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.

the kingdom of night

I once heard Nazi Germany referred to as “the kingdom of night.” This called to mind the image of a nation where it is dark all the time, even during the brightest noon. Where behind, alongside every sunny day there is the darkest night, all the time, because of what was happening, what was being done. (Once, a German man saw his young son walking along a road, smoking a cigarette and carrying a rifle, and it was then that he knew that he needed to take his family and leave Germany).

As a law student exclaims to his professor (who clearly lived during this time) in The Reader, “And once you knew, why didn't you all kill yourselves?” Why didn't the people see the darkness behind all their sunny days?

And then I thought: it is dark even in daytime here, now. As Mary Wollstonecraft once asked, "Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? – Hell stalks abroad."

the reader, part two

(see citation and summary here)

Another issue that this movie caused me to wonder about is: why do we prosecute crimes against humanity? And why do we do it in the way that we do?

That is, in The Reader, several death camp guards are put on trial for their crimes (against humanity). And, weirdly, the trial is conducted very much like a normal trial. They want to prove, using the normal legal burdens of proof, who was where when, who knew what, who had intent to commit this specific act, etc. (In this case, the act was leaving three hundred prisoners to be burned to death in a locked church). Eventually, one of them is convicted of three hundred counts of murder, and sentenced to life in prison (she is paroled for good behavior after twenty years). The others are convicted of three hundred counts of aiding and abetting murder, and sentenced to four years or so.

The strangeness of it all is that it seems as if the law is being forced to apply to a case, a context, a world, in which it really doesn't. What was done here was as much like murder in the normal case as as a banana (well maybe more similar than that). They were all part of a system of systematic murder (indeed much of the nation was part of such a system). It's a good deal different than the normal case, which typically involves individuals acting on their own initiative (except for maybe mob killings), for personal reasons. And moreover, what they did wasn't illegal at the time – indeed it was sanctioned by the government. This was a different sort of crime (that is why we invented the term “crime against humanity,” the idea of a crime so foul that its wrongness is written in all of our hearts – though the point is, unfortunately, that it isn't), and it is odd that we apply the “peacetime” system to it.

So, on to “why.” I once heard that there are four reasons for administering legal punishments. One: deterrence. Two: rehabilitation. Three: redress (the convicted benefited in some way from breaking the rules, and we must remove that benefit). Four: retribution. Of these four, only retribution has any real chance of making sense. But even it doesn't. No one human being can ever be made to suffer to compensate for the death of three hundred. We just aren't put together that way (it's not as if pain is measured like the volume of a liquid, and all we have to do is pour enough into this one vessel to make the scales even). Indeed, it just exposes the ridiculousness of the idea – to think that any punishment could ever be commensured with what was done.

So I'll propose a fifth reason that might explain (or justify) what is going on: to uphold the rule of law. The rule of law is the notion that nobody and nothing is above the law itself, something not identified with the whim or will of any one person, or even group of persons. It applies to us all without exception – or it does not apply at all. For this reason, we must try these individuals, and try them according to the law as we have it.

But one young law student exlaims: who knew? EVERYBODY KNEW. Everybody knew what was going on at Auschwitz. Everybody who did nothing is guilty, some more so than others. If we were to really apply the law, we'd have to hang an entire nation. And we can't do that. So even the rule of law has pragmatic exceptions in exceptional circumstances, it appears - if that is even what is going on here.

(cynical sixth reason: PR).

the reader, part one

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976051/
The Reader
directed by Stephen Daldry
2008

The basic plot is this: a fifteen year-old boy has a sex-filled affair with an older woman in Germany during one summer in the 1950's. He reads to her a lot. Years later, while a law student, he observes a trial of several Nazi death camp guards. She is one of them. She is sentenced to life in prison, because rather than point out that the other guards are also responsible, she keeps quiet about her illiteracy (hence all the reading to her). This whole affair haunts him for the rest of his life.

My first question is: what would we think of this movie if we switched the genders? What if it were a fifteen year old girl who fell madly in love with (and had tons of sex with) an older man who was a death camp guard? Now, there isn't really an answer to this question, because we don't have that story and its specifics in hand; we only have the idea of such a story. But there are some points to be made about possible responses.

First of all, the fact that the affair is (in fact) filled with rape might be more on our minds. And if she were as eager for it all as our young lad is, we'd be a little leery of her mental health – maybe she's “under his sway;” maybe she's sex-crazy. Who knows, really.

We'd also look at the guard differently, I expect. There's an image in our minds of the German concentration camp guard. In the popular mind, he's a strong, cruel individual (and he always speaks in harsh German). With her, there's none of that aura of terribleness to her.

Something related to the two above points is that we would expect the power dynamics of the relationship to be very different. In one scene, they argue; she tells him to leave and that she's going to take a bath. She turns the water on; he pushes past her and turns it off. Even though she's much older, he has a certain authority and power over her, in virtue of the fact that he's taller and stronger. Some of this also comes from their personalities: consider the long bike trip they take, where he is clearly leading them (and she is content to be led).

Anyways, the point is that I do not think this is a movie where it would be easy to switch the genders around.

* crazy footnote: Israeli Holocaust Pornography

The movies, gender, the holocaust