Far from Heaven

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

The full essay is at "Far from Heaven."

All That Heaven Allows

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

The full essay is at "All That Heaven Allows."

Pope Francis and the Traditionalist Opposition: Transcending Ideological Sides

Certainly by the close of 2023, a group of American Roman Catholic clerics, informally headed by Cardinal Raymond Burke (a traditionalist and legalist), were actively opposing Pope Francis. The problem for the members of the opposition faction was that, as traditionalists, they would take seriously the specific oath of obedience they had made to the pope and his successors. Lest such oaths be construed as only binding when they are convenient, which would effectively dissolve any binding, the traditionalist were at risk of being caught by their own hypocrisy. How to deal with such people? The pope had doubtless asked himself this very question on multiple occasions. How does enforcing the oath square with loving one’s detractors, even enemies? The American president Abraham Lincoln put his political rivals on his cabinet; should Pope Francis follow suit, or should he expunge his disloyal opposition and risk Burke’s charge of dictatorship? Does such a charge even make sense, however, given the oath of obedience? I submit that a Christian organization—any Christian organization—ought to be run not by the world’s methods, but according to a radically different kingdom, possible here and now, in the transformation of one’s own heart by serving, and even caring for, one’s detractors. Otherwise, a Christian organization is so in name only, and thus inherently hypocritical.

The full essay is at "Pope Francis and the Traditionalist Opposition."

On Calls for a Genocide of the Jews: Harvard vs. Yale

A university administration can be susceptible to creating an unlevel playing field in the name of truth but with political ideology in the driver’s seat.  Amid controversial political disputes wherein ideology is salient and tempers are flaring, free speech can be arbitrarily and prejudiciously delimited as academic freedom is eclipsed by ideological intolerance. More abstractly put, the ideology of an organization’s dominant coalition can be stultifying. During the fall 2023 semester at Yale, for example, I attended a lecture at which the lecturer, a faculty member, held his own topic hostage by deviating to an unfounded ideological presumption of systemic racism in Hollywood. The leap in his assumption evinced an ideological agenda capable of blocking even his intellectual reasoning, and the resulting irrational intolerance easily impaired the academic freedom of the students to even question the unfounded assumption or ask what had happened to the advertised topic. Whether the label is systemic racism or antisemitism, the highly-charged application thereof into a political dispute can be act as a weapon to weaken or block outright an unliked political position and thus unfairly limit free speech and even academic freedom. I have in mind here calls for a genocide of the Jews as Gaza ceasefire rallies were occurring on college campuses. Which is more fitting: university codes of conduct against hate-speech or the protection of free speech, which is vital to academic freedom and a university’s academic atmosphere? In other words, are such calls more accurately classified as hate-speech or political speech?

The full essay is at "Genocide of the Jews."

On the Role of the U.S. Supreme Court in Safeguarding the Peaceful Transfer of Power

In the E.U., the state governments and federal institutions can ask the European Court of Justice (the ECJ) for an opinion on a legal matter. This is rare in the U.S., though waiting for a dispute to winds its way formally through district and appellate courts may be unduly bureaucratic, not to mention lengthy. On December 11, 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the U.S. Supreme Court the ECJ’s counterpart, to decide whether the former U.S. president Donald Trump had any immunity from criminal prosecution of his involvement in the riot at the U.S. Capitol that interrupted the formal counting by a joint session of Congress of the Electoral College presidential ballots. The trial was set to begin the following March, and the question of the former president’s immunity had to be decided before the trial could begin. Hence the “extraordinary request,” which I contend should not be extraordinary given the time frame and the important role of the highest court in safeguarding American democracy from domestic threats.

The full essay is at "On the U.S. Supreme Court."

Avatar: The Way of Water

Sequel to Avatar (2009), Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) contains many parallels with the original film—perhaps too many. The most outlandish, yet philosophically robust, concerns the return of Steven Lang even though his character, the antagonist Col. Miles Quaritch, is killed by Neytiri at the end of the first film. Lang delivers some outstanding lines, so it is no wonder that David Cameron wanted to extend Lang’s character’s life. In so doing, Cameron invented the devise of a recombinant, a Na’vi artificially grown with the human Quaritch’s memories and personality implanted in the brain. This device is fundamentally different than a Na’vi avatar body in which a human brain is temporarily infused remotely by a human. In the case of Jake’s avatar body, which has both Na’vi and Jake’s DNA, there is no question that Jake’s avatar is not Jake himself. In the second film, the lines of identity blur between the human Miles Quaritch of the first film and the Na’vi Quaritch of the second. Cameron himself seems to be not of one mind on the question of whether the Na’vi Quaritch is the same “person” as the deceased human Quaritch. I contend that they are not, and, by implication, that a person’s self-identity, based on existing (or experience of oneself) does not rest solely with one’s memories and personality. In short, there is more to being a person. Before applying philosophy of personhood to the Quaritch characters in the films, I want to provide a context by briefly laying out the extent of parallels between the two films.

The full essay is at "Avatar: The Way of Water."

U.S. Anti-Trust Law: Applicable to Amazon?

In September, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and seventeen states sued Amazon on ant-trust grounds for restraining trade and excessively raising prices on third-party sellers and consumers. Three months later, a leaked internal memo revealed Amazon’s anti-labor strategies of buying off local politicians and gaining reputational capital through well-publicized charitable work. Such work, as an anti-union strategy, demonstrates that the very expression, corporate social responsibility, is an oxymoron, or at the very least a misnomer (i.e., misnamed); a more accurate, and thus revealing, label would be corporate marketing. One effect of the “responsibility” connotation is that companies such as Amazon with mammoth market power could effectively hide strategic efforts in restraint of trade, and thus curtailing competition. Combined with feckless anti-trust prosecution, the result is an American economy that has not lived up to Adam Smith’s theory wherein competition via the price mechanism is necessary for individual self-interests to have beneficial unintended consequences systemically and thus in terms of the public good.

The full essay is at "U.S. Anti-Trust Law: Amazon."

Time Magazine’s Person of the Year: Taylor Swift

Time magazine named the singer Taylor Swift as its person of the year for 2023. Such a force of nature were her stadium-filled concerts during that summer that they triggered economic booms in the respective host cities. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for example, hotel rooms went for as much as $2,500 downtown on the night of the concert. In terms of American culture, the analogy of gravity waves may fit. During an interview for television at her home (or one of her homes), Swift’s savvy business acumen was very evident; her marketing prowess was extraordinary. She even re-released her own songs, resulting in a huge financial windfall for what are really the same songs merely re-sung. It is not as if she had grown a new voice. Swift personifies American culture, whose “movers and shakers” seem “happy go lucky” on stage yet, behind the scenes, they tend to be lazar-focused on the business end. In short, considerable distance may exist between the societal image and the private business practitioner, and the ethical element can get lost in the shuffle and excitement. 

The full essay is at "Taylor Swift." 

Wall Street

Oliver Stone’s film, Wall Street (1987) was filmed in the midst of U.S. President Reagan’s push for financial deregulation. As a MBA student at the time, I volunteered to help a professor with his paper on financial deregulation. The theory behind why the NASD (the National Association of Securities Dealers) could self-regulate its members seemed solid enough to this idealistic youngster (i.e., me); I had yet to witness human nature in the field, and over decades. Similar to Marx overlooking the human need for economic compensation as an incentive to work on a daily basis (though I overlook it too in posting free essays online), I was blind to human nature in that I did not see that the NASD itself would protect even its most sordid members so to safeguard the reputation of the profession and, even more realistically, stick up for other “members” of the “club.” The Newtonian-like automatic mechanism whereby industry self-regulation would work was too beautiful to let human nature interfere. Similarly, when I worked in public accounting, I saw the “check mark” indicating that, “as per comptroller, discrepancy resolved,” was just one of several technical points in conducting an audit. The illusion of technique as somehow objective in the business world can shield practitioners from the ethical content. In case you’re wondering how this relates to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, the antagonist Gordon Gekko is the poster child for greed, and thus the reason why the public should not rely on industry self-regulation to police Wall Street. Bud Fox goes headlong into being Gekko’s insider-trading protégé, easily ignoring conscience personified by Lou Mannheim even though he and Bud work in the same brokerage office. In Freudian terms, the id easily defeats the superego. It’s not even a close fight.

The full essay is at "Wall Street."

Mary Magdalene

In the film, Mary Magdalene (2018), Mary Magdalene and the other disciples have two different interpretations of the Kingdom of God; these may be called the interior and the eschatological, respectively. The Kingdom of God is within, already and not yet fully realized, or not yet at all, as it will be ushered in by Christ in the Second Coming, which is yet to come. The film’s point of view is decidedly with Mary’s interior interpretation and against Peter’s revolutionary (i.e., against Roman oppression) eschatological take. After both sides fail to convince the other, Peter sidelines Mary in part also because of her gender, so she decides to preach and help people on her own. That the film does not portray Jesus and Mary as romantically involved is a smart move, for it sidelines a controversy that would otherwise distract the viewers from focusing on the question of the nature of the Kingdom of God. This focus is long overdue in Christianity, and is important because only one of the two interpretations—the eschatological—has dominated historically. The film is valuable theologically in that it gives the minority position—Mary’s interior interpretation—a voice. To be sure, Mary Magdalene is a controversial figure, so the choice of that character as a mouthpiece in the film for the minority theological position on the Kingdom is daring and not without its drawbacks. For one thing, she is a woman in a man’s world in the film. Outside of the film, in real life, a medieval pope denigrated her by erroneously identifying her as the prostitute in the Bible, and her reputation had to wait until the twentieth century for the Vatican to correct the error and label her as the Apostle to the Apostles. Finally, there is the Gnostic gospel, The Gospel of Philip, in which Jesus kisses her and the male disciples ask, “Why do you love her more than us?” That jealousy is present in the film, and plays a role in the dispute between Mary and Peter on the nature of the Kingdom. So, returning to the film, having her as the mouthpiece for a minority position that has not seen much light of day historically in Christianity puts the credibility of the interpretation at risk. Accordingly, it may not have much impact in shifting the emphasis away from the eschatological Kingdom in the religion, given the tremendous gravitas that any historical default enjoys.

The full essay is at "Mary Magdalene."

The Exorcist

One of the most iconic films of the horror-film genre, The Exorcist (1973) focuses on the duality of good and evil that the film’s director, William Friedkin, maintained is in a constant struggle in all of us. The dialogue between the two priests performing the exorcism on the one side and the Devil possessing Regan on the other not only reveal the duality, but also the essence of evil itself. Once this essence is grasped, interesting questions can be asked that are distinctly theological, as distinct from modernity’s trope of evil portrayed in terms of, and even reduced to, supernatural movements of physical objects. The decadent materialist version of the theological domain stems from modernity’s bias in favor of materialism and empiricism. In other words, highlighting supernatural physics as being foremost in representing the religious realm is how secularity sidelines religion, rather than how religion itself is. The bias of modern society is very clear in the film as the “professionals” go through alternative explanations first from the field of medicine, privileging the somatic (physical) and then the psychological domains of medicine. In other words, the narrative establishes (or reflects) a hierarchy of three qualitatively different levels of descending validity: the somatic is primary, and only then the psychological, and, if the first two do not furnish an explanation, then, and only then, are we to turn to the theological as metaphysically (i.e., supernaturally) real primarily shown by physical objects defying the laws of physics. Science, rather than religion, is thus still in the driver’s seat. The bias in favor of materialism is in the assumption that only after feasible hypotheses from modern medicine are nullified can theological explanations be considered (as credible). In this way, the film reflects the hegemony of materialism that has taken hold since the Enlightenment, and the relegation of the theological as “magical” supernaturalism, as in a bed levitating of objects flying around Regan’s bedroom. The essence of evil is instead interior. If religion is a matter of the heart, then how could evil be otherwise?

The full essay is at "The Exorcist."

Breathless

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

The full essay is at "Breathless."

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Diwali, or Deepavali, is one of the biggest festivals in India. More than a billion Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists in the world celebrate the festival of lights in which good triumphs over evil. “Despite its deep religious significance, Diwali today is also a cultural festival observed by people regardless of faith.”[1] In this regard, Diwali is like Christmas, which plenty of non-Christians celebrate as a day of giving complete with the secularized myth of Santa Claus, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Frosty the Snowman. To claim that Diwali is exclusively Hindu or Christmas is only a Christian holiday—and thus in resentment to ignore either holiday—violates the spirit that both share. The “Happy holidays” greeting is an oxymoron, given its underlying motive of resentment. Yet if this were the extent of human aggression, the world would be a much better place. The Indian documentary film, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), reveals much worse than the passive aggression of dismissing a national holiday as if it did not exist. The violence unjustifiably and wantonly inflicted by university police on students at several universities who are protesting caste discrimination and the politically partisan coup at the Film and Television Institute of India, goes beyond even the harm exacted by the discrimination by caste. A Diwali celebration is shown in the film, and this raises the question of whether we can of yet even assuming our species' “progress,” celebrate the victory of good over evil as long as human beings in power abuse their discretion with impunity.

The full essay is at "A Night of Knowing Nothing."

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1. Harmeet Kaur, “What to Know about Diwali, the Festival of Lights,” CNN.com, November 11, 2023.

Bladerunner

In 1982, when Bladerunner was released, 2019 could only have been a blink of an eye in people’s thoughts. Even the year 2001, the year in which the movie 2001: A Space Odessey (1968) takes place, must have seemed far off. Of course, the actual year was not so futuristic as to have a computer take over a space station; controversy over AI eclipsing the grasp of human control would not hit the societal mainstream for twenty years.  So, Ridley Scott can hardly be blamed for positing flying cars, and, even more astonishing, imposing the notion of a replicant, a being of genetic biomechanics that fuses computer and human characteristics, on 2019. Even acknowledging the tremendous impacts on society of inventions since the dawn of the twentieth century, the pace of technological change is slower than we imagine. In 2019, on the cusp of a global pandemic, flying (and self-driving) cars were just in the prototype/testing phase, and AI existed rudimentarily, and certainly not corporeally in human form. Scott missed the mark, probably by decades, though he got the trajectory right. Indeed, the film’s central issue—that of the threat of run-away, or “rebellious,” AI to humans—was reflected in the press especially during the first half of 2023. I contend, however, that the philosophical merit of the film lies not in political theory, but, rather, in what it means to be human. The nature of human understanding, self-awareness, an ethical sense, and matters of theological reflection are all brought to the forefront in the question of whether the replicants can and should be taken as human beings. In other words, it is the fusion of AI, or computers more generally, and biology that lies at the core of the film.

The full essay is at "Bladerunner."

The Bride and the Curfew

Our species is capable of horrific cruelty that defies any claim of having a conscience, and yet we can be willing to override our otherwise intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation for an ethical principle; that is to say, a person can choose to lay down one’s life for another person. Our biological nature—how we are hardwired—includes both vicious aggressiveness resembling that of chimps and yet the ability to “act on principle” in selfless love. In the Albanian film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), these two facets of human nature are on display, in direct contact as it were, such that the sheer breadth in human nature is made transparent. The two poles are personified by the Nazi military commander and Shpresa, the young Albanian woman living who assassinates a Nazi solder in her Nazi-occupied village.

The full essay is at "The Bride and the Curfew."