Monster of God: Life of Pi

Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Or rather, sometimes life’s getting stuck on a small lifeboat with a man-eating tiger in the middle of the goddamned Pacific, starving and feeling utterly alone, and then you live, though you might as well be dead given all you’ve endured. “And so it is with God,” says Pi Patel (played by Irrfan Khan as the adult narrator, and Suraj Sharma as a young man), chief character of the modern fairy tale Life of Pi, based on Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel and directed by the versatile Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Ride With the Devil, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Hulk, Brokeback Mountain, Lust Caution, Taking Woodstock). And so it is with this film, which we’re told, early on, will make us believe in God. We’re told this, and because the film doesn’t live up such a lofty goal, we may forget that the narrator doesn’t promise such consolation. I think that’s the point here, and there’s a chilly ambivalence beneath the blanket of warmth with which Lee has decorated things, from the friendly storybook credit sequence of animals peaceably existing in a zoo, to the family smiles that wrap things up. This CGI-laden 3-D spectacle is a little deceiving with its children’s story book cover, and I think it’s really an effective meditation on loneliness and despair, and the stories we tell ourselves to cope, like a benevolent guide engineering and overseeing the Universe. Whether it’s God, an animal, or your own sense of permanence, it’s drawn up from the same binary code of our imagination. Does Richard Parker, the tiger with a human’s name (through a clerical error), have a “soul”? Or is that what we project onto him? Are we watching Life of Pi from a basic Western view of binaries (God/no God) instead of the Eastern one that gave birth to Pi, a Hindu culture of millions and millions of gods?  I’m not sure if belief or non-belief is the central issue of this beautiful and horrifying moving tapestry.

READ THE FULL PIECE ON LIFE OF PI HERE AT L'ETOILE MAGAZINE. 

Poets of Faith IV: Kierkegaard and Scorsese - The End of Morality

IV. THE END OF MORALITY

Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, The Departed

Kundun (1997), a film detailing the early life of the Dali Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader and the embodiment of the Buddha of Compassion, seems an unlikely topic for a Catholic filmmaker like Scorsese, much less for a Scorsesean analysis associated with Kierkegaard, who believes the only way to spiritual salvation lies with faith in the Christian God. It remains a Western film directed by a Catholic filmmaker and oriented toward his own spiritual concerns. Though some conspicuous Western Buddhist names appear in the credits (screenwriter Melissa Matheson, and composer Philip Glass), Kundun is utterly Scorsesean, and may fit into this thesis combining the talents of the director with Kierkegaard and the Danish philosopher's own spiritual concerns.

The quest that Lhamo, who will become the Dali Lama, undergoes in the film, mirrors Kierkegaard's own development of the individual. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard looks at the child, who is focused on "I." "The mark of maturity and the dedication of the eternal is the will to understand that this I has no significance if it does not become the you, the thou, to whom the eternal incessantly speaks and says: 'You shall, you shall, you shall.' It is youthful to want to be the only I in the world. Maturity is to understand this you as addressed to oneself, even though it were not said to a single other person. You shall; you shall love your neighbor. O, my reader, it is not to you I speak. It is to me, to whom the eternal says: ‘You shall.’” Before God, there is eternal equality among men, and this is a tricky concept to understand in our lives. To not view the Other as an "It," and to view oneself as a "You" (just as the Other truly is), is hard to wrap one's heart around in practice. Kundun begins with three-year-old Llamo waking up, the first image being his eye (a visual pun). The child exerts his will on the world around him: demanding to be told stories, sitting at the head of the table, stopping copulation/aggression between insects, and, when some visiting monks come to his parents' farm, taking their trinkets and materials and claiming, "Mine! This is mine! Mine mine mine!" After being recognized as the 14th Dali Lama, Kundun (as he is now called) continues to willfully think of himself as an embodiment of Power. As he grows older, his teachers remind him that he exhibits "too much pride" in his answers to questions. He begins to understand that he has to "squeeze this brain."

During the film’s final sequence, Kundun is able to see beyond the "I." This is dramatically enacted along with the key exterior conflict of his young life: the imposition of a mechanical system (Mao's Chinese Communist Party) onto the people of Tibet, an invasion that invalidates Kundun’s rule. The wonderment is whether or not this character, like all of us, is able to individually affirm himself in the midst of a character-quashing (and quite Hegelian system of “progress”) force of "leveling" and then give himself over to the Eternal.

Kundun is not a patronizing motion picture. This theocracy is plagued by the same spiritual problems found in Kierkegaard's Christendom. Kundun is surprised to learn that there are monks with guns, and that there is a prison in the palace. The monks surrounding him are aligned with political factions, warring with each other in power struggles. The monk that discovered him, the regent Reting, apparently is taken up with the pleasures of his money and women. Kundun wants to reform his country, make changes to certain hypocrisies, and even do away with some religious formalities that can only distract other beings from their own spiritual development.

The world in this film is becoming increasingly technological and dehumanized. The end of the world is forecasted as Kundun watches films of nuclear destruction. The earth is tribally disconnected by the iron curtain, and Tibet finds itself at the mercy of Mao's China, offering a new kind of reform based on technological efficiency and the eradication of reactionary ideas, including religion. The Tibetan rituals and meditative silences are broken by broadcasted Chinese patriotic music and militaristic marches. Yet Kundun's own self is enabled to grow during this period. Encountered by proposals offered by a general, Kundun recounts, "I thought he would be some kind of monster. Even with horns growing out of his head. But he's a man – just an ordinary human being. Like myself." The Chinese, increasingly hostile to the Dali Lama's Tibet, are never yet identified by Kundun as an Other, unlike other monks, one of whom mentions, "They're worse than ghosts!"

The advanced communist system of reform and efficiency, however, signals a loss of morality and character in the world. The Chinese torture Kundun's brother, releasing him because they believe that he would assassinate Kundun for them. "They believe that?" Kundun asks, nonplussed. Lineage and meaningful relationships, to say nothing of love, are eradicated in a highly intellectualized world of reform. Meaning is completely an exteriorized element in the communist system. Mao tells Kundun, "Religion is poison," very condescendingly. During this scene, Kundun bows his head, crestfallen, as everything he represents and has been struggling for is eradicated by an age of progress. We see his point of view directed towards Mao's shiny shoes, the only object his tortured mind can focus upon.

Things get progressively worse as thousands of monks die and are tortured through humiliating techniques. "Nuns and monks are made to fornicate in the streets. Soldiers give guns to children and force them to shoot the parents." Nonetheless, Kundun realizes he must resist politics. One of his closest friends advises, "Don't let them tangle you in politics. Remember – you're a monk." The world of religion is separate from the world of men. And Kundun realizes that compromise is out of the question. This means that he cannot work with the Chinese on their mechanistic political level, nor adversely on their militaristic level. He will not order any violent retaliation.

General Tan complains to Kundun about the Tibetan palace, "This place is a tribute to the past!" Adding, "We are trying to liberate you! You need reform!" Kundun stops him. "No – Buddha is our physician, he will heal us. Wisdom and compassion will set us free. You cannot liberate me, General Tan. I can only liberate myself." The system is completely inadequate for the reforms that are truly needed to give life meaning (such as may be provided by the rituals of religion). In China, Kundun is anachronistically dressed in his regal clothes while everyone else is a clone in light blue uniforms. He is surrounded by steel and hyperreal environments, and has to endure lectures dealing with "isms" and "ities." The world of the spirit is lost to the will of the system. This particular section of the film recalls the "unending abstraction" at odds with "the reality of religion" described by Kierkegaard in The Present Age where he writes, "The generation has rid itself of the individual and of everything organic and concrete, and put in its place 'humanity' and the numerical equality of man and man."

Regardless of Tibet's fall to China, Kundun grows fully into himself, and is able to let himself go to the eternal. His flight to India in 1959 is a fascinating sequence of cross-cutting between the action narrative (trekking along mountains and evading the Chinese) and the Buddhist ritual of a sand-painting mandala, a symbol for the self. His voiceover notes, "My foes will become nothing. My friends will become nothing. I, too, will become nothing. Likewise, all will become nothing. Just like a dream experience, whatever things I enjoy will become a memory. Whatever is past, will not be seen again." Part of the sand ritual entails that the mandala be destroyed – which seems absurd given the scrupulous detail given to its construction. It is dashed away and collected into an urn, then poured into the river.

Just before reaching India, Kundun awakes. The angle on his face is the same one we saw of him sleeping as a little boy when the film began. When he opens his eyes he sees his parents' feet. He has returned to himself. He turns around and sees himself as a boy sleeping. He has fulfilled Kierkegaard's idea of development and maturity – fully developed, but able to perceive himself not so much as an "I" but as a "you." Upon entering India’s border post, he is asked who he is. "What you see before you is a man, a simple monk." "Are you the lord Buddha?" the border officer asks. "I think I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you see yourself." There is a kind of resignation here, visually symbolized by the sand painting ritual, where something beautifully crafted is ritually made nothing. "The exister must practice resignation," John Mullen writes on the stages of becoming a religious person. "He must admit his own complete dependence upon, and nothingness in the face of, the Eternal." Kundun has annihilated that which hindered him as a child (or which hinders all of us) from reaching the eternal – himself. Kierkegaard writes in Concluding Unscientific Postscript that it is the individual himself that is the hindrance in finding God.

We cannot say that Kierkegaard would approve fully of Kundun, given its eastern religious context. Scorsese's own position on the narrative is ambiguous: the spirituality and transformations within the picture are wholly subjective, different from the world of The Last Temptation of Christ, wherein Jesus is the messiah. Here we cannot say objectively that the Dali Lama is the reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion. Even he has his doubts, asking, "Do you think Reting found the right boy?" But Kundun squarely addresses themes of spirituality and individual development, conflicted by systematic mechanizations and social mores. The world is disintegrating gradually in its man-made architecture of progress, becoming flat, but there is the rare individual existing above this "gradual" temporality.

One of Scorsese's most overlooked films would be his next one, Bringing Out the Dead (1999), his final collaboration with Paul Schrader, once again exploring the mean streets of Hell's Kitchen as seen through the eyes of a paramedic going through an existential crisis, Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage). He hasn't been able to save anyone in months, caught in a slump with the neighborhood's victims – by drugs, guns, stabbings, suicides, or natural causes – dying on him. One of these victims, a homeless asthmatic teenager named Rose, haunts him the most as he incessantly sees her face projected onto countless figures haunting the New York streets.

Being pulpy material, Bringing Out the Dead would not stress itself as an overtly religious film, but from the beginning its aims are nothing if not religiously oriented. The opening titles begin with the Touchstone Pictures logo accompanied by the same Tibetan drums featured in Kundun, indicating something of a link between the two films. Both pictures subsequently take place in worlds that are becoming increasingly soulless and focus on protagonists who must wrestle with their pride and fulfill a sense of compassion.

Frank's world is saturated in religion. Catholicism is everywhere. His preferred hospital is Our Lady of Mercy (dubbed Misery), while crosses and almost eschatological warnings permeate the crass and amoral atmosphere of the streets, which are covered in the smoky hazes and hot-lights that Scorsese previously featured in the inferno of Casino (Bringing Out the Dead was also shot by Robert Richardson). Frank also has something of a God-complex, admitting that saving someone's life is akin to "God being You," the best drug in the world, a sense of amazing power where everything is "bathed in blinding light." Frank has also been told, apparently, that it is easy for people to open up to him because he "has a priest's face."

However, his sense of compassion is at odds with the parameters of his job. Our Lady of Mercy is a technological gadget-sphere dedicated to keeping patients alive who may be better off not alive. In this electrosphere of life-support "systems," human beings are vegetative cyborgs reliant on drugs and technologies to keep them stable and breathing. When a new “plant food” cardiac arrest patient is rushed in, the doctor shakes his head, "All this technology. What a waste!"

Frank realizes that he is a component in this machine, and that his job has less to do with saving lives than bearing witness. He is simply a "body" (his boss, in a humorous scene, promises Frank that he'll fire him "tomorrow," but tonight he "needs bodies out there!"). Unlike his coworkers, he is unable to disassociate himself from the existential problems of his role as a professional paramedic. Larry (John Goodman), has food and the promises of advancement in his career. Marcus (Ving Rhames) exudes ecclesiastical (though not inward-directed) Christianity. Tom (Tom Sizemore) relies on his cathartic aggression.

The outside world is haunted by "ghosts" and omens of religion. A character identified as Sister Fetus rants on a microphone, warning of God's impending judgment: "Put down that crack stem and drop your jug of sin! Your high-heeled skirts and your stock dividends – your patent-leather underwear, televised suicides, lap dances in leotards in delicatessans! And the Lord said, 'If you can find one that isn't a sinner – just one – then I will spare the city!" Sister Fetus is akin to Andre Gregory's characterization of John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ, a voice in the wilderness "knocking on the door" of an absent minded den of vice. Frank leers at her from his window, taking introspective notice.

This links the air of Bringing Out the Dead to the infernos of Casino, a kind of Old Testament biblical epic, however more intimate this portrait may be. Though God is surrounding the world, He cannot penetrate it objectively. Frank, with his visions and haunts of seeing Rose and other people he has failed to "save," cannot help but grapple with the conflict. Marcus, the religious paramedic who notes that the outside world cannot be changed (one's soul can be changed only by Jesus), nevertheless has an extroverted nature. "You ever notice people who see shit are always crazy? Scientific fact," Marcus tells Frank after Frank's confession of seeing ghosts. Later on, Marcus "saves" a drug-overdose at a goth club, a staged prayer geared on converting decadent youths (as he prays with the young people surrounding the overdose victim, Frank quietly injects life-saving chemicals into the young man's veins). The faith of Marcus comes across as a façade, not close to the hard Christianity of struggle seen in Frank or focused on by Kierkegaard.

Karen D. Hoffman writes about the similarities between The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, seeing Frank as a man who considers himself to be a secular savior in a world where transcendence is sought, but only achieved through temporal, secular means (namely, drugs). Frank's last temptation comes at a drug den called the Oasis. "Agency is lost as the mind's subjectivity gives way to the body's objectivity," writes Hoffman of the scene. Frank takes one of the drug dealer's pills, but in the heat of a hallucination he rejects it, transcending the chemical comforts of the objective world, and storming out of the Oasis to continue his indeterminate spiritual mission. Frank must not relinquish the role of savior, despite his doubts and struggles. Like Christ, he is re-assuming his role on the cross.

At the conclusion of his journey, set over the course of three days (Thursday night to Sunday morning – much like Christ's crucifixion to resurrection), Frank is told by Rose's ghost, "No one asked you to suffer. That was your idea." His suffering has brought him illumination and peace on a Sunday morning. He falls asleep in the bed of one of his patient's daughters, Mary (Patricia Arquette), and the image glows, bathed in Richardson's hot lights.

Frank's journey is that of a religious individual who "has lost the relativity of the immediate, its diversions, its pastimes…The absolute consciousness of God consumes him like a burning heat of the summer sun when it will not go down," to quote Kierkegaard. Like Jesus, God is a pain in the neck for him, and he surrenders his pride to what he believes God is calling out to him (manifested in the act of allowing one of his patients to die, even against the ethics of his profession). His reflection (which for Kierkegaard "is and remains the hardest creditor in existence”) is a necessary gate to suffering, but it makes him unique in the cesspool of Hell's Kitchen, saved by the eternal’s grace. Like Kundun, Frank has transcended the circumscriptions of both his ego and the mechanizations of an imposed system, able to love his neighbor and enact mercy.

*

"The dying of despair transforms itself constantly into a living." Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death

Speaking of The Departed, Scorsese has asked, "Could this really be the end of morality?" He was noting the present age after September 11, 2001, when it was becoming increasingly apparent that human beings are subject to surveillance and role reversals in order to adapt to a world that is becoming more globalized, with time and space compressed. Character and identity are smashed by systems of homogeny in the fulfillment of this brave new world of cyborgs: the modern age with its cold technology and cybernetic networks of governance is another step in a Hegelian "system" being imposed. John Mullen notes, "[Hegelianism] when applied in social and individual life has the effect, Kierkegaard will argue, of a mass lobotomy…It is a life chilled with compromises, where each time what is gained is a little bit of peace and what is lost is a little bit of integrity."

This is precisely what Scorsese is conveying in The Departed, wherein the departed of the title are not the mortally dead. What has departed is the Self, from the docile bodies in a vast system of signs and duties. The grittiness of crime noir is the framework of the piece, with undercover police officers and mole gangsters: human beings that must reassign their sense of lineage and identity, forsaking integrity for the fulfillment of immediate goals. Michael Ballhaus, costume designer Sandy Powell, and production designer Dante Ferretti create an atmosphere noted for its lack of conspicuousness, colors being beige, unsaturated blues, grays, and light brown. The world has been "leveled" and everyone is "just one of them." Given this space where everyone is "just one of" everyone else, the reality of sin is null and void. Where can contemplation of the Eternal reside?

Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) has some sense of a transcendent essential self, which places him at odds with his job as an undercover cop. He obsesses over photographs of his family, struggling to hold onto some firm sense of himself in a world decorated by Ikea paintings. These paintings happen to decorate the apartment of his unknown nemesis, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a criminal working covertly as a cop. Both characters exhibit despair, though in different ways. Sullivan is running away from his true self, evading reflection (and thus "the infinite") while Costigan obsessed over reflection.

Of interest is Sullivan's acquisition of immediate interests, and his way of presenting him appearance. "For the immediate man does not recognize his self, he recognizes himself only by his dress…he recognizes that he has a self only through externals," according to Kierkegaard, which explains Sullivan perfectly. Sullivan understands that his ranking on the police force is contingent on how he dresses (he criticizes a fellow cop for "dressing like you're going to invade Poland," understanding that to rise in this system you at least have to have a suit and tie). In conversation with another cop (Alec Baldwin), he is told that a wedding ring matters, being that it tells the world that a guy is tolerable, his cock works, and that he has a stable job. Sullivan surely may have a life of comfort with his advancements, but he is a stranger to himself. He is a metaphor that Scorsese is using for the average working man, and he exhibits the Kierkegaardian trait of people choosing not to see themselves: "[The self] will not humble itself in faith under its weakness in order to gain itself again; no, in its despair it will not hear of itself, so to speak, will not know anything about itself…for this self is too much a self." Sullivan projects both this high level of defiant despair and lower levels of despair in his petty bourgeois attitudes and maneuvers, but it also applies to Costigan, who is not allowed to humble himself and open up to others. And "he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all."

Both Costigan and Sullivan are tuned in with their given "social duties" of the future-perfect technocracy, which is opposite to any realized individuality. Mullen describes this idea perfectly in his notes on Kierkegaard: "Kierkegaard saw a relation between this belief in universal human progress, in the inevitability of a conflict-free existence, and the middle class penchant for finding the path with the least resistance, the middle class search for the easy life, the easy money, the easy shared ideas, the easy Christianity." On completion of his duties, Costigan does not even care about getting paid. "I just want my identity back," he says. By contrast, Sullivan in his last scene seems relieved to have the burden of his despair removed by being killed. This man that cannot reveal himself is the most unhappy man. In this world life has no depth, and what is sought is only on the "surface of the everyday."

*

Conclusion: The Subjective Cinema

A trademark in both Kierkegaard and Scorsese has to do with "subjectivity." Christianity "protests every form of objectivity; it desires that the subject should be infinitely concerned about himself,” writes Kierkegaard. “It is subjectivity that Christianity is concerned with, and it is only in subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively, Christianity has absolutely no existence." God does not exist objectively. God is only in the individual's internal subjective journey with the Eternal. Scorsese similarly puts the viewer into the head of his protagonists, applying visceral effects of color, composition, camera movement, editing, sound, and music selection to capture an experience that he wants to impose on the audience, marvelously handled most recently in Shutter Island. The dynamics of Scorsese's style aim to capture the spiritual dilemma of not only his characters, but of himself. While filming a hallucination, such as in Bringing Out the Dead, Scorsese "cannot be objective" but "must show what the characters see.”

By engaging themselves in the lives of their characters (whether Kierkegaard's ironic pseudonyms or Scorsese's protagonists), Kierkegaard and Scorsese have devoted themselves to the poetic creation of aesthetic work. Kierkegaard, at least, understands that the poet is not in the realm of the religious (after all, in Fear and Trembling we read how words are inadequate for describing Abraham and the knight of faith, so unfathomable is he). Long passages of Works of Love are dedicated to describing the poet, and how his creations are focused on a subjective, "preferential" love (different from the love of God or the holy command of, "You shall love your neighbor.") In one of his final works, the Attack Upon Christendom, Kierkegaard announces, however ironically, "I am only a poet." He is simply asking for the society around him to be honest with itself, and says that to call oneself a Christian is a headier and weightier task than any one dares to think.

Scorsese is similar, admitting that he is an inadequate Christian. Interviewed about Kundun in 1998, he admitted that filmmaking is his form of worship. "'I don't know how to say this without sounding silly, but in doing this, it's like an act of faith, or an act of worship…Well, you should have a family, you should be able to raise children. Yeah, to a certain extent – I tried that, I wasn't so great at it, and I continue to try to do it now. The whole picture 'is a religious act.' It's work equaling prayer." Both artists are conscious and despairing individuals between the worlds of the religious and the secular, gravitating one way or another, conscious of the ceaseless knocking of the eternal at their doors.

Separated by time and culture, Kierkegaard and Scorsese are unique in their similar concerns of religion and the inward process of development on the part of the subjective individual. This path they are exploring passionately and poetically is a lonely one, particularly in eras where God is present as a mere signifier in the objective world. Yet God's silence in the objective world of systems and efficiencies (such as is the focus of the novel Silence, by Japanese Catholic novelist Shasuko Endo, a film adaptation of which Scorsese dreams of making) gives rise to a passionate struggle in a being's quest for identity and true religion.

Bibliography

After Hours. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Joseph Minion. Griffin Dunne. Warner Bros, 1985.

Bringing Out the Dead. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Paul Schrader. Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman. Touchstone Pictures, Paramount Pictures, 1999.

Cape Fear. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Wesley Strick. Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange. Universal Pictures, 1991.

Casino. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Nicolas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Sharon Stone. Universal Pictures, 1995.

Christie, Ian. "Scorsese: Faith Under Pressure." Sight and Sound. November, 2006, pp. 14-17.

Collins, James. "Faith and Reflection in Kierkegaard". In The Journal of Religion.
Vol. 37, No. 1. (Jan. 1957), pp. 10-19. Http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00224189%28195701%2937%3A1%3C10%3AFARIK%3E2.0.CO%3B@-H.

Crocker, Sylvia Fleming. "Sacrifice in Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling'". The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 68, No. 2. (Apr., 1975), Http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0017-8160%28197504%2968%3A2%3C125%3ASIK%22AT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23.

The Departed. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by William Monahan. Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson. Warner Bros., 2006.

GoodFellas. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese. Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro. Warner Bros., 1990.

Hoffman, Karen D. "The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead: Scorsese's Reluctant Saviors." In The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese. Ed. Mark T. Conrad. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

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A Kierkegaard Anthology. Ed. Robert Bretall. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1946.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love. Trans. Howard and Edna Hong. New York: Harper Perennial, 1962.

Kundun. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Melissa Mathison. Touchstone Pictures, 1997.

The Last Temptation of Christ. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Paul Schrader. Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel. Universal Pictures, 1988. DVD. Criterion, 2001.

Mean Streets. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin. Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro. DVD. 1973. Warner Bros, 2004.

Mullen, John D. Kierkegaard's Philosophy: Self Deception and Cowardice in Present Age. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1995.

Raging Bull. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin.
Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci. United Artists, 1980.

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Poets of Faith III: Kierkegaard and Scorsese - The Eye in the Sky

III. The Eye in the Sky

The Debt of Sin in Cape Fear and Casino

For Kierkegaard, “Sin” separates Christianity from "pagan" religion. Sin binds the individual in a private discourse with God. Scorsese's characters, concerned with sin and its inescapability (as Jesus notes, in trying to walk away from lust, he is only giving birth to his pride) and the needed sacrifice to atone oneself with the eternal, are tormented by sin’s guilt. Many of his films focus on bourgeois worlds that cannot be thought of as being distinct from Kierkegaard's portrait of Christendom, wherein characters are surrounded by Christ, but living aesthetic lives not aligned with any sense of sin, or where sin's reality is like death's reality (the wages of sin, biblically, is death). Still many of these characters in their defiant lives of despair (whether they are ignorant philistines or defiant) can escape God – for a while. The distractions of day-to-day life usually keep this eternal reality at bay, though it is surely always present in their minds. As Jake LaMotta notes after losing a boxing match in Raging Bull, "I don't know, I've been doin' a lot of bad things lately, maybe it's comin' back to me," to which his brother Joey remarks, as if dismissing voodoo, "Forget that shit." "By unconsciousness the despairing man is in a way secured (but to his own destruction) against becoming aware – that is, he is securely in the power of despair," according to Kierkegaard. This is a human-wide condition of sickness that Scorsese portrays in the dens of Soho of After Hours, the gangster world of GoodFellas, but most interestingly in two acquired projects Scorsese did for-hire (the penance he had to pay Universal Pictures for getting The Last Temptation of Christ financed), Casino and Cape Fear.

After Hours (1985), Scorsese's Kafkaesque depiction of a man's hellish night in Soho after he pursues pleasure out of boredom, is about a character in despair, a working man (a "word processor", aligning him with being some sort of machine), Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), who is a completely self-absorbed – if kind – man. Meeting a woman (Rosanna Arquette) who likes the same books he does (particularly Henry Miller, indicating some sort of hedonistic possibility in a future relationship), Paul goes to Soho hoping to score a one-night stand. What he receives in return is punishment. With no money to pay his cabbie (it flew out the taxi window), and unable to return home via subway (the fares went up 50 cents that night – and so he is 27 cents short), he discovers the woman is emotionally unstable, rejects her, and discovers that she has killed herself. He is mistaken for two burglars (played by Cheech and Chong) running rampant through the neighborhood. Unable to do anything besides objectify other people, he is unjustly accused of cruelty, callousness, and ingratitude, and so finds himself overwhelmed with guilt. Chased by the neighborhood inhabitants like a mob chasing the Frankenstein monster, he finally kneels and lifts his arms to God: "Why? Why are you doing this to me? Do you want me to suffer?" Scorsese, in his own commentary on the film, answers, "Yes!" Paul resembles Travis Bickle in his inability to merge into any kind of community, but his lifestyle (he's not a hedonist – but he'd probably like to be one) demands a penance that he cannot be prepared to give. Living a life of "bad faith" (being polite, or being a 'word processor,' he is incessantly dishonest), we either only see Paul running from his demons in New York City, or trapped at work. Appropriately, the film ends with him falling out of Cheech and Chong's van in front of his office building, just as day is breaking.

In Cape Fear (1991), Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) is more readily identifiable than many of Scorsese's other heroes, being that he's a legitimate lawyer, married with a teenage daughter, and not a criminal. He is living a "normal life," or seemingly normal. We learn gradually that Sam is shallow, and has a tense marriage based on his wife Leigh's (Jessica Lange) depression and his past infidelities. The "God" element in the film is personified by the villain, Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a former client of Bowden who was found guilty of rape 14 years earlier. It turns out that Bowden, trying to be moral (though contrary to the ethics of the Law), buried a report on the rape victim's promiscuity, leading to Cady's incarceration.

Bowden’s success has afforded him a stability based on being sometimes dishonest to keep an even keel (an issue further discussed in The Departed). We see him playing racquetball with a firm co-worker, Lori (Ileanna Douglas), with whom he may be acting too freely. His conscience grasps this, and he suggests that they see less of each other, because he's married. "Is marriage synonymous with deception?" she asks. Leigh knows absolutely nothing about Sam's personal life outside of the home, and he admits with a wry smile, "It's best if my wife doesn't know you exist.” Scorsese quickly cuts to outside the health club with Sam walking Lori to her car, contradicting himself and suggesting they play again tomorrow. At home, it is inferred that Sam has had other affairs and is neglectful of his family, which mirrors his work life as a successful lawyer. In his work, Leigh jokingly says, "Fighting dirty is what Sam does for a living."

After leaving Lori, Sam goes to his car and is confronted by Max Cady, who says something important. "Free as a bird apparently. You go everywhere you want, with whomever. That much freedom could get a fella into trouble." Cady is an inscrutable, almost superhuman character; he is cited as reading Nietzsche often, namely Thus Spake Zarathustra, and loudly quotes the 17th century mystic Silesius, who said, "I am like God and God like me. I am as large as God! He is as small as I! He cannot above me nor I beneath Him be!" It has been suggested that Cady is Scorsese getting a personal vengeance fulfilled on the fundamentalist Christians who attacked The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, leading to the director having bodyguards for years following. Yet looking at Sam’s carefree life, and his resistance in fulfilling his duties as a good husband and father, we may see Cady as something different and ethereal, or supernatural. Cady is God's messenger reminding Sam of the reality of sin and death, a personification of the struggle that Sam is able to resist in his comfortable life. Max tells Sam that life is "struggle," and that Sam does not understand struggle. "Every man has to go through hell to reach his Paradise," he says. In prison for 14 years, Cady lost contact with his wife and children, was sodomized, and worked through struggle to transform himself. From a perverse angle, Cady is not so much in Sam's life to enact vengeance, but rather to save Sam. Though Cady is surely a villain, he is also exceptionally perceptive. In a restaurant he offhandedly mentions, "These young people – they're not very happy. They're committed to their professions and their ambitions, but not to each other." Cady is also describing Sam and his family: full of materials and empty objects, permeated with shallow vanities indicative of despair and a wide margin from the eternal. We should note Leigh, after making love with Sam and believing that her husband is asleep, goes to the mirror and vainly applies makeup, staring at her reflection.

That Cady should be so perceptive about the empty lives surrounding him while personifying a terrifying villain is one of the challenging elements in the architecture of what is otherwise probably Scorsese's most conventional film. Sam, like the people "committed to their professions and ambitions while not committed to each other," is a surrogate for the audience that will flock to the movie, adults saturated in their "freedom" and comfort, much like the Bowdens going to see the John Ritter comedy Problem Child, which Cady interrupts with his cantankerous laughter and cigar smoke. The Scorsese character Bowden perhaps most resembles is the other embarrassing surrogate, Paul Hackett in After Hours, who is also being punished for trying to live a "normal" life. When Cady tells Bowden that he doesn't know what suffering is, he is right. "Have you suffered so many things in vain?" he asks Bowden, quoting Galatians 3. Later, Cady recommends to Bowden reading the book between Esther and the Psalms (Job) – further indicating that the suffering Bowden is about to undergo is related to his salvation and spiritual development.

Cady's resemblances to God (and his God complex), his eerily omniscient ability to surveil the Bowdens, his superhuman determination, and acutely perceptive memory, call to mind Kierkegaard's thoughts on the unchangeableness of God, and how we should not take our frivolities lightly. Frivolity "comes to feel itself secure,” leading to forgetfulness and a dismissal of one thing – the eternally unchangeable witness (God). "If…your will is not in harmony with His will, consider that you will never be able to evade Him." This frivolous individual, whom for Kierkegaard may well be the bulk of Christendom, resembles Jesus in the last temptation sequence, and Bowden, both who have grown forgetful about the eternal and God. Cady, meanwhile, resembles Kierkegaard’s silent man who does not forget, with an "unchanged remembrance." Just as Cady becomes always present for Bowden, reminding him of his sins and inadequacies, Kierkegaard's God is always present in our lives, not discriminating between the significant and insignificant – always there, knocking on the door. Using the help of a private investigator, Kersek (Joe Don Baker), the Bowdens try to set a trap for Cady. "I'll be able to know if the Holy Ghost is sneaking in," Kersek notes on his techniques of securing the Bowdens’ house. He is, of course, wrong, and foiled by his pride. Cady is indeed akin to the "Holy Ghost" and does get in, killing Kersek and leaving him to bleed on the kitchen floor. The blood soon envelops Sam, a visual metaphor for the sin on his hands.

For both Sam and the audience, the climax of the film is terrible to watch, and if it is a cleansing, it is a torrential one. Cady terrorizes the family in their houseboat, tying Sam up and preparing to rape both Leigh and the daughter, Danny (Juliette Lewis). But this also feels like a ritualized act, as Sam drops out of his dutiful obligations as lawyer (an important hearing), using the excuse of force majeure, "an unforeseeable act of God" that cancels out promises and obligations. Subtextually, Bowden is more right than he knows. In the boat, as Cady notes how his grandfather handled snakes in church while his grandmother would drink strychnine, a black mass begins. Cady tells Leigh, "Ready to be born again, Mrs. Bowden? A few moments with me and you'll be speaking in tongues." Sam, in his struggle and determination, frees himself and stops Cady, but not before Cady judges him, sentencing Sam to his own personal hell, "The ninth circle!" he yells at Bowden, a gun pressed against Bowden's head. "The circle of traitors! Traitors to GOD!" Only after Sam here confesses his guilt (in throwing away the report that would have saved Cady 14 years), is he able to enact his role as Hollywood hero, handcuffing Cady's ankle to the boat as it begins to sink in the tempest of the Cape Fear River. Sam looks on from the river's edge as Cady speaks in tongues and sings religious psalms, sinking into the water.

Trembling, Bowden looks at his hands and sees the stigmata – hands covered in blood, Christ-like, proposing the question of his forgiveness. He shudders upon seeing them and washes them immediately in the water, wrought with anxiety. He opens his hands again. They're clean. That the hands should be shot from two distinct angles is also of interest. Sam, awake to his nature and despair, sees the stigmata hands with blood on them with his own eyes, the image photographed from his point of view. Washed clean, his hands are photographed from an alternate angle – whether it is the point of view of "the objective world," which doesn't see the frivolities of the aesthete's sinful nature, or God, the ultimate Other Who has forgiven Sam, is open to interpretation. What is certain is that this man has changed and is now aware of his most insignificant actions.

Casino (1995) does not overtly address religious issues at all. It captures the den of vice and sin that Scorsese vividly captured in GoodFellas five years previous, which also led to a certain ambivalence concerning the reaction of its audience. That confusion on the part of the audience pertained to the fact they were expecting GoodFellas all over again, and when they were disappointed, they paradoxically blamed the film for simply being GoodFellas once more. However, as contextually similar as the films are, their differences are legion and primarily has to do with the filmic language with which they unspool. The later film is imbued with a religious subtext.

GoodFellas was shot by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who would apply similar color patterns of grey, beige, and unsaturated blues to another film of moral confusion, The Departed. Those films carry the sense of God’s absence. Casino, on the other hand, is supremely religious in its presentation, almost Baroque, as indicated by the use of Bach's "St. Matthew's Passion" over the opening credits as Sam "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro) burns in Hell. Scorsese is here collaborating with cinematographer Robert Richardson, noted for his use of hot key-lighting from above, showering shafts of light as if from heaven, raining down on the characters below (this integration of the real and the cosmic is featured in Richardson and Scorsese's two subsequent collaborations, Bringing Out the Dead and The Aviator). The use of these hot lights contrasting with black spaces in the wide canvas of the screen (Casino was shot with 2.35:1 ratio, whereas GoodFellas was presented in 1.85:1), make for a far more surreal affair, overtly ecclesiastical in its expressionism.

What Casino is addressing through its subtext is Sin, or a notion of the absence of Sin that nevertheless is in hot pursuit of its purveyors. In his opening voiceover, Ace tells us that he was given “Paradise on Earth,” the Tangiers Hotel and Casino, to run as he saw fit. Las Vegas, this Sodom and Gomorrah that Scorsese is painting (the Bach music at the beginning, along with the stretches of desert, indicates that this is a biblical epic of sorts), is described as "a morality car-wash," as the city literally "washes away your sins." Things that are vice elsewhere – gambling, prostitution, etc – are given a pass to Ace and his Chicago/Kansas City gangster friends. This is a new creation – a counter religion. The Big Bang that creates the film (Ace's car blowing up – sending him hurtling through Hell) gives birth to this "Paradise on Earth" of neon lights. In his commentary on the film, Gavin Smith of Film Comment notes, "It's materialism that's this tribe's religion, and money, the root of all evil, its God." For Kierkegaard, money is "the world's god," as he notes in Works of Love, in his search for earnestness. The Casino is the holy place, the count-room being identified, much like the Jewish tabernacle, as the "Holy of Holies." Smith notes, "To index his characters' proximity to imminent damnation, Scorsese plays off cinematographer Robert Richardson's signature burned-out highlights and hotspots against the garish neon of Vegas and, in certain scenes, purifying shafts of white light and spectral luminosity." Smith points to a scene where Ace's friend Nicky (Joe Pesci) brutally beats a man that has insulted Ace. The lights become horizontal, and the cigarette smoke in the foreground gives the atmosphere of hellfire, the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" on the soundtrack linking this world to the "insatiable search for gratification," linked to "disproportionate violence."

Ace has assumed the proud role of "God," obsessed with surveillance and watching everyone like an android control freak. But no character, not even Ace (as we learn), is able to be above the world of men and be free of surveillance and judgment. In the fascinating documentary-like exposition, wherein the mechanics of Vegas are laid out in voiceover by Ace, we see this system. Presented in a stunning sequence of swish-pans, dealers watch players, box-men watch dealers, pit bosses watch the box-men, floor-bosses watch the pit-bosses, the casino manager (Don Rickles, a cheeky and effective casting selection) watches the pit-posses, Ace watches the casino manager, and the "Eye in the Sky" (camera swishes up to a black ball on the ceiling) is "watching us all."



The FBI is also watching, as are political and civic leaders, in addition to the bosses "back home," who are introduced to the film as hotly lit men at a table, the composition resembling Leonardo's Last Supper. No matter how these characters may try to escape their transgressions against one of these entities, they are found, and sins are atoned, usually in blood. This is an entire world of aesthetes looking for escape from boredom in an excess of stimulation that Scorsese ecstatically presents. Utilizing every cinematic trick up his sleeve, Scorsese over-stimulates us to the point of numbness. Serving this simmering dish of stimulation to appease our own search for "satisfaction," we become as exhausted and wasted as Ace's junkie wife, Ginger (Sharon Stone). The characters in the film, held captive in their despair, do not grow beyond two dimensions, though the objects they surround themselves with grow increasingly loud. During the film's second and final act, when incidents double for events in the first act, the excess of the early 1980s is parodied as the Stones' "Satisfaction" becomes DEVO's whacked-out New Wave synthesized cover. At the conclusion, Ace is still alive, but he is a hollow shell, unchanged, back where he started. The world of this constant stimulation is a world of despair and emptiness.

Casino is a picture of lost souls held apart from God and the religious, stuck in a void of spiritless materialism and countless objects. People are fleeing their existential debts, their guilt. "[The] decisive mark of the religious person," according to John Mullen, "is a sense of total guilt," which for Kierkegaard meant "debt." There is a debt owed to the eternal – the meaning of life aligned with a relation to God. "To be a sinner," Mullen continues, "is to choose to sever one's bond to the Eternal. It is to intentionally turn away from the proper absolute concern of one life. It is thus to alter radically – meaning at the root, fundamentally – the nature of one's self." The men and women in Casino bathe in their sin, simultaneously assuming they have some kind of control over their fates. Having a clear concept of sin, according to Mullen, is to understand the "difference between man and the Eternal." Ace, for instance, is marked by his defiant pride and belief in his ability to control other people, much like his Scorsesean successor, Howard Hughes in The Aviator, which proves to be a fatal flaw. In this "morality car-wash," sins are ignored expediently. Thus, no character can recognize that they are sinners, and are hence closed off from salvation (unlike Charlie in Mean Streets, Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ, Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, or Andrew Laeddis in Shutter Island). Ginger is a metaphor for the rampant materialism at play in the picture, devoted to stimulation and satisfaction, but far from faith, commitment, love, and the eternal. Her death mirrors the imagery at the beginning of Casino, the carpet beneath her drug addled corpse resembling the flames of hell. The characters in Casino are pleasure-oriented automatons. To quote Kierkegaard, "By unconsciousness the despairing man is in a way secured (but to his own destruction) against becoming aware – that is, he is securely in the power of despair."

Character is impossible to fully develop in Scorsese's despair-ridden worlds. The next, and final, batch of films to be examined focus on the Godless world and its mechanizations, and how there are a few lonely, solitary, sacrificial characters attempting to hold onto themselves, and occasionally giving themselves over to the eternal in their own spiritual journeys.