No film captures this cacophonous, almost desperate violence quite like Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008). A film that turned Liam Neeson from a serious dramatic actor into America’s favourite murder-dad. What I want to do here is look at one of Taken’s legacies. Specifically, I want to argue that Taken can be understood as a genre unto itself.

What does this mean, to say Taken is a genre? For starters, genres are ways we categorize works of art. Genres can be broad, like comedy or sci-fi. They can be more specific, like a ‘casino crime caper’ or ‘dystopian teenage romance’. In each case, what makes genres ‘genres’ is that these categories guide both creation and interpretation.^[1] So a movie being a comedy means both that the people making it were using the idea of “comedy” to guide their decisions, and the people watching it were using the idea of “comedy” to appreciate it. To say Taken is a genre, then, means that there are movies which can be understood as “Takens”. To appreciate these movies, it’s not enough to understand that they share features with Taken, but to view them as “a Taken.”

Later I’ll go over three particular Takens but first we need to set up just what a Taken is. If it’s a genre, what are its distinctive features? What does it take to be a Taken?

Taken

Let’s start with the plot, which is most famous for revolving around Liam Neeson as murder-dad Bryan Mills. Mills starts the movie as an ex Green Beret and CIA officer who has been reduced to working security because nobody needs him anymore; his wife has left him for another man and his daughter thinks he’s a loser. On a trip to Paris, his daughter and her friend are kidnapped by vaguely-ethnic Albanian gangsters who plan to sell them into slavery. Mills delivers his famous monologue over the phone – “I will find you, and I will kill you” – and murders his way across Paris until he saves his daughter from a sheik straight out of Disney’s Aladdin. He wins back his daughter’s adoration, and gets her music lessons with the pop star he was bodyguarding for at the start of the movie.

But, of course, a movie is more than its plot. So let’s look at what makes this such a post-9/11 movie. Plenty is obvious on the surface: the special forces super soldier kicking into action to save his daughter from the ambiguously Middle Eastern bad guys (and doing so without the help of the hapless French). There’s more to it, though. As Susan Faludi noted in The Terror Dream, the American reaction to 9/11 involved trying to reinforce a particular kind of gender ideal. 9/11 was understood as a violation of the American domicile: the household inhabited by mother, father, and 2.3 children.

In reaction to this “violated domicile,” there was a cultural move to not just restore men to the forefront but restore the “paterfamilias”, the father-protector of the family who led and provided for the domicile. As Faludi notes, news pundits heralded 9/11 as an outright refutation of feminism: women in leadership had displaced (or worse) the manly men who protected America, and this led to America being attacked.^[2] Donald Rumsfeld heralded the return of “heroes,” great men who would not just defend the US but restore its (gendered) order.^[3] America’s opinion-makers agreed: the male id needed to be unleashed so that men could re-take their position as leaders and defenders of the family order.^[4]

All of this is not just found in Taken, but is essential to making it what it is. Mills, the ex-special forces guy, has been left adrift after his skills were no longer needed in the 90s peace. His ex-wife has decided that he’s a relic and left him for a soft, suburban man. The vaguely-ethnic bad guys upset the domicile by kidnapping his daughter; the fight is ultimately over control of his daughter, with the looming threat of her being sold as a sex slave to the Sheik. The movie ends, of course, with Mills heroically killing all the bad guys, winning back his daughter, and restoring the domicile.

Looking at Taken as a genre, then, isn’t just about the plot. It’s about Taken as a story of restoring order to a violated domicile by setting out into a dangerous and foreign world. And it’s all of that as part of the US’ collective emotional response to 9/11.

What I want to do now is look at three movies – The Grey, John Wick, and Pig – which show some of the interesting directions Takens have gone. These are far from the only instances, but they show the different directions the genre can go. And, from afar, can even show how the US has culturally developed since 9/11.

The Grey

The place to start is with The Grey, a movie released shortly enough after Taken that it not only starred Liam Neeson but was marketed as “Taken with wolves.” Neeson plays John Ottway, a hunter mourning the death of his wife, and who has to chaperone survivors to safety after their small plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness. Their mission is made more difficult by the fact that they are pursued by a pack of hungry wolves.

There are some obvious differences, of course – here Ottway is leading a group of people, not retrieving his daughter – but the similarities are significant. Ottway’s character is defined by the tragic shattering of the domicile and he plays the paterfamilias-protector character going through a dangerous foreign land (in this case the wilderness). His motivation is to restore the domicile and playing the paterfamilias in the woods is his way of achieving that.

Where Taken is a glorious story of revenge and restoration, The Grey confronts the absurdity of death. Each human has a corresponding wolf, and the humans’ deaths are absurd and meaningless. The characters die when urinating, falling, slipping near a river. And each of these tragedies are, importantly, irreversible. Ottway’s character arc is about coming to terms with the meaninglessness of his wife’s death, and accepting that there really is nothing he can do.

In the acceptance of tragedy, it becomes clear how The Grey stands relative to Taken. The Grey takes the tragic shock of 9/11 and begins the process of reckoning with the fact that there maybe isn’t any greater justice to be had, and there’s no way to put back together what was broken. There’s no saving and reuniting the family; Ottway’s wife is dead and there’s nothing he can do about that. This is what makes The Grey a 'Taken', then. Not that it’s “Taken with wolves”, but because it takes the story, themes, and context of Taken, and uses them to make a new movie that has to be understood in the context of the original.

John Wick

The next Taken I want to look at has Keanu Reeves as the titular Wick, and came deep into the Obama era.

The plot is that Wick is a former super assassin who retired to marry and settle down. The story starts shortly after his wife has died; she had bought him a dog by which to remember her. A gang of criminals kills the dog while stealing Wick’s car, causing Wick to (literally) dig up his old assassins’ tools and go on a mission of revenge through an elaborately-imagined criminal underworld. This story is pointedly psychological, and is frequently read as a return to addiction. Wick got clean for his wife, and now he’s relapsing. So what makes this a Taken?

For one, this is a story of Wick, the man of his house, going on a mission of revenge after his domicile is violated. The dog is presented as his last connection to his wife, so in killing it, the villains are not just invading Wick’s house but tearing apart the nuclear family. The dangerous foreign land in this movie is a fantastical criminal underworld, complete with gold coins, codes of honour, and secret institutions. And it is pointedly very dangerous: anyone and everyone could be a secret assassin.

But where Taken and The Grey are deeply interested in politics, John Wick represents a retreat from politics into the psychological. As Graeber argues in The Utopia of Rules, this was typical of many superhero movies of the era, where the personal becomes subordinate to the personal and psychological.^[5] Taking The Dark Knight Rises as an example, Graeber notes how a story about a revolution in Gotham City – where Occupy-coded anarchist-terrorists take over the city and entomb the cops – is ultimately about Bruce Wayne the person learning to have healthy relationships with others.^[6] Despite using political images, the movie is not actually interested in revolution or justice or any other part of politics. That’s all window dressing for Bruce Wayne delving into his psyche.

Similar to The Dark Knight Rises, the fantastical criminal underworld of John Wick is merely flavour for the character Wick’s personal journey. The bad guys are still vaguely ethnic, but there is no symbolism or any other importance to their ethnicity. There’s no real politics of the household, with the domicile instead representing Wick’s personal normalcy. The dog represents his own personal health more than it does any familial integrity: by the end of the movie the dog is replaced, the new dog indicating that he’s at peace once again.

John Wick, then, isn’t a response to Taken like The Grey is. Rather, it’s a Taken for its era. It’s what happens when Taken is removed from the extremely politically-conscious, post-9/11 period, and re-created in an era where a sufficient number of people were no longer really paying attention to politics. The political world is gone. The social world is gone. John Wick is a Taken where the conflict is entirely within the individual.

Pig

Pig gives us Nicolas Cage as Robin Feld, a grieving hermit. Like The Grey it confronts the inevitability of death, but moves from the context of 9/11 to climate change. It combines grieving what has been lost with grieving what will be lost.

Feld – at first just “Rob” – lives in a small shack in the Oregon woods with his truffle pig, where he trades truffles to a luxury foods supplier, Amir, for baking supplies. One night people break in and steal his pig; he teams up with Amir to head into the city to retrieve it.

We learn of Feld’s past as an elite chef, and the dark underbelly of the luxury restaurant world. While Pig keeps the revenge structure of the other Takens, as Feld moves through his old foes, he pointedly avoids taking revenge. This culminates in a ‘showdown’ with Amir’s father Darius – the pig thief – where Feld recreates a meal he had previously cooked for Darius and his wife.

While not a man of violence like Mills or Wick, Rob is still the paterfamilias of a broken home. His home has fallen apart through him losing his wife and now his pig. Both Portland and the restaurant scene play the role of the dangerous foreign land. Rob even has Wick’s secret stash, though for him it’s strategically stored luxury ingredients.

The story centres on grief. At the beginning of the film Feld tries and fails to listen to a recording his late wife made for him. Amir’s mother, Darius’s wife, is in a comatose state but neither Amir or Darius can fully let go. Rob and Amir talk about catastrophe – tidal waves and eruptions – and how there’s no way to escape them. At the end of the movie they have an exchange about how if they’d never gone to look for the titular pig, Rob could’ve lived out his life imagining the pig was still alive. “Maybe,” he says, “but she’d still be dead.”

As with The Grey, this is a story about a nuclear family that cannot be put back together. Feld’s wife is dead, his pig is dead; he goes by his old house and the persimmon tree is gone. But for Pig, these things were always transient.

In Pig, everything is transient. A meal, of course, is an experience which immediately disappears into the past. Feld counsels a luxury chef who has abandoned his dream of running an English pub: “Every day you wake up and there will be less of you.” The time he’s invested in his restaurant has been spent wrongly. Even cities are temporary, Portland doomed to be destroyed by tidal wave, earthquake and volcano.

But we have what we value, and memory lets us hold on to what we value. Feld is able to return to his wife’s cassette. The meal lets Darius not only remember his wife but return to the good that he had with her. Even the discussion about the end of Portland ends with a mutual vow between Rob and Amir:

“Well I’m not fucking moving to Seattle.”

“Fuck Seattle.”

In its focus on transience, Pig is very much a Taken for a world that has moved from terrorism to climate change as the foremost imagined threat. Feld’s pig was stolen, but the biggest threat of the movie is the persistent decay of time of passing. This is a world where everything is coming to an end, and the only thing you can do is salvage what good you can in the time you have.

The foreign world, too, is not dangerous in its potential to be harmful but in how it represents the wrong paths in life. Pursuing power, fame, and money as superficial signifiers of status instead of finding what’s truly valuable.

Looking at Taken as a genre, then, isn’t just about the plot. It’s about Taken as a story about restoring order to a violated domicile by setting out into a dangerous and foreign world.

These are just a few standout examples of Takens. They show the different direction the genre has gone. Regular Takens are still being made, even starring Liam Neeson.^[7] The world, America especially, still loves its murder-dads murdering the family back together.

But looking at these examples gives us a way to understand (one) way the US has developed after 9/11. We begin with murdering the family back together, we move on to confronting the absurdity of death. With John Wick the story turns inwards, and lastly with Pig we get a connection to new political themes.

The transition of movies away from explicitly interrogating the meaning of 9/11 doesn’t mean that Taken is going to be left in the dust. There are still reasons to understand the US as a society reacting to 9/11. And, so long as that’s the case, there will be new Takens to be had.

References

• Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
• Friend, Stacie. Fiction as a Genre, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 112/2 (2012), pp. 179-209.
• Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015).

Further Reading

For more of the cultural influences that went in to Taken, nothing comes close to The Terror Dream by Faludi (see above). The book was actually published before Taken was released, so you can think of the movie as a successful prediction by Faludi.

The movie’s pre-credit scene certainly does what it can to live up to its advertisements. We are introduced to Savant, alone with a rubber ball in an open-air jail cell. A bird lands in his cell and, instead of sympathising with it, he instantly kills it with his ball. The camera lingers on the bird’s viscera. We are then introduced to the rest of the initial suicide squad, a bunch of brightly coloured dipshits posing in front of an American flag. They are sent off to invade and overthrow Corto Maltese, a loose analogy of Cuba and Venezuela, as the workers of the government office bet which squad member will die first. Upon arriving, the squad are instantly cornered and killed in increasingly ridiculous ways. Savant, horrified by his team’s collapse, turns and flees which causes the bureaucrat Waller to detonate the bomb inside his head. A bird flies down and picks at the stump where Savant’s head used to be. The blood spells out “Warner Brothers presents.” Dark Humour.

A dark comedy having a moral core is nothing surprising. After all, the audience needs some way to side with the protagonists, and the morally uglier a movie is the more we feel like there has to be some point to it. However, The Suicide Squad goes beyond just having a moral core; it has a moralistic one. And I think this is striking, that a movie that revels in the graphic deaths of its characters could also end up with the tone of Helen Lovejoy’s pleading to “please think of the children”. Now, we could just dismiss this as sloppy writing, as if Gunn went for a simple message and ended up with a simplistic one. But I want to suggest that there’s something interesting going on, and that there’s a deep connection between dark humour and insipid morality.

When I say a movie has “insipid morality,” what I mean is that it presents a moral message that is trite and simplistic; is the sort of thing that would be presented as obvious common sense; and is made stupidly. For The Suicide Squad that insipid morality is an obsession with the purity of children. Much of the core team are understood either as children or in relation to children. Both Polkadot Man and Ratcatcher II are explicitly framed as children whose powers were created by their parents. King Shark, a simple-minded man-eating shark god, is defended by Ratcatcher II for being infantile. Team leader Bloodsport is motivated by the desire to protect his daughter. And Peacemaker… well, John Cena has always had a talent for looking like an overgrown toddler.

The Suicide Squad goes beyond just having a moral core; it has a moralistic one.

Characters often state a motivation to protect children. Harley Quinn kills the president of Corto Maltese after he mentions killing children and she calls that a “red flag” for a toxic relationship. The soldier Rick Flag repeatedly shouts “they experimented on children” in righteous anger. The heroes talk about defending all the innocent children from the mind-slaving starfish. And the office secretary declares “all those people, John. Little kids,” after she incapacitates the evil bureaucrat with a golf club. These declarations of innocence and purity confer a sense of innocence and purity to the protagonists, then, since they were defined as children.

This sort of moral triteness would be a tonal clash with most movies, but it stands out particularly in the context of dark humour. This is because dark humour is interested in transgressing not just moral norms, but all good taste. Take Savant’s brief arc. He kills the bird (moral transgression) and then the camera lingers on the viscera (taste transgression). The movie invites the audience to laugh at him panicking, fleeing, and dying. His arc concludes with his corpse being eaten by a small bird. The humour inheres in the moral and aesthetic ugliness.

There’s a similar dynamic in the characterization of Polka-Dot Man. The original Polka-Dot Man was simply an eccentric who hid devices inside of polka dots on his suit. In The Suicide Squad, the character is infected with an interdimensional cancer virus which manifests in gigantic pulsing multicoloured pustules all over his body. The humour comes both from that being disgusting and the fact that it’s using cancer as the basis of the joke. Often, dark humour targets the very idea of the good, with death itself being the punchline. Polka-Dot Man is killed at his first happy moment, good guy rebels are killed because the protagonists were careless, and there is a repeated joke about Harley Quinn not even knowing who the supporting character Milton was even after he was killed in front of her.

That dark humour is centred not just on the transgression of norms but on the transgression of all norms is, I think, the source of why it can lead to moral insipidity. This is because transgressions create a problem for trustworthiness. What I want to do now is give a brief account of trustworthiness and explain how it gets undermined by dark humour. I’ll then show how insipid morality can be understood as an attempt to restore trustworthiness.

There are two ways to understand someone being trustworthy. The first is just that she is the sort of person who can be trusted.^[1] This can mean we trust them in general, but usually trust is particular to certain specific things (“domains” in technical-speak). A stranger may seem trustworthy for me to ask them to keep an eye on my bag while I use the washroom, but I wouldn’t have them take care of my home while I’m away. Another way of understanding trustworthiness is through commitments: a trustworthy person is a person who meets her commitments.^[2] These commitments are usually like promises, so if a trustworthy person says she is going to do something, you can count on her doing it.

In each case, trustworthiness seems to fundamentally involve doing what you say you’re going to do. And here is where humour can be a problem, because humour can often involve talking a lot of nonsense. It’s accepted that when you’re joking you don’t mean what you say, thus the phrase “I’m just joking.” The more you don’t mean what you say, the harder it is for me to count on you to do what you say you’re going to do. The more nonsense you talk, the less connection there is between what you say and what you do. The less connection there between what you say and what you do, the less I can take what you say to be an indication of what you’ll do.

Normally we only joke about certain things, and in certain circumstances. I’ll more readily talk about misfortunate befalling me than you, and while I might say anything at the pub I wouldn’t say the same thing in an important meeting. I think trustworthiness makes sense of this: the more likely it is to matter what I say, the less I talk nonsense. The point at which it begins to matter what I say can be understood as (one of the) boundaries of morality and good taste that dark humour transgresses. Remember that dark humour works not only by joking about things beyond morality and good taste, but that crossing those boundaries is central to the jokes themselves. This is to say that when you’re practicing dark humour, you’re talking a lot of nonsense.

This sort of nonsense speak in dark humour poses an additional problem. Normally, if you want to transition from speaking nonsense to speaking seriously, you do something to make clear that you’re now adhering to normal conversational rules. Maybe you change your posture and tone of voice, or maybe you just change topics to something you wouldn’t joke about. But with dark humour, these boundaries themselves are the targets of humour, and so they’re harder to use to make yourself seem serious. Just as turning words to nonsense makes it harder for those words to be taken seriously, turning conventions to nonsense makes it harder for those conventions to be taken seriously. And, as I mentioned earlier, dark humour often targets the very ideas of morality, goodness, and good taste. So not only are words and conventions reduced to nonsense, but so too is the very idea of the good.

If the very idea of morality seems like nonsense coming from you, how do you reestablish that you’re still a good person? Or, at least, not a bad one? If the worry is that the boundaries of good taste have become murky, then the solution can be to redraw them—or at least the ones that matter—as brightly as possible. Here is where moral insipidity starts to come in. Brightly drawn, obvious moral lines to let everyone know that, when it’s important, they can still count on you. But that’s not a full answer. Brightly drawn boundaries can fit with more sophisticated morality too. So why does dark humour lend itself to the insipid? Here are three suggestions.

One possibility I want to reject is that moral insipidity is just a narrative contrivance, to find one final boundary between the heroes and the villains of the story. This may sometimes be the case, but I think there’s also something particular to dark humour. And, also, I think what I’m about to say about moral insipidity goes further than just movies. For one example, I think it helps to explain parts of QAnon, or other forms of conspiracism which are obsessed with the purity and innocence of children.

To start, if the goal is trustworthiness, then that thing re-establishing trustworthiness has to be fundamental. That moral core has to be an absolute moral core, which creates enough moral gravity to ground everything else. This determines insipid morality’s inflexibility. Whenever a character in The Suicide Squad implores us to think of the children, that’s never expanded upon. The only children ever seen, in fact, are Bloodsport’s teenaged daughter and the metaphorical children of the squad. The children we’re being told to think of remain entirely abstract. They’re simply “the children”: some kind of universal absolute. This absoluteness confers reliability, meaning that when it comes to thinking of the children, you can count on the dark humourist.

This absoluteness relates to a second, closely related feature of insipid morality, which is that it has to establish the priority of the moral boundaries in question. Dark humour indulges in transgressing moral boundaries, so any boundary that has to be observed has to be more important than the others. It has to be okay to violate those other boundaries but not this one. If The Suicide Squad invites us to laugh at death, failed attempts at meaning, and the emptiness of the good, then that last inviolable moral boundary has to be placed above life, meaning, and the good.

Insipid morality… is not so much a result of undermining morality as it is a result of trying to reconstruct it.

Lastly, something has to ground that priority and that is a sense of purity. In the genre of dark humour, nearly every boundary is transgressed in the name of humour and nonsense. If the insipid morality is to work to establish trustworthiness, then it has to be free of that meaning- and morality-undermining nonsense. This means it has to stay pure. The priority of thinking of the children, then, finds itself not in that children have potential, or that they are part of a society, or even that they are human, for these boundaries have been transgressed. Rather, The Suicide Squad thinks of the children because the children have been untouched by the darkness of the rest of the movie. The purity of children, then, is free of trustworthiness-undermining nonsense.

These three factors together don’t strictly determine insipid morality. I think it is possible to have moral principles centred on absoluteness, priority, and purity that aren’t necessarily stupid. (Well, I might be a bit surprised if there was a non-stupid morality based on purity.) But, when dark humour does lead to insipid morality, I think this is the path that it travels. And, since the problem of trustworthiness is one that dark humour faces, we should expect dark humour to lead to insipidity fairly often. It’s an ironic conclusion—that transgressive humour should lead to trite, simplistic morality—but I think it’s easy enough to embrace. Insipid morality, if I’m right, is not so much a result of undermining morality as it is a result of trying to reconstruct it. And that’s maybe not the sort of task our darkest, most twisted minds are suited for.

References

• Hawley, Katherine. How to Be Trustworthy, (Oxford: OUP, 2020).
• Jones, Karen. Trustworthiness, Ethics, (2012).

Further Reading

A short overview of trust and trustworthiness can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on trust.

An introduction to humour, including a discussion of dark humour, can be found in Noel Carroll’s Humour: A Very Short Introduction.

And since I disagree deeply with Carroll, I will selfishly recommend the section on why we value humour from my own piece, The Social Account of Humour.

Bong Joon-Ho’s 2017 film Okja tells the story of a young Korean girl, Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun), trying to get her superpig Okja back from the Mirando corporation.

Along the way she crosses path with the activist group the Animal Liberation Front, who view Mirando’s superpig celebration as a way to unmask the corporation’s environmentally-friendly hypocrisy. The ALF’s plan is to humiliate both the corporation and its CEO Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton): for Lucy to change through the power of shame and embarrassment. What I want to do in this article is to talk a little bit about the power of shame and embarrassment as seen through the lens of Okja. This involves showing what can be accomplished through shame, but also what can’t.

So, first, what does the movie show us about Lucy Mirando and the Mirando corporation? After all, if shaming Lucy is an important part of this movie, then we have to establish what she’s being shamed for. Our introduction to both the corporation and its CEO begins with the first scene, and immediately suggests contrasts. Lucy Mirando, happy, upbeat, and dressed all in Apple-appropriate clean white addresses a group of journalists within a former industrial building. She announces a break from how her father used to run the company: he was a “terrible man,” who committed “atrocities” which stained the building’s walls “with the blood of fine working men.” In contrast, Lucy wants to signal a new commitment to “new core values” of “environment and life.”

To celebrate this new direction, she announces a competition and new product. They have discovered a new animal in South America: a superpig. These superpigs are an environmental wonder, consuming fewer resources and producing less waste.  They have carefully reproduced 26 of these superpigs and sent them around the world to be raised in accordance with different local, traditional farming techniques. The superpigs will then be visited by Dr. Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal), a character best described as 'David Attenborough by way of Waluigi', who will declare a winner for 'Best Superpig'.

This opening scene tells us a lot quickly about Mirando, both the person and the corporation. They’re trying to make a transition from old way to new ways. The old ways are rough and brutal, represented not just by Lucy’s words but the rough building the press conference takes place in. They’re industrial, based on an opposition between the bosses and the workers. In contrast, Lucy’s new ways are friendly, cooperative, environmentally- and globally-conscious. The dour functional industrialism of her father has been replaced by the smiling, clean and well-animated Mirando of the present.

From this description you can probably guess the ALF’s motivation, and how the plot initially progresses. They want to show that the new Mirando corporation is not so different from the old. They want to show that Lucy’s stated values of a happier, more environmentally friendly Mirando are nothing but talk. To achieve this, they attach a secret camera to Okja’s ear which records nefarious goings-on at Mirando’s headquarters, including a drunken Dr. Johnny torturing Okja. These recordings are then broadcast at Mirando’s superpig celebration in downtown New York, showing the world that Lucy’s kinder, gentler façade is all hypocrisy. The ALF’s plan is that this will shame and embarrass both Lucy Mirando and the Mirando corporation, and that this will further the ALF’s goal of a more just society for non-human animals. But why should shame and embarrassment be expected to accomplish that?

To understand how the ALF expected to achieve their goals, it helps to know a few things about emotions in general. The first is that emotions often have objects, which are what the emotions are about. So when I am afraid I am not merely afraid, but I am afraid of some awful animal lurking in the shadows. When I’m proud the source of my pride is an accomplishment, like writing this blog post. Second, emotions prompt a response of some sort. Pride leads you to stand a little taller and maybe push your chest out. Fear leads you to run away. The third is that emotional experiences direct our attention at the object, and prompt us to search for reasons why that reaction might be well-founded. Returning to the fear example, the fear keeps my attention on the animal and prompts me to see whether or not it’s dangerous. If the animal is a ravenous wolf, then my fear is well-founded because the wolf is dangerous to me; if the animal is a hapless mouse then my fear is not well-founded because it’s not dangerous to me. This indicates a fourth thing about emotions, which is that what they have us looking for in the object is evaluatively important. So the fear leads me to evaluate the mouse as dangerous, and the pride leads me to evaluate writing this blog post as an accomplishment worth feeling good about. This evaluative characteristic of emotions is so important that some theorists have argued that emotions are a special kind of perception specifically for perceiving evaluative properties, though that’s not important for us now.^[1] What’s important is that emotions have an object (they are about something), and they lead us to focus on this object and look for reasons which support that emotion’s relevant evaluation, and respond appropriately. Now let’s apply that to shame and embarrassment.

Shame and embarrassment are emotions we feel when we’ve done something wrong. There’s some disagreement as to whether they are genuinely different emotions, or just the same emotion experienced at different levels of intensity.^[2] For the sake of this post and conceptual cleanliness, let’s stipulate a difference: embarrassment is for when you’ve done something wrong in the context of etiquette. It’s a social offence, but merely a faux pas. The sort of thing you’d probably feel comfortable laughing about if it happened to someone else. Shame, on the other hand, is for when you’ve committed a moral offence. These aren’t merely violations of etiquette, but instances of having done something seriously wrong.

If shame and embarrassment are about having done something wrong, then what they’re about — their object — is the thing we feel we’ve done wrong. We feel small and shrink away; where pride has us stand tall and beam, with shame and embarrassment we have trouble meeting people’s gaze. In fact, as with fear, there’s often the urge to run away from the social situation entirely. And, lastly, the reasons embarrassment and shame have us looking for are going to what made our action wrong. If embarrassing, which social rules did we violate? If shameful, what moral rules did we transgress?

Lucy’s new ways are friendly, cooperative, environmentally- and globally-conscious.

Understanding shame and embarrassment in this way, we can see more of what the ALF was trying to achieve. First of all, by shaming Lucy Mirando they aimed to make her confront that her actions were morally wrong, especially  that the cruelty Mirando corporation was inflicting on animals was wrong and needed to be stopped. Even if Lucy was not necessarily susceptible to shame, the ALF also targeted her for embarrassment by showing her hypocrisy. She was failing to live up to her own ideals of a happier, friendlier Mirando corporation. Both of these reactions would be helped along by public outrage, a loud and vocal public who also see Mirando corporation as shameful and Lucy as embarrassed. This would ideally result in the behavioural effects of shame and embarrassment: Lucy Mirando and the Mirando corporation going away. So, how does that work out?

This is where the movie gets particularly interesting, and where Bong shows us what he thinks of as the limits of shame’s political usefulness.

Throughout the movie Lucy has been taunted in conversation by her sister Nancy. After the calamity at the superpig festival we finally meet Nancy to discover that she (also played by Tilda Swinton) is Lucy’s identical twin. But where Lucy is happy, upbeat, and defined by clean light colours Nancy is dark, scowling behind sunglasses, and wearing earth tones. She even talks with a growl as she tells Lucy that the board has decided to put Nancy in charge. Nancy’s first order of business? Ignore all press and send all the superpigs to the slaughter. Once the product is out, people won’t care how it got there if it’s cheap. Even Okja, the prize-winning best superpig is ordered slaughtered. Why? In Nancy’s words, “we can only sell the dead ones.”

The climax of the movie takes places at the slaughterhouse as Mija, along with Jay (Paul Dano) and K (Steve Yeun) of the ALF rush to save Okja from slaughter. Jay and K are caught by security and escorted out, just as Nancy arrives to oversee the start of the plant’s operations. They yell at her that she should be ashamed, but she doesn’t care. She first responds by shouting “fuck off! We’re proud of what we accomplish,” before eventually settling into apathy. Ultimately, she doesn’t care what Jay and K have to say. Mija does manage to save Okja, but only by bartering Nancy a golden pig in exchange. “Our first sale,” Nancy triumphantly declares, as she drops the golden pig in her pocket.

Shame, obviously, has no power over Nancy. Or, at least, Jay and K have no ability to shame her. She doesn’t care about their attempts to shame her because she doesn’t care about their standards, and they have no ability to make her care about their standards. She is not immoral so much as she’s amoral, a creature of pure capitalism pursuing profit and profit alone. This shows us one limitation of shame and embarrassment: they are social emotions that ultimately rely on the compliance of the person who would be shamed or embarrassed. If they’re not willing to correct their behaviour of their own volition, you need something extra to make them comply. But there’s more, too.

Once the product is out, people won’t care how it got there if it’s cheap.

Remember that Lucy and Nancy are identical twins, and the corporation carries their name. The ALF aren’t just trying to take on Lucy Mirando, they’re trying to take on the whole corporation. But in using the tactics of shame and embarrassment they can only defeat the part of Mirando that is susceptible to shame and embarrassment. That’s Lucy, who wants to do things better: friendlier, more eco-conscious, more animal friendly. But those features of Lucy, those parts that make her susceptible to shame, are not what the ALF is seeking to target. This leads to what Bong shows us in the film: the friendliness, the ecological consciousness, the general desire to ‘be better’ is simply jettisoned. The crude industrial mechanisms which grind everything to dust for profit persist.

Feeling shame and embarrassment is a pretty important part of living together. It’s a key part of treating each other better, and respecting the standards of others. But, Bong reminds us, this is deeply limited. It leads us to being better people, but the problems plaguing the world are deeper than the transgressions of people trying to be good. Mija may learn to be a vegetarian, but the Mirando machine grinds on. This is perhaps why Bong ends the movie where he does: with Jay and K leaving prison. They meet up with other members of the ALF on a bus before masking up for their next mission. The fight’s not done. We go again.

Further Reading:

If you want to read more about how emotions direct our attention and lead us to search for reasons, check out Michael Brady’s Emotional Insight (2013).

For more on emotions and evaluation, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is good as always. See sections 5, 6 and 7 of their page on emotions.

Why should this bother us? After all, movies of historical events are full of things that didn’t happen. Conversations are invented, thoughts speculated, and perspectives manufactured. Very little of the dialogue spoken in Chicago 7 was actually uttered by the historical figures portrayed on film, so why would some scenes and not others stand out as particularly wrong? To put it another way, what is it that makes us care about the historical accuracy of some scenes more than others?

The natural place to start is the idea that some fictionalized scenes make the movie worse, but others do not. We don’t care about the smaller inventions because they don’t substantially affect how the movie goes, they’re more like the little cogs that keep the rest of the movie ticking. Inaccuracies in the big showpiece scenes, on the other hand, are the real substance of the movie. If the big scenes are bad, that’s much more significant in making the whole film bad, so it’s the big scenes that we care about.

Now, we have to be careful about not falling prey to a circularity here. What I’ve just written could be interpreted as saying that we care about the big scenes because they determine the goodness or badness of the movie, and those scenes determine the goodness or badness of the movie because we care about them. To dodge this problem, I need to offer an additional way to think about the big scenes being good or bad. For this I want to reach for aesthetic cognitivism.

Aesthetic cognitivism has two components. The first is the idea that works of art can have cognitive content. This means that art can be a source of understanding about the world, and provides us the sort of content which is the basis of understanding. The second part of aesthetic cognitivism is that works of art can be better or worse as works of art based on their cognitive content.

A common type of cognitive content is what’s called a “cognitive-affective perspective.” This means that a film does not just present the viewer with a bare set of facts, but it presents an emotionally-laden way of viewing a subject justified by certain information. In the case of Cinderella, for example, we are invited to feel sympathetic towards the titular Cinderella, and that sympathy is justified by the suffering inflicted upon her by her wicked stepmother and stepsisters.

This starts to help us understand why we care about some scenes in a movie but not others. The small scenes, the cogs that just keep the film moving, don’t necessarily provide cognitive-affective perspectives on the important historical events. And to the extent that they do contribute to such perspectives on the characters, their contributions are minor: hallway dialogue developing characters or a moment alone to show how a character is feeling. On the other hand, significant scenes like the climactic honouring of the dead in Chicago 7, play a very significant role in determining the cognitive-affective perspective a film offers of its subjects.

What is the perspective offered by that courtroom scene? First of all, it shows the protagonists as righteous. Specifically, they’re righteous because of a commitment to a set of higher values of justice and unity centred on a patriotic belief in the value of America. This unity is endorsed by (and therefore the righteousness is extended to) not just the defendants and observers, but also the prosecutor.

It’s a powerful, well-constructed scene with a very significant problem: it never happened.

The patriotic commitment of the scene is the culmination of the film’s narrative which emphasizes the patriotic commitment of the characters: Abbie Hoffman talks on the stand about the greatness of American institutions, Jerry Rubin defends a flag-waving protester from a sexual assault by a bunch of frat bros, and the reveal of Tom Hayden’s radical commitment begins with defending a teenager ascending a flagpole. Bobby Seale, leader of the Black Panther Party, is granted a mistrial after his treatment by the judge is so egregious that the prosecutor Schultz is moved to outrage. Altogether, then, the film offers a vision of the defendants, especially Hoffman and Hayden, as true patriots who believe in the strength and virtue of the American ideal. Their patriotism is so strong that the abuses of the court move everyone to outrage, and that outrage becomes a source of patriotic unity. This culminates in the film combining the symbols of a defiant raising of the fist with standing to mourn America’s war dead.

So what’s the problem?

Cognitivism holds that art can be a source of understanding. To offer proper understanding of something, what the film offers about that thing must be true. The patriotic narrative is not true. In fact, it is strikingly false. While Hayden did record America’s war dead in his notebook, he did not record only America’s war dead. He recorded all the war dead, especially those of the Vietnamese. His opposition to the war was not rooted in an American patriotism, but rather an opposition to war as an imperial project. Hayden saw this imperial project as fundamental to the United States, and so opposing the war meant opposing the entirety of the American state structure. The movie inverts the entire moral mission of the defendants. They are not patriots driven to outrage by the corruption of American virtues, as the film presents, but universally-minded political activists driven by an opposition to inextricable American vices.^[1]

And what of the message of unity? The prosecutor Schultz, it turns out, felt no such sympathy for the defendants. In fact, interviews conducted with Schultz leading up to the release of the film show that he’s still convinced of the righteousness of the trial, and the criminality of the defence.^[2] In light of Schultz’s lasting commitment to the righteousness of the prosecution, the film’s presented unity between him and the defendants seems particularly misplaced.

Altogether, then, the film presents a cognitive-affective perspective that seems to get important facts wrong. It therefore presents an incorrect understanding of historical events, which undermines its cognitive value. To this we might add that since The Trial of the Chicago 7 is specifically of a genre that cares about accurately depicting historical events, this cognitive disvalue is particularly significant. If the movie is bad at one of the things it is specifically supposed to be good at, then that seems significant.

However, there’s still something missing. When the film misrepresents the moral mission of the defendants, it seems to be doing something not just factually wrong, but morally wrong. The issue is not just that the movie is worse as a movie, but rather that it (or the filmmakers) have committed some more serious moral offence. I believe this can be addressed by appealing again to cognitive-affective perspectives. Specifically, we can say that the cognitive-affective perspectives the film provides are not merely inaccurate to historical events, they’re morally inaccurate too.

So what’s the problem?

Chicago 7’s moral inaccuracy is grounded in its historical inaccuracy. This is to say that the perspective the film offers is wrong in such a way that the factual wrongness is itself morally bad. Some of this is part of a disrespect for the historical characters. Hayden, Hoffman, Seale, and the rest of the defendants ended up on trial for acting on political convictions which were deeply important to them. Misrepresenting their important personal convictions consequently fails to respect how their actions followed from their values. This insult is heightened by the film inverting their values, turning them in to dedicated patriots.

There is also a deeper moral wrong. The film presents a cognitive-affective perspective not just on the characters but on a deeper set of values. The film presents a moralized view of the world which centres the value of American institutions, American lives, and American patriotism. The greatest sins in the world of Chicago 7 are not of the mass murder that Hoffman, Hayden and Seale actually opposed but rather disunity and procedural impropriety. In showing Hayden and Hoffman as patriots and Schultz as sympathetic, the historical inaccuracy of the movie turns in to moral offence, not just promoting questionable moral values but doing so at the expense of a more penetrating and urgent moral criticism.

This, then, gives us our twofold answer to the question of why we care about the historical inaccuracy in The Trial of the Chicago 7. The film does not just relay to us a set of historical facts, but also presents an emotionally-laden perspective on those facts. The inaccuracy of the facts, and the inaptitude of the perspective, undercuts the film’s cognitive value: by presenting a false vision of past motivations the film thereby presents an incorrect understanding of historical events. This inaccuracy is morally loaded, as it promotes not just an inaccurate factual understanding but also a bad set of moral values. This helps explain both why we might think historical inaccuracy makes a film worse and also why historical inaccuracy is a moral offence that extends beyond questions of a film’s value.

Further Reading

If you wish to delve further, see chapters 7 and 8 of Berys Gaut's Art, Emotion and Ethics, Oxford University Press (2007).

If you want to explore other aspects of philosophy of film, you might start with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy entry on Philosophy of Film.