms rather than being absolutes. The change in Rachel’s feelings and behavior toward the Vassman couple once she is informed that they are Jewish rather than Aryan is so palpable that Rachel’s earlier claim, “we are all human,” rings hollow. 

The German philosopher, Schopenhauer, claimed that we are all of the One, and thus we should be compassionate to everyone rather than, as per Cicero’s ethic, show concentric concern first for friends and family, and then, to a lessor degree, to people further out. That Rachel felt love from the Vassmans should be enough for her and Joseph to help the Vassmans to join the family in Switzerland; being of the same group-identity should not matter, and that it does rings of sheer artifice. So much hatred has spewed through history as a result of people treating group-identity as an absolute. The genocides in Nazi Germany and, nearly a century later, in Gaza, speak to how horrible human beings can be because “group-identity” qua absolute can so easily lead to the perception that people outside one’s own group is subhuman and thus can be tortured and killed in even the most grievous ways.

Mary

The film, Mary (2024), is pregnant with intimations of the theological implications of her unborn and then newly born son, Jesus. That story is of course well-known grace á the Gospels, and the theology of agape love associated with that faith narrative is at least available through the writings of Paul and many later Christian theologians. What we know of Mary is much less, given that her role in the Gospels is not central even though the heavy title, Mother of God, has been applied to her without of course implying that she is the source of God. The film, like the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church has done, endeavors to “evolve the myth” by adding to Mary’s story even though the additions are not meant to be taken as seriously as, for example, the Catholic doctrine that Mary is assumed bodily into heaven. The movie comes closest to the magisterium in suggesting that Mary’s birth is miraculous; the magisterium holds that Mary is born without sin, and that Jesus inherited this because of the Incarnation (i.e. God, rather than Joseph, impregnates Mary). Suffice it to say that the perception of myth as static is the exception rather than rule; it is natural for the human mind to work with myths such that they can evolve rather than take them as given in a final form or extent. This is not to say that we should focus on the faith narratives as if they were ends in themselves and thus unalterable; rather, as the film demonstrates, religious transcendence is of greater value.

I contend that the film does a bad job of adding events to Mary’s life—filling in gaps, as it were—but the film does a good job of evolving her spirituality, or spiritual strength, and an even better job at intimating the nature of religious or spiritual transcendence. The failure, I suspect, have more to do with wanting to titillate audiences with fight scenes and even special effects, such as when Mary and Joseph ride a horse through a wall of fire to escape a fight scene. As there is no hint if a miracle, the entire scene adds nothing theologically and thus it can be easily tossed. Similarly, killing off Mary’s father in yet another fight scene adds nothing theologically and can thus be written off as another appeasement to keep movie-goers entertained by action and drama. Mary’s years spent growing up in the Temple scrubbing floors and presumably being educated are more useful, however, because her stint there cements Mary’s association with religion, which in turn helps support her as a major, though not the central, character in the Gospels. In this way, the film can be considered to serve as a foundation, or basement, for the Gospel narratives, which of course focus on Jesus, the Christ-Messiah.

The principal ways in which the film evolves the story by providing background to the Gospels are subtle and few. The first does not even involve any lines. Mary’s spiritual strength can be seen literally in how she maintains eye-contact when she comes face to face with Herod. He is the one who looks away; she does not. The implication stated by one of Herod’s guards is that Mary has “special powers,” and is thus a threat. The assumption is antiquated in the modern world; we would say Mary has fortitude. More than once in the film, she does not cave into the demon who is trying to tempt her. Her spiritual—not just ethical!—strength is evinced in her standing up to evil entities, human and otherwise. This hints at Jesus’s line to Pontius Pilote, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” Mary has that same faith, so there is a spiritual connection between mother and son. Considering all the antagonists facing Mary in the film, her faith that her role in the saga by which love will conquer the world by means of her son will succeed is truly amazing.

That faith is explicitly thought by Mary as the last line in the film. “But in the end, love will save the world.” Love will prevail. That may sound strange to people living in 2024, given the horrendous and large-scale aggression that were still being unleashed by certain governments, which of course are comprised of human beings with power. Mary’s faith may seem woefully or downright utopian. In the film, Mary believes that her faith that love will save the world has a lot to do with the fact that she chose her son just as God chose Mary to bear Jesus, and she would make the same choice even in that last scene after hearing a prophesy in the Temple from an old man. Holding baby Jesus in his hands, the man tells Mary and Joseph, “This child is destined to cause the fall and rise of many in Israel, and he will be opposed, and the sword will pierce your soul, Mary, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.” Even in spite of this future, Mary says, in effect, bring it on; the goal is worth it.

Parsing the prophet’s statement can provide us with the theological meat of the film. The haughty will be brought low by Jesus’s preachments and example of self-less, humble love, whereas the presumed lowly yet humble Hebrews of pure hearts will no longer be presumed to be sick or sinful (or both). It is easy to grasp that the sword refers to Mary watching Jesus’s excruciating death on a cross and having to mourn the death of a son; it is more difficult to understand what is meant by the sword that will pierce Mary’s soul being necessary “so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.” Christians watching the film may expect something like, “so that many will be saved.” Revealing the thoughts of many people whose thoughts were presumably hidden is a curious expression. Is the revealing of the thoughts of many part of, or necessary for, love to save the world? At its conclusion, the film raises an interesting puzzle that, in pertaining to the future, presumably has to do with the content of the Gospel narratives, including Jesus’s preachments and life. In the Gospels, does he or his actions facilitate the revealing of the thoughts of people? What thoughts, and of whom?

It is perhaps in the nature of religious truth that it is not in a film’s action scenes, but like the breeze that passed by Ezekiel on the mountain—a breeze that eludes the grasp of our finite fingers. Distinctly religious transcendence is not exhausted within the limits of human cognition, perception, or sensibility (emotion), so wrote Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth century. The film is perhaps most of value in affording us an experiential glimpse of such transcendence as we try innately to figure out the prophesy.

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?

Wall-E

In the film, Wall-E (2008), a robot “falls in love” with another, whose anthropomorphic pronoun is she/her rather than it as is fitting for a machine. As a robot does not have genitalia, neither the masculine or feminine single pronoun applies, and because a robot is an entity, the plural pronouns also do not apply. Word-games aside, the more substantive and interesting matter of whether a robot, and even AI (i.e., machine learning), can (or could potentially) understand the phenomenological experience of falling in love, and, whether yes or no, be able beyond mere prediction to match couples who would fall in love were they to meet. A college course on these questions, especially with relevant films including Wall-E and The Matrix being assigned, would be incredibly popular and capable of tremendous mind-stretching. 

The full essay is at "AI on Falling in Love."