philosophy in film

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

PERSONAL VELOCITY
Written and directed by Rebecca Miller

Paula: I used to write. Then I used to paint. I think I’m going to be one of those people with a lot of potential who never really takes off.
Norwegian Man Who Dies with Paula: Those are always the best kind of people.

youtube.com/watch?v=klxyh_BrLic

THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Directed by David Fincher

[b]Sean Parker: We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the internet!

Marylin Delpy: You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.

Marylin Delpy: What are you doing?
Mark Zuckerberg: Checking in to see how it’s going in Bosnia.
Marylin Delpy: Bosnia. They don’t have roads, but they have Facebook.
[Mark says nothing]
Marylin Delpy: You must really hate the Winklevosses.
Mark Zuckerberg: I don’t hate anybody. The “Winklevii” aren’t suing me for intellectual property theft. They’re suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn’t go exactly the way they were supposed to for them.

Mark Zuckerberg: I’m just saying I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs.
Erica Albright: Why?
Mark Zuckerberg: Because they’re exclusive. And fun. And they lead to a better life.
Erica Albright: Teddy Roosevelt didn’t get elected president because he was a member of the Phoenix club.
Mark Zuckerberg: He was a member of the Porcelain, and yes he did.

Sean Parker: When you go fishing you can catch a lot of fish, or you can catch a big fish. You ever walk into a guy’s den and see a picture of him standing next to fourteen trout?

Mark Zuckerberg: I was drunk, and angry, and stupid…
Marylin Delpy: …and Blogging.
Mark Zuckerberg: And Blogging.

Erica Albright: The Internet’s not written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink[/b]

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE
Written and directed by the Coen Brothers

[b]Reidenschneider: They got this guy, in Germany. Fritz Something-or-other. Or is it? Maybe it’s Werner. Anyway, he’s got this theory, you wanna test something, you know, scientifically - how the planets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water comes out of the tap - well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes you look at it, your looking changes it. Ya can’t know the reality of what happened, or what would’ve happened if you hadn’t-a stuck in your own goddamn schnozz. So there is no “what happened”? Not in any sense that we can grasp, with our puny minds. Because our minds… our minds get in the way. Looking at something changes it. They call it the “Uncertainty Principle”. Sure, it sounds screwy, but even Einstein says the guy’s on to something.

Ed Crane: And then it was Riedenschneider’s turn. I gotta hand it to him, he tossed a lot of sand in their eyes. He talked about how I’d lost my place in the universe; how I was too ordinary to be the criminal mastermind the D.A. made me out to be; how there was some greater scheme at work that the state had yet to unravel. And he threw in some of the old “truth” stuff he hadn’t had a chance to trot out for Doris. He told them to look at me, look at me close. That the closer they looked, the less sense it would all make; that I wasn’t the kind of guy to kill a guy; that I was The Barber, for Christsake. I was just like them - an ordinary man. Guilty of living in a world that had no place for me, yeah. Guilty of wanting to be a dry cleaner, sure. But not a murderer. He said I was modern man, and if they voted to convict me, well, they’d be practically cinching the noose around their own necks. He told them to look, not at the facts, but at the meaning of the facts. Then he said the facts had no meaning. It was a pretty good speech. It even had me going…

Ed: Frank.
Frank: Huh?
Ed: This hair.
Frank: Yeah.
Ed: You ever wonder about it?
Frank: Whuddya mean?
Ed: I don’t know… How it keeps on coming. It just keeps growing.
Frank: Yeah, lucky for us, huh pal?
Ed: No, I mean it’s growing, it’s part of us. And we cut it off. And we throw it away.
Frank: Come on, Eddie, you’re gonna scare the kid.
Ed: I’m gonna take his hair and throw it out in the dirt.
Frank: What the…
Ed: I’m gonna mingle it with common house dirt.
Frank: What the hell are you talking about?
Ed: I don’t know. Skip it.[/b]

Later…

[b]Ed Crane: I thought about what an undertaker had told me once - that your hair keeps growing, for a while anyway, after you die, and then it stops. I thought, “What keeps it growing? Is it like a plant in soil? What goes out of the soil? The soul? And when does the hair realize that it’s gone?”

Ed Crane: I don’t know where I’m being taken. I don’t know what I’ll find, beyond the earth and sky. But I’m not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don’t understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don’t have words for here.

Ed Crane: Doris and I went to church once a week. Usually Tuesday night.
Priest: B-9. I-29.

Ed Crane: It’s like pulling away from the maze. While you’re in the maze, you go through willy nilly, turning where you think you have to turn; banging into the dead ends. One thing after another. But you get some distance on it, and all those twists and turns, why, they’re the shape of your life. It’s hard to explain. But seeing it whole gives you some peace.[/b]

REPULSION
Directed by Roman Polanski

Carole: I must get this crack mended.

THREE COLORS: BLUE
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

[b]Julie: Today on tv she showed the scores I took from you.
La copiste: Yes.
[pause]
After the accident when nothing was sure I made a copy. When you picked it up I knew you would destroy it. I kept the copy. I sent it to Strasburg.
Julie: Why did you do that?
La copiste: This music is so beautiful. You can’t destroy things like that.

Antoine: I’d like to meet you. It’s important.
Julie: Nothing’s important.

Julie: Now I have only one thing left to do: nothing. I don’t want any belongings, any memories. No friends, no love. Those are all traps.[/b]

The ending notwithstanding? Here we come back to dasein.

THREE COLORS: WHITE
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Karol: [to the man who wanted help committing suicide] That was a blank. The next one’s real. Are you sure?

He wasn’t.

THREE COLORS: RED
Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Valentine: I’m sorry. I ran over your dog, Rita. A German shepard.
The Judge: That’s possible. She disappeared yesterday.
Valentine: She’s in my car…alive. I don’t know what to do.
[pause]
Should I take her to a veternarian?
The Judge: As you wish.
Valentine: If I ran over your daughter would you be so indifferent?
The Judge: I have no daughter , miss. Go away.

Later…

The Judge: Why did you pick up Rita?
Valentine: Because I had run over her. She was bleeding.
The Judge: Otherwise, you’d have felt guilty. You’d have dreams of a dog with a crushed skull.
Valentine: Yes.
The Judge: So who did you do it for?

This cynicism dissolves later in the script. But is it any more or less reasonable?
[b]…

Valentine: Michel, tell me…do you love me?
Michel: I think so.
Valentine: You love me or you think so?
Michel: It’s the same thing.

The Judge: I want nothing.
Valentine: Then stop breathing.
The Judge: Good idea.

The Judge: Deciding what is true and what isn’t now seems to me…a lack of modesty.
Valentine: Vanity?
The Judge: Vanity.

Valentine: You’re not afraid?
The Judge: I wonder what I’d do in their place. The same thing.
Valentine: You’d throw stones?
The Judge: In their place? Of course. And that goes for everyone I judged. Given their lives, I would steal, I’d kill, I’d lie. Of course I would. All that because I wasn’t in their shoes, but mine.[/b]

THE IDES OF MARCH
Directed by George Clooney

[b]Stephen Meyers: I can’t find the goddamn polls!

Stephen: Because you wanna win. Because you broke the only rule in politics. You wanna be president? You can start a war, you can lie, you can cheat, you can bankrupt the country, but you can’t fuck the interns. They get you for that.

Paul: Well, one day we’ll grab a beer and you can tell me what you had on the governor that put me out.
Stephen: How do you know I didn’t have something on you?[/b]

Here’s the thing though: Clooney exposes [going all the way back to Mr Smith Goes to Washington] Hollywood’s rendition of the jaded, cynical opportunists in American politics. Then he hosts a dinner for Barack “change we can all believe in” Obama who, in his own way, is smack dab in the middle of all this!

Is Clooney the starfucker here?

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
Directed by David Fincher

[b]Mikael: Rape, torture, fire, animals, religion. Am I missing anything?
Lisbeth: The names. They’re all biblical

Henrik: You will be investigating thieves, misers, bullies. The most detestable collection of people that you will ever meet - my family.

Martin: The fear of offending is stronger than the fear of pain.

Bjurman: Would you prefer institutionalization?

Lisbeth: [to Bjurman] I just want to know, am I going to have to do this every time I need money to eat?

Bjurman: I forgot to ask you…[rips open condom package]…you like anal sex?[/b]

But then, on her next visit:

Lisbeth: [to Bjurman] Good. You’re alive. You recognize this? I had it with me last time. I set it here, remember? And this snap, you see it? It’s not a snap. It’s a wide angle fiber-optics lens.
[plays video of Bjurman raping her]
: I thought it was going to be another blow job, which is disgusting enough. But I misjudged just how sick you are. Okay, here’s what is going to happen.
[inserts anal plug into Bjurman]
Pay attention. Look at me!
[tasers Bjurman]
Once you can sit again, which could be a while, I admit, we’re going to go to my bank and tell them that I alone have access to my money. Nod.
Bjurman: [nods yes]
Lisbeth: After that you will never contact me again. Each month you will prepare a report of a meeting that we will never have. In it you’ll describe how well I’m doing. How sociable I’m becoming. Then you will negotiate with the court to have my declaration of incompetence lifted. If you fail, this video will spread across the internet like a virus. Nod.
Bjurman: [nods yes]
Lisbeth: And if anything should happen to me. If I get run over by a car. If you run me over with a car. This will upload automatically. Nod that you understand.
Bjurman: [nods yes]
Lisbeth: [picks up Bjurman’s pants] Ooh, Gabardine. I’m taking the keys to this apartment because I’ll be checking on you. And if I find a girl in here with you, whether she came of her own free will or not.
[Bjurman nods to the video]
Lisbeth: No, not the video. I’ll kill you. Do you doubt anything I’ve said? Do you doubt what’s in the reports that have followed me around all my life? What do they say, if you had to sum it up? They say I’m insane.
[Bjurman desperately nods no]
Lisbeth: No, it’s okay. You can nod because it’s true. I am insane.

No, not really. She just lives her life…outside the lines?

The situation she was in with her “guardian” was insane. When the conditions of your life are so whacked, “insane” measures make sense and help you survive. It wasn’t likely any “proper” authority would have believed Lisbeth about the abuse, considering her history and reputation. She had to deal with the matter herself, by the means available to her, in a way that would end the abuse with near certainty.

“Insane”, yes. But she seemed to embody Nietzsche’s notion that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The end of the movie reminded me of Andy Dufresne going from bank to bank in The Shawshank Redemption.

I’ve always wondered, what exactly did Nietzsche mean by that statement? Of course it’s not true in an unconditional sense, for being wounded such that a limb has to be amputated certainly does not leave you stronger or open up any potential to be stronger that wasn’t possible before. However, there are contexts in which N’s statement rings brilliantly profound such as the case with being exposed bacteria and allergens early on in life leading to the development of a stronger, more resistant immune system for life. But what the hell did Nietzsche have in mind? If it was simply the sentiment that hardship can strengthen skills and resolve, well that’s fairly common wisdom.