while watching sin city last night with cp and jiahao, i was reminded of an essay i once tried to write on what i termed "constructed moralities" in film. (perhaps there is a real name for this that i will be informed of by the literature types). i originally conceived of the idea after watching the second part of kill bill and noticing that the moral and ethical codes followed by the characters in the film, while having little to do with normal, real-life behavioural strictures, are, nevertheless, internally consistent to a fault. (i.e. revenge is not only acceptable but expected; the special exemption of children from violence, etc.) the same has been true of a bunch of recent films i've liked, and this exchange from the sopranos also comes to mind (if you aren't a fan: tony is the mob boss, melfi is his psychiatrist. christopher has just been shot):


Melfi:
Do you think he[Christopher]’ll go to hell?

Tony:
No. He’s not the type that deserves hell.

Melfi:
So who does?

Tony:
The worst people. The twisted and demented psychos who kill people for pleasure. The degenerate bastards who molest and torture little kids and kill babies.The Hitlers. The Pol Pots. Those are the evil fucks who deserve to die. Not my nephew.

Melfi:
What about you?

Tony:
What? Hell? You been listening to me? No. For the same reasons. We’re soldiers…and soldiers don’t go to hell. It’s war. Soldiers…they kill other soldiers. We’re in a situation where…everybody involved knows the stakes, and if you’re going to accept those stakes…you’ve got to do certain things. It’s business. We’re soldiers. We follow codes. Orders.

Melfi:
So does that justify everything that you do?

Tony:
Excuse me, let me tell you something. When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for, because they were trying to save us from poverty? No, they did it because they needed us. They needed us to build their cities and dig their subways and to make them richer. The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn’t want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were, we wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that mean something to us: honor and family and loyalty. And some of us wanted a piece of the action. Now we weren’t educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way.

*

also: elijah wood has the scariest eyes in tinseltown.

Currently reading:
Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata