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Let Me In

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American remake of the superior Danish vampire movie, “Let the Right One In.” Story of a shy, sensitive and withdrawn young 12 year old boy, Owen, who unwittingly becomes good friends with a 12 year old girl vampire, Abby. Abby has just moved into the neighborhood with her dad, an older man who goes out to kill innocent young people and drain their blood for his vampire daughter to drink. Meanwhile, Owen is bullied by an increasingly violent older kid at school. Of course Owen doesn’t know Abby is a vampire at first but they become fast friends and her strange actions become more apparent to Owen.

The name of the film is the heart of the theme of this moral tale about the seduction and temptation of evil in our lives. The notion is that a vampire cannot enter the victim’s home dwelling unless she is invited in. Otherwise, she will die. So by the time Owen discovers Abby is this evil monster (he even calls his estranged dad to ask him is there real evil), he is already very fond of her, “going steady” and finds it hard to stomach her need for feasting, but finds it even harder to say goodbye to her. He is drawn to her. He is seduced by her sweetness toward him. There is no sexual aspect brought into this film, which keeps it on track thematically. There are several times where she is called “Sweetheart” or “Sweetie” by several people illustrating how sweet and innocent evil can come disguised into our lives. Is not Satan disguised as an Angel of Light? So, we are responsible for accepting the seduction of sin for a season.

So when Owen wants to see what happens to Abby if she is not asked into his home, she starts to bleed and die. He quickly yells out “you can come in!” to stop it. This is the point where Own has allowed his moral senses to be dulled by the friendliness of the temptation. He has stepped over the line. She has been so good to him, he can’t bear to see her in pain. And isn’t that exactly how all evil seduces us? It’s always “greyed” so that we blind ourselves to its true nature. She’s been a friend to him when no one else has, she’s taught him to stick up for himself with the bully, she’s even tried to share his candy with him, which causes her to vomit since vampires can’t eat candy of course.

It takes place in the 1980s and we see on the TV a news clip of Ronald Reagan talking about fighting evil by the power of Jesus Christ. Owen’s mother prays to Jesus Christ before their meals. Is this some kind of religious reference? Often, this is done to make political statements, but in interviews the director has indicated that it was not a political statement so much as a dealing with a state of mind in that era where the notion of evil being outside the United States instead of inside of us. So the movie deals with evil as an essence within us that takes us over.

By the end of the film, Abby’s father has died and so she needs someone to take over his task of providing blood. Owen takes that place as we see him traveling with her box that she sleeps inside. So Owen has embraced the dark side in this coming of age story, a demonic Romeo and Juliet that illustrates the subtle seduction of evil within us and how we succumb willingly and end up justifying the evil that we do.

Buried

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This thriller is based on a high concept that actually works surprisingly well. It’s the story of a US government contracted trucker in Iraq who wakes up after an attack, only to discover that he has been buried alive in a wooden coffin somewhere in the desert. His kidnappers leave him a cell phone to try to get a million dollars ransom or they’ll let him die. And the entire film takes place in the coffin with Paul, played by Ryan Reynolds. You would think no way could a feature film 1 hour and 40 minutes long be visually interesting enough to hold attention. But it does because it is dramatically entrapping.

As Paul seeks to call his loved ones and those who might help rescue him, we learn he is working for a government contracted company to drive supplies in Iraq for the US government. The film incarnates anti-war politics into the thriller plot. It’s message is that of guilt by complicity. The point is made several times that Paul sees himself as an innocent citizen just making a living doing his job, and he is therefore not responsible for the war. While the kidnappers are supposedly not terrorists, just Iraqis who are reacting out of desperation because their country is being decimated by the war brought on by the United States. As Paul says he’s not a soldier, just a guy with a family, we hear the kidnapper say that he is just an Iraqi citizen and his family is being destroyed by the US.

So the filmmaker makes the same moral equivalency argument that terrorists make, namely that innocent civilians are just as guilty as soldiers and deserve to die because they go along with the military. Knowing this is the moral, makes you immediately know how it has to end: with Paul’s death. He cannot ultimately be rescued because then his guilt would not be punished according the values that the filmmakers are espousing in this moral sermon.

An anti-corporate message is also communicated as we see the cold heartless bureaucrat from the corporation who hired him using a contractual technicality to fire him on the phone while he is in the coffin, thus freeing the corporation from responsibility and insurance accountability to his family.

The Town

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Crime Drama. The story of a bank robber in Charlestown NY who discovers love and tries to get out of the world of crime and violence he has succumbed to. The movie hook is that Charlestown is a small community in New York that has more bank robbers per square mile than anywhere in the US. The idea here is also family generations and the sins of the father. What does it cost to get out? What does it take to change your life? It’s a pretty formulaic story: Boy meets girl. Boy is a criminal so he loses girl. Boy tries to get out of crime in order to get girl.

The moral values in this film are confused. While Ben Affleck’s character Doug shows a moral soft spot – he doesn’t kill people, he keeps his insane step-brother in line, and he falls in love with the desire to get out, he protects his innocent girlfriend from violence – he ultimately does not do the right thing: accept justice and help the FBI. In this case, the FBI lead, Agent Frawley, is the pretty boy from Mad Men and while he is not the typical diabolical evil Lawman so often portrayed in these kind of movies, he is played without any depth. There is one moment meant to make this FBI guy ultimately cruel: When he brings Doug in and tells him that if he doesn’t help the FBI there will be a time when he will want to, and it will be too late and Lawley will tell him, with relish, to “go F— yourself.” Needless to say, when Doug gets away, he leaves a note for agent Lawley, telling him to “Go F— yourself,” thus winning the moral duel. Doug thinks that helping to turn in other criminals and their higher ups for their crimes is “ratting,” so instead he tries to run away with his new love. Only problem is the bad guys won’t let him. So he does this one last robbery.

The moral premise of the film is entirely unsatisfying storytelling because the audience is encouraged to root for a criminal to get away crimes and then not paying for his crimes. Doug never gives himself up to the law, never accepts his moral responsibility and never pays for his crimes. He thinks that feeling sorry, “getting out” and starting over, without paying for his crimes, is enough. One of the last lines of the film is Doug saying, “Even when you try to change, there are still consequences for the things you’ve done in life.” True enough, yet a cop-out, because this humanistic morality of a criminal feeling sorry and losing love seems to be all the payment required by these storytellers.

Doug does lose his chance at love because he runs away to Florida and apparently can’t have her. He gives her the bank robbery money to help out with a boy’s club. As if doing good with stolen money is redemption rather than returning it to the victims he violated. He tells a clerk while robbing the bank to not worry cause it’s “not her money.” No, it’s just thousands of other innocent people’s hard earned money. These are all manipulative tactics of trying to avoid the guilt from his actions, but they are not justice. Guilt would have been satisfied, justice appeased, had Doug accepted the penalty for his crime, helped the FBI to attain justice and accepted the rejection from evil criminals for doing so, or at least died fighting against his old life. So there certainly are morally satisfying conclusions that would have redeemed Doug. The filmmakers just didn’t choose them.

Devil

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Christian morality tale. This movie starts with a creative interesting open of establishing shots of the city – all of them upside down. No fancy effects, but it really sets the feel for what you are about to see – this is going to turn your worldview upside down.

It’s basically the story of five people trapped in an elevator in a business building and someone or something is killing them one by one. The protagonist is actually a cop on the outside trying to figure it all out as everyone is doing everything they can to free the people. The cop has his own “inner demons” as he works through his inability to forgive a kid who accidentally killed his family in a car accident. Thriller elements: the sound in the elevator is broken so the security can only talk to the people in the elevator, but cannot hear them, no pens to write on paper for the cameras and the cameras are too low resolution to see driver’s licenses. And of course cell phones won’t work here either. So the cop seeks to find out who each person is and to determine which one is killing each of them as the lights go out.

The cop soon discovers each of the trapped persons have records of crime, theft, lying, swindling or stealing. Not big crimes, but this movie reminds me of Phone Booth, in that it makes the point that there are no “little white sins.” We are responsible for every wrong we commit against others. The reason why each character is being taken by the devil is because they do not admit their evil. They do not accept the responsibility for the consequences of their life choices. This movie incarnates the very Bible verse put on the first screen of the movie:

“Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (1Peter 5:8)

Devil is an incarnate parable of this Bible verse. It begins with Catholic folk religion through a religious Mexican character telling the story. He tells of how his grandma would tell a story of the devil becoming flesh to make people face the consequences of their choices in life. And of course, that is what is happening in this story. At one point the religious character tells the unbelieving cop, “Everyone believes in the devil a little. Even those who say they don’t.” At the end of the movie, the last thing the storyteller says is that his grandma would tell him, “Don’t worry (about all the scary stuff of the devil), it only proves that if there is a devil, there has to be a God.” By the time it all starts making sense to the cop, he asks the religious character, “hypothetically speaking, if your story is true, how does one get out of it?” In other words, how do we find redemption? And then we see the last character facing the devil and confessing his sin and guilt toward others whose lives he destroyed. We hear an amazingly non-humanist biblical line that “no one is good,” none of us. The devil then tells him that’s not enough to save him, it won’t make up for all the evil he did in life. To which he replies, “I know.” He accepts damnation as justice for the wrongs he has done in life, and that such moral crimes MUST be paid for with blood. This is no easy humanist “forgiveness” without consequence. In Christianity, this is called “repentance”. It’s a change of mind that acknowledges one’s own guilt and our inability to pay for that guilt apart from our own damnation.

But then something amazing happens. With the last person dying in his arms, this “self-admitted” guilty character tells the Devil three times (making thematic emphasis) to “take me instead” of her, “because I deserve it.” This is of course substitutionary atonement, a distinctly Christian concept.

Substitutionary atonement is the doctrine that Jesus Christ died in the place of sinners in order to pay the penalty for their sins so they would not go to hell. Kinda like dying in the electric chair in the place of a capital criminal. The guy is not trying to be his own Christ, I think the filmmaker is making a veiled reference to Christ’s dying in our place because he knows that the Hollywood censors would not allow clear Christian faith in movies. (the other possibility is that the filmmaker is a religious humanist who wants to have Christian ideas without Christ, but this seems less likely since there are veiled references to Christianity all throughout. Although one piece of evidence that the filmmaker is not deeply familiar with the Christian faith is that he quotes the Bible verse at the beginning about the devil like a roaring lion, but gets the citation wrong. He puts it as “Peter 5:8, instead of 1 Peter 5:8.). At one point, the religious character starts praying a Spanish prayer into the intercom that I would like to know what he is actually saying. That might enlighten the meaning or theme.

The themes in this movie reflect a Christian worldview: The reality of the devil and damnation, forgiveness, confession, repentance, and accepting of one’s guilt for the choices we make, and redemption through confession and repentance and forgiveness, along with substitutionary atonement. I would make one caveat: Shyamalan worked on the story, but another person wrote it and another person directed it, so I am not sure how much Shyamalan’s own worldview comes into play here. But one possible interpretation may be that Shyamalan has a Hindu universalist type religious heritage, so he may be trying to subvert American faith by using our western cultural symbols like the Devil and other Christian notions to communicate his own idea of Karma. Though there are no references to past lives in the story there is a reference to the idea that we are responsible for everything that comes our way in life as consequences for our choices. But even here, reaping what we sow is also a Biblical idea.

Inception

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Boy, where does one begin? This is another philosophical opus by Christopher Nolan that pretty much confirms his rein as the king of intelligent philosophical mainstream filmmaking. The success of his films prove that people DO like deep mythological, ethical, and philosophical foundations to their stories.

The life of the mind and the question of what constitutes reality is a common theme in Nolan’s films, and Inception takes this to the limit. It’s main purpose appears to be exploring the nature of how ideas take hold in our minds, and how our cherished presuppositions are held by faith and “locked away” in our minds to such an extent that they determine what we think of reality. Those “unproven” subjective presuppositions about reality then guide and determine our behavior regardless of objective reality.

DiCaprio’s Cobb character leads a team of people who use sophisticated technology to be able to enter into people’s dreams in order to steal their secrets for competing corporations of what have you. The metaphor here is incarnated in each person having some kind of locked safe deep in their consciousness where they hide away their secrets they don’t want discovered. The dramatic challenge of the movie is when a client hires them to do the reverse, to plant an idea into a person’s consciousness, in order to get them to do something the client wants. This is what is called “Inception.” So they seek to find the “safe” in a target’s dreams where they can deceive him and place the notion that he should “break up his father’s corporate empire upon his father’s death.”

Nolan employs a lot of concepts about dreams that we are familiar with. He uses the notion of falling or death as what wakes us up from a dream. He applies the notion that time in a dream goes by much slower than in our real world, so if they go deeper into his consciousness to a deeper level dream, the time slows down even more.

But the hero’s journey of Cobb is his own guilt over the suicide of his wife, Mal. His guilt over her death is manifested by her showing up in all his dreams as a killer of the dream that makes him and others wake up. In short, she is the reality waker. But when we discover why, it makes it quite a powerful postmodern tale of the questioning of our notions of reality. It turns out that they both indulged in this dream world escape by creating dreams where they could experience their fantasies together. When Mal wanted to stay longer and longer in their dreams, Cobb tried to snap her out of it by placing an inception in her mind that this wasn’t reality, so she needed to wake up. And how does one wake up in a dream? By killing one’s self. The only problem is that this planted presupposition stayed with her into the real world and she thought that it too was a dream, so she killed herself to “wake up.”

Wow, our presuppositions (faith commitments) have real world consequences on our behavior, and it is not always for the good. But also, this is raising the question “How do we know our notions of reality are true?” We act upon certain unproven notions that find their way into our minds through the narratives that we live or observe or construct. In a way, the movie is a metaphor for how those beliefs enter into our mental lockboxes. Through storytelling. The team of dream thieves are storytellers (like filmmakers) who craft entire worlds and pretend to be characters in a story that embodies a certain belief about reality. It implants themes about reality and how to behave into our consciousness, that we then hold onto and use as our basis for acting in our own world.

I entered the movie thinking, “This is about dreams. If he concludes, “it was all a dream,” I am going to be ticked off.” So I was happy when he ended on the note that left it ambiguous whether or not it was a dream for the hero. I think the point was that the movie is self-consciously NOT real, but a dream of reality that tries to engage in an inception in our minds. Therefore in the movie he can never conclude with an absolute statement about the “reality” of the film. I believe that is his point as a postmodern filmmaker: He wants us to question reality, and he is not going to conclude whether the “reality” in the movie is reality, precisely because of his epistemic commitment to questioning reality with the nature of stories. This explains why he mixes dream elements with reality elements. For example, the fact that he wears a wedding ring in the dream world, but not in the real world, and the kids are a couple years older at the last shot, BUT there are dream world indicators in the real world, such as the walls closing in on Cobb as he runs from the bad guys, and the fact that the kids are in the same exact position at the end “reality” scene as they are in the dream scenes. He wants us to question reality, but he is not going to give us an answer.

Quite clever. A story about how the power of stories accomplish their goal of affecting our consciousness and constructs of reality.

The Last Exorcist

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This movie is a particular genre that I enjoy for its prophetic edge. I call it Found Footage Horror. It’s the idea that the movie we are watching was the footage that was shot by someone making a documentary about something very dangerous that leads to their demise. The Blair Witch Project was the first (and still among the best), Paranormal Activity was the biggest money making movie in history and was this genre. And now The Last Exorcism.

The story is that these kids are making a documentary of an exorcist who has lost his faith and become more of a secular humanist. He used to fake exorcisms for people in order to help rid them of inner “demons” they naively thought were real, but from his view were simply manifestations of psychological problems. The exorcist’s name is Cotton Marcus, an obvious reference to Cotton Mather, infamous Puritan of the Salem witch trials. So Cotton is going to show us how he fakes the exorcisms because he has decided to stop engaging in them, due to someone dying in the midst of an exorcism. He is giving it all up in order to be more consistent with his secular humanism.

The only problem is that the subject of this last exorcism, Nell, is really possessed by a real demon. Only Cotton doesn’t know it because even when she manifests he is able to explain away her behavior as disturbed psychosis due to an incestuous relationship with her father. This movie explores the nature of blindness that a secular worldview can have when confronted with spiritual reality. The idea is that we are limited in understanding reality by our presuppositions and philosophical categories. If our worldview precludes any possibility of the supernatural, well then, if we are faced with the real supernatural, no matter how convincing it is, our worldview will explain away that reality in terms of our own categories and limited language and definitions. Thus, all “demons” are simply mental illness or psychological expressions.

So when the filmmakers discover at the very end that it was all real demonic possession, it is too late, and they are destroyed by the very evil they thought they could “expose” as fake. This is a movie about hubris, and how we are incapable of defeating evil if we do not have a proper understanding of it, and how we will be defeated by that evil for our willful ignorance of pride. It skewers the modernist pride of empirical “knowledge,” the hubris of Enlightenment scientism, the folly of materialism. It is a Christian morality tale in the extreme.

I love this genre because I think it embodies the new world of digital filmmaking where anyone can make a movie and we don’t need millions of dollars and big studio sets and cameras. We just need a great story and some good directing and acting. Also, with YouTube and Facebook etc. everyone is a filmmaker, putting up their little videos of their lives. This genre embodies that notion as well as the postmodern play with reality that much art is currently engaged in. There is no music soundtrack usually (Where it is used in this movie, it does not work) and the “real people with their personal cameras” technique is one more way to enhance the suspension of disbelief so necessary for a good movie to reach in and grab you. It carries a sense of reality one step beyond traditional moviemaking. Another aspect is the general lack of big special effects or “movie-like” sensational visuals. It is the illusion that this really happened, so the moment you see anything that smacks of Hollywood filmmaking, you are taken out of the movie. Where The Last Exorcism fails is precisely where it uses some special effects to show the demon and create an “inhuman” fetus birth. At that moment everyone pretty much sighs and the movie is ruined, unlike Blair Witch, which retained that sense of mystery to the end, giving you a creepy feeling of reality.

Clash of the Titans

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The worldview here is subversive Humanism: Mankind is the measure of all things, and human life is more worthy to experience than heaven or the supernatural. Demigod Perseus, (half man, half god) goes on a journey to save mankind from the destruction of the gods giving up on man. Zeus creates men in order to give the gods strength through their prayers, but men turn from the gods for their own glory, so Zeus lets out the wrath of Hades and the underworld to cause them to turn back to the gods and pray in their suffering.

The worldview of this movie is that this world holds more value than the afterlife. Perseus prefers his humanity and living in this world than in taking the offer to live with the gods. Deity is as petty and capricious as humanity, so why bother with them? One recurring phrase that emphasizes the theme is “One day, somebody’s got to take a stand. One day, somebody’s got to say enough.” I guess that means enough of the gods meddling in our lives because that’s pretty much what everyone complains about throughout the film. Another statement by Andromeda: “The gods need US! They need our prayers! What do WE need the gods for?”

The protagonist, Perseus, being the man of both worlds is the one struggling between which world is a better one, and he chooses the world of humanity over the gods, which is the message of the storytellers. I am reminded of the movie Troy, that made the same point that the gods have no power, they are merely religious beliefs, only humans actually accomplish anything by their own choices and this life is all that matters. Only in this movie, deity is real but it is STILL not worthy of the human experience.

When faced by Zeus, Perseus tells him about his men, “We live, we fight, we die for each other, not you.” When asked if he wants to go live with the gods in a safe heaven, Perseus replies, “I’ve got everything I need right here.” In this mythology, the gods feed off of men’s prayers. They need men or their powers fade. Hades even says, “It’s mankind who holds the keys to Hades’ rise. Only men can stop it.” Gods in this system are more like exalted humanity than transcendent deity. In fact, I think they are anthropomorphisms of social construction. In other words, they are real in the story, but the story is about showing how they are impotent or without ultimate authority in this life. In the beginning of the movie, someone shouts, “This is the age of man!” in defiance of the gods. I think this movie is a humanistic subversion of religion as reliant upon man, as the measure of all things. Man is “growing up” into his own by freeing himself from the capriciousness of deity in control of his life.

In an interesting apparently deliberate contrast with Christianity, Zeus says “I wanted men to worship me. But I didn’t want it to cost me a son.”

Alice in Wonderland

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This is a feminist tale of liberation from patriarchy. Alice is in a Victorian oppressive environment where women should just accept whatever man they can get and not have dreams of achievements, because otherwise they will end up as unhappy delusionary spinsters. That is what happens to Alice’s aunt, who held out for true love and is still waiting for her Prince Charming, that never came (And the aunt is delusionary because of it). Meanwhile, Alice is being pressured into marrying an obnoxious selfish idiot of a rich boy who sees her only as an accouterment to his life and who proposes to her right before she falls into the rabbit hole. What else does a young woman without means do in such an unfair world?

So Alice goes on this journey in a wild world where she becomes the prophesied one to kill the dragon of the wicked queen in order to save the land. She doesn’t see herself as a warrior of course, but ultimately embraces her fate and kills the dragon and saves the day. When she comes back into the real world, she now has the courage to say no to the marriage proposal and convinces her dead dad’s ex-business partner to employ her with the company because she is a dreamer like her dad and has big dreams about where to take the business.

This movie is a parable meant to encourage young women that they have the same mythology as men, that they can slay dragons just like a man, that there is no difference between the narrative of male and female being, and that ultimately, a woman does not need a man to be fulfilled, but she can find her meaning and purpose in a career or job, just like men do.

Repo Men

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Remy and Jake are repo men of the near future who repossess artificial bodily organs from those who can’t make their payments – thus killing them under the protection of the law of course. They are of course heartless and without concern for their victims, who are usually irresponsible in not making their payments, but mostly portrayed as victims of the cold heartless corporation who manipulates people into buying their organs purely for profit and don’t care at all about the humanity of those to whom they sell. When Remy has an accident, and has to get an artificial heart, and falls back on his payments then his friend Jake has to repo his heart so the chase is on.

Well, this story deals with the moral theme of the corporation and profit seeking vs. the human being. The recurring statement that the repo men use to rationalize their taking of human lives is, “A job is just a job.” This is of course, the rationale that many people use to avoid being accountable for what they do to make money in life, so it’s all very relevant to our world. But it is a very very bloody movie, especially the ending, which I think ties in with the morality of the tale being about money versus humanity, and blood is very human and is the price paid for the dehumanizing of life.

Jake even makes the argument that society is based on rules. If we don’t enforce the rules, then we have anarchy which is worse. But Remy concludes after he experiences the other side of the gun that “In the end, a job is not just a job. And if you want to change who you are, you have to change what you do.” So in this story, who we are is not separate from our behavior. We are what we do. We cannot divorce our private moral values from our public actions. I was just following orders simply will not do as an excuse for anyone. The movie is a tragic tale of warning as it ends with a very Brazil ending of the hero being taken over by technology and put in a dream state of control by the corporation, the ultimate end of our humanity if we let ourselves be driven by technology over our humanity, by artificiality over reality, by the pursuit of pleasure over accepting suffering.

Shutter Island

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Okay, this one has a real big spoiler that will ruin the movie if you read this before seeing it. So beware. This is a detective thriller about a pair of federal marshals who come to an island used to imprison the criminally insane. Their goal is to find an escaped inmate who may be dangerous. The lead marshal is Teddy (DiCaprio), who has a past. In fact, this movie ends up as A Beautiful Mind, only ugly. As Teddy uncovers a conspiracy of covering up by the establishment, he is led to the belief that they are experimenting on people. It all turns out to be an elaborate act put on by the staff to try to help Teddy overcome his own self delusion protecting himself from facing the evil of his wife killing their children and then he killing her. It’s all very bleak and pomo nihilistic. Teddy snaps out of it for only a moment, but then drifts back into his delusion and ends up having to have a lobotomy to stop it. Of course, we all know now that lobotomies are barbaric. But when Teddy muses at the end, “Which would be worse, to live as a monster or die as a good man?” One moment in the film, an orderly has a debate with Teddy claiming that survival of the fittest and power of the weak over the strong is the only thing that is real, morality is just a social construct. I am not really sure what to make of this. It seems very hopeless and without redemption. Perhaps Scorsese thinks the unwillingness to face one’s moral accountability is destructive delusion. Or maybe he thinks monsters survive because they are not hampered by the self destructive notions of the conscience in the good man, which kills him. I don’t know. It’s all too confusing and unclear.