The Reader (2008), with some remarks on Pleasantville (1998)

Related theme:

The contrast between the good man
and good citizen.

This post is unusually long, as I treat the film as a vehicle which makes possible a discussion of political and moral themes going back to the time of Homer. The film, when viewed in a certain way, can motivate insight into fundamental intellectual and spiritual problems in American and Western civilization today. To make skimming possible, I have bolded some of the main points.

One of the things that makes 'The Reader' a film worth discussing is the way in which it brings out the contrast between good and bad stance taking. On one level the film is about a woman who lacks any ethics or compassion for Jewish prisoners. But it turns out that the "Nazitime" (Nazizeit), as Germans call this period, provides us with an ability to shed light on what I take to be the distinguishing moral trait of Western civilization. This trait involves proper moral stance taking. It turns out that the way we want ourselves to respond to moral issues in a particular way is not limited to behavior which is easily recognized as atrocious or depraved. The more fundamental issue is whether, prior to any particular moral claim, we take moral stance taking itself seriously or not. It is precisely for the reason that most Western intellectuals today think they are not supposed to take moral stances towards their own thinking about moral issues that Western and American civilization is in crisis. This is in contrast to the assumption that our moral-spiritual crises owes to poor understanding of the relevant issues simply, or spiritual shallowness.  It turns out that the ground of the crises in which we collectively find ourselves exists prior to any particular moral value. The Reader makes this distinction nicely.

Just as the most important claim is not that the antagonist in 'The Reader' is a bad woman because she was cruel, it does not make sense to call intellectuals and artists in our time bad or immoral for the reason that they may reject Western philosophy as a basis our commonly held heritage. The problem is not first and foremost that the majority of our thinkers today either do not understand the sources of our common moral-spiritual values or that they actively reject them. The problem is more fundamental. The problem is that the majority of our intellectuals in and out of academia hold that we are supposed to be neutral towards moral and spiritual issues. The issue goes much deeper than the simple rejection of teleological world views.

If I am correct in arguing that the widespread rejection of moral stance taking among our intellectual class - as opposed to the rejection of moral-spiritual values - constitutes a crisis of civilization, such films as 'The Reader' play a role in helping show us the way back to a life-sustaining civilization. Somewhat ironically, while the majority of our intellectual class as well as film critics pay scant attention to the serious moral and spiritual issues of our time, many writers in Hollywood are today paying attention to just such issues. I cannot recall seeing a film review or hearing a talk on a campus which recognizes the morally and spiritually serious themes many films in recent times are dealing with. How are we to account for this underwhelming silence in the face of a clear pattern of artistic receptivity to moral-spiritual phenomena?  

My first reason for claiming that 'The Reader' makes moral stance taking a central theme is the manner in which it makes reference to Homer's time, around 1000 BC. The significance of including Homer in the script and book goes beyond anything merely literary or romantic. The significance of having Homer in the context of a story about a woman who felt she was doing her duty by letting the prisoners in a church die during a fire is that the basis of moral decision making used by the prison guard in question is found in Homer. And the Homeric basis of making moral judgment in general and judgments about justice more exactly is a pre-cursor to Western civilization. That is to say, to understand Plato and Jesus as founders of Western moral philosophy, we have to understand that what came prior to both was a culture in which someone is judged good simply and solely on the basis of whether or not they fulfilled their expected function. To call someone "good" in Homer's time is as if we were to call a robot "good" in our time. The reason we would not call a robot "good" in a moral sense is because it has no consciousness, and is therefore unable to take a stance towards what it does. A robot has no inner intention towards a moral ideal. It simply does what it does, and that is all. To understand Western moral philosophy, then, one must understand that it developed in part in reaction to a culture in which the individual does not take moral stances, but simply does or does not fulfill their function in society.

Put another way, we do not understand where Christian or Greek moral philosophy comes from without understanding Homer. In"A Short History of Ethics", Alisdair MacIntyre explains: "The society reflected in the Homeric poems is one in which the most important judgments that can be made about a man concern the way in which he performs his assigned social function". To be a good man in Homer's time, one must simply fulfill their allotted social function. A king, for example, is good simply by virtue of acting in a way expected of a king. A king is not good because he has a set of qualities apart from the fulfillment of his function in the way we would think of moral qualities today. An individual in Homer's time is not good because he has a disposition to behave in a certain way. Rather, he is good if and only if he does behave in a certain way. By contrast, after Plato and Jesus, we will not base our judgment of someone as "good" on whether or not they fulfill a particular external act, but on the basis of whether or not they have an inner orientation towards qualities we will want to see cultivated in a person or our society. Stated another way, we will want to see that the individual cares about values we collectively want them to care about. 'Caring' is perhaps the most important moral quality we want to see in a person we call 'good' after Plato and Jesus. In other words, we will want a person to care about qualities we have judged to make public and private life good. In Christian language, this inner orientation is called "heart", and when we say that the "heart" is what counts morally and spiritually, we are saying that we want an individual to have a certain kind of inner orientation or intention which is not solely grounded intellectually nor solely based on feeling. Jesuits and other religious refer to this ground of a good life as the "affects". So for example, I may have an affective sense of compassion for another person when they are in trouble, and this sense is made up both of a feeling of empathy for another person as well as an intellectual judgment that the situation is unjust or wrong and needs to be responded to with both a particular intent as well as corresponding action.

Getting back to the Homeric context which comes prior to the transition to philosophy in Plato's time:  As time goes by after 1000 BC, the social and political context in which Homeric judgments about what counted as good and bad social behavior breaks down. What happens practically when this breakdown occurs? We can gain insight into this by comparing the breakdown in the basis of moral judgment between Homer's and Plato's time to the breakdown in the American farm economy in the 20th century.  Imagine a farm family which has been in farming for a hundred or more years. So long as the social, political and economic context is conducive to farming, each new generation can continue to farm without thinking much about it. The relevant factor here is how each new generation of sons experiences their adoption of their father's way of making a living. When the average young person grows up in this environment he will go into farming without much thought given to it. The more isolated he is from other ways of life is he less likely to deeply question what he will do with his life. He simply plans that he will farm, and that's it. What is relevant here for our purposes is that the typical son in a farm family does not make use of moral, let alone spiritual concepts, to arrive at the decision as to how he will live his life. In common parlance, he does not ask: "What should I do with my life", and if he does, it is in such a superficial way as to have little or no moral or spiritual meaning as Platonic and Christian culture will understand it. The stress for him is on doing what he is expected to do or on "what has always been done". What is missing here is moral language as understood after Plato's time and the arrival of Christianity. To stress the relevant modal verbs, he will simply do what he does, never saying things like "I should do this or that or I should not do this or that".

This microcosm of the larger American farm economy prior to the 1950s is relatively Homeric in its use of moral judgment. One judges themselves and others as good by virtue of fulfilling their allotted social function simply, nothing more. This is precisely the basis of moral judgment the antagonist in The Reader is making use of.  And this is the precisely the basis of moral judgment Plato will attempt to undermine and transcend, in particular in The Republic. This can be said even more so of Jesus. For both Socrates and Jesus, calling a person "good" will not be based first and foremost on external behavior, e.g. as an example which brings the relevant point out sharply, fulfillment of duty in Nazi Germany, but on having an inner stance to seek and care about what we can loosely refer to as goodness and a Christian, not Greek, notion of justice. "Goodness" loosely stated is a quality which pervades a person, a 'person' understood as a unity, and which enables him to fulfill his purpose not as a member of a society but as a human being first and foremost. The rejection by most Western intellectuals of a teleological conception of the universe, again, is more an effect than a cause of the rejection of moral stance taking today. The paradigm animating the choice of subject matter for our intellectuals is not one which leads their consciousness to get into a relationship to the deeper ends of human existence. What this means is that the majority of work in the humanities and social sciences today exclude the core condition of Western values: caring about the good. For the good is a kind of object which to be meaningful must be subjectively, or inwardly, related to. No seeking or striving is possible when I adopt the stance that I must be strictly neutral towards subject matter I choose to pay attention to. But this approach inexorably leads to a robotic kind of living. And this is just what the main character in the film 'The Reader' seemed to be: robotic towards all moral values.

Why is it that today we more often observe writers underscoring a problem when individuals define themselves as "good" based on purely external behavior? This is particularly a theme in science fiction. It is not a coincidence that science fiction film makes use of robots, for robots are uniquely suited to evoking the relevant moral and philosophical issues. A robot is not able to take a stance towards its actions, for it has no consciousness. And what we want to say about the typical Nazi prisoner guard is that they have no conscience. But conscience requires first and foremost not a particular moral code, but a conscious stance-taking towards stance taking. Having a conscience in the West requires that I tell myself I should take this or that stance towards this or that moral value. In this sense, Western philosophy can be said to begin with awakening a consciousness, following by the experience of conscience. And it is here where I want to suggest that we can compare the moral failing of the antagonist in 'The Reader' to the civilizational crisis experienced daily in most Western humanities and social science classes and op-ed pages. There is a dearth of the proper kind of stance taking. The problem is not that our intellectuals have largely adopted the scientific method and applied it to the human realm, e.g. resulting in psychological reductionism. The problem is that they have internalized the spirit of the scientific methodology; of Descartes, and made this criterion the "heart" of their stance taking as it regards their choice of field of study! Insofar as a thinker tells himself they he can only discuss things which are amenable to neutral description, he ends up adopting no relation to moral value; to the Good; to Justice, in any substantive sense! He ends up functioning in a way too close to the Homeric 'good citizen' or a robot.

Pleasantville as a context of Homeric morality

We can also make use of the film 'Pleasantville' to gain insight here. This movie portrays a small community with a Homeric basis of moral judgment. What is most noticeable about Pleasantville is that the inhabitants just do what they do. They do not think about what they do. Stated in more contemporary language which makes the relevant point better: they lack introspection. They do not have any inner intention towards what they do other than in relation to the external fact of fulfillment of assigned duty. They do not, in short, have a Platonic or Christian basis of moral judgment, where this philosophy is integral to a way of life prescribed by both Plato and Jesus.

The story of 'Pleasantille' involves two youngsters entering a small town. When the youngsters (Reese Witherspoon and Toby Maguire) appear in the town of Pleasantville, the citizens don't know what to make of them. These two teenagers do not simply do what all the rest do. The effect of seeing the two teens do things differently is to motivate the citizens of the town to begin asking themselves why they do what they do and why they shouldn't do it another way. The use of teens here follows Plato's use of young people as those most open to Socratic seeking. More generally, the film reflects the 'Allegory of the Cave' in Plato's Republic. In this story, Plato portrays a single individual who has been in a cave all his life. At some point he is forced to stand up and turn around. He then sees that what he assumed to be true is not be true in the way or for the reason he thought it was. He can then ask the question that is at the basis of Western moral and spiritual transformation: What should I do with my life? How should I live my life? As soon as one asks this kind of question, he is beginning to take the kind of stance towards his existence that is called forth by mainstream Western philosophers and prophets. The question "What should I do with my life" is usually experienced very differently than the question: What do I do to fill my expected function in society? While the teens in Pleasantville are always aware of the primacy of the question "What should I do in this situation", the former question, "What do I do to fulfill my externally expected role", is the only one the ice-cream server in Pleasantville or Cypher in the Matrix know to ask. More importantly as regards antagonist in 'The Reader': These individuals do not tell themselves that they should care about certain moral qualities we in the West and America will come to say all good human beings as such should care about. In Western civilization, it is living out of a consciousness in which I tell myself that I should care about certain kinds of moral or spiritual goods that counts first and foremost for human goodness. When the question "What should I do with my life" or "in this situation", leads to questions about what it means to be a good person; what it means to live a good life as a human being, we are entering into the central feature of Western civilization: the normative role assigned to intent to care about those deepest aspects of human existence. The paradox of this "way" is that the intent, the "seeking" is in a mysterious relationship to the intended goal of the activity of seeking; of intending. In other words, I cannot know ahead of time the results of my serious intention to live a good life; to do what I should do, in a deeply moral or spiritual sense. To get into the right stance towards the deepest ends of human existence, then, does not guarantee a particular outcome.

How is this all related to 'The Reader'? It turns out that taking the right stance does not so much require that the individual take a particular stance towards any particular proposed situation, e.g. we want the antagonist in 'The Reader' to act in a certain way - to save - the prisoners in the burning church. Rather, there is a prior requirement - that she take a stance towards the very notion of stance taking. We might call this a "meta-stance". To be judged a 'good man' in Western civilization, one has to care about caring about certain values we collectively have come to hold should be cared about. To be judged a good person, I should tell myself that I should do what I should do. I have to care whether I care.  In Jesus' language, the individual ought to have a state of heart that sincerely cares about doing God's will, and then to live that care out in action that accords with the inner intent.  Action alone does not cut it, but nor does inner intent. Aristotle tells us that both the right intent and right action are required to live well in a moral, spiritual as well as what we today mean by "practical" sense. Talking and thinking about those qualities which make life good is a task for American intellectuals today. Sadly, they are not only fulfilling their unique function, but are on the whole antagonistic towards fulfilling it. On the other hand, films like 'The Reader' are fulfilling very well, whether or not critics or intellectuals are sensitive to this.

A Fundamental Problem

The fundamental moral problem with the main character in 'The Reader' a character in a work of fiction, is not that she let the prisoners die. For if we stop with this, we are not understanding what it is that led her to do this. The most fundamental problem is that she has adopted a moral philosophy that tells her that she is not supposed to take a stance towards such issues. This is more subtle than one may initially realize. A central point I have wished to make is the fact that there exists a double level of stance taking whenever we enter into the arena of Western moral thought as well as thinking about justice. The antagonist in 'The Reader' tells herself she cannot and should not care about the well being of other human beings. The issue is not that she is a bad woman, but something more fundamental: that she does not care about what we want to say the good person should care about and act in accord with. And this, I propose, is largely the situation Western intellectuals as descendants of the scientific method and Descartes are in today. For the most part, in treating detachment and a certain definition of objectivity as their highest moral value; by making the application of the spirit of the scientific method normative, the majority of Western and American intellectuals reject any notion that they should care about what makes life good in any other than a Homeric sense. The stress of most intellectuals in and out of academia today is on fulfillment of assigned duty. The 'assigned duty' is to neutrally describe the human realm. But to remain neutral when dealing with the human realm means that we must avoid any discussion of those values that make human life good in a deep sense.

One effect of this impoverished situation is to push activists and intellectuals into a false kind of politics, wherein the notion develops that if we just refine our political system adequately, we will have more justice.  But to the extent that all the stress is on external relations between citizens and on impersonal law, there is no role granted to inner intent; to caring; to taking the right kind of stance towards morality, justice and spiritual good. Rather, in America today for the most part the stress is on form, or process. The stress on a certain understanding of objectivity, a kind of objectivity rightly applied to the hard sciences and math, but disastrously to the human realm, makes it unlikely that our intellectual will let himself act on care for the good, the true and the beautiful. Like the antagonist in 'The Reader', moreover, they cannot or do not tell themselves they should care about the good, true and beautiful. The silence of the American intellectual class in and out of academia on moral and spiritual matters as understood by the greatest thinkers and prophets of Western civilization owes to a misguided notion that to take a stance on the Good and the True would be to indulge in a kind of subjectivity associated with bad science and bad thinking more generally. The good is not a category Descartes' method can sanction, for it is experienced in consciousness itself, or subjectively. But proper stance taking as understood by Plato, and as misunderstood by the main character in 'The Reader' as well as the majority of our intellectuals, calls upon just such subjectivity, understood as an inner orientation towards qualities we wish to see in a human being. The primary quality we wish to see in a human being in our civilization is that they care about moral goodness. For the most part, both our antagonist and our average Western intellectual believe their task calls for strict neutrality towards the good. Both believe they are doing their duty by merely neutrally describing this or that aspect of those realities which are wholly external to consciousness. In the case of 'The Reader', our antagonist tells us she is simply doing her duty when she does not let the prisoners out of the burning church. While in Homer's time stance taking was not relevant to the moral judgment of an individual, to the extent that the West's morality and spirituality is Platonic and Christian in origin, stance taking is a central feature of what it means to be a good as well as just person. Note that when we call a Nazi a bad person, we are not first and foremost saying that they are not obeying a moral code. We are complaining that they do not believe they should care about being a good person. And being a 'good person' is grounded first and foremost in caring about being a good person. If this sounds circular, in some sense it is. But this does not detract from its viability as a life-giving moral and spiritual "way" or practice. This distinction is brought out quite clearly in the film when we note that the antagonist does not seem to understand the charges leveled against her, or more generally against Nazis. While we are tempted to attribute this detachment to evil or a mass psychosis, such charges fail to shed light on the really fundamental issue. The issue is not that the antagonist is bad or evil. To stop with this judgment is to miss an important point. An evil person willfully wills the bad. The problem with the antagonist is not that she willfully wills the bad; the unjust, but that she takes no stance towards the issue of the good as a quality separate from the function she has been assigned to fulfill. She does not make any distinction between her externally assigned role - the Homeric basis of morality - and the need for an inner intent followed up with action. Reflective of her subjective stress on external fulfillment of function, she can only treat the prisoners in the burning church in terms of both her and their fitting into a function in society, and not as human beings simply. In both ways, she, and Nazi Germany more generally, is a throwback to Homeric times. What I want to suggest, however, is that the true import of the film is its pointing to the real possibility that the kind of stance taking domjinant in Homer's time is the kind taken by the majority of intellectuals today. More than a majority of intellectuals in the West and American today, along with the antagnist in 'The Reader', are failing on a daily basis to internalize the most important aspect of Platonic philosophy: a particular stance of the 'heart' towards the good, where the 'good' is conceived as the ground and end of human life in both the private and public realm.

Overview of main ideas

Plato and Aristotle as the two founders of Western civilization's understanding of its morality introduce the notion that to be a good human being (Aristotle's 'good man'), one must engage in philosophic activity as a kind of ongoing spiritual exercise. We embody the gist of this practice - its core - when we think and reflect on how we should live if we want to be good human beings. The essence of being human for Kant is the ability to tell ourselves what we ought to do. Freedom is ultimately meaningful only insofar as it is used to develop my potential as a being who can grasp and enact the good in my own life as well as the lives of others. Actively telling myself what I ought to do can be viewed as a modernized version of the Platonic practice of philosophy as a "way" to live a good life. Platonic philosophy as a spiritual practice gets me into the stance required for seeking what is conceived at once as the ground and purpose of my life as a human being. The ground and end of this practice is divine in nature, and Plato refers to it as the 'Idea of the Good.' Philosophy as Plato understands it gets me into a relation to my true self, other concrete people in my life, and God if I am a believer. But this spiritual practice requires first and foremost that I take the stance that I should pursue the good. The majority of Western intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences, along with our antagonist in The Reader, have a basis of judgment that makes them unable and unwilling to do this from the get-go.

The purpose of much modern academic and intellectual work is to merely explain this or that aspect of reality neutrally. The heavy moral value placed on neutrality is reflective of the basis of Homeric morality. By contrast, the purpose of Plato's writing is in part to get the reader into a right relation to a moral-spiritual object termed "the Idea of the Good". We might describe this as "proper stance taking". When Plato explains to Glaucon in the Allegory of the Cave that the one who is released goes outside the cave and gains knowledge of the Idea of the Good, we moderns will too easily focus on what happened externally, thinking we are supposed to try to merely neutrally describe the events. We will all too rarely pay attention to what occurred in the consciousness of the one seeking enlightenment. To some extent, this confusion is due to a problem inherent in writing: Plato wrote down a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. Because the narrative has an "end" - enlightenment - it is all too easy to detach this end from the process of seeking itself. After the scientific revolution and the spirit of Descartes' infects all of Western thought, we make the fatal move of thinking that 'enlightenment' is objective in the same sense that gravity is external to consciousness. In so doing, we fail to see that for Plato, as with Jesus, the core or locus of what they are talking about is not a goal detached from a "way" of life, but the "way" itself! Just as so many Western anthropologists think they are supposed to "neutrally explain this or that social or religious practice", e.g. the members of the group danced around the fire and chanted, yet fail to see how their paradigm prevents them from grasping the centrality of stance taking in true religious practice, we moderns so affected by the spirit of the scientific method will think we are supposed to merely explain what the enlightened one did when he stood up in the cave; what he did when he went outside the cave, and what he did or did not do when he returned. We do not or cannot grasp that to read Plato correctly, each reader is called to internalize the inner or subjective stance of the Enlightened One in his own life. It is in the seeking that we 'find', and not apart from the activity of living a certain way. Core to this "way", I have tried to underscore here, is the internalization of a certain kind of intention, which I refer to as "caring".

One of the great anomalies in 21st century Western civilization is that our intellectuals and academics for the most part think that their normative task is to neutrally explain a truth which is conceived as external to consciousness. In other words, they tell themselves that they cannot tell themselves to care about moral values. The key to beginning the civilizational work to change this intellectually, morally and spiritually corrosive situation is to pay close attention to the double level of stance taking that undergirds this practice: Most thinkers believe that they should be neutral. The very nature of Cartesian neutrality, or objectivity, is such that when it becomes normative for the intellectual he ends up largely unable to get into the right relation to the Good; the kind of moral-spiritual object said by Plato to be core to the best life. He is not prevented from doing this by the assumption that the objects he studies and grants validity to are more important than other objects of study, but by something more fundamental. Any human good that requires him to make a kind of judgment of the sort one would make of and towards the Good is disqualified as worthy of attention in his model. The effect of this detached neutrality, taken to be the highest virtue of the intellectual class in the modern West, is to disconnect him from the ground and end of being as articulated by one of the founders of Western civilization.

Conclusion

Let's conclude. What was the crime of the antagonist in 'The Reader'? Her crime ultimately was that she took no stance towards the Good and towards Justice. She told us that she simply did her job. The neutrality of her fulfillment of her function is core to her ethics. Like the cast members of 'Pleasantville', she simply did her duty. To repeat the key issue here: it is not first and foremost that she did positive harm to the prisoners that makes her evil, but that she did not take the stance that she should care about justice. In Platonic language, she did not care about or seek to be in relation to the Good. And again, she can not understand this as a charge against her. She lived out of a Homeric basis of moral judgment, where she tells us that she was simply fulfilling her function, typically termed "duty" by Nazis. She loves a literature that portrays a way of life based on an absence of moral stance taking as we now subscribe to, and she could not love the Good or the Just. As such, we must judge her a failure as a Westerner for two tightly connected reasons: She failed to tell herself that she should take a stance towards ethics and justice, and she failed to take the particular stance of caring about Goodness and Justice in her relation to the prisoners in the burning church. And this, I propose, is precisely the reason why the strictly enforced neutrality of our intellectual class today is also a civilizational failure for us. Let at least a few among we who work with ideas and words strive to overcome this by proper stance taking; by seeking to care and cultivate the good in our own lives and justice in the life of society.

A couple of years after a play on Broadway appeared called "Proof", another one appeared called "Doubt". This is fitting as we exit a long period in Western civilization in which heavy stress has been placed on gaining and possessing certitude about various truth claims. Some writers have referred to this aspect of modernity as a "Quest for Certitude". No such quest existed for the pre-moderns, who had more faith. Without giving anything away, I was motivated to write the following remarks and pose some questions about the film.

At the beginning of the film we see the Principal of the school, played by Meryl Streep, question the theme of a sermon. The topic of the sermon was "doubt". In other words, she displays doubt about a sermon on the topic of doubt. When we are exposed to a meta-claim like this, we may be being exposed to a form of discourse which can function to help those under the spell of the Enlightenment escape from their slumber.  The Enlightenment form of reason seeks to explain truths not of human existence, but of external reality. To spell what I mean in suggesting that discussing doubt about doubt can help us find our way again, in the Apology of Socrates, Socrates tells us three times that he will tell us the truth. When we look closely, though, we find that the truth that he tells us is that he knows he does not know the truth. Plato makes the theme of wanting to be told the truth of human existence a primary one. How is it that a meta-claim can help us escape from the gravitational pull of the Cartesian mind-set - a mind-set which has had the effect of bringing so many Western intellectuals to believe that their proper task is to describe a truth which is merely objectively true, 'objective' in the sense of being external to consciousness? When we see a contrast between the form of a claim and its content, we are brought first to see the powerful role of intentionality in Truth-telling. In the Socratic example above, when we see that we are not being told the truth as content, but as form, we begin to get insight into the fact that there is a form which is central for us - namely, our relational stance towards the objects we focus on. The problem with the Cartesian project is that there is no relational stance, for the simple reason that there is no role for subjective intent vis a vis theoretical objects. In short, when the intellectual thinks he is supposed to merely neutrally describe reality conceived external to consciousness, we have no care for what we focus on. And this lack of holding an intentional stance on the part of the great majority in our intellectual class is the simplest way into understanding why we are spiritually lost as a culture. Doubt about our method, then, is in order, not because it gets the data wrong, but because it asks the wrong kind of questions.

In modern terms, Plato makes it clear that the psychology of the seeker of truth itself as such can be an issue. In Platonic philosophy, what can seem to the novice to be simply a stress on the nature of truth understood as something objective turns out to be much more profound. When the seeker goes deeply into philosophy, religion, and spirituality, what we find from the wisest who came before us is that what is going on in our heart; what we want in a deep way - the certainty that our understanding of truth is objectively correct - can function like a large mountain we must "get over" and "go through" before we "arrive" at the truth.   A focus on the truth conceived as merely objectively given - when mixed with Descartes' stress on extension - negates what we can loosely refer to as the truth of human existence. Pre-modern Western civilization had no such stress on truth as merely objective, and this shows up in the thematic contrast between faith and reason later. Catholic thought and practice gets at this matter simply, by de-stressing reason and stressing the primacy of faith informed by reason. Reason here, however, is a pre-modern reason which is predicated on stance taking. In this formula, reason helps us gain insight into spiritual truths, but we can never know the truth in the way we know a mathematical formula or gravity. Our stance; our care for the Goodis a necessary ingredient in our relation to the Truth. The truth is not, after all, "outside the mind". But when someone with a religious sensibility hears this who is also under the spell of the Enlightenment, they will interpret this claim to mean that there is no truth simply.   This is the problem of the religious "conservative," who has unbeknownst to himself adopted the stance of a modern "philosopher". To think one is upholding a well grounded religious tradition by asserting this or that truth claim whose referents are external to consciousness is to mistakenly assume that the content of a truth claim trumps its form. In the world of the spirit, however, the form of a truth claim is a de-limiter of the claim understood as content, for if I have the wrong kind of spirit or intentional stance in making the claim, I may negate my relation to that truth. And since my being in active relation to Truth is the end of true religion, negating that relation is tantamount to negating the Truth.  Pre-moderns, both Greek and Christian, telll us that Truth is not external to mind. The truth as understood and articulated by pre-moderns is not, again, external to consciousness. When we do "arrive" at insights into truth in the pre-modern tradition, both Greek and Christian, it is not presented in the form many of we moderns expected it to be presented in.

What does all this have to do with the film Doubt, as a film with two levels of stance taking? In the case of a good film, we can take two perspectives - one from within the film and one from without. In this case, we can relate the doubt to the characters in the film, but we could also relate it to ourselves as viewers who have a particular reaction to the very open ended nature of the script. This very open ended nature of the script becomes a kind of empty space into which our hearts can begin to move when we let go of our own need for certitidue about our view of truth. On the other hand, if the individual viewer is sure they are right, they may well not notice this aspect of the script. Applying a claim of Jesus to our times, their "filling in the blank spaces" with an interpretation characterized by certitude may prevent them from "having the ears to hear". The open-ended nature of the script can function to assist the viewer in gaining needed insights into his own "mountains"; into his own modern heart. In the case of the film, what is being doubted is not so obvious after all. The "turn" towards what is going on in our hearts can be a "first step" along "the way" over and through our own mountains that block us from God, God who is not "out there" and "external to consciousness", but who wants to be in relation to us in our daily lives. While in the case of this film, the surface focus of the film is on the priest, the script is neutral. We may place the stress on the priest, but we may also place the stress on the nun and what is going on in her heart. In my understanding, there is no stress really on what objectively happened. And given all that has happened to us modern Westerners, both objectively and subjectively, to our collective "spirit," this formal aspect of the film makes it profound. This formal aspect is but one example of an art form which helps us find our way back to our true selves and God.

I include this film because it is one of the most beautiful portrayals I have ever seen of inner experience of unavoidable suffering. The film is French, and one can sense Cartesian duality at play here in the choice of the subject matter. This is a true story about the former editor of "Elle", Jean Dominique Bauby, who experiences a stroke which leaves him completely paralyzed, except for his ability to blink. The script of the film is written by Mr. Bauby, which he conveyed by blinking. It is meaningful for the reason that it is a true story, and because in listening and watching the film, the viewer knows that this individual wrote the script. So we are in a sense invited to come into the inner experience that Mr. Bauby had.

For me, this invitation is one of those rare moments when we can "live with" another in their letting go of their own lives. If we are called to "die to ourselves" in order to live, and if the ultimate meaning of this "dying to self" is in self-giving to another, then the work of art that Jean Dominique Bauby offers to us here can be viewed as just such a self giving. With him we can also learn what it means to "die to self" so that we may live more truly. Mr. Bauby died soon after the film was finished.

This film has an excellent account of a transformation of a single individual who works for the East German secret police (known as the "Stazi") and who goes through the experience of realizing that his sense of moral duty is misguided.  Because German culture is so influenced by Kantian morality - a morality which determines whether an action is right or wrong by asking "Is this something that can be generalized to all individuals?", German morality is also heavily influenced by a sense of duty, whose source is both Kant himself as well as Prussian culture. What this means is that German culture tends more than other Western language groups to stress Aristotle's "good citizen". One of the most important themes that Greek culture gave us as Westerners and Americans is the question: Is the human being good only because of his role in the larger society; e.g. his job, or is there some trait about the human person that makes them good as an individual human being as such.  (See the page on this web site discussing this distinction.) German civilization in the 20th century has shown us in both Nazi and Communist ideologies what can go wrong when we place heavy emphasis on the role of the individual in the larger group, or society. As such, Germany is a fertile venue for reflection on one of the deepest most meaningful contributions of Western civilization to itself.

In this film, the primary focus is on an individual who "does his job well and minds his business" (Plato's definition of justice in the Republic.) In spying on others, he lives wholly in light of Aristotle's category of the "good citizen". But he has some sense within him, a sense which we can refer to as "reason" or "goodness" that will constitute the basis of his transformation to a "good man".   The highest type of person in the West is the individual who is first and foremost a "good man" and only then a "good citizen", and not the other way around. The primary artistic or literary way the priorities are presented in the way they should be is by portraying a single individual who starts out fitting in just fine in his group. This could be his job or society. He then comes upon a dilemma, or conflict, which may force him to ask: What are the moral values which guide my actions as a member of this group/in this job? In the most extreme cases, used for artistic reasons to illustrate a moral point, he is forced to make a choice, and move towards a way of life which reflects his deepest moral and spiritual values. In this film then we see just such a transformation, and in fact the concept of "the good man" is made explicit towards the end of the film.

The thing I love about this film is what I love about others of a similar vein: it carries a deep message about important truths of human existence. To do this well, the writers and artists must avoid allowing the claims to be experienced by viewers as cliches. One of the great things about film is that it allows this necessary task of any moral accounting: the infinite variabilility of scripting allows the creators to avoid cliches.

I can think of no other film based so strongly on the 12 step philosophy as a way of life than "When a Man Loves a Woman." In particular, the sense of the 1st - 3rd steps is powerful, and we continually get the sense that the two main characters are being forced to contront clear unmanageability in their lives. Stated another way, we see the two main characters coming face to face with a realization of their own limits. In these two characters, we have a contrast of types. Ben, the lawyer, has no sense that he has any deep need of the type discussed elsewhere on this site. The recovering alcholic knows he has need. The reocurring bridge in the film functions as a loose metaphor perhaps for the need to summon courage to make a leap of faith from one way of life to another which is radically different, giving a new meaning to the expression "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it". The two characters in our film are confronted quite strongly with an unavoidable crossing in this 24 hour period.

A few points in the film we see clear allusions to the Christian call to dye to self, a claim which requires a great deal of attempts at understanding. At the outset of the film we are told it is Good Friday. In response to this, Ben asks "what's good about it"? The film shows clear indications that the writer sees the way of life expressed in the 12 steps as overlapping with basic Christian themes:  coming to awareness that I am not self sufficient in the way I may assume I am; coming to an awareness of my "drug of choice", whether it be alcohol, chaos, or the more usual - the false sense of self-esteem gained by public acclaim no matter my ethics; status and wealth; realizing I need others; and above all else, being forced to see that I don't have control in the way I assume I do. We may take it that any "way" which assists individuals to "access" the truth of human existence will be somewhat hidden from view. That is, it's meaning will not be made evident to all, and only to those who seek to gain understanding.

Key lines: "Can you live there with me? When the man comes to the edge of things, he has to commit. Can you commit? Can you stay there with me?"

"Were taught this fairy tale that the good and bad end badly." Prior to any kind of transformation, we hear the "good and bad" as referring to individuals who live purely good or purely bad lives. We are to avoid being "black and white", and the stress is thus on "and" as a disjunction, as pointing to two distinct types of individuals. Before the viewer gains the needed insights, he will take the line to be reflective of the norm that we are to try to have our cake and eat it too in the moral and spiritual world. So for example the lead lawyer played by Sidney Pollack tells Ben Stiller that he feels he can go to bed each night in spite of seriously unethical and illegal behavior because he "does more good than bad". Notice that in this claim there is no sense of living a good life as a "way", but rather as calculating each action to see how well it benefits me in a narrow sense. After a viewer gains what I call the needed insights, he will see the line as descriptive of a dysjunction that is to be avoided - as just this type of life. So here we see a nice example of using language with moral judgments in it that require interpretation and assesment of the whole picture to see a) what stance the speaker is taking, and b) what stance we are supposed to take from a perspective of 'the whole' of life.

In the film, the director makes contrasts with the image of the rose petal. This is an appearance, and it is both beautiful and fleeting as such. But as with Plato, there is a reality being pointed to by the image. Ball, playing the role of philosopher, inserts the character of Ricki Fitts into the film, who sets up images and then consciously goes behind them. With the medium of film within film, Ball has Ricki use a camera to observe the world of appearances, while telling us what is beyond them, a kind of beauty that transcends merely physical beauty. This, of course, is ultimate Plato: Beauty as a quality is not to be confused with a beautiful thing, or for that matter, girl. Ricky, labeles 'weird' by a girl who sees only physical beauty, sees the beauty behind the images, or appearances.

Questions to think about here: Which characters in the film are motivated to see beyond appearances? How do they define the real in their lives? How is the real also a moral quality, and how is it an important part of what we might think of as a deeper philosophy of life? On another note: One trait of all modern film is that the solution posed to the problem presented in the film - in this case the materialism and superficiality of the larger culture- is itself problematic. So here, Spacey responds to his mid-life crisis of meaning by taking on activites that are obviously shallow. By creating solutions to cultural problems that are themselves merely symptoms of the problem and not really solutions or effective responses, film writers today seem to be suggesting something about the depth of the problem their film means to in part critique, insofar as the solution they pose to the problem is often itself no less problematic; no less shallow. What is interesting here is that this artistic device, which clearly becomes a pattern in more serious films after 1973, does not seem to fit with any Western literary or spiritual tradition. That is, it is not the normal literary practice to have a character in crisis respond to his realization that this is the case in an essentially shallow way. Hence we may think we should dismiss these responses as responses to be taken seriously.

But it turns out that there has been another transformation in American film, a kind of deepening that really takes root in the early 1990s. One of the most significant aspects of this transformation is the use of style to make substantive moral points. In the case of the pattern of a film having a character respond to a crisis of meaning which is no better than the problem, the film may be understood to point outside itself. The relevant style here is the relation of the crisis critiqued to the response given. In American Beauty, we must ask ourselves: what is the response-as-solution of Spacey to his realization that he has been living his life in a superficial manner to date? To become a hamburger flipper and buy the car of his dreams, as well as to obsess on a teenage girl. This, of course, is not a serious response to the problem he rightly diagnoses. What is, then, the relation between the crisis he diagnoses and his response? It is absurd. How ought we interpret the film maker's articulation of this particular solution to this particular problem he is consciously putting into the film? The film maker himself must be saying something here, for there is no other way to account for the specific pattern of relation just mentioned. Patterns are not accidental. What might this point be? Here is my take: The kinds of problems American writers and artists today are responding to are so deep that they cannot get the audience to take their views seriously if they make typical critiques with typical responses to the critiques. (There must always be at minimum these two elements for a dramatic film or book to be robust in a moral-spiritual sense. ) By presenting a "solution" to the problem they see which is really absurd, they might be saying to us as viewers that the problem they are diagnosing is so serious or deep that it will not be responded to without a kind of transformation. And this transformation cannot be brought about within the image-laden paradigm of American culture as it presently exists. In other words, what any writer and film maker worth his salt must be telling the audience is that we cannot get beyond image in this society today. We do not, that is, heed Plato's distinction, and are thus not living out one of the greatest moral-spiritual values in Western civilization.   To let a character fall down in his own imagery, as Spacey does, is, I would put forth, to say just this. We do not do what Ricki Fitts does - for we stop at the image, and like Angela, think that we are supposed to care only about the appearances. And for Ball, I put forth, this is a moral-spiritual tragedy.

Another way of thinking about this: Those writers who make use of the pattern discussed above are pointing outside the context of the film when they present absurd or silly solutions to the problems they present. The problem is with the limitations of the audience in that the audience is only receptive to solutions which fit a certain kind of world view, one which defines a good life primarily or exclusively in terms of material well being and external order and security. (Locke and Hobbes)

It's worth arguing a bit more for my claim: The clue that film makers are seeking to tell us something about ourselves is suggested by the fact that in almost all serious films for the last 10 years, the solutions to the cultural problems being pointed to are at face value absurd or simply another manifestation of the problem. The fact that there is a pattern here suggests that there is a cultural phenomenon going on. While part of this may be explained by demands of the market, this pattern also transcends these demands. After all, there have been some very successful money making films which are very heady and serious in the last 10 years. I think of two: The Hours and The Passion of the Christ.

"You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. And they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, much like ourselves."-Plato

The Matrix, Socrates and Plato

The Matrix and Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave'

Essay comparing Plato's Allegory and The Matrix

Visual representation of the cave with essay

Matrix Links

What to pay attention to: In Matrix II in particular, pay close attention to all the "speeches". In Plato's dialogues, we are at times presented with "speeches" by one of the characters. It is often in the context of these "speeches" that Plato gets across the themes he wishes to. It is relevant that the ones who gives the speeches in the film are not the humans, but the representatives of the machine world. Why is this? We might understand this as a symbolization of a problem in modernity, and in particular the problem of giving too much power to technology. (This issue points outside the film, however, and not to something within it.) The relevant issue here is fairly straightforward conceptually: modern Americans in particular have placed undue confidence in technology, in the sense that they do not seem to have the intuition that some positive morality needs to guide it. This high confidence in modern "systems" can be seen best in the widespread attitude that free markets alone can lead us to a good society even though it is assumed that the only operative motive in the marketplace s the profit motive. Here, good society is defined as: A society which is conducive to material well being and external order. The machine world in the Matrix is a highly efficient one and in this world there is no morality. This lack of sensitivity to the ground of moral good is the key difference between the moderns, on the one hand, and the ancients and classicsls, on the other, including the Christians. The latter held that the good; virtue had to come from will and action seeking the good together. Moderns tend to think that the good can be detached from will and action and seem to hope that it can be automatically attained. This attitude is the analolog of the hope for the free lunch in the moral and spiritual realm. The Matrix nicely portrays in concrete symbolization the consequences of remaining in denial about the need for personal and collective responsibility to the moral and spiritual realm, or that is, the realm of soul, if you will. The moderns make a trade off: Religious wars and such conflict will be gotten rid of at the cost of spiritual depth in society. Notice that the tradeoff is not a bad one necessarily. But it comes at a cost. This cost is the theme, on some level, of many of the films in this list.

More discussion

Pay attention to the speech Spacey gives when he is drunk on the street about Socrates. This is important and will give some clues as to how to interpret the film. It will help to look at my discussion on the "chart of ideas" page regarding the distinction between the good man and the good citizen before watching the film as well as here.

This is about the Archbishop of El Salvador and is a true story. Raul Julia plays the lead. Main theme: Aristotle makes a distinction between the good man and the good citizen. Basically, Aristotle tells us that the individual acting in his capacity as a member of society will not necessarily be a good person in the way the individual acting as an individual could be if he chooses to be so. In other words, we tend to define ourselves as good persons by how we function with groups, from our work or family context, all the way up to society as a whole. In the history of Western philosophy and spirituality, however, there is an ever-present theme that the best way to live from a moral and spiritual perspective will not be found in a comfortable relation to groups or popularity, but in tension or conflict with them. This tension will often be experienced inwardly, and not necessarly outwardly. Examples of such tension would be: When an individual becomes a public figure and assumes at a gut, feeling level that his popularity makes him good - he either will or will not eventually realize that his popularity doesn't make him good in any morally or spiritually robust sense; when a politician takes a position that is unpopular because he thinks the popular position is wrong; when a father or mother has insight that a teenager does not yet have and disciplines a teenager who really thinks the parent is awful for doing so. In American society, the tradition of civil disobedience is meant to make room for the honoring of the priority of the 'good man' over the 'good citizen'. For more remarks on the topic, see this link.

One way to watch the film is with the following assumption: Archbishop Romero begins from a position of defining himself in terms of being a "good citizen"; as a member of a group, to questioning his assumption that being a "good citizen" makes him a "good man". We might say that this is the primary dramatic movement within the film. Initially, he assumes that he must go along with the norms and values of the group he is a part of. In this case, he is an Archbishop in a country with military rule. As such, he is part of an elite leadership group. It is natural perhaps that he assumes that he must be accommodating to the military initially. But as time goes by, he comes to see that he must look for a higher ethical and spiritual standard. In terms of the distinction Aristotle is making, he comes to experience the very real difference between what it means to be a ‘good citizen’, on the one hand, and a ‘good man’, on the other. He comes to see that he must live as a ‘good man’ and not merely a ‘good citizen’ as one who conforms to the norms of the group, if he is to save both his own soul and do what is spiritually and morally good and right.

If it is accurate to say that the Christian "way" reconciles the tension between the good man and good citizen, this would be to say that it leads us to a society where all can be "good men" without fear of not also being "good citizens".

This theme is relevant for us, as Americans do not usually have any reason to think about the distinction between the two capacities, and we tend to assume that there is no such tension between these two capacities. One reason for this "glossing over" owes to a kind of watered down or "easy" Christianity dominant in American culture, one whose primary function is to unify society rather than to be a way for the single individual to live a truly good life and/orsave his own soul, however these are specifically defined. On the other hand, we can also say that American civilization does not take Aristotle’s distinction very seriously because it is more hopeful that the good person is in fact functional in society. In other words, we tend to be optimistic that the individual will respond to the challenge to be deeply good not only in relation to his own salvation, but also in a social and political context. This was the hope of the 60’s generation earlier on, lasting up until around 1978. Following this period, American culture moved into a more radical form of individualism whose limitations are now becoming more apparent.

Listen for this Key line: At the beginning of the film the speaker says: "... and most of these stories aren't even true".   There are two ways of hearing this line. The usual way to hear it, or that is, at the level of appearance, it will seem to mean that the stories are false, or a lie. But of course, there is good reason to believe that such an interpretation is not reasonable. The writer of the story presumably wishes to convey something of substance, or that is, something which is true. So the stories cannot be simply false. There must be some kind of truth in the film, then, even if it does not exist in the form we are used to, e.g. rationalistic, empirical or quantifiable.

Truth in the everyday sense of the term - meaning "happened factually" or empirically cannot then be the basis upon which we are supposed to judge the veracity of the stories. Perhaps better put, the lack of factual veracity of the stories does not tell us anything about the meaning of the activity of storytelling, a storytelling which points to something beyond words, those truths of human existence which we cannot "capture" as we can capture mathematical and scientific truth. Human existence is not 'fact-like' in the way phenomena of the physical world are factual. In Eric Voegelin's words, "existence is not a fact. "

In summary, we are to become open to a horizon of understanding which goes beyond the empirical horizon of our modern, English language culture.

The following is a paper on the Big Fish and Eric Voegelin written by a student in March 2008.

Edward Bloom was an adventurer from the start, a curious youth that developed into a questioning man. He sought answers, and although he was unsure of what he was looking for, he continued the search towards the divine ground that pulled him. “I was on my way to discover my destiny, not sure what that would be exactly, but I explored every opportunity that presented itself” (Big Fish). The importance in this comment by Bloom is that he was “not sure what that would be exactly.” It emphasizes that the stress was on the search itself and not some material compensation or reward of a physical sort that would be found at the end.

What pulls Bloom, the ground, is not a thing-like object, but, rather, as Aristotle writes is “’eternal, immovable, and separate from the things of sense perception’” (Voeglin Reason: The Classic Experience 272). For this reason the “success” of his hometown and the “perfection” of life in Spectre could not hinder Bloom’s travels; these places offered satisfaction only in a physical way. “This town is everything a man could ask for,” says Bloom of the town of Spectre, “And if I were to end up here I’d consider myself lucky, but the truth is I’m not ready to end up anywhere.” Bloom’s mind is in a “responsive pursuit of his questioning unrest to the divine source that has aroused it,” as Voeglin states (Voeglin Reason: The Classic Experience 272). He is responding to the pull of the ground, immersed in the search, and living experientially.

Voeglin states that the attention of the questioning man is toward the ground of existence, something experiential, for consciousness does not grasp “thing-like” objects. Bloom, the questioning, searching man, does not focus on the facts or material aspects of his experiences, but on the moments, as they were specifically experienced through him and in his life. He creates a language of symbols, not a language of fact and finite detail, to tell of these experiences, a sort of story telling to convey the experiences of his search. Symbols, Voeglin claims, “have nothing to express but the experiences enumerated, the placement of reality experienced in the wider context of the reality in which the differentiated movement occurs” (Voeglin Gospel and Culture 186-187). The falsifications of Bloom’s stories were not told as lies, but as symbols to express the deeper meanings of his search and the significance of his experiences.

Bloom recounts his escape out of Spectre beginning, “A dangerous path is made much more dangerous in the darkness” (Big Fish). He then proceeds to tell the story of the trees branch arms that closed around him and the wild-life that fought to end his life there on that path. Although the elaboration is obvious falsification, it is important to use the right language symbols to convey his experience. If Bloom was to recount the night just as it was: a scary, dark, night lost on an unknown path, it would not convey the experience and the resulting feelings of horror, discouragement, failing, or the final triumph, in a way that would properly display how he experienced that night. The falsifications serve to demonstrate the proper meaning of the experience, and, in that way his story becomes a successful language symbol.

When the stress is on experience, the language must correspond. In this way Bloom’s falsifications and elaborations have great importance. He conveys the essence of his experience rather than the empirical facts.

“The language symbols expressing the movement are not invented by an observer who does not participate in the movement but are engendered in the event of participation itself…Myth is not a primitive symbolic form…but the language in which the experiences of human-divine participation in the in-between become articulate” (Voeglin Gospel and Culture 187-188).

Bloom, although his life becomes a myth and a myriad of stories, is successful in living experientially and expressing his experiences in a way that does the most justice to their meaning to him. By elaborating the thing-like objects of his story he better conveys the true essence of the moments and their immense significance to him in his search.

Watch these relationships: Between Everett and Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker); Between Everett and Ben; between Everett and Julie (Claire Danes). One interesting take is to see Ben as a character who artfully represents who Everett would or could be if and when he begins to let go of what we are told is his deep need to be perfect.  Meredith and Ben may be viewed as mirror reflections of each other before they each begin to gain insight into themselves. As in any good story-telling which helps us "access" our own lives, there is an "after" to this "before". Note that the cast is clear on the nature of the relationship between Everett and Meredith, and that this would not be a realistic representation of an actual family. But again, our criterion for judging this aspect of the film ought not be limited to whether or not the film is realistic in a literal fashion. What makes this film so good is the manner in which the concrete members of this family do indeed help bring out the best in each other. As a subtle symbol of this, note the the board over the garage in the scene where two characters are sitting in a car towards the end of the film, in which the word "Sentry" is printed. What is the role of a Sentry? Nothing is accidental in film, and we can gain more insight by asking "why" especially when we see text that has obviously been placed consciously in the background.

One part I thought bad and having no coherent relation to the film as a whole: The scene when Meredith makes some very reasonable remarks about having a gay child. The reaction of the family is not well explained on any level in my view, and it adds nothing to the basic themes of the film. It seems like an awkward attempt at sensitivity and comes across as simply politically correct.

These are my own remarks. Warning: I give important details away.

I think my favorite category of film are those that have the theme of "sin and repemption" in them. I recently saw the film LITTLE CHILDREN, and found it intensely psychological as well as spiritual. I would loosely define the difference between psychological and spiritual as follows: Conditions and events are "psychological" when they get us in touch or evoke some reality about our own inner selves; Conditions and events are "spiritual" when they are evocative of and /or constitute for me a relation between my own deeper self and ultimate reality or realities. So therapy or counseling is psychological when it helps me understand something about my inner self; my history. Therapy becomes spiritual when the insights I gain therein help me grasp the relationship I am always also in to transcendent or non-empirical realities. "Grace" is a word in Catholic and Christian culture to capture the phenomenon of this linkage. I believe that in the last ten years, American film in particular has been evocative of all of these issues.

What amazes me is how blind critics are to these movements in the culture. This overwhelming silence of the more educated among us itself needs explaining. I read reviews of films like Little Chilren, Magnolia, and Into the Wild, and literally never see more than most superficial and cliched remarks in them, reducing everything to the most shallow explanations and hyper focusing on style over content. Catholic culture should be aware of its ability to offer a sharp contrast to this strange phenomon of blindess to depth, in which the writers in the culture diligently keep themselves from having any insights that might suggest the individual is not the sole author of his/her existence.

When I saw Little Children a couple of months ago, I was blown away by its depth. It was not nominated for Best Picture in 2007, but I think it deserved to be. Its not being nominated probably owed to its serious and somewhat dark nature. One sign of the psychological and spiritual growth of American culture is visible when such film do after all get attention. In particular, when what could be easily labeled "negative" subject matters get attention. The claim in American society that "that film was too negative" can be a code for "that film made me think about my own mortality; my own need for God; my own limits."

Below are my remarks on the film Little Children. I can't stress how truly odd it is that one never sees these kinds of interpretations in the larger culture. I think Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, gives us a way of understanding and interpreting American intellectual resistance to the kind of analysis offered here of this film. Tillich claims that white Anglo-American culture in particular is resistant to metaphor. Why? I believe this resistance, which I see all the time, is due to the fact that metaphors point to something beyond themselves and require interpretation. (The reformation supposedly did away with a need for the second, which required the priest.) Both aspects of metaphor threaten the American psyche with a sense of loss of the kind of independence it believes is both necessary and sufficient to happiness. I want to suggest that the kind of independence valued by the American psyche is often harmful to true salvation; to true happiness, and to the true self. Films like Little Children I believe are helping us "access" these deeper truths. I can't do anything but assume that this PATTERN suggests an increasing consciousness of these issues on the part of our artists and writers. This is a great sign indeed, if it is so!

Remarks on the film itself:

I thought this film it was amazing.   Best, or deepest aspect, of the film: The relationship between Ronnie, the sex offender, and Larry, the ex-policeman who makes it his mission to tell the neighbors about the existence of the sex offender in the neighborhood. Note that as far as sex offense goes, what Ronnie did was relatively minimal - he exposed himself. This will matter later. And as the film goes on, we learn why Larry is no longer on the force. He shot a child in a mall, who later died. We are not given clarity about the circumstances of this act, but we are given the impression that this individual's demons were at work in this event. These two facts together may make it more likely that the viewer, who may identify with Larry's crusade, will be more open to asking what I take to be a key question in the film: What is the difference between the sin that Larry commited, on the one hand, and Ronnie? What is the difference in the psycho-spiritual condition of the two, or that is, their inner realities? Too, what is the role of mental illness in grevious acts? Such questions can also bring to mind the dictum that we are not to cast the first stone. To say this is not to excuse or rationalize away sex-offender behavior. This is not at issue. I take one psycho-spiritual point of the story to be that it is always harder and more spiritually arduous to see what is really going on with ourselves than it is to focus on the faults of others. And there is perhaps no better diversion to focusing on ourselves and doing the psychological and spiritual work I need to do in my own life than offenses like those of Ronnie's.

What I'm interested in is that Puritanical aspect of American culture which seeks to project our own dark side onto others. I'm interested in the way we use the certitude that we are morally right about this or that position, not because I want to say that we may be wrong in our claims, but because of what I take to be the reasons for this intractable and often-times cruel passion: we are fearful of our own fallen nature and our own dark side. The truly significant role of Ronnie in the film, especially in light of the fact that his offense is relatively minimal, is that he becomes a kind of metaphor for Puritan culture upon which we cast our own fears about our own presumed fallenness. In this sense, the film can be understood to be not about a sex offender, but first of all about all the adults arrested at various stages of psycho-spiritual development (they being the referent of the title) in the film besides Ronnie, and secondly about the culture in which the film is made.

Perhaps one of the best scenes in the movie is the one around the pool, in which the children were lined up staring at Ronnie, swimming amphibian like, as if purposely evoking a pre-historic moral level of development. I take the referent of this imagery to be what we might lable a kind of Christian atavism, present in the Puritan impulse to project onto others my own fears about my own sin. (See "The Scarlet Letter" and Salem witch trials.) The children staring at Ronnie in the pool is our own underdeveloped sense of depth psychology ready to "vomit" our own unredeemed sins. So that when Ronnie comes up out of the water, he says to the cop: "I was only trying to get cool", while all the others around the pool, took the occasion of this particular sinner to project their own sin, which in the Puritan psyche is experienced as dirty and shameful.

Another great scene comes at the end of the film, when Larry the ex-cop seeks to save Ronnie from his own attempt to self-mutilate. And in this scene, too, we are witness to a dual level of psycho-spiritual symbolism - a kind of symbolism which is evocative of a potential reality: Larry the ex-policemen who had made it his mission to alert the neighbors of the sex-offender' s presence, is in fact ready to accept his own dark side; his own sin. In doing so he is now ready to stop projecting his own fears and loathing, which were in fact directed onto himself from the get-go, onto a victim, in this case the most heavily burdened sinner in Puritan culture: the sex offender. When we are driven by our own fears of our own fallenness and our own misdeeds, when we have not accepted ourselves as we really are, we are susceptible to that logic which tells us we are justified in accusing another of moral depradation, when in fact it is we ourselves who are the real victims, victims of our own bad psychology and bad faith. The truth is that we first need to accept ourselves, and this requires an overcoming of the pseudo-religion of Puritanism.

This is one of my favorite movies from the last few years. What was significant to me was that Chris couldn't be dismissed as just another American individualist, as we see from the way he affects those he comes in touch with on his journey. The most important text in the film is in the contrast between his claim to Ron that he ought not put too much stock in human relationships, and his later writing, while alone and sick in Alaska, that he had learned something, that "happiness has to be shared". Chris seems to me to be a combination of Jesus, Socrates and the American individualist. There is a great spiritual potential in a particular synthesis between true Christianity and American individualism. This synthesis would have to be undertaken by those who have insight into the deepest truths of both ways of living. To gain such insight into the what the former is about would require first of all understanding what the latter can by itself never be.

The remarks below are from Metacritic.com

Freshly graduated from college and with a promising future ahead, 22-year-old Christopher McCandless chose instead to walk out of his privileged life and into the wild in search of adventure. What happened to him on the way transformed this young wanderer into an enduring symbol for countless people. Was Christopher McCandless a heroic adventurer or a naïve idealist, a rebellious 1990s Thoreau or another lost American son, a fearless risk-taker or a tragic figure who wrestled with the precarious balance between man and nature?

In my opinion, Six Feet Under is the best commercial American television series to date. A primary trait of American civilization is defining the real as the ideal, as in "the American Dream". To understand American society, one must grasp two things: states of mind determine reality for the American, and maintaining or sustaining a certain kind of "state of mind" is key to experiencing life as the American assumes he is supposed to want to. While there is praiseworthy romantic quality to this "way of life" which so heavily stresses the "dream" as a quality of consciousness, there is too often something lost. And what is often lost in the American emphasis on the ideal life is the deeper realities of human existence.

Alan Ball brings to bear, like no other film maker I have seen, Plato's distinction between 'appearance' and 'reality.'  The 'realities' he 'reveals' with Six Feet Under are those inner experiences, longings and fears that all of us have. But too often our culture treats being serious as a kind of faux pas, we too easily live our lives without getting in touch with the deeper currents in our souls. In the turn towards depth psychology and spiritual themes, American film and TV writers have recently shown us that "positivity" and remaining in the ideal is too often simply shallow. If the tendency to emphasize the ideal is associated with being "positive", then being "positive" ends up being a denial of those deeper aspects of human existence that the emphasis on the ideal cannot bring out. Hence artists' and writers' turn towards a kind of intensity and what may appear to the uninitiated as being "negative". So for example, American Beauty as well as earlier, Blue Velvet, can appear as "too negative" or "too intense". The practical aim of such a task is to "break through the dream illusion". By delving more deeply into the human heart, this film maker "breaks the dream illusion" and thus brings us to a kind of reality we may not have been aquainted with before. I say "aquainted" with, because upon first introductions, the viewer may well want to keep the feelings that come up in watching these shows at "arms length". But there is such depth in this series that it can be considered a form of meditation within an American context. For to "be with" the characters in this film as they experience their daily lives is to go through something like a "dying to self" that I believe all Americans are called to do today, to move out of their all too easy "positivity" which too often costs them the deepest part of their selves; their true selves.

The finale to the series, at the end of its 5th year, is amazing, and was for me a spiritual experience. I still find myself reflecting on it from time to time, and it helps me get clarity about the potential meaningfulness of my life.