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Ethics Goes to the Movies
Key Features
Christopher Falzon
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Christopher Falzon to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-93819-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-93820-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67580-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Filmography 273
Glossary 277
Bibliography 288
Index 300
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my colleagues William Herfel, Joe Mintoff, Michael Newton,
Timothy O’Leary, Sarah Rice and Tim Stanley who were kind enough to read
through various chapters and to give me the benefit of their special expertise; Tim
Madigan and an anonymous reviewer for their tremendously helpful comments
on the text as a whole; Penny Craswell for casting her expert eye over the text and
saving it from all sorts of inelegancies; and Andy Beck, my editor at Routledge,
for his ongoing support and patience. This book is dedicated to Penny Craswell,
who has also been very patient.
Introduction
Rear Window Ethics
‘We’ve become a race of peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside
their own house and look in for a change. Yes, sir. How’s that for a bit of home-
spun philosophy?’ So says visiting insurance nurse Stella about the activities of
her charge, L.B. ‘Jeff’ Jefferies, in Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window. Wheelchair-
bound with a broken leg, cooped up with nothing to do, he has taken to passing the
time by staring out of the rear window of his apartment, watching the neighbours
in his block go about their lives. As is well-known, Rear Window unfolds as a
murder mystery as Jeff tries to work out if the bedridden woman across the way
has been murdered by her husband. But the film also includes some reflection on
what Jeff himself is doing in the film. Stella is sure that there’s something prob-
lematic about Jeff’s obsessive neighbour-watching. She thinks that those who
indulge in such activity really ought to stop and think about what they are doing.
Even Jeff comes to wonder about his activity, at least for a moment. As he says
later to his girlfriend Lisa, who has her own concerns, ‘I wonder if it’s ethical to
watch a man with binoculars, and a long-focus lens … Do you suppose it’s ethical
even if you prove he didn’t commit a crime? As Lisa says, it’s a question of ‘rear
window ethics’.
So, ethical reflection is coming into this film at a number of levels. Stella
and Lisa wonder about the ethics of Jeff’s behaviour, as does he. In addition, the
viewer may have their own thoughts about Jeff’s activity. Is all this surveillance
justified in the interests of solving a crime or is that simply an excuse to look? Is
Jeff a detective or a pervert, or perhaps a bit of both? And these are interesting
questions for the viewer to consider since Rear Window can readily be seen as
offering a metaphor for cinema and movie-watching. The scenes in the apartment
windows are like silent movies. Jeff himself is very much like a moviegoer, the
immobilised watcher who watches, unseen, in the dark. For their part, the mov-
iegoer is able to secretly go places and watch things that they would not ordinarily
be able to in real life. In considering the ethics of Jeff’s activities, the viewer is
also in a position to think about the ethics of their own movie-watching activity.
Is watching movies a form of voyeurism? Can it amount to the violation or exploi-
tation of those being watched? These concerns and questions notwithstanding,
2 Introduction
everyone involved in Rear Window is completely absorbed in the activity they
are raising questions about. Whatever his misgivings, Jeff can’t tear himself away
from the window; and despite their initial concerns, Stella and Lisa are quickly
drawn into Jeff’s surveillance activities. And so, of course, are the film’s view-
ers. As Pauline Kael pointed out many years ago, it is precisely ‘the opening into
other, forbidden or surprising kinds of experience’ that draws viewers to the mov-
ies in the first place (Kael 1970, 105).
If what the film is showing us provokes ethical questions and concerns in char-
acters and viewers alike, the viewer is also, uniquely, in a position to use the film
to explore these ethical views and concerns, to interrogate them in the light of
the film experience. This book is a more extended and systematic version of that
exercise. It is an introduction to ethical thinking, in particular the kind of system-
atic ethical thinking that has been undertaken for centuries by philosophers. And
it makes use of some recent and not-so-recent films to illustrate and explore some
of the key theories, arguments and problems that have emerged in the history of
ethics. I should say that using film for the purpose of exploring various aspects
of philosophy is not an especially novel thing to do. Films, along with television,
have enjoyed a good deal of popularity in recent years as an avenue for talking
about philosophical positions and issues. There are many books that have gone
down this avenue, including a number of excellent introductions to ethics. What
this book does that might be new is to take this approach in relation to an entire
history of ethical thinking.
Considering ethical thinking historically means that there is a progression
of ideas to consider, and a natural logic to the ordering of the ideas, since later
accounts respond to, contend with or distance themselves from earlier ones. But
we are not simply visiting a dusty museum of superseded thoughts. The history
of ethical thinking is also a history of the present, insofar as these ideas continue
to speak to and inform contemporary ways of thinking. And films are a useful
medium to employ in exploring the contemporary relevance of these ideas because
films are inevitably contemporary in their content and references. This is not to
forget all the changes in context, outlook and style that have occurred over the last
hundred years or so of film history. For all that, film remains a modern art. Even
history films have to speak to and resonate with modern audiences, which is why
they can so readily introduce anachronistic elements into their portrayals of his-
torical figures and events. A film like Agora, for example, might be seen as reading
the early modern confrontation between science and dogmatic religion back into
the confrontation between classical antiquity and a rising Christianity. Even in this,
the film is providing a measure of how certain ideas and viewpoints have become a
part of contemporary ways of thinking. And in using films to talk about views that
have emerged in the history of ethical thinking, one has a measure not only of how
far these historical views continue to speak to contemporary experience, but also
how these views have entered into and become part of that experience.
This is not to reduce the films being discussed here to no more than means for
talking about ethics. First, any use of films to talk about ethics is at the same time
a way of talking about the films. Seeing a character or their actions as providing
Introduction 3
an illustration or instantiation of some ethical view or concept is already a way of
thinking about what is going on in the film. Moreover, ethical views or ideas may
be invoked or alluded to in the film by the characters themselves in talking about
other characters or themselves. This makes talking about these views very much
a matter of talking about the film. Beyond this, the film is going to be more than
just a means for discussing ethics simply because talking about a film in terms of
its philosophical or ethical relevance can never really exhaust what is going on in
the film. A film is not an ethical treatise, a philosophical work. It has a life of its
own and there will always be more going on in it than the illustration or instantia-
tion of ethical views. There will be the story to get on with, and lives to portray,
and non-philosophical concerns, artistic, dramatic or comic concerns are going to
come into play in terms of what is being presented.
By the same token, that a film has a life of its own, and will be governed
significantly by non-philosophical concerns, is not incompatible with a film hav-
ing philosophical or ethical content. It would be odd to argue that films, simply
by virtue of having non-philosophical concerns, are unable to engage with such
content. Indeed, this can be expressed more positively: that a film is irreducible to
any philosophical or ethical ideas it might illustrate or instantiate arguably means
that there is room in film for a critical engagement with these ideas. Certainly, a
film may be set up to do little more than promote a certain viewpoint or way of
thinking. There are plenty of didactic, moralistic and propagandistic films of this
sort. But films can also reflect on and challenge the perspectives and positions
they portray in various ways, through playfulness, irony, even downright subver-
sion (see Stam 2000, 139; Wilson 1986, 13). And it can be very much part of their
artistry, drama or comedy that they do so.
So, the suggestion is that reflection on philosophical or ethical ideas might
take place through the workings of a film, which is able to portray these ideas in
various lights, positive or negative. The philosophical text is not the only context
in which such critical reflection can take place. Admittedly, this book does not
go too far down this path. That is, it does not seek to explore how a film might be
philosophical or ethical in its own right, without in any way serving to illustrate
or engage with philosophical or ethical positions in the literature. No doubt, like
Hitchcock’s notion of pure cinema, there is pure film-philosophy, pure cinematic
ethics. This is not the concern of the present book. The overriding purpose here
remains that of introducing ethical positions from the history of ethical thinking,
so the films remain to that degree subordinated to the philosophy. Nonetheless,
films are not subordinate insofar as they have resources to reflect on any ethical
views they might be thought to illustrate or instantiate, to interrogate them even
as they portray them. These ideas are not only concretely illustrated in the films
but also, in being refracted through the lens of cinematic experience, are able to
be studied from a number of different angles.
The aim here as mentioned is to use films to talk about an entire history of
ethics. That a historical film can readily introduce anachronistic elements into its
picture of the past reminds us that any history is going to be, to some extent, a
‘history of the past in terms of the present’. One can safely assume that the history
4 Introduction
of ethical thinking is far messier than what is being portrayed in this book, which
is a more or less smooth and continuous progression from ancient thinking to
recent ethical thought. But in the end, the same could probably be said of any his-
tory. This does not necessarily make the history wrong, only necessarily partial. It
should just be kept in mind that the history of ethics being presented here is not the
whole story. Apart from anything else, there are some glaring omissions, such as
Emotivism and other ethical views from twentieth-century analytic philosophy; as
well as the moral views of Pragmatist figures like John Dewey. Most obviously,
it is very much a story of one tradition of ethical thinking only, namely, Western
ethical thinking. It has nothing to say about non-Western ethics. And with regard
to the discussion of religious ethics, the religion is restricted to the Christianity
that happened to become dominant in the West in the medieval period.
What Is Ethics?
I have been referring rather vaguely to ethical thinking and to unspecified ethical
theories, positions, views and ideas that we will be exploring. Before proceed-
ing any further, it will be useful to consider what might be understood by the
notion of ethics. No special distinction is being made between ethics and morality
here. One term comes from the Greek (ethos) and the other from Latin (mores),
meaning customs, manners or social norms. And while there are of course ethical
theories, and a history of such theories, ethics is not something we encounter first
as abstract theory, ‘moral philosophy’, a branch of philosophy. Rather it is in the
first instance something utterly practical, very much part of everyday life. One
does not need to be a philosopher to be acquainted with it. Living a life is enough.
Ethics here is thinking about how we should live that life and what sort of person
we ought to be. And the ethical dimension of everyday life is the more or less
organised framework of norms, values and commitments that embody our sense of
how we ought to live, the sort of life we aspire to, in terms of which we ordinarily
think about what to do, make our decisions and act.
A life without such a framework, in which we just did whatever we were
moved to do by immediate wants and desires, would be at the very least an under-
developed one. Very young children might qualify. They are not yet responsible
moral agents, able to play a role in the dramas of life. But while some adults do
of course act childishly, a framework of norms and values is not something moral
agents can easily do without. We cannot lead our lives without making choices
that show we think that some things are more important than others. Ordinarily,
we are committed to being a certain sort of person, to living a certain kind of life;
and this requires us to adhere to a framework of justification and criticism, the
‘horizon of evaluation’ in terms of which we reflect and weigh up the choices
and actions we undertake. This set of commitments and values is central to who
we are, our ‘identity’. Such an orienting framework is necessary if we are to be
agents at all. To lose it would not amount to a liberation but a terrifying experi-
ence of disintegration. It would be precisely an ‘identity crisis’, a breakdown, a
catastrophic loss of orientation. In such a state, we would no longer know where
Introduction 5
we stood, how to choose, what actions to pursue and we would be crippled as
agents (see Taylor 1985a, 34–35).
Thus, ethics, understood as a set of values or ideals concerning how to live that
goes beyond mere survival, is not an optional extra but an essential part of being
a functioning human being, a responsible moral agent. It defines who one is and
where one stands in the world, and at the same time, what one aspires to or tran-
scends oneself towards. Whatever particular form it takes, ethics always involves
some form of self-transcendence or self-overcoming. We can equally say that it
is a distinguishing mark of human beings that they are the creatures for whom the
ethical question can arise: how should I live? What kind of life do I want? (Malik
2014, 184). While this is the kind of question one might associate particularly
with twentieth-century existentialism, it would be better to say that existentialism
is the philosophy especially concerned with asking this distinctively human ques-
tion. It is also the question that was especially important to the Greeks, right at the
beginning of systematic moral reflection. Socrates, in Plato’s Republic says that
‘we are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live’. It is not perhaps the
kind of question that can be associated so readily with modern moral philosophy
to the extent that the latter has been a highly theoretical exploration of grounds or
basic principles underlying moral judgements.
So, ethics is not in the first instance a matter of philosophical theory, but some-
thing to be lived. As James Griffin suggests, ethics in this sense of a lived ethics
appears early in the life of a culture (Griffin 2015, 1). As a culture develops, roles
are established that involve adherence to particular norms of behaviour. And indi-
viduals are inculcated into that culture, developing as individuals in the process
insofar as they imbibe its norms in the course of socialisation. They are then able to
take part in that society, play various roles within it, participate in its dramas. This
is not to say that life is simply the slavish reproduction of pre-existing formulae, of
the customary ways of doing things that we may have absorbed from our culture.
Otherwise, morality would never change or evolve. But nor however are we ever
completely our own creation, however much we might like to imagine ourselves so.
We inevitably acquire some kind of ethical framework for living from our culture
in the course of growing up, in the process of becoming who we are. However, this
ethical apparatus is also something that gets put to the test in the course of living,
sometimes being modified or even coming completely undone in the process.
What about the various philosophical theories of ethics, the history of which
is the subject of this book? These ethical theories are not entirely distinct from
lived ethics, but rather, parasitic upon it. What usually happens is that philoso-
phers come along and try to provide lived ethics with foundations, to discern
what characterises or underpins moral judgements, to bring ethics under a set of
simple rules or principles. What these days is known as normative ethical theory
aims to produce some kind of coherent, systematic account of what makes moral
judgements correct, in terms of some fundamental principle that defines a feature
common to all correct moral judgements. On the basis of some such principle,
philosophers have been inspired to justify, affirm and also criticise, even try to
reform, existing values, norms and ways of behaving.
6 Introduction
But it is important to stress that ethics does not wait for philosophers to provide
it with theoretical foundations. That sort of theorising happens after the event,
the event being the moral training that starts in early childhood. Equally, a con-
nection to life is necessary even for the most general ethical theory. Sometimes
these theories claim to rely on intuitions about the nature of the good, access to
divine revelation or the deliverances of pure reason in order to arrive in an a priori
manner at principles that can provide a foundation for lived ethics. But however
it might be arrived at, a general theory of ethics without any intrinsic reference to
life would be empty and irrelevant. Equally, no matter how abstract, ethical theo-
ries generally involve some idea of how to live, bound up with a broad conception
of what it is to be a human being and also of the larger world in which one exists.
Even a highly theoretical account like that of the eighteenth-century philosopher
Kant in the end exhorts us to live a certain way, to be what we are, namely rational
beings whose reason lifts us above nature, and to never fall below that to become
a mere thing, pushed around by natural forces.
Nonetheless, it is an occupational hazard for theoretical accounts that in their
efforts to systematise lived ethics, or to subordinate it to simple rules or princi-
ples, life can end up being subordinated to theory, leaving us with an ethics that
is unliveable, and hence inhuman. How else could there emerge such improbably
superhuman figures as the entirely rational Kantian agent, or for that matter, the
god-like Stoic sage or the all-knowing utilitarian calculator? This inhumanity is
a problem for an ethical theory. As one commentator puts it, ‘if ethics retreats to
a fantasy world, providing dictates that could guide only the infinitely rational,
impartial, all-knowing agent, then it loses its interest and value to our societies’
(Hayward 2017). It is an at least necessary condition for any conception of how
we ought to live that it is physically and psychologically possible for human
beings to live in the way prescribed.
It is true that ethics involves the aspiration to certain ideals of behaviour. To
that extent it is a form of transcendence, of going beyond or overcoming one-
self. And every person who aspires to be a certain sort of person, to live a certain
life, engages in this transcendence. This is why a moral agent cannot be reduced
to a thing, and ethics cannot be exhaustively accounted for in purely objective,
scientific terms. But nor can we entirely transcend our bodies, become pure
subjects. The physical and psychological capacities of human beings always
have a bearing on ethical life. Perhaps some people can rise higher than others,
so we cannot judge what human beings are capable of just by what the ‘ordi-
nary person’ can manage. But whatever the case, none of us can aspire to what
is physically or psychologically beyond human beings as such. This suggests
that the constraints on ethics are ultimately practical. Ethics should concern
itself with what falls within the limits of human capacity (see Hayward 2017).
A theory-driven ethics that is not ultimately grounded in human life and what
human beings are capable of achieving is not only of no positive use or value.
It can indeed be positively dangerous. It can become a tool for terrorising life,
a basis for tormenting or brutalising people insofar as they fall short, as they
inevitably must, of the impossible ethical ideal.
Introduction 7
Film as Experimental
If ethical positions have a fundamental connection to the practical, and to what
people are capable of doing in practice, they are not immune from being put to the
test of experience, the practical experience of living. For a lived ethics, merely to
live is to put oneself to the test. And what is being put to the test in these ‘experi-
ments in living’, to borrow a notion from John Stuart Mill, is not some hypothesis
or theory, but we ourselves, as defined by the values or ideals that constitute our
identity as moral agents.
Most straightforwardly, we can be put to the test as moral agents simply by
encountering challenging circumstances, which concretely pose the question of
whether we are able to live up to our defining ideals in practice. These are not
experiments concerned with exploring human biology or psychology, but with
human beings as moral subjects; though once again, human biology and psychol-
ogy have a role to play since they provide the capacities we have to work with as
moral beings and the ultimate constraints on the sort of person we can be. Further,
if even general ethical theories and positions have to have some connection to the
practical and can only require of people what they are capable of doing if they
are going to be meaningful, they are similarly not immune from the test of expe-
rience. If an ethical theory was to formulate an ideal of conduct that could only
be attained by a superhuman being, and which no ordinary human being could
live up to in practice, that would be a significant problem for the theory. To that
extent, even abstract moral theories are at risk of disconfirmation in the light of
experience and the experiment of trying to live the theory in practice affords us
the opportunity to reflect on the theory in question.
Experiments in living are intrinsically dangerous in the sense that they expose
us to the possibility of failure. Most straightforwardly, there is the risk of falling
short of our defining ideals in practice. The stakes in such experiments are not
simply epistemological. Failure to conform to expectations represents not just dis-
confirmation but self-betrayal, an occasion for guilt, embarrassment and humili-
ation – not to mention an opportunity for lying and self-deception as one tries to
preserve one’s conception of oneself, and one’s estimation in the eyes of others.
The connections between experiment, experience and danger are reflected in the
very language we use. Experiment and experience once meant the same thing, and
they share the Latin root expereri (to try, to test), which is itself linked to the word
for danger (periculum).
We can, however, envisage experiments in living in which we are removed
from the lives being lived and the risks this experimentation entails. We can
envisage hypothetical scenarios, fictional stories or narratives, which provide an
occasion for reflecting in an extended way on possible forms of life and views
about how one should live. Being fictional here does not amount to being false,
only to that which is ‘fictioned’, that is, fabricated or constructed (see O’Leary
2009, 86–88). This is one way of thinking about the function of the fictive arts,
including films as a contemporary art form. Like novels and plays, films can be
seen as offering experimental scenarios in which moral agents, ideals and views
8 Introduction
of life can be explored and tested. Narrative film seems particularly well-placed
to run such virtual experiments. It is an art form that engages directly with expe-
rience, that confronts the viewer in a visceral way, as well as being able to por-
tray relatable characters with some structure of values, ideals and commitments,
experimental subjects able to be put to the test.
With respect to ethical theories, these as noted must also have some connec-
tion with the practical. They have to be able to be lived in practice. So even a
highly theoretical account like Kant’s exhorts us to live a certain way, to live up
to a certain ideal of conduct, to be a certain kind of character. As such, through
characters, actions and lives that illustrate or embody them, ethical theories can
be concretely portrayed in film; and we can also ask critical questions about them.
The question might be posed for example as to whether it is possible in practice
for human beings to live up to the ideal of how to live, or be the kind of ideal char-
acter, that is envisioned in the theory. Or we might consider how far a complex
human and moral reality that is being portrayed in the film can be captured by the
theory. And it may be that the theory is going to be found wanting or inadequate
when put to the test of experience in these ways.
Of course, a film can also be questioned in connection with the ideas and posi-
tions that it portrays. Insofar as the film invokes a theoretical view or position, the
position may be misconstrued or oversimplified. As an instance, Nietzsche, part
of whose ‘posthumous life’ has been in the movies, and one of the few philoso-
phers to make regular appearances there, is regularly misrepresented. Aside from
this, a film may portray undeveloped characters and contrived, unrealistic scenar-
ios. It may recycle well-worn cinematic conventions and stock characters, so that
in the end it only references other films, a movie universe with movie heroes and
villains. Or it may uncritically take on and amplify conventional views circulat-
ing through the culture that offers a mythological or ideologically distorted view
of the world or of ourselves. In this role, the film acts as no more than a means of
perpetuating these views and is essentially part of the problem. But while films
may be constructed to do no more than confirm, reproduce and reinforce prevail-
ing myths, they are also able to invoke aspects of our experience that resist and
go beyond such representations, reminding us that experience that is richer, more
diverse or more complex than these representations allow. In so doing, they can
challenge not only those cultural myths but also film’s sometime complicity in
perpetuating them. This is the experimental film as both cultural critique and cin-
ematic self-critique.
Film understood as experimental, in this broad sense of offering a narrative
through which characters, ethical positions or forms of thinking can be critically
examined, explored and tested, has affinities with the thought experiments found
within philosophical texts. These too are fictional narratives, hypothetical scenar-
ios offering a mode of critical reflection. That is an aspect that some film philoso-
phers have emphasised, arguing that it makes sense to think of some fiction films
as working in ways that philosophical thought experiments do, questioning exist-
ing views, posing counter-examples, exploring what is essential to a concept and
Introduction 9
so on; and in that regard, as not only capable of illustrating philosophical ideas
and themes, but of ‘doing philosophy’ (Wartenberg 2007, 67). However, there are
also some significant differences between film and philosophical thought experi-
ments, one being that film is more emphatically invested in experience. Whereas
the philosophical thought experiment is austere and sketchy, the film narrative is
richly detailed. Where philosophical experiments focus on concepts rather than
people, and don’t engage the audience, cinematic narratives give access to con-
duct, characters and extended stories involving the audience in their characters’
lives and fate. And unlike even literary narratives, films do not merely describe
but show things in detail, especially faces, gestures and conduct, communicating
their significance directly.
These differences have led some to argue that there are too many disanalo-
gies for film to be understood as philosophising or reflecting in this way (see
Wartenberg 2011, 19–21). But rather than trying to judge film in terms of the
narrow model of the philosophical thought experiment, it seems more fruitful to
argue that the differences film as film brings to the table, particularly the ability to
show experience in a richly detailed way, enhance its capacity to engage in narra-
tive experimentation, to invoke challenging experiences, in ways that go beyond
what is possible within the philosophical text. As Damien Cox and Michael
Levine put it, through its relative richness of detail, film can ‘sometimes provide
nuanced investigation of fundamental features of experience well beyond the ordi-
nary achievements of written philosophical texts, and in doing so robustly refute
hollow and simplistic ways of understanding life’ (Cox and Levine 2012, 12).
In other words, film precisely as film is well placed to present experimental sce-
narios in which moral theories and forms of understanding can be put to the test of
experience. And the experiment in question is not the abstract thought experiment
but the concrete experiment in living.
In Jonathon Glazer’s 2013 Under the Skin, a remarkable and rather d isturbing
scene unfolds in a quiet, understated way. On a beach, a woman watches a
swimmer emerge from the ocean and walk towards her. The two of them are
alone except for a family further down the beach. The family’s dog is swim-
ming in the rough surf. Suddenly there is the sound of screaming. The dog is
in trouble. A woman is in the water, swimming out, trying to rescue the dog.
Now she is also in trouble. Her husband dives in after her, their baby left on the
beach. The swimmer runs back into the ocean to rescue the husband, who once
brought back to the beach immediately breaks free and goes back into the water
to try to save his wife. The woman with whom the scene began has a different
reaction. She watches the tragedy unfold impassively, with complete indiffer-
ence. Then she walks down to the swimmer, who has returned to the beach and
is lying exhausted on the sand. She picks up a rock and strikes him with it, and
then drags him off the beach, leaving the crying baby to its fate, which is very
likely death from exposure.
The film’s premise is that the woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, is in
reality an alien in a woman’s skin, here to hunt humans, men in particular
(Figure 1.1). The alien predator amongst us is the basis for any number of films.
But what is interesting about Under the Skin is that it seems to depict a genu-
inely alien perspective on the human world. And what characterises the alien-
ness of this perspective is that it is one of absolute amorality, portraying how
things might look if one had no moral concerns at all. The drowning family is of
no concern. The swimmer who heroically tried to rescue them is no more than
a convenient source of food. The baby is a mere detail in the background and
can be left to die. It may be that such amorality is so foreign to ordinary ways
of thinking that it is only really intelligible from the perspective of an alien. But
we can turn this around, look on ourselves as the alien beings for a moment, and
ask why it is that these beings should view things in moral terms. What’s in it
for us? Why should we ‘do the right thing’ rather than just what happens to be
in our interests?
16 Excess and Obsession
Figure 1.1 The alien on the prowl in Under the Skin (Jonathon Glazer, 2013. Credit: A24/
Photofest).
Why Be Moral?
‘Why be moral?’ is perhaps the ultimate metaethical question. Philosophical
thinking about ethics is typically divided into two areas. Normative ethics is con-
cerned with producing theories about what we ought, morally speaking, to do,
theories that allow us to make substantive moral judgements. Metaethical reflec-
tion asks general questions about the nature of the moral judgements we make and
perhaps the biggest metaethical question is why be moral at all? What reasons are
there for me personally to be moral, even when it does not appear to be in my indi-
vidual interest to do the right thing? And why should people in general be moral,
i.e., why should a society adopt the institution of morality?
In the first instance, it might be thought that we are only moral beings because
if we do not do the right thing, we will be found out and punished. But suppose we
could do whatever we wanted and be sure of getting away with it? What reasons
could we have then for being moral? This is a question that was posed very early in
the history of philosophy by the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato (c.428–347 bce),
in one of his dialogues, The Republic. And he posed the question through a story,
the story of the ring of Gyges, about a shepherd who discovers a ring that enables
him to become invisible. With this power, he is able to seduce the queen, plot with
her to kill the king and take over the kingdom, becoming wealthy and powerful
in the process. He can do all of this without fear of detection or punishment. So
he is in a position to pursue and satisfy all his desires, regardless of moral con-
straints, and he does very well indeed out of it. This raises the question – what
reason could Gyges possibly have for not doing what benefits him, doing what
is in his interests? Why should he bother, under these circumstances, to do the
right thing? As Plato phrases it, why would anyone bother to remain within the
Excess and Obsession 17
boundaries of moral behaviour ‘when he is able to take whatever he wants from
the market-stalls without fear of being discovered, to enter houses and sleep with
whomever he chooses, to kill and release from prison anyone he wants, and gen-
erally to act like a god among men’ (Plato 1993, 260c; using the standardised
pagination for works by Plato)?
The tale of Gyges continues to resonate 2000 years later, although the media
available for storytelling has changed somewhat in the meantime. Fast forward
to the present, and we have a story that would make a reasonable plot for a film,
and that film could be taken to raise similar questions about why one should
bother to act morally. In contemporary cinematic stories, it is likely to be scien-
tists rather than shepherds who discover the secret of invisibility, but this does not
stop events taking a familiar path. Whatever noble aspirations the scientists might
have had at the beginning, once they have this power their aspirations typically
give way to various sorts of wickedness as soon as they realise how much they
can get away with. Films with this theme range from the classic The Invisible Man
(Jack Griffin, 1933), where the chemist (Claude Rains) who has discovered the
invisibility formula resolves to dominate the world through a reign of terror, to the
more recent remake, Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven, 2000), where the wickedness
that ensues, including voyeurism and murder, is presented in meticulous detail.
You might want to take an optimistic view of these scenarios, highlighting
various mitigating circumstances. Perhaps the scientist behaves badly because
the process that makes them invisible also drives them crazy, as in the original
Invisible Man film. Or perhaps they were simply bad people to begin with, as
in the later version where the main character, Sebastian Caine (Kevin Bacon),
is shown to have questionable traits like overweening arrogance long before
the invisibility process that turns him into a monster. Given this, perhaps the
bad behaviour of the character who discovers invisibility is not a reflection of
human nature as such, but only the nature of the particular individual involved
or as a result of the invisibility process. This also seems to be the case with
the ring of invisibility that features in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
(2001–2003) and The Hobbit (2012–2014) films. In these sagas, based on the
J.R.R. Tolkien novels, we do not simply have a magical ring that confers invis-
ibility, as in the Gyges story, but one that exerts an evil force that corrupts
the wearer. Here once again we can blame any bad behaviour on the invis-
ibility process.
But even if we were to accept this, there are other kinds of invisibility where
these considerations don’t arise, and yet the question of why one should bother to
be moral remains. Why do the right thing, for example, if you found that your day
was mysteriously repeating over and over, with the actions of the previous day
erased each time, so that only you remembered them, meaning that you could do
whatever you liked without any real consequences? This is the predicament that
weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) finds himself in Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis,
1993). Although the character is certainly grumpy and cynical, he is not an espe-
cially bad person, even when he has the opportunity to be so. Nonetheless, under
those circumstances, the question inevitably arises – why not be as gluttonous,
18 Excess and Obsession
lecherous or villainous as you like? Phil’s first response to his situation is very
much like that of a modern-day Gyges. He proclaims: ‘I’m not going to live by
their rules any more’, meaning the rules of ordinary, well-behaved citizens, and
sets out on a night of mayhem.
If Groundhog Day relies on a fantasy device to achieve its state of figurative
invisibility, there are more down-to-earth forms one can consider. What if, like
the perfidious eye doctor in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989),
you have the wealth and social standing to cover up any crimes you might com-
mit, including adultery, fraud, even murder? Or if, in the criminal world, you have
the kind of power that allows you to act with complete impunity, doing whatever
you like without having to worry about public scrutiny or legal prosecution, like
the gangsters Tony Montana in Scarface (Brian de Palma, 1983) or Henry Hill in
Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). Or suppose you have the kind of financial
clout that allows you to do much the same in the business world, like the busi-
nessmen Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) or the Jordan Belfort
character in The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013). These characters
all raise the question of the moment. Why abide by moral constraints if you have
nothing to lose by doing whatever is in your immediate interests? Why not take
the opportunity to fulfil every wish, no matter how extreme?
If these are all Gyges-like scenarios that have been portrayed and explored in
various films, it is worth adding that film itself might be seen as offering the pros-
pect of unlimited wish-fulfilment for the moviegoer, the satisfaction of any desire
without danger to oneself. Every movie is a virtual world, a hypothetical situation
in which anything that one desires can potentially be realised, at least in visual
terms. Any scenario is possible, and more importantly, can be safely enjoyed by
the film-goer, watching invisibly in the dark. Those in the movie audience, it
turns out, are the original invisible men and women. Naturally, the representative
power of cinema being what it is, the idea of film as an avenue for wish-fulfilment
for the viewer has itself been represented in film, as early as Sherlock Jr (Buster
Keaton, 1924). In the film, Keaton, a lowly film projectionist and hopeless would-
be amateur detective, falls asleep and dreams of entering the film he has been
projecting. Here, he becomes Sherlock Jr, the greatest detective in the world.
Having said that, it is not clear that we always wish for the unlimited satisfac-
tion of our desires, the absence of any moral constraints; or indeed that we look
to films only to gratify our desires, wishes and fantasies. The prospect of there
being no moral constraints, no consequences for transgression, might in fact be a
profoundly disturbing prospect. We might desperately wish for there to be a moral
universe, like the rabbi, Ben (Sam Waterston), in Crimes and Misdemeanours,
who insists that without some kind of moral order that acts of wickedness violate,
the world would be a dark, meaningless and terrifying place. A moral universe
can certainly be portrayed within film, a world where good prospers, and even
if it experiences some reverses along the way, will ultimately prevail over evil;
and where those who do wrong, even if they fail to see the light and join the side
of good by the last act, are at least going to be found out and punished by the
end. There are many films in which an essentially moral world is reassuringly
Excess and Obsession 19
confirmed in these ways. Indeed, this is pretty much the standard Hollywood
scenario. And there is clearly an appetite for such films, even if part of their
appeal might be the pleasure of seeing the bad guys violating all moral norms and
standards, indulging in all the forbidden appetites, before being inevitably and
properly called to account for their transgressions.
We know however that in real life things don’t always work out this way,
that good does not always prevail and that the bad guys don’t always get their
comeuppance. Indeed, like Gyges, they often do very well. And there are plenty
of ‘realistic’ films that serve to remind us precisely of this. In so doing, they raise
with renewed force the question of why one should be moral. One of the pleas-
ures of Crimes and Misdemeanors is that it is quite conscious of its distance from
the Hollywood moral universe. The main character, the ophthalmologist Judah
Rosenthal (Martin Landau), contrives after some agonising to have his mistress
killed when she threatens to expose their affair and ruin his comfortable life; and
in the end he gets away with it, even prospers by it. It’s a stark repudiation of the
conventional Hollywood story and the film itself comments on this. At the end of
the film, the murderous eye doctor meets the director, playing a failed filmmaker,
at a wedding, and recounts his story in the guise of a possible film plot. Allen’s
character replies that it would be a better story if the murderer was wracked with
guilt and driven to give himself up. The doctor’s reply is that this is what hap-
pens in the movies, not in real life: ‘If you want a happy ending, you should
go see a Hollywood movie’. The film’s ending is astonishingly bleak, and if on
one level it might be regarded as offering a gloomy, pessimistic view of human
nature, it might just as easily be seen as presenting a realistic one, stripped of all
comforting illusions.
A similarly pessimistic, or realistic, vision is evident in Roman Polanski’s neo-
noir Chinatown (1974), which revives forties film noir themes but gives them a
darker twist. In classic film noir like John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941),
society might be corrupt and evil, and the private investigator who brings it to
light may themselves be flawed, but in the end, they usually manage to bring
about some degree of justice. In Chinatown, there is no triumph of any sort. When
LA private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) stumbles on a network of graft, mur-
der and incest, presided over by evil businessman Noah Cross (played by John
Huston, no less), neither he nor the police have the power to do anything about it.
Worse, Gittes himself ends up causing the death of the woman he is trying to pro-
tect from Cross’s predations and Cross escapes any punishment. In a similar way,
the classic western undergoes a reality check in No Country for Old Men (Joel
and Ethan Coen, 2007). The decent western hero who fights for what is right, and
who traditionally triumphs over evil through perseverance and resourcefulness,
appears here in the figure of sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). However, Bell
finds himself ‘over-matched’ by the new, brutal forms of drug-related crime he
is confronting. He is unable to protect ‘his people’, cowboy-adventurer Lewellyn
Moss (Josh Brolin) or his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), from retribu-
tion, after Moss happens upon a large amount of money from a drug deal gone
wrong. And he is unable to bring to justice the chief agent of that retribution, the
20 Excess and Obsession
terrifying hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). In the end, all sheriff Bell can
do is escape into retirement from an evil that he cannot defeat.
As a final variation on this theme, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1989) simul-
taneously foregrounds a standard Hollywood story of good triumphing over evil
and subverts it. On the face of it, the film is a conventional story of evil being
properly punished, as clean-cut hero Jeffrey (Kyle McLachlan) manages in the
end to defeat sadistic gangster Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). But the hero finds
he has affinities with the evil Frank, being similarly drawn to nightclub singer
Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) who represents the prospect of illicit, per-
verse sex. Moreover, the ‘good world’ that Jeffrey leaves and to which he even-
tually returns, represented in the picture-perfect images of the town with which
the film begins and ends, is shown to be an impossible idealisation, a comforting
veneer that hides a much darker reality that is always just below the surface.
Under the manicured lawns, there are hideous insects. If we are going to be real-
istic, we need to acknowledge that wrongdoing is not always found out and pun-
ished, that people can and do get away with evil, and often do very well out of it.
So, is it true that the only reason people adhere to moral standards is because of
fear of being caught and punished otherwise? Or can we give a better answer to
the question of why we should be moral?
One response might be that even if we can avoid external scrutiny and
punishment, we will suffer punishment at our own hands for evil deeds, through
guilt and remorse. On this view it is our conscience that keeps us behaving ethically.
We have an internal moral sense, whether this is something inbuilt or inculcated in
us through our upbringing. However, even if conscience is a psychological reality,
it is certainly possible to imagine it absent. Lack of conscience, the absence of any
moral constraints on one’s actions and a willingness to do whatever furthers one’s
interests, is the familiar mark of the movie psychopath. But it might also be argued
that despite the prevalence of such figures in film, this conscience-less, amoral kind
of outlook is in reality relatively rare in individuals. It is a strange way of being,
marking the conscienceless individual as ‘other’, not like the ordinary human being,
and more appropriately embodied as the mysterious viewpoint of an alien, as in
Under the Skin. It is an outlook, however, that might be more prevalent at the insti-
tutional level. The documentary The Corporation (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott,
2003) makes the case that were the modern corporation a legal person, an actual
person, the kind of person it would typically be is one that is utterly self-interested,
deceitful, callous, without guilt, willing to break social rules for its own ends – in
short, a psychopath. The amoral corporation is itself a familiar character in films,
from Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) to Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987). But typically
in these films, the corporation is pitted against human characters that we can iden-
tify with. Those characters who act in its name have sold their souls and ceased to
be human. In the case of Alien this is quite literally so, since the ‘company man’, the
villainous Ash (Ian Holm), turns out to be an android.
At the same time, there is perhaps something a little convenient about this
relegation of evil to the alien psychopath or the inhuman corporation. The very
notion of ‘evil’, as immoral behaviour that seems so bad that it can only come
Excess and Obsession 21
from some conscienceless other, may be a convenient way of distancing our-
selves from actions that after all are in the last analysis committed by human
beings like us (see Morton 2004, 4–5, 93–94). It is far more disturbing to think
that terrible things might be done by people we can relate to, people who are
not monsters or sadists but to all intents and purposes ordinary individuals. The
controversy over twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt’s notion of the
‘banality of evil’ was precisely of this nature. Arendt introduced the notion in
her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, based on her coverage of ex-Nazi Eichmann’s
1961 trial in Jerusalem. The controversy was over the idea that a participant in the
Holocaust, a mid-level administrator responsible for organising transportation of
Jews to Nazi death camps, might not be crazy, or a monster, but a normal person,
indeed a nobody, a mediocrity. Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012)
depicts Arendt (played by Barbara Sukowa) covering the Eichmann trial and the
subsequent furore over her book. In it, she is presented defending her position
in a climactic public lecture: ‘I wrote no defense of Eichmann, but I did try to
reconcile the shocking mediocrity of the man with his staggering deeds. Trying to
understand him is not the same thing as forgiveness’.
It might be imagined that one’s conscience would stop them from participating
in such horrors. It is easy to think that there is some kind of moral instinct in us
that would have compelled us to do the right thing, had we been German citizens
during the Nazi period. Arendt herself reports that Eichmann had the opportunity
to see the death camps in operation and was repelled by them, but soon after
began his duties administering transportation. He had a conscience, she suggests,
but it ‘functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began
to function the other way around’ (Arendt 2006, 95). For Arendt, this turnaround
is the real root of Eichmann’s evil. It amounts to him ceasing to think for himself
or to see the world beyond the dictates of Nazi policy. In so doing, he ceased to
see things from the standpoint of other people and to adopt a moral understand-
ing of what he had done to them. Giving himself to the movement, his guiding
principles became efficiency and obedience in the name of the great cause. One’s
conscience can no doubt always be recalibrated in this way, so that one overcomes
one’s ordinary repugnance to crime in order to perform what one understands to
be an important task requiring great courage.
Moreover, even those whose consciences function in the ‘expected way’ may
be less constrained by it than they imagine. This is what the eye doctor Judah
discovers in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Recounting his supposed movie plot to
Cliff at the end of the film, he indicates that while he suffered terrible guilt at first
over what he had done, to the point where he was on the verge of confessing to
the police, that guilt gradually diminished over time; and though he occasionally
has a bad moment, he has learned to live with what he has done. After all, as he
points out, people learn to live with all sorts of terrible sins. And apart from all
this, even if conscience does work as expected to prod us and keep us more or
less on the straight and narrow, we might still want to know why we should obey
our consciences, what reasons we might have for doing so. We need to look more
closely at the issue.
22 Excess and Obsession
Plato’s Moral Theory
This brings us back to Plato, who presents the original invisibility story, the story
of Gyges. The rest of the Republic is, in effect, Plato’s answer to the question
the story poses, of why we should be moral even if we can get away with being
immoral. In this, Plato wants to reject the view of morality and of human nature
that the story implies: that the only reason to abide by moral standards is to avoid
being caught and punished for transgressing them. Along with that, he rejects the
idea that we are essentially creatures driven by our desires, with morality being
merely an external constraint that limits their satisfaction. Plato acknowledges
that human beings have desires, but he does not think we are just creatures of
desire. He thinks that there are in fact different parts to our makeup. He points out
that we often experience mental conflicts and argues that these conflicts reflect
this internal complexity. Someone who is thirsty but knows the water is poisoned
both wants to drink the water and stops themselves from drinking, which sug-
gests to Plato that one part of the person just wants to drink, but another, differ-
ent part is more wisely and sensibly commanding them not to drink (see Plato
1993, 435c–441c). Move forward now to David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999),
and we see such internal compartmentalisation in dramatically exaggerated form.
The film’s unnamed narrator (Edward Norton), with a responsible job and a well-
furnished apartment, finds that a side of his personality at odds with his ordinary,
responsible self, has taken on a life of its own. He finds himself confronted by his
alter-ego, the anarchic and dangerous Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), for whom jobs
and apartments are merely shackles to be thrown off at the earliest opportunity. If
Durden ultimately turns out to be a delusion on the narrator’s part, this only under-
scores that the split is really internal, between different parts of his personality.
The move from experiencing internal conflicts to imagining that there are liter-
ally different parts operating within ourselves is clearly not a large one. On the
basis of such conflicts, Plato argues that the self, or soul (a term that is without
religious overtones for Plato) has three distinct parts: a rational part, a desiring
element and a spirited part. Reason is the part of the soul that knows reality, calcu-
lates and makes decisions. Its proper role is to rule the desiring part. Desire is the
irrational, appetitive part of the soul, made up of instinctive cravings and urges. It
includes all the physical desires, such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire, as well as
the desire for money. Properly speaking, it should be regulated by reason. To this,
Plato adds a spirited part, which is manifested in feelings of self-disgust, shame,
courage, indignation and strength of will. The spirited part’s role is to provide
reason with the force it needs to govern desire. This picture provides the basis
for Plato’s view of morality. Being moral for Plato is not just a matter of submit-
ting to external constraints that stop you pursuing what is in your self-interest.
It certainly involves controlling and regulating your immediate desires, but by
themselves, these desires cannot be trusted to pursue what is in your interests.
You may want to do all sorts of things that you know, rationally, are bad for you,
like drinking the water you know to be poisonous. The rational part looks at the
overall picture, at what is good for the self as a whole and for each part. So, if I am
Excess and Obsession 23
really self-interested, I must be ruled by the rational part; I must have a properly
balanced soul, and, for Plato, having this inner balance is what it is to be moral.
What this means is that for Plato, being moral, instead of being opposed to self-
interest, is in fact very much in the interests of the self. It means having a well-
ordered soul, in which each part plays its proper role in the whole. The proper
role of the rational part is to govern the other parts of the soul; the spirited part’s
role is to provide reason with the force it needs to govern; and the appetitive part
should be controlled and regulated by reason. Moral goodness thus amounts to a
kind of mental health or well-being, which is clearly beneficial for its possessor.
It is also an enjoyable state to be in, and so Plato can argue that the moral life is a
happy one. With this picture of the moral human being, Plato introduces an influ-
ential conception of human nature, the idea of human existence as essentially a
struggle between reason and desire, a struggle that reason ought to win. For Plato
and many who come after him, reason is the ‘higher’ part of the human being and
desires are the primitive, irrational and chaotic ‘lower’ part. In these accounts, we
are typically identified most closely with our higher, rational part. While desires
are still seen as part of us, they are often seen as less central, to an extent alien to
us, an unfortunate accompaniment that is perhaps part of our animal heritage, and
certainly needing to be kept in check by the rational self. If the desiring side of our
makeup were allowed to have its way, our inner balance would be overthrown.
We would be enslaved to our appetites and passions, which without any constraint
would become tyrannical.
We can see more clearly how having such an inner balance amounts to being
a morally good person insofar as Plato relates this harmony to our having recog-
nisable virtues, morally admirable character traits. In the well-ordered state, we
would have the virtues of justice, courage, temperance and wisdom, which are
the central elements of Platonic morality. We would be wise because the ruling
element possesses knowledge of what is good for each part and for the whole;
temperate, or self-controlled, because desire and pleasure are tempered by the rule
of reason; and brave because the spirited part allows us to pursue the precepts of
reason and to overcome the distractions of pain and pleasure. Finally, we would
have the overall virtue of being just, where justice is understood not in the modern
sense of having equality of opportunity or outcome, but in terms of something’s
being well-balanced, each part playing its proper role in the whole. So understood,
being just for Plato is synonymous with being moral. Being moral in this way,
with the proper balance of reason, desire and courage, is also a prerequisite for
playing one’s proper role in society (443d-e). And having the proper balance of
parts, with each part playing its proper role, also characterises the just or good
society, the republic that gives Plato’s dialogue its title. The tripartite self becomes
a microcosm of the tripartite society, whose corresponding parts are the ruling
class, the workers and the soldiers. The just society is the one in which each social
group plays its proper role: that of the workers being to serve the rulers, the rulers
to control the workers and the soldiers to do the bidding of the rulers and enforce
their rule. Once again, justice has nothing to do with equality. It amounts to a
morality that consists in playing your proper part in the whole.
24 Excess and Obsession
Returning to the individual case, the relation between inner balance and moral-
ity is also illuminated when we consider the alternative, when we fail to have this
inner balance. Corresponding to the virtues are various vices, such as foolishness,
cowardice and self-indulgence, all of which are reflections of disharmony in the
soul, of injustice. As is often the case with this reason-centred sort of picture,
immorality is seen to arise above all if one’s desires and appetites escape the con-
trol of reason. If your desires are not under the control of your reason, if you lack
self-control, you won’t be able to pursue your true interests. You won’t be able to
do what is good for you overall, but instead will be subject to the psychological
tyranny of your desires, which will grow out of all proportion. You will be the
victim of your appetites, desiring ever more in the way of food, drink, material
goods, wealth and so on, falling prey to all manner of addictions and obsessions.
Others will suffer as well, since you will be driven to satisfy yourself at their
expense, for example, by seeking the unlimited sexual pleasure that can only be
had through force or deception. Given that morality amounts to a kind of mental
health or well-being, the immoral person is unbalanced, mentally disordered, and
the thoroughly immoral person is on the verge of being insane.
This is an influential conception of evil, or at least, morally bad behaviour.
Being self-indulgent, ruled by one’s appetites and blind to the needs of oth-
ers, is certainly a conventional way of thinking about what being a bad person
involves. The bad children in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel
Stuart, 1971) are bad in precisely this way: Augustus and Veruca are greedy and
demanding, Violet and Mike are addicted to the point of obsession with chew-
ing gum and television. They have not improved in the Tim Burton remake,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). Mike is now obsessed with video
games. Of course, they are only children, not yet being fully developed adults,
and so have the excuse of not yet being mature. A crucial part of this develop-
ment is learning to govern one’s desires, in the way that Charlie (Peter Ostrum,
and in the remake, Freddie Highmore), the one ‘good’ and also most grown-up
child does. At the same time, in their subjection to their appetites, these little
monsters have something in common with the classic movie monsters of early
cinema, the monsters that seem to personify unleashed desire beyond the con-
trol of reason. A defining mark of the monster is that it is utterly self-seeking,
wholly concerned with satisfying its appetites. There is the wicked Mr Hyde
of Jekyll and Hyde fame, the werewolf, the classic vampire, all grotesque fig-
ures that have been literally deformed by the appetites that consume them. The
cinematic vampire in particular provides an enduring image of a creature com-
pletely given over to its desires, although as we will see, there have also been
some interesting variations on the theme, including the vampire who strives to
manage and control their blood lust and to be good.
These movie monsters are inhuman, and generally speaking have to be hunted
down and destroyed. As always, it is convenient to ascribe wicked acts to some-
thing that is ‘other’, not like us. Yet they are not entirely alien to us. They all
relate in some way to the human psyche, or at least a certain understanding of it.
In particular, the monster can be taken to represent the dangerous desires within
Excess and Obsession 25
us that strive to escape our control and which we must struggle to keep in check
if we are not to find ourselves being taken over by them. Even the vampire, per-
haps the most alien of these figures, provides a metaphor for human addiction, for
being entirely given over to one’s appetites. In the case of the more complex and
reflective vampire who struggles to control their urges, there is an image of the
human struggle to master desire. These monsters may also be explicitly linked to
the human to the extent that they emerge out of us or take us over. Struggling to
prevent their emergence, or being taken over by them, once again dramatises the
Platonic picture of the individual as engaged in a battle to control their desires and
appetites, and of the consequences of losing control. The monster, all appetite,
unleashed on the world to commit every kind of mayhem in pursuit of its needs,
exemplifies the idea of immoral behaviour as being a matter of unchecked desire.
The Jekyll and Hyde story, popular in the thirties and early forties, but also pre-
sent in one form or another in a number of more recent films, points very clearly
to such a view of the self and of what constitutes immoral behaviour. The two
best known classic versions are those of Rouben Mamoulian (1932) and Victor
Fleming (1941). Both films open with Dr Jekyll (Fredric March and Spencer
Tracy respectively) holding forth on the ‘dual nature of man’, as composed in
Platonic fashion of good and evil parts chained together in the soul, constantly
battling one another. In the films, we see the dire consequences when Dr Jekyll
invents a potion to separate the two halves of his nature. The intention is to free
humans from their ‘evil side’ so that the good in people will be able to develop
unhindered. Instead, it is the evil side that is freed and Jekyll turns into the gro-
tesque, murderous Mr Hyde. In Mamoulian’s film (see Figure 1.2), the evil side is
explicitly characterised in terms of ‘elementary instincts inherited from an animal
past’. In both films, it is identified with desire and appetites, particularly those of
a sexual nature. It manifests itself in Dr Jekyll in the desires he struggles to repress
when, though engaged to be married to a ‘good woman’ (Rose Hobart and Lana
Turner respectively), he meets a ‘bad’ one, Ivy Pierson (Miriam Hopkins and
Ingrid Bergman).
Fleming’s 1941 version of the story is itself more ‘repressed’ than the ear-
lier 1932 film, more toned down in its sexual content. This no doubt reflects
the arrival in Hollywood of the Hays Code, the set of industry moral guidelines
designed to rehabilitate the industry’s image, which was enforced after 1934. Ivy
Pierson, a prostitute in Mamoulian’s version, becomes a barmaid in Fleming’s
remake, with the implication of prostitution being omitted. Ivy’s flirtation with
Jekyll is more overtly sexual in the earlier film than in the later one. Nonetheless,
the 1941 film still manages to smuggle in some surprisingly frank sexual imagery,
particularly in the Tracy Jekyll’s first transformation scene. One of the images
Fleming employs here is that of a horseman and his steeds, an image also used
by Plato. Jekyll experiences himself as a charioteer whipping two horses, which
dissolve into his fiancé e and the barmaid Ivy. But this is not a representation of
reason striving to control the other parts of the soul, as it is in Plato. The image
has in fact been subverted in the film to become a metaphor for the unleashing
of Jekyll’s desires for sexual possession and domination. For both films, desire,
26 Excess and Obsession