The Vicious Kind

Why do people do bad things? Most pressingly, why do people do bad things when they know they are bad? The entire film centers itself around a brilliantly quotidian answer to this question: It’s hard to be a good person.

Human perfection, seen universally in cultures as a form of spiritual virtuosity, is virtually impossible. Hence the mythologies of individuals who are deemed superhuman for their righteous tenacity. Indeed, these few men have carved entire worlds out of the mystique of their spirituality.

If it is impractical then to be a perfect moral agent, why even bother? At its crudest, it is to prevent harming others that we are devoted to. If we seek out the best for the ones we love, then acting impiously counter-acts the effort to nurture and support what we love, our very ends in themselves.

The film challenges immorality and its harm to loved ones very explicitly. We see the damage wrought, and the consequences as devastating, by those who found living above our crude animal desires as difficult.

This raises an interesting question on the basis of the drive of human will. Human freedom in itself does not grant that one’s actions will be virtuous. The obvious wrongness of certain actions-as made clear in the film-do not illuminate the general concept of morality itself. Is it sufficient to say that acting how we instinctually want is not always righteous? Why is it so hard to live beyond our instincts?

Ultimately, we have a Christian paradigm depicted to us: that the long causal chain of sin persists in creating human imperfection. Yet we return to challenging this paradigm: why does immorality continue to have momentum? In this particular vignette of sin, there is nothing external to the lives of this family which causes such destruction, other than willful disregard of living for something beyond what one simply wants.

Is this what is truthfully difficult for man to do? Emphatically yes. Finding purpose is the ultimate challenge in living. While not preoccupied on such a profound meditation, life can become dull when it is relaxed. The animal of human is always searching for something to direct his will towards. And oftentimes, this directs itself toward a self-indulgent affinity, which is inescapable.

The cultivation of self-discipline is the enterprise of religion itself; and thus with its decay, living at the peak of mediocrity creates a void which must be filled, irrespective of how irrational filling this void becomes.

The fact human history’s most influential members dictate their self-disciplines indicates the significance of combating the dichotomy of good and evil. Very succinctly, with four people, The Vicious Kind exposes the paramount value of religion in society. When families begin harming themselves, as true signs of the absence of any love outside of oneself, we have a self-destructed society, which can no longer persist as it has.

Grade: A