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.