Life Is Beautiful:
The Lure of Evil and the Rebellion of Love
ANTHONY C. SCIGLITANO, JR.
The rose is without why; she blooms because she blooms; she pays herself no heed, asks not if one can see her.
—ANGELUS SILESIUS (Johann Scheffler)
Nothing is more necessary than the unnecessary.
—UNCLE ELISEO
Roberto Benigni was introduced to many Americans when he accepted the Best Foreign Film Oscar for Life Is Beautiful by straddling the tops of celebrity-filled seats to get to the aisle at the Academy Awards. While Benigni may be a bit loony, he is also brilliant—albeit in his own, bizarre way. Benigni finds room for both brilliance and lunacy in Life Is Beautiful to portray a father’s love for his child in the midst of a terrible time, a time when the shadows of fascism threatened to swallow up all the light of goodness in Europe.
Life Is Beautiful is not primarily a movie about the Shoah.1 It is first and foremost a love story through which Benigni offers a vision of life’s meaning that he opposes to the vision held by Nazism. This may seem unnecessary. Nazism is clearly not an attractive vision of life. The first point I want to argue in this chapter, however, is that a Nazi view of life’s meaning can be more tempting, and more subtly tempting, than one might think. We might recall that Germans did not become Nazis because they wanted to think themselves evil, but because they found something seductive in Nazism, something that resonated with their own aspirations as human beings. The second argument of this chapter is that Nazism and what we might call “Benigni’s vision” are so different because they spring from fundamentally different attitudes toward life: while an attitude of pride determines a Nazi vision of life, gratitude lies at the root of Benigni’s vision. Each attitude serves to organize what one wills and how one reasons.
A Game of Life and Death
The action of Life Is Beautiful occurs in two places, Arezzo, Italy (birthplace of Petrarch), and an unnamed concentration camp. The film opens when Guido (Benigni) comes screaming downhill toward Arezzo while his friend, Ferrucio, attempts to control a suddenly brakeless vehicle. Flying ahead of the King and through a town parade, Guido wrongly receives the fascist salute as if he is the celebrated monarch himself. The car finishes its wild ride when it breaks down by a beautiful farm; soon, a beautiful woman drops from a hayloft into Guido’s awaiting arms. He makes an eager hero, declares himself Principe Guido and Dora his Principesa.
Further “chance” meetings between the two in Arezzo are even more outrageous. Guido launches into her when his bicycle gets away from him; he later pretends to be a Fascist inspector sent from Rome so that he can visit Dora at her school; and on a horse named Robin Hood, he steals Dora (gold) from her own engagement to an upwardly mobile fascist. Dora later has a child by Guido, and they live near his Uncle Eliseo. Guido, Eliseo, and the child, Joshua, are Jewish; Dora is not. In other words, she chooses to marry a poor Jew who is a waiter—later a bookstore owner—rather than the upwardly mobile fascist. Her courage becomes more obvious later in the film.
The movie’s tone gets progressively darker after Dora comes home to an empty, ransacked house. Her husband, father-in-law, and son have been taken for deportation to a camp. Although she need not do so, Dora decides to join her family. The overseers of the camp separate women from children; somehow, Guido’s son manages to stay with him and hide in the barracks as German soldiers snap orders to the prisoners. The rest of the film follows Guido as he struggles to maintain for his son’s sake the illusion that the camp is an elaborately structured game at the end of which the last child left unfound by the enemy will win a real tank. With aid from others, Guido succeeds in maintaining the illusion, but at the cost of his own life. Guido’s resourcefulness and imagination are credible throughout the concentration camp scenes because from the beginning Benigni has portrayed him as uncommonly adept both physically and intellectually. A German doctor at one point calls him a genius because of his uncanny ability to solve riddles. The story itself is related to us by the son as a way to honor his father’s memory.
Benigni’s Picture of the Nazi Mind
Nazism or Nazi ideology is often thought of as a mythology and exaltation of the will, of force and raw power. There can be no doubt that Nazism does extol the will. In addition, however, Nazism can be depicted as an abstract rationality, a system of calculations devoid of contact with the flesh and blood of human beings. Although these might seem like irreconcilable positions, Nazism reconciles them by subordinating the second to the first. Calculation serves power; reason is slave to irrational will. Even science gets taken up into this politics of power. Hitler commandeered a genetic theory to claim that by breeding certain human beings with other human beings he can achieve the superior race. This breeding policy involves the further conclusion that certain types of blood or certain ethnic groups constitute racial contaminants and must be eliminated.
Hitler makes claims; he does not make arguments or feel the need to persuade others rationally. Force does not debate. The story the Nazis tell themselves is that they are a superior race, and, therefore, that they have rights over against others, many of whom on this account have no right to exist. The meaning of life has to do, then, with cultural and racial domination, which some believe is theirs by right. There is a morality here, namely a kind of social Darwinism that would sacrifice the weak in view of the supposed creation of a superior humanity. Such an exalted end justifies every abominable means. In this light, Nazism may sound neither attractive nor alluring. But consider the following scenario.
One day, Upper Management Guy decides to approach one of the many corporate wage-slaves—let’s call him “cubicle guy”—under his authority. Upper Management Guy tells cubicle guy that his talents are wasted in his current position, but that he can’t promote him because of a nasty report filed by the much less talented, and obviously jealous Middle Management Guy. In fact, he says, he’s seen this kind of thing happen a million times to just this kind of worker when middle-management types look to destroy the careers of the talented workers below them to ensure their job security. The unfortunate result is that the company remains mediocre, records low profits, and has to lay people off. “Hey,” he says, “you want to get a drink after work? We can talk some more about this.”
In this scenario, Upper Management Guy plays on cubicle guy’s pride and feelings of discontent, identifies an enemy, and begins to present an alternative scenario where cubicle guy finally gets what he really deserves. Cubicle guy is also led to believe that not forming an alliance against Middle Management Guy hurts others, while forming this alliance is good for everyone. In other words, cubicle guy is able to think well of himself even while plotting to bring Middle Management Guy down. Of course, the truth is that Middle Management Guy never filed that report, and perhaps cubicle guy is not particularly talented. However, it serves upper management’s interests to get rid of Middle Management Guy and to replace him with a loyal dupe. It also serves cubicle guy’s interest not to grasp any of this—for that knowledge would give him an uneasy conscience. So he never investigates.
The point is not that cubicle guy then leaps upon unsuspecting Middle Management Guy, disemboweling him with his letter opener. It is the temptation we are after. It is tempting to think that our genius has gone unrecognized and that someone is to blame for our lowly position in life. Given the right conditions, the necessary spark, a combination of these elements can lead to violence. It is also tempting to think that in certain cases, with respect to particular people, we have special rights that they do not possess, rights that relieve us of the basic requirements for compassion and respect. We exalt ourselves to their detriment. There exist obvious cases: domestic abuse, office mistreatment, sexism, racism, and imperialism; and less obvious instances: verbal abuse, cutting wit, belittlement, intimidation, condemnation, or just forgetting someone’s existence. In all of these cases, whether they articulate it or not, someone believes that they rightly dehumanize others, deify themselves, or both. Fascist, Nazi ideology makes doctrine out of these base human attitudes, summed up by pride.
Benigni proves expert at depicting the various Nazi doctrines or values in action and in conversation, even as they filter down in silly ways to the people. Of course he does so in a way that also shows their rank absurdity. We learn early on that Guido’s traveling buddy, Ferrucio, is a fan of Schöpenhauer’s philosophy of the will.
Schopenhauer was a nineteenth-century philosopher whose view of the will influenced Friedrich Nietzsche, a favorite philosopher of the Nazi regime.2 Ferrucio believes that will power is the key to success. Ferrucio himself is a harmless character. More important is that some version of the philosophy of will has filtered into society and is taken seriously even by those who have little to gain from it. The irony here is that Guido’s friend finds a job as an utter lackey to Oreste, the owner of a local furniture store. Apparently will power only gets you so far!
Benigni consistently ridicules Nazi racial ideology. Some of this ridicule is obvious and hilarious; at other times it is subtle. For Nazism it is the racism that justifies the right to power—because Nazis perceive themselves as belonging to a superior race, they judge that they have rights over other groups. Guido repeatedly encounters Oreste—the owner of the furniture store—who aspires to status in the fascist social-political world. The first encounter with Oreste yields the following:
GUIDO: What are your political views?
ORESTE (distracted by his children): Adolfo, Benito, be good!
Guido quickly changes the subject and steals the merchant’s hat. We then hear Oreste say, “He stole my hat.” In Italian, however, we hear something else, namely, a nationalist who says “hat” in a local dialect. The nationalist fails to properly pronounce the national form of the Italian language. Guido accomplishes this theft several times, twice yielding the word “hat” from Oreste, as if to emphasize that this merchant’s fascism runs contrary to who he really is. He must perpetuate a delusional existence to support a self-destructive ideology. And fascism, as an ideology of absolute loyalty to the state, is a self-destructive ideology. Only the will of the state matters. Of course, if the merchant is part of the superior race, we have to wonder why he is consistently fooled by this Jewish fellow.
Perhaps the most humorous scene in the film has Guido appear before young students at Dora’s school dressed up as a fascist party official visiting from Rome. His job: to explain Italian racial superiority. Instead, he ends up in his underwear, the students left tittering wildly at the absurd picture before them. Argument being of little use against authoritarianism, Guido turns to mockery. He reduces racist ideology to its own absurdity. People must learn to see that beneath the shiny boots and goose-step procession lies a common, vulnerable humanity.
Within Nazi ideology, consequentialist reasoning comes to serve racial pride and a drive for power. Individual, irreplaceable lives bear little significance. Benigni is not subtle here. He has an Italian woman express her wonder at the mathematical acumen of German schoolchildren in relation to their more sluggish Italian counterparts. Her example is the following math problem that German youngsters reportedly dispose with ease:
WOMAN: If the state spends 4 marks per lunatic a day, 4.5 marks per cripple, and 3.5 marks per epileptic, and there are 300,000 total, how much would the state save if it eliminated all of these individuals?
Dora responds that she “doesn’t believe this,” but the woman thinks that she is referring to the disparity of math skills. The example confirms for her German superiority! Of course, Dora is rejecting the appalling character of the example and how casually those around her, including her fiancé, speak of it.3 She is also, however, rejecting the whole meaning of life represented by the Fascist worldview.
The Counter Story: An Ontology of Gift
The word “ontology” refers to that which is truly real, most real, as opposed to that which is only apparent, illusory, façade. We make this distinction all the time. If Coke is the real thing, the assertion is that Pepsi is somehow less authentic, the soda of falsehood. It’s not “classic.” Real grass versus Astroturf, real wood versus pulp board, outdoor stadiums versus domed, Guinness versus Coors.
The classic philosophical example of the real versus the illusory is Plato’s allegory of the cave. In Plato’s allegory, prisoners sit in a cave facing a wall and watch as movements occur on the wall which they believe are real, but which are actually the play of shadows from a fire which shines from behind them. They must be led out of the cave to perceive reality, and thus the difference between reality and mere appearance. That which is truly real is often said to be true, good, and beautiful as well. Guido, Dora, their son, and Guido’s uncle Eliseo will present us with a vision of life’s meaning more true, good, and beautiful than anything the Nazis put forth (admittedly not a high standard)—they offer a counter story or vision regarding life’s meaning. Rather than pride, gratitude directs the use of will and intellect. We can start with Guido.
Guido is the classic comedic fool, the naïf who reveals what is highest in what appears lowest. He is like a child in the best sense: the beautiful world around him, whether the countryside, Dora, or Arezzo, captivates and energizes him. Guido’s encounters with nature (“This is beautiful,” he shouts), with Dora, with his uncle, and with his son come to him as gifts. Dora literally falls from above. He only meets Dora because his car breaks down and Ferrucio shoos him away from the vehicle to fix it. His Uncle gives him a job, a place to live, and much more.
Eliseo hires his nephew as a waiter, and trains him in one of the movie’s great scenes. Rehearsing his servant’s role, Guido practices bowing, but to a point where his forehead practically touches the floor. Learning to serve, he turns to groveling. Eliseo stops this buffoonery to teach Guido a lesson about service and dignity. “God serves men,” he says, “but he’s not a servant to men.” Eliseo is the wise Uncle, a guide who helps Guido change from a clever, agile fool to a clever, agile Prince, willing to play the fool for a higher purpose. The meaning of Eliseo’s other piece of wisdom—“Nothing is more necessary than the unnecessary”—provides what I take to be the interpretive key to this film.4
Two events in the film unpack the significance of this proverb most clearly. First, there is the surprising, spontaneous love that Dora gives to Guido and to her family. Not only does she descend from the hayloft, but by giving herself to Guido she also descends from a higher social class (and literally crawls under a table to kiss him). Guido is not only a Jew, he is a poor one. Her ultimate gift, however, comes when she boards the deportation train to share her family’s destiny. This act was literally unnecessary; she is not Jewish. Love too is not necessary. It cannot be demanded by law, or arrived at by syllogism. In another sense, however, her expression of love at this point in the story is the most necessary act of all, for it manifests human solidarity in the face of Nazi belief in racial separation and subjugation. We might say that love is both necessary and free in this case. Dora is not externally required to give her love, but she is internally compelled. If we could ask Dora about her choice to board the train, she might reply, “I had no choice,” which is the right answer, even if we know that technically she did have a choice.
In another way, we often consider games unnecessary. “It’s just fun and games,” we say, indicating a lack of seriousness. Of course few who have ever played a game of Scrabble or Chess, basketball or golf, can believe that the competitors are not serious. A player who fails to take the game seriously lets everyone down. No one wants to win a game of Scrabble against someone who is too distracted by MTV to care. What we would seem to imply when we say that games are unnecessary is that they are not useful, or, if they are useful their usefulness is secondary to their real purpose which lies in pleasure. Along with games, we perhaps also place imagination in the “unnecessary” box. We can pull it out when we have time to spare, but otherwise better to keep it under wraps. We don’t want to be dreamers. After all, calculation and hard work pay the bills, not imagination.
In Life Is Beautiful, however, games and imagination5 play a central role. Dr. Lessing uses puzzles to cling to sanity; they fail him, perhaps because he is such an isolated figure. He always eats alone, and the only person to engage him is Guido. Guido’s character loves games, pranks, and puzzles. He steals hats and hearts, he solves riddles, and he protects his child through an enormous effort of creativity. If games are normally considered unnecessary, it is nevertheless precisely a “game” that saves Joshua’s life and manifests Guido’s desperate love for his child. Guido’s imagination becomes what is “most necessary” if his son’s life is to be saved. Guido must strain every mental muscle to maintain the illusion that everything Joshua encounters in the camp exists as part of an elaborate game to win the real tank; certainly his will is at work to give his son a love worthy of Dora when she boarded that train. It is the only way to “pay forward” his wife’s sacrifice. With Guido, however, love and gratitude direct will, reason, and imagination as they ought to be directed: for the good of others. Of equal importance is the help that Guido receives at key points in his “game.” Unlike Lessing, Guido is not a solitary figure.
Although the story is about Guido’s sacrifice for his child (not just his death, but his whole existence in the concentration camp is a living sacrifice for the child), he is also kept alive because of the child. As Guido drags anvils up stairs to a furnace (essentially a picture of hell), he expresses his despair to a prisoner behind him. The prisoner explains that to stop would mean death. Guido’s face reveals comprehension: if he dies, Joshua dies. Like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the mountain, Guido hauls the anvil to the furnace. Unlike Sisyphus, however, Guido has a purpose external to his climb and help outside himself. His child staves off Guido’s despair by his very presence; in turn, Guido constructs stories to maintain the game illusion. When Guido is desperate, when exhaustion and anxiety cloud his imagination, Bartolomeo (a fellow prisoner) or the uncle pitch in, and the life-saving game, that which is “unnecessary,” yet “most necessary,” is saved.
Can we say that the meaning of life represented by Guido is more realistic than that of Nazism? It is tempting to view those who are successful or powerful as the ones who are realistic. They must hold a superior ontology, we tell ourselves (probably in simpler words). Success is surely helped by insight. But in the context of the film, it appears that the powerful fascists are simultaneously the most deluded of all. A clever contrarian might note that in fact, Guido dies at the end. If that’s realism, then who wants it? But then, who doesn’t die in the end? Neither power nor success purchase immortality. Such a view would represent an utterly false ontology, a forgetfulness of our finite nature. Like Guido and like the rest of us, each and every member of the Nazi party ceases to be. Death is the purest of democracies.
The hubris of Nazism is not merely dangerous to those against whom it arrays itself. A false view of the self also endangers the self. Pride on such a grand scale destroys those who hold it because their lives stand precariously perched over the abyss of self-delusion. Violence against others is necessary because their existence testifies to the lie at the fascist core. Pride makes of us fragile beings for whom truth is always a danger, something to be squelched lest it collapses our carefully constructed balsa wood identity. An ontology of racial superiority and power is ironically an ontology of fear.
The question that confronts Guido and the rest of us is what if anything is worth living and dying for, not whether or not we shall ever “go into that good night.” A realistic conception of life might grasp existence, both ours and that of the world, as that which is given and that to which we are given to respond. This view suggests that our very existence—the community around us, the patterns of life that take shape before our eyes—we could not have procured for ourselves, but receive as a gift. We might say that existence is given and not grabbed; for Guido, life is not merely given, but also gift—it is good and beautiful. It’s true, also, that nothing in this view precludes recognizing that we are capable of evil and ugly responses to the gift of being. We all know, for example, that people can receive a gift in the most gracious and in the most awful ways. The gracious extreme involves a spontaneous outburst, sometimes more fervent than expected by the gift giver; the opposite can also be the case: “What am I going to do with this?” The latter is wrong precisely because it forgets that the gift need not be given. “Awful gift receiver” guy seems to think that he ought to have received something better, when, in fact, he needn’t get anything at all.6
Reception of a gift, then, carries with it certain appropriate and inappropriate responses. We recognize the giver as free (otherwise it is not a gift but an obligatory exchange) and therefore generous. We recognize ourselves as dependent upon the graciousness of another and in their debt. Primarily, then, our existence is receptive, humble, and rooted in generosity.7 Our gratitude extends to a desire to return this generosity (not the gift!). Recognition that existence is a gift, given similarly to all, prohibits conceiving ourselves gods among men. Moreover, Guido’s humility is not a lack of energy. Humility indicates a rightful estimation of one’s place in the universe, not a low sense of self-esteem or an impoverished notion of one’s responsibilities towards others. Indeed, reactions to gifts often include bursts of energy, renewed vigor and vitality. This is Guido’s story. Gift begets gratitude begets generosity, vitality and creativity.
Life Is Beautiful?
Why beautiful? Why not true or good? An obvious answer is that Benigni is an artist. A second answer comes from Dostoyevsky, who tells us: “Only beauty can save us.” We are back at our original question: Why focus on beauty? We said earlier that Guido must show the absurdity of Nazi ideology because there is no arguing with a fundamentally coercive ideology. The beautiful is that which can be grasped by the senses; beauty can move us sometimes despite ourselves. The difficulty that Guido confronts is that people around him have lost a taste for beauty and goodness, and with it a sense of humor about themselves (only the children and Dora laugh when Guido strips before them; Oreste is utterly humorless). Pride lacks beauty and humor precisely because it is so self-absorbed.
What do we mean by beauty? At the heart of beauty lies attractive form. It may be safe to say that life comes to us first as a series of forms and shapes. Prior to creed and duty, we encounter a world of edges and corners, colors and sounds, light and language. Our world takes shape as the smell of Grandma’s perfume, the taste of milk, the light of the countryside. Form does not merely represent meaning that is somehow already present; without shape, our world has no meaning, like a language without grammar. Form is essential to meaning. Would anyone say, for instance, that the form a person’s life takes over time is unrelated to the meaning of that life? Just as important, it is through form that meaning can happen as an event. An embrace not only expresses affection already present, but also impresses affection on a relationship—just as withholding an embrace does the opposite. Form and content work together; an embrace normally expresses and increases affection; a slug to the jaw does not.
Beauty is not simply “form,” but form that compels, moves, attracts, fascinates. In Guido’s world, beauty enchants, but does not coerce, an important distinction because enchantment can turn demonic, as in a charismatic figure like Jim Jones. The beautiful must also be good. It is the story of Guido and his family that fill out this vision of a beautiful life as a good life. Benigni’s story specifies the beautiful life as ecstatic, a life formed through giving and receiving for others.
The word “ecstatic” means “to stand outside”; it is a form of self-forgetfulness that we experience8 when we are “lost” in music or in a movie, when we are “in the zone” or when we “lose track of time.” Beauty trains us to be less self-centered, like a rose: “The rose is without why; she blooms because she blooms; she pays herself no heed, asks not if one can see her.” Like the rose, love does not calculate its own interest or pay itself vain heed. Love is, in a sense, whyless.
Guido is lost in the beauty around him. He exults in the countryside and gapes in wonder when Dora boards the train. Guido’s ecstatic existence is true because he responds with gratitude and joy to the gifts he is given and good because he returns life’s generosity in kind. Benigni knows that not everything attractive is beautiful, not every ecstasy good and true. We can be attracted to Nazi charisma, we can lose ourselves in an utterly evil cause, we can falsely assess our ontological status in relation to others, we can even fail to notice beauty when it appears. This family story shows us his vision of a truly beautiful and good life. Indeed, Benigni tells us at the beginning of the film that the movie is to be like a fable, a tale with a lesson. We might ask, then, what it all has to do with us, we who do not live among Nazis?
One of the great capacities of cinema is its ability to show us the drama that underlies our apparently prosaic lives. It does this by condensing all the drama of a life into two or three hours. Family love may appear mundane when it comes to bear the dust of the everyday. What Benigni shows, however, is something more familiar, so familiar in fact, that we often miss it. Guido’s sacrifice, after all, is the sacrifice every loving parent makes for his or her children each day. To bear and love one’s children is to live in their bones, to suffer their burdens, to fear for them when they are naively unafraid, to take joy in their life, sadness in their struggles, and to do anything to protect them against their enemies. In short, to give one’s life. The goal of all this is sometimes survival alone; but a parent usually hopes for much more, for a child who can trust, who is strong and good, who has a richly textured life—happiness. Like Guido, all parents must battle their child’s enemies: hunger, ignorance, pride, humorlessness, stupidity; glamour parading as beauty, falsehood dressed up as truth, evil costumed as goodness. If life, our life, is a beautiful gift, then we have something to lose. To Benigni, that constitutes a drama worth living and dying for.
1. Explain the relevance of the two epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter.
2. Is the game Guido plays with his son morally justified? Would the act of deception be acceptable if instead of his son it involved his wife?
3. Does Guido’s joy in life blind him to the impending atrocities? Is Guido naive?
TO READ NEXT
Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Augustine. The Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Jonathan Glover. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2001.
C.S. Lewis. The Four Loves. New York: Harvest, 1971.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by G.M.A Grube and C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992.
1 “Shoah” means destruction and seems much more appropriate than the more frequently used “Holocaust,” which signifies a sacrificial offering to God for atonement.
2 The debate regarding Nietzsche’s influence on Nazi ideology still rages. It has been firmly established that he was neither an anti-Semite, a rabid nationalist, nor a believer in racial purity (quite the contrary—he seems to have thought that mixed races produced stronger cultures). Nevertheless, his genealogy of morals assigns to Christianity and Judaism the less than flattering label of “slave” morality and holds them responsible for Western cultural weakness. He sees the value of compassion, for instance, as a way for the weak to dilute the cultural strength borne by the “masters,” those who are vital and alive. The masters then become self-conscious and encounter feelings of guilt regarding their strength. On the latter theme, see Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swenson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998). See also Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, What Nietzsche Really Said (New York: Schocken, 2000), especially pp. 103–124. Nietzsche’s most avid defender is Walter Kaufmann. See Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). In his Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), Jonathan Glover shows links between Nazism and a highly selective reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy. See pp. 11–18, 40–47, and 355–364.
3 This dialogue recalls the type of things that people like Adolf Eichmann would calculate in the dispassioned manner of a bureaucrat. See the classic study of Eichmann by Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994).
4 Eliseo’s other memorable remark, “Silence is the loudest cry” and his need to have Guido understand that genuine evil is starting to arise are two other instances of his wisdom in the film.
5 Imagination can mean many different things. It involves the ability to create, to synthesize various impressions and ideas, to put oneself in another’s shoes, to see a puzzle from more than one angle.
6 We are assuming here that the gift is appropriate. Utterly inappropriate gifts can of course be given (the proverbial baseball mitt that a child gives to his mother for Mothers’ Day, for instance).
7 Whether a god must be presumed here is an open question; it may be that Guido believes in God; he is Jewish, but we do not know from the film whether he is religious. Eliseo’s comment about God points to this conclusion, but can also be construed as a useful observation drawn from the culture.
8 Perhaps “we” don’t actually experience, because the subject is gone in some sense and only comes back in a changed state.