Baby Face (1933)

In the movie Baby Face, Barbara Stanwyck plays Lily, a young woman who has been pimped out by her father to steel-mill workers and politicians since she was fourteen years old.  She is persuaded by Mr. Cragg, a German cobbler, to leave Pittsburg and put her talents to use in a big city like New York.   When she and her friend Chico (Theresa Harris) get to New York, Lily decides to apply for a job with Gotham Trust, a bank that occupies every floor of a skyscraper.  As she rises figuratively by having sex with the men that work there, she also rises literally from floor to floor.  We expect executives in a movie to be reasonably attractive, as middle-class professionals.  But before she gets to them, she first has to land a job in the firm to get things started, which requires that she have sex with a funny-looking guy with a whiny voice in the personnel office.  That makes us a little queasy.

Furthermore, where she has sex with some of the men is pretty seedy as well.  When she has sex with that guy in personnel, they do it in the office of the head of that department, who is out to lunch.  From him she moves on to a junior executive played by John Wayne, whom she casts aside once she sets her sights on his boss, Mr. Brody.  She lures Brody into the ladies room after work, where they immediately start doing it. Unfortunately, in his haste to satisfy his lust, Brody leaves the door open, and Mr. Stevens, a higher-ranking executive, catches them in the act.  Brody loses his job as a result, which means Lily has no more use for him.  The hapless fellow is not only unemployed now, but desperately in love with Lily as well.  She brushes him off when he shows up at her apartment, telling him to go back to his wife and children.  Lily almost loses her job too, but she pretends that Brody followed her into the restroom and was able to take advantage of her because she couldn’t afford to lose her job.  Stevens understands her situation, and he gets to understand it even better when he starts having sex with her.  By that time, she has risen enough in the firm for her to afford a nice apartment where they can rendezvous.

But soon she figures that working as Stevens’ assistant is not good enough and that she needs a promotion.  So, she arranges to have his fiancée catch them embracing in his office.  Heartbroken, his fiancée tells her father, Mr. Carter, First Vice President of the firm, who decides Lily must be fired.  She is fired, after a fashion, as she transitions to being Mr. Carter’s kept woman in a swanky apartment with servants.  She and Chico are still friends, but as Chico is African American, she pretends to just be Lily’s maid when others are around.  We begin seeing Lily draped in diamonds and furs, while Carter also makes contributions to her bank account.

Just as Brody showed up at her place, pleading to see her again, so too does Stevens show up at her new place, also expressing his love for her.  When he discovers Carter in the bedroom, he shoots him.  Outside the bedroom, as she hears the shot, Lily stands there impassively.  Seconds later, while we are still looking at Lily, we hear the shot of Stevens shooting himself in the head.   With an almost imperceptible start at the sound of that second shot, she continues to have a blank expression on her face.  Then she walks into the bedroom and silently surveys the carnage.

This love-nest, murder-suicide causes a scandal for Gotham Trust.  Courtland Trenholm (George Brent), the playboy grandson of the founder of the firm, is called in to straighten things out.  But it isn’t long before he falls under her spell and marries her.  When he finds himself being unfairly accused by the board of directors of causing the bank to fail through mismanagement on account of his relationship with Lily, he tells her they will need to raise a million dollars for his legal defense, that she will need to cash in all the stocks and bonds he has given her, along with all the other valuables she had accumulated previously.  But she isn’t having any of that, so she and Chico book passage for Paris.  On board the ship, however, she realizes she loves Courtland.  When she gets back to their penthouse, she finds that he has tried to commit suicide.  She has the elevator operator call a doctor.  She knows she will have to cash in all the loot she has accumulated over the years to pay his legal bills, but that’s all right, because they love each other.

Even though the movie was severely edited before it was released to the theaters, it remained the most notorious movie of the Pre-Code era.  The first time I watched this movie, what I saw was this edited version.  At that time, it was thought that the original version was lost forever. But what remained was enough for it to become one of my favorite movies. When a copy of the original version was found, the movie that I already thought was great became even greater.  Today, we would call it the director’s cut.  Both versions are available on DVD in Volume One of TCM’s Forbidden Hollywood Collection.

The original version was modified for theatrical release in three ways. The first form of editing is the sort we usually expect: stuff is cut out. In one scene, after Lily decides she is through turning tricks for her father/pimp, she wrestles with a politician who has paid for her services. In the original version, he refers to her as “the sweetheart of the nightshift,” but that line is snipped out for the theatrical version. In the original version, she thinks she is rid of him and pours herself a beer. When he grabs her from behind and puts his hand on one of her breasts, she breaks the beer bottle over his head, and then nonchalantly returns to her beer. That was cut out for the theatrical version. And then there is the scene that takes place when Lily and Chico hop a freight to get to New York. A guard threatens to call the cops and have them put in jail, but Lily has sex with him in exchange for letting them stay on board. That was eliminated in the theatrical version. There are many other bits and pieces edited out, too numerous to mention. In general, what we easily suspect or infer of a sexual nature in the theatrical version was made a little more explicit in the original.

The second form of editing consists of added footage that was never filmed originally. In the original version, Lily rides in the ambulance with her husband Courtland after his attempted suicide. Even though they will have to spend all the money they have to keep him from being convicted for malversation, they look at each other fondly, knowing that even without that money they will live happily together, at which point the movie ends. In the theatrical version, the part where they look at each other with love in their eyes is edited out. What follows is a scene in which Lily is punished by having her return to Pittsburg where she started, with her husband going to work as a laborer in a steel mill, forcing her to live amongst the lowlifes she wanted to get away from.  This added scene was required in order for it to pass muster with the censors.  We don’t see Barbara Stanwyck in this scene, because by that time she was already busy making another movie.  It is merely described by members of the board of directors.

The third form of editing was that of changing the words of Cragg, the German cobbler who is Lily’s mentor. In the first scene in which Cragg and Lily are together, in the speakeasy her father owns, he asks her if she read the book he lent her. In the original version, we find out that the book was written by Friedrich Nietzsche, who Cragg says is the greatest philosopher that ever lived. In the theatrical version, that line is suppressed, so we don’t know the name of the book or who wrote it.  As to the name of the book, I shall venture a guess.  Lily says she had a hard time understanding it, which suggests that it was Thus Spake Zarathustra.  Moreover, this was the work in which Nietzsche proclaimed the coming of the superman, which is what Cragg believes Lily can become.

After her father dies, when his bootleg still explodes, she visits Cragg at his shop. He tells her she must leave the town they are in or she is lost, that with her youth and looks she has power over men, that she can be a master instead of a slave. In the original version, he quotes from The Will to Power, in which Nietzsche says that no matter how we idealize it, life is nothing but exploitation.* He tells her to exploit herself, to use men to get the things she wants. In the theatrical version, however, we do not see the title of the book or get the quote from Nietzsche. Cragg’s remarks about Lily’s exploiting herself and using men are removed and replaced by something quite different: he tells her to be clean and to remember the difference between right and wrong.  This is quite the opposite from what we might expect from a student of Nietzsche, the philosopher that wrote Beyond Good and Evil.

Along the lines of suppressing Nietzsche and modifying Cragg’s advice, the other forms of editing are also used. In the original version, Lily comes home to her plush apartment in New York to find that Cragg has sent her another book by Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season. She turns to a passage emphasized by Cragg in which Nietzsche says that to get what you want, you must “crush all sentiment.”** In the theatrical version, we do not get to see that quotation, the title of the book, or its author. Instead, we have footage added after the original version had been filmed in which she finds a letter from Cragg inside the book.  In that letter Cragg tells her she has picked the wrong way, that life will defeat her unless she regains her self-respect. Just to make sure we understand Cragg’s admonition as supposedly arising from his Christian faith, the closing just above his name says, “Merry Christmas.”  And this too is quite the opposite of what we might expect from a student of Nietzsche, the philosopher that wrote The Antichrist.

As noted above, I saw the theatrical version first. I had read that the Nietzsche stuff had been suppressed. Nevertheless, I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. Apologists for Nietzsche are often at pains to say that he has been misunderstood. The movie Rope (1948) is a good example. In that movie, a college professor, played by Jimmy Stewart, talks about the superman, who is so superior he has the right to eliminate those who are inferior. When he finds out that a couple of his students decided to eliminate an inferior acquaintance by murdering him, the professor is appalled that they misunderstood what he was saying. And so, I figured Baby Face would have been in that vein even if some allusions to Nietzsche had been left in. But in the original version, Lily did not misunderstand Nietzsche, as explained to her by Cragg.  In fact, Cragg would have been disappointed to find out that Lily gave in to sentiment instead of crushing it.  This modification is the most radical way in which the movie was edited for theatrical release.

*Although this has the flavor of Nietzsche, I have not been able to find that quotation in The Will to Power, neither in the Walter Kaufmann translation with which I am most familiar, nor in that of Anthony A. Ludovici, which was part of a project overseen by Oscar Levy, and which would have been available to those who wrote the screenplay for this movie.

**As with the other quotation, I have not been able to find this one in Thoughts Out of Season.  Furthermore, the paragraph just above the passage and the one just below it appear to be duplicates, suggesting that it was fabricated.

Hollywood vs. Abortion

It has long been a standard complaint by conservatives that there is a liberal-media bias, not only in the presentation of the news, but also in the dramas and sit-coms we see in movies and on television. In 1992, Michael Medved published Hollywood vs. America, in which he indicted Hollywood for its assault on our values and virtues.  Through its various movies, he argued, Hollywood makes fun of religion, undermines marriage, promotes promiscuity, and bashes America.  The movies are violent, foul-mouthed, offensive, and degenerate.  The book makes for a really great read.  One thing Medved does not do, however, is accuse Hollywood or the television networks of promoting abortion, for the very simple reason that they don’t.  In fact, for the most part they condemn it.

There are four ways in which movies can condemn abortion:  (a) The movie can portray the woman who has the abortion as immoral or unlikable; (b) abortion can be shown to be harmful; (c) abortion can be associated with misery and regret; or (d) the movie can show us how having the baby is a rewarding experience that makes everyone happy.

In order to properly analyze Hollywood’s attitude toward abortion in the movies, we must distinguish among three different types:  (1) Movies made before 1973, when abortion was illegal, (i.e., before Roe v. Wade); (2) movies made after Roe v. Wade, but in which the story takes place before that decision, when abortion was still illegal; and (3) movies in which the story takes place after abortion had become legal.

Not surprisingly, movies made when abortion was illegal, especially those covered by the Production Code, in effect until 1968, invariably condemned abortion by one or more of the four methods listed above.  In A Place in the Sun (1951), for example, a man gets a woman pregnant and then tries to get her an abortion.  When that fails, he murders her.  In Detective Story (1951), several women have died from botched abortions.  The abortionist is pursued by a police detective, who then discovers his own wife had an abortion from that doctor.  He is so disgusted that their marriage is all but ruined.  But then he gets killed in the end anyway, asking his wife to forgive him in his dying breath.  In Peyton Place (1957), a young woman is raped by her stepfather and gets pregnant.  A doctor refuses to give her an abortion, but then she falls and has a miscarriage.  This is a typical Hollywood solution:  deny the woman the abortion, allowing her to remain free of sin, but then give her the benefit of an abortion through a substitute.  In The Interns (1962), a doctor steals some pills to give a woman an abortion, gets caught, and is no longer allowed to practice medicine.  In the television show Maude, the episodes “Maude’s Dilemma, Parts I and II,” (1972), the title character worries about the fact that she is pregnant at the age of forty-seven.  Finally, she and her husband tearfully decide to have an abortion.  In Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), a man and woman have a one-night stand and she gets pregnant.  She wants to get an abortion, but he decides against it because he does not trust the abortionist.  They end up falling in love and getting married instead.  This has become the favorite Hollywood ending, the woman choosing not to have the abortion and living happily ever after.

One possible exception is Blue Denim (1959).  A teenage boy gets a girl pregnant.  First, she almost has an abortion, but her father and the boy’s parents prevent it at the last minute.  Second, she almost goes away to have the baby, presumably to give it up for adoption, but at the last minute, she and the boy decide to get married.  They love each other, but there is one sour note.  His parents talk of how his chances of going to college and becoming an engineer or a lawyer are foreclosed.  In fact, he will not even be able to finish high school.  The boy says he’ll get a job in a filling station or something.  I thought that at the end, the boy’s parents would tell them they will support them, letting the couple live with them while they put the boy through college.  But that doesn’t happen.  Their future is as bleak as the “straightjacket” the boy’s father says it will be.  Apparently, there was a need for a compromise.  On the one hand, the abortion is prevented, allowing for a partial happy ending where they will get married and keep the baby; on the other hand, teenagers in high school having premarital sex had to be condemned and shown to have bad consequences, thereby precluding a completely happy ending.

In the second type of movie, the ones made after 1973 but set during the illegal period, abortion is still presented negatively, though somewhat more sympathetically.  Godfather II (1974) was made just after Roe v. Wade, but set in the 1950s.  When Kay tells Michael about her abortion, she says, “It was a boy, and I had it killed!”  Such defiance on the part of a woman, saying that she had the abortion and she is glad she did, would never have been allowed while the Production Code was in force.  In fact, this was the first movie in which someone actually used the word “abortion.”  Nevertheless, Kay is pretty much miserable for the rest of the movie.  In Dirty Dancing (1987), a movie set in 1963, a young woman suffers from a botched abortion.  In Cider House Rules (1999), which takes place in Maine mostly during World War II, an abortionist is portrayed as being basically a good guy, but is sort of a pathetic character that is addicted to ether, eventually dying from an overdose.  His protégé is against abortion, but ends up reluctantly performing one on a woman who is a victim of incestuous rape.  In Mad Men (2007-2015), we find out that Joan had an abortion when she was younger, but she is redeemed:  she decides to have the baby when she gets pregnant again, in conformity with the preferred Hollywood outcome.

It is not surprising that movies set before Roe v. Wade would present abortion negatively, for that was a time when not only was abortion illegal, but also when it was shameful for a woman to have premarital sex in the first place.  What is surprising is that in the third type of movie, made after the sexual revolution and the legalization of abortion, Hollywood still condemns abortion.  A pregnant woman almost never has an abortion in this third type of film, deciding instead to have the baby.  A case in point is the movie Alfie (1966) and its remake (2004).  In the 1966 movie, which belongs to the first type, Alfie gets a married woman pregnant at a time when she and her husband have not been having sex.  He helps her get an illegal abortion, and is deeply distressed to the point of tears when he looks at the fetus lying on the table.  He later talks to a friend about the unborn child, saying that he “murdered him.”  In the remake, which belongs to the third type, we are led to believe that the woman had a legal abortion, but she later reveals to Alfie that she had the baby instead.  That part could have been left out of the movie and we would never have missed it.  But Hollywood went out of its way to say, “We were only kidding about the abortion.  She had the baby.”

In Knocked Up (2007), a friend of the father-to-be suggests an abortion.  But so taboo is the subject that he can only utter something that rhymes with “abortion,” at which point the father-to-be quickly dismisses the idea.  The woman he got pregnant has the baby, and she and the father become a loving couple.  In Juno (2007), the title character changes her mind about having an abortion when she gets to the clinic, in part owing to her conversation with an abortion protester, no less.  She ends up having the baby and giving it up for adoption.  Then, she and the boy whom she had sex with end up being happily in love.  But this movie does more than merely encourage women to give a baby up for adoption rather than have an abortion.  It also makes the case that there is nothing wrong with being a single mom at the same time. The husband of the adoptive couple is portrayed as immature.  Just before the baby arrives, he tells his wife he wants a divorce. The wife decides to go ahead and adopt anyway, and we see her happily holding the baby in the hospital.  So, the movie is saying that both giving up the baby for adoption and being a single mom are good alternatives to abortion. In Murphy Brown (1991-1992), the title character gets pregnant and decides to have the baby and raise it herself, since the man who got her pregnant has an aversion to being a father and husband.  This show was made famous when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized it for disparaging the importance of fathers in raising children.  Michael Medved, whom I referred to above, also complained about the way movies and television promote the idea that being a single parent is just fine, as in the case of Murphy Brown.  But he overlooked the fact that in so doing, the movies are actually making a case against abortion by showing it to be unnecessary, something one would think Quayle, Medved, and other pro-life people would welcome.  Given the way unmarried women in movies and television casually have babies, the implicit message is that there is absolutely no need for a woman to have an abortion.  Have the baby and be happy, the movies and television shows seem to say.

On the other hand, when an abortion does occur in this third type of movie, it is condemned by one or more of the first three methods listed above.  In The Last American Virgin (1982), after a boy gets a girl pregnant, he refuses to have anything to do with her.  Another guy, who is in love with her, manages to come up with enough money for her to have an abortion, after selling some of his possessions and borrowing money from his boss.  But after she has the abortion, she gets back together with her former boyfriend, who wants her back now that she is no longer pregnant.  The guy who helped her get the abortion ends up looking like a fool.  Obviously, she is no good.  In House of Cards (2013- ), Claire, a ruthless woman with no scruples, has had three abortions in the past, and for that she is punished:  when she realizes she wants to be a mother, she finds out it may be too late.  Of course, the old abortion-substitute method is still useful.  In Citizen Ruth (1996), the title character is a pregnant lowlife, who becomes caught up in a tug of war between pro-choice and pro-life groups.  The movie goes between the horns of the dilemma by having Ruth miscarry.

There are two great exceptions to Hollywood’s condemnation of abortion.  The first is Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).  This the rare movie in which a major character, who is sweet and likable, gets pregnant, casually has an abortion with no regrets, and then lives happily ever after.  The movie has a remarkably clean conscience about abortion.  When her older brother finds out that she is having an abortion, he completely supports her, which goes against the stereotype of the older brother that is puritanical about his sister’s sex life.  I was stunned when I saw this movie.  Mistakenly, I thought that a milestone had been reached in movie morality. But I was wrong, for it was completely anomalous.  Movies soon reverted to the standard formula:  having an abortion is bad; having the baby is good.

Over thirty years had to pass before there was a second exception to the rule that movies usually condemn abortion, Obvious Child (2014), and what an exception it is.  This movie not only portrays abortion in a positive light, as in the case of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but it also expresses utter contempt for the pro-life point of view.

I always focus more on the content of a movie than on formalist considerations, but I could not help but notice that the movie was filmed in a 2.35:1 ratio, the widescreen format typically used for action movies, instead of the more common 1.85:1 ratio that tends to be used for romantic comedies. This movie intends to present its pro-choice message in a big way.  Speaking of romantic comedies, that is exactly what this movie is.  Donna (Jenny Slate) is a struggling comedienne who does stand-up, and she is just as funny offstage as she is on.  Her humorous take on life persists throughout the film, and even her abortion provides material for one of her comedic routines.  People who are pro-life need the subject of abortion to be taken seriously, and this movie refuses to do that, treating it instead as something to joke about.

When the movie starts, her boyfriend breaks up with her right after one of her performances, and for a while she is upset.  Then she meets Max (Jake Lacy), and she has the best one-night stand you ever saw.  But you know what that means.  In movie logic, if a woman has sex with a guy just once, she gets pregnant.  She goes to an abortion clinic to make sure, and when the test comes back positive, she says she wants an abortion.  The doctor tries to talk to her about options, but Donna says she is not interested in hearing about those options, and simply wants an abortion.  In this way, the movie snubs the pro-life alternatives.  Speaking of which, we never see the outside of the abortion clinic, and thus we never see pro-life people hurling insults and carrying signs saying “baby killer” and whatnot.  The movie ignores them, much in the way Donna ignores the options the doctor keeps mentioning.

Donna is a Jew.  This is important for two reasons.  First, it allows for a crucial joke to be told.   Because Donna’s humor is always about stuff going on in her life, when her boyfriend breaks up with her, her depression over the breakup enters into her performance.  Supposedly she bombs, but actually her jokes are still funny.  And one of her jokes is about the holocaust.  If she were not a Jew herself, such a joke might have come across as anti-Semitic.  But being a Jew, she is inoculated against that charge.  So, why does the movie need a holocaust joke anyway?  This movie makes its attacks on the pro-life movement not through direct argument, but through the association of ideas.  A lot of pro-life advocates try to equate abortion with the holocaust, arguing that abortion clinics are like the showers at Auschwitz.  This movie undermines that argument by treating the holocaust itself as material for humor, refusing to take that analogy seriously, just as it refuses to take abortion seriously.

Second, it allows for a cultural contrast between her and Max.  When Donna first meets Max, a friend comments that Max is very much a Christian.  This is ominous, because we associate the pro-life movement with Christianity. Therefore, when Max comes back into her life after she has decided to have an abortion, we expect that when he finds out, he is going to take a strong pro-life position, waxing sentimental about the baby, and being appalled that she would even consider doing such a thing.  But as it turns out, he is all for it, completely upending our expectations.  In a similar way, when Donna tells her mother about her situation, her mother tells her about the illegal abortion she had in college, which worked out fine and was for the best.  And Donna’s roommate Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann) is also an abortion veteran, with no regrets.  In other words, no one in the movie represents the pro-life position.  It is deemed unworthy of consideration.

Much of the humor in the movie is scatological.  There were several fart jokes, on and off stage, including a scene in which Max urinates outside while accidentally farting in Donna’s face.  There is a joke about what fluids do to a woman’s panties, a joke about diarrhea, a joke about anal sex, and a funny scene in which Max steps in shit.  When Donna’s boyfriend breaks up with her, he does so in a unisex restroom, and there are several references to his “dumping” her. Furthermore, when Donna and Nellie are in the bathroom doing a pregnancy test, Nellie sits down on the toilet to have a bowel movement.  I have no problem with bathroom jokes, but they keep appearing so relentlessly throughout the movie that it becomes clear that they are intended to have some kind of significance.  Their purpose is to get us to form an association between the embryo and fecal matter.  The message of this movie is that having an abortion is just a way of taking a reproductive dump.  Therefore, whereas the pro-life people argue that the embryo is a human being and that killing it is murder, this pro-choice movie answers that the embryo is just waste material that needs to be excreted.

Finally, abortion is shown to be perfectly compatible with romance.  The abortion takes place on Valentine’s Day, and Max brings Donna flowers and accompanies her to the clinic.  He says it is the best Valentine’s Day he has ever had.  Later, when they are back home and she is recovering from the procedure, they decide to watch Gone With the Wind.  This, coming at the very end of the movie, is emphatic by position.  They are going to watch one of the great romantic movies of all time, and it is just the right movie for these two lovers, who we believe will eventually get married and live happily ever after.

As effective as this movie is in making its pro-choice case, I suspect that Hollywood will play it safe in the future and continue to make movies that condemn abortions when they occur and reward women who have the baby instead.

On the Need to Reform Our Present System of Naming Children

Like David Copperfield, I was born.  Immediately thereafter, my parents decided it would be a good idea if I had a name.  In that regard, their judgment was sound.

Then sentiment took over, and they decided to give me the same name as my father.  My father had reservations, because when he was a boy, he knew a kid who had the same name as his father.  Everyone called this kid “junior,” which my father thought was icky.  The fact that my father did not like this kid only intensified that feeling.  In order to spare me the fate of being tagged with a moniker like that, my father insisted that I be a “second,” which is to say, the Roman numerals “II” were added to my name on my birth certificate.  I think my life would have been easier if the blank on that certificate following the word “father” had been filled with the word “unknown,” allowing me a name that was all mine, with neither “jr.” nor “II” following it.

For the first fifteen years of my life, I was subjected to the “lecture.”  I would be told, by those who think such things important, that I should never have been a second.  Only if my father had been a junior, or if I had been named after an uncle, they informed me, would that have been appropriate.  This lecture was delivered to me through the years by various people, and I became weary of hearing it, even if they never tired of saying it.  So, about the time I entered high school, I took matters into my own hands, and dropped the “II.”  This took care of the lecture, but as I was still living at home, I needed some way to distinguish my mail from that of my father, and so the dreaded “jr.” took its place.  A year later, I got my first driver’s license, with the “jr.” on it, and that made it official.  When I finally moved out and got an apartment of my own, I dropped the “jr.” as well.  But with a birth certificate with a “II” on it and a driver’s license with a “jr.” on it, there really was no escaping these suffixes, one of which will probably, despite my protestations, end up on my tombstone.

Meanwhile, there were my relatives to deal with, and for that purpose the “-y” was added to my first name, as in “Johnny.”  There are two problems with this kind of name-formation.  First of all, names like “Johnny,” “Billy,” and “Charley” are diminutives, which just do not have the stature and maturity of the names of their respective fathers, “John,” “Bill,” and “Charles.” Worse, they are phonetically indistinguishable from “Johnnie,” “Billie,” and “Charlie,” which are girls’ names.  With the addition of a single “-y,”, I was not only rendered a small version of my father, but was also feminized at the same time.

And then there is the use of the word “Little,” uttered before the first name, as in “Little Pete.” This last way of trying to undo the confusion of having two people in the same house with the same name is the worst of the lot.  All the ones previously considered only suggest that the person so named is derivative of someone else, a diminished version of what came before.  With the use of the word “Little,” the reduced stature of the person so referred to becomes explicit.

And all this to satisfy some strange masculine pride in one’s own name!  The whole point of having names is so that, through utterance or inscription, we can indicate the person of whom we are speaking, and do so in an unambiguous manner.  And just when we need it most, as when two males are to live under one roof, vanity triumphs over reason, and the son winds up with the same name as his father, as if it were some precious heirloom that must be handed down from one generation to the next.  I say this is a masculine trait, because the cases where a mother names her daughter after herself are so rare that I have personally only known of two of them.  The feminine solution to undoing the ambiguity that was deliberately created is for the daughter to take on a nickname, like “Sweetie.”  In any event, I have certainly never heard of a woman named after her mother going by the sobriquet “Judy, jr.,” for example, or “Little Judy.” And “Judy, II” would make us suppose her to be royalty.

But the problem is mostly confined to men, and it is toward this vain sex that we must focus our attention.  In particular, it is time to abolish the custom of allowing a man to name his son after himself.  And while we are at it, it is time to abolish the custom of having the wife change her last name to match her husband’s.  There is no reason for a woman to lose her identity by taking on her husband’s name, especially when she is likely to get divorced five years hence. And what surname do we give their children, you ask?  Well, children belong more to women than they do to men. They are the ones who do most of the child rearing, and who get custody of the children when that divorce finally arrives.  Therefore, we should give the children the woman’s last name.

This last proposal, by which all male children would have first and last names different from those of their fathers, may sound like something on the feminist agenda.  If so, it would not be the first time that men have benefited from the feminist movement.  With this reform, every boy could grow up to be his own man, with his own name.

Domestic Violence in the Movies

As so often is the case, what we see in the movies tells us something about ourselves and influences our behavior, for movies reflect our values and often shape them. And while we all have had the experience of seeing a movie that expressed values to which we were opposed, for we do not all think and feel the same way, movies must at least be in tune with a significant portion of the populace or they will not make a profit.  In particular, it is interesting to note the way domestic violence is treated in the movies, and how that depiction has changed over the years.  This essay will focus on physical assault, especially in the form of slapping, as opposed to sexual assault, which I have written about elsewhere:  The Forsyte Saga, Rape and Race in the Movies, and Has No Always Meant No?

Let us begin with the situations in which women hit men.  The classic example is that of a woman slapping a man who has insulted her by making a pass, but there are other reasons as well.  In Gone With the Wind (1939), Scarlett slaps Ashley for what she regards as a betrayal. We see this slap as evidence of her passionate love for him, and thus we are sympathetic.  As for Ashley, he simply leaves the room, thereby showing that he is a gentleman. At a later point in the movie, when Rhett kisses Scarlett against her will, she slaps him too.  He laughs when she says he is no gentleman, which only adds to his image as a charming rogue.

Just to name a few of the more well-known films that happen to come to mind in which women slap men, there is The Glass Key (1942), Body and Soul (1947), Scaramouche (1952), The Americanization of Emily (1964), Point Blank (1967), When Harry Met Sally… (1989), and Groundhog Day (1993).  The most recent example I can think of is The Butler (2013), where a mother slaps her son for being disrespectful to his father.  The slap is presented as an expression of her righteous indignation.  In general, when a woman slaps a man in a movie, the slap is typically represented as morally justified, and if the man simply allows her to slap him, he gets points for being manly.

Since women are the weaker sex, it is perhaps not surprising that the movies do not condemn women for slapping men, but actually seem to approve of such behavior.  The idea is that she is too weak to do any harm.  In reality, we do hear of cases where men are physically abused by their wives or girlfriends, but the movies do not seem to be aware of them.  In any event, if we did not know better, we might expect that a man would be regarded as utterly despicable for hitting a woman, owing to his advantage of size and strength, but such is not the case.  Although the attitude toward men in movies who hit women is different from that of women who hit men, it is not totally negative.

The most obvious case that comes to mind is that of the gangster, beginning with Public Enemy (1931), in which occurs the notorious scene where James Cagney pushes a grapefruit into a woman’s face.  There is a misogynist streak in most movie gangsters, and thus we are not surprised when they mistreat women.  What does surprise us, perhaps, is that when the gangster slaps a woman, it contributes to his image as a tough guy in a different way from that of hitting another man.  It may take more courage to hit another man, but in hitting a woman, the gangster shows himself to be without any tender feelings or sentiment, something that Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar (1931) dismissively refers to as “soft stuff.”

By the 1940s, this trait on the part of movie gangsters had become so established that in Scarlet Street (1945), Dan Duryea figures that the way he routinely slaps Joan Bennett around qualifies him to go to Hollywood and be an actor.  “Why, I hear of movie actors getting 5000 … 10000 a week!” he says.  “For what?  For acting tough, for pushing girls in the face.  What do they do I can’t do?”  At another point in the movie, when Joan Bennett’s roommate says she does not understand how Bennett can be in love with a man like that, Bennett says, “You wouldn’t know love if it hit you in the face.”  To this her roommate replies, “If that’s where it hits you, you ought to know.”

That hitting women adds to a gangster’s macho persona is illustrated by the contrast between Michael and Fredo in The Godfather:  Part II (1974).  When Kay tells Michael that she had an abortion, he becomes furious and slaps her. This is consistent with his character as a tough guy. But when Fredo’s wife gets drunk at a party and becomes insulting and obnoxious, Fredo does not hit her, because he is not man enough.  If Fredo had slapped his wife, that would have been inconsistent with his character, which is that of a weakling.  I hope it is understood that when I say this, I am not speaking of my attitude, but the attitude conveyed by the movie.

Of course, honorable mention goes to The Killers (1964), in which Ronald Reagan slaps Angie Dickenson, thereby letting not only her, but also the men in the room know who is boss.  But it is not only gangsters that look tough when they hit women in the movies.  Private detectives sometimes do it, as when Jack Nicholson slaps Faye Dunaway in Chinatown (1974).  And James Bond even hits one of his “Bond girls” in From Russia with Love (1963).

Toughness is not the only positive trait that is established by hitting women.  In The Moon Is Blue (1953), David Niven plays his usual debonair self.  At one point in the movie, he mentions that his wife divorced him because he hit her.  When Maggie McNamara expresses surprise that he struck a woman, Niven, with a self-satisfied look on his face, says that he seldom strikes anyone but a woman.  The movie would have us think of this as part of his charm.

In The Philadelphia Story (1940), Cary Grant pushes Katherine Hepburn in the face, knocking her down.  But this movie, like The Moon Is Blue, is a comedy and comedies present a special challenge.  On the one hand, it seems stuffy to take them seriously; on the other hand, one has to wonder if they are able to encourage certain behaviors by treating them lightly.  In any event, it is interesting to note that in the remake, High Society (1956), this scene was left out, which was probably for the best, because seeing Bing Crosby push Grace Kelly in the face and knock her down would not have gone over well with the audience.  I don’t think this is due to a change in audience attitudes in the sixteen years that passed between the two movies as to a difference in attitude toward the stars.  Katherine Hepburn had become unpopular with movie audiences in the 1930s, probably because she comes off as being superior, and a lot of people may have enjoyed seeing her get pushed in the face.

The ultimate apology for hitting women is when it is construed as an expression of love, as in Carousel (1956), which romanticizes wife beating and child abuse.  In that movie, a man hits his wife and later hits his daughter.  But since he really loves them, the mother and daughter both agree that sometimes a slap can feel like a kiss.  The last word in this category is Sunrise (1927).  In that movie, a man falls in love with another woman, who persuades him to murder his wife.  He plans to drown his wife in the middle of a lake, but at the last minute, he finds he cannot do it, but not before she has seen the murderous intent in his eyes.  She flees from him when they get to shore, but eventually they reconcile, and the movie would have us approve of her forgiveness, because deep down he really loves her.

When a woman slaps a man in a movie, he usually deserves it, the case of Scarlett’s hitting Ashley being an exception.  Men, on the other hand, are usually not morally justified in hitting a woman.  An exception to this might be James Bond.  If he has a license to kill, perhaps he also has a license to slap. Another difference is that if a man who is slapped just stands there and takes it, he cuts a good figure, but when a woman is slapped, we either pity her, as in the case of Kay in Godfather II, or we regard her as a fool, as in the case of Joan Bennett in Scarlett Street.  In that latter movie, Bennett tells Duryea, “If I had any sense, I’d walk out on you.”  To this, Duryea replies, “You haven’t got any sense,” as he slaps her back and forth across the face. Of course, some women just like being slapped as part of rough sex, as in Charley Varrick (1973), where Joe Don Baker’s idea of foreplay is to slap Sheree North hard across the face, which she seems to relish. This is one case in which being slapped makes a woman look tough.  But most of the time, the woman gets nothing out of it but the slap.

The movies can treat slapping in this fashion because it never causes serious bodily harm, at least not in the movies.  Of course, by convention, fist fights in movies never seem to cause serious bodily harm either, so all the more so can they represent slapping as ultimately harmless in its physical effects. Now, a gangster in a movie can show that he is tough by going beyond slapping, as in The Big Heat (1953), where Lee Marvin throws a pot of scalding hot coffee in the face of his girlfriend, Gloria Grahame, permanently disfiguring her.  But this makes us dislike him.  When a man only slaps a woman in the movies, however, we are still allowed to like him or admire him, and she is still allowed to love him.

At least, that is the way things used to be.  Whereas movies still show women hitting men as being a positive thing, the situations where men hit wives or girlfriends do not seem to occur so much anymore.  Either men do not slap women at all, or they do more than just slap, as in the movie Enough (2002), so that we will be sure to know that we are not supposed to like them.

An optimist might say that this is progress.  Since movies no longer admire or excuse men who hit women, then to the extent that we are influenced by movies, men will be less likely to hit women in the future.  Alternatively, the fact that movies have changed in this way may reflect a change in attitude of the movie-going public whom the producers of movies wish to please. We no longer approve of domestic abuse as much as we used to, and the movies have simply followed along.

A pessimist, on the other hand, might say that it is easy to censor the movies, but not so easy to censor life.  The tendency to regard slapping women as proof of masculinity, or to excuse it as really being an expression of love, may have been purged from the movies but not from the heart.

Movie Marijuana

Marijuana seems to be on its way to legalization.  Polls indicate a widespread acceptance of medical marijuana and, to a lesser extent, its use for plain old recreation.  Politicians and even presidents do not suffer politically from admitting to having used it, and President Obama has asserted that it is no worse than alcohol.  Of course, our tolerance is limited to past use only. The idea of a president smoking a pot while unemployment remains high or war rages in the Middle East is unthinkable.  Overall, however, the attitude of the public toward marijuana is becoming increasingly positive, or at least mellowing.

Judging by the movies, the surprise is that legalization is taking so long.  We have all heard of Reefer Madness (1936), the most well-known exploitation film depicting the evils of marijuana, leading to rape and murder. Exploitation films justified their existence as being cautionary tales, but much of their appeal lay in titillation, so it is hard to assess what the audience really thought of this movie when first released; but by the 1970s, its popularity in the midnight-movie circuit was strictly camp.

Marijuana was clearly depicted as having baleful consequences in Touch of Evil (1958), where it is used by a bunch of degenerates, while apparently molesting a woman.  And in For a Few Dollars More (1965), a psychopath needs to smoke it after killing a man and his family, causing him to dream of the time he raped a woman who killed herself in the middle of the act.

Starting in the late 1960s, marijuana ceased to be associated with evil and perversion:  people who smoked marijuana in the movies no longer had horns, but haloes. From that time on, in movies or on television, if a character smoked a marijuana cigarette, you knew you were supposed to like him.  In Platoon (1986), there are two sergeants, one good and one evil.  And we know which is which, because one sergeant smokes marijuana, while the other does not.

This leads to a rather startling corollary.  Since the late 1960s, marijuana is so strongly associated with goodness that no evil character has been allowed to smoke it.  When I say “evil,” I am referring to the attitude that the movie has toward that character, and not that he is a criminal.  That is, if a character is portrayed as so unlikeable that the audience wants him to die, or at least to come to a very bad end, then he is evil, as I am using the term; whereas if a character is portrayed as likeable, and the audience hopes things will turn out well for him, then that character is not evil, even if he breaks the law.

For example, in American Beauty (1999), there is a subplot concerning a Colonel Fitts and his son Ricky.  Now, Ricky doesn’t just smoke marijuana—he supplies it.  But that’s all right, because by this time the positive associations with marijuana in the movies is so strong that a marijuana dealer is thought of as promoting the public weal.  We can scarcely bring ourselves to call him a criminal, although technically that is what he is.  But in any event, he is not evil. On the other hand, his father is not only obnoxious in general, but is a homophobe as well. Because he is evil, in the sense that we detest him and wish him ill, it is absolutely forbidden that such a character be seen smoking a marijuana cigarette.

Those who are opposed to marijuana legalization sometimes argue that it is a gateway drug, that it leads to the use of more dangerous substances. Whatever the truth of the matter, this is generally not seen in the movies, especially when the other drug is associated with evil, for that would create cognitive dissonance.  Early in the movie Wolfen (1981), a wealthy couple is seen snorting cocaine, so we know right away something bad will happen to them.  And justice is swift, for their horrible death soon follows.  Therefore, any movie showing someone progressing from marijuana to cocaine would disturb us, because the former tells us to like that character, while the latter tells us he is doomed.

In the end, however, the positive qualities of marijuana will usually trump the negative qualities of a harder drug.  In Breaking Bad (2008-2013), Jesse Pinkman is a user and dealer in methamphetamine, but since he smokes marijuana, all is forgiven.  On the other hand, Gus Fring is the most evil character in the whole series, from which it follows with Euclidean certainty that he must never be allowed to profane that sacred weed by smoking as much as a single joint.

And then there is the element of pity.  While cocaine has an evil taint, especially when indulged in by the rich, other drugs tend to elicit our sympathy.  Heroin is a surprisingly sympathetic drug, and thus we pull for Frank Sinatra’s character in The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), and we feel sorry for Jane in Breaking Bad.  To a certain extent, we also feel sorry for those who use methamphetamine, for the meth addicts in Breaking Bad were pathetic.  But unlike heroin, where people are allowed to keep their good looks, meth addicts are ugly, so our compassion contends with our feelings of disgust.  On the other hand, even when used to excess, we never feel sorry for the pothead. Instead, overuse is more likely to be portrayed comically, as with Cheech & Chong. Regarding Obama’s comparison of alcohol and marijuana, the movies may allow us to feel compassion for someone who drinks, as in The Lost Weekend (1945) or Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), but never for someone who smokes marijuana, unless it be for a totally unrelated reason.  To suggest that the marijuana user is an object of pity would be to imply that there is something bad about smoking marijuana, and modern movies are not about to do that.

Therefore, if the movies are any indication, I not only expect to see full legalization of marijuana, but I anticipate the day when companies like Altria and R. J. Reynolds begin selling it by the pack as well, possibly filter-tipped and with menthol, returning them to their glory days before tobacco began its fall from grace. A drug that the movies depict as having so many morally uplifting qualities cannot long be resisted.

Arrowsmith (1931)

The movie Arrowsmith was based on a novel of the same name, written by Sinclair Lewis.  I had read and enjoyed Main Street, Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry, but despite that and despite the fact the the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, I did not care for it.  And despite the fact the the movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1931, I did not care for that either.  The movie took a lot of liberties with the novel, leaving out stuff and changing things around, most of which did not bother me one bit.  However, the movie is better than the novel, because there is an absurd event that is described in the novel that the movie wisely, or perhaps fortuitously, left out.

In the novel, Martin Arrowsmith, who is a medical student, becomes engaged to a woman named Madeleine. During the summer, Martin goes Canada, where he meets a nurse named Leora.  He proposes to her, and she accepts. But Martin is still not sure which woman he wants to marry. So, he invites both of them to have lunch with him, and when they arrive, he announces that he is engaged to both of them, and he will let them decide whom he will marry. Madeleine leaves in a huff, but Leora stays and clinches the engagement.

When I reached this point in the novel, I threw it aside in disgust. It was one of the stupidest things I had ever read, especially in a well-known novel by an otherwise good author. I had no interest in reading a novel about a man who is that ridiculous. I would say the same about Leora, since any self-respecting woman would do what Madeleine did, which is to get up and leave, but I suppose she was so desperate to get married that she was willing to swallow the insult. It was the better part of a year before I could bring myself to finish the novel.  But the damage had already been done and was irreparable.  On account of that scene with the two women, I despise the novel to this day.

Years later, the movie turned up on television, and I remember wondering to myself how it was going to handle this business with the two women. I was pleased to see that the Madeleine character was not in the movie, thereby eliminating the scene that caused me to dislike the novel. As for the rest of the story, Martin (Ronald Colman) is interested in medical research. In testing a new medicine, the standard procedure is to have a control group that gets a placebo to compare with the group that gets the experimental medicine. That way the researchers can tell whether the medicine makes a difference, and whether there are side effects. This is especially emphasized in the novel, where the students are portrayed as being obsessed with controls.

When the bubonic plague hits the West Indies, Martin decides to go there and try out his new serum. This requires the use of a control group. But if the serum is effective, this will mean that most of those in the control group will die on account of having only received a placebo. He ends up giving the serum to everyone. Martin’s humanity triumphs over his desire to establish the efficacy of the serum.

As the movie came to an end, I finally realized the point of the lunch date with the two fiancées. Madeleine was essentially acting as a control for Leora. By comparing the reactions of the two women, Martin was able to assess Leora’s love for him by contrasting it with Madeleine’s. The idea was to show just how obsessed Martin was with the need for controls, that he would even try to apply it to love and marriage.

That may have been the idea, but it is still absurd. And it is unnecessary. A man will typically have enough experience with women in general to be able to decide whether he should marry one woman in particular. Every woman he has ever dated is a control of sorts. Likewise, a woman will have had enough experience with men to know that if the man she is engaged to turns out to be engaged to someone else as well, she can be glad she found out before she married the jerk.

In a similar way, the same could be said about the bubonic plague.  We have had plenty of experience with epidemics involving this disease, so much so that a control group was not really necessary.  If everyone in the West Indies is given the serum, and the epidemic comes to an abrupt end, that is sufficient proof of its efficacy.

It may be that Sidney Howard, the man who wrote the screenplay, left Madeleine out of the movie for the simple reason that most movie versions leave stuff out that was in the novels on which they were based. But I like to believe that Howard thought the lunch date with the two fiancées was as preposterous as I did, and he mercifully gave it the ax.

The Evolution of Torture in the Movies

The public’s changing attitude toward torture over the years is reflected in the movies, and the conclusion, sad to say, seems to be one of increasing acceptance.  For a long time, when depicted in film, torture was portrayed as something evil, something done by Nazis, for instance.  An example of this is the movie Foreign Correspondent (1940).

But eventually, torture came to be seen as justified in certain cases.  One of the earliest movies to represent torture as something good is Dirty Harry (1971).  Early in that movie, the “Scorpio Killer” has buried a little girl alive with only enough oxygen to last her a few hours, and then demands ransom for her release.  Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) is a police detective who agrees to deliver the money.  When he does, the serial killer announces that he intends to let the little girl die.  When Harry catches up with him, he tortures the killer until he tells him where the girl has been buried.

Even if we disapprove of torture in real life, we cannot help but approve of Dirty Harry’s actions while watching the movie.  And this for five reasons:  (1) We are certain the man is guilty.  Dirty Harry knows, as do we, that the man he is torturing is the Scorpio Killer.  (2) The punishment fits the crime. The Scorpio Killer is evil, and clearly deserves the pain Harry inflicts on him. (3) There is a time element.  In just a few hours, the girl will die, so the information must be extracted from him immediately.  (4) The situation is ad hoc.  Although early in the movie a doctor jokes about Harry beating a confession out of a suspect, it is our sense that he does not routinely torture criminals.  (5) The torture is effective.  We find out later that the girl was already dead, but Harry does get the information concerning where she is buried.

Perhaps the greatest example of justifiable torture is in Dr. Strangelove (1964). Because no actual torture takes place, but is only feared, and because this film is satirical, it does not come readily to mind as a torture-justifying movie as does Dirty Harry.  But even so, it makes a case for torture that cannot be exceeded.  General Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has decided to launch a sneak attack on the Soviet Union, which will start World War III.  Worse still, the Russians have just activated a doomsday device that will destroy all life on this planet if ever they are attacked with nuclear weapons.  Ripper does not know this, but when his air force base surrenders to the army, he rightly fears he will be tortured for the recall code, which will allow the president to order the bombers to return home.  Again, we have the five elements:  We know Ripper is guilty.  He would deserve what he gets.  There is a time element of about 15 minutes before the planes invade Russian air space.  The army does not routinely torture people.  And finally, it is because Ripper knows that the torture would be effective that he commits suicide.  Anyone who can contemplate the scenario thus outlined and still say it would be wrong to torture Ripper may count himself as being morally pure on this issue.

More recently, we have had the television show 24.  The principal difference between this series and the two movies above is that Jack Bauer usually manages to find someone to torture before and after lunch.  That is to say, torture is not ad hoc for him, but rather seems to be part of his job description.  Still, the other four elements are typically present, and they seem to suffice for showing that torture is good.  The fact that torture no longer has to be ad hoc to be acceptable indicates a growing acceptance of torture on part of the public.

Now, I can enjoy a fascist fantasy just like anyone else, but some people have the unfortunate tendency to confuse art with life, justifying torture by what they see in the movies or on television.  The five ideal elements that justify torture in the movies or on television, however, are not likely to be found when people are tortured in real life.  Sometimes the innocent are tortured right along with the guilty.  Or, if guilty, we must wonder if their guilt is always sufficient to justify the torment they must endure. The presence of a time element is more likely to be an exception rather than the rule.  Nor is the torture exceptional, but is carried out on a regular basis.

Now, what do we say about the kind of man who would make torture his life’s work, a man who gets up every morning, goes to his dungeon, makes a few notes on his clipboard, and then proceeds to inflict pain?  The answer is simple.  He likes it.  He enjoys causing pain, or he would not do it day after day.  And such a sadistic monster will not be squeamish about the guilt or innocence of his victims.  In fact, he may even prefer the innocent, for unlike the guilty, they can never give him the information he requires, and thus he gets to keep them longer.

As for the effectiveness of torture, that is debated by the experts.  From a moral point of view, it would simplify things greatly if it turned out that torture was worthless, and that the information sought could more easily be obtained through other means.  But since this goes contrary to common sense (I would certainly talk if I were tortured!), it might be best to concede that torture is useful, and then fall back on the principle that the ends do not justify the means.  To borrow a line from another movie, Touch of Evil (1958), “police work is always easier in a police state.”

The euphemism “harsh interrogation techniques” is used by those who would defend torture under another name.  And, it must be admitted, there is a difference between waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and exposure to uncomfortable temperatures on the one hand, and the kind of torture that mutilates its victims on the other.  Regarding these harsh interrogation techniques, the point is often made that Navy Seals and other soldiers who volunteer for special forces are subjected to the same sort of thing to toughen them up.  And if our soldiers can endure such treatment, the argument goes, there is no reason to spare the terrorists from the same.

However, when our own soldiers are waterboarded and the like, they know that they are among friends, as it were.  They know that things will not be allowed to get out of hand, and the length of time they will have to endure the treatment will be relatively short.  Many others have been through it before, and they may even look forward to the experience, as it will give them bragging rights later on.  The enemy has no such reassurances.  He knows he is in the hands of those who hate him, and there is no telling how far things will go, or for how long.

This psychological difference is not unimportant.  Imagine a man with a knife, telling a woman to undress, after which he ties her hands and feet to the bedposts.  If the man is her boyfriend, and they are playing a game, it may be the best sex she’s ever had.  But if the man is a stranger, who, for all she knows, may mutilate or kill her when he is through raping her, it will be a night of terror so awful that even if she survives physically, she will suffer from the trauma for the rest of her life.

In a recent movie about torture,  Zero Dark Thirty (2012), torture is also represented as justified, only now, another one of the five ideal elements has been dropped.  Just as torture in this movie is routine rather than ad hoc, so too is there no time element, no “ticking time bomb” about to explode any minute.   The man being tortured is definitely guilty, and the torture proves to be effective in getting the information.  There is some doubt as to whether he deserves the punishment he receives, but let us stipulate that he does.

If this movie shows any reticence about torture, it consists in the fact that the protagonist, Maya, does not actually torture anyone herself, and she does not like it.

In conclusion, over the years we have seen torture in the movies go from something done only by evil people, to something done by the good guys, but only if the five ideal elements are to present, to the dropping of first one and then another of these ideal elements.  The net effect seems to be that there is a growing acceptance of torture on the part of the public.  This is an ominous trend.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

In the movie Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Emmi, a German woman who appears to be in her sixties, stops in an Arab bar to get out of the rain. She meets Ali, who is from Morocco, and who is at least twenty years younger than she is. One thing leads to another, and he ends up spending the night with her, and they become lovers.

There have been a lot of movies about couples that have to deal with prejudice and disapproval, but this one seems to be going for the gold. First, Emmi and Ali are a mixed-race couple in which the woman is the one who is white.  Moreover, he is also foreign. And though religion never comes up, we suspect that she is Christian and he is Muslim. And then they are different in age by a generation. Just as society accepts a mixed-race couple better when the man is white, so too does society accept an age difference better when the older one is the man. But just as in this case the woman white, so too is she the one who is older.

Mixed-race couples of the same age can make a go of it, getting married and having children, if that is what they want. But when the woman is much older than the man, even of the same race, it is better for them to treat the relationship as a fling, and that means they should not live together, and they should definitely not get married. As the bartender says of their relationship, “Of course it won’t last. So What?” But this movie manages to get them married anyway.

First, we find out that Ali shares a room with five other men. Since she lives alone, it seems to make perfectly good sense for him to move in with her. But later we find out that as a mechanic, he makes more money than she does as a cleaning lady. So, if she can afford an apartment all to herself, why can’t he? Then the landlord objects to her subletting her apartment. In America, a woman could simply say he was her roommate, but I guess things are weird in Germany. So, she says that she and Ali are going to get married. She is not serious, saying this only to satisfy the landlord about his subletting objection, but Ali thinks it is a good idea. And so, against all reason, the movie contrives to get them married.

The rudeness and bigotry they experience from almost everyone is over the top, with people calling her a whore, ostracizing her, and even kicking in her television set. But let us assume that these vicious extremes of prejudice are the way things would have been in Germany in the 1970s. If so, then the total capitulation that follows is unbelievable. Emmi suggests that she and Ali should go somewhere on vacation, and that things will be different when they get back. It is an absurd prediction, but it comes to pass nevertheless. When they come back from vacation, everyone is nice to them. Granted, they all seem to want something from Emmi. But what a coincidence it is that so many people would want something from her all at the same time, and enough so for them to overcome the vehement prejudice we know them to harbor. But that is not the only change that happened while they were on vacation. Emmi and Ali have changed as well. Ali becomes sullen, cheats on her, and seems to be ashamed of his relationship with her. And Emmi begins to exhibit prejudice against foreigners. She tells him to help carry stuff down to the cellar, as if he were the hired help; she refuses to cook him couscous, saying he should get used to eating German food; and she and her friends talk about him while he is standing in the same room, discussing how clean he is, after which they examine him like some prize bull.

Actually, those who made the movie seem to be as obsessed with the question of Arab cleanliness as the characters in the movie. We have a scene in which Emmi gives Ali a toothbrush, a scene in which we see him taking a shower, a reference to his taking a shower, and a scene in which the female Arab bartender says she is going to get cleaned up before she and Ali have sex.

We expected there to be disapproval from others, and we expected Emmi and Ali to begin to suffer from their differences once the initial passion wore off. But the sudden shift from one extreme to another, separated only by that incredibly transformative vacation that we never see take place, but only hear about, is jarring.

And then, as we wonder how all this is going to work out between them, Ali collapses on the dance floor from a perforated ulcer. It is almost as if the people making this movie did not know how to end it, and so they just threw in a medical emergency at the last minute, leaving us with a final scene in which Ali is unconscious in a hospital bed.

Angel Heart (1987)

Angel Heart is one of my favorite movies.  Unfortunately, I cannot begin to do justice to its style and tone, the music and the imagery, which I always find unnerving.  I might do better discussing the symbolism—the fans, the mirrors, the stairs and elevators—or the clever use of names, but I’ll just stick to the story; for the manner in which it is told can be confusing, and so much so that I was still not sure exactly what happened, even after a third viewing, especially since what we see is not always veridical, owing to distorted memories and perceptions.  For that reason, I believe it will be worthwhile to focus on the logic of the narrative, both as to the sequence of events and the metaphysics of the soul.

One of the problems with the story of Faust, the man in the German legend who sold his soul to the Devil, is that we never understood why anyone would make such a foolish bargain in the first place. A few decades of wealth, power, fame, and sex in exchange for an eternity of suffering the fires of Hell? The story fares much better when understood in the allegorical sense, of course, but it is always better if a story makes sense literally if it is to have much value figuratively.  Angel Heart at least makes an effort to satisfy both requirements.

Johnny Liebling is a crooner who thinks he knows a way to cheat Satan. He makes a pact with him, in which Satan gets Johnny’s soul in exchange for fame as a singer, under the name Johnny Favourite.  Having made the deal and benefited from it, he then performs a ritual that involves cutting the heart out of a soldier and eating it.  By so doing, Johnny is able to get rid of his own soul and replace it with that of the soldier, whose name is Harold Angel.

Let us pause for a moment to consider this.  It is common for those that believe in life after death to suppose that the soul and the body are two distinct entities.  In some versions of Christianity, the soul occupies the body during life on Earth, but when the body dies, the soul goes to an afterworld, like Heaven or Hell, where it will spend eternity.  Some Christians believe the soul will get a new body, others do not.  In either event, the soul is what is essential to the person, so the loss of the body it occupies here on Earth is not lamented.  Likewise, for those that believe in reincarnation, when a person dies, his soul is reborn into another body.  Again, it is the soul that is essential to the person, not the body that it occupies, so that here too the person is said to survive death.

With that in mind, the idea that Johnny acquired Angel’s soul would seem to be the reverse of the usual understanding of the relationship between the soul and the body.  Instead of saying that Harold Angel now has a new body, that of Johnny Favourite, the movie is saying that Johnny Favourite has a new soul, that of Harold Angel.  The identity is a function of the body, not the soul.  But that would seem to call into question the whole notion of immortality.

Let us continue with the narrative before trying to sort this out further.  Since Johnny has gotten rid of his old soul and has now acquired a new one, the one that used to belong to Harold Angel, he has escaped damnation. In addition, he planned to take on the soldier’s identity, allowing him to hide from Satan. As part of the ritual, the soldier’s dog tags are sealed up in a vase. Only if Johnny himself opens the vase himself will the ritual be undone.

Before Johnny can assume the identity of Harold Angel, World War II breaks out. Johnny is drafted and subsequently suffers an injury, which causes him to have amnesia. He spends some time in a hospital, during which he has extensive facial reconstruction.  His friends get him out, but his face is still in bandages, so they don’t know what he looks like with his new face.  They bribe the doctor to falsify records, making it appear that Johnny is still there as a patient. Not knowing what to do with him, they simply drop him off in a crowd of people in Times Square on New Year’s Eve of 1943, hoping that will jog his memory, for it was on a previous New Year’s Eve in Times Square that Johnny had ritually murdered the soldier. As a result of Johnny’s confused memory about acquiring the soul and taking on the identity of Harold Angel, he comes to believe that he is Harold Angel.

Ten years after the war, which is when the movie starts, this Harold Angel (Mickey Roarke), who knows only that he got messed up during the war and was sent home, has become a private detective. As such, he is hired by Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to find Johnny Favourite. Angel does not realize it, but he has been hired by the Devil to find himself. We do not realize it either, at this point, and we are encouraged by the movie to like Angel and to identify with him.  He seems to be a nice guy, and after all, we usually like private detectives in movies.  He even blows bubble gum.

At one point in the movie, Johnny’s daughter Epiphany (Lisa Bonet) says that her mother told her that Johnny “was as close to true evil as she ever wanted to come.”  If this is so, then how is it that Angel is so likeable?  Or, since this is getting confusing, let us say that the when Johnny Favourite acquired the soul of Harold Angel, he became what we shall call Johnny Angel.  Therefore, Johnny Angel is likeable because he has the soul of Harold Angel, who was presumably a likeable person.  But this brings us back to the standard understanding, which is that the essence of the person is the soul, not the body.

Just as an aside, I cannot help but wonder how it makes sense for the Devil to make a pact with someone as evil as Johnny Favourite supposedly was.  Such a person is already destined for Hell, so what does he have to bargain with?  The Devil would naturally want to make a deal for the soul of someone who is a devout Christian, one who believes that Jesus Christ is his savior.  Now, that would be a soul worth the effort.  Why would the Devil waste his time providing all those worldly goodies for someone whose soul he already has in the bag?

Anyway, as Angel starts investigating, he begins experiencing disturbing images from the past. Little by little, he begins to suspect the truth. He is horrified at the idea that he might be Johnny Favourite, and as we have come to like him and identify with him, we are horrified too.

In his desperation to assure himself that he is who he thinks he is, he breaks open the vase, and the dog tags of the real Harold Angel fall out. The spell is broken. At this point, Louis Cyphre appears, announcing that Johnny’s soul now belongs to him.  But wouldn’t the soul to which Louis Cyphre now lays claim be the soul of Harold Angel, not the soul of Johnny Favourite?  The reason Cyphre has been going to all this trouble is that he wants the original soul of Johnny Favourite, not the Harold Angel substitute.

Recent memories that Johnny had distorted are replaced by accurate ones, memories of the gruesome way he murdered people in his effort to keep anyone from finding out that he was Johnny Favourite hiding out as Harold Angel.  And so now we find that this amalgam we are calling Johnny Angel, while being the likeable Harold Angel on the one hand, is also the evil Johnny Favourite on the other, and this evil side surfaces from time to time, something the good side has been unaware of.

Perhaps we are now in a position to interpret what happened in a way that is consistent both with the usual understanding the relationship between the soul and the body, on the one hand, and with the split personality of Johnny Angel, on the other.  When Johnny Favourite acquired the soul of Harold Angel, his own soul did not vanish, but rather remained in Johnny’s body alongside the new one.  When Johnny eventually died, the soul of the hapless Harold Angel would have gone to Hell, while Johnny Favourite’s soul would have passed through the Pearly Gates of Heaven to dwell among the righteous.  But now that the ritual has been undone, Harold Angel’s soul has been released, much in the way the dog tags were released from the vase, and Johnny’s body now has just the one soul, the one he had to begin with.  And that is why he can now remember the murders with such clarity.

Because Johnny had a way to cheat the Devil, this story works on a literal plane.  But a remark made by Louis Cyphre gives this Faustian story a new twist. Cyphre says that Johnny was doomed the minute he cut that boy’s heart out. In other words, all that dabbling in black magic and making a pact with the Devil was just so much hocus-pocus. In itself, it was harmless nonsense, and Johnny would never have gone to Hell for that. It was only when he did something truly evil, when he murdered that soldier, the very act that was supposed to undo the hocus-pocus, that Johnny was damned. By this remark, Cyphre links the literal understanding of this story with its allegorical one.

Consciousness Naturalized

One of the arguments against the theory of evolution is that the theory cannot account for the existence of consciousness.  No mere essay such as this one could possibly do justice to the mind/body problem, and it must be that extra cup of coffee I had this morning that has led me to this presumption.  However, there is one feature of the debate over the nature of consciousness that I believe is worth calling attention to, even if only in an oversimplified manner, as necessitated by the limitations of space.

The theory of dualism typically attributes to consciousness and matter radically opposite properties.  Among other things, consciousness, thought of as the essence of the mind or the soul, is associated with that which is alive, aware, and active, whereas matter is said to be lifeless, insensible, and passive. Because mind and matter are thought of as distinct substances that interact with each other, it is easy to imagine that the mind or soul can survive the body.  This is most agreeable with religious notions of immortality.  As such, whereas matter is part of nature, the conscious mind is supernatural and destined for some kind of afterlife.  Needless to say, on this dualistic understanding of mind and matter, material evolution cannot possibly explain the existence of the immaterial soul.  And thus it is that the existence of consciousness is often put forward as an objection to the notion that the theory of evolution is sufficient to fully explain life, especially the existence of man.

In response to this, a lot of atheists argue that consciousness did evolve, that it is an emergent property of matter, arising when a certain level of complexity is reached.  They may admit that they are not sure exactly what level of complexity is required, or at what point in the evolution of life consciousness emerged, but emerge it did.  Such a position essentially accepts the conception of matter as formulated by the dualists:  it is lifeless, insensible, and passive. We might be able to understand how complexity of such matter could eventually produce animal life, but it is hard to see how mere complexity could ever bring about sensation or feeling from such an unpromising beginning.

There is no need to accept this conception of matter as laid out by the dualists, however.  In fact, since the dawn of philosophy, a lot of materialists have realized that in order to materialize consciousness, matter must be spiritualized.  Thales, the first pre-Socratic materialist, said that all things came from water.  To this assertion that everything evolved, if you will, from a material element, he added that “things are full of gods.”  Lucretius, another materialist, said that in addition to properties such as size, shape, and weight, atoms also had “inclinations.” Thomas Hobbes, in elaborating his theory of materialism, explained the motion of bodies as resulting from an “endeavor.”

In other words, instead of arguing that consciousness emerged from matter as a result of complexity, one can argue that it was there from the beginning.  Of course, if we are going to attribute consciousness to matter in its simplest forms, in an electron for instance, it must be consciousness in its simplest form as well.  Some people strongly associate consciousness with intelligence, but electrons are clearly not intelligent.  For others, “consciousness” means self-awareness, but that also lets out electrons.  At most, an electron can be thought of as having something like a feeling or an urge.

If we decide to accept a notion of matter that is conscious, we have a choice to make between interactionism and parallelism.  Referring again to the metaphysics of Lucretius, inclination was a property that atoms had alongside material properties, such as size, shape, and weight. Whereas the material property of weight made the atoms fall straight down, in his view, the inclination of the atoms could make them swerve.  And this inclination was the basis of the will in man.  In other words, he had an interactionist view of things.  Material properties of atoms would have them do one thing (fall), while the mental property, the inclination, would have them do something else (swerve).

The problem with this understanding of things is that it seems to be the same old dualism of mind and body shrunk in size to that of the atom.  Alternatively, there is the idea of parallelism, known as the dual-aspect theory.  To go back to the example of an electron, its mental aspect, be it a feeling or an urge, is not a property distinct from its mass and electric charge.  Rather, the feeling it has is the “inner nature” of the material properties, the way the mass and charge are experienced by the electron.  Under this view, there are no Lucretian swerves. If an electron swerves, we can attribute that swerving to such things as an electric or gravitational field, with some kind of sensation present paralleling that swerve.

The first philosopher to propose the dual-aspect theory was Spinoza, whose writing, unfortunately, is more mediaeval than modern.  Schopenhauer is my favorite exponent of this view, although his philosophy is bound up with Kant’s transcendental idealism, which I have never been able to fully understand.  And if I read him right, Shadworth Hodgson, who is mostly known as being the first epiphenomenalist, also espoused a version of this theory. With regard to the last two philosophers, we may discern a debate as to which is causally determinative, the mental or the physical.  In other words, just who wears the pants in this universe?  For Hodgson, it was the physical.  He compared consciousness to the color of the stones on a mosaic, whereas the stones themselves and the cement that holds them together correspond to physical reality. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, opted for the will as being causally determinative, with physical reality being just the outer appearance of the phenomenon of the will.

But to ask which of the two, the mental or the physical, is the more important is like asking of a coin dropped into a slot to buy candy, which was the more important, the head or the tail. Keeping with the coin analogy for a moment, imagine seeing coins on a table, all of which are Indian Head nickels with a buffalo on the back, some of which have the Indian head facing up, with others having the buffalo facing up.  If we had never seen this type of coin before, and we had no way of turning one of them over, we might never suspect they were the same coin.  In a similar way, when we look at a stone, we cannot see its mental aspect, and when we feel a pain, we cannot see its physical aspect.

The head of a coin and its tail never interact.  If we toss a coin in the air, the head and tail move together in parallel, neither one being determinative of the motion of the other.  On the other hand, coins interact with each other.  If we move those hypothetical coins around on the table, still ignorant of the fact that they are the same type, we might see an Indian bump into a buffalo and cause it to move, and we might see elsewhere a buffalo bump into an Indian and likewise cause motion, leading us to conclude that there is interaction between Indian Head nickels and Buffalo nickels as distinct kinds of coins.  In reality, the interaction is between a single kind of coin, viewed differently.

In a similar manner, we know there is a correlation between pain and brain states.  A dualist will say the brain state, which is physical, causes the feeling of pain, which is mental.  In reality, the brain state and the pain are two aspects of a single thing.  In asserting this identity, I am not saying that the mental aspect of this brain state is identical with its physical aspect, any more than I would say that the head of a coin is identical with its tail.  Rather, just as a coin with an Indian head on its obverse side can be identical with a coin with a buffalo on its reverse side, so too can a brain state, observed as physical from the outside, be identical with a brain state, felt as pain from the inside.  In this regard, identity theory is in agreement with the dual-aspect theory, the difference being that most identity theorists believe that such identities are limited to nervous systems, which is a version of the theory that consciousness emerges when there is sufficient complexity, whereas the dual-aspect theory assumes such identities in even the simplest forms of matter.

The dual-aspect theory is not a popular one, and has few proponents.  The main reason, I believe, is that it is counterintuitive to say that matter in general has a mental aspect, and so much so that to advocate such a theory is to open one up to derision.  It is in the opposite situation from dualism, which appeals to our intuition and common sense.  And most of us speak the language of dualism, for it is easily understood and allows for brevity of expression.

My pet theory aside, the main point I wanted to make in all this is that in debating the theory of evolution with those who say the theory cannot explain consciousness, we need not resign ourselves to accepting the impoverished conception of matter provided by dualism, but may avail ourselves of an enriched version more suitable to our needs.  The longer we delay the moment in which consciousness makes its appearance in this world, the more we implicitly concede that there is something mysterious and inexplicable about it.  Better to embrace consciousness as present in matter from the beginning, thereby completely naturalizing it.