Decalogue Five: Thou Shall Not Kill

"The law should not imitate nature, the law should improve nature.

People invented the law to govern their relationships.

The law determined who we are and how we live. We either observe it, or we break it.

People are free. Their freedom is limited only by the freedom of others.

Punishment means revenge.

In particular when it aims to harm, but it does not prevent crime.

For whom does the law avenge?

In the name of the innocent? Do the innocent make the rules?"

So, I'm writing this review, but I don't want to. I told Alex I would, then I gave it back to him, took it back, gave it back, and finally somewhere along the way it was generally understood that I was writing this review. Here's why I don't want to: (1) it's about the death penalty, so it's a messy subject; (2) it's the most non-linear of the episodes thus far, which might go to the issue that this is a truly messy issue with no easy answers -- this was not an easy episode to watch; (3) with those 2 issues being said, this episode was my favorite so far by far. It's hard to review what you love (see my Wall-E review for confirmation of that).

I am against the death penalty. It's been quite a hard road to come to this position, but I've come to it because the death penalty essentially de-humanizes the criminal. It makes them a non-person, having forfeited all rights. I'm reminded of the ancient practice where the condemned, just before their execution, would have their name erased from the civic registry. It's like they never existed. I just can't see the redemptive aspect there. I know many will argue that being on death row increases the possibility that the criminal will seek redemption with the victim's family and with Christ, but that's simply not justification for denying someone their humanity.

The Krysztof's (Kieślowski and Piesiewicz) are in full agreement here. This is not a balanced look at the death penalty. This is not Dead Man Walking. The state machinery of death is given the same level of scrutiny and condemnation as the punk kid who kills the cabbie. The Watcher even looks on both with indignation (holding a "measuring rod" in one scene -- is this the image of the Law as the "Standard" to measure up to?)

I love that they didn't make the criminal "good at heart," like some contemporary version of Jean Valjean. He's not. He's a punk. He watches in amusement as some fellow hooligans run down and beat up some poor victim. He tosses rocks off of overpasses and watches the ensuing automobile accidents. And, in one bizarre (and downright disgusting) moment, he tosses a young man into a urinal because he came whistling into the restroom. He's one brief step from a sociopath. He doesn't have a reason to kill the cabbie, he does because he can.

He's not good. But he's human. And the state can't deny that. The way they kill is in diametric oppostion to how the kid kills, but that doesn't make it any more justifiable. The kid's strangling of the cabbie takes a long time, and after a number of attempts, and various instruments used, he finally finishes the job. The state's method is quick and clean -- a simple jerk of the neck in a small antiseptic room. They've done this enough to have the procedure down pat. But I'm left wondering at the end of the film if the motivation for the state's killing isn't too far different from the kid. The state kills because it can.

The hero of the film is the young idealistic lawyer. The film opens with his monologue quoted above. He's been asked the question before, and the answer seemed easier then (he doesn't, as I recall, mention if his answer hasn't changed -- as mine would have over the years). He's the hero of the film because he never loses the young man's humanity. What the state says is "justice," he rightly calls "revenge."

When we look at something like capital punishment from a distance, the answers seem clear, the problems look inconsequential. But ethics is not done in a vacuum. We deal with the lives of people, messed-up people who despite the evil that works in them and through them never quite forgo everything that makes them human. Theory is easy; people are hard. One of the key image/metaphors used throughout these series of films is glass. Kieślowski and his DP's (he used a variety of them) are masters of using refractions and reflections. We often look and judge the characters of these films through glass (a glass "darkly"?). Maybe that's the point -- we use our moralism as a way to maintain distance and separation from these people's actual lives. We base our judgment of people based purely on image rather than truth. The truth is: whatever the evil in them, they never cease being what God created.

After Alex and I finished the film, we went back to hear (and copy down) the monologue that begins the film. And after the line, "Do the innocent make the rules," Alex said something like, "Sounds like 'he who is without sin cast the first stone.'" Indeed it does.

Decalogue II & III: Show, Don't Tell

Okay, I’m beginning to see why everybody who has seen these films calls them brilliant. Really, the reason is quite simple: it’s because they are frickin’ brilliant. No doubt about it. They are really something special. Just to show all you high-budget punks out there – made-for-TV can be all up in that bizz, yo.

Two things that I find especially amazing about these particular films: the shots and the storytelling. Let me explain.

1. One of my favorite shots of all time is in the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Those of you who know the movie may remember the scene where he burns the house down. There is a shot as he strikes the match and you see the “Keep Away From Children” warning as the fire flares up – it’s properly scrumtrullescent.[1] Well, in The Decalogue, those kind of shots are almost common. From the I, there was the milk in the tea. In II, there are delicious shots of a cigarette box starting on fire, the water dripping from the ceiling, the wasp struggling in the tea. This last was especially poignant, a perfect representation of the feeling fairly common for humans in the universe. In III, there is that wonderful shot when Ewa leaves her mother’s house and we watch her leave from the window. Several overhead shots such as these give us a strange perspective of the events – one reviewer suggested this may be “God’s perspective.” In any case, this kind of choreography and direction give us a strange, life-like surreal quality to our viewing – it feels like we’re there, it feels like our own story is being told. The almost constant absence of music, the simple, long framing of shots, and the natural dialogue complete with awkward pauses and introspective silence all work towards a very “mundane” reality within the films.

2. In most creative writing classes and books, most likely the principle rule you will learn is “Show, Don’t Tell.” The idea is, don’t tells us, “He was mad.” Show us. Show us his shaking hands. Make us hear his tone of voice. Have him kick something. Anything other than tell us through simple exposition: He was mad. The Decalogue manifests this principle perhaps better than any film I’ve ever seen.[2] There is almost no exposition at all. No conversations happen that explicitly relate to us the plot, tell us what is going on in explicit terms, even tell us what the characters are thinking and feeling. We are shown the story by a woman ripping the leaves off of a plant, a man toppling the donation candles before an altar, a woman standing at a window smoking a cigarette. The film forces you to interact with it, to experience it along with the characters.

Decalogue II tells the story of a woman whose husband is sick, perhaps dying. She tries to get the doctor that is caring for him, who lives in the same building as her (remember that all the stories take place within this one building), to give her a prognosis: will he die or not? The doctor refuses to give a diagnosis. She pushes him, explaining that she is pregnant – but with another man’s child;[3] if he lives, she will get an abortion, if he dies, she will keep the child. Still, the doctor will not give prognosis. “I have seen patients that should have died and pulled through, and patients that should’ve been fine, but died inexplicably.” Eventually the doctor does give in, and his “prognosis” serves to illustrate the commandment “Thou shall not take my name in vain:” No one but God decides who lives and dies. That is the realm of his authority alone.

Decalogue III is probably, thus far, the most abstract examination of a commandment. An exposition of the Sabbath, we have a man who is drawn away from his family on Christmas Eve by a former lover in the midst of crisis. They spend the night together, and we unravel their complex history as well as the deep layers of interaction between them as the night progresses. The main idea seems to be the principle of family within the Sabbath command. It is an examination of fidelity and regret.

I am excited to see the rest. Every 50 minutes feels like a lifetime. They are not exactly fun to watch. But they are encompassing. They are engaging yet “normal” stories that never fail to leave you wondering, and identifying with all the characters portrayed. There are no black and white people – each story is told from all perspectives, so that while some characters are better than others, we find it hard to judge any of them, because they are people. The Decalogue is a meaningful, purposeful look at life, and thus, as we watch, we find that, in some strange way, we are looking at ourselves.

5/5 (for both)

---

[1] Those of you who have not seen the movie, stop everything you are doing right now, give yourself a swirly, then acquire and watch the movie with all the quickness that you can possible muster. This is life or death.

[2] Other films that do this really well off the top of my head: Punch-Drunk Love, Darjeeling Limited (really, any Wes Andersen film), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Yojimbo (and it’s Western interpretation, Fistful of Dollars), and National Treasure. This last one is a complete joke, as National Treasure actually serves as a prime example of how to rely completely on exposition for moving the plot forward.

[3] This (adultery) has been a theme in two of the films thus far, and we have not even gotten to the commandment on adultery.

The Decalogue I: Adventures in Polish Film-making

It has begun…

The Decalogue. Adventures in Polish film making. And if all ten are as good and as thought-provoking as the first, then we should be in for an adventure indeed.

By way of introduction, the Decalogue is a Polish made-for-TV miniseries that was made in the late 80’s. All ten films are centered on the tenants of a modern-day housing project, where the characters of each independent episode sometimes interact. The intent of each of the ten independent episodes is to examine, interpret, or otherwise contemplate each of the Ten Commandments.[1] Over the course of approximately the next ten weeks, I would like to review each of the ten episodes in kind.

The first episode is a clear and harmonious look at the first of the Commandments: Thou shall have no other gods before me. The story centers around a boy and his father. The boy is an incredibly inquisitive child, and also very intelligent. He shares his father’s love of computers and math equations, and the concreteness therein. The father, in his love of the mathematic esthetic, has ceased to have any concrete beliefs about God and the afterlife, and even betrays strong skepticism the existence of a soul.

The philosophy of the film is heavy from the get-go. We begin with a child’s questions about death and afterlife, and the father’s own agnostically-formulated answers. This is contrasted by the parallel relationship of the young boy with his aunt (his father’s sister), who believes in God. “God is…very simple, if you have faith,” she says.

The computer stands as a centrifugal force. Several times throughout the film, information is plugged into the dead, staring green and black monitor, then spits out its perfectly compiled information. The philosophy we are to understand behind this computer is espoused in a principle scene where the father, apparently something of a college professor, waxes eloquent on a modernistic, rationalistic understanding of language and mathematics, in which he posits, despite the many difficulties of language and culture, that there can be some kind of grand, mathematical, master language. In this way, he comes to view computers, machines, with the possibility of personality. This belief will have some disastrous consequences – which he probably could not prevent regardless.

The pinnacle scene for me came when the father stares into the dead face of his monitor. There is no information to plug in at this point to avoid the great disaster. No simple equation. Life has struck, and there is no mathematical language to give it meaning. As I watched, I could only think, “You gotta destroy that computer. That’s the only solution. Scorched earth policy, man. Tear down the idols.” And echoing in my mind was Isaiah 44, especially that great line: “All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses neither see nor know, that they may be put to shame.”

The acting is fabulous and believable, especially the wide-eyed wonder and passion of our young boy[2] (I’m not going to even pretend to know these Polish people’s names). The directing impressive. Towards the beginning, there is shot of a tea cup that I really like. “The milk’s sour,” the boy says; yes, that and then some. As the first scene comes full circle with the last, we are left only to contemplate how little we know, how much we trust, and what certainty there really is.

I would consider it a pro-religious film, and at the least, not anti-religious. It is interesting to note that this was made and aired behind the Iron Curtain, during the Cold War. I don’t know if the director/writer ascribes to any Judeo-Christian or Judaistic tradition, or what influence that has had on his life. The father’s name in the first film is Krzysztof, as is the director’s and writer’s. I don’t know if this is autobiographical, the tumultuous journey of the modernist (maybe it’s just a really popular name). But I do know that twenty years later, he has still given us something very important to think about. Especially when we consider just what idols in which we regularly put our faith.

5/5

---

[1] I believe that it goes by the Roman-Catholic and Lutheran lists.

[2] And to me, this boy and the boy from Searching for Bobby Fisher, they really look a lot alike…just thought you might like to know.