The medium of film has an
amazing ability to trigger emotions, even very strong ones, through dialogue,
narrative, cinematography and sound. The suspension of disbelief, if achieved,
renders the impact all the more complete. Dread, for example, can be conjured
up even with another yet different emotion, such as joy, even in the same song.
The medium is also capable of stimulating thought not only as viewers attempt
to figure out unnecessarily convoluted plots, but also thinking more abstractly
in philosophical or theological terms. Such abstractions, besides being implicitly
or explicitly treated in the narrative, extend beyond the confines of a
narrative and its story-world. “Life and death” is such a theme, as is whether the
human soul is immortal. Less tantalizing, though arguably just as important for
typically being overlooked, philosophy of mind (and philosophy of psychology),
for which a strange, incomprehensible plotline is by no means requisite or even
constructive, stands as a rich reservoir for filmmakers. Even though the
question of life and death is central to the film, Silent
Night (2021), which interestingly was made during the
global coronavirus pandemic—there is even a “Covid Supervisor” listed in the
credits!—a seldom-recognized vulnerability innate to the human mind may deserve
top billing in that film. The group-think evinced by the group of friends at
the house on Christmas Eve and perhaps a wider mass-hysteria only touches the
surface of the problem in terms of the human mind. I contend that the
star-attraction in the Christmas film rightly goes to the human mind’s vulnerability
to presumption to the assumption of infallibility (and susceptibility to
group-think cognitively and as in terms of power). In the context of a group’s suicide pact, critical
thinking in the sense of critiquing whatever assumptions are being held is so
very important, yet it is only evinced by Art, a young boy, who is under
unrelenting pressure especially from his parents to take a fatal pill before a “cloud”
of toxic, climate-changed gases hits.
The full essay is at "Silent Night."
