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

Following

Christopher Nolan will be remembered most for grand tapestries which convey his profound insights. He has been able to craft very clever and subtle images which pass as blockbuster and teenage-boy summer flicks; yet his Batman reboot is draped in layers of social commentary. Inception too has in itself a feeling of deep reflection on the demands and values of the contemporary society.

Yet fortunately, Mr. Nolan has been able to convey such visceral critiques in a much smaller portrait. At a much earlier time, that is before he became a household name, such an instance of this remark is seen with Following.

In Following, Mr. Nolan addresses an issue, albeit superficially compared to his Batman diagnosis, of the contemporary nihilism of the day. By nihilism, we take the absence of values above what one creates for oneself. Intriguingly, Existentialism in itself is a response to the demise of God in Western Society – while it embraces the nothingness found out there – beyond the walls of the self – it is a philosophy which nonetheless capitulates that sense of meaning or purpose that makes human life one of living and not dying. However, one requires a proper sense of orientation, which returns the individual back to square one, lost in a vortex of empty veracity and platitudes which feign as self-fulfillment. Clearly, then, Following is an anti-Existentialist piece.

Mr. Nolan highlights the absurdity of a decadent Godless society, one which finds no solace in creating a world which is higher than the morals of man. In a preceding epoch of the seasons of civilization, where the value man strives for is established in a higher Being, an appreciably perfect order which he attempts to integrate into, with this absolution, he is left with creating games for himself to pass the time.

One such game is following people. The sense of accomplishment of this “odiousness” highlights the insignificance man now has in his own self. Yet paradoxically his freedom to make his life stems from this pettiness. And, quite poetically, the film demonstrates the inescapable futility of pathetic self-serving.

The main character lacks the awareness, even in the bitter end, that the game he is playing is minuscule to those games being played around him. Mr. Nolan does not suggest that these games are any different or better – in fact quite the opposite. He expounds on the absurdity of a meaningless life, where values created by man in a vacuum arise no higher than what would be dramatized by eloquent simians.

Mr. Nolan’s main triumph in this work is his refusal to predictably cast his protagonist as a higher self, someone who strives to exhaust the ugly pettiness of the mediocrity that consumes everyone, simply because it is easier for people to indulgence than to imbue. Sardonically, we can see the “virtue” of the protagonist do him in at the sudden finale; clearly a sign of his obliviousness to his participation in a meaningless existence for himself, despite a belief in the contrary.

The ethos I find in Following, another striking note from Mr. Nolan, is this: true freedom does not enslave.

Grade: A