Monthly Archives: January 2014

Nihilism, the Death Drive, and the Joker in The Dark Knight

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In On Evil, Terry Eagleton argues that Freud’s concept of the death drive can be synthesized with traditional theological accounts of evil, particularly those of Augustine and Aquinas, to define evil in terms of death and annihilation. As portrayed in The Dark Knight, the Joker perfectly embodies this theory of evil. The Joker embodies nihilism, chaos, and fear because he has no ordinary motive, such as wealth, power, or revenge. He destroys others for no other reason than his perverse enjoyment.

Nihilism and the Death Drive

At the end of his introduction, Eagleton says, “evil is indeed all about death–but about the death of the evildoer as much as that of those he annihilates” (18). The Joker is obsessed with death, both his own and that of others. During the bank robbery with which The Dark Knight opens, the Joker nonchalantly shoots one of the men he hired to perform the heist. In fact, he gives each member of his crew the order to kill another of the thieves once his role in the robbery is complete. Throughout the film, the Joker kills police officers and gangsters alike, and arranges the assassinations of a judge, the police commissioner, and, of course, Rachel, the mutual love interest of Batman and Harvey Dent.

Beyond his destruction of other human lives, the Joker exemplifies the drive toward his own annihilation. According to Eagleton’s reading of Freud, the death drive is the idea that “human beings unconsciously desire their own destruction. At the core of the self is a drive to absolute nothingness” (108). The Joker exemplifies this kind of nihilism. At Gotham General Hospital, he gives Harvey Dent a gun and presses it against his own head–had Harvey’s coin landed on the other side, he would have pulled the trigger. At the climax of the car chase, the Joker and Batman advance toward each other–Batman on the Bat-cycle and the Joker on foot. Although the Joker has a gun, he does not shoot at Batman. As Batman races toward him, the Joker mutters to himself, “Come on. Come on. I want you to do it. I want you to do it. Come on. Come on hit me. Hit me. Hit me!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGisF2GgKHM

Eagleton says, “The evil are in pain” (103). Three times the Joker asks, “Wanna know how I got these scars?” He tells two different stories–and would have told a third had Batman not interrupted him–about the origin of his gruesome trademark. Neither anecdote the Joker shares about his scars is true, but they both point to the foundational truth that he is a profoundly maimed individual or, as the Joker riffs on a famous Nietzsche quote, “Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you stranger.” The Joker’s humanity has been brutally warped by the abuse and suffering–whatever form it actually took–he has undergone.

Eagleton argues that evil, in contrast to the more common wickedness or immorality, is “supremely pointless” (84). Evil has no utilitarian goal; it is irrationally unconcerned with money, sex, and power. It is wicked to kill someone for money, but it is truly evil to kill someone for no reason at all, for the enjoyment of it. Eagleton calls this “obscene enjoyment” (100) as it is the sado-masochistic element of evil. Hence the Joker puts the “laughter” into “slaughter” as is emphasized on the side of his eighteen-wheeler.

Augustine’s Privation Theory of Evil

The classic description of the pointlessness of evil comes from Augustine’s Confessions. Augustine describes stealing pears as the nadir of his sinfulness because he stole them not for the sake of eating them–he threw them away afterward–but simply for the enjoyment of the sinful act of theft itself.

Augustine’s views of evil developed partially in opposition to Manichean dualism. The Manichees believed that the universe was the battleground of Good and Evil, which were equal but opposite cosmic forces. Evil, thus, was its own substance, independent from Good. In the words of Peter Brown’s landmark biography of Augustine, Augustine of Hippo, the Manichees believed that “God was good, totally innocent” and “so convinced were they that evil could not come from a good God, that they believed that it came from an invasion of the good” by a “hostile force of evil, equal in power, eternal, totally separate” (47). For a time, Augustine identified as a Manichee, but once Manichean beliefs proved hollow to him, he abandoned them.

According to Augustine’s later views, as well as those of Aquinas, evil is a “deficiency of being” and a “lack, negation, defectiveness, deprivation” (125) as Eagleton summarizes. Like darkness is a lack of light and hunger is a deprivation of food, evil is fundamentally an absence of the Good. God is the source of all being, all existence; evil is a corruption of the Good, with no independent existence of its own. As the Joker illustrates, the greater the deprivation of the Good, the more twisted and destructive one becomes.

The Joker, the Nazis, and Logistics

The irony of the pointlessness of evil is that the most evil figures, from the Joker to the Nazis, are often capable of incredibly rational thought and organization. Eagleton argues that one of the “most grotesque features of the Nazi death camps was the way in which sober, meticulous, utilitarian measures were pressed into the service of an operation which had no practical point at all” (96-97). The extermination of Jews during the Holocaust had no utilitarian function (in fact, it was anti-utilitarian, as German resources necessary for combating the Allies were wasted killing Jews) but was carried out in the most efficient, utilitarian way.

The same is true for the Joker, who is a logistical genius. Although his murders have no practical purpose other than inspiring panic, he plans them with incredible forethought and the greatest attention to detail. He makes his getaway from the bank in a school bus amidst a line of other school buses; he disguises himself as a nurse to infiltrate Gotham General; he arranges for a burning firetruck to block the path of the police convoy and force it down onto Lower 5th (a.k.a Lower Wacker in Chicago). Knowing that the police will be watching for snipers during the commissioner’s funeral procession, he sets a timer on a window shade overlooking the parade route, so that it flashes open to distract the cops, while he shoots at the mayor from the ground (again in disguise, this time as an officer). He surgically implants a bomb in a criminal’s stomach so that he can detonate it via a cell phone and make his escape from prison. Using masks and fake guns, he dresses hostages up like his own men, while giving his thugs doctors’ lab coats to wear to confuse the police. If he were not a few clowns short of a circus, the Joker could certainly work as the Chief Operating Officer of a major corporation.

In planning a strategy to stop the Joker, Bruce tells Alfred “Criminals aren’t complicated, Alfred. We just need to figure out what he’s after.” Bruce is correct that most criminals seeks something rational, like money, power, or revenge, but the Joker is no ordinary criminal. As Alfred tells Bruce, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical . . . some men just want to watch the word burn.” In contrast to Gotham’s mobsters, who seek wealth and power, the Joker seeks simply to annihilate everything and everyone. Thus, toward the end of the film, the Joker sets fire to an enormous stack of money and proclaims his superiority over the mob, “All you care about is money. This town deserves a better class of criminal.” The Joker acknowledges that he is a man of simple taste–“dynamite, gunpowder, and gasoline”–those things which burn best. His motto is “everything burns,” which suggests that life is meaningless–the basic claim of nihilism. The Joker’s nihilism is self-fulfilling: if he can cause Gotham to descend into chaos, then he was right all along.

It is out of his own inner lack that the Joker’s violence springs. It is the absence, the “terrible non-being” at his core that drives the Joker to destroy everything around him. Eagleton contends that the “obscene enjoyment of annihilating the Other becomes the only way of convincing yourself that you still exist” (100). The Joker turns his inner feeling of nihilism outward.

Eagleton further argues that in the evil person, the death drive is “turned outward so as to wreak its insatiable spitefulness on a fellow human being. Yet this furious violence involves a kind of lack–an unbearable sense of non-being, which must, so to speak, be taken out on the other” (127). This is why the Joker has “nothing in his pockets but knives and lint,” why he frequently kills even the thugs who work for him, and why he blows up a major hospital.

The characteristics of the evil which the Joker represents is what makes him so difficult for Batman to defeat. In the interrogation scene, which may be the most wrenching moment in the film because it shows Batman at his most vulnerable and humiliated, the Joker mocks Batman, even as Batman slams his fist into the Joker’s head, by saying, “You have nothing to threaten me with. You have nothing to do with all your strength.” Unlike any other villain, Batman ultimately cannot defeat the Joker through force because the Joker cannot be deterred by pain–he relishes it. Because of his nihilism, the Joker does not fear anything. Through a combination of technology, determination, and physical toughness, Batman can crush most opponents into submission, but the Joker will never stop.

Christopher Nolan has given evil a new face for this generation in the Joker. Yet, the evil which the Joker embodies has important precedents in both history and fiction, from Nazism to Shakespeare’s Iago in Othello and the Witches in Macbeth. Iago’s nihilism springs from his irrational desire to engineer Othello’s destruction, while the Witches relish the chaos that results when they give Macbeth their prophecy. In his drive to annihilate Gotham City, the Joker seeks to make the world look like the gaping wound in his own soul.

Sources:

Terry Eagleton. On Evil. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Peter Brown. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Watchmen and the Divine Watchmaker

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In Watchmen, Jon Osterman a.k.a. Dr. Manhattan is Alan Moore’s critique of the idea of a personal God. Far more so than in the film version, the original graphic novel frequently compares Dr. Manhattan to God, yet the overarching effect of this comparison is to suggest that even if God does exist he would be incapable of saving humanity from itself. Dr. Manhattan has various god-like characteristics: he knows the future; his power is unlimited; he can be in two or more places at once; he does not age and apparently will not die; he can rearrange atoms and it is suggested that he can even create life. There is even a panel, toward the end of Watchmen chapter XII, with Dr. Manhattan walking on water. What can we call a being like this other than a god? Yet, despite all of his power, Dr. Manhattan is incapable of ending the misery and suffering of humanity upon which Moore’s dystopian landscape focuses so intently. Dr. Manhattan’s character arc implies that even if God were walking around on earth, literally glowing with unimaginable power, he would still be unable to save the world.

Moore explicitly connects Dr. Manhattan to God in the final panel of Watchmen chapter III. After leaving Earth for Mars, Dr. Manhattan sits on a rock, which looks a bit like a throne, on the red planet. The epigraph for the chapter, from Genesis 18:25, is written below the image: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” The biblical context of the verse is Abraham’s “negotiation” with God about the impending judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah. When God reveals to Abraham that he will destroy these cities for their wickedness, Abraham beseeches God to spare them for the sake of the righteous, including Abraham’s own nephew Lot. Abraham says, “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” Using this verse as the chapter’s epigraph, Moore puts Dr. Manhattan in the position of God, as judge over humanity, yet, Dr. Manhattan refuses such a role, leaving Earth for Mars when humans weary him.

Deism in Watchmen

Moore consistently uses Deist imagery to characterize Dr. Manhattan. Deism conceives of God as the Divine Watchmaker: he created the world with the care of a watchmaker designing a beautiful watch, but once it was finished, he merely sat back and admired it for a moment before moving on to other things. According to Deism, God created an orderly world that functions on its own (governed by the laws of nature), but he is not personally involved in the vicissitudes of human life. Deism partly resulted from Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of universal laws of motion. Unlike earlier medieval models of the cosmos, the Newtonian universe is mechanistic, like a finely tuned clock. Once God set it in motion, it simply ticks indefinitely. Before he was transformed into Dr. Manhattan by a lab experiment gone awry, Jon Osterman was a physicist. He becomes a physicist because his father, a watchmaker, insists that he not pursue “an obsolete trade.” Jon, however, is fascinated by the internal mechanism of watches. He enjoys taking them apart and putting them back together again. Even before gaining god-like powers, Jon has the detached temperament of the Deist God, content to toy with the gears of a pocket watch.

Ironically, though others believe him to be a god, Dr. Manhattan is an atheist. After leaving Earth for the solitude of Mars, he muses, “Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there . . . A clock without a craftsman.” In the 19th century, the argument from design was used to support belief in God. If the universe is so intricately crafted, like a fine clock, then surely there must be a clockmaker? Dr. Manhattan, however, accepts the beauty of the universe without assuming that it was created by a divine being. He doubts both the Deist myth of of a divine watchmaker and the Christian claim that the world was created by the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.

At his father’s urging, Jon studies atomic physics. Jon is transformed into Dr. Manhattan when he is accidentally locked into the “intrinsic field” test chamber. The watchmaker motif continues as Jon enters the chamber to retrieve a watch he had fixed for fellow scientist and girlfriend Janey Slater. It appears that Jon is utterly disintegrated, but instead he is transformed into the invincible Dr. Manhattan. Jon learns to reassemble his body as he learned to reassemble the pieces of his father’s pocket watch: “Really, it’s just a question of reassembling the components in the correct sequence.” First, Jon appears as a floating nervous system. Then, a circulatory system. After that, he puts together a “partially muscled skeleton” before he finally reappears in a body that looks essentially human other than the blue glow. The panel depicting Jon’s reappearance in Watchmen chapter IV is reminiscent of Raphael’s depiction of the Transfiguration of Jesus. Dr. Manhattan, floating above the terrified scientists, is surrounded by a halo of light. In the biblical scene, Jesus goes up a mountain with his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John. Jesus “was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matthew 17:1). This is a “proleptic disclosure” of Jesus’ coming post-resurrection glory. It is a foreshadowing of Jesus as he will be when he returns to claim his place on David’s throne in the New Jerusalem, and of the Jesus whom John witnesses, “one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength” (Revelation 1:13-16). In his transformation into Dr. Manhattan, Jon Osterman’s body is permanently transfigured with the same kind of radiant light as Jesus in the Gospel narratives: “Their bleached faces stare up at me, pale and insubstantial in the sudden flare of ultraviolet. Sunburn in November.” Dr. Manhattan, however, does not aspire to be humanity’s savior.

Dr. Manhattan as a Divine Figure

Immediately after Jon’s transformation, people begin to think of him as a god. The Viet Cong who surrender to Dr. Manhattan feel terror “balanced by an almost religious awe.” Janey says, “They say you can do anything, Jon. They say you’re like God now.” Jon replies, “I don’t think there is a God, Janey. If there is, I’m not him.” Jon has no desire to play the role of God, to eradicate evil or create a just society. He soon reveals his defining character trait–detachment. He is so detached that he does not bother to inform his father that he is still alive, after the military notified Mr. Osterman of his son’s “accidental disintegration.” Dr. Manhattan becomes the willing servant of the U.S. government, fighting crime and turning the tide in Vietnam, yet he does so with profound indifference. He says, “The morality of my activities escapes me.” He bears so little empathy that, when he and Laurie return from Mars, he hardly notices that the streets of New York are littered with corpses. Adrian Veidt has killed half of the city’s population, yet far from grieving or even feeling sorrow, Dr. Manhattan is elated that he is temporarily incapable of seeing the future (it is obscured by “tachyon” particles). The opening panels of Watchmen chapter XII show him to be utterly oblivious to the atrocities around him.

The film version of Watchmen depicts Dr. Manhattan as simply not caring that much about humanity, failing to convey that he is incapable of acting decisively to alter the future. Janey is bewildered and outraged, for instance, when Dr. Manhattan does not intervene to save President Kennedy from assassination. Dr. Manhattan explains to Janey, “I can’t prevent the future. To me, it’s already happening.” It is not, as in the film, that Dr. Manhattan is extremely apathetic, but that he actually cannot change the future. This is a direct critique of the Christian concept of Providence, in which God superintends all of human history (“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” Romans 8:28). Dr. Manhattan cannot change the future because he experiences past, present, and future all at once. On Mars, Dr. Manhattan explains to Laurie, “Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time.” The film portrays Dr. Manhattan as a human being who has can see the future but does nothing about it, but the graphic novel attempts to imagine how God must feel, seeing all events–past, present and future–unfolding simultaneously. Dr. Manhattan explains his determinism to Laurie, “Everything is preordained.” When she accuses him of being a “puppet following a script,” he replies, “We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.” The terror of Moore’s dystopian world is not super-villains or nuclear war, but the idea that not even God may be free to save humanity from destruction.

Throughout Watchmen, Moore emphasizes Dr. Manhattan’s utter inability to alter the future in his encounters with the Comedian. Edward Blake a.k.a. the Comedian is half masked superhero half mercenary, fighting for the U.S. in Vietnam. The Comedian intrigues Dr. Manhattan because he is the most “deliberately amoral” human he has ever met. Jon appreciates the Comedian’s amorality because, in his detachment from human life, he has become fully amoral. Whereas the Comedian believes that there can be no meaningful morality in such a bloody, ugly world, Dr. Manhattan is amoral because he sees past, present, and future all at once. Moral frameworks are absurd to Dr. Manhattan because he realizes that everything is predetermined, that choice is an illusion. The Comedian understands the “madness, the pointless butchery” at the heart of the human condition, as exemplified by the war in Vietnam, and he responds with gleeful, violent rage. Dr. Manhattan, too, understands the evil that afflicts human nature, but his perception of time prevents him from feeling any emotion about it at all. Hence, he fights on behalf of the U.S. military, securing a victory over the Viet Cong.

The Comedian impregnates a Vietnamese woman, and when the war ends she urges him to take responsibility for her and their child. When he refuses, the woman slashes his face with a broken glass bottle. The Comedian shoots her without hesitation. Dr. Manhattan observes the whole thing, and even seems upset by it, but does not intervene. In one of his few displays of something approaching compassion, Dr. Manhattan says to the Comedian, “Blake, she was pregnant. You gunned her down.” The Comedian, of course, does not care; he is more annoyed by the wound to his face than the fact that he just murdered his lover and unborn child. Blake replies, “Y’know what? You watched me. You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia . . . but you didn’t lift a finger.” Dr. Manhattan is the powerless, all-powerful: he is not bound by any human weakness, yet because of his perception of time he is unable to help even the most innocent victims. Dr. Manhattan’s character suggests that if God exists, then he is, at best, merely a silent, pitying witness of human suffering and, at worst, utterly indifferent to our plight. The Comedian’s final indictment of Dr. Manhattan is “You don’t really give a damn about human beings.” The Deist God truly does not care about humanity. He enjoys the orderly world which he has created, but then moves on, perhaps to create another one.

Dr. Manhattan does come to a belated appreciation of life when Laurie realizes that the Comedian is her father. He realizes that the probability of Laurie’s existing is astronomically small: it not only required a genetic chain generations long, but also Laurie’s mother loving a man who had once tried to rape her. Only when Dr. Manhattan sees life as a “thermodynamic miracle” does he regain enough interest in humanity to return to Earth. Yet, this is not divine love, but rather the fascination of a scientist. Dr. Manhattan is compelled by the sublime, particularly in the very large, like the chasms and mountains of the Martian landscape, and in the very small, like the mysterious patterns of atoms: “I’ve walked across the sun. I’ve seen events so tiny and so fast they hardly can be said to have occurred at all.” Despite his transformation, Dr. Manhattan retains Jon Osterman’s love of exploring how the universe works. Nevertheless, in neither the graphic novel nor the film version of Watchmen is this enough to compel Dr. Manhattan to remain on earth.

Gnosticism in The Matrix and Prometheus

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Gnosticism originated in the ancient world, but has evolved throughout history. The core of Gnostic thought is that the material world, especially the human body, is corrupt. While God created the good, spiritual world, a lesser being, the Demiurge, created the physical world. One can be saved from the curse of physical existence only through secret knowledge, or gnosis.

William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium” encapsulates some of the essential elements of Gnosticism. The second stanza denigrates the body, pointing to the soul as the only source of hope: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.” The elderly reveal the body at its most fragile. Yeats likens an old man to a “tattered coat” to express how insubstantial the aging body is. Unless the soul can escape the body it is doomed. Yeats reiterates this idea in the third stanza: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.” The body is now compared to a “dying animal” separate from the heart, pained with the desire to escape the cage of corporeality. The final stanza presents the image of the soul escaping the body to inhabit the form of a golden bird. This form is free of the disease and decay to which the human body is subject; it is pure, beautiful, and eternal.

Gnosticism in The Matrix

Perhaps better than any other film, The Matrix dramatizes a Gnostic mythology. As Gnosticism posits that the physical world is a prison, so Morpheus calls the Matrix a “prison for your mind.” A sophisticated computer program that simulates a virtual reality, the Matrix seems so real that most humans do not suspect that the world around them is an illusion, or that their bodies will be harvested by machines. Yet, some, like Neo, feel an inexplicable sense of wrongness in the world–“like a splinter in your mind driving you mad,” as Morpheus says. This corresponds to the Gnosticism’s idea that only a small minority of people are “pneumatic,” those who possess the ability to understand gnosis, to realize the nature of reality, and transcend materiality to achieve salvation. Most people are “hylic,” oblivious to the reality behind the physical world, just as millions of people are unaware of the Matrix. Some glimpse the true nature of reality, but lack the discipline to be saved. Cypher fits into this middle group. Although Morpheus shows him the truth and frees his mind from the Matrix, after almost a decade of guerrilla warfare against the machines, Cypher’s new motto is “Ignorance is bliss.” Cypher betrays Morpheus to Agent Smith in exchange for his mind being re-implanted in the Matrix. He loves physical pleasures too much to value his freedom. As he eats a steak in the Matrix, he tells Agent Smith “You know, I know that this steak doesn’t exist. I know when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.” They sit in an elegant restaurant, and Cypher tells Agent Smith that he wants to be “rich, you know, someone important, like an actor.” Morpheus saves people from the Matrix by revealing to them the secret knowledge that the world as they perceive it is an illusion. Morpheus is aptly named because in Greek mythology Morpheus is the god of dreams. The Matrix is a dream-world; as Morpheus tells Neo, “You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.”

Agent Smith embodies Gnosticism’s disgust toward materiality. While interrogating Morpheus, he says, “I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it. It’s repulsive, isn’t it?” Body odor is a constant, palpable reminder of the filth and corruption of the human body. Agent Smith even feels contaminated by it, which is absurd since Morpheus’ sweat in the Matrix is not real. Furthermore, Agent Smith is a computer program, so it is impossible for him to actually be contaminated by human bodily fluids. Yet, Agent Smith must inhabit a human form, albeit a virtual one, within the Matrix, and he abhors it. More so than any other sense, smell is offensive to Gnosticism. Agent Smith feels the Gnostic longing for freedom from corporeality, as he tells Morpheus, “I must get out of here. I must get free.” He also compares people to viruses, arguing that unlike other mammals, humans fail to develop a natural equilibrium with their environment, but rather exhaust all of the resources in a given area before moving to the next area: “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, and we are the cure.” Agent Smith is, thus, a Gnostic misanthrope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb6yOklzHMI

Agent Smith’s hatred of Neo overcomes his revulsion toward the human body. In The Matrix Revolutions, he transfers his consciousness from the Matrix to the real world by possessing the man Bane. After trying to kill Neo and Trinity, he reveals himself and reiterates his Gnostic complaints against the human body, particularly its fragility and stench: “Still don’t recognize me? I admit, it is difficult to think, encased in this rotting piece of meat. The stink of it filling every breath, a suffocating cloud you can’t escape.” As the speaker of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” calls the body a “dying animal,” so Agent Smith calls it a “rotting piece of meat.” He continues, “Look at how pathetically fragile it is. Nothing this weak is meant to survive.” Agent Smith taunts Neo, “Look past the flesh, look through the soft gelatin of these dull cow eyes and see your enemy.” When he is blinded by Agent Smith, Neo gains the ability to perceive the true nature of things. He can no longer see physical appearances, but he can look beneath them. When he looks at Agent Smith, he sees a fiery, infernal form, and the machine city as he sees it is made of golden light. In reaching the peak of his power as the One, Neo no longer even perceives the physical world. Neo’s new sight reveals that the human body is no more than a “tattered coat upon a stick,” in Yeats’ words, easily torn away to reveal the spirit.

Gnosticism in Prometheus

Prometheus likewise features Gnostic elements, including characters on a quest for ultimate knowledge and a portrayal of the body as a hindrance to the soul. Two scientists, Drs. Holloway and Shaw, lead a corporate-sponsored expedition to a distant planet, seeking the beings who created humans. They discover a crypt of humanoid creatures which they name Engineers. Shaw tests the genetic material of the severed head of one Engineer, finding that it resembles human DNA. As Gnosticism posits that humanity was not created by God but by a lesser being, the Demiurge, so in Prometheus the Engineers designed people. The film’s premise and title are derived from Greek mythology. Prometheus is one of the titans, the first race of gods, who were eventually overthrown by Zeus and the younger Olympian gods. It was not Zeus, but Prometheus who created humanity.

The expedition discovers a massive structure which turns out to be a star ship buried underground. One of the chambers is full of canisters of black ooze. Shaw, the mission’s lone survivor along with the android David, realizes that the Engineers were planning to destroy earth’s population when they were mysteriously killed. They also encounter a single living Engineer, a paler, more muscular version of a human. Although they had hoped to learn why the Engineers created humans, this Engineer is in no mood to enlighten them. Apparently, the Engineers regretted creating people and planned to wipe them out, much like God’s decision to flood the earth and begin again with Noah’s descendants: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them'” (Genesis 6:5-7).

Prometheus’ opening scene shows an Engineer drinking some of the black liquid. After a few moments, his body begins to rot, dissolving completely as it washes down a waterfall. The film later implies that this is the Engineers’ method of creating life: the poison breaks down and mutates their DNA, and the water disseminates it throughout the planet. The same poison that destroys the Engineer’s body engenders new life forms. The paradoxical nature of the black liquid–life-creating and life-destroying–is confirmed throughout the film. Two members of the expedition get lost and are killed by predatory reptilian creatures bred from the ooze. David takes one of the canisters of the life-spawning poison back to the ship, putting a drop of it in Holloway’s drink because Holloway relentless taunts him about being an android. Holloway rapidly grows ill; even such a small dose of the poison is sufficient to rot him from the inside. Yet, before the poison takes effect, Holloway and Shaw sleep together, and Shaw, who is infertile, conceives. Even as ingesting it kills Holloway, the Engineer’s poison engenders life in the barren Shaw. Shaw’s “child,” however, is not human. It is a squid-like creature, which grows with the terrifying speed of a tumor. Shaw extracts the creature from her body with the help of an automated surgical machine. Despite its severance from Shaw’s body and any source of nutrients, the creature continues to grow. It is soon disgustingly large, like a huge, fleshy squid with long tentacles. While the physiological details do not bear close scrutiny, the fact that Shaw conceives such a monster, which has not will other than to feed and spawn, suggests that human nature is not so far from the utterly bestial. For the Gnostic, the human body is as repulsive as the squid-like monster which Shaw conceives. Prometheus, thus, presents a vivid image of humanity’s capacity to, literally, breed monstrous evil.

Peter Weyland, the trillionaire sponsor of the expedition, is on a Gnostic quest for immortality. Weyland funds the mission because he believes that Holloway and Shaw have found clues that will lead them to the creators of humanity. The aged Weyland, who hopes that the Engineers will show him how to defy mortality, signifies the Gnostic view of the fragility of the body. As Yeats says in “Sailing to Byzantium,” “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick.” Welyand is so near death that he spends the entire voyage in suspended animation. David awakens him only when he discovers the last living Engineer. Although Weyland meets this Engineer, he is not given immortality. The Engineer kills Weyland and as many of the other humans as he can; only Shaw escapes. Shaw, too, is a bit of a Gnostic. Although she does not loathe her body, at the end of the film she chooses to seek the Engineers’ home world instead of returning to earth. She abandons earthly life to search for the secret knowledge of humanity’s origin.

Sources:

Govindini Murty, “Decoding the Cultural Influences in ‘Prometheus,’ from Lovecraft to Halo.'” The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/06/decoding-the-cultural-influences-in-prometheus-from-lovecraft-to-halo/258357/#slide1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gnostic_terms

Violence, Justice, and Sacrifice Part 2: Gran Torino

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In Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood offers a critique of the classic Western myth of the lone gunslinger. Reflecting on the inescapable cycle of violence in which the gunslinger participates, he de-romanticizes the films through which he earned his fame, such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. With Gran Torino, Eastwood deepens this critique of vigilante justice and endless cycles of violence by offering self-sacrifice as the true path to justice.

Gran Torino features several important parallels to Unforgiven: a victimized woman, a reckless youth seeking murder, and Eastwood playing a grizzled veteran of many battles who has lost the taste for blood. Whereas in Unforgiven the protagonist is drawn back into the cycle of violence, Gran Torino offers a vision of ending the cycle of violence through self-sacrifice.

As with Unforgiven Eastwood starred in and directed Gran Torino. He plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War veteran and auto worker who finds his neighborhood taken over by Hmong immigrants from southeast Asia. He is the epitome of toughness, work ethic, and racial prejudice. The film opens with the funeral of Walt’s wife, introducing Walt’s curmudgeonly nature, irritation with his shallow and materialistic sons and grandchildren, and his contempt for the priest of his local Catholic parish.

At the beginning of the film, Walt is antagonistic toward the well-intentioned, but obnoxious priest’s attempts to get him to return to church and go to confession. He dismisses the priest as an “over-educated, 27-year-old virgin, who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them eternity.” Walt believes religion is a sham, admitting that he only went to church because of his wife. Walt is particularly unimpressed with the priest’s eulogy for his wife, which consists mostly of cliche reflections about how death is bittersweet. Initially, Walt seems an unlikely candidate to ask himself What Would Jesus Do?

The film introduces its central themes of violence, justice, and sacrifice through Walt’s Hmong neighbor, Thao, and his thug cousin. Thao’s cousin and the rest of his gang try to recruit Thao. As an initiation into the gang, Thao is supposed to steal Walt’s 1972 Gran Torino. Walt hears a noise in his garage, however, and goes to investigate. With his gun pointed at Thao, Walt slips; Thao flees.

Later, the thugs return to “offer” Thao a second chance to join their gang. They try to drag Thao into their car, while Thao’s mother, sister, and grandmother try to stop them. The ensuing commotion brings Walt outside with his gun pointed in the thugs’ faces. “Get off my lawn,” Walt growls. The thugs back down and the entire Hmong community considers Walt a hero for saving Thao. Walt, of course, was acting out of selfish motives–he simply wanted the foreigners off his lawn. Eastwood develops Walt’s character throughout the film, however, so that by its end he grows to love the Hmong neighbors he previously despised.

Walt is equally successful the next time that he uses the threat of violence. He happens to see Thao’s sister, Sue, being hassled by three guys. He tells them, “Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn’t of fucked with. That’s me,” and then scares them off by first pointing his finger at them like a gun, and then drawing a real pistol and aiming it at them. He then takes Sue home. This initiates a genuine friendship between the gruff Walt and the vibrant, quick-witted Sue.

Thao’s mother wants her son to make amends to Walt for trying to steal his car. Thao begins to work for Walt, but his penance becomes an apprenticeship. Walt teaches Thao how to use tools and make various home repairs. Acting as a surrogate father, Walt helps Thao toughen up and learn valuable skills.

The Hmong gang will not relinquish their claim on Thao. When Walt discovers they have given Thao a cigarette burn, he again uses violence and intimidation to stop them. Walt follows the thugs to their home and attacks one of them. After beating him up, he tells him to stay away from Thao. Walt further threatens the thug saying, “Got it? I’ll take that as a ‘yes’ because if I have to come back here it’s gonna get fuckin’ ugly.” Unlike earlier in the film, however, this show of force proves insufficient to eliminate the threat posed by the gang.

The gang retaliates first by shooting up the front of Thao’s house. Not content with vandalism, the gang beats and rapes Sue, to whom they are related by blood. The first two times Walt was able to scare off the thugs with his gun and fierce attitude, but now he has run up against the futility of trying to fight violence with violence, as it only adds “deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars” as Dr. King said.

Much like in Unforgiven, the unthinkable offense–that which the hero cannot refrain from retaliating against–has happened. In Unforgiven, when Will Munny’s friend Ned is killed, he slaughters those responsible–and several others who were hardly involved just for good measure. Gran Torino sets up the expectation that Walt will do the same to avenge Sue. Walt has given the thugs a fair chance, and now it’s time for him to blow them all away like they deserve, or so the old cowboy myth goes.

After Sue is abused, Walt tells the priest, “Thao and Sue are never gonna find peace in this world as long as that gang is around.” The problem with evil is that it never stops. It never sleeps. It never relents. No matter how many times Walt threatens the gang, they will never stop their predations. The priest worries that Walt will adopt the role of the avenger and kill the thugs. He says to Walt, “If I was Thao I guess I’d want vengeance. I’d want to stand shoulder to shoulder with you and kill those guys.” That is exactly what Thao wants. He is outraged by the way his cousin and the other thugs abused his sister, and wants revenge. Thao says, “Don’t let me down, Walt, not you” and “Thinking time is over. Now is the time to kick the shit out of those pricks.” Walt is more circumspect, however. He says to Thao, “Mr. Tough Guy out for blood all of a sudden–you know nothin’ about it.”

Having killed over a dozen people in Korea, some of them only teenagers, and having seen many of his fellow soldiers killed, Walt knows the grim reality of death. He refuses to undertake killing lightly. In fact, he refuses to undertake it at all.

Walt shows Thao the Silver Star he received in Korea. He earned the award by being the only member of his regiment to survive a deadly mission. Thao asks Walt what it was like to kill a man. Walt responds, “You don’t want to know.” A few minutes later, however, he elaborates, saying that killing is “goddamn awful.” He tells Thao that the only thing worse than killing a teenage boy who has been forced into war is receiving a medal for doing so. He locks Thao in his basement to protect the kid from getting himself killed. While Thao screams at Walt to let him out, Walt tells him that killing leaves a stain on the soul and “I’ve got blood on my hands; I’m soiled.”

Walt leaves to face the thugs alone, much like in Unforgiven. Like in the classic Western, the unflappable Walt stares down a shooting gallery of foes. He mocks his enemies, saying “Go ahead and pull those pistols like miniature cowboys.” Unlike the thugs, who relish the role of outlaws, Walt refuses to take on the role of the cowboy, of the lone gunslinger. In parallel to an earlier scene, Walt points his finger at the thugs as if it is a gun. When he reaches into his coat for his lighter, they open fire. Walt does not defend himself against the barrage of bullets; he falls to the ground with his arms spread apart in the sign of the cross. Walt’s last words are “Hail, Mary, full of grace” because in the act of following Christ’s example of laying down his life for his friends (John 15:13), he affirms the faith he previously rejected as superstition.

The climax of Gran Torino might easily shock long-time Eastwood fans. You mean he isn’t gonna get up and blow them all away? You mean he wasn’t wearing a bullet-proof vest? You mean he’s really dead? Walt discovers that self-sacrifice is the true path to justice. The thugs are arrested for murder; Thao and Sue are safe; the film ends with the priest giving Walt’s eulogy as it opened with the funeral of Walt’s wife. If Unforgiven dramatizes the falsehoods of the myth of the classic Western, then Gran Torino offers an alternative to seeking vengeance through violence.

Violence, Justice, and Sacrifice Part 1: Unforgiven

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In Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood critiques the classic Western myth of the lone gunslinger. Reflecting on the inescapable cycle of violence in which the gunslinger participates, he de-romanticizes the kinds of films through which he earned his fame, such as A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven, William Munny, is an aged, retired gunslinger, who has forsaken a life of violence to raise his children. As the film progresses, he is gradually drawn back into the harsh cowboy world which he has worked so hard to leave behind. The maiming of a prostitute, the folly of a young man, and the death of a friend conspire to force him inexorably back into the role of avenger, dealing out vigilante justice on a corrupt sheriff.

In the world of the classic Western, it is typically the miscarriage of justice which underlies the heroic action of the protagonist. Unforgiven follows this model: in the town of Big Whiskey, a prostitute’s face is slashed by one of her clients. The town sheriff, Little Bill, determines that the assailant, and his semi-accomplice friend, must pay the pimp five and two ponies, respectively, for damaging his “property.” Little Bill believes this is sufficient, as his central concern is preserving peace and order, not striving for true justice. The lead prostitute, Alice, is outraged that the assailant will not even be whipped for his crime.

The prostitutes exercise what little agency they have by pooling their money to put a bounty on the heads of the men who maimed one of their own. The sheriff’s failure to enact justice, sets in motion the events that draw William Munny away from his children and his pig farm to take up his gun for the first time in over a decade.

The text with which the film opens describes Will as a man with a “notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition,” yet when we first meet him he seems no more than a weary man struggling to feed his young children. Will’s wife has died, and so he must work to keep his pigs, which are plagued by fever, alive without much comfort or support.

Will’s wife, Claudia, is the one who reformed him, turning him from drunkenness and murder. As with the classic Western, Unforgiven associates Christianity, femininity, and pacifism. All three are combined in the person of Claudia. Yet, Claudia is absent. Will clings to her memory, but without her benevolent influence he is unable to prevent himself from falling back into the cycle of violence and vigilante justice. As Will’s friend Ned says, “If Claudia was alive, you wouldn’t be doin’ this.” Also following the pattern of the classic Western, the female, Christian voice of pacifism is introduced, only to be silenced. Tension is created some woman close to the hero implores him to turn from violence; the hero ultimately disregards the call of pacifism, typically when something so heinous–whether an insult or a killing–is perpetrated that he must respond with force.

As Jane Tompkins argues in West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, the “viewpoint which women represent is introduced in order to be swept aside, crushed, or dramatically invalidated” (41) While the Western hero murders allegedly to protect women and children, he never heeds the “discourse of love and peace which women articulate” (41).

The Victorian era firmly established a gendered dichotomy between the male, public world of business, politics, and war on the one hand, and the female, private world of the home, emotion, and religion on the other. This basic bifurcation of life is assumed in the Western, so that manliness is generally severed from religion and emotion.

The Western as a genre thus defines itself, as Tompkins says, “in part by struggling to get rid of Christianity’s enormous cultural weight” (32). The feminine voice calling for mercy is the “enabling condition” for the Western because the “genre’s revenge plot depends on an antithetical world of love and reconciliation” (41) that must be rejected. Tompkins further observes that the shoot-out is the Western’s sacrament of choice. High Noon, for example, “begins in a church, the movement of the entire film–as if to compensate–is away from the sacramental moment of the protagonist’s marriage and toward the apocalyptic moment of his shoot-out, the sacrament the Western substitutes for matrimony” (35).

Although Will has forsaken his outlaw lifestyle, his drinking and killing ways, he is drawn back into it when the Schofield Kid arrives. The Schofield Kid is an exquisite caricature of the classic Western gunslinger–all bravado and no actual skill. Whereas the classic Western outlaw is preternaturally skilled at shooting, the Kid’s eyesight is so bad that he can only see well enough to shoot accurately at a mere 50 yards. Unforgiven employs the trope of a gunslinger shooting at a cowboy hat to prove his skill for ironic purposes. When Ned discovers how near-sighted the Kid is, the Kid tries to prove his skill by shooting at a cowboy on the ground nearby, in a parody of the scene in For a Few Dollars More, in which Lee Van Cleef’s character, Colonel Mortimer, uses his pistol to prevent Eastwood’s character from retrieving his hat. Will and Ned are unimpressed. While the classic cowboy is a fearless killer, the Kid pretends to have killed five men but has killed none. The Kid has all the recklessness of an outlaw, but no true mettle. He is ultimately a pretender, enamored with, as Will says, “the spectacle, the fancy clothes,” the trappings of being a gunslinger, but unable to truly face mortality without blinking.

The Schofield Kid tells Will about the “whores’ gold” and, out of need of the money, Will eventually joins him. Will recruits his old partner-in-crime, Ned. As they travel together, Will and Ned reflect on the violence of their shared past. Will expresses regret that he shot a man who offended him while drunk. He rues the incongruity between what the man had done, which he does not even remember, and his killing of him. This theme pervades Unforgiven: the incongruity between the wrong perpetrated and the killing it triggers.

Will believes that although he rides toward murder, he can retain his rehabilitated state. He tells Ned, “Claudia, she straightened me up . . . just ’cause I’m goin’ on this killin’ don’t mean I’m goin’ back to the way I was. I just need the money.” The film will dramatize, however, that despite Will’s intentions, in going after the bounty, he will re-metamorphose into exactly the brutal killer he used to be. It is, of course, out of necessity that Will goes on this mission. He does not want his children to starve. Unforgiven forces us to reassess our understanding of “necessity,” as it suggests that acting out of necessity can lead to horrific bloodshed.

Will does not immediately return to the role of gunslinger with enthusiasm. He is filled with regret throughout the early part of the film, which culminates in his paralyzing fever. Alone in Big Whiskey’s saloon, Will is almost comically helpless before Little Bill. With Ned and the Kid upstairs visiting the prostitutes, Will must face Little Bill’s indignation and brutality alone. Although Will huddles meekly, shaking with sickness, Little Bill insists not only on taking his firearm, but also on beating him up. Little Bill enjoys asserting his authority in the name of keeping the peace, and he kicks Will around the saloon until Will crawls out into the rain.

After his beating at Little Bill’s hands, Will descends into feverish delirium. His friends take him to a barn to recover. Will recounts seeing the Angel of Death and the rotting corpse of his wife in his dreams. Despite the haunting, ominous nature of his delirium, when Will recovers his health he also regains his resolve to avenge the prostitute and collect his share of the reward. He does not seem to heed the implicit warning of his nightmares.

Will maintains his virtue for much of the film. As they ride through a storm, Ned offers Will a drink to keep warm; Will refuses. He steadfastly refuses to drink alcohol even when, at Big Whiskey’s saloon, he shivers with fever. He also declines to sleep with the prostitutes, as an advance on the reward money, as Ned and the Kid do, out of fidelity to his late wife. He insists, “I ain’t no crazy, killin’ fool,” yet things begin to change when they hunt down the assailant’s friend.

From the rocks above, Will, Ned, and the Kid watch the assailant’s friend pass beneath with some other men. Ned fires at their target with his rifle, hitting his horse. The horse goes down, crushing the man’s leg. Their target is immobilized, but Ned cannot bring himself to fire again. At this critical juncture, Will takes the rifle from Ned and shoots the prone man. Whereas Ned balks at taking life, Will embraces it.

The whole scene is a wonderfully grotesque de-romanticizing of the classic Western portrayal of death: instead of a suspenseful, dramatic killing, in which a single bullet shatters the victim’s life and sends him flying from his horse to land irrevocably flat on the ground, this death is awkwardly prolonged. As soon as his horse falls on top of him, the victim begins moaning to his friends taking cover nearby. He calls for help and whines that his leg is broken. Moreover, Will’s fatal shot hits the victim, crawling in vain for the safety of the rocks, in the stomach. This man dies as slowly as possible. He gets plenty of screen-time to tell his friends that he is dying, and to declare how thirsty he is. Will finally tells the men below that he will not shoot if they will get their friend some water. This dismal scene, like Unforgiven as a whole, strips the glamor, glory, and nobility from the myth of the outlaw gunslinger.

Though lacking in drama, this man’s death is still poignant because he is one of the least guilty characters in the film. He is guilty only by association with the man who cut the prostitute’s face. In fact, he is the only character with the intuition that true justice involves restitution more than retribution. When he and his friend return to Big Whiskey to pay the pimp with their ponies, this man brings an additional pony–his finest–with him. He offers this pony to the victimized prostitute as recompense for what was done to her. Alice and the other prostitutes, however, cannot understand his action and, on behalf of the maimed woman (who is never consulted), they reject this gift and revile the man who offers it.

Restitution is integral to the biblical conception of justice. According to the Torah, it is not enough to merely replace what one steals: “If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall repay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep” (Exodus 22:1). Likewise, after encountering Jesus, Zacchaeus the tax collector follows the Law in making restitution for the money he had stolen from the people: as he promises Jesus, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold” (Luke 19:8). In Unforgiven, the possibility of restitution, like the voice of pacifism, is raised only to be shoved aside to make way for retribution.

While there are certainly a number of crimes punishable by death in the Torah–“Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 24:17)–they were designed to obviate endless blood feuding. The genius of this kind of retribution is that the death toll stops at one. The community puts the murderer to death, making it unnecessary for relatives of the victim to seek to avenge their kin and thus avoiding multi-generational cycles of violence.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses the Torah’s prescriptions for retribution: “If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him” (Leviticus 24:19-20). Jesus teaches, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:38-39). Jesus seems to understand the Torah’s commands about retribution as he treats its stipulations about divorce–as a necessary and temporary concession to weak, sinful people. As Jesus tells the Pharisees, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). Laws about retribution were likewise necessary for maintaining justice, but not themselves the ideal pattern for God’s people. Even before the giving of the Torah to the Israelites, God spared Cain, the first murderer, from retribution (Genesis 4).

After the murder in the canyon, Ned is so disturbed that he abandons the mission. He has again tasted the life of the gunslinger and found it too bitter. The Kid reviles Ned, and he and Will continue on their own. Ned is unnerved and loses his confidence; Will is invigorated. His earlier paralyzing indecision, symbolized in his debilitating fever, vanishes as he embraces the role of avenger.

Little Bill’s men capture Ned. Seeking information about the whereabouts of Will and the Schofield Kid, Little Bill mercilessly whips Ned. Through the character of Little Bill, Unforgiven shows that justice entails far more than simply maintaining law and order. Little Bill ends up beating Ned to death, not precisely on purpose, but certainly without much restraint. The scene could be far more graphic than it is, but it is wrenching not only because of Ned’s relative innocence, but also in the image of a white man beating a black one.

Meanwhile, Will and the Kid track down the man who maimed the prostitute. In a scene much like the one in which Will shoots the assailant’s friend, the Kid kills the assailant in a highly unglamorous way. The assailant leaves the shelter of his hideout to use the outhouse. The Kid opens the outhouse door and shoots his victim three times. The victim’s companions come outside and fire at Will and the Kid as they make their getaway.

Although the Kid boasts about his killing prowess throughout the film, actually killing a man unnerves him, like Ned. “Was that what it was like in the old days?” and “Were you ever scared in them days?” the Kid asks Will. Will replies that he was drunk most of the time. The Kid admits that this killing was his first, and eventually breaks into tears. One of the climactic moments of the classic Western–avenging a wrong against a woman–is here reduced to the grotesque shooting of a man on the toilet, or “three shots while he was takin’ a shit” as the Kid says. The irrevocable nature of what he has done (“all on account of pullin’ a trigger”), as well as the utter lack of glamor, comes home to the Schofield Kid, so much so that he resolves never to kill again. The Kid tries to assuage his conscience by appealing to a comforting narrative of guilt and retribution, saying that the dead man had it coming. Will replies bluntly that “We all have it comin'”. Unforgiven thus counters the assumptions which the classic Western makes about guilt and innocence with a picture of universally guilty, that is, sinful, humanity. The film unravels the Western’s myth of the justness of revenge by asserting that all are guilty, all deserve death.

After avenging the prostitute, Will and the Schofield Kid learn from her that Ned has died under Little Bill’s whip. Hearing of his friend’s death, Will finally takes back to the bottle. Relapsing for the first time is a prelude to his fully embracing his old nature–his “notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition”–as he re-metamorphoses into his former gunslinger self to avenge his comrade.

While the Schofield Kid “won’t kill nobody no more,” Will returns to Big Whiskey’s saloon to confront Little Bill. Animated by fury, Will avenges Ned far beyond what even retributive justice would deem necessary. First, he guns down the pimp, taking the saloon’s crowd, grossly celebrating Little Bill’s triumph over Ned the “assassin,” by surprise. He then faces off against Little Bill and four other armed men. Little Bill orders his men to fire on Will as soon as he empties the other barrel of his shotgun. Will hurls his shotgun at Little Bill, and then draws his pistol. He fatally wounds all five men before him, including Little Bill, before they can shoot him. He kills a few of the saloon’s fleeing patrons for good measure.

Unforgiven‘s criticism of the classic Western reaches its peak in this climactic scene, as the film actually shifts fully into the register of the classic Western itself. This scene closely resembles similar epic confrontations between the lone gunslinger and a slew of opponents. In A Fistful of Dollars, for instance, Eastwood’s grim-faced, cigar-smoking character blasts four opponents into oblivion in the instant before they can even get a shot off. Within the arc of the normal Western narrative, one feels that the hero is wholly justified in his killing, however excessive it may be. Unforgiven, in contrast, undercuts this feeling of satisfaction by emphasizing the ease and gratuity with which death is dealt out.

Little Bill’s final words are an appeal for the mercy he did not grant to Ned: “I don’t deserve this, to die like this.” Will’s infamous reply, delivered in Eastwood’s trademark gruff, uncompromising voice, “Deserves got nothin’ to do with it,” is followed by Will finishing off Little Bill. Deserving death, indeed, has nothing to do with being killed in the world of Unforgiven. Or, rather, the reasons for which the characters are killed are incommensurate with the finality of death. Whatever his past crimes may have been, Ned did not deserve to die, nor certainly did the friend of the man who cut the prostitute’s face. Even the offender, who is a despicable man, did not deserve death for cutting the prostitute’s face. Little Bill, perhaps, deserves to die for beating Ned to death, but Will kills his four deputies along with him, who are guilty only by association. Unforgiven displays the gratuitous nature of the cycle of violence: one death leads to another and another, from the man who cut the prostitute’s face to Ned to Little Bill. As reprehensible as the maiming of the prostitute is, how can it possibly have triggered the deaths of a dozen men?

Although he repudiates killing early in the film, by its end, Will has returned to being the man who has “killed just about every thing that walks or crawls.” Those who miss Unforgiven‘s ironic treatment of the Western’s mythos, may wrongly cheer rather than lament Will’s transformation. It is easy to rejoice that Will’s long latent “notoriously violent and intemperate disposition” has been reawakened, and even to applaud the gruesome discharge of death at the film’s conclusion. Will’s sinful nature, though banished by his wife’s presence and repressed for over a decade, has not been eradicated.

The meditation on violence, justice, and sacrifice begun in Unforgiven reaches its conclusion in Gran Torino, in which the protagonist chooses self-sacrifice over vengeance, martyrdom over murder, and breaks the cycle of violence.

Tryin’ Real Hard to be the Shepherd: Miracles and the Major Prophets in Pulp Fiction

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Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino’s signature film, memorably combines violence, hilarity, and theological reflection. Its central characters, Jules and Vincent, are hit men. Although at the film’s beginning they are more or less on the same page ethically–both content with their job, both killers with little pity for their victims–their viewpoints diverge radically after a hit almost goes fatally wrong. Jules’ perspective is wholly reoriented, while Vincent’s remains the same. Jules resolves to abandon his criminal life, while Vincent clings to it and is killed soon after.

Jules has a habit of reciting a well crafted speech before blowing away his victims:

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

Why does Jules recite this speech? As he admits in a mood of self-critique at the film’s end, “I been sayin’ that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a coldblooded thing to say to a motherfucker ‘fore you popped a cap in his ass.”

As a hit man for L.A. gangster, Marsellus Wallace, Jules kills people for a living, but he also has a sense of style. He recites this quasi-biblical passage to build the intensity before striking the executioner’s blow. He likes the dramatic imagery and grandiose phrases. Jules may also enjoy reciting this speech because it serves as a self-justifying hermeneutic for killing others. Not that Jules is religious, but that the powerful rhetoric seems to give him the confidence to adopt the role of merciless killer necessary for his occupation. The speech has a self-aggrandizing effect, making murder seem righteous, as Jules casts himself as the instrument of divine wrath.

Jules gives this speech twice in the movie: the first time, near the beginning, he delivers it with great fervor before he carries out a hit on Brett; the second time, near the film’s end, he recites the words in a more subdued tone in the diner, after having forsaken murder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2WK_eWihdU

Jules claims that this speech is from Ezekiel 25:17, though only the last part of it is. In the English Standard Version, Ezekiel 25:17 reads, “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful rebukes. Then they will know that I am the LORD, when I lay my vengeance upon them.” This last part is how Jules ends his recitation, but the rest of his speech is not in the biblical text. The context of Ezekiel 25 is a series of judgments against enemies of Israel: Ammon, Moab and Seir, Edom, and Philistia.

The speech is filled with biblical phrases, like “Blessed is he” and the “valley of darkness,” and various biblical buzz-words, like “righteous,” “iniquities,” and “charity.” It also includes a number of characters which could be said to have biblical models: the Selfish, the Weak, Evil Men, the Shepherd, and Lost Children. As we will see, Jules’ transformation will involve his embracing the shepherd’s role of guiding others.

What changes between the first and second time Jules recites the speech? The plot unfolds in a non-linear fashion, so the scene in which Jules and Vincent kill Brett and his friends is split into two parts. The first part of the scene ends with Jules reciting his speech, and then Vincent joining him in blowing Brett away. In the second part of the scene, however, we discover that another of Brett’s friends was hiding in the bathroom. This guy unloads his own gun at Jules and Vincent. Incredibly, he misses completely, and Jules and Vincent kill him, as well.

Jules and Vincent respond in diametrically opposed ways to this. Jules believes it’s a miracle; Vincent believes it’s luck. Jules exclaims, “We should be fuckin’ dead!” and Vincent replies, “Yeah, we were lucky.” Jules immediately realizes that Vincent’s idea of luck and his own conception of the miraculous are incompatible. Jules says, “That shit wasn’t luck,” and continues “ That was . . . divine intervention.” He asks Vincent, “You know what divine intervention is?”  and Vincent responds, “That means God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.” Vincent is being sardonic, but Jules is dead serious, “ Yeah, man, that’s what is means. That’s exactly what it means! God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.” Vincent still tries to down-play what happened, “Chill the fuck out, Jules, this shit happens,” but Jules is insistent,   “We should be fuckin’ dead now, my friend! We just witnessed a miracle, and I want you to fuckin’ acknowledge it!”  

For the first time in his life, Jules is willing to consider that God may be real, and not just real, but intimately involved in human life–so involved that He would comes down from heaven to deflect bullets away from a couple of hit men. 

In All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly analyze the disparity between Jules’ gratitude and Vincent’s skepticism toward their miraculous survival. They align Jules with the Greek spirit of wonder, exemplified by Homeric figures like Odysseus, and Vincent with the more Roman belief in chance. Vincent, like “the Roman citizen invoking blind Fortuna” (70), cannot understand Jules’ gratitude. Dreyfus and Kelly observe that Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck, “has no natural precursor in the Homeric world” (65) Unlike the Greek world, in which favorable events were thought to be caused by the beneficence of the gods, in the Roman world of Fortune, “stoicism and reserve” (65) are the proper attitudes. Stoicism and wonder represent incompatible alternatives: either good things happen for a reason, and should elicit gratitude, or they are the results of random chance, and should merely be shrugged off. When the spears of Odysseus’ foes go awry, he praises Athena, just as Jules is grateful to the divine for miraculously surviving a barrage of shots fired at him from point-blank range.  

Dreyfus and Kelly argue that a life of wonder and gratitude is more meaningful than one of stoicism. They observe that ungrateful characters in Homer are typically condemned. Ajax, for instance, offends Poseidon by claiming that he survived the wreckage of his ship unaided by the gods. Poseidon destroys Ajax for his lack of gratitude. Pulp Fiction gives Vincent a similar fate.   

While Vincent maintains his cynical position, Jules’ beliefs are reoriented by the miracle. Jules says, “But me, my eyes are wide fuckin’ open” and then tells Vincent that he is going to retire. Vincent finds Jules’ resolution absurd; he cannot fathom why Jules interprets what happened to be anything more than good fortune. Like many in the modern world, Vincent cannot accept miracles, the supernatural, or Providence; he is shocked that Jules seems to imply that “God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets.”

Vincent’s indifference is even more extreme when we consider that this is the second of three “miracles” which he experiences throughout the film.

The first miracle: at Marsellus’ request, Vincent takes his boss’s wife, Mia, out for the evening; Mia snorts some of his heroin, thinking it is cocaine; she almost dies, but Vincent gives her a shot of adrenaline to the heart. Had Mia died, Marsellus certainly would have had Vincent killed.

The third miracle: Jules and Vincent drive off with a friend of Jules’ named Marvin who was connected to Brett. Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin in the face, and Jules goes to his friend Jimmy’s house to get off the road. Jimmy’s wife, Bonnie, will soon be home, and Jules, Vincent, and the car are covered in blood and gore. With the help of Mr. Wolf, however, the body is hidden in the trunk, the car is cleaned, and Jules and Vincent get some new clothes before Bonnie gets home. They succeed in driving the car to a junkyard where the evidence will be discreetly destroyed. Vincent, therefore, has at least three profound reasons to feel immense gratitude, yet he feels none.

Later, as Jules and Vincent share breakfast at a diner, they continue their discussion of the alleged miracle. Vincent reiterates his skepticism: “I witnessed a freak occurrence.” Jules counters that Vincent is looking at it all wrong, that “What is significant is I felt God’s touch, God got involved.” Jules argues that he experienced God’s presence in their survival, and he cannot go back to his old life after that.

Vincent wonders what Jules will do now. Jules says he plans to “walk the earth.” Vincent is pretty confused as to what this means, so Jules clarifies: “Just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures.” Jules envisions an itinerant life of ministry not unlike Jesus’. Vincent is not sold on the wisdom of Jules’ plan, so he asks, “How long do you intend to walk the earth?” Jules responds, “Until God puts me where he wants me to be.” Vincent then asks, “What if he never does?” Jules’ reply reveals the depth of his new-found faith: “If it takes forever, I’ll wait forever.” Now that he trusts that God intervened to save him from those bullets, Jules believes that God has some purpose for his life and is fully open to whatever it may be. Jules has been so transformed by the miracle he experienced that he is willing to forsake his old life and devote himself to wandering the earth with no promise of reward.

Vincent decides that Jules will become a bum, “like those pieces of shit out there who beg for change. They walk around like a bunch of fuckin’ zombies, they sleep in garbage bins, they eat what I throw away, and dogs piss on ’em.” Vincent is also unnerved by how unwavering Jules is in his new sense of certainty about the folly of his old life and his determination to begin his new life. At one point, Vincent says, “Stop fuckin’ talkin’ like that!” to which Jules replies, “If you find my answers frightening, Vincent, you should cease askin’ scary questions.” The “scary questions” which the two have been entertaining are scary to Vincent because they question everything which he has assumed about life. Jules has brought an ethical dimension into things which was previously absent.

Vincent makes decisions based on how they will benefit him. He is an essentially selfish person, in the sense that his moral calculus rarely prioritizes the good of others. The only traditional virtue which Vincent seems to abide by is loyalty, and even that commitment is tenuous at best. After taking Mia out, Vincent finds himself back at the Wallace home, considering whether or not he should sleep with Mia. Mia obviously enjoys her night out with Vincent, and invites him in for a drink when he takes her home. Vincent goes into the bathroom to debate his course of action with himself.

Vincent speaks aloud to the mirror: “One drink and leave. Don’t be rude, but drink your drink quickly, say goodbye, walk out the door, get in your car, and go down the road.” He tries to convince himself to leave without taking advantage of Mia. Vincent recognizes the situation’s ethical dimension: “It’s a moral test of yourself, whether or not you can maintain loyalty.” Yet, his conception of the importance of loyalty is devoid of any content: “Because when people are loyal to each other, that’s very meaningful.” Vincent has no real reason to maintain loyalty, just a vague sense that it is important. The real reason he convinces himself to leave without making a move on Mia is his fear that Marsellus will find out and maim or kill him, as earlier references to Tony “Rocky Horror” show.

Tony “Rocky Horror” fell four stories from his balcony through the glass roof of his greenhouse, apparently because Marsellus ordered it. According to rumor, passed on to Vincent by Jules, Marsellus had Tony “Rocky Horror” tossed off of his balcony because he gave Mia a foot massage. Mia denies this, but it sticks with Vincent, nevertheless. It is thus not loyalty which actually constrains Vincent, but the prohibitive danger of cuckolding his boss. Vincent has no ethical reservation about sleeping with Mia; his only concern is self-preservation. Vincent has no true ethical code, nothing by which to live other than the pursuit of pleasure–such as his heroin use–or the pursuit of power–such as working for a gangster.

The genius of the film’s non-linear structure is that it ends with Jules and Vincent each poised on the moment of choice–Jules rejecting his old life, Vincent reaffirming his violent, selfish lifestyle. By the film’s end, however, we already know that Vincent will soon die. This gives Vincent’s decision not to heed Jules’ example a sense of doom. While Jules decides to resign from Marsellus’ services, Vincent continues to work for Marsellus, and dies on his next assignment. He is killed by Butch, a boxer who double-crosses, and then later rescues, Marsellus, and whom Vincent was sent to kill. Vincent ironically tastes his own medicine as the man on whom the hit was put out kills the hit man. Vincent goes to Butch’s apartment, ready to kill him if the boxer returns there. Butch does return, seeking a watch that belonged to his great-grandfather, surprises Vincent, and shoots him with his own gun. One thinks of Ajax.

In the film’s final scene, the robbery at the diner, the full scope of Jules’ transformation–and how radically different he is from Vincent–becomes apparent. Jules offers the inept robbers the money in his wallet–$1,500–but will not part with the case belonging to Marsellus, which he and Vincent retrieved from Brett. This sparks a comically tense and tensely comical situation in which Jules holds a gun to one of the robbers, while trying to keep the other hysterical robber–Yolanda–calm enough not to shoot anyone.

Jules is more than happy to part with the money, as it is no longer as important to him as it used to be. Vincent, however, is less than thrilled about the situation. He says, “Jules, if you give this nimrod fifteen hundred bucks, I’m gonna shoot ’em on general principle.” To what “general principle” does Vincent refer? To his guiding principle of self-interest. Vincent cannot understand the compassion which Jules shows to the hapless robbers. From Vincent’s perspective, Jules has one of the robbers at gun point, and thus should not give up any of his money. For Jules, however, the money matters much less than his finding a way out of the situation without anyone being killed. The authoritative voice which Jules possesses, which he used to taunt and intimidate Brett early in the film, he now uses to maintain calm and preserve life.

Amid Yolanda’s periodic shrieking, Jules explains the change he has undergone. After reciting his speech for the robbers, this time without fury, Jules tries out a few interpretations. The first is a self-serving reading of the text: “Now I’m thinkin’, it could mean you’re the evil man. And I’m the righteous man. And Mr. .45 here, he’s the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness.” Jules’ second interpretation is an idealized, wish-fulfillment: “Or it could be you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish.” Finally, Jules’ dismisses these first two interpretations–more eisegesis than exegesis–as the fantasies they are. His third interpretation abandons self-justification: “I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin’. I’m tryin’ real hard to be a shepherd.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PeyiU3uWJ8

The robbers are “the weak” for obvious reasons: they are lazy cowards. They cannot or will not work real jobs; they are only robbing the diner because they think it will be easy money. In the film’s opening scene, they discuss how restaurant managers and waiters will not endanger themselves to stop a robbery.

Jules rightly sees himself as a representative of the “tyranny of evil men.” He acknowledges his guilt as a murderer, and recognizes that gangsters like Marsellus Wallace need henchmen to enact their will. Jules’ new motto is to try “real hard to be the shepherd.” He embraces the role of guiding others, beginning with the robbers of the diner. He chooses to be for others, while Vincent remains committed only to his own interests.

The character of the Shepherd is a particularly robust biblical archetype. Israel’s patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were shepherds. So, too, was King David, Israel’s greatest king and the forebear of the Messiah (See 2 Samuel 7). By the time of the prophet Jeremiah, the image of the shepherd was a well established figure of leadership. The people of Israel are described as sheep, and their leaders as shepherds. In Jeremiah, Israel’s shepherds–its priests and kings–are generally castigated for failing to lead the people properly:

“Wail, you shepherds, and cry out, and roll in ashes, you lords of the flock, for the days of your slaughter and dispersion have come, and you shall fall like a choice vessel. No refuge will remain for the shepherds, nor escape for the lords of the flock” (Jeremiah 25:34-35).

Even as Jeremiah criticizes Israel’s current shepherds, he also foretells the emergence of better shepherds who will lead the people in righteousness. This passage also reiterates God’s promise to send the Messiah, a king who will rule from David’s throne and deliver the people from their enemies:

“Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the LORD. ‘Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land'” (Jeremiah 23:3-5).

One cannot be a good shepherd without a powerful voice. Sheep have poor vision and get lost easily, so they learn to follow the shepherd’s voice. As Jesus says, “The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers” (John 10:3-5). In his role as the Good Shepherd, Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).

Jules’ voice makes him uniquely suited to the role of the shepherd. Throughout the film’s final scene, Jules controls the situation with his voice:

Jules: “So, we cool Yolanda? We ain’t gonna do anything stupid, are we?”

Yolanda (crying) “Don’t you hurt him.”

Jules: “Nobody’s gonna hurt anybody. We’re gonna be like three Fonzies. And what’ Fonzie like?  C’mon Yolanda, what’s Fonzie like?”

Yolanda (through tears, unsure): “He’s cool?”

Jules: “Correct-amundo! And that’s what we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be cool.”

When Vincent returns from the bathroom to see Yolanda pointing a gun at Jules, and Jules pointing his gun at the other robber, he is ready to intervene. Only with his commanding voice does Jules prevent either Vincent or Yolanda from opening fire: “It’s cool, Vincent! It’s cool! Don’t do a goddamn thing. Yolanda, it’s cool baby, nothin’s changed. We’re still just talkin’.”

To be a good shepherd, one must also be willing to risk oneself to protect one’s sheep. When David tells Saul that he will fight the Philistine giant, Goliath, Saul protests that David is too young to challenge such a skilled warrior. David counters that he “used to keep sheep for his father. And when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth. And if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him and killed him” (1 Samuel 17:34-35). To be a shepherd requires defending the flock from predators.

David was literally a shepherd before he became king and, as king, he was figuratively a shepherd over the people. Like his ancestor, David, Jesus not only adopted the role of the shepherd, but also was willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of his flock. Jesus declares, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Humanity is Jesus’ flock: he “saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36).

The call which Jules hears to the shepherd’s vocation demands both a powerful voice and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life for others. Jules, it seems, has both.

Sources:

Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011.

http://handsomecitizens.com/2013/09/05/the-year-is-1994-pulp-fiction-unleashed-itself-upon-the-world/

 

Memory and Narrative in Memento and the Torah

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The protagonist of Memento, Leonard, has lost his short-term memory. He retains–or so it seems–a basic knowledge of who he is and, most importantly, that his wife was the victim of a brutal assault. Leonard’s life is oriented around pursuing his wife’s killer; vengeance gives him purpose.

A foundational exhortation of the Old Testament is to “remember the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 8:18). That is the impetus behind every feast and observance commanded in the Torah. Memory is likewise the underlying necessity for the “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love. Without memory, there can be no narrative of God’s faithfulness to his people, and thus, no proper response of worship by the people back to God.

Memento explores the violence that results from Leonard’s efforts to construct a narrative for his life after he has been stripped of his ability to properly remember. The scriptures likewise recount the fatal consequences of forgetting what God has done.

Memory in the Torah

In Exodus 12:24-27, God instructs Moses about how to celebrate the Passover: “Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.”

The memory of God’s miraculous deliverance from Egypt is to be L’dor V’dor, seamlessly passed from generation to generation.

The crossing of the Jordan is likewise to be memorialized. In exact parallelism to God’s instructions to Moses about observing the Passover, God commands Joshua to take twelve stones from the Jordan, over which the Israelites crossed as God held back the waters. Joshua set up the twelve stones they took from the Jordan at Gilgal:

“He said to the Israelites, ‘In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God” (Joshua 14:20-24).

As God parted the Red Sea, so He parted the Jordan, and in both cases the inquiries of future generations are to prompt the community to remember and re-tell the stories of God’s past faithfulness.

Memory Loss in Memento

To create continuity between past and present, Leonard uses notes, tattoos, and a Polaroid camera. Not quite the law written on the heart foretold in Jeremiah 31, Leonard’s tattoos provide his only incontrovertible truths. As he gathers information about his wife’s killer, he tattoos it on his body, so that despite his memory loss, those Facts are always right there for him to see. Leonard likewise uses the Polaroid to take pictures of significant people and places, and then writes notes about them, so that when he encounters them again he will know who and what they are even though he doesn’t actually remember them. As he says, “you learn to trust your own handwriting.” When we first meet Leonard’s friend, Teddy, for example, we, like Leonard, view him through the lens of Leonard’s note about him: “Don’t believe his lies.”

While Leonard is confident in his ability to uncover the truth, despite his memory loss, his tools fail him throughout the film. Natalie is able to manipulate Leonard, for instance, because he cannot find a pen in time to write himself a note about her shocking cruelty.

Forgetfulness in the Torah

If memory is the biblical virtue that makes all others possible, then forgetfulness is a most debilitating vice. No matter how faithful God is to his people, if they fail to remember what he has done it will do them no good. The paradigmatic Old Testament example of forgetfulness is the bad report of the spies and the Israelites’ subsequent refusal to enter Canaan. When the twelve spies return from Canaan, all the people, other than Joshua and Caleb, turn against Moses, as they clamor to return to Egypt:

“And all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The whole congregation said to them, ‘Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! Why is the LORD bringing us into this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become a prey. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?’ And they said to one another, ‘Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt.” (Numbers 14:2-4).

The Israelites’ forgetfulness is so profound that, although God delivered them from Pharaoh’s army, they are unwilling to face the Canaanites for fear that they will die. Earlier, having forgotten the affliction of slavery they complain about the manna God graciously provided for their sustenance and mis-remember their life in Egypt:

“”Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at” (Numbers 11:4-6).

Rather than gratitude for their deliverance, the Israelites actually reminisce about the good ole’ times they had back in Egypt. This will not be the last time the Israelites long to return to Egypt (see Jeremiah 42). Their forgetfulness virtually makes void all that God had done for them. As a result, God condemns that generation to die in the wilderness.

Jesus’ disciples, especially in Mark’s Gospel, are characterized by a short-term memory loss as dramatic as Leonard’s. Although Jesus miraculously feeds a crowd of five thousand men with five loaves and two fish (Mark 6:30-44), when his disciples are faced with another hungry crowd, this time of only four thousand men, they ask, “How can one feed these people with bread here in this desolate place?” (Mark 8:4) as if they had not witnessed the earlier miracle.

Leonard’s memory loss undermines even those truths which he claims with certainty. Throughout the film, Leonard refers to Sammy Jankis, a man with similar memory loss as himself. Unlike Leonard, Sammy apparently failed to find a system through which to cope. Sammy’s wife grows increasingly frantic as she tries desperately to restore his memory. The one thing Sammy does remember is how to administer his diabetic wife’s insulin As Leonard relates the story, Sammy’s wife tells him that it’s time for her shot even after Sammy has already given it to her. Sammy shrugs and gives her another shot. Sammy’s wife repeats this process, hoping that Sammy will somehow realize that he has already given her insulin. According to Leonard, Sammy sends his wife into a coma by giving her multiple insulin shots.

It’s not until the end of the film that we realize that Leonard has conflated Sammy with himself. Leonard’s wife survived the assault; she died when Leonard gave her too much insulin. His quest for vengeance is an illusion. Even that which Leonard believes most firmly about himself is not true.

The Israelites’ warped memory allows them to alter the shape of their communal narrative, casting themselves in the role of the victim, and descend into self-pity, rather than trust in God. Leonard’s failure of memory likewise enables him to construct a false, but reassuring narrative for himself.

Meaning and Narrative

Memento‘s final, horrifying revelation is that Leonard’s quest to avenge his wife is a fiction he has perpetrated on himself. The film’s plot unfolds ingeniously in reverse, so that the end of the film is actually its chronological beginning. In the film’s final scene, we discover that Teddy, who is a police officer, has tried to help Leonard achieve a kind of catharsis by enabling him to confront and kill his wife’s assailant. Teddy already helped Leonard kill the man who assaulted his wife a year before the events of the film, but Leonard doesn’t remember it.  Teddy and Leonard recapitulate the drama of Leonard’s vengeance when Teddy arranges a meeting with a drug dealer named Jimmy, who Leonard murders believing him to be his wife’s killer.

In talking to Teddy after killing Jimmy, Leonard realizes that his life will be meaningless without something to pursue, so he turns Teddy into his suspect. He burns the Polaroid Teddy took of him after he killed his wife’s assailant and the one of the dead Jimmy, writes himself a note not to trust Teddy, and records Teddy’s license plate as that of his wife’s killer. At Teddy’s expense, Leonard provides himself with a string of clues that will give him direction every time he comes to his senses. Engineered by Leonard himself from the beginning, the film’s first scene (and its chronological end point)–Leonard’s killing of Teddy–is inevitable.

Leonard is a modernist insofar as he lives within a narrative of his own making. He is the author of the narrative of avenging his wife’s killer. It is his handwriting alone which he trusts, and his notes alone which authorize his murders.