Blade Runner & Being Human

“More human than human,” is the motto for Dr. Tyrell’s new experiment Replicant, Rachel. Rachel is a different make, because of problems Tyrell had with his former creations: “in them we recognized a strange obsession,” Tyrell relates to Deckard about the originals. “If we gift them with a past, if we create a cushion, or pillow for the emotions, consequently we can control them better.” This obsession of the Replicants is the desire to be human, to have meaning in life, to have experience. It is clear through these desires that the Replicants are dangerously approaching the obtaining of a fully human existence.

Blade Runner proposes the question of what it means to be human and addresses the possibility of artificially creating human experience. Renee Descartes would say that the existence of a mind is paramount to being human. Pris quotes the philosopher while in JF’s apartment: “I think, Sebastian, therefore I am.” And the Replicants do have powerful minds and thought processes. For example, Roy, while at JF’s apartment, plays chess against his maker Dr. Tyrell and ultimately beats him. Deliberately chosen because of its use in mind science studies, chess is a game at which machines and computers have notoriously become superior to humans. In 1997, when the chess program Deep Blue beat human chess champion Gary Kasparov, the world was forced to address possibility that machines have finally surpassed humans in terms of intelligence. What makes Roy’s victory even more impressive is that he defeated his creator.


However, Roy’s mind and power are not enough to satisfy him, and this speaks to the larger problem that he has with his existence. Jean-Paul Sartre, in “Existentialism as a Humanism”, explains the relationship between an artisan and his creation, a paper-knife, in terms of essence and existence. Sartre concludes: “[the paperknife’s] essence—that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible—precedes its existence.” The paper-knife’s purpose was predetermined by its creator, so it came into being with a set definition, a set purpose. Similarly, Roy and the rest of the Replicants were created with purpose in mind: they were engineered to be slaves. But Roy has a problem with this existence—and with his imminent death by technical failure, evidenced by his hand-clutching throughout the film—which has spurred him to lead the escape out of imprisonment and confront his creator. What Roy faces is what Sartre calls “the first principle of existentialism”, which is “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.” Roy feels the need to overcome his pre-determined destiny, a life of pre-determined length, and cannot let himself simply die before becoming more. He seethes for “more life” and more experience; he pains for a life that he can create for himself.

Rachel, who struggles with the reality of her Replicant-ness, adds an interesting twist to the debate on human vs. Replicant as well. In the scene after she saves Deckard’s life, the two have an intimate conversation that addresses the questioning of both characters’ identities. As the two sip liquor out of shot glasses, Deckard notes that the shakes they have are “part of the business.” Rachel corrects him, noting, “I’m not in the business. I am the business.” This moment of self-realization changes the dynamic of their relationship: she is his prey. But soon after, as Rachel presses Deckard for more information regarding her existence as a Replicant, she poses him a question that fundamentally calls into question his identity: “You know that Voigt-Kampf test of yours? Did you ever take that test yourself?” Ridley Scott, having employed still, controlled camerawork, breaks this precedent and uses handheld as he focuses in on Rachel. This moment bristles with electricity and sends the audience’s head spinning. What if Deckard is a Replicant as well? There is no way for us to be sure of his humanity; the Blade Runner units were assembled in response to the Replicant uprising and, for all we know, they could be technological creations as well. Whose human after all?


The answer of Deckard’s Replicantness is beyond the point. It doesn’t really matter if he is human or Replicant because both, as evidenced by Roy, suffer the same existential anguish. Though Roy’s suffering is more imminent than most everyone else’s—his life is about to come to an end, about to end without him having made sense of it—his struggle is a universal one. Every human must cope with a shared fate: death. Everyone struggles to break free from the ropes of the created world and make meaning of one’s existence. The true thesis of the film is that, in creating machines that are increasingly intelligent, we will endow them with the same, unanswerable question we all face: in the end, what does it all mean?

Wings of Desire & Unifying Contrasts

It’s unfortunate to see that, in the English translation of Wim Wenders 1987 film Der Himmel uber Berlin, all we get is Wings of Desire. In it, we lose the most central character of the film, the ever-fascinating, ever-dualistically contrasted capital of Germany. Today, Berlin is a city of the old and the new. Then, it was a city of East and the West. And before, it was a city of the Jews and the non-Jews.

The film’s opening sequence maintains the theme of contrasts, which lasts throughout the film’s entire narrative, as it follows angel Damiel on an escapist tour of the city. Damiel and the rest of the angels, whom we meet later on, have superhuman abilities: they can hear the thoughts of every passerby and selectively tune to whomever’s mental narrative they chose, they can survive without eating or drinking, they can transport themselves to different locales. And, of course, they can fly. Damiel perches atop a Berlin church, transports himself into a plane overhead, and then weaves his way between different Berlin apartments. However, Damiel’s freedom and immorality are in great contrast to the thoughts of the individuals we come across: a husband arrives at his dead mother’s home and remarks how he has felt “no grief”; a solitary, lovesick man thinks to himself how his lover "never loved [him]”; a bored child sits in his apartment, wishing there was something good on TV. Even the more lighthearted Berliners maintain their mortality and a sense of being stuck: a car packed full of immigrants, a man complaining about how women ruin life, a couple in an ambulance racing to the hospital. All of these mini stories are coated in the pensive questions that the film’s narrator poses: “why am I me, and why not you?” he queries in his rhyme. “Isn’t life under the sun just a dream?”


Damiel, despite many of these depressing insights into these smaller characters’ minds, is still fascinated with what it means to be human. When he meets up with fellow angel Cassiel, they compare the day’s story highlights. Cassiel tells morbid and bleak tales of suicides while Damiel relates the small moments, especially lighting up when he speaks of a woman who could feel his presence. But Damiel is “fed up with his spiritual existence” and longs for a human body, a more real life where he can have thoughts and feelings of his own. He wants the “now”, not the “eternity”; he wants the pleasures of small experiences, like “blackened fingers” from the newspaper and the satisfaction of a meal. Damiel is frustrated with his omniscience and perfection as well; he would like to guess from time to time, and to be wrong. Cassiel is tempted by the darker aspects of humanity: to be savage and to draw evil out of others.

This contrast between the two characters deepens as the story develops. The two eventually get involved with Marion, the acrobat who often is dressed as an angel herself, and Peter Falk, an American actor who is the star of a World War II drama set in Berlin. Marion, much like the passengers on the subway that Damiel encounters, poses large questions to herself while embroiled in her own thoughts. “How should I live?” she wonders. She desires to love and to be loved, but doesn’t know if there’s someone out there. As Damiel, unseen by Marion, sits by her side, she stares right at him. He is immediately enraptured. This infatuation with her, coupled with his ever-persistent desire to shed his wings and become human, leads Damiel to “enter the river” of the “ford of time” and cross over to the mortal side. Cassiel aids in this help but doesn’t join him, despite his sobering failure to save a man from jumping from a high building, the film’s most haunting moment.


Now, Damiel and Cassiel are visually contrasted as well: Damiel can see color, so now we, the audience, see color when following him. He pulses with excitement at these basic human experiences which he had only know about, but never experienced first hand: to bleed, to see color, to feel cold, to sip coffee. Damiel echoes the famous subject of many philosophical queries, Mary the colorblind scientist. Mary is a scientist who is trapped in a world of black and white, but knows everything physical there is to know about the color red without actually being able to experience it. When released into a world of color, she learns and experiences something new with her interaction with the color. It’s this subjective truth and understanding that Mary learns. Damiel’s understanding of color, therefore, represents the joy of subjectivity, of experiencing something for oneself. Simply put, it’s the pleasure of being an individual.

Damiel has been reborn, and this theme of newness surges through the final act of the film. “Other wings will grow in the place of old ones,” Damiel relates, making a strong commentary about the politics of Berlin at the time of the film’s creation. Damiel’s ability to move on, to advance, to jump from one world to the next—and from one wall to the next, as he wakes up right next to the Berlin wall when he is reborn—is part of the large push that Wenders was a part of to create a new Berlin, a new Germany. From the cab driver’s lecture about how there are more borders than ever to the depressing idea of “extra people” that Falk makes about the film’s Jewish extras all lead up to the final, encapsulating speech of the film that Marion gives. In a blatantly religious ceremony, where Damiel passes a cup of wine to her, she proclaims a call for action, staring straight at the camera, into the audience: “we are deciding everyone’s game,” she states. “I am ready, now it’s you. Now or Never.” She, and Wenders and Berlin and Germany, ache for unity.

Easy Rider & "Freedom"

Easy Rider defined the term “freedom” for a generation. The image of Wyatt and Billy driving motorcycles on an open road, the desert landscape behind them, has become so symbolically and ironically representative of what it means to be free. But that opening visual is simply that: the first look, the surface view of what ends up being a counter-cultural thesis, thoroughly entrenched in existential philosophy.


The means and the way by which the two riders, played by Peter Fonda & Dennis Hopper, traverse the American wasteland, set in motion the film’s definition—or, rather, commentary—of the state of freedom. They are drug runners, jumping the border to Mexico to score cocaine, and then carrying it to LAX for delivery. With the money made, they embark upon a trip without a destination: they simply have money, drugs, motorcycles and a general dissatisfaction with their current surroundings. They reject time, evidenced by Wyatt’s tossing of his watch on the desert ground. At a broader level, they are rejecting structure; director Hopper visually connects this theme by employing an alternating jump cut between scenes that creates an appropriately jarring rhythm to the narrative.

And the two aren’t the only ones joining together in this rebellion. Along the way, they make a pit stop at a farm run by a white man with a Mexican wife, with whom he has what could be described as a litter of children. They pick up a similarly jaded, city-bred passerby that just wants to be “a long way away” from his hometown. They also stop at a self-sustaining hippie commune that, ironically enough, has to reject visitors because there are simply too many people and not enough food. Finally, they pick up a third traveler, George Hanson, who becomes, one could argue, the voice of the duo, providing the thoughts of the often-silent Wyatt. “This used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it,” Mason muses.

The structuralized society the duo, as well as many of the people they meet along the way, rejects also rejects them. One of the film’s first moments is the two being turned away from a run-down motel. While riding through a small town, Wyatt & Billy get thrown into jail for illegally participating in a parade. Jail is where they meet the well-connected-but-alcoholic Hanson. Later, a small town diner refuses to serve them, its customers ignorantly insulting them for their dress and demeanor—though the girls do flock.

Thus, on this trek, all three men find those that grasp for the same strands of freedom as well as those that are too afraid of addressing life’s deeper questions. By mere image, mere surface, our heroes frighten those in developed society. Hanson relates that they are “scared of what you represent to them…what you represent to them is freedom.” Hanson continues, making a larger commentary of society: “it’s real hard to be free when you’re bought and sold in the marketplace.” A core message of the film, this highlights the main struggle of the characters: to be free in a world that doesn’t easily permit it. Mason, perhaps because of these beliefs he holds, meets a horrific fate when locals from a small, ignorant town come to the group’s campsite and beat him to death in his sleep.


This connection between the morbid and the free exists throughout the film. By Hanson’s logic, he was murdered by those who are scared of his freedom. One of the early campsites is at an Indian burial ground. The trio drives by a cemetery in the middle of their journey, prompting a music change and ominously alluding to what is soon to happen. Near the end of the film, when Wyatt & Billy finally make it to New Orleans, the intertwining of freedom and death becomes even stronger. The “right place” to do the acid that Wyatt has held onto for the majority of the film, is in a cemetery. This trip spirals into an avant-garde, chaotic combination of visuals and music. The characters partake in a bizarre and horrifying mix of sexual escapades, religious prayer, and crazed moaning. Amidst the madness, director Hopper provides a glimpse into the fatalistic end of the film. Freedom has climaxed in a place of death.

So it’s no surprise, then, that our heroes have a tragic trajectory. When they are uselessly shot and killed by a hillbilly in a game-like fashion, it finally cements the notion of being free with one’s mortality. “They only wanted to be free,” the music croons at the film’s close. The society Wyatt & Billy were a part of, however, not only left the two at odds (“we did it,” proclaims Billy; “we blew it,” proclaims Wyatt), but also was one that restricted an ideal of freedom.

High Noon, Men & Fate

In the classic Western, there are men and then there are boys. This is supremely evident in High Noon where being a man means looking fate and nothingness in the eye and refusing to back down.

For Marshall Will Kane, fate has a time stamp. It’s at noon, better known as the time when his fearsome enemy Frank Miller, whom he brought to justice, arrives on the train. This news comes directly after Kane was just married, ready to leave the small New Mexico town and open up a store with new, pacifist Quaker wife Amy. Kane tries to leave with his beautiful bride, but duty ropes him back into town; he is a man of honor and, to the dismay of his wife, his obligation to justice is too great.


On Kane’s return, however, he finds the town he dedicated so much of his life to hesitant, and even openly hostile, to the idea of supporting him. The local bartender and hotelier hate Kane for driving away business as outlaws attract attention (and drinkers), and Kane’s locking up of Miller puts them in dire economic straits. His second in command Harvey harbors jealousy for not being made Marshall and believes that Kane holds a grudge against him for shacking up with former flame Helen Ramirez. Kane’s friend hides away in the comfort of his own home, sending his wife to fabricate a lie when Kane comes a knockin. When Kane interrupts a church service, he finds some willing to help, but they are quickly dissuaded by impassioned speeches made by the minister and a churchgoer. “You’re asking me to tell me people to go out and kill, maybe gets themselves killed. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say,” the minister relates. The only person jumping at the chance to help Kane is, ironically enough, a 14-year-old boy.

Miller, a man who hasn’t even arrived controls the entire psyche of the town. This power is shown by the frequent shots of an empty chair in Kane’s desk. Director Fred Zinnemann zooms into the empty chair, giving this nothingness, this mere presence, the thematic reigns of the film. If Kane wasn’t already feeling permanently abandoned, staring at an unavoidable fate, his trip to former Marshall Martin Howe’s home does absolutely no better. Martin gives his existential, meaningless outlook on existence, further sending Kane into a crisis: “You end up dying alone on a dirty street. And for what? For nothing,” Martin tells Kane. “Deep down, they don’t care. They just don’t care,” he adds. Zinnemann visualizes the town’s abandonment, the lack of care and compassion, when Kane steps out into the middle of the street and the camera, in a masterful crane shot, pulls back to reveal how alone he really is. The streets are abandoned. It’s a ghost town: no people and no beliefs. Except for Kane, of course.


Against all odds it seems, Kane soldiers on, symbolizing the ultimate “man”. As Helen tells Harvey: “when he dies, this town dies.” Of course, after the huge production is over, the town rushes out, all having been safely watching the production from the buildings surrounding the gunfight. Kane refuses to say a word after saving his wife from the gunpoint of an outlaw, and simply leaves. This time, it’s the town that stands around, perplexed, abandoned and, as an entity, alone, looking like children who just lost their father.

Vertigo & The Illusion of Fact

Vertigo has such a tightly wrapped psychological narrative that, at the film’s close and during the process of revisiting it, it’s difficult to place yourself in the shoes of Scottie Ferguson at each of his different psychological stages.

The best place to start, it seems, is when Scottie is given the task of finding Madeline. His old school friend Gavin Elster calls him in, and, after relating that “San Francisco is changing” and that he “wishes he lived in the old days”, Gavin proposes a mystery for Scottie to solve: he must find out whether or not Gavin’s wife, Madeline, is being possessed by her dead great grandmother.

So off we go on at the helm of an odd request, and follow Scottie as he follows Madeline around the city, amassing a set of facts and clues and reporting back to Elster. His first real day is eventful: it takes him first to the flower shop, then to the graveyard and to the museum. Along the way, he—and we—begins to compile a list of hints about this possibly possessed woman: flower bouquet, Carlotta Valdes, portrait in the Legion of Honor. Hitchcock’s camerawork often parallels Scottie’s point of view at these moments, intertwining Scottie with us, making us feel the same heat of the case Scottie does. In the museum scene, for instance, as Madeline stares up at the painting of Carlotte Valdes, the camera zooms into Madeline’s recently purchased bouquet of flowers and then to the bouquet in the painting; it then moves from the bun in Madeline’s hair to Carlotta’s bun in the portrait. Scottie’s eyes control the camera. He and we take note of the clues.


But even as the facts build, there is an unnerving sense of unease to all of it. Everything is falling too perfectly into place, everything almost too controlled. The details spill too easily at Scottie’s feet. Scottie falls in love with his prey, but she promptly commits suicide, in sight for him to see. This launches Scottie back into an even deeper psychological hell than he first spiraled into at the film’s open. And, much to the dismay of the ever-motherly Midge Wood (a perfectly rigid and desexualized name if there ever was one), the only way Scottie can fully recover is to solve the mystery, to re-involve himself with everything Madeline. He begins to see her everywhere he goes, in every woman he sees; he obsesses over the facts that made up the case.

After all, Scottie is a detective, a policeman. “There’s an answer to everything,” he tells Midge early on in the movie. At his core, he is a man of facts. Likewise, Vertigo, at its core, is a film of facts. So when, after Scottie meets Judy and Hitchcock immediately reveals to the audience—and not Scottie—that Judy was pretending to be Madeline, that it was all a huge setup, everything immediately changes. The facts that were presented, cloaked in that eerie uneasiness, are now seen in an entirely new light. Before, as Scottie tracked Madeline down, we felt intelligent, we felt investigatory, we were hot on the case. But, in remembrance or on second viewing, we truly feel the anger Scottie feels for having been duped. As Judy divulges the truth into the letter to Scottie, the facts are now more than facts: they are instructions. These instructions have been relayed twice: first from Gavin Elster to Judy, then from Elster to Scottie. Elster sets two individuals in motion, timing their staggering perfectly in order to pull off the crime. And it all had gone to plan.



From here on is a far different mystery. This is the second layer of the film, the second investigation that Scottie undertakes, but this time around we know more than he does. So we watch Scottie as he puts the pieces of the puzzle back together. Perfectly ironic is the fact that Scottie’s instinct drives him to undergo a similar act of creation Judy did before. He recreates Judy into Madeline. With this action, Scottie does exactly what Gavin did. The facts build up and Scottie brings his ghostly beloved back from the dead, only to hit another roadblock when his set of facts overflow and he realizes he’s been duped. Again, he follows his instinct, bringing Judy back to the scene of the crime, leading him to witness the death of yet another.

Though it might be tough to recreate the original psychological impact of the first viewing of Vertigo, there are facts and details Hitchock sprinkles into the first two acts, his own little clues that foreshadow what’s to happen. My personal favorite occurs in the bookstore Scottie and Midge visit. He tells them of the old days of San Francisco, and the actions of Carlotta Valdes’ husband: “He kept the child and threw her away.” This time, he kept a copy and threw away the original.

Orpheus & Mirrors

Technically, thematically and metaphysically, the mirror is the most important aspect of Orpheus. Through this reflective prop, the film creates impressive special effects, makes a self-reflective commentary about society and creates a complex world that’s part-illusion, part-reality.

The first time a mirror comes into play occurs when Orpheus is in the bedroom of The Princess, who we later learn to be Death. After thoroughly confusing Orpheus as to whether his reality is real—“sleeping or dreaming, the dreamer must accept his dreams”—Death sits down in her chair, the mirror in front of her reflecting both her expression and that of Orpheus. The second of the many cryptic radio emissions syncs with the visual: “the mirrors would do well to reflect further.” On its second repetition, the mirror suddenly cracks.

The mirror cracking is one of the film’s early signs that something otherworldly is happening, but the action also reveals the technical mastery director Jean Cocteau displays when it comes to filming mirrors. In the later scene when Death and Cegeste take Eurydice to hell, the camera and editing tricks are on full display. When Death smashes the mirror and exits into the world of the beyond, the pieces magically reassemble, a clever trick of running the film backwards (and, maybe, a far-off reference to the radio call: “silence goes faster backwards”). More technical wizardry is at work when the camera’s positioning—directly in front of the mirror—should result in its visible reflection, but, as Death walks out, it’s nowhere to be seen. As the film was made in 1950, this required some impressive editing, most likely some placement of filmstrips upon each other. This act, layering one reality upon another, reflects what occurs in the story as well: Death passing from one world to the next.


Generally, the film’s use of mirrors intertwines well with the larger social and human commentary that the film makes. The centerpiece of this commentary arrives when Orpheus arrives, only to find his wife dead. Heurtebise tries to calm him down and instruct him how to save Eurydice. While both stare into the mirror, Heurtebise relates to Orpheus: “Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life and you’ll see death at work.” An important distinction between the two “deaths” lies here. In the first line, where “Death” is capitalized, Heurtebise is clearly talking about the character Death, the Princess, whom the audience has already seen travel through the very mirror the two characters are standing in front of. In the second sentence, however, the word is lowercase, showing that he is generally speaking of death. And what he says is absolutely true. Mirrors, over life’s span, show the physical decline of a person: skin sags, hair recedes, eyesight worsens. One watches death approaching with each glance into the mirror.


Finally, mirrors are the gateway between the illusionary world of the afterlife and our present day reality. When Death first transports using the mirrors, to Orpheus’ great surprise, Cocteau teases the audience with what lies beyond. The camera briefly jumps into the world behind the mirror, showing Orpheus struggle on the other side, trying to physically force his way in. When the camera cuts to a close up, it suddenly feels like Orpheus (or, rather, actor Jean Marais) might be pounding into the screen itself, trying to escape the fictional world of the film into the audience’s. This strange interplay between illusion and reality continues, as Orpheus falls asleep at the mirror in the house and wakes up in a mirror lodged in a desert. Mirrors have the inexplicable effect of transporting characters to other times and place. They literally are tools of metaphysics.

And Cocteau’s own twist on the classic Greek tale also involves mirrors. In the tale, Orpheus sends his wife back to hell by looking at her. Here? He sees her reflection in the mirror.

Wild Strawberries & Addressing the Self

“In our relations with other people, we mainly discuss and evaluate their behavior and character. That is why I have withdrawn myself from nearly all so-called relations,” our protagonist, Isak Borg relates via voiceover to the audience in the opening scene of Wild Strawberries. He proceeds then to evaluate his own behavior and character, saying he is “rather lonely” and a “pedant”, but his life has been full of “hard work”. The camera wanders around the room, an academic fortress complete with grand guardian dog perched by his side, and the voiceover provides the background behind each photograph. This opening montage is a neatly wrapped package of identity: it begins and ends with a low-angle shot that gives a sense of royalty to Isak, but also jumps around the room, mimicking the movements of a visitor’s eyes.

But, as Isak relates, inter-personal relations are made up merely of discussions and evaluations of behavior and character. This introduction, which features Isak addressing himself for the audience, finds its pair in another instance of addressing the self. This quaint, warm and grandfatherly introduction comes in great contrast to the stark and terrifying nightmare sequence where Isak confronts a balloon faced version of himself—which promptly pops/dies—as well as a version of himself in a casket. Bergman skillfully employs non-diegetic music, including an ominous heartbeat when Isak roams the streets alone and some classic horror music when the presumably dead casket-Isak grabs the dream Isak and brings him closer. The final shot of the nightmare sequence is an intense, close up from Isak’s POV as casket Isak pulls him closer to him. This is not only a literal wake up call (the horror awakens Isak) but also a thematic one. This version of himself challenges the introductory one he provided the audience—Isak realizes that, if he continues to live his life in a state of withdrawal, he might end up like the Isak in the casket: knocked off the carriage and left only with his unconscious self.


So the film’s catalyst is evident: Isak needs to change. He is not fully sure how to effect change, but he starts by deciding to drive seven hours rather than fly on, career-wise, the most important day of his life. Isak senses that he needs to re-involve himself with the rest of humanity; maybe his interactions will prove his theory of people incorrectly. When his estranged daughter-on-law joins him on the road trip, it’s the first step in a journey that involves Isak revisiting his past and taking on the history behind his unhappiness. With each new piece of background knowledge—and each new passenger picked up along the way—Isak and the audience learn what has led to Isak’s dissatisfaction with human interaction, mainly that his brother stole the love of his life and his mother was unflinchingly control-driven.

These dips into the past, mainly occurring when Isak drives up to the home where his family used to spend his summers, are both pleasant and painful for Isak. He lights up when seeing his cousin Sara, the love of his life, but then suffers from serious loneliness and emptiness when he watches his brother snatch her away and Isak, ghost-like, hovering in the corner, watches the lunch table filled with his vibrant family members. Ultimately it seems, the pleasure of others outweighs the pain, as he relates to the local gas-station owner that “I wish I stayed here.” The film addresses the pain that is felt when addressing the past: Isak has another dream involving, presumably, a factual past event where he watches his wife, whom he doesn’t truly love or fight for, cheat with another man. But Isak’s past and his work bring him great pleasure, as evidenced at the ceremony. The road trip forces Isak to understand and get to know his daughter-in-law and the pressing issues she has with her husband, Isak's son Evald. Isak ultimately gets involved with the situation, speaking to Evald at the film’s close and relating his desire to move on and let go of grudges.


Though the film does end on too upbeat a note—as if all the negative past events are negated—the audience has witnessed a significant change in Isak. For pain and pleasure, Isak has successfully addressed himself, his hypocrisies, his faults, his wrongdoings, and has made a decided effort to change. Withdrawal, it seems, does more harm than good.

Breathless & Aimless Unhappiness

“After all, I’m an asshole,” our protagonist tells us in the opening scene of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, letting us know that though we might not want to root for him, we will have to deal with him the whole movie. “After all, it’s gotta be done,” he reminds us, underneath the girly newspaper he holds up.

Michel is a pleasure-seeker; he follows his id and schedules nothing. His first action, stealing a car, exhibits his recklessness and impulsive nature. He justifies it later on while speeding away, telling the camera in almost documentary fashion, that it’s just “as old Bugatti said, cars are for driving, not stopping.” Michel drives the way he lives his life; there’s no thinking about consequences, there’s simply the one speed he maintains and neither the women he sleeps with nor the police chasing after him can derail him. His actions dictate his disregard: he orders breakfast and then leaves, he declines money his female acquaintance offers but then steals it when she’s not looking, he walks into a hotel room and takes a key, he knocks a man out in the bathroom and steals his wallet. Even when he sees the death of a man on the street, an omen when considering Michel’s eventual fate, Michel takes a look and then continues reading the paper. The death gives him no pause, much like his murder of the cop early on. Life's largest consequence has no effect whatsoever.


All these actions reveal Michel’s lack of a moral center. He’s aimless and unsatisfied. But, nonetheless, he does little of actual value to change his situation. He expresses to Patricia that he can’t live without her, but, as soon as she leaves him, he curses her off. The only thing that might salvage Michel is Patricia. Like the girl in the story Michel relates about the bus driver who stole five million francs, Patricia could be his confident, his partner in crime. But Patricia is under a similar trance of aimlessness. Her confusion and what she wants is understood when she tells Michel: “I want you to love me, but at the same time I don’t want you to. I love my freedom also.” This greatly contrasts with what she says later about freedom, mainly, that she doesn’t have any. “I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or if I’m not free because I’m unhappy,” she says to Michel in her room. Though she fights a battle against an unknown something—herself? the country? her job?—her cognizance of her state of mind makes her more capable of handling reality than it does Michel. She is a visitor in France, and can always retreat home, whereas Michel has no grounding or homebase.


Ultimately, however, she turns him in, disbelieving in his self and only believing in his unhappiness. “When we talked, I talked about me, you about you, whereas we should’ve talked about each other,” he relates. This vague reasoning, that they could’ve changed something to be happier, is as aimless as the rest of their actions in the film. Michel, despite this reality, continues to run even after the police mortally wound him. He sprints away, because life is for running, not stopping, and in the film’s final moment, he brings the theme full circle. He insults himself, but the policeman mishears him, relating to Patricia that his last words were the insult directed towards her. But, this misinterpretation, along with the “mask”—the series of three facial gestures—that Michel passes along to Patricia, perhaps signifies the passing of his own aimlessness as well.

The Modernity of M

Fritz Lang had incredible foresight. The editing, cuts, and usage of sound he displays in M is beyond modern. First and foremost, this is evident in the non-static nature of the camera. The camera constantly follows its characters (evidenced when the child-killer, Hans Beckert, is on the prowl) and often acts as the eyes of different characters (when the detective searches around the room). Especially impressive is the way Lang moves the camera through narrative structures: when the police chief receives a file and begins to read through it, the camera jumps back to the scene of the crime to provide visual reminders for the viewer. When the two larger groups—the police and the underworld—both discuss the hunting of Beckert, Lang jumps between the scenes, thematically connecting the two groups and creating an ironic dialogue and comradery between the two sides of the law.


Lang also takes advantage of sound. Most chilling is Beckert’s whistling of “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, which is the ultimate reason for Beckert’s capture (made by, ironically, enough, a blind man: one of the many aspects of Lang’s larger commentary about the efficiency of the police.) Lang uses sound—or, rather, lack thereof—to heighten the child killer’s violent libido when he stares at sets of knives (his weapons) and the reflection of a young girl in the mirror of a store window. The sound of the hustle and bustle in the streets fades off, and the silence is almost louder than noise. Presented in front of the killer are the two things he lusts most for: weapons and a fresh, young victim. When Beckert screams to the underworld at the film’s close that “I want to escape, to escape from myself! But it’s impossible. I can’t escape. I have to obey it,” the audience understands, as they have already witnessed Beckert unable to control his horrifying desires.

Lang also interconnects the murders and Beckert’s insanity with strong and recurring visual cues; when he tracks down the victim he sees in the store reflection, he briefly passes a window with a bouncing arrow. This reminds the viewer of the ball Elsie bounced at the beginning of the film. To the right of the arrow is a hypnotic, black and white swirl, denoting Beckert’s lack of self-control and forward the idea that he is under a sort of id-driven spell. The placement of the two items—the arrow in the left half and the swirl in the right—is the exact placement of Elsie’s ball and Beckert’s shadow when the two characters meet. The swirl also visually connects with the empty and barren staircase that leads up to the Beckmann’s apartment: both give off an optical illusion that jars the viewer.


“It’s me, pursuing myself,” Beckert screams to the underworld. What an incredibly apt way to describe his insanity as well as Lang’s process. Not only does this line link with Beckert’s shadow—how he was first presented to the audience—but also sums up the film’s central purpose: the character’s and the audiences’ pursuit of Beckert. The camera jumps and cuts to different physical locations, mirroring the thoughts of the characters during the investigation. M is a remarkably early example of how the camera interprets the power of the mind.

Rashômon & Subjective Truth

“I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it at all,” the woodcutter states gravely, bleakly looking out into the rain. The priest, with an equally stony expression, offers no spiritual explanation, following the woodcutter’s gaze and futilely turns to the outside rain for an answer.

Thus opens Rashômon. This stark, wandering and vague philosophizing prepares the audience for a similarly answerless narrative. It begins with the woodcutter telling his tale about finding the body. Akira Kurosawa thematically ties the visuals with the narrative by deploying a tracking shot aimed straight into the sun. It’s as if trying to find truth is as blinding and difficult as staring into the sun. This shot is equally powerful to the one where the woodcutter finds the body: the camera, at a low-angle, is where the face of the unknown (at the time) victim should be, his hands raised in the final moments of self-defense. This creates a menacing frame for the camera, and the woodcutter’s expression mirrors that.


This ominous pose suits the story well, and when each character begins to spin his or her version of how the samurai died, the lurking feeling remains that we will never find out or discover the meaning. The four different takes of the same event add an interesting dimension to the discourse about subjectivity and truth. Ultimately, nothing is really concluded about what actually happened, but what is concluded is a commentary about human nature. The existence of these different, subjective truths, in an existential sense, makes the search for meaning all the more difficult. When the woodcutter relates that he “doesn’t understand his own soul”, it couldn’t be more clear that the events that conspired shook him to his core.

Kurosawa often places the camera in such a way that it visually links the audience with different characters; in a way, Kurosawa personifies the audience. When the woodcutter originally finds the body of the husband, for example, he stares down directly at the camera, in front of which is the husband’s hand. Later on, during the bandit’s retelling, he relates how he overtook the wife and began raping her. During these initial frantic moments, the camera, aimed up at the sky, spins around in circles, making us the wife and her world spins out of her own control. In both these moments, we are victimized, an interesting contrast to what we visually become during the trial scenes. There, the defendants sit on the ground before us in extremely vulnerable positions, and answer questions that we don’t hear but they can. The characters are relating their stories, confessing their “truths” to a voiceless character. The film strips away the middlemen: we, the members of the audience, are truly the ones who will judge the characters.


At the same time, however, Kurosawa makes sure, through his camera personification and our exposure to all these different stories, to make us experience each subjective truth of the characters as fully as possible. And, since no one truth results from all the recountings of the murder and rape, this disturbs the characters and us. The profound effect that is made on the woodcutter and the priest has more to do with the differing claims of each character than the actual crimes committed. The fact that each character’s tale cannot be true, but they nonetheless stand by it and subsequently paint each other with such inhumane strokes really shakes the third parties, and, ultimately, the audience.