Ethics Goes to the Movies

An Introduction to Moral Philosophy

Christopher Falzon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317383260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Movies hold a mirror up to us, portraying the complexities of human reality through their characters and stories. And they vividly illustrate moral theories that address questions about how we are to live and what sort of people we ought to be. In this book, Christopher Falzon uses movies to provide a rich survey of moral positions as they have emerged through history. These include the ethics of the ancient world, medieval ethics, Enlightenment and Kantian ethics, existentialist ethics and the ethics of the other. Each theory is explained in detail, using a number of examples from the book's wide selection of movies. The discussion draws on a range of recent and not-so-recent films, from Hollywood blockbusters to art-house cinema.

Key Features:

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• In addition to covering thinkers one would expect in an introduction to ethics (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Kant), the book discusses less canonical figures in detail as well (e.g., Marcuse, Foucault, Habermas).
• Similarly, the book examines both major ethical theories (e.g., Kantianism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics) and theories too often glossed over in introductory texts (e.g. Stoicism, Epicureanism, Habermas's discourse ethics and Nietzschean ethics).
• A wide range of movies are discussed, from Hollywood blockbusters and classics like The Dark Knight, Casablanca and Dirty Harry to lesser known films, like Force Majeure and Under the Skin.
• Atthe end of each chapter a focus on two feature films is included, with a plot summary and interpretations of several key scenes with a time marker indicating when in the film the scenes occur.
• A Filmography includes all movies discussed in the book and a Glossary covers key philosophical terms and figures; both with corresponding page numbers.

1 Excess and Obsession

Ancient Ethics

In Jonathon Glazer’s 2013 Under the Skin, a remarkable and rather ­disturbing scene unfolds in a quiet, understated way. On a beach, a woman watches a swimmer emerge from the ocean and walk towards her. The two of them are alone except for a family further down the beach. The family’s dog is swimming in the rough surf. Suddenly there is the sound of screaming. The dog is in trouble. A woman is in the water, swimming out, trying to rescue the dog. Now she is also in trouble. Her husband dives in after her, their baby left on the beach. The swimmer runs back into the ocean to rescue the husband, who once brought back to the beach immediately breaks free and goes back into the water to try to save his wife. The woman with whom the scene began has a different reaction. She watches the tragedy unfold impassively, with complete indifference. Then she walks down to the swimmer, who has returned to the beach and is lying exhausted on the sand. She picks up a rock and strikes him with it, and then drags him off the beach, leaving the crying baby to its fate, which is very likely death from exposure.

Figure 1.1 The alien on the prowl in Under the Skin (Jonathon Glazer, 2013. Credit: A24/Photofest).

The film’s premise is that the woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, is in reality an alien in a woman’s skin, here to hunt humans, men in particular (Figure 1.1). The alien predator amongst us is the basis for any number of films. But what is interesting about Under the Skin is that it seems to depict a genuinely alien perspective on the human world. And what characterises the alienness of this perspective is that it is one of absolute amorality, portraying how things might look if one had no moral concerns at all. The drowning family is of no concern. The swimmer who heroically tried to rescue them is no more than a convenient source of food. The baby is a mere detail in the background and can be left to die. It may be that such amorality is so foreign to ordinary ways of thinking that it is only really intelligible from the perspective of an alien. But we can turn this around, look on ourselves as the alien beings for a moment, and ask why it is that these beings should view things in moral terms. What’s in it for us? Why should we ‘do the right thing’ rather than just what happens to be in our interests?

Why Be Moral?

‘Why be moral?’ is perhaps the ultimate metaethical question. Philosophical thinking about ethics is typically divided into two areas. Normative ethics is concerned with producing theories about what we ought, morally speaking, to do, theories that allow us to make substantive moral judgements. Metaethical reflection asks general questions about the nature of the moral judgements we make and perhaps the biggest metaethical question is why be moral at all? What reasons are there for me personally to be moral, even when it does not appear to be in my individual interest to do the right thing? And why should people in general be moral, i.e., why should a society adopt the institution of morality?

In the first instance, it might be thought that we are only moral beings because if we do not do the right thing, we will be found out and punished. But suppose we could do whatever we wanted and be sure of getting away with it? What reasons could we have then for being moral? This is a question that was posed very early in the history of philosophy by the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c.428–347 bce), in one of his dialogues, The Republic. And he posed the question through a story, the story of the ring of Gyges, about a shepherd who discovers a ring that enables him to become invisible. With this power, he is able to seduce the queen, plot with her to kill the king and take over the kingdom, becoming wealthy and powerful in the process. He can do all of this without fear of detection or punishment. So he is in a position to pursue and satisfy all his desires, regardless of moral constraints, and he does very well indeed out of it. This raises the question – what reason could Gyges possibly have for not doing what benefits him, doing what is in his interests? Why should he bother, under these circumstances, to do the right thing? As Plato phrases it, why would anyone bother to remain within the boundaries of moral behaviour ‘when he is able to take whatever he wants from the ­market-stalls without fear of being discovered, to enter houses and sleep with whomever he chooses, to kill and release from prison anyone he wants, and generally to act like a god among men’ (Plato 1993, 260c; using the standardised pagination for works by Plato)?

The tale of Gyges continues to resonate 2000 years later, although the media available for storytelling has changed somewhat in the meantime. Fast forward to the present, and we have a story that would make a reasonable plot for a film, and that film could be taken to raise similar questions about why one should bother to act morally. In contemporary cinematic stories, it is likely to be scientists rather than shepherds who discover the secret of invisibility, but this does not stop events taking a familiar path. Whatever noble aspirations the scientists might have had at the beginning, once they have this power their aspirations typically give way to various sorts of wickedness as soon as they realise how much they can get away with. Films with this theme range from the classic The Invisible Man (Jack Griffin, 1933), where the chemist (Claude Rains) who has discovered the invisibility formula resolves to dominate the world through a reign of terror, to the more recent remake, Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven, 2000), where the wickedness that ensues, including voyeurism and murder, is presented in meticulous detail.

You might want to take an optimistic view of these scenarios, highlighting various mitigating circumstances. Perhaps the scientist behaves badly because the process that makes them invisible also drives them crazy, as in the original Invisible Man film. Or perhaps they were simply bad people to begin with, as in the later version where the main character, Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon), is shown to have questionable traits like overweening arrogance long before the invisibility process that turns him into a monster. Given this, perhaps the bad behaviour of the character who discovers invisibility is not a reflection of human nature as such, but only the nature of the particular individual involved or as a result of the invisibility process. This also seems to be the case with the ring of invisibility that features in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) and The Hobbit (2012–2014) films. In these sagas, based on the J.R.R. Tolkien novels, we do not simply have a magical ring that confers invisibility, as in the Gyges story, but one that exerts an evil force that corrupts the wearer. Here once again we can blame any bad behaviour on the invisibility process.

But even if we were to accept this, there are other kinds of invisibility where these considerations don’t arise, and yet the question of why one should bother to be moral remains. Why do the right thing, for example, if you found that your day was mysteriously repeating over and over, with the actions of the previous day erased each time, so that only you remembered them, meaning that you could do whatever you liked without any real consequences? This is the predicament that weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) finds himself in Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). Although the character is certainly grumpy and cynical, he is not an especially bad person, even when he has the opportunity to be so. Nonetheless, under those circumstances, the question inevitably arises – why not be as gluttonous, lecherous or villainous as you like? Phil’s first response to his situation is very much like that of a modern-day Gyges. He proclaims: ‘I’m not going to live by their rules any more’, meaning the rules of ordinary, well-behaved citizens, and sets out on a night of mayhem.

If Groundhog Day relies on a fantasy device to achieve its state of figurative invisibility, there are more down-to-earth forms one can consider. What if, like the perfidious eye doctor in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), you have the wealth and social standing to cover up any crimes you might commit, including adultery, fraud, even murder? Or if, in the criminal world, you have the kind of power that allows you to act with complete impunity, doing whatever you like without having to worry about public scrutiny or legal prosecution, like the gangsters Tony Montana in Scarface (Brian de Palma, 1983) or Henry Hill in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). Or suppose you have the kind of financial clout that allows you to do much the same in the business world, like the businessmen Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) or the Jordan Belfort character in The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013). These characters all raise the question of the moment. Why abide by moral constraints if you have nothing to lose by doing whatever is in your immediate interests? Why not take the opportunity to fulfil every wish, no matter how extreme?

If these are all Gyges-like scenarios that have been portrayed and explored in various films, it is worth adding that film itself might be seen as offering the prospect of unlimited wish-fulfilment for the moviegoer, the satisfaction of any desire without danger to oneself. Every movie is a virtual world, a hypothetical situation in which anything that one desires can potentially be realised, at least in visual terms. Any scenario is possible, and more importantly, can be safely enjoyed by the film-goer, watching invisibly in the dark. Those in the movie audience, it turns out, are the original invisible men and women. Naturally, the representative power of cinema being what it is, the idea of film as an avenue for wish-fulfilment for the viewer has itself been represented in film, as early as Sherlock Jr (Buster Keaton, 1924). In the film, Keaton, a lowly film projectionist and hopeless would-be amateur detective, falls asleep and dreams of entering the film he has been projecting. Here, he becomes Sherlock Jr, the greatest detective in the world.

Having said that, it is not clear that we always wish for the unlimited satisfaction of our desires, the absence of any moral constraints; or indeed that we look to films only to gratify our desires, wishes and fantasies. The prospect of there being no moral constraints, no consequences for transgression, might in fact be a profoundly disturbing prospect. We might desperately wish for there to be a moral universe, like the rabbi, Ben (Sam Waterston), in Crimes and Misdemeanours, who insists that without some kind of moral order that acts of wickedness violate, the world would be a dark, meaningless and terrifying place. A moral universe can certainly be portrayed within film, a world where good prospers, and even if it experiences some reverses along the way, will ultimately prevail over evil; and where those who do wrong, even if they fail to see the light and join the side of good by the last act, are at least going to be found out and punished by the end. There are many films in which an essentially moral world is reassuringly confirmed in these ways. Indeed, this is pretty much the standard Hollywood ­scenario. And there is clearly an appetite for such films, even if part of their appeal might be the pleasure of seeing the bad guys violating all moral norms and standards, indulging in all the forbidden appetites, before being inevitably and properly called to account for their transgressions.

We know however that in real life things don’t always work out this way, that good does not always prevail and that the bad guys don’t always get their comeuppance. Indeed, like Gyges, they often do very well. And there are plenty of ‘realistic’ films that serve to remind us precisely of this. In so doing, they raise with renewed force the question of why one should be moral. One of the pleasures of Crimes and Misdemeanors is that it is quite conscious of its distance from the Hollywood moral universe. The main character, the ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), contrives after some agonising to have his mistress killed when she threatens to expose their affair and ruin his comfortable life; and in the end he gets away with it, even prospers by it. It’s a stark repudiation of the conventional Hollywood story and the film itself comments on this. At the end of the film, the murderous eye doctor meets the director, playing a failed filmmaker, at a wedding, and recounts his story in the guise of a possible film plot. Allen’s character replies that it would be a better story if the murderer was wracked with guilt and driven to give himself up. The doctor’s reply is that this is what happens in the movies, not in real life: ‘If you want a happy ending, you should go see a Hollywood movie’. The film’s ending is astonishingly bleak, and if on one level it might be regarded as offering a gloomy, pessimistic view of human nature, it might just as easily be seen as presenting a realistic one, stripped of all comforting illusions.

A similarly pessimistic, or realistic, vision is evident in Roman Polanski’s neo-noir Chinatown (1974), which revives forties film noir themes but gives them a darker twist. In classic film noir like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), society might be corrupt and evil, and the private investigator who brings it to light may themselves be flawed, but in the end, they usually manage to bring about some degree of justice. In Chinatown, there is no triumph of any sort. When LA private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) stumbles on a network of graft, murder and incest, presided over by evil businessman Noah Cross (played by John Huston, no less), neither he nor the police have the power to do anything about it. Worse, Gittes himself ends up causing the death of the woman he is trying to protect from Cross’s predations and Cross escapes any punishment. In a similar way, the classic western undergoes a reality check in No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007). The decent western hero who fights for what is right, and who traditionally triumphs over evil through perseverance and resourcefulness, appears here in the figure of sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). However, Bell finds himself ‘over-matched’ by the new, brutal forms of drug-related crime he is confronting. He is unable to protect ‘his people’, cowboy-adventurer Lewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) or his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), from retribution, after Moss happens upon a large amount of money from a drug deal gone wrong. And he is unable to bring to justice the chief agent of that retribution, the terrifying hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). In the end, all sheriff Bell can do is escape into retirement from an evil that he cannot defeat.

As a final variation on this theme, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1989) simultaneously foregrounds a standard Hollywood story of good triumphing over evil and subverts it. On the face of it, the film is a conventional story of evil being properly punished, as clean-cut hero Jeffrey (Kyle McLachlan) manages in the end to defeat sadistic gangster Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). But the hero finds he has affinities with the evil Frank, being similarly drawn to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) who represents the prospect of illicit, perverse sex. Moreover, the ‘good world’ that Jeffrey leaves and to which he eventually returns, represented in the picture-perfect images of the town with which the film begins and ends, is shown to be an impossible idealisation, a comforting veneer that hides a much darker reality that is always just below the surface. Under the manicured lawns, there are hideous insects. If we are going to be realistic, we need to acknowledge that wrongdoing is not always found out and punished, that people can and do get away with evil, and often do very well out of it. So, is it true that the only reason people adhere to moral standards is because of fear of being caught and punished otherwise? Or can we give a better answer to the question of why we should be moral?

One response might be that even if we can avoid external scrutiny and ­punishment, we will suffer punishment at our own hands for evil deeds, through guilt and remorse. On this view it is our conscience that keeps us behaving ethically. We have an internal moral sense, whether this is something inbuilt or inculcated in us through our upbringing. However, even if conscience is a psychological reality, it is certainly possible to imagine it absent. Lack of conscience, the absence of any moral constraints on one’s actions and a willingness to do whatever furthers one’s interests, is the familiar mark of the movie psychopath. But it might also be argued that despite the prevalence of such figures in film, this conscience-less, amoral kind of outlook is in reality relatively rare in individuals. It is a strange way of being, marking the conscienceless individual as ‘other’, not like the ordinary human being, and more appropriately embodied as the mysterious viewpoint of an alien, as in Under the Skin. It is an outlook, however, that might be more prevalent at the institutional level. The documentary The Corporation (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, 2003) makes the case that were the modern corporation a legal person, an actual person, the kind of person it would typically be is one that is utterly self-interested, deceitful, callous, without guilt, willing to break social rules for its own ends – in short, a psychopath. The amoral corporation is itself a familiar character in films, from Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) to Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987). But typically in these films, the corporation is pitted against human characters that we can identify with. Those characters who act in its name have sold their souls and ceased to be human. In the case of Alien this is quite literally so, since the ‘company man’, the villainous Ash (Ian Holm), turns out to be an android.

At the same time, there is perhaps something a little convenient about this relegation of evil to the alien psychopath or the inhuman corporation. The very notion of ‘evil’, as immoral behaviour that seems so bad that it can only come from some conscienceless other, may be a convenient way of distancing ourselves from actions that after all are in the last analysis committed by human beings like us (see Morton 2004, 4–5, 93–94). It is far more disturbing to think that terrible things might be done by people we can relate to, people who are not monsters or sadists but to all intents and purposes ordinary individuals. The controversy over twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’ was precisely of this nature. Arendt introduced the notion in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, based on her coverage of ex-Nazi Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. The controversy was over the idea that a participant in the Holocaust, a mid-level administrator responsible for organising transportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, might not be crazy, or a monster, but a normal person, indeed a nobody, a mediocrity. Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012) depicts Arendt (played by Barbara Sukowa) covering the Eichmann trial and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Rear Window Ethics
• 1 Excess and Obsession
• 2 Sin and Self-Denial
• 3 Pleasure, Happiness and Rights
• 4 Personhood and Autonomy
• 5 Slaves, Supermen and Authentic Selves
• 6 Encounters with Aliens
• Filmography
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index