Update and some scripts!!

Hi, everyone. It's been a few weeks since my last big update post. Sure, there is a new video every week, but I should really update my patrons more frequently on the goings-on behind the scenes. 

My next big project, DCEU Film & Culture Analysis, is coming along nicely. There are (tentatively) four parts to this gigantic mini-series. Each video will be about an hour. I'm about halfway through writing part two of four. Everything is going according to plan.

To my patrons who are considering making a paid request: Commissions have been ratcheting up this year. So many commissions. That's good news for me, of course, but that creates quite the backlog. If you were planning on making a paid request and hoping to see it before the end of 2018, now would be the time to make that pledge. There are only a few spots left open all year. Seriously.

And now, some scripts from previous episodes:

OLDBOY

 AUDIO 1
 Does Dae-Su deserve his revenge? In the 2003 film Oldboy, Oh Dae-Su is kidnapped and confined in a room for fifteen years. After a long struggle, he seemingly escapes but is actually allowed to leave be the man who imprisoned him as part of a longer scheme. Dae-Su spends the course of the film trying to learn who imprisoned him and why. In the end, it is revealed that a man named Woo-jin had him kidnapped and tortured due to something that happened while they were both in school. Woo-jin had sex with his sister, and Dae-Su saw what happened. When word spread, the sister committed suicide. Dae-Su's quest for revenge against Woo-jin is actually itself the product of Woo-jin's own revenge against Dae-Su. Unbeknownst to Dae-Su, he begins a romantic relationship with a young woman who is later revealed to be his daughter. This, too, was part of Woo-jin's revenge. So, going back to the question: Does Dae-Su deserve his revenge? Does Woo-jin? And what do we mean by “deserve” anyway? Retributive Justice is a form of punishment that suggests those who commit wrongful acts morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment.    
  For the act of kidnapping and imprisonment, Woo-jin morally “deserves” to suffer in equal measure. Believers in retributive justice contend that those who commit wrongful acts, especially serious crimes, should be punished even if punishing them would produce no other good for society at large. For example, imagine if Woo-jin, some time after having Dae-Su kidnapped, suffered an injury that left him physically incapable of conducting his criminal enterprise. For the sake argument, let us pretend he is no longer a threat to anyone in society. Lawful imprisonment of such an individual is generally justified as protecting the population from him. However, if he is now incapable of doing so, what would be the point of confining him? If you answer, “Because he deserves it,” then that is an example of retributive justice. It does not need to serve society. And if so, is that just for society – and therefore justice – or is it revenge? Retributive Justice must be supplemented by a theoretical justification for punitive harsh treatment. The strongest criticisms against retributive justice are that its proportionality cannot be met without sacrificing plausibility and that theoretical accounts of why wrongdoers positively deserve harsh treatment are inadequate without invoking the divine.  
  AUDIO 2   
 Dae-Su's actions following his release are “revenge” in the sense that they are not legally justified, but is that the only way to compare and contrast justice and revenge? Another way to determine whether something is justice or revenge is closure. Revenge begets more revenge. Justice creates closure. But is that true? When Dae-Su raids his old prison, he comes across a guard. He wants information from the guard, so he tortures him by pulling his teeth until Dae-Su learns enough. Later, Dae-Su is captured and confronted with the same torture. This is a reference to the ancient “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.” version of justice. There is no closure, the violence only continues and propagates itself. When Woo-jin enacts his elaborate revenge for his childhood slight, it creates a new quest for revenge for Dae-Su. Again, revenge spurs on more revenge, ad infinitum. However, this line of thinking has a couple flaws. For one, it person A takes revenge on person B by killing person B, and nobody is aware that person A committed the killing, then nobody who knows person B would be able to take revenge. Therefore, there is closure. Does that retroactively make it no longer revenge but justice?
 Furthermore, “justice” if used through the legal system creates a lot of opportunities for revenge because it is so public. Everyone knows all the players involved. Another method to contrast justice with revenge is the claim that revenge is motivated by self-interest whereas justice is impartial. Woo-jin's revenge is highly personal and conducted by himself and his cronies. Dae-Su's revenge is also highly personal and conducted by himself and his daughter and friend. Although, both his daughter and friend are made to believe Dae-Su only wants to know why it happened – not that this is information being gathered for revenge. So, one could claim that Dae-Su's revenge is a solitary effort. But again, there are flaws in this equation, most notably that justice is impartial. The idea that the legal system is impartial is a comfortable lie that tell ourselves. There are all manner of biases that impede justice, some of them unconscious and some of them systemic and written into the legal system. Woo-jin seems like he has the money and power to protect himself more than the average person. If, instead of his personal revenge, Dae-Su attempted to have Woo-jin arrested for kidnapping, what is the likelihood that Woo-jin would be convicted? How can we implicitly trust the police and the justice system when we have so much evidence that supports mistrust?
 AUDIO 3
 Must Dae-Su's pain, misery and lost fifteen years be sacrificed on the altar of society, or does he deserve retribution however he can find it? 20th century philosopher Simone de Beauvoir saw her homeland of France conquered by Nazi Germany. Following its liberation, she questioned the need for country to punish and avenge the population of France. Beauvoir saw the self-other relationship as always marked by the connection between autonomy and reliance, of freedom and bondage. In order to fully recognize the humanity of another, one must first be able to accept and recognize the ambiguous nature of both self and other. However, another way to contrast justice with revenge is by asking “Who does this action serve?” If the action serves the individual but not society, then the action is revenge. If the action serves the individual AND society, then the action is justice. If Dae-Su had killed Woo-jin, that would serve his revenge, but wouldn't it also serve society to be rid of him? An argument against revenge in this case could be that Woo-jin's revenge created another attempt at revenge by Dae-Su, but the teenage Dae-Su's actions were not illegal and possibly not immoral – only unfortunate.   
 Its effects, the suicide of Woo-jin's sister, were calamitous, but if the consequences of an indirect act eventually results in catastrophe, is the person who committed it even responsible? Dae-Su did not kill the sister. She killed herself. Also, they were all children and not has culpable in their actions as adults. Woo-jin, on the other hand, definitely committed an illegal and immoral act against Dae-Su by kidnapping him and imprisoning him for fifteen years. The film tries to make the case that revenge begets revenge, but there individual actions are not similar. This may be a false equivalency. Halfway through the movie, Dae-Su puts a hammer to Woo-jin's head, ready to kill him. Woo-jin says that Dae-Su enacts his revenge now, the truth about the kidnapping would never be revealed. Is Dae-Su's revenge more important than the truth? He relents, suggesting it is, but it does not seem definitive. He still wants revenge. He just wants...both. He wants his revenge and the truth about why he was imprisoned.   
 AUDIO 4
 Woo-jin says that seeking revenge is the best cure for someone who has been hurt. If that is true, then the value of revenge is psychological. It does not benefit society in any appreciable way. It benefits the person seeking revenge, and even then, not in a material way. Is revenge justifiable if the only benefit is brief and psychological? Woo-jin says that revenge is good for your health, but then asks what happens afterward. Wouldn't that pain return? Dae-Su says that even if he is no more than a beast, he has a right to live. Dae-Su has human rights, whether imbued in him through the divine or through law, but if that is true, then his antagonist, Woo-jin, has the same. What if there is no difference between the way most cultures meet out justice and revenge except for a few superficial and structural differences? What if what we call “justice” is a comfort we tell ourselves to satisfy both our instinctive needs and consciences? I hope not.   
 

SOLARIS

 AUDIO 1
 When do we achieve personhood? Is it something we always have since the moment we are born, or is it something given to us by our interactions with others or the accumulation of memories? In the 1972 science fiction film Solaris, we drift through the questions – weightlessly, as if through space or floating across an ocean. Kris Kelvin is tasked with boarding the space station that orbits the remote planet of Solaris. When he arrives, he learns that one cosmonaut, Gibarian, has committed suicide, and the surviving men, Sartorious and Snaut, warn Kelvin that he may begin seeing things. Visitors to the station. These “visitors” are created through some phenomena of Solaris – reaching into the memories of the men on the space station and creating new people. The planet manifests Hari – a replicated version of Kelvin's deceased wife. He struggles with how much of the real Hari she could be, and she struggles with her improbable existence.   
 Due to being created from his memories and her appearance, Kelvin treats her as if she were the original Hari, falling in love with her. However, what if the planet created multiple versions of Hari at the same time? How could they ALL still be the REAL Hari? And what makes someone REAL to begin with? To 17th century English philosopher John Locke, autobiographical memory was the key to personhood. To being...a person. To existing as a person. “Consciousness alone makes Self. Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person; the identity of substance will not do it, for whatever substance there is, however framed, without consciousness there is no person; and a carcass may be a person, as well as any sort of substance be so, without consciousness.” What Locke meant was that the self resides in the consciousness, which he believed to be memory, not the soul. Certainly not the body because, as he said, that would mean a corpse could be considered a person. In Solaris, we see the memories of Kelvin – that of his late wife – create a new Hari. By Locke's definition of what is considered a person, Hari qualifies as she is the physical manifestation of memories much as he believed we are our own memories.   
 AUDIO 2
 She may not be the original Hari, but she is a person. When she is examined, Hari is determined to be made of a different substance than Kelvin and the other cosmonauts – indeed, all human beings – but her memories are what makes Hari – HARI. Not the physical. This is roughly similar to a thought experiment by Locke. Imagine there exists a prince and a cobbler. The cobbler dies, and through some miracle of science or what-have-you, the prince's consciousness is transported into the body of the cobbler. Would the prince's consciousness suddenly think himself a cobbler or would be still remember himself and consider himself a prince? When Hari first appears on the space station, she appears to have no autobiographic memory as she was gifted existence by Kelvin and the planet. Seemingly failing the Lockean personhood test, Kelvin rids himself of her by sending her away in a rocket. However, as soon as Hari's second iteration is given a chance to exist for a while on the space station, she accumulates autobiographic memory – not just what Kelvin's memories gave her. She has her own experiences on the station and with Kelvin and the other cosmonauts. By Lockean standards, she has achieved personhood.  
  Belief in memory as the primary qualification for personhood creates certain problems, though. What if Hari suddenly lost all her memories? Would she no longer exist? What if Kelvin suffered an accident while on the space station and had amnesia? Does that mean Kelvin no longer exists and that we should treat whatever is left inside the body of Kelvin as a completely distinct individual? Should we burn his birth certificate and cancel his bank accounts? … When Kelvin introduces the new Hari to Sartorious, the cosmonaut explains that all of Solaris' new creations are made of neutrinos. To Sartorious, this alone disqualifies Hari from personhood, suggesting he only believes organic matter can form a person. This presents its own problem. If the building blocks of the body are the only thing that makes or breaks Hari's personhood, what if Sartorious were changed by the power of Solaris from his normal matter to neutrinos overnight? What if Solaris “decided” to do this as an experiment. Everything else stayed the same. His memories, his name. He would just be made of new...stuff. What he no longer be a person? If he could still think to himself – still perceive his consciousness – how would he account for that?     
  AUDIO 3  
 Gibarian, in a recorded message, says QUOTE “We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the cosmos. We are only seeking Man. We don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors.”  UNQUOTE. Maybe he has a point. Are the cosmonauts searching for life on other worlds, or are they searching for confirmation of humanity's importance? Are they examining Solaris because it is so alien, or are they searching for meaning in their own lives? Solaris does not teach them about the cosmos. It teaches them about themselves. It connects the cosmonauts to other people – apparitions from the past -- not to alien worlds. 18th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believed that the self is essentially a social construction, meaning we are who we are only insofar as we are understood to be by others. The cosmonauts are not searching for new planets, they are searching for connections. Their existence – all existence – is not independent. It is dependent on our interactions and connections with others. By this standard, the recreated Hari is “real” because her “realness” is dependent on Kelvin. To Hegel, one's self-hood cannot be determined in isolation.  
  “Self-consciousness is faced with another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a two-fold significance. First, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as another being. Secondly, in doing so, it has superceded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self.” This is in contrast to the more solipsistic quote from Renee Descartes, I think there I am, because to Hegel – and perhaps to Kelvin – existence comes from mutual recognition. Let's explore that as it relates to Solaris. Hari is fabricated onto the space station and into reality without a clear idea of who she is or how she was created. Because she was created through Kelvin's memories, everything that she is comes from his memory of her. Since Kelvin has no memory of how this Hari was made – because how could he? – she does not know either. Her consciousness is a literal version of what Hegel proposed in the abstract. Her existence – her self-hood – is dependent on another. Do we exist if nothing else in the universe could perceive us to exist? It is the personhood and metaphysical version of the lone tree falling in the woods paradox. From Hegel's perspective, now neither Kelvin nor Hari considers the other are essentially real but sees themselves in the other. Hegel called the dependent consciousness a “slave.” Yet, Hari engages in the process of what Hegel would call “negating the other's otherness” by trying to free herself.    
  AUDIO 4  
 Even though her initial existence was formed entirely through Kelvin's memories, she grows by convincing Kelvin to think of her as an independent person. When he does this, she becomes one. We are who others believe us to be – and in the case of Solaris – this is quite literal. We are defined through the eyes of other people, and without other people, we could not have a meaningful concept of self. Towards the end of the film, Kelvin and Snaut discuss their experiences. Kelvin wonders about the meaning of existence, the meaning of love. Snaut claims that thinking about the big questions is something for the end of life only, but Kelvin responds that we never know when our lives will end. To Snaut, the big questions of philosophy only make us unhappy and the happiest people he knows do not think about anything so significant. Ignorance, perhaps, is bliss. Can philosophy make us unhappy? Well, sure, there's some Arthur Shopenhauer works that can be rather pessimistic, and Albert Camus can be a little bleak. Studying different points of views of different philosophers can lead some astray from the religion they were taught as children, and sometimes there is nothing more earth-shattering than learning the foundation upon which one built one's view of the universe and one's conception of morality.    
 BUT unhappiness is not the aim of philosophy. Kelvin wonders if something so necessary to life can also harm life – and he's speaking about love here – but this is also true of philosophy. It can harm, but philosophy also teaches us ethics. It teaches us politics. It teaches us our outlook on the universe and so much more. Philosophy can drag us away from our religions – for some -- but it can prop them up for others. There are many theistic philosophers. Plus, for some, being pulled from faith, apostatizing, is not inherently negative. It can be rather freeing. Accepting one's limited role in the universe, at a glance, can make one feel insignificant and meaningless, but another way to think of it is...no pressure. There is no pressure because life is an opportunity more than a trial. The very end shows that Kelvin appears to have decided to stay behind on Solaris and live in a neutrino creation of his life. Will Hari be materialized as well? We are not told. Kelvin can never “go home” again in the figurative sense. He can never be who he once was. Maybe the ending, much like whether or not philosophy can make us unhappy, depends on how we look at it. Has Kelvin given up on life by leaving Earth, and has he embraced it by making a life...of his own?    
 

STALKER

 AUDIO 1
 Is a world without faith uninhabitable? That seems to be the central question of the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker. In the future, after an unknown event, the world is miserable and impoverished. Due to a meteorite or a miracle or something other mysterious cause, there exists a place called The Zone – a land that appears habitable and green but is actually even more hazardous than the rest of the world. Zone guides, called stalkers, lead visitors through the land to a hidden place inside called The Room, in which the visitor's deepest desire is fulfilled – by God, by the universe, by something else. One stalker, unnamed in the film, guides a Professor and a Writer through the Zone. The Professor wants to win the Nobel Prize, and the Writer wants inspiration after struggling through writer's block. BUT in the end, they do not enter The Room. They do not receive their wishes. Based on the lamentations and cries of the stalker, the world no longer has faith. No longer believes in God. No longer believes in anything. He never goes into the Room itself because that is not what he wants.
 Instead, the stalker wants to bring others into the Room to have their wishes fulfilled because in doing so, the visitors to the Zone prove their faith. They prove that they believe. Otherwise, they would not bother with the dangerous trek through the Zone. When the Professor and the Writer travel all this way and do not enter the Room, the Stalker is devastated. He cries out when he returns home that they believe in nothing. For the Stalker, he requires the faith of others to justify his own desire for faith. Whether the Stalker believes in God or not is unclear, but if he is so distraught that the Professor and Writer do not enter the room because they have no faith, his reaction is so intense because this is more proof that faith does not exist anymore and that believe in God is meaningless – even harmful. The Stalker cannot hold on to faith all by his lonesome. He needs to see faith in others. His misery requires company. His faith requires adherents. In the beginning of the film, his wife cannot understand why he would risk arrest by violating the law and entering the Zone, but for the Stalker, the Zone is everything because it is the kingdom of God. The Room is the miracle – the proof that God exists.
 AUDIO 2
 The world outside the Zone is drab and lifeless – a world without faith. The Zone itself appears habitable at a glance – a miracle in this world -- but it is fraught with its own dangers. Of this, Tarkovsky has said in interviews and in his diaries: “The Stalker needs to find people who believe in something in a world that no longer believes in anything. … The film is about the existence of God in man, and about the death of spirituality as a result of our possessing false knowledge.” But is a world without faith truly uninhabitable, or is the world worthless without faith only to the filmmaker? Arguments against faith in God or other supernatural powers or the need for religion itself are usually ontological, meaning relating to whether something is or is not. Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being and existence, so an ontological study of faith centers around whether or not God exists. However, Stalker is more concerned with the effects of a world without faith rather than whether or not faith is justified. Therefore, the arguments for and against faith in the film are teleological: an explanation of something as it relates to its goal or effects.   
 What is the “effect” of faithfulness on society? What is the “effect” of faithlessness on society? A common argument against religion is that it is often the source of conflict: political conflict that strips the rights of people under religious grounds, international conflict in warfare, etc. However, are religious-based prejudices the result of religion itself or is religion used as a means in which to justify pre-existing prejudice? Would – for example – bigotry against homosexuals suddenly disappear or wane if the religions that condemn homosexuality suddenly disappear or wane? The Crusades were publicly justified as ordained by God, but the motives were actually material. Land and wealth. Some religions teach misogyny, but misogyny existed prior to the formation of said religions. Then again, some harmful religious practices have no basis in pre-existing prejudices or desires. Religion-based medical neglect, for example. Also, even if prejudices and other ills of society preexisted religious justification, would said ills have prospered for so long without divine rationalization?
 AUDIO 3
 For the Stalker and perhaps even the filmmaker, these nuances are not taken into account in the film. A world without faith is simply bleak. The world outside the Zone is colored in sepia-tone. The miracle of the Zone is in full color. Faith and goodness are perhaps mistakenly conflated into one. 17th century philosopher Voltaire had a more skeptical view of the goodness of faith – the teleological goodness, not ontological. "Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. ... Certainly any one who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices." To the Stalker, however, this is unacceptable. Without faith, he believes his life is both meaningless and worthless. He spent time in prison, his daughter has lost her ability to walk and faces other mutations. The world is dry and heartless, and he assumes this is because the world has lost its faith.   
 In the narrative of the film, this is true because that is what the filmmaker has created, but if this were real and not fiction, one would question the Stalker's conclusions. The hardship of the world might not be a result of a lack of faith. Rather, lack of faith might be a result of the hardship of the world. His cause and effect might be backwards. Following the horrors of World War II, existentialism became more popular in philosophy, for example, because the holocaust, atomic warfare and other horrors posed a lot of philosophical and theological problems. A change in belief did not change the world, but the events of the world did create a change in belief. Also, the seeming lack of faith among the Stalker's people and the condition of his home might have no direct correlation. But that is not how the Stalker sees the world. His view is more akin to 20th century philosopher Robert Adams. His moral argument for theistic belief centered around the concept of demoralization—weakening moral motivation. To Adams, achieving good over evil requires more than human effort, but human effort can add or detract from the total value of the universe. It is demoralizing NOT to believe there is a God, giving a moral advantage in accepting God.   
 AUDIO 4
 “If there are any practical advantages that are worthy to sway us in accepting or rejecting a belief, the advantage of not being demoralized is surely one of them. But can it be right, and intellectually honest, to believe something, or try to believe it, for the sake of any practical advantage, however noble? I believe it can.” In other words, though Adams believes in God ontologically, his argument is also that faith in good teleologically. This might not be satisfying to everyone, especially since the concept of it simply being helpful to society to be faithful can be phrased differently to sound malevolent. Napoleon believed faith was good for his people too but said it like this: “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” Is the Stalker's world truly inhabitable because of lack of faith, or is this a convenient excuse for why things are the way they are? Human frailty comes up from time to time in the film. A famous line from Stalker is “Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. … Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being.” [picture] This is similar to the philosophy of ancient Chinese thinker Lao-Tzu, but for a Christian like Tarkovsky, he might connect that [picture] more with the Bible:
 “The meek shall inherit the Earth.” Another example of human frailty in the film comes in the form of someone the Stalker once knew. A man -- nicknamed Porcupine – wanted the Room to resurrect his deceased brother, but instead, the Room gave Porcupine riches because, deep down, that is what he truly wanted. When the Stalker, Professor and Writer arrive in the Zone, they pass by poles that look as if they are arranged to be crucifixes. Their journey to the Room is a spiritual one. They trudge through the Zone as though facing the hardships of the cross. As we drift through the water, we see an image of Jesus Christ – abandoned, perhaps – alongside garbage. When the Writer wears the crown of thorns, he does so only dismissively, even ironically. He and the Professor do not have enough faith to enter the Room. The film is not hopeless, though. When the Stalker returns home to his long-suffering wife, her surprising unconditional love for him despite his many failings takes on an aspect of the divine. This reflects the relationship between a loving God and a disappointing humanity that tries, fails and tries again. We hear the recitation of several verses of the Book of Revelation through voice over narration, but Tarkovsky, like many Christians, knew that Revelation was not about damnation but about hope. The group's journey was a prayer that went unspoken, but he can always try again. Faith cannot be easy. It must be...a struggle...and for the Stalker, the struggle is not over.   

ANDREI RUBLEV

 AUDIO 1
 When the faithful are confronted with sin, they are confronted with more than a binary choice: to sin or not to sin. They are also confronted with questions about whether or not the action is a sin in the eyes of their God or only a sin in the eyes of their organized religion. If one performs the alleged sin, will man be offended or will God? How does a sinner regain the favor of God? Will the alleged sinner be rewarded in the end? In Tarkovsky's 1966 film Andrei ROO-BLEE-EV, the titular character struggles with sin and reward. Loosely based on the life of the medieval iconographer and monk, the film tracks Rublev's journey across the land, encountering sinners, patrons of his art and the chaos of the early 15th century. Early in the story, he encounters a man whose body is covered with ants, a symbol of decay. He then sees a snake – the Biblical serpent – the tempter of sin. We know straight away that Rublev's journey will be filled with temptation and visions of great sin. Rublev's struggle to use his art to spread the word of God – and his challenge in creating it – mirrors his own wavering faith.
 In this film, art and faith are mirrored or...combined. For Tarkovsky, it is as if they were one in the same. Of this, he once said “The ability to create is our similarity to our Creator. Art is an attempt to understand—to find the truth, which is the reason for human existence.” So, what does this mean as it relates to this film? Let's explore. In this scene, KI-RILL, a monk with no artistic talent, shouts at the heavens that God has not granted him the ability to create icons. In classical paintings, dogs were considered symbols of fidelity – of faithfulness – so when Cyrill leaves the village and abandons his art – abandons his FAITH, figuratively – a dog follows him, and he kills it. By killing the dog, the symbol of fidelity, he has killed his faith. In another scene, Rublev says, QUOTE “Russia, dearest Russia, she bears everything, she will bear everything. How long will it continue, Theophanes?” UNQUOTE. Are the people shrouded in darkness or not? What is their path to the light? Is there one? The film paints the struggle of the people of Russia as an ancestral curse – a smiting due to a seeming godlessness.   
 AUDIO 2
 Rublev's wavering faith is not due to some evidence of the non-existence of God. He sees the sins of humankind. He sees what the church claims are sins. He sees incongruity with this. If God exists, why is man so wicked? If the church is holy, why is it hypocritical and harsh? If some acts of sins, why are they not easy to detect and determine? Early in the film, a jester mocks the state and the church, and because of this, someone in Rublev's party alerts the authorities and has him arrested. Was justice done here? If the crowd enjoyed his antics, who is the victim? God? How could God be so easily offended? Isn't he...God? Later, we see a convicted criminal about to be tortured and executed. Is his alleged sin to blame, or is it a sin to treat him so poorly? Which is worse, and does one justify the other? The confusion of what is sin and what is not sin continues as Rublev recounts the death of Jesus Christ. Rublev claims that the men who crucified Jesus were obeying God's will, and because of this, their actions were not sins. Rublev and his party encounter a group of pagans who are in the midst of a celebration. A ritual for Midsummer. Rublev is caught spying on this.   
 He is captured and tells a woman that she is sinful because she engages in sexual activity. She claims that doing so is not wrong and that her people are persecuted for their beliefs. What is wrong about consenting adults having sex? It may be “sinful” in Christianity, but she is not a Christian. What business is it of Rublev? Later still, when Rublev is commissioned to paint a church, he recoils at having to depict the Last Judgment, saying that he does not want to terrify people into belief. Over the course of the film, Rublev is conflicted about his desire to spread the word of God and his concerns about how humanity uses those very words. There is a sense that there are the pure intent of God and the corrupted usage of God as a means to grab power. There is a concern that humanity may not be good enough to live up to the expectations of God, and if that is true, why spread his word? Rublev encounters a young woman. A group of raiders take away her. Rublev is naturally concerned, but a man tells him that the raiders will not hurt her because that would be a sin. Rublev, now knowing that knowledge of sin does not deter men from committing them, rescues the woman by murdering one of the men.   
 AUDIO 3
 For his atonement, he takes a vow of silence and gives up his career. Christianity claims that human beings are subject to death and eternal separation from God as a result of sinfulness, but that they can be saved through some form of atonement. If Rublev takes his atonement upon himself, then he may not believe in a theory of Christian atonement called Ransom Theory or Christus Victor. In ransom theory, God and the Devil are in a kind of competition for souls. Human sin gives the Devil a legitimate right to the possession of souls. It would be inappropriate for God simply to violate the pre-ordained rules of the competition and rescue our souls from the Devil, but it would be appropriate for God to pay the Devil a ransom in exchange for our freedom. The death of Jesus Christ is that ransom. This theory was popular in what was called the Patristic Period – early Christianity. If Rublev, a monk, still believes himself potentially condemned for his actions, he probably pays little mind to the idea that he would be instantly absolved simply for being a Christian. By atoning in this way, Rublev is participating in some form of Satisfaction Theory.   
 Human sin constitutes an offense against God, the size of which renders forgiveness only possible if something is done either to satisfy the demands of justice or compensate God for any wrong done to him. Another monk, Saint Anselm of Canterbury, popularized this debt-cancellation model in the centuries prior to the events of this film. He once said “God hath promised pardon to him that repenteth, but he hath not promised repentance to him that sinneth.” Is it...enough? Is Rublev rewarded for his beliefs? For his atonement? Are his sins washed away? Well, remember the connection between art and faith? Let's look at that to determine an answer. Rublev's work is eventually destroyed – testing his faith. If his art is his faith, then his faith is being dismantled. Not just the icons he creates. But in the end of the film, the black and white turns to color, and we see his surviving works. Again, if art is his faith, then the fact that his art is still seen today is his reward. The life of a person of Christian has a few integral components. One is the belief itself, the other is how the Christian wrestles with sin and the last is the reward. Rublev believes, he struggles with sin and atonement, and one assumes – if one is a Christian – that he received his final reward in Heaven.   
 AUDIO 4
 “Divine Moral Desertism” is the view that one receives a reward from God in the afterlife that is precisely the level of happiness or unhappiness that they deserve on the basis of their level of moral virtue or vice during life. It's a comforting thought. We are seeing Divine Moral Desertism in action in the film – at least in the epilogue. We are also seeing it as it relates to his art. Much as – in Christian thought – the soul survives after death and receives the reward in the afterlife, Rublev's art survives after his own death. Rublev's journey through life as it concerns his faith parallels his life as it concerns his career as an iconographer. In art, Rublev learned his talent, he struggled with how best to utilize it, and then his final reward was the immortality of his works. Tarkovsky's work, too, is a struggle with his art. He created a film about faith in the Soviet Union in 1966 when there were no films about religion, apart from satire or anti-religion propaganda. It was not released widely in his own country for years. It was even a topic of conversation in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The Soviet Union tried to prevent its release for years. He believed in his film, he struggled with it, and its eventual release and popular reception in the world was his reward.
   
  
THE SACRIFICE

 AUDIO 1
 In an isolated countryside home in Sweden, Alexander wonders about his relationship with God, his family and the progression of modern humanity. His friend, Otto, has adopted a more esoteric worldview to help him sort out his life. His wife, Adelaide, lives a life of regret. His son, Little Man, says nothing at all. Alexander, his friends and his family learn of a coming nuclear war. In a panic, Alexander bargains with God, saying that he will sacrifice what he loves most to protect the world. Alexander sets fire to his own home. He races around like a madman, chased by his loved ones, all while watching it burn to cinders. In the end, the world does not end. An explanation for what happened is never given. With this in mind, did Alexander save the world or was the world never in danger? Was the sacrifice of his home in vain, and was it a sincere act of faith or only an act of desperation?
 Early in the film, Alexander is greeted by Otto. After some pleasantries, Otto begins to pontificate on the works of 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Specifically, he references, perhaps incorrectly, the eternal recurrence – sometimes called eternal return -- a concept in Nietzsche's work that the philosopher considered his most important idea. Otto says that the world begins, ends and then starts again. People begin, end and start again. Everything that happens has happened before, and everything will happen in exactly the same way again. To Otto, this is the eternal recurrence, but most interpreters of Nietzsche's work do not see it quite that way. Nietzsche's explanation of the doctrine – indeed, nearly all his doctrines – involves a lot of hypothesizing and writing that superficially looks like the ranting of a madman. “Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible! - Supposing we could judge value, what follows?” Nietzsche's presentations are generally presented in hypotheticals, allusive bombast or metaphorical rigamarole. A cursory glance at his concept of eternal recurrence would give someone the idea that it is cosmological or spiritual. In fact, that was an early interpretation, and it appears to be line with Otto's interpretation as well.
 AUDIO 2
 The group quietly awaiting the end of days is connected with this interpretation. Humanity has begun, as it had been a previous time, it will end in nuclear annihilation, and will reoccur. When Nietzsche declared that God was dead, believers in this – really meaning that God never existed – faced a new reality without the possibility of an everlasting reward. Without eternity itself. Under eternal recurrence, instead, we have a life that repeats forever instead of a life that goes on forever. However, modern interpretation of eternal recurrence suggests that it is more of a thought experiment about how one lived one's life. Imagine an endless return of life, and one's reaction to the prospect reveals something about how valuable one's life has been. In this interpretation, it is more about regret than about fate or a cyclical existence. We see this in the film, too. Alexander's wife, Adelaide, says that he threw everything away long ago. He was once a theater actor. She loved being the wife of a great actor. Later, regret about marriage is brought up. Speculation about what life would have been like – perhaps better – married to someone else.   
 ... What do we regret at the end of our lives? What would we be willing to give up to change it? When the news program announces the possible end of the world, we should see this not as an earth-ending event so much as it is a metaphor for death feeling like the end of the world. For someone, it is the end of THEIR world. They will no longer exist to experience it. For the faithful, this is not so, but can Alexander be counted among their numbers? In the beginning of the film, Alexander is asked about his relationship with God. He responds that it is non-existent. Does Alexander share any Nietzschean qualities? Nietzsche charged Christianity with the nihilism he often spoke of because – to him – it depreciates the only life we definitely have, life on Earth, for the sake of an unknown and possibly absent afterlife.
 AUDIO 3   
 The coming apocalypse in the film connects with Nietzsche's writings as well, placing an emphasis of humankind, its being in the world and its coming inexistence. Yet, Alexander rejects the notion that God is dead and instead makes an appeal to God to save his world. Alexander says that he will sacrifice whatever he has in order to convince God to spare the Earth. This whole sacrifice business is a little confusing, though. From one perspective, it looks as if Alexander is prepared to give up anything to save the world, but from another perspective, if the world is about to end anyway, is anything he could sacrifice meaningful? For example, if he wanted to sacrifice a goat to save the world, the goat is going to die one way or another, either by his hand or by God's hand. Alexander offers to sacrifice all he loves, but since he loves his son more than anything, that is the offering to God. This is, of course, reminiscent of the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kiekegaard wrote extensively of this story and its differing perspectives in his work entitled Fear and Trembling.
 To Kiekegaard, there are a variety of ways to view the Binding of Isaac. In one, Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac because he believed God was always right. In another, Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac because he feared the wrath of God if he did not. In another still, Abraham only prepared to sacrifice Isaac because he knew God was good and therefore would spare his son. “The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is.” Applying this to The Sacrifice, is Alexander's offering legitimate? Is he willing to give up everything he has to selflessly save the world or does he know that if nothing is left after the apocalypse, there is no harm in giving up everything anyway? Is this a test from God? If Alexander kills his son as a sacrifice, is this actually what God wants? In the end, Alexander makes his offering by burning down his home.   
 AUDIO 4
 Earlier in the film, he spoke of how important it was to him. Perhaps Alexander's sacrifice was less about his desire to save the world and more about his desire to reestablish his relationship with God. To cast aside thoughts of a neverending cycle of life and focus once again on the possibility of an everlasting reward. To cast aside Otto's Nietzschean ideals and embrace his God. His act of burning down his home with the sure knowledge that it will convince God to spare the Earth would make him, to Kierkegaard, a “knight of faith” --  someone who has made a leap of faith into the absurd by which the knight regains everything he has lost – or in this case, sacrificed. Then again, what we are witnessing in the film is a kind of “deathbed conversion.” The adoption of religious faith when approaching death. Perhaps the earliest of such conversions as it relates to Christianity is the crucified thief in the Gospel of Luke. He expresses his belief in Jesus Christ, and upon hearing this, Jesus claims that they will see each other in heaven.
 Much like with the faithfulness of Abraham, this could be seen a number of ways, though, some of which are sincere and some that are self-serving. Did the thief convert because of a genuine conviction or because he was afraid of death and wanted to safeguard himself in case heaven existed? Is Alexander suddenly sure of the existence of God and is now willing to make a sacrifice to him, or – now – faced with certain doom, does he simply feel that his attempt at sacrificing his home is worth a shot considering it will either yield a positive result or no result? The home will be burned anyway, in a nuclear disaster. When giving Alexander a painting, Otto says “Every gift involves a sacrifice. If not, what kind of gift would it be?” But if this is a gift to God that will be destroyed either way, is it a sacrifice? Maybe Alexander is more desperate than faithful. Maybe Alexander believes, as acolytes of Nietzsche generally believe -- that God is dead. The world is not destroyed in the film. The ending shows Alexander's son still alive and laying by the tree. Did Alexander save the world or was the world never in danger? Mistaking the application of causation in worldly events to God has always been common. Parsing what is sincere faith and what is selfish lip service to God is challenging. It may even be impossible to determine, not just in regards to someone else but in regards to one's own convictions.