Inessentials

I’ve been watching The Vampire Diaries recently, which is a really entertaining, surprisingly capable show that scratches my itch for marathon-able genre television. It reminded me, though, of something that I’ve seen repeated in a lot of other vampire mythologies. Well, okay, I’m really only familiar with The Vampire Diaries and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I’m pretty sure it’s not in all vampire stories, but it seems to have become one of the key points that all vampire stories need to accept or deny. I want to know: why do vampires respect property laws?

Vampires, the stories go, are not allowed to enter a house where a human being lives. Once that person dies, they can enter. Otherwise, they must get an invitation (usually, an invitation from the human habitant) in order to enter. Some myths allow the vampire to later be expelled, others don’t. The point is, vampires are bound – physically prevented somehow – from entering a human residence.

Perhaps this says something strange about me, but I find it much easier to go along with a story about vampires than I do to go along with a story that assumes (1) that property rights are natural and (2) that property-ownership is a non-vague metaphysical relation. Allow me to elaborate.

Some folks think that I stand in an ownership-relation to my body. I own my body. By extension, when I work the common land that belongs to everyone or no one, I make that thing mine by mixing my labor with it. (Yes, it’s called the labor-mixing argument. It’s in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government if you want the history of the idea. Homework: How did Marx exploit this principle?) I then have a natural right to whatever I’ve labored on. Slowly, by extension, and in ways that are not always clear, we extend ownership to many things that I didn’t mix my labor with. Usually, I paid for it and that makes it mine. Using arguments like these, some people see the right to own property as a natural right, one that applies to all human beings just because they are human beings. This is distinct from a legal right which is a right that applies only because the laws of the place I live say so. (More homework: Are civil right different from these two or identical to one or the other? What about human rights?)

Property rights as legal rights make a lot of sense to me. Property rights as natural rights don’t seem that plausible to me. The way to make them plausible, I think, is to say that they are natural in virtue of some aspect of human beings (or, more generally, rational agents), particularly something about the way they naturally congregate into societies.

What seems like a really bad way to argue that property rights are natural rights is to find support in either (1) the physical constition of the universe (that is in nomological law) or (2) in some broadly logical principle about objects and their relations (a metaphysical law). Nothing about my physical make-up as a member of homo sapiens logically requires that I be able to own property. And nothing about me as a physical being or as a rational agent seems to require it either (although some will disagree at this point).

All this means that it strikes me as extremely unlikely that the universe as it exists or as it would exist if there were vampires would be one that makes it a truth of the world that vampires must respect property lines. (I’m assuming a very plausible principle here: fictional worlds are like are own in every way not specifically marked as different. E.g., The world of The Vampire Diaries has gravity like ours and New York City has the same layout, but there is a place called Mystic Falls, there are vamipres, and so on.)

And while we’re at it, why the doorstop? Why not the curb? Property lines are ambiguous. And furthermore, whether or not someone lives at a place is vague (there are cases where it is not clear that I live there or I do not live there). I mean, have you ever tried to file taxes in two states? It’s a nightmare. How likely is it that there is some property principle in the universe (like gravity,or two objects can’t coexist at the same place at the same time) that is non-ambiguous and non-vague?

Vampires? I can roll with that. Ownership as a nomological or metaphysical law? That’s what bugs me.

UPDATE: I just watched TVD s1 e20, where Damon makes the following statement about threshholds, “Hotels and short-term leases are a gray area. Play it by ear.”

UPDATE 2: And to clarify, my objection is not that there can’t be vague objects in nature. (There’s no sharp border between a mountain and a valley, for instance.) It’s that even if property rights were somehow natural (which I don’t think they are), there’s no non-arbitrary reason for there to be a sharp cut-off (the doorstep/window) for something ambiguous and vague like where property lines end.

Chapter three in Film as Philosophy: Thinking on Screen. Earlier posts: overview, chapter one, chapter two.

First, a confession. Although I’ve expressed skepticism about whether films can do philosophy, I have used films while teaching philosophy to help students connect to ideas. In one case, I used the example from this week’s chapter, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, to help students find ways into Marx’s thought. Wartenberg makes many of the same connections to Marx that I drew out in class. However, I intentionally avoided making any implications about whether Chaplain intended his film to be understood this way, or whether the film was itself Marxist, or whether the film makes any arguments. Instead, I tried to show that there were parallels between how Chaplain presented the life of the factory worker and Marx’s critique of how capitalist systems dehumanize and alienate workers and left it at that.

Wartenberg sets out to convince me and other readers that we should not be so down on the illustrative aspects of films. Put simply, when a film illustrates a philosophical idea or argument, it counts as doing philosophy. Oddly, this argument is directed at some of his allies, those who say that films do philosophy, but who deny that illustrating an idea or argument counts as philosophy (which includes Christopher Falzon and Stephen Mulhall). This makes the chapter a bit unwieldy, since he takes on opponents on two fronts: both those who deny that films can do philosophy and those who assert that films can do philosophy, but all of whom deny that illustrating a philosophical theory would count as doing philosophy. In Wartenberg’s words, “I shall argue that films that illustrate previously articulated philosophical positions can, despite their status as illustrations, make a contribution to our understanding of the philosophical position that they illustrate” (32).

This leads to my favorite section of the book so far. To understand better what it means to illustrate a philosophical position and why this could itself be philosophy, Wartenberg attempts to do what no one, perhaps, has done before: provide an philosophical analysis of illustration. Although admittedly sketchy and underdeveloped, it’s exciting to see a philosopher wrangle an idea a previously untouched idea. Here’s a sketch of his sketch, leaving out all the juicy bits:

1. Illustrations “are always illustrations of something else.” So “intentionality” is “a mark of illustrations” (39). E.g., an illustration of the fence-painting scene from Tom Sawyer.
2. Some illustrations become “iconic representations” and are thus as essential to the book as the text (40). “This suggests that we should be wary of assuming that illustrations are less important or significant than the texts they are designed to illustrate” (41). E.g., John Tenniel’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He also suggests Winnie-the-Pooh and Harry Potter as other possible examples. I think Quentin Blake’s illustrations of Roald Dahl’s books would be another fitting example. Importantly, this claim is used to support Wartenberg’s thesis that “The fictional world of the book is constituted by both the written text and its illustrations” (41). This is a key step in his argument for the possibility of imagistic arguments.
3. More exciting still, Wartenberg turns to birding books, where “the illustrations are integral to the books’ purpose, for they convey a great deal of information that is not ascertainable from the written text alone” (42). This is a pretty fantastic example, as it shows how illustrations can be integral to a book’s purpose. In my notes, I wrote that an example from fiction might be James Thurber, whose illustrations are not only integral to the feel of his books, but (if I remember) occasionally are necessary to understand the short stories.
4. A final category of illustration are those that are eventually treated “as independent works of art” (43). E.g., Marc Chagall’s illustrations for Daphne and Chloe.

All of this discussion of illustration is not intended to show that films are philosophy because they fall into one of the categories of illustration of philosophical ideas; rather, Wartenberg’s aim is to show that being an illustration does not mean that the illustration is “subordinate to that which it illustrates” or should be denigrated for being an illustration (44). In other words, if films are illustrations of philosophical ideas, that does not disqualify from being being philosophy.

Wartenberg then turns to Modern Times as an illustration of “Marx’s theory of the exploitation and alienation or estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker in a capitalist economic system, a view that forms the core of his philosophical critique of capitalism” (44). After a brief lesson from Eisenstein about symbolic montage, Wartenberg proceeds to relate key scenes from the film along with how these scenes illustrate specific Marxist critiques. The conveyor belt sequence shows that the objects control the workers. The lunch sequence shows workers becoming commodified. And so on.

Wartenberg’s point is that visualizing a metaphor (or, presumably, an idea or an argument) “makes it more concrete” (50). And this can be an instance of philosophy, since its specificity is not objectionable (argued for in the last chapter) and its illustrative nature is not objectionable (argued for in this chapter). He also suggests that there might be two original contributions to Marxist philosophy contained in the film: “To the more obvious idea of a body becoming mechanical, Modern Times adds the notion of a mind so rigidified by routine that it also becomes a mere mechanism, seeing only evidence of patters it has been required to search for and recognize” (51). (This is a reference to the bolt-tightening movements being extended to non-bolts.) But even if there is nothing philosophically original in Modern Times, it still counts as doing philosophy. Just as philosophers are doing philosophy when the explain some philosophical theory (in, for instance, a published journal article), “cinematic illustrations of philosophical theories play an important role in transmitting the ideas developed by philosophical theories to a wide audience” (53).

Am I persuaded yet that films do philosophy? Not quite. I concede (as Wartenberg expects) that films illustrate philosophy. He anticipates the objection that illustrations qua illustrations are subordinate to the texts they illustrate and handles it quite nicely. But his treatment of what philosophy is extends to treating much of what philosophers do as non-original contributions to philosophy (which allows him to say that film’s non-original, illustrative contributions to philosophy also count as philosophy). He claims that ”…most philosophers philosophize without making original contributions to the discipline,” and that “…it is generally agreed that historians of philosophy are doing philosophy, even though their work is rarely taken to make an original contribution to philosophy itself rather than a contribution to our understanding of its history” (44). Wartenberg and I have very different views of our (shared) field of philosophy (and our shared sub-field of the history of philosophy). I think that my work in the history of philosophy is itself philosophy and is an original contribution to philosophy. In fact, if it weren’t original, it wouldn’t be philosophy. (Original here, doesn’t mean “never been said before” but “makes moves that originate with the author.”)

In other words, it seems to me that Wartenberg lowers the bar of what counts as philosophy in a way that allows in film.

Additional observations:

• Wartenberg continually refers to Chaplin’s character as “Charlie.” This isn’t in the film, is it? I thought the film left him unnamed (which would be more fitting of Wartenberg’s general reading of the film).
• From page 32: “Charlie Chaplin’s 1935 masterpiece, Modern Times.” From page 44: “Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece, Modern Times.”

Chapter one in Film as Philosophy: Thinking on Screen. More on the project here.

Wartenberg opens the book with synopses of three films, Rashomon, Blade Runner, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. All three films, he claims, “pose philosophical questions and even take stabs at answering them” (2). He uses this claim to make a very nice point: “This suggests that one cannot really understand these films without thinking about the philosophical issues they raise.” This is surely true, but it’s not true in a way that will help Wartenberg’s thesis, particularly, since fundamentally philosophical concepts undergird all sorts of practices and conversations. (You fill your car with gas because you believe the gas causes the car to go, even if you realize that formulation of causation is problematic.)

The clarified thesis that Wartenberg will defend is set off against two “extreme” claims. In answer to the question, “To what extent are films capable of actually doing philosophy?” one could make the strong claim that “films are capable of actually doing philosophy in something like the sense we think of the classical texts of the Western tradition – such as Plato’s Republic and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy – doing philosophy.” Against this, there is the opposite pole that “film is a medium that is very adept at popularizing philosophical issues but lacks the capacity to actually produce original philosophy itself.” Wartenber’s thesis is a moderate form of the former: “films can do philosophy.”

I was disappointed in how Wartenberg then attempts to unpack his “moderate” thesis. First comes a strange digression in which he argues that since films are a popular art form, and philosophy addresses widespread and basic human questions, then films would address these issues to reach a wide audience. (I simply don’t see how that follows in the general case, nor does it seem obviously true in the specific case.) But Wartenberg is building toward the clarification of his thesis: “films are capable of giving philosophical ideas a liveliness and vivacity that some may find lacking the written texts of the tradition” (4). This is an odd place to go because it is a moderate form of the thesis that Wartenberg is not defending: that films are popularizers of philosophical ideas, but do not themselves do philosophy. A few pages later, he will make this same mistake in summarizing his analysis of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which he argues embodies a philosophical idea “by providing vivid examples that make it clear what the stakes are in an otherwise quite abstract philosophical debate” (8). Again, this is a version of the “opposite pole” thesis: that films contain ideas, whereas Wartenberg wants to defend a moderate version of the other thesis: that films do philosophy, not just present ideas.

So when Wartenberg gives his most forceful statement of his thesis yet on page 9, nothing he has said to this point supports or clarifies this thesis instead of the one he dismisses. Here is his real thesis:

I will show that films not only have the ability to illustrate philosophical claims or theories in way that provides general illumination, but I will show that films can make arguments, provide counterexamples to philosophical claims, and put forward novel philosophical theories. … Sometimes, to put my thesis provocatively, philosophy can be - and has been – screened, that is, shown to us in what we see while watching and listening to a moving picture.

So far, he has set up the first half of that thesis (which even his opponents grant), but nothing yet for the more provocative half of the thesis, which is also what I am hoping to reach an opinion about.

A few final observations on this opening chapter.

• I was disappointed that Wartenberg argues that films can be just as philosophically interesting as great novels, which assumes that novels are philosophical and puts films on the same footing (5). I am someone who believes films are on the same footing as novels, but wants to be convinced (in both cases) that the art form can sustain philosophy. He defends the (to me) less interesting half of the claim.
• Wartenberg will try to overcome three objections to his thesis (8). Explicitness: Films lack “the means for articulating the conceptual structures necessary to embody” a philosophical position. Generality: Films are about specific instances; philosophy works at a different level of generality. Imposition: Films don’t do philosophy; what philosophy is found in films is brought to it and imposed on it by a philosophical informed viewer.
• Wartenberg wisely notes that his thesis in no way entails that everything passing as “philosophy and film” or “philosophy and popular culture” is worthwhile or interesting (10).
• He makes a nice observation that changes in technology have allowed for multiple rewatches of films. From this he says, plausibly, that this has led filmmakers to make films that are intended to be watched more than once. But then he concludes that this explains partly “the increased frequency of philosophical films, for the philosophical content of a film won’t reveal itself completely on a first viewing” (11). Even if this is true (and I’m not sure that it is), he has done nothing to this point to show that there are in fact more philosophical films recently.
• He distinguishes the claim that a film is “a work of philosophy” from the claim that a film “philosophizes.” The former is stronger, since a film can philosophize (his example is the novel The Brothers Karamazov) without being a work of philosophy full stop (12). It’s the latter (weaker) claim that he defends. In my introductory post, I often used the former phrase, which I will try to avoid going forward.
• He will focus on Hollywood or mainstream films instead of foreign or art films partly because he doesn’t want to be seen to be focusing only philosophy in a loose sense that many philosophers will grant is being done in a film like The Seventh Seal (9-10). This is probably a good idea; it should help keep the (undefined) use of “philosophy” more narrow.

As a philosopher (or better, a professional academic philosopher in training) with an interest in film, it was probably inevitable that I would eventually have to engage one of the big debates in the still small field of philosophy of film: Can movies be works of philosophy?

When philosophers do philosophy, it is usually either in dialogue with others or in the solitude of one’s mind and typically results in a presentation (spoken word, perhaps a few slides) or a publication (written word, usually a journal article but occasionally a book or blog post). In each of these cases, philosophers convey concepts in words. Those works of philosophy that are produced are fundamentally verbal. This doesn’t mean there couldn’t be other ways of doing philosophy, but they are far less common. Here’s one now-accepted example: Logicians have come to realize that there could be a completely visual language (think: advanced Venn diagrams) in which one could establish the rules of logic and derive logical results without the use of either a natural language or an artificial, symbolic language. In an analogous way, could one use the “language” of film to do philosophy?

We certainly think of some films as being “philosophical” in the generic sense in which we often use the term when we mean “thoughtful” or “reflective” or “left me thinking about its interesting themes after I left the theater.” These could be sci-fi films like The Matrix or 2001: A Space Odyssey, art house fare like Rashomon, or any other genre or classification of film. There’s no good reason to discontinue this use of the term, but the question I am asking is narrower.

We also think of some filmmakers or individual films as being particularly “philosophical.” For example, Woody Allen’s name is sometimes offered up as an example of a philosophical filmmaker. I suspect that sometimes “philosophical” is used as a sort of honorific term that can be used to identify an intelligent or creative director or writer. I want to be careful to avoid using the term this way. Woody Allen is no more or less great a filmmaker if we determine that he is or is not doing philosophy in his films. Annie Hall is no less funny, sophisticated, or rewarding if we ultimately decide that it is not a work of philosophy. When I argue later that Allen is or is not doing philosophy in his films, I hope it is understood that this in no way marks his films as any less great than they are. The same goes for Charlie Kaufmann, Terrence Malick, and everyone else who makes intellectually stimulating films.

My point is this: We can use “philosophical” in a broad sense to mean “intellectually engaging” or “concerned with long-standing questions.” Or we can use it in a narrow sense, the sense that I plan to use it, to mean the sort of careful, rigorous argumentation, in dialogue with other texts, that seeks to defend or refute a conclusion about any of a range of traditional issues. This is what I mean when I ask if movies are philosophical or if they can be counted as works of philosophy.

Because I want to explore this question further, and could use a little social prompting to keep me going, I thought I would read and publicly respond to Thomas E. Wartenberg’s Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. From what I can tell (I’ve only glanced through it), it argues for the thesis that films do count as works of philosophy. He provides both general arguments and individual case studies. It also seems the most direct answer to the question I am forming.

I am putting this out here so that you can read along with me if you like. (Book club!) From the bits I have read, the book is written in a very readable style that should not be too off-putting to those not used to the density of most philosophical writing. It’s also fairly short. If that seems too much, you can read my comments as I read along. My goal is to give comments on each chapter as I read, with a new post showing up every 5-7 days or so. (I am dissertating on something not at all film-related, so I’ll be reading slowly.)

At the outset, I should note that I am disinclined to say that films can be works of philosophy. As wonderful as my experiences at the movies have been, I don’t think that I have ever seen a film that argued for a conclusion in a philosophically sophisticated manner. Part of why I am engaging Wartenberg is that he thinks films can be works of philosophy, and I am looking for the best arguments for that thesis that I can find. (We philosophers are a perverse bunch. We are much more interested in the arguments against the positions we hold than the arguments for them.) Part of me wants to be persuaded by Waternberg. I would love to say that Solaris or The Thin Blue Line is a philosophical achievement and not just a cinematic one, but I am not ready to say that.

Yet.

Here is a passage I came across during my day job as a scholar of early modern philosophy. It is taken from Francis Hutcheson, the influential eighteenth century thinker. He briefly discusses the nature and usefulness of the sense of humor. It’s from his lecture notes, which were later published as a textbook. (Translated from the Latin by Michael Silverthorne. Full text available here.)

By the aid of these senses, then, some of the things that happen to us appear delightful, fitting, glorious, and honorable to us, while others seem vile and contemptible, and we may discern yet another reflexive sense: a sense of things that are ridiculous or apt to cause laughter, that is, when a thing arouses contrary sensations at one and the same time. In the case of men’s intentions and actions, bad behavior that does not cause grievous sorrow or death gives rise to laughter, because there is some dignity in the very name of man because we have a certain opinion of his prudence and intelligence, whereas bad behavior that leads to serious pain or death rather excites pity. In the case of other things, we are moved to laughter by those which exhibit some splendid spectacle at the same time as a contradictory image of something cheap, lowly, and contemptible. This sense is very beneficial, whether in increasing the pleasure of conversation or in correcting men’s morals.

Much of what he says here about the ridiculous and contradictory is a fairly standard theory of humor that dates back to Aristotle. What I find intriguing is that last sentence.

We can all agree that having a sense of humor is beneficial because it increases the pleasure of conversation. But how exactly does a sense of humor “correct men’s morals”? I suspect he is referring back to his earlier point that we laugh at bad behavior (short of death or “grievous sorrow”), which serves as a corrective to bad behavior. Basically, when we laugh at louts, they are shamed into acting better.

Going beyond the text, this passage got me thinking about the role that a sense of humor has in living a good life. I’ve long thought that a sense of humor (both the ability to laugh when appropriate and to make others laugh) is an important character trait. But it is not a virtue that is developed on its own. As Hutcheson reminds us, our sense of humor influences our other character traits. For instance, being able to laugh at our foibles gives us a healthy distance that can encourage us to improve them.

But I’m still wondering if a sense of humor improves us in other ways. How does being able to laugh and make others laugh improve our other character traits? Is a kind person made more kind by having a sense of humor? Is an intelligent person made more intelligent or better demonstrate that intelligence when they have a sense of humor?

I presented a paper in applied ethics at the Sport and Society Conference cosponsored by St. Norbert College and the Green Bay Packers, probably the first collaboration between a professional sports team and a college or university. There were a variety of interesting talks, roundtables, and presentations.

I’m providing a link to my paper which asks the question “Is Team Loyalty a Virtue?”[PDF]. My goal was to ascertain whether the loyalty of a sports fan to a particular team is justifiable. The paper is still (in my estimation) only about half worked-out. Surprisingly little has been written on the subject, so a lot of what I was trying to do was just lay some groundwork. The paper, as it is now, is really a suggestion for what it would take to show that the loyalty of a fan to a team is virtuous.

Anyways, enjoy, and feel free to leave comments below.

Community has a well-earned reputation for mixing in lots of meta-humor into its character humor and one-off jokes. A lot of the humor comes from seeing how the writers play off sit-com clichés. When done properly, it adds a layer of sophistication to the show that I find very compelling. A show won’t survive long just doing that; it still needs characters we are interested in or stories we find compelling. In its first season, Community has done this remarkably well, incorporating nearly every kind of joke you could ever want in a sit-com.

We can appreciate those jokes about television (directed at itself, at other sit-coms, or recently at Glee), and it can lead to us thinking of Community as a smart show, one that it takes attention, background knowledge, and intelligence to watch. But I want to highlight a different way that Community‘s creators express and expect intelligence in their show. Here’s an exchange from last week’s “Modern Warfare,” an extended parody of action films.

The dialogue I want to draw your attention to is not the characters’ awareness of clichés and how they see themselves against those clichés. It’s the following.

Britta: “You’re right, you know. I am a phony. I try to act compassionate because I’m afraid that I’m not.”

Jeff: “Oh, please. I invented phony.You care about people. I accuse you of faking to convince myself that I’m not such a jerk.”

Britta: “Jeff, you help people more than I do and you don’t even want to. You’re not a jerk; you’re fine.”

There is a sophistication to this exchange that I really appreciate. Britta expresses a profound insight about herself: that what looks like compassion is actually rooted in a fear of being uncompassionate rather than a true benevolence. Jeff dismisses her worry because, as a phony, he recognizes what phoniness is and can see it in other people. Those are two really insightful observations for characters to make, and it takes an awareness by the writers of who these characters are and an ability to verbalize it without sounding pompous or distracting from the mood of the show. That is really smart writing.

But then it gets better. Britta recognizes a distinction between a person who has positive character traits (e.g., a compassionate person who wants to do go for others) and a person who produces positive consequences (e.g., a jerk who actually does good for others). Britta recognizes that the character traits, intentions, and desires that make a person a good person are not always correlated with actually doing good. On the other hand, there are people who are able to do a great deal of good that don’t have a great character. For example, Richard Nixon has done more good than most people who lived in the 20th century. It doesn’t follow that he had a morally praiseworthy character; he probably didn’t. It also doesn’t follow that he didn’t do a great deal bad, as well. He certainly did. Jeff, through elements of his personality and his position in the group, is able to do a lot more good for the study group (and the community college) than the person who is dedicating her life to doing good. That doesn’t make Jeff the better person, just the more powerful one.

One thing that Community has done a great job of this season is tracking Jeff’s reluctant immersion into the group. Positioning himself as an outsider who in the pilot claimed that he was a moral relativist who doesn’t care about other people to a group-member willing to make sacrifices (that he doesn’t fully understand) for the sake of others.  This can only be achieved when you create really complex characters, and the writers have a really firm grasp on them and the intelligence to draw out of those characters compelling stories and sensible dialogue. What makes Community the smartest show on television isn’t (just) all the self-referential humor, it’s also the ability to articulate very finely the social interactions of these complex characters while exploiting the backdrop of a community college to draw out interesting ethical and socio-psychological insights.

And it’s funny.

Some spoilers for Terminator Salvation, but it’s not like you were going to watch it anyways

Terminator Salvation fails for a number of reasons. It’s about 30 minutes too long, and all the dullest, most senseless, least compelling sequences come in the second half of the film, leaving the viewer with a sour taste. That’s a shame only because there are some pretty nice action set pieces in the first half. But what stands out about the film is its ham-fisted attempt to reflect on the classic science fiction question, “What makes us human?”

You see, in Terminator lore, machines are bad and humans are good. So when Salvation attempts to break new ground, it does so by introducing a character that is partly human and partly machine. This is then supposed to provide a philosophical quandary both for hybrid (“what am I?”) and for those who interact with it (“what is it?”). (Apparently this has become the standard fourth-film-in-a-franchise question, since Alien: Resurrection posed the same question, but with alien-human hybrids instead of machine-human hybrids.) Perhaps in more deft hands this could have been an interesting question for a film. Instead, it is in the hands of McG (Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle), the pens of John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris (Surrogates, Catwoman), and the grunting of Christian Bale (Reign of Fire, Newsies).

Not having anything interesting to say about the interactions of humans and machines, the filmmakers decided to blow stuff up. Personally, I am in favor of blowing stuff up on screen. It’s fun to watch. Maybe not in the second hour, when the filmmakers have lost track of who we care about and why, so we have no reason to root for any of these characters to survive. We just hope our bladders survive the two hours it takes to finish the film. But not content to blow stuff up, McG, Brancato, and Ferris also decide that they should say something. This is a science-fiction film, after all, and therefore must have pretenses to philosophical navel-gazing.

So here is what they do. They create a character that is partly human and partly machine. Half the film’s heroes argue that the hybrid is fully human, and the other half argue that the character is fully machine. Apparently, the writers decided that there would be added emotional resonance if every person in the film was an idiot. This is called “screenwriting.”

As a philosopher (yes, I really do have a postgraduate philosophy degree), one thing I try to do in exploring difficult questions is start with the facts. Applied to this film, in wondering what we should think of a human-machine hybrid, and important fact to consider would be this is a human-machine hybrid. Apparently, this never occurred to anyone involved with the making of this film. They decided that it is much more interesting to ask “Is it fully human?” or “Is it fully machine?” In other words, they could never reach the part where they actually do some philosophical reflection, because they are too stupid to acknowledge the single most basic fact that the entire film is built around. Somewhere between deciding to make a film that introduces a human-machine hybrid and actually making that film, they lost track of that single basic idea.

Now, it would be wrong to say the movie fails because of some intellectual fault in the film. As an action spectacle, this film fails because it is boring. But sometimes boring science fiction films can be saved by the interesting questions they address. This is why we still watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris. And it is also why you should watch Moon, the low-budget space flick that nobody saw last year. Better acting, a more compelling plot, and an interesting question at the center (albeit one that is raised to explore psychological and emotional elements rather than strictly philosophical implications). While I don’t think Moon is an excellent film, I can guarantee that you won’t leave it with that gross, McG-y taste in your mouth.