Moral Deliberations in Modern Cinema | Page 3

the face of the most callous and abusive behaviour,
that there is something "tender" in Greenleaf Jr. When she confronts
the beguiling monster, Ripley, she encounters the fate of all victims of
psychopaths: disbelief, pity and ridicule. The truth is too horrible to
contemplate, let alone comprehend. Psychopaths are inhuman in the
most profound sense of this compounded word. Their emotions and
conscience have been amputated and replaced by phantom imitations.
But it is rare to pierce their meticulously crafted facade. They more
often than not go on to great success and social acceptance while their
detractors are relegated to the fringes of society. Both Meredith and
Peter, who had the misfortune of falling in deep, unrequited love with
Ripley, are punished. One by losing his life, the other by losing Ripley
time and again, mysteriously, capriciously, cruelly.
Thus, ultimately, the film is an intricate study of the pernicious ways of
psychopathology. Mental disorder is a venom not confined to its source.

It spreads and affects its environment in a myriad surreptitiously subtle
forms. It is a hydra, growing one hundred heads where one was severed.
Its victims writhe and as abuse is piled upon trauma - they turn to stone,
the mute witnesses of horror, the stalactites and stalagmites of pain
untold and unrecountable. For their tormentors are often as talented as
Mr. Ripley is and they are as helpless and as clueless as his victims are.
The Truman Show
By: Sam Vaknin
"The Truman Show" is a profoundly disturbing movie. On the surface,
it deals with the worn out issue of the intermingling of life and the
media.
Examples for such incestuous relationships abound:
Ronald Reagan, the cinematic president was also a presidential movie
star. In another movie ("The Philadelphia Experiment") a defrosted Rip
Van Winkle exclaims upon seeing Reagan on television (40 years after
his forced hibernation started): "I know this guy, he used to play
Cowboys in the movies".
Candid cameras monitor the lives of webmasters (website owners)
almost 24 hours a day. The resulting images are continuously posted on
the Web and are available to anyone with a computer.
The last decade witnessed a spate of films, all concerned with the
confusion between life and the imitations of life, the media. The
ingenious "Capitan Fracasse", "Capricorn One", "Sliver", "Wag the
Dog" and many lesser films have all tried to tackle this (un)fortunate
state of things and its moral and practical implications.
The blurring line between life and its representation in the arts is
arguably the main theme of "The Truman Show". The hero, Truman,
lives in an artificial world, constructed especially for him. He was born
and raised there. He knows no other place. The people around him -
unbeknownst to him - are all actors. His life is monitored by 5000
cameras and broadcast live to the world, 24 hours a day, every day. He
is spontaneous and funny because he is unaware of the monstrosity of
which he is the main cogwheel.
But Peter Weir, the movie's director, takes this issue one step further by
perpetrating a massive act of immorality on screen. Truman is lied to,
cheated, deprived of his ability to make choices, controlled and
manipulated by sinister, half-mad Shylocks. As I said, he is unwittingly

the only spontaneous, non-scripted, "actor" in the on-going soaper of
his own life. All the other figures in his life, including his parents, are
actors. Hundreds of millions of viewers and voyeurs plug in to take a
peep, to intrude upon what Truman innocently and honestly believes to
be his privacy. They are shown responding to various dramatic or
anti-climactic events in Truman's life. That we are the moral equivalent
of these viewers-voyeurs, accomplices to the same crimes, comes as a
shocking realization to us. We are (live) viewers and they are (celluloid)
viewers. We both enjoy Truman's inadvertent, non-consenting,
exhibitionism. We know the truth about Truman and so do they. Of
course, we are in a privileged moral position because we know it is a
movie and they know it is a piece of raw life that they are watching.
But moviegoers throughout Hollywood's history have willingly and
insatiably participated in numerous "Truman Shows". The lives (real or
concocted) of the studio stars were brutally exploited and incorporated
in their films. Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney all were
forced to spill their guts in cathartic acts of on camera repentance and
not so symbolic humiliation. "Truman Shows" is the more common
phenomenon in the movie industry.
Then there is the question of the director of the movie as God and of
God as the director of a movie. The members of his team - technical
and non-technical alike - obey Christoff, the director, almost blindly.
They suspend their better moral judgement and succumb to his