gran torino, part three

part one
part two

Towards the beginning of Gran Torino, a dorky young Hmong boy is ambling along the sidewalk, reading a book. He is hassled from a car by a Hispanic gang, whom he totally ignores. A Hmong gang rides up, and drives off the Hispanic gang (a .38 just won't cut it when the other guys have Uzis). They then demand that Thao get in the car; he owes them, and the leader is his cousin, etc. This time, when they call his name, he pauses, dithers for a moment, before moving on. The gang continues to hassle him, trying to induct him (they show up at his house, etc.)

Christine Korsgaard writes, "If I call out your name, I make you stop in your tracks... Now you cannot proceed as you did before. Oh, you can proceed, all right, but not just as you did before. For now, if you walk on, you will be ignoring me and slighting me." And then later: "For [the act of calling out your name, more or less] to fail in that way, I would have to hear your words as mere noise, not as intelligible speech."*

The exchange in Gran Torino makes Korsgaard's point very effectively, though it does have its complications. In a way, I want to say that Thao does hear the Hispanic gang's taunts as mere noise, and the Hmong gang's words as intelligible speech (at the very least, there's a qualitative difference for him between the two). It's easy enough to give no weight to the Hispanic words, but because he has a certain connection with the Hmong (i.e. his is a Hmong), it is much harder in that case. (Korsgaard would say that mere humanity is sufficient connection, but history sometimes makes me doubt this).

This may be the reason that wear headphones that make it impossible for me to hear what's going on around me. The odd thing is that they're just as effective at enabling me to ignore people when they're off as when they're on. What this seems to indicate is that part of the pressure comes from the knowledge that the other party knows that I've heard and understood them (intent can come through even across a language barrier): there's an element of mutuality that makes the whole thing work.

What all this indicates (this is another thing you can see throughout Gran Torino) is that even in nearly purely adversarial mattters, it can be hard (though not necessarily hard, not universally hard), it can be hard to get away from treating other humans as humans. The Hmong gang takes the actions it does because it feels it has a claim on Thao; in a way, this enables them to show up at his house and try to take him in. (And the other characters acknowledge the claim, as it were: if it were a different gang, one with no claim, they'd call the police). (Perhaps this accounts for why it's so hard to deal at all with, why it's so hard to react to, people who don't default to treating humans as humans).

* Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, pp141, 143. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.