Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation

Liberal theory begins from an idea of the state of nature. For everything else, nature may be a model of order, but for human beings it represents the threat of disorder: in nature people would have a life that is “nasty, brutish and short.”¹ Contemporary theories of the state of nature are less likely to use the Hobbesian language of a war of all against all than the language of social choice theory, speaking, for example, of the failure of collective action. The point, however, remains the same. The problem of state creation is that of bringing individuals into an ordered arrangement, without requiring that they change their nature. Each wants to advance his or her own ideas of the good life. The state is to serve these individuals; they are not to serve it. Contract theory remains an apt description of the liberal approach not because there is any actual bargaining but because the premise is that the political order serves each individual’s interests. A reasonable person, accordingly, would agree to this.

Liberal theory imagines the founding of the polity as an exercise of practical reason working on a clean slate—as if we start from nowhere and build the basic order of the state using reason alone. Philosophers, whether Rawls or Habermas, would still be kings.² They imagine themselves as fundamentally rational, asking what it would take to get them to agree to enter a political organization. The organization would have to advance their interests; it would have to have mechanisms to assure that everyone was subject to the same fair rules—thus, the emergence of the rule of law protecting rights, property, and contracts. Short of this, one would only agree to participate in a political order because of coercion. What I do solely from fear, however, is not a measure of justice.

But where is love and sacrifice? Where is history and destiny? Where is the revolutionary violence that has been so tied to our political history? Where, one wants to ask, are the families and children for the sake of which we live our lives? These may not appear in political theory, but they are just what we find when we examine the way in which the political order is imagined in film. It is not enough to say that these are matters of merely individual interest, that is, matters of individual life choices. Only if one accepts the starting point of liberal political theory would one think this. That is surely not the way we live our lives.

Hobbes thought that fear of death was the primary motivating factor that moves the individual from nature to polity.³ A rational actor, in that case, would not enter a political arrangement that demanded his life. How could he, if the entire point of the agreement is to advance individual interests by securing life? But we would be hard pressed to say that the purpose of the state, as we have known it, is to secure life over death. The development of the Western nation-state has been deeply intertwined with war. The United States has been at war or preparing for war for more than half of its national life.⁴ This is not just bad luck or the working out of a progressive path to what the state “really is.”

Is it all a matter of risk management? Would a rational actor enter into an arrangement that imposed a risk to his life if that risk were less than that which he faced in the state of nature? That seems rational, but it is the wrong question. What has to be answered is why he would stick to his contract once the risk materialized. If the choice is between breaking the contract—flight—and death, why would I choose the contract? There is no argument that compliance advances my current and future interests. The answer cannot be the moral force of the promise alone. The question of why be moral is the same question as why maintain the social contract at the risk of one’s life. Hobbes’s answer tended toward coercion—the sovereign has the power to enforce the contract. But that answer assumes that we would and should violate the contract if we can get away with it.

The answer we find in film to the Hobbesian conundrum is that we sacrifice for love. We freely give ourselves to the violence of the state as an act of love. The films I discussed in the previous chapter reveal liberal theory to be a literal failure of the imagination. That theory fails to capture the way the social imaginary works in our political narratives. We are not each of us a hero, but neither are we the rational actors that liberal theory imagines. In both cases, film and theory, we use ideal types to express how we imagine political experience.

We know what we are to do in the extraordinary moment, just as we know what we are to do when a loved one becomes gravely ill. We don’t recalculate our interests; we give of ourselves. Think of the national response to 9/11. We did not calculate individual interests, and we did not rely on the coercive power of the sovereign. The passengers on United Flight 93 knew just what it was they had to do when they found themselves suddenly on the front line of a battle for which they had not previously volunteered. The line between fact and fiction is crossed just at that moment, for it is the imagination that sustains meaning in both.

If a liberal theory of politics fails to capture the richness of the political imagination, is the appropriate response simply to turn to conservatism? Classic conservatism was certainly skeptical about the capacity of reason to reconstruct the state from first principles applied in an imagined state of nature; it certainly defended family values over abstract rights. However, it was never the object of a popular democratic politics. It could not be so because the protection of tradition appeared as a class-based project of protecting social hierarchy. Conservatives defended the family as a center of male authority; they defended tradition as the source of unequal distributions of wealth; and they defended the church as a source of moral norms that could discipline the masses. Together, family, state, and church defined a class-structured society in which wealth, public power, and moral authority all worked to subordinate some groups while empowering others. Arguably, conservatism was more about exploitation than it was about sacrifice. Its concern for tradition had less to do with the grounds of love and more to do with the sources of privilege. This is not what we find in the popular democratic representation of politics in film.

The narrative of the film brings into view the identity that cannot be spoken in political theory. This violent truth of politics can be spoken only after it has been linked to familial love. This is the exact point of contrast with liberal political theory: not the individual but the family occupies the center of our political imaginary. What connects family and state is that both rest on love, not reason. And all forms of love, as Plato wrote in the Symposium, are bound to each other.

A politics of the deed is a politics of sacrifice. The suicide bomber reminds us of this today. Because he deploys against us our own deepest archetype of the foundation of politics, he is perceived as an existential threat. The imagination of that threat far outpaces the actual harm done. His threat exceeds his grasp because an enemy willing to sacrifice himself imagines no limits on his willingness to use force. This is a deep truth we know about ourselves. There is an easy move from the lone suicide bomber using the weapons he has at hand to the use of weapons of mass destruction. This is why we so easily imagine the terrorist threat as one that involves nuclear weapons and why we are so fascinated today with the ticking-time-bomb hypothetical.⁵ That hypothetical was itself recently rendered in the film Unthinkable.⁶

In this film the terrorist bomber willingly gives himself up to what he knows will be torture: he must sacrifice himself. The bomb—actually multiple bombs in his case—that is ticking away is nuclear. That threat poses the question: “What will we do?” Will the figure of law enforcement, a woman FBI agent, give way to the figure of the torturer—a shadowy figure who operates outside of formal, legal recognition? The film answers: “Of course we will torture.” Against the terrorist’s political commitments the interrogating agent of the state—the torturer—poses love of family. The torturer goes so far as to murder the terrorist’s wife in front of him. He threatens to do the same to his children. He poses this question to the terrorist: Will he sacrifice his children for his politics, or will he sacrifice his politics for his children? He chooses politics over family.⁷ With that we are left only to wait for the nuclear explosion.

A politics that is not tempered by the love of family is exactly our image of a fanatical politics. It is the point at which faith and nihilism intersect—the end point of all millennial religions. Despite the film’s effort to create a gap between the familial and the political, we know that the families of suicide bombers often honor their acts no less than families of our own sacrificial soldiers honor their children’s acts. For both, family and state align under the sign of the sacred. To portray the terrorist as evil, and not just the enemy, there must be a violation of this order of the family. It is not the terrorist’s sacrifice that we find shocking. It is his resistance in the face of the murder of his wife and the threat to his children. This is what we find “unthinkable,” although that hardly means “unimaginable.” Indeed, the film ends with the figure of law—the FBI agent—who constantly resists and then gives in to the torturer, walking out holding the hands of the terrorist’s young children. We know where they belong; law will protect the children. Law, however, we also know has no power to resist the coming explosion.

If Unthinkable is about the moment before the catastrophe, then The Road is about life after the explosion.⁸ In the opening scenes of the movie some global catastrophe occurs that destroys animal and vegetative life on the planet, leaving only a few humans wandering around looking for food. We are back in the state of nature, and it is a very inhospitable nature. The movie is about a father and his young son, born shortly after the catastrophe. The mother cannot bear the idea of living in this world. She would follow other families in an act of collective suicide. The father insists on hope, finding in his son a “warrant” to continue to live. The mother wanders off into the woods to die. The father and son try to make it to the coast, avoiding threats from other survivors who have become cannibals searching desperately for food.

This is as stark a picture of the state of nature as one can imagine. The father believes he must endure for the young son. His child is called an “angel” and his “god.” There is nothing metaphysical about these claims, only the endless power of love. The father will do anything, kill anyone, to protect his son. He tells his son to treat everyone as a threat, although the son’s natural inclination is to help whoever he comes across. Ultimately, the father dies at the edge of the sea, leaving the son alone—but not for long. It turns out that a family—mother, father, son, and daughter—have been following them out of concern for the child’s well-being. When his father dies, they quickly step in to adopt him.

That moment of adoption is the original political act. It answers the question of how a community might emerge in the state of nature. Until this moment everyone they meet is literally a threat. Sometimes that threat is of murder and cannibalism. Other times it is simply the threat of taking up scarce resources and thus hastening their starvation. There is only one thing that is powerful enough to overcome self-interest in this state of utmost scarcity: children. The child is the warrant not just for the father’s endurance and sacrifice but also for a community of intergenerational sacrifice. Without children there is not only the literal end of the world, but there is, before that, the end of the political.⁹ As an old man, whom they run into in their travels, says, God has long ago turned his back on humans. God will not save humanity, for the only god is the child.¹⁰

Only for love will we kill and be killed. It is not the killing, but the sacrifice, that marks the origin of the state. This is origin in the double sense of starting point—as in The Road—and foundation—as in Unthinkable. Only here do we learn who we are, just as others learn the truth of our identity. Thus, in Unthinkable the terrorist gives himself over to be tortured as a test of himself and proof of who he is. Willing to kill, he must be willing to die. Sacrifice can be paid in only one currency: identity. In The Road we learn that the father loves his child and that for him he will sacrifice himself. Both stories are easily recognized by us, for there is a direct line from these films to the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. The terrorist reminds us of what Abraham was prepared to do: sacrifice his son to his god. The father reminds us that God did intervene and that family and state worship the same god.

The terrorist is constructed in an image close enough to our own imagination of sacred violence that he appears to us as an existential threat to the state. Law is imagined as too weak a force to counter the terrorist. Apart from torture, which is nothing more than a test of the martyrdom sought out by the terrorist, there is only love of family to pose against him. One form of love can only be countered by another. But we cannot know in advance whether the terrorist will choose god over family or family over god. Who could know what Abraham would do until the moment he raised the knife? The nation-state of the twentieth century was well aware that, when it chose war, it put at risk its own children. Indeed, Europe destroyed a generation of its children in the First World War and then suffered the even greater loss of young and old in the tactics of urban destruction, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the Second World War. Still, it chose war.

Torture and terror answer in the most brutal way possible the question of who I am. The terrorist who gives himself over to be tortured in Unthinkable, no less than the torturer who operates completely outside of law, are both expressions of identity over representation. They exist in the world of the deed. If the torturer defeats the victim, forcing him to talk, that is the speech that refounds the state as an order of representation.¹¹ It is not contract, but confession, that puts off a world destroying violence.

It is no accident that the political response to torturing regimes is often a “truth and reconciliation” commission. We might better call these “confession and forgiveness” commissions. They operate with a religious aura at the point of a new foundation.¹² Whether truth can actually lead to reconciliation is a difficult empirical question, but that politics must be founded on giving voice—representation—to violent sacrifice is central to the construction of political narrative in fact and fiction.

Sacrifice at these moments of foundation is always complex, involving multiple actors in intersecting narratives. Those killed by the prior regime are now read as martyrs. Their loved ones sacrifice their moral entitlement to revenge: reconciliation is their sacrifice for the foundation of the state. The victimizer, too, must show that his violence was no less in thrall to a political narrative. He does not confess to personal pathology. This is the confession of the defeated. They must sacrifice their prior political identity. If a new political order is to emerge, truth must be linked to sacrifice on both sides of the conflict. This makes reconciliation—forgiveness—possible. This is the faith that founds the polity by moving from violence to word, from identity to representation.

The politics of identity represented in these films is that of the extraordinary moment, not that of ordinary life. The satisfaction of ordinary personal interests always comes later. It is that which we can achieve only after the threat has been removed, the sacrifice performed. Representation succeeds identity; the ordinary requires an extraordinary foundation. What is distinctly not at issue is the ordinary political confrontation between those who identify themselves as liberal, on the one hand, and as conservative, on the other. These are matched political positions battling over a different question: what are the norms that should be pursued in and through the laws and customs of the polity? Film cannot take up the ordinary disputes between our political parties without becoming narrowly didactic.¹³ In contrast, I have been speaking of the archetypes that inform the political imagination, whether of Democrats or Republicans. Family is not a value unique to conservatives; sacrifice is not avoided by the liberal. The issue here is not party politics but the fundamental structures of the imagination within which that politics operates.

One important point of contrast between liberal political theory and the political imaginary at work in popular film is the central role of the individual in the former and of the family in the latter. So far, I have been speaking of the tragic demand of politics on family: the creation of meaning through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the action of love, but love grounds comedy as well as tragedy. We often find films exploring the relationship between the political and the familial in its comic form. The theme is the same as with tragedy: familial love provides the necessary condition of a successful politics. The point is well made in a popular film from a few years back, The American President.¹⁴

This is a romantic comedy, not a drama of life and death—although even here there is a necessity in imagining that the president orders the death of someone, somewhere. This power of life and death is what marks him as the president.¹⁵ This is not a matter of legal process but of the presidential decision to kill for the state. There is always something of the torturer of Unthinkable in the image of the president. This sets him apart whether or not he is personally charismatic. The point of the film, however, lies elsewhere. It shows us again the inescapable intertwining of the familial and the political in the national narrative. Indeed, nowhere is this intertwining more evident than in the symbolism of the “first family.”

Residence in the White House continues to carry the same sort of symbolic weight as that of a royal family. We see the democratic version of the king’s two bodies: the finite character of particular presidential families rotating through the permanent institutional expression of the presidency. The Oval Office is matched by the residence, with the president literally moving daily between his embodiment of the world-destroying power of the American empire and the scenes of ordinary domesticity upstairs.¹⁶ In the film state dinners are matched with “meatloaf night” in the residence.

The president, Andrew Shepherd, comes into office as a recent widower, with a daughter who is about twelve years old. The movie is the love story between Shepherd and a lobbyist, Sydney Ellen Wade. Wade has to see through the office to the man, while Shepherd must constantly insist that the office has nothing to do with his feelings for her. Trying to be ordinary while the rest of the world watches—and reports—proves to be more or less impossible. The president cannot find a private space in which to pursue the loving family; instead, the resolution is to turn familial love into a source of political strength.

The deep structure of the narrative is the necessity for familial completion as a predicate to political power. This necessity operates quite independently of the particular political values that Shepherd pursues. Those values happen to be liberal: gun control, protection of the environment, and support of the ACLU. His opponent is the political conservative. These positions, however, could be reversed. At issue is the repair of a family; the president’s family must be made whole. His daughter needs a mother as much as he needs a spouse. The maintenance of the state requires the completeness of love. Thus, only when family and politics are aligned can we be confident that the president will win reelection. Until the first family has been repaired and defended, the nation is in peril. That peril is represented as an openness to unfounded fear. Love, quite literally, grounds the security of the state.

This same narrative operates in a variety of forms in our actual politics: some banal, some hypocritical, some romantic. Consider, for example, the recountings of the narrative of Edward Kennedy’s life that circulated in the media after his death in 2009. Often, the narrative was presented as a moral narrative of sin and recovery.¹⁷ Recovery begins with a renewal of familial love. Only when he was happily remarried could he become the master of the Senate—someone above partisanship, for he now represented the nation as a whole. A banal variation is found in the countless rhetorical performances of the withdrawal from politics “in order to spend more time with my family.” Here the suggestion is that politics has taken a pathological form by undermining family. The politician announces that he is giving up a life of one sort of love—political—for that of another—familial. This is a career-ending speech, for the task of the politician is to model the unity, not the separation, of these forms of love.

The American President is romantic comedy taking up the same question of the origin of the state as the narratives of sacrificial violence in the last chapter. Film places itself in the exceptional situation, which is not just the point of origin but also the point of renewal. Political and familial renewal are one and the same. The state is in constant need of renewal in part because it exists in a world of threats but also in part because the extraordinary gives meaning to the ordinary. The retreat at the end of the day to the family residence in the White House is the entry point for the power of love to renew the ordinary politics of party confrontation.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that when we turn from theory to imagination, we find little concern with individuals and the social contract. We find in film something closer to classical political theory than to modern theory: the polity, Aristotle thought, emerges naturally from the coming together of families.¹⁸ This idea of familial origins, however, is no longer seen as transformed by the coming into being of the polity. Instead, political and familial order are both linked to a thoroughly Christian idea of meaning coming into the world through sacrifice for love. We find a secularized, political version of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” Love, sacrifice, and faith are the elements of the political narrative we want to see again and again.

What fascinates is not the use of the state to provide a space for an economy of material interests but rather the image of the state as an economy of love. Films create for us a narrative of the willingness to sacrifice. This is the burden of love. Meaning begins not from the satisfaction of need but from the possibility of sacrifice. It begins in the act that cannot be derived from argument. We “fall” in love; we do not reason ourselves to love. The same is true of our relationship to the state. We do not choose our state from a list of existing states. We do not have the option of “none of the above.” We find ourselves already grasped by a political community. Its history is our history; its future is our burden.

Just here, we find the answer to the question of why the family appears so central to the political drama despite the absence of the family from political theory. These films are fundamentally about the action of love. The bringing of meaning into the world through sacrifice—real or metaphoric—is the archetype at issue. The point is not that politics is founded on families rather than individuals—both are theoretical abstractions—but rather that love collapses distinctions. Distinctions are maintained in an order of representation. Love reaches beyond representation to identity. We see this most immediately in the biblical expression of unity made possible through the creation of Eve: “two become one” in the connection of man and woman. Identity beyond difference is always the meaning of love. This giving up of difference and becoming one with the object of our love is given existential expression in sacrifice.

The point is not that film is simply making use of politics to tell a story of love. Just the opposite. The modern nation-state has been a construction of the erotic imagination before it has been a construction of reason.¹⁹ In political terms we must have sovereignty before law. Sovereignty is the point beyond distinctions, the point of identity that founds an order of representation.

Liberal theory is simply not prepared to deal with love as a creative force—a force that was already central in Plato’s understanding and that is at the center of Christianity. When these films show us the inseparability of the familial and the political, they are taking up this world-creating power of love.²⁰ They place the family at the center because family has become for us the sign and signature of love. We associate the familial with the transcendent claims of love. This is especially true today in the relationship between parent and child. We find in the innocence of childhood the absolute and unconditional claim of love. As the father in The Road explains, the child is his god. Nothing really competes with this as a symbol of the power of love to take us beyond our concern for protection of our rights and satisfaction of our interests.

A common theme of film is the competition between one’s love of family and one’s professional role. Is the political narrative of the familial simply another version of this story? Not quite. The general theme has profession giving way to love. There is a reordering of values such that the protagonist sees that professional life or social role in the absence of familial love is empty.²¹ The resolution is the turn away from this role to the reality of love. This story appears in the rhetoric of the ruined politician who “wants” to spend more time with family—a rhetoric I have described as banal. The strong form of the political narrative is quite different: the resolution is not in the turning away from the professional role but in the alignment of family and politics. The first family is not an alternative to the political; it is the supplement, the foundation, the necessary condition of the political.

To qualify for a professional role is to possess a body of knowledge. The exercise of the role is the application of that expertise. This is especially so in a service economy in which the ends for which that expertise is applied come from outside of the actor. The lawyer and the businessperson—paradigms of professional roles—serve others. The reason deployed in such a role is thoroughly instrumental. One consequence is a gap between role and identity. That gap is portrayed in film as the absence of love. We know in advance in which direction the trade-off will be made: no one gives up love for role without suffering the trauma of existential loss. This is the modern version of “the deal with the devil”: professional success is purchased at the cost of one’s eternal soul. The narrative in film is of recovery and repair; it puts role in its place, finding identity in love.

Political participation, in contrast, is not a role; rather, it is an expression of identity. The demands of citizenship are themselves demands of love. Love must be protected from role, so politics must be kept pure of role. Thus, the endless demand for “honest” politicians. This is only another way of saying that for love there is an absence of distinction between the familial and the political. This is our oldest story of sacrifice. Abraham was promised that if he were to sacrifice his only legitimate son, he would become father of a great nation. Nation is family and polity.²²

The romantic family of the contemporary social imaginary derives its power overwhelmingly from the innocent child. Isaac, too, was the innocent child. Jesus, of course, becomes the sacrificial offering in place of Isaac. There is a particular fascination with the innocence of the infant Jesus in Christian art—carried forward even today in our endless imagery of Christmas. This idea of the innocent child has always been available, but modern historians tell us it was in retreat until quite recently. They argue that the concept of childhood as something other than a privative form of adulthood is a recent innovation.²³ Morally, the child represented the lack of discipline that opens a space for sin. Economically, childhood was a state of need to be traversed quickly in order for the child to become a productive resource for the family. This early modern child had to be controlled by the authority of the parent, or the child would be lost spiritually and fail economically.²⁴

Whether this historical claim is correct or not, clearly it is not the case today that childhood is seen as a time of threat or danger. We find quite the opposite: the innocent child instructs the parent. The parent who has allowed him- or herself to be corrupted by the world needs to be saved.²⁵ He or she occupies a role that fails to connect with personal identity. The child is the purity of identity before representation. We have countless films deploying this archetype. Sometimes the child appears in the adult’s life through some sort of accidental death of the parents;²⁶ sometimes it is the parentless child of the orphanage or the abandoned child who is the source of innocence;²⁷ sometimes the child is the product of an accidental pregnancy.²⁸

The child has no role apart from being him- or herself. The infant shows forth its meaning in its very presence. This coincidence of being and meaning is the quality of the sacred—a point I made with respect to revolution in the last chapter. The child is always the world made new and has, therefore, an innocence that must be protected and preserved. In the presence of the child we want to linger as long as possible. An adult who fails to respond to the presence of the innocent child is irredeemably lost.

The murder of a child—or even the loss of a child—presents the deepest tragedy imaginable in a film. It leaves in its wake broken adults who can never fully recover. An older film in this genre is Don’t Look Now, in which there is not even sanity left for the parents of a child who accidentally drowned.²⁹ A more recent film, I’ve Loved You So Long, takes the tragedy one step further.³⁰ A woman has spent fifteen years in jail for murdering her six-year-old son. She has been released and has temporarily moved in with her younger sister’s family. She wants mostly to be left alone, resisting contact with others. Only toward the end do we learn what seems to have been hidden from everyone everywhere, including at the trial. The killing had been a “mercy killing.” She was a doctor and had “kidnaped” her own son, when she realized he was dying of a disease that would cause excruciating pain. Doing the act out of love, she gave herself over to endless punishment. The loss of a child, she tells us at the end, is the worst form of prison, one from which you are never released.³¹

Here, too, we find comedy tracking the same themes as tragedy. Juno was such an endearing film because of the way in which it established a kind of double relationship to the innocence of the child. This is the story of a precocious high school student who becomes pregnant and decides not to have an abortion, electing instead to go about finding suitable parents for her child. Juno is herself still a child. We like her in part because she knows this about herself. She seems incapable of dishonesty, of playing any role other than herself. She says at one point, when asked by her father what she has been doing, that she has been dealing with issues way above her “maturity level.” She has about her the innocence of a child, which makes her presence a source of love for others.

Pregnant, Juno also has the power to give this gift of innocence to another. She can redeem an adult from the meaninglessness of his or her role. The couple she finds to adopt the child, however, is not quite ready for redemption. The would-be mother is, but the father, who still fantasizes himself as an adolescent, is not. Indeed, meeting Juno encourages this fantasy on his part. He wants to be of the world that Juno occupies—a world without the responsibilities of adulthood—rather than to be the parent who cultivates that innocence in another. The adoptive couple shows us this double response to the burdens of their role: she would be a mother; he would be an adolescent. The parent can find redemption from the meaninglessness of her or his role through the innocence of the child, but this is quite different from becoming a child again.

The resolution of the film brings the world back into the proper relationship of innocence and responsibility. Juno’s infant goes to the adoptive mother, while the would-be father leaves to live out a fantasy. Juno picks up her own life within the protective aura of the love of her own family. She is again matched with her boyfriend in a scene of entirely innocent adolescent love. From the child all meaning flows.

One exception is the Secret Service agent who fascinates us precisely because he will “take a bullet for the president.” This person is in some ways the living dead; therefore, he can have no family. His only source of meaning is the president himself. Consider, for example, In the Line of Fire or The Sentinel.³² In the former the agent is haunted by his failure to take the bullet for President Kennedy. He can have no ordinary life—no family—until he redeems himself through sacrifice for a president some thirty years later. The latter is interesting because it includes an affair between the First Lady and the agent, as if they both confuse the president with the agent whose identity is defined by the president’s life. The plot may be silly, but the idea of the two-become-one makes a kind of mythic sense.

Film has hold of a powerful strain of democratic legitimacy in linking familial love to political violence. One symbolic measure of the legitimacy of political violence is whether the state has convinced its mothers to give up their children. A democratic state that cannot sustain the support of the mothers when it asks their children to kill and be killed has no legitimate claim to make war. This is the lived experience of the Kantian idea that a democratic state will be reluctant to go to war, for it risks rejection in the polls if the people do not support its demand for sacrifice.³³ The mothers will not sacrifice their children for the sake of an abstract idea of justice. They are not likely to accept the sacrifice of their children to prevent other people from behaving poorly toward each other. The love of family must be aligned with the love of nation. Today, the ticking time bomb must be nuclear, and it must be aimed at us. This was, of course, the logic behind the apparently false rhetoric of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which spoke of a threat from weapons of mass destruction. If this threat is false, there is no backup argument to be made about bringing justice to Iraq. That is not worth my child’s life.

What is the value of a child’s life is directly at issue in one of the most successful of recent movies, Saving Private Ryan. Here the question is not whether the sacrifice of the child is something we can ask of the mother but rather how many such sacrifices can we ask of her. The film begins with the death of three of the four children of Mrs. Ryan on the battlefields of the Second World War. On a single day she receives notices of all of their deaths. She has one remaining son fighting, and the question is “Has she given enough for her country?” The military command decides that she has and sets about trying to find and save the remaining Private Ryan, who is fighting behind enemy lines in Europe. After much bloody travail they find him. He will not, however, abandon his unit, which is about to be assaulted by the Germans.

We might think of this as a conflict between the mother’s love of her son and the son’s love of his fellow combatants. But that is not quite right. There is no conflict because there is no limit to the sacrifices that will be made for love. That his brothers died is not a reason for him to save his life—just the opposite. The military command applied the wrong metric. Private Ryan is not violating his mother’s love; and she would not condemn his willingness to sacrifice. State and family are inextricably bound to each other. Of course, the movie assures us that all is right in the order of sacrifice. Private Ryan lives, although those who came to save him die. A useless mission? Not exactly, for the only measure of all such actions is the willingness to sacrifice out of love, which is never a means to an end. What survives out of sacrifice is that intersection of familial and political love that is Private Ryan.

The drama of the state is the drama of familial love because there is no sacrifice for the state that is not experienced as the sacrifice of a family member. Brothers is another example of a recent film that works at this connection between the familial and the political.³⁴ The film opens with a contrast of two brothers. The older, Sam, is successful at everything: school, sports, and family. He is married, with two young daughters. He is also a captain in the marines. The younger, Tommy, is a failure at everything. He has just been released from prison after an unsuccessful attempt at bank robbery. Sam is about to leave his family and return to Afghanistan for a second tour of duty. Tommy returns to a place that offers no home. He is at odds with his father; he tends toward irresponsibility, anger, and drunkenness.

In Afghanistan Sam’s helicopter is shot down. His family is told that he died in the crash. Actually, he is taken prisoner, tortured, and ultimately made to perform the unspeakable act of shooting his fellow prisoner. Tommy increasingly steps into the familial place, bonding deeply with Sam’s two young daughters, falling in love with his wife, and taking on the role of supporting the domestic household. Had this been some other culture, the younger brother would literally have inherited the family of the older brother. The problem is that Sam is not dead. He eventually returns home, suffering now the psychological consequences of his murderous act of betrayal. He is cold and distant. He cannot speak of what he did. He is able to speak and to think of just one thing: the suspicion that his wife and his brother have been sleeping together—they have not.

He has become a stranger to his children, who want nothing to do with him; they want their loving uncle. His wife knows something happened, but since he will not speak, she cannot help. The family falls apart, dragging in a pathological older father who, it turns out, had raised his children, Sam and Tommy, in the shadow of his own experience in Vietnam. He, too, had been unable to speak of his war experience, an inability that led him to drink and abuse. The result was two sons, each reflecting one side of his split personality: one son is a leader, the other a criminal. By the end of the movie these roles have been reversed: we are not sure which son is the criminal and which the hero. Or maybe neither is criminal or hero. Both are only victims, one of the family and one of the state, but there is no line separating these.

Family, law, and political violence are all at issue here. Sam, who goes to war, must be able to read his act as the sacrifice that makes possible the innocence of familial love. When his violence cannot be read as sacrifice but only as murder, the result is a corruption of the family. If he is a murderer, then he can neither love nor be loved (remember Walt Kowalski from Gran Torino). A murderer cannot be the father of the innocent child. That innocence cannot redeem his act of murder. His moral corruption sends him out of their presence, as he turns to drink and violence. Figuratively, the children banish their father in favor of their uncle, Tommy, who may have committed a crime but, having “served his time,” has nothing to hide. Indeed, his participation in the innocence of family gives him the strength to go to the victim of his crime and offer an apology. His voice contrasts sharply with his brother’s silence. Sam says at one point that he did what he did for the sake of love: only by killing his companion could he get home. But he says this as an accusation against his wife: “I did this, while you betrayed me.” The problem, however, is that he does not really believe this. He believes that he has murdered, not that he has sacrificed. He comes home polluted, and that pollution prevents his reentry into the family.

The truth that cannot be uttered is that which reveals the sacrificial foundation of the state to be nothing more than an act of murder. Their Vietnam-veteran father refused to confess, and this led to the pathology of his family. Sam, the good son, shows us the brutal reality of the state beyond the myth of sacrifice: it is a killing and being killed, and that is all there is to it. It is not an order that succeeds the state of nature; it is the state of nature itself. On the field of battle there is only the murder of the other in order to save oneself. There is nothing heroic about this. We might think that we are only killing the enemy, but we are killing men. If we are willing to kill the enemy to save ourselves, we are willing to kill our companions to save ourselves. We want to live, and we will do whatever is required to do so.

Defiance, another recent film about two brothers in war, makes a similar point but in far more conventional terms.³⁵ The film concerns a Polish Jewish family caught up in the German genocide. They flee the advancing Germans but in different directions. One brother escapes into the woods and creates there a nonpolitical space of assistance to homeless Jews. A kind of enclave is created in which all live as an extended family. The other brother joins the Red Army and becomes a leader in the fight. The film traces their movement back to each other. The brother who seeks a secure place for familial love learns that he cannot avoid the violent political act of defense. The other brother learns that without family there is nothing worth defending. The brothers ultimately join together, bringing back the necessary alignment of family and state, of love and sacrifice.³⁶ We can read the film as a search for a middle ground between the bourgeois values of the West and the loveless communism of the Soviets. But it is more compelling as an inquiry not into political forms but into the structure of the imagination. There cannot be love without sacrifice; there cannot be politics without love. Familial identity must ground political representation.

The stable point of meaning, the source from which all meaning flows, is the family: the innocence of children, the loving spouse, the love between brothers. An unsuccessful war is one that cannot link political violence to the protection of the family. The family can extend its reach to the criminal, but it cannot save the soldier who has learned the singular truth that war is murder and that in the extreme situation all men will kill rather than be killed. The failure of sacrifice is literally the end of a meaningful world. Sam had to choose, just as the Christian martyrs had to choose: life or death? If he chose death, the world would be saved for a kind of innocence. But he chose life, and with that he banished innocence from the world. Choosing, he proved Hobbes right: nothing is of more value than life. The problem, however, is that this is a truth with which he cannot live.

Exploring the narrative of the political in film is necessarily an exploration of the familial, for these are the double sources of a single national narrative: family and country as a unified order of love. The pathology of one necessarily corrupts the other. A failure of sacrifice will undermine the family, but will a failure in the family undermine the order of political violence? This is a much harder theme for film to take up because of its unrelenting message of failure. One has to wonder, however, whether our long controversy over the serving of gays in the military is not related at least in part to this felt relationship between the familial and the political. More often in film, we see a compensatory response to this worry about the political consequences of familial failure: the military provides a community of value sufficient to overcome the familial deficiency. A classic expression is An Officer and a Gentleman.³⁷ The film plots the struggle for the erotic core of the child of a broken family who “wants to fly jets.” It must displace the failed father with the father figure of the drill sergeant: tough love for no love. Learning the virtues of the officer remakes the possibility of the familial. He is “reborn” as both an officer and a gentleman.

In film the borders separating the private and the public continually disappear in the representation of the sacrifice for love. The innocence of children and the world-creating character of the coming together of two individuals to form a family are very much at the center of the imagination of the political.³⁸ There is no liberal individual on the field of battle or in the familial order, for each is a domain of life and death rather than of the pursuit of interests.

I have been exploring one of the oldest metaphors that we have: the nation as family. God, we read in the Old Testament, is married to Israel. The metaphor shifts from spouse to children when Israel is seen as the patrimony of Abraham. It takes yet another form with the appearance of Christianity. Christ is the son of God, and the church is the body of Christ. All these images are variations on what the Genesis story of creation describes as the “two become one” of love. Unity must overcome difference. Without that we fear we will be condemned to an unbearable, existential loneliness. Death is the symbol of that loneliness, while love is always the symbol of rebirth.³⁹

These deeply entrenched ways of thinking about self and others, about the meaning of life and death, remain the archetypes of order even in our modern, secular age. We can no more think of politics as a product of contract than we can think of marriage as a contractual relationship. More precisely, we can think it, but we cannot imagine it. For the imagination it is not contract but covenant in both cases. A covenant bears remnants of sacred presence—we covenant with or before God—and of new beginnings. The pressure in the modern wedding ceremony, in which the couple writes their own vows, is not to displace the language of God with that of contract but rather with the language of love. Love is enough: with love we don’t need God.

Of course, there are many loveless marriages, just as there are many states that fail as communities of meaning. Contract or quasi contract may survive in both cases. We know of prenuptial agreements in which contract precedes and sets the boundaries of marriage. Such agreements are usually directed at what will happen to property if the marriage fails. Historically, many states refused to recognize prenuptial contracts precisely because they seemed inconsistent with the meaning of marriage: they plan for its dissolution rather than its success. Some states would recognize such agreements only until the point at which the couple has a child. Family, they seem to be saying, cannot be a matter of contract. Neither is the state a matter of contract.

In the end a prenuptial agreement cannot tell us the meaning of marriage, for it is written in anticipation of failure. Similarly, a failed state cannot tell us the meaning of the political, for it occupies precisely the situation in which the political fails to take hold. We cannot learn the meaning of God from an atheist.⁴⁰ This is not to say that film cannot explore the failure of family, state, and faith. We understand these situations as failure, however, only when we understand what has been lost. That is indeed a serious question for all of us.

Coming to the familial from the political emphasizes the family as the site of love and the source of sacrifice. The child, I have argued, is at the center of our imaginative construction of the family and of the state. All of these ideas and images have had a very long presence in the West. Twenty-five hundred years ago Plato was already speaking of the creative power of love and investigating the relationship between family and polity. Christianity offers the image of a sacrificial community founded on love. While the circumstances of application have changed in modern films, there has been no radical challenge to these archetypes. The same is true of another idea central to the Western imagination of love: the association of love and innocence. The child is innocent. The promise of the child is that he or she will refound the world on that innocence and thus bring meaning back to a world that has fallen into the meaninglessness of the ordinary. Paradigmatically, this is the story of Isaac coming as a blessing to the elderly and childless Abraham and Sara. Sara’s laugh on hearing of what was to be is the recognition of the marvelous.

The child as father of the man is a common archetype of film. With respect to this idea we must ask the same questions that structured the previous chapter: how is origin represented, and from what directions do we see contemporary threats to this ideal of meaning? At issue in the familial is the same structural relationship of identity to representation. There are, accordingly, familial parallels to the forms of anxiety investigated in the last chapter. Contract threatens covenant in the same way that a closed code threatened identity, and just as a meaningless violence threatened sacrifice, the materiality of sex threatens love. The former threat appears in a contemporary form in horror films, the latter in pornography. These are the double threats to romantic comedy, which is the cinematic home of the loving family.

In politics the innocent point of origin is the founding; in religion it is revelation. Both of these ideas of beginnings borrow from the experience of natality: the coming into being of the person, which is always the start of a new world.⁴² For this reason human beginnings are never caused; they are never explained merely by their location in a sequence of events as if they were the product of a slowly changing pattern of DNA. A biography is a history, not an account of the chemistry of DNA.⁴³ No child—and no state or faith—is simply one among many. The child, even before she says her first word, is never a fungible commodity: we are not indifferent to which child we take home from the hospital. We will not trade. The same is true of nations and faiths: ours is always unique; each is incommensurable with others.

At stake in the idea of beginnings without cause is a distinct idea of human freedom: to be free is to be capable of beginning again. This is the promise of “rebirth” in Christianity. It is also the promise of “naturalization” for the immigrant. The child, too, is not the made product of the parents, as if he or she were simply an aggregation of preexisting parts. The Nicene Creed says of Jesus what is true of every child: “He is begotten not made.”⁴⁴ In myth the beginning of the person is the arrival of the soul to the body. If we ask of the origin of the soul, we are told it is without beginning.

Innocence captures all of these ideas of natality, origins, exception—of an identity outside of representation but the point from which all representation flows and to which it must refer back. The sacred always has this quality of innocence. It has it even when it terrifies. Thus, in both politics and religion the idea of innocence easily becomes an idea of violent destruction: the Terror is the moment of innocence destroying corruption. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, with its appeal to a “a new birth of freedom,” accomplishes the same identification of innocence with violent destruction. In religion the millennial wish to return to the purity of origins is often associated with a vision of destruction of this all-too-compromised world. In film the connection of innocence and terror can be much more vivid, as the child becomes the source of horrific destruction.

Because I love my child, one might be inclined to think that I create a world for her. But this is no more correct than thinking that love is an interior experience. It makes just as much sense to say that the child creates a world of meaning for me. The child brings me into the world as much as I bring her into the world. If I try unilaterally to give my child a world, I am suffering a pathology of narcissism. This double relationship of world creation—of parent creating child and child creating parent—is the theme of countless romantic comedies in which the child takes on the burden of creating or completing the family. These children never seem to be threatened by the entry of a possible competitor for their single parent’s love. Rather, they see the need to create a world that is whole and complete. These films are always comedies, for what could be more pathetic than to see such an effort fail?

The innocent child as the origin of the family has a distinct cinematic signature. This is the child who finds a spouse for the father or mother and thus finds, as well, the missing parent for himself or herself. A well-known example is Sleepless in Seattle, in which a young adolescent acts in response to his father’s overwhelming grief at the loss of the spouse/ mother.⁴⁵ Such films are often appealing to children, precisely because they are about child empowerment in response to the threat of parental failure. Think of The Parent Trap, made first in 1961 and then again in 1998.⁴⁶ It offers a theme that is always timely: identical twins secretly changing places and successfully plotting to reunite their divorced parents. The empowerment of the child is a powerful reassurance in the face of the fear that comes from recognition of the fragility of self and family. A world in need of repair must return to the origin: the innocent love of the child. The message to the child is the same as to the adult: love creates a world. The world that matters in the first instance is the family.

Recently, in The Kids Are All Right, these themes were given a contemporary twist in casting the family as one with two moms.⁴⁷ This is otherwise an ordinary, suburban family with an eighteen-year-old daughter and a fifteen-year-old son. The kids could not be more typical: a shy but bright daughter about to leave home for college; an athletic but confused son who is easily impressed by the wrong people. Even the parents are ordinary in their daily struggles with children, home, and careers: one is a successful doctor, the other a stay-at-home mom looking for a new career now that the kids are older. This family does, however, have a unique feature in its explicit acknowledgment that the children owe their biological origin to contract. The moms contracted for the services of an unknown donor through a sperm bank—the same donor for both children. What, then, is a father?

As teenagers the kids want to take responsibility for their own existence. At eighteen, the daughter is legally allowed to inquire of the sperm bank for information regarding the donor—her father—but he must agree to its release. He does, and then begins the unfolding of a new set of relationships to their father, who has remained unmarried. The kids want to bring him into their lives and into their home. He enthusiastically embraces them as “family.” So much so that he finds himself having a brief affair with one of the moms and fantasizing about her and the kids moving in with him. That would be the moment at which the children had successfully created their own family—the moment in which contractual creation is displaced by the necessity of love.

Of course, it does not work out that way, for these children already have a family. Families are not simply on offer. The father is, as described by the other mom, an “interloper.” Biology gives him no more of a claim than does contract. The origin of these children was not in contract or in biology but in love. In the end he is not welcome in this family because it was not in need of repair, only of a little therapy. We, along with the kids, are left to puzzle about what exactly he is: father or sperm donor? In a reflection of the archetype, he learns this lesson of love from the kids: no longer content to be the sperm donor, he wants a family. It will not, however, be this one.

One image of the world-creating power of love is in the children’s ability to create their own parents. The same power of renewal is at stake in the parental longing to return to contact with the child. The conventional world of representation finds its limits in the existential loneliness of old age and then death. The aging parent, no longer employed, losing health, friends, and then even the capacity for speech, is a familiar image. This literal meaninglessness must be met by the necessity of love. One version of this idea appears in the political narrative of sacrifice that I traced in the last chapter. There is a gentler side of this idea that appears within the ordinary family drama. A movie on this theme came out at the same time as The Kids Are All Right and with a similar title, Everybody’s Fine.⁴⁸ Robert De Niro plays a recent widower planning a reunion for his grown children at the family home. He is retired and living alone; he seems to be without any significant friendships. He is overwhelmingly lonely. His career had been in making cable for telecommunications. One has the sense that he had not been much involved with the interior life of the home as his children were growing up. He was, instead, a technician of representation, leaving love and identity to his spouse.⁴⁹

When all the children cancel, he sets off to visit each of them around the country, despite warnings of danger from his doctor. What the doctor’s prescriptions cannot provide, however, is the presence of love in the now-empty family home. As he moves from child to child, he finds that each is hiding something. Some truths cannot be spoken. No one wants him to linger; each passes him off to the next. None is capable of sharing the bad news in his or her life with him. The ultimate bad news is that his oldest son, a New York artist, has just died of a drug overdose in a Mexican jail. The father is aware of the multiple deceptions, but he is uncertain about what is really going on. He suffers a heart attack on the plane trip home.

At stake in both of these films is the world-creating power of familial love. Love is not a private feeling but a way of being in a world. Every family, happy or unhappy, is its own world. We feel this even with our closest friends: we cannot quite imagine life within their families. There is always something that eludes us. In this sense love is private, not because it is interior but because it is so complete. Thus, even a biological father can be called an “interloper.” Both of these films associate the remaking power of love with truth, but it is not the truth of representation. Representation might see a father as a sperm donor or be disappointed in a child’s professional failure. The truth of love is the truth of an unconditional acceptance that depends on neither contract nor success.

If love always exceeds representation, then we can never quite understand why others love each other. We can’t see what they find so compelling in each other. We can never give an account adequate to the fact because we can never see the world that they create. We know this about ourselves as well. There is something opaque or mysterious about relationships of love that have been lost. We can never remember how it was that we were in love with that person. Love lost seems rather never to have been. It is easier to understand it as mistake or illusion than to try to understand how there could have been a world that is now gone and not retrievable. Thus, the figure of the “ex” in film generally has one of two qualities: either love remains, in which case the parties will get back together, or there is only intolerance, with no sympathy for what was once there.⁵⁰

The opacity of love to the outsider seems universally true, whatever the locus of love. We can’t quite imagine what other people find compelling about their own countries, when we have no attachment. Similarly, we can’t imagine the authenticity of their faith, when what they believe seems bizarre or archaic. “Who could believe that?” we wonder, while worshiping our own God-turned-man.

What cannot be expressed is the experience of an ultimate or transcendent meaning. Translation is not possible across these experiences because they are beyond or before representation. Films are notoriously immoral in their expression of the exclusivity of the world-creating power of love. We see this most obviously in those endless portrayals of the faceless enemy who are nothing but bodies to be destroyed. Enemies rarely have a subjectivity rooted in a world of love. They are seen only as the threat of negation to our world, not as the affirmation of their own world. Enemies are destroyed with reckless disregard for the fact that they, too, are persons. The idea of the “extra” captures this rather precisely. The extra is literally expendable. He or she has no voice and makes no claim to identity. There is a deep immorality suggested by the extra: he or she is the person emptied of personhood. Whether literally killed or simply cast into the background as part of the scenery for the central drama, the extra is, in Hannah Arendt’s words, denied “the right to have rights.”⁵¹ There is a relatively short step from the ethos of the extra to the ethos of the zombie. The extra who has a life that is not life—the living dead—is the zombie.⁵²

The world that emerges from love is a necessary world. This necessity does not arise from a relationship of cause and effect but rather from its characteristic exclusivity. It is necessary because it is not bound to anything else. Finding myself in love, I find myself in a world that places demands upon me. I don’t ask whether these demands are just or whether they are a means to some other end. They are simply the way the world is. Love is, in this sense, like death: necessary but without reason.

The redemptive power of the child is very much at issue in The Burning Plain.⁵³ The trick of the film is that we don’t realize until deep into the movie that two sets of characters, who seem quite different, are actually the same people at two different points in their lives. When we do make the connection, we experience literally the effort to move from representation to identity. The problem of the film is to question whether this identity can be achieved after so much separation. The answer is that it can be achieved but only through the redemptive love of the child.

We see the main characters, Santiago and Mariana, falling in love as teenagers; we see them years later living very separate lives. Santiago is now a crop duster in Mexico with a twelve-year-old daughter. Mariana runs a fancy restaurant in Seattle. The film cuts back and forth between these two different sets of circumstances without giving clues sufficient—at least for me—to pick up the fact that there is a difference in time and thus the possibility that these are the same people. We wonder for a very long time what is the connection between the characters in Mexico and those in Seattle. He is a devoted father; she is engaged in a destructive series of brief sexual affairs with random men. Once we realize that we are seeing two different moments in the lives of a single couple, we reach the more serious question: not what is the connection between different people, but what is the identity of a single person through time?

The movie is not about them but about their children, Santiago and Mariana, who see each other for the first time at the funeral of the father. The husband of the adulterous wife has brought her children to heckle the Mexican American family as they leave the grave site. Santiago, the teenage son who lost his father, sees Mariana, the teenage daughter, standing with her father. Santiago, in turn, goes to watch the funeral of Mariana’s mother and then follows Mariana home. The two of them are drawn to each other, at first because each is curious to learn about the parent’s lover. They quickly step into the roles of their respective parents, making love to each other in their parents’ beds, keeping their relationship secret from their families, creating their own private world. They engage in a significant act of representation, both burning scars on their arms by which they are to remember their time together. They also engage in symbolic acts of familial life: eating a meal together and sleeping together. As Santiago rescues her from a raging father, who has just found them out, Mariana tells him that she is pregnant.

Only toward the very end do we learn that her undeserving is rooted in the fact that she set the fire that caused the explosion of the trailer and death of her mother and Santiago’s father. She had not meant to kill them, only to drive them into the open. But this act, which could not be spoken, was that for which she had to do penance by giving up love, by offering herself to the world as an object to be used, by cutting herself. She must speak this truth about herself before she can see herself as worthy of love. She confesses to an anesthetized Santiago in his hospital room, but perhaps that is enough, for she has already been forgiven by the innocent child. The child’s act of grace creates the possibility of her directly speaking her past. Wholeness cannot be recovered by acts of penance in this world—even by acts of self-destruction—but only by the innocence of the child.

There are a number of elements at work here. First, we see the sheer contingency of love. The relationship of Santiago and Mariana begins with a chance sighting in what is supposed to be a scene of acrimonious confrontation. This is one of the oldest archetypes we have: love crosses borders. Its character as foundation means that it creates new communities in disregard of established lines. This is what makes love so politically dangerous. A recent, futuristic retelling of this tale was offered in the hugely successful Avatar.⁵⁴ Whether that new foundation succeeds or not, we recognize the stakes. In The Burning Plain the young couple are driven out by her father’s rage; in Avatar the crossing of borders makes possible successful rebellion of the colonized against the colonizer.

Second, we see again the concern with stabilizing identity in representation. The self-inflicted scar is to mark the permanence of their love. This is reminiscent of the scarring in Inglourious Basterds.⁵⁵ There, the swastika was carved on the forehead so no one could forget or be mistaken about who these people are. Here, the scar is self-imposed so that they will not forget who they are. Their daughter, the twelve-year-old, reads the similarly placed scars on each of her parents as a sign of their unity. Of course, this is exactly what she embodies: the expression of their unity. She is the singular product of their love, and thus the point of intersection of representation and identity.

Third, the presence of the child confronts the moral failing of the mother. Mariana is undeserving, for she has murdered her mother and Santiago’s father. Murder always undermines love. In Brothers the act of murder by the brother while a prisoner of war undermined his capacity to recapture love of family. Cain murders his brother and is marked; Mariana murders her mother and must bear that self-knowledge. Not surprisingly, we see her cutting herself later on. This mark of Cain must compete on her body with the shared mark of love.

Mariana is a kind of Oedipus figure—now as a teenage girl. Oedipus steps into the place of his father, Mariana into the place of her mother. Neither is morally entitled to that place because each murdered the parent. Both are exiled from love. When Oedipus learns that he murdered his father, he puts out his eyes and flees from his family. Mariana does not put out her eyes, but she too flees, and she refuses to let herself be seen. She, like Oedipus, casts herself into a space that is nowhere. Oedipus, however, has been touched by the gods and is ultimately recognized as a kind of sacred figure, the object of a competition between Thebes and Athens for his dying body. We don’t have those gods available to us, but we do have the child. Instead of Thebes sending an emissary to recover her for the city, we have Santiago’s friend and the twelve-year-old Maria setting out on a mission of recovery. There are no gods to forgive Mariana, but there is her daughter.⁵⁶

The lovers in the film always seem to live in a complete moment that excludes everything and everyone else. For this reason their actions can seem reckless to outsiders: they respond only to an internal dynamic. This was already true of the parents of Santiago and Mariana, who created a separate life in the trailer. For Mariana’s mother neither her marriage nor the responsibilities of motherhood offered any resistance to the possibility of love. Staying away seemed literally impossible. Similarly, Santiago’s father loves her as she is, not as she once was or might become. He tells her she is beautiful and that she should not have breast reconstructive surgery. This completeness could lead to nowhere but death; as soon as the world penetrates, they are dead. The children who take up a parallel relationship are also impervious to all the risks, threats, and claims of familial opposition. Love simply must be. It is, as Santiago says repeatedly, no one else’s business; it is their world, into which no one else can enter. Their self-imposed scars speak a language no one else can read—until their daughter matches the markings on each.

In love we say we find ourselves, but what we actually find is a world. This is why we cannot explain love as a personal feeling or an interior state. We come to that world by giving up the self alone. This is just the movement of the film: Santiago and Mariana, like their parents, create a world. If that world closes in on itself, if it resists representation, insisting on a constant presence, then it will appear not only impenetrable but dangerous to everyone else. It will be like a state of permanent revolution, in which creation is inseparable from destruction. The impossibility of such a world is seen, in one form, in the parents’ death. The threat of such a world is seen in another form in the familial horror films I discuss below.

Just as the sacral monarch has been replaced by the everyman of the popular sovereign, the sacral infant has been replaced by the innocent infant of every family. The familial order provides in microcosm the same rhythm that we saw in the political order: the movement from identity to representation. We must secure the erotic foundation, the truth of subjecthood, before we can take up the burden of representation. As the existentialists say, “existence before essence.” That moment of origin remains the foundation toward which representation always points. “Who are you?” we ask of others, just as we ask it of ourselves. We answer with a yearning for the truth of the subject revealed in familial love. This is the question asked and the answer offered in The Burning Plain, Everybody’s Fine, and The Kids Are All Right—the list could continue indefinitely. Home is the place to which we return to find ourselves. We find ourselves there because home is wherever we find love.

We find ourselves in a meaningful world that is the product of our own imaginative construction. We don’t, however, occupy this world unreflectively, as if it were simply a changeless natural order. Nor do we occupy it as in a dream, as if we can give no account of how or why we are there. Rather, we occupy it as subjects: we take ourselves and our world as objects of thought. We take up the elements of our imaginative construction, asking questions and expressing doubt about each or about the entirety. There is no faith without doubt, no love without anxiety. Home is the place to which we return and the place from which we flee. Freud taught us that we so love the father that we would kill him, if we could. Families, accordingly, can be the source of a world-informing love or of a world-destroying hatred.

These responses mimic an earlier fear of the displacement of religious orthodoxy from the place of ultimate meaning. For the counterrevolutionaries, the good news of transcendent meaning has already occupied the world in the body of Christ. If so, a claim that the infant can be a new source of ultimate meaning only expresses a demonic threat of deception. That deception may promise renewal, but it can only bring death. As a social movement this sort of fear of the child is difficult to find in our secular age, but it has a familiar presence in film: the inversion of the moral valence of the infant—not innocent but Satanic. A culture that attaches such power to the infant may end up in thrall to the infantile, and from there it is only a small step to the fear of destruction by that which is worshiped. Films remind us that in our fears and anxieties we may not be as modern as we think.

Films in this devil-child genre include Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, Children of the Corn, and The Exorcist.⁵⁸ Sometimes, the child is literally the progeny of Satan; sometimes, Satan has possessed the child. There is a fear that the child will not renew but capture the parent, that it will not redeem but murder. The point of renewal at which everything is possible is also the point at which everything is at risk. Sacrifice loses its meaning before a murderous child. We turn to the infant for love but find only murder. This idea that a child who kills its parent is tainted by evil is precisely the concept of “undeserving” at work in The Burning Plain. That we might not be able to tell which is the innocent and which is the evil child is a theme at least as old as King Lear.

The sacred has always had this double character of redemption and threat, of creation and destruction. If the child appears outside of the ordered domain of representation, then we cannot be sure whether he or she is good or evil, whether we will experience renewal or death. To stand too close to God was always as dangerous as it was promising. The child for whom we will sacrifice ourselves is not so far from the child who would murder us. The difference between sacrifice and murder can come to no more than a difference in belief. We can change our minds; we can come to doubt.⁵⁹

Horror films in this genre play on the fear that the turn to a redemptive child, the hope for meaning from natality, will be met by rejection, denial, and destruction. That which promises redemption is necessarily also that which threatens irredeemable loss. Not surprisingly, corresponding to these films of infantile threat are teenage horror films focusing on a moral, rather than a redemptive, message. When the child appears as a threat, the parental response will itself be murderous. In these films, if the teenager engages in illicit activity—specifically drugs or sex—then he or she will suffer a horrendous death. Think of the earlier Rebel Without a Cause, Halloween, or Hell Night.⁶⁰ This line of films is itself acknowledged in Scream when one of the characters summarizes a rule of horror: “sex means death.”⁶¹

With the failure of love the family breaks into a competition between the murderous threat of the child, on the one hand, and the murderous threat against the rebellious teenager, on the other.⁶² Both threats suggest the same vision: not innocence and renewal but violence and destruction. The interesting point is the reciprocal vulnerability of parent to child and child to parent. Where exactly does evil lie in the family? Just as in politics, there is no threat that does not draw forth a counterthreat. In both domains the line between sacrifice and murder may be no line at all.

What exactly is the familial anxiety that leads to these double visions of murderous intent? One suspects that it involves a kind of psychological “dirty hands.” No one is so pure of heart that he does not feel that he, too, is fallen. Every person is aware of his mixed relationship to his own parents. He knows that he was hardly innocent, that he did not fulfill this redemptive role. Freud taught us this much. Reciprocally, facing one’s own children, one suspects oneself of using them. Is redemption on offer, or is it a demand imposed? We fear that we want from them for our own sake, not theirs.⁶³ This juxtaposition of the sense of sin and the hope of redemption can turn into a fear. We fear we will get what we deserve, and we know that we are not deserving. The relationship of sin to grace is so complex that it had to be mediated by the ritual formalities of confession and forgiveness in the church. Unleashed from convention, it can be an open sore of psychological trauma. Here hope and fear intersect. The result of that intersection can be love or murder.

The parent who fears his or her own undeserving will experience the child’s rejection as an act of spiritual murder. In film it becomes an actual murder. The reciprocal threat is felt by the child who fears that he has failed his parents. A child can easily feel the parent’s concern as a form of intrusion, an effort to deny his own subjecthood. It can appear to him as a kind of murder. What did Isaac think on the altar: love or murder? Must not Abraham have feared that Isaac would grab the knife and turn it on him? Is it not possible that he thought he deserved no less, for perhaps he was wrong in his faith? If we can no longer make sense of the family as a site of sacrifice, then we are likely to see it as a site of murder. Is the child sent off to war sacrificed out of love or murdered out of selfishness? The move from sacrifice to murder is traced by the disappearance of love. The horror film that “ends well” is one that allows for the recovery of love. The horror film that ends in murderous destruction has exiled love.

In contemporary slasher films these themes have become thoroughly ironic. These films operate with a self-reflective humor, mocking our fears. They can do so because we are acutely aware of the constructed character of representation in these films. The classic instance of this is Scream, which incorporates self-reference to earlier horror films in its plot.⁶⁴ Film has become a topic of film, and the audience is in on the joke.⁶⁵ There is nothing to fear in evil, for there is nothing to fear in film. That which has been constructed as evil can just as easily be inverted. We can dispose of the threat by rewriting the script.

Of course, we could always do so. But now the film does not let the audience’s awareness of itself as audience lapse. We are making fun of ourselves as speechless spectators when we see zombies on the screen.⁶⁶ In the same way, we make fun of the moralizing impulse of the classic teenage films that linked premarital sex to destruction. Reefer Madness, a film originally made for educational purposes, becomes a cult classic, as does The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.⁶⁷ Irony is in the cast of mind with which we approach these traditional tropes. This is a position we can take only from deep within a world of representation: it is a representation of representation. No irony is possible in the experience of identity.

The contemporary slasher film is a self-referential, representational order that invites the audience into a kind of ritualized participation.⁶⁸ There is no longer any question of doing battle with code. The possibility of freedom is now located in irony, not sacrifice. Identity is never at issue: it is all role playing and self-mocking. We see this same sort of self-mocking institutionalized in the carnivalesque showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Sound of Music.⁶⁹ In the contemporary slasher film, acts of horrendous destruction do not have the moral weight of murder in a political narrative, let alone in the conventional social order, for there is never a moment in which the intended audience does not understand that it is participating in a film. Someone unaware of the conventions will be repulsed by these films: he or she will flee the theater because the films violate all the ordinary conventions of representation. The representation of violence has been severed from the production of any meaning outside of the production of more violent representations. It is as if the point of the film is only to produce its own sequel.⁷⁰

Horror in these films is a practice of self-referential representation. It is another form of the code turned in on itself—now as the object of an adolescent anxiety that beyond representation there is no identity to be found.⁷¹ We are reminded of the figure of Cipher in The Matrix: Cipher chose to return to the self-enclosed world of the matrix. Youth, in these contemporary slasher films, has little to do with innocence and everything to do with victimhood. Representation without identity is experienced as a threat of death. For example, entering the adult world of business, travel, and sex, the teenage characters in Hostel discover that their only function is to be hunted and tortured.⁷² They are the commodities of a business that sells to the wealthy an opportunity to engage in the hunting and torture of youth. A symbolic order of exchange—whether of money or sex—comes to this: without identity we are simply objects to be used, and used up, by those who have more money.⁷³ When political identity does show itself, it does so only as an element of exchange value: it costs more to purchase an American for torture. Whether rebellion is successful or not is actually irrelevant, for the conditions will always repeat themselves absent the refoundation of an order of love in both family and state. In a world of representation shorn of identity, however, that is exactly what is not possible.⁷⁴

The point of the contemporary slasher film with its endless gore is to convert murder into nothing more than a vehicle of symbolic exchange. The characters are stylized, acting according to the rules of the genre.⁷⁵ To look for sex is still to find death but not because the film teaches a lesson in conventional morality. The good and the bad will be slaughtered alike, for the fundamental normative character of a closed-in world of representation is indifference.⁷⁶ There is no good or bad, which is why slaughter has no particular moral effect—only an aesthetic affect. The films create suspense—when will the inevitable death occur?—but that suspense is no longer in the source of any imagined form of politics.

Thus, even vampires are no longer representations of evil. There is only a kind of mocking, ironic representation of representation: we can make of the vampire whatever we wish, for this is an entirely plastic world. There is nothing beyond the ironic representation of the traditional morality of film. The same is true of the traditional adolescent exploration of the world: the symbolic journey. The trip always leads to death, not because one ought to stay home—death will seek you out there as well—but because the film is mocking the character of representation itself.⁷⁷ If previously the trip stood for the movement of self-discovery, it will now be shown up as heading to nowhere but death.

The strain on the imaginative structure of family is no longer religious or moral but self-referential and symbolic. These contemporary horror films pick up the theme of the threat of code, of representation detached from identity, that we saw in chapter 4. The child who knows he or she is not innocent, who knows he or she has no redemptive love to offer, is captured by representations that have no meaning beyond death, which is to say they have no meaning at all. The audience of these films is no longer reading through the narrative, as if there is a world that is represented in the film. Rather, viewing the film is better understood as a form of ironic self-representation. Thus, Dawn of the Dead, which features zombies invading a shopping mall, “has become a midnight favorite at shopping malls all over the United States.”⁷⁸ In this world symbols can refer only to other symbols. The films literally refer to each other; representation reproduces itself.

The reappearance of zombies in horror films supports this same line of interpretation. The zombie, which has no language, is the signifier stripped of the signified. Zombies are the force of language that remains even after communication fails. They are nothing but the violence of the word, once the word has lost its capacity to express meaning. Any symbolic system let loose upon the world, but no longer communicating any meaning, will tend toward meaningless destruction: money, sex, violence. What Shakespeare wrote of a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, is today expressed in the zombie horde full of fury but signifying nothing.⁷⁹ From the perspective of a lost identity, every symbolic system can threaten to appear as a horde of zombies. The zombie looks human—indeed it looks familiar as friend or relative—but identity no longer holds. It is the walking dead: all that remains when we no longer have an identity beyond representation.

The locus of the horror film remains the family. Its general motion is to displace sacrifice by murder, love by evil. It does so by severing representation from identity. The natural home for this movement is the family, beginning with the innocent infant and moving to the teenager on the brink of finding romantic love, which is the moment of regeneration of a new family. Politics does not threaten the familial order; one order of love does not threaten another. Rather, the symbolic burden is to align the orders of love. What threatens the family is the same thing that threatens the polity: representation turned in on itself and stripped of identity.

Sometimes the threat of the horrific comes not from a division within the family but from an entire family. The murderous family characterizes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, House of 1000 Corpses, and Deliverance.⁸⁰ Each of these films shows us a family literally turned in on itself, that is, one occupying an otherwise empty space of the rural American landscape. These families can see no meaning in the outsiders. In this they are like the adulterous parents in The Burning Plain. Cut off from the possibility of representation, those parents must die. The symmetrical move in horror is to murder outsiders, which includes an imagined threat to the audience. The exchange between inside and outside is always death.

A world of representation turned in on itself, in which representation is literally of nothing, is a world in which individuals are fungible because they are nothing more than placeholders in a system of representation. In The Matrix individuals are either representations in the code or batteries for machines. In the horror film they are literally deconstructed: either they are dismembered or they become zombies. Either way they may as well be dead. If there is to be a victory, it must come from a recovery of love. But part of the message of this genre is that no such victory is ever really possible. Representation can always turn in on itself. We continue to live on the edge. So, unlike the political narrative, there is no compulsion that these movies end with the positive affirmation of love.

Seen as the inversion of the archetype of familial sacrifice, horror films have a good deal in common with pornography.⁸¹ Both genres stand in opposition to the identity-representation structure of the romantic family and the modern nation-state. Horror displaces sacrifice with murder; pornography displaces love with sex.⁸² In both, truth is immediate and of the body, whether of pleasure or pain.⁸³ In horror we have speech without meaning, for every representation can lead only to death. In pornography words become mere sounds. There is only physical pleasure and its absence, sex or repression. Every other representation must be penetrated to reveal the mute truth of sex.

Sex that fails to generate representation is sex that has been stripped of its connection to reproduction. Materially, the pornographic coming together of bodies produces no children. Symbolically, it produces nothing at all—except, of course, more of itself. The pornographic moment, like the horror film murder, is only capable of repetition, not narrative representation. It is an iterated, repeated pleasure, never transcending the act by founding a human world of representation.

We might offer a narrative of a porn movie, but it would be little more than description of what has occurred. If surprise is the sign of freedom in discourse, porn contains no surprises. The narrative is more like a soundtrack. It tells a single story: pleasure (usually female) has become a problem, but that problem is resolved only by an unrestrained/ unlimited sexual act. For this reason there can be a vast enterprise of privately created, amateur pornography on the web. It bears no burden of representation, of narrative. We need know nothing about characters or plot, for the meaning of the act is the act itself. This collapse of meaning and act is the scandal of the pornographic, for it is a sort of inverse image of the sacred, which also collapses being and meaning. There is, of course, a long tradition of their intersection in the practice of individual penitents. Representation and identity collapse in pornography because the act of watching—voyeurism—is simultaneously an act of sexual pleasure.

The pornographic always offers itself as an alternative to the differentiated human world of role and representation. It pulls into its blunt materiality the occupant of every conceivable role from priest to politician, from housewife to businessman. These people are not literally dead, but a world that is reduced to the sexual act is not so far from the world of the zombie. Language has no place in either world, and without language there is no history. There is only endless repetition.⁸⁴ If pornography is without language or narrative, discussion of a particular pornographic film is a problem—not just the problem that I cannot assume any familiarity with particular films but a problem that goes to the nature of the genre, which resists narrative particularity. For this reason, unlike other discussions in this book, I speak of pornography as a genre. The narrative form of pornography is closer to the medical than to the historical or familial. Sex is a “cure” for the problem of the incompleteness of the body itself—usually but not always represented as a female lack or absence.

Pornography today literally fills the interstices of electronic media. Pornography is present already in the still picture. It needs no narrative that places the image in time or space.⁸⁵ A pornographic film aggregates multiple pornographic moments. We can turn off the volume and still understand the film. A film that tries to supplement the pornographic with a narrative line will likely appeal to a banal story of familial love. It does so because we cannot make the pornographic speak without changing its nature. Language in pornography is always at the point of dissolving into directions—and groans.

The pornographic literally strips the world of any meaning beyond the act. There is no before or after, for the act does not place itself within any narrative beyond that of coming to the act. Thus, the moment of sex can occur anywhere and anytime. It is free floating, unattached: a kind of antisignifier. The pornographic moment is the diversion that makes a claim to being all the truth that there is. It inverts the world, casting everything else as a flight from the singular hard fact of bodies and sex. Strip away role, stop the speaking, and all that we find is an endless desire for more of the same: physical pleasure.

Horror and porn trade on the same ideas and anxieties, but they do not take the same attitude toward these common sources. The former is ironic; the latter has a curious kind of seriousness to it. Irony signals the presence of a representative community that is self-conscious. Thus, horror films easily lend themselves to collective, ritualized practices that are self-mocking. The horror film is always on the verge of moving from disgusting to funny. Humor is a collective experience: the wholly private joke is hard to imagine. Pornography, on the other hand, presents itself as deeply antisocial. Of course, there is some social viewing of pornography that adopts the mocking tone, but it is far less certain of itself and fit only for the college campus. These films are fundamentally to be seen alone. They cut off communication in their insistence on the limits of the body. It is not an accident that the spectacular growth of pornography is associated with the computer and private cable access; both are means of viewing alone. It is hard to imagine the growth of an online community of pornography viewers.⁸⁶ What might they say to each other? Online porn sites solicit comments, but those comments do not constitute reciprocal discourse among the viewers. Rather, they are participatory expressions of the voyeur; they are often the sort of words we expect to hear on the screen. The spectacular growth of the horror film, in contrast, is associated with the multiplex cinema as a gathering place for young people.

Because pornography is serious in a way that horror is not, it must generally be embedded in a deeper morality tale in which the pornographic moment is succeeded by the reaffirmation of the conventional order of family and role. No one is ever trapped in the pornographic—never a kind of zombie of sex. Rather, the pornographic experience remains what the film itself promises, a diversion that enables return—not a return to the redemptive moment of innocence but a return to the ordinary pursuits of the everyday. Thus, the pornography on ordinary cable television offers a narrative of itself as a kind of “aid to marriage.” Normal people pursue the pornographic as an occasional diversion that promises to put them in touch with the truth of the body but all in service of the ordinary.⁸⁷ When pornography does not end in the affirmation of convention—most importantly family—it crosses over into horror.⁸⁸

If childhood is not innocence, then family is not the site of identity. If love is not identity, then it is only sex. Horror and porn are so popular with teenagers because they know themselves not to be innocent and suspect that they are not capable of love. Porn and horror together represent the splitting apart of the familial order of love as one that links identity and representation. Because porn and horror both have their origin in the familial, they can elide into each other. Nevertheless, analytically we need to maintain the distinction. The horror film turns the body into an empty signifier, while pornography claims that the body is itself the limit of whatever meaning there is. Pornography occupies the place of identity, horror that of representation. Pornography suggests that we are already complete in ourselves and need only withdraw from convention to find this enduring truth. It is a secular form of the ecstatic, which requires no speech.⁸⁹ The horror film suggests that the absence of meaningful speech leaves the body as only an object for destruction. Without speech we are zombies.

Each of these genres replicates a form of anxiety identified in the last chapter. The zombie is machinelike, the signature of a complete code that precludes the possibility of freedom. In political films the subject must go to war against code, just as he or she must go to war against the zombie. Of course, in the political film love and freedom triumph over machine and code. The horror film does not press the narrative of freedom on to the anxiety of symbolic closure. Instead, it confronts that anxiety with irony.

Pornography is often accused of encouraging a form of violence.⁹⁰ In fact, our politics is a celebration of violence in the form of the sacrificial act, while pornography is a taking back of the body from the domain of sacrifice. It is a form of political heresy precisely because it denies the metaphysics of sacrifice. Horror films, too, are accused of a kind of celebration of violence. That accusation not only misses the irony of the genre but fails to see that the mutilated body has already been stripped of identity and rendered an empty signifier. In both cases we can say that the violence of our political life needs no support from horror or porn. The celebration of the foundation of the state brings sacrifice deeply into our imaginative lives, and that may be all the violence that we can stand.⁹¹