philosophy in film

From Duel directed by Steven Spielberg

Man, you never know, you just never know. You just go along figuring some things don’t change, ever. Like being able to drive on a public highway without somebody trying to murder you. And then one stupid thing happens…twenty, twenty-five minutes out of your whole life. And all the ropes that kept you you hanging in there are cut loose. And it’s like, there you are, right back in the jungle again.

From Darren Aronofsky’s Pi:

[b]Restate my assumptions. One: Mathematics is the language of nature. Two: Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature.

Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics; the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile. So, what about the stock market? The universe of numbers that represents the global economy. Millions of hands at work, billions of minds.

A vast network, screaming with life. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the stock market, there is a pattern as well… Right in front of me, hiding behind the numbers. Always has been.[/b]

And:

Personal note. Sol died a little when he stopped research on Pi. It wasn’t just the stroke. He stopped caring. How could he stop, when he was so close to seeing Pi for what it really is? How could you stop believing that there is a pattern, an ordered shape behind those numbers, when you were so close? We see the simplicity of the circle, we see the maddening complexity of the endless numbers…off into infinity.

From Synecdoche, New York written and directed by Charlie Kaufman

[b]Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you’ll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce.

And they say there is no fate, but there is: it’s what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved.

And the truth is I’m so angry and the truth is I’m so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve been so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long have been pretending I’m ok, just to get along, just for, I don’t know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to or care about mine.

Well, fuck everybody.[/b]

From Network directed by Sydney Lumet

Arthur Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU… WILL… ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that… perfect world… in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

From Adaptation directed by Spike Jonze

[b]KAUFMAN: I spend my whole life paralyzed worrying what people think of me and you - - you’re just oblivious.

DONALD: I’m not oblivious.

KAUFMAN: No, you don’t understand. I say that as a compliment. I really do.

[pause]

There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.

DONALD: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.

KAUFMAN: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was really sweet to you.

DONALD: I remember that.

KAUFMAN: Then when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. It was like they were laughing at me. You didn’t know at all. You seemed so happy.

DONALD: I knew. I heard them.

KAUFMAN: How come you looked so happy?

DONALD: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.

KAUFMAN: She thought you were pathetic.

DONALD: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.[/b]

From Mindwalk directed and written by Bernt Amadeus Capra

[b]SONIA: Mechanistic, as if nature functioned like a clock. You take it apart, reduce it to a number of small simple pieces, easy to understand, analyze them, put them all back together again and then understand the whole.

JACK: Isn’t that what’s known as “scientific thinking”, Miss Hoffman? Really, what you call the mechanistic view, isn’t that what the scientific method is all about?

SONIA: OK Jack–you’re right in a sense. But it wasn’t always so, not before Descartes. When he introduced such thinking, it amounted to a revolutionary break with the Church. He said, “I don’t need the Pope to tell me how the world functions, I can find that out for myself, because to me, the world is just a machine.” And then he became so fascinated with clockworks that he made the clock into his central metaphor. He said, “I consider the human body as nothing but a machine. A healthy man is like’ a well-made clock; a sick man like an ill-made clock.”

JACK: The metaphor seems a little clumsy now, but it worked, didn’t it?

SONIA (nodding): Yes, so successfully that scientists came to believe that all living things, plants and animals, are nothing but machines and that’s the fallacy. It carried over into everything; art, politics…[/b]

youtube.com/watch?v=EqrPFG40tNo

From Chinatown directed by Roman Polanski

[b]Jake Gittes: How much are you worth?

Noah Cross: I have no idea. How much do you want?

Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you’re worth. More than 10 million?

Noah Cross: Oh my, yes!

Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?

Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gitts! The future. Now, where’s the girl? I want the only daughter I’ve got left. As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.

Jake Gittes: Who do you blame for that? Her?

Noah Cross: I don’t blame myself. You see, Mr. Gitts, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.[/b]

Last line

[b]Walsh:

Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown[/b]

From Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later

[b]Selena: Look, if someone gets infected you’ve got between ten and twenty seconds to kill them. It might be your brother or your sister or your oldest friend. It makes no difference. And just so you know where you stand — if it happens to you, I’ll do it in a heartbeat… He was full of plans, Mark. Do you have plans, Jim? Do you want us to find a cure and save the world, or just fall in love and fuck? Plans are pointless. Staying alive’s as good as it gets.

Writing on a church wall: Repent…the end is extremely fucking nigh[/b]

ANIMAL KINGDOM
written and directed by David Michod

[b]J: After my mom died, this is just the world I got thrown in.

Leckie: You know what the bush is about? It’s about massive trees that have been standing there for thousands of years… and bugs that’ll be dead before the minute’s out. It’s big trees and pissy little bugs. And everything knows its place in the scheme of things. Everything… everything sits in the order somewhere. Things survive because they’re strong, and everything reaches an understanding. But not everything survives because it’s strong. Some creatures are weak, but they survive because they’re being protected by the strong for one reason or another. You may think that, because of the circles you move in or whatever, that you’re one of the strong creatures, but you’re not, you’re one of the weak ones. That’s nothing against you, you’re just - you’re just weak because you’re young. But you’ve survied because you’ve been protected by the strong. But they’re not strong anymore, and they’re certainly not able to protect you. We’re here because we know who you are and we know what you’ve done.

Pope: It’s a crazy fucking world.[/b]

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Marion: [after Harry tells her she’s beautiful] That’s nice, Harry. Other people have told me that before, and it was meaningless. When you say it, I hear it.

Marion: Getting the money’s not the problem Harry.
Harry: Then what’s the problem?
Marion: I don’t know what I’m going to have to do to get it.

Sure enough, later:

Uncle Hank: Ass to ass.

CONTROL
Directed by Anton Corbijn

[b]Ian: Existence. Well, what does it matter? I exist on the best terms I can. The past is now part of my future. The present is well out of hand.

Ian: I felt as if things were becoming a bit clearer earlier on, but can now see everything falling to pieces before my eyes. I’m paying dearly for past mistakes. I never realised how one mistake in my life four or five years ago would make me feel how I do. I struggle between what I know is right in my own mind, and some warped truthfulness as seen through other people’s eyes who have no heart, and can’t see the difference anyway…I saw Apocalypse Now at the cinema. I couldn’t take me eyes away from the screen…On the record, there’s Marlon Brando reading The Hollow Men, the struggle between man’s conscience and his heart until things go too far, get out of hand, and can never be repaired. Is everything so worthless in the end? Is there any more? What lies beyond? What is left to carry on?[/b]

SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER
Directed by Steven Zaillian

[b]Bonnie: He’s not afraid of losing. He’s afraid of losing your love. How many ball players grow up afraid of losing their fathers’ love every time they come up to the plate?

Fred: All of them!

Bonnie: He knows you disapprove of him. He knows you think he’s weak. But he’s not weak. He’s decent. And if you or Bruce or anyone else tries to beat that out of him, I swear to God I’ll take him away.

Fred: He’s better at this than I’ve ever been at anything in my life. He’s better at this than you’ll ever be, at anything. My son has a gift. He has a gift, and when you acknowledge that, then maybe we will have something to talk about.[/b]

THE DEER HUNTER
Directed by Michael Cimino

Michael: I came 12,000 miles back here to get you…What’s the matter with you? Don’t you recognize me?..Nicky, I love you, you’re my friend. What are you doing? We don’t have much time, Nick. [Nick pulls the trigger on a gun, clicking on an empty chamber] Is this what you want? Is this what you want? I love you, Nick. [Michael pulls the trigger, clicking on an empty chamber] Come on, Nicky, come home. Just come home. Home. Talk to me. [looking at Nick’s track marks] What did you do to your arms? Do you remember the trees? Do you remember all the different ways of the trees? Do you remember that? Do you remember? Huh? The mountains? Do you remember all that? Nick: One shot. [He smiles and laughs in recognition] Michael: One shot, one shot. [Nick pulls the trigger, shooting himself] Michael: Nicky, Nicky, don’t, Nick, no!!

THE GOOD THE BAD THE WEIRD
Directed by Jee-woon Kim

[b]Park Do-won: Yoon Tae-goo, everyone has the right to dream big but…If you chase somethig to get something, something else will come chasing you. Life is about chasing and being chased. There is no escape.

Yoon Tae-goo: Let me sleep man. Stop making me think.[/b]

JOY DIVISION
Directed by Grant Gee.

Punk enabled you to say “Fuck You!”. But somehow it couldn’t go any further. It was just a single, venemous, one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger which was necessary to re-ignite rock-n-roll. But sooner or later someone was going to want to say more than, “fuck you”. Someone was going to want to say “I’m fucked”. And it was Joy Division who were the first band to do that…to use the energy and simplicity of punk to express more complex emotions.

youtube.com/watch?v=rF9V_Mlr534

Ian was a big Burroughs fan because his writing was very much a post-industrial nightmare. It was about bigotry and lack of ethics. The cynical, hate-filled, totalitarian, dark underside greed of Western society gone mad. The secret nature of perception. The cutup. It all seemed to fit and suggest there was a way to integrate that more artistic and literary idea into what was otherwise a paltry glam rick, prog rock wilderness.

youtube.com/watch?v=ihCbVT637aM

LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

[b]Paul: Fucking God!

Paul: Why were you going through my pockets?
Jeanne: To find out who you are.
Paul: To find out who you are?
Jeanne: Yes.
Paul: Well, if you look real close, you’ll see me hiding behind my zipper

Paul [alone at his dead wife’s bedside during her wake]: Our marriage was nothing more than a foxhole for you. And all it took for you to get out was a 10 cent razor and a tub full of water. You cheap, goddamn, fucking, godforsaken whore, I hope you rot in hell. You’re worse than the dirtiest street pig anybody could ever find anywhere, and you know why? You know why? Because you lied. You lied to me and I trusted you.
[gradually starts losing his composure]
You lied and you knew you were lying. Go on, tell me you didn’t lie. Haven’t you got anything to say about that? You can think up something, can’t you? Go on, tell me something! Go on, smile, you cunt!
[starts crying noticeably]
Go on, tell me… tell me something sweet. Smile at me and say I just misunderstood. Go on, tell me. You pig-fucker… you goddamn, fucking, pig-fucking liar.
[sobbing]
Rosa… I’m sorry, I… I just - I can’t stand it to see these goddamn things on your face!
[peels off her fake eyelashes]
You never wore make-up… this fucking shit.
[wipes off her lipstick with a flower petal]
I’m gonna take this off your mouth, this - this lipstick…
[falls over her, sobbing uncontrollably]
Rosa - oh GOD! I’m sorry! I - I don’t know why you did it! I’d do it too, if I knew how… I just don’t know how… I have to… have to find a way…[/b]

Wag the Dog

Macy: There are no nuclear devices in Albania. Albania has no nuclear capacity. Our spy satellites show no secret terrorist training camps in the Albanian hinterland. The border patrol, the FBI, the RCMP report no-- repeat–no untoward activity along our picturesque Canadian border. The Albanian government is screaming its defense. The world is listening. There is no war.
De Niro: Of course, there’s a war. I’m watching it on television.
Macy: Who might you be? What you all said and done?
De Niro: My name is Conrad Brean.
Macy: Who do you work for?
De Niro: Nobody whose name you want me to say, Mr. Young. I promise you.
Macy: So well and good, but when the fit hits the shan somebody has to stay after school.
Who do you suppose that might be?
De Niro: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Macy: The spy satellites show it, Mr. Brean. They show no war.
De Niro: Then what good are they if they show no war? I mean, why we spend a quarter trillion dollars a year on defense department? What good are they if they show nothing? Are they useless or just broken? Or what? If there’s no threat, then where are you? Let me go one more. If there’s no threat, what good are you?
Macy: Mr. Brean, you are the threat.
De Niro: I’m the threat? I am the threat? What have I been doing the last 30 years that you haven’t been doing. You wanna me fool in on that?
Macy: The last 30 years, Mr. Brean I have been working to ensure the security of my country.
De Niro: I’m sure that speaks well of you and your parents but if forced to choose between the security of your country and the security of your job, which would you pick? While you hesitate, permit me to suggest that they are one in the same. Your country and your job.
Macy: I’m doing my job, Mr. Brean. That’s what you see me doing.
De Niro: I’m doing my job, too. Let me ask you something. Let me ask you a simple question.
Why do people go to war? Why they go to war?
Macy: I’ll play your silly game.
De Niro: OK. Why they go to war?
Macy: To ensure their way of life.
De Niro: Would you fight to do that?
Macy: I have.
De Niro: If you went to war again, who would it be against? Your ability to fight a two-ocean war against who? Sweden and Togo? That time has passed. It’s over. The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It’ll be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst perhaps to their own governments, have… To go to that war, you have to be prepared. You gotta be alert. The public has gotta be alert because that is the war of the future and if you’re not gearing up to fight that war then eventually the ax will fall. You’ll be out in the street. You can call this a drill, call this job security call it anything you like, but I got one for you. You go to war to preserve your way of life. Chuck, this is your way of life. And if your spy satellites don’t see nothing, if there ain’t no war then you can go home and take up golf my friend 'cause there ain’t no war but ours.

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON
Directed by Roger Spottiswoode

Dr. Don Francis: How many hemophiliacs have to die before it’ll be cost effective for you people to do something about it? A hundred? A thousand? Give us a number so we won’t annoy you until the amount of money you start losing on lawsuits makes it more profitable for you to save people than to kill them!

Bobbi Campbell: Now for years and years and years people in my hometown were telling me I was a freak because of my sexual orientation, until I came to San Francisco, and I found a community of freaks just like me. We stood together. We stood together! And it took a long time. But we finally forced this one tiny spot of the universe, the Castro, to realise that how we choose to have sex, and where, is our own damn business. Which to all other people who haven’t gone through what we’ve gone through sounds funny and they may laugh, but I know speaking for most of us, I would rather die as a human being than continue living as a freak.
Dr. Mervyn Silverman: Clearly there’s a lot of strong feeling on the subject…
Voice in the crowd: What good is all the gay rights in the world if we are all dead?

Chip: 666… that’s my room number!

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Veronika: What else do you want to know about me?
Alexandre Fabbri: Everything
Veronika: [picks up her purse and dumps the contents on the bed in front of him]

BROKEN WINGS
Directed by Nir Bergman

youtube.com/watch?v=PBJI32Wume8