Rethink.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

- Hopkins

No one gives a damn. You have to take it.

- Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), “The Departed”

I want my identity back.

- William Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), “The Departed”

Jack Nicholson’s rejection of the Church in “The Departed” is for no less purpose than to play God. Why should he participate in the Eucharistic meal, where two or three meet in Christ’s name, and Christ becomes all in all, when he can make his own way? The question only comes up late in the movie whether anything after his own existence can be assured, and I do not speak of eternal life.

The Departed refuses to give a vision of criminality that shies away from the word “evil.” Most times we civilians want to think of criminals as merely being those who don’t have, and steal for survival or have lost something great that has become a void in their hearts. We don’t want to believe evil exists – we want our criminals to be motivated by want of survival or the manifold problems which accompany love. In some ways, this line of thought comes from post-Hobbesian political philosophy; to say that all we’re scared of is violent death and only concerned with self-preservation is to neglect focusing on criminal psychology and say that we all have the same motives in a sense.

The unfortunate consequence of this sort of reasoning – reasoning which you can clearly see that equality can be built from – is that we can’t say that cops are better than criminals. Pajiba’s review of this movie falls prey to that ridiculous notion, that DiCaprio’s good cop and Damon’s corrupt cop are really alike. They’re nowhere near alike – this movie makes it very clear that there is a big difference between one who would take a bullet for someone he doesn’t know, and another who would kill just because he could.

If we take the existentialist questions this movie raises through its characters seriously, we can see even larger differences between our everyday worldview and the one which has Jack Nicholson’s villain who-would-be-god on the one side and DiCaprio’s cop forced into not being himself. DiCaprio’s cop is the place to start with these questions – he became a cop because his family had always been involved in crime, and it disgusted him, and he literally wanted to make the one person who counted – Mom – proud. But he is pressed into going undercover in Costello’s gang, so he has to do jail time, he has to see a court ordered shrink, and only a few cops can actually know he’s a cop. His ability to have the identity he wants is taken away from him, for the sake of justice.

Nicholson’s villain has the identity he wants – that of being a tyrant – and receives a warped honor from his thugs. But ultimately, given that everyone thinks he’s psycho or sleaze, what is most telling about his identity is that he has complete control over honors dispensed. It is because of him that Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) can rise as a cop with an immaculate record to the near top of the police force and be an informant for his gang.

The question of honor, obviously, is that of how the Others consider the Self through the institutions we have set up. Platonic thought is dismissive of honor for a deep reason, in that self-knowledge alone dismisses these sorts of questions, and that self-knowledge doesn’t stem from sociability through institutions, but through the persistent quest for a Good that transcends any given institution or time. So for Plato, considerations of honor are going to collapse – usually – into mere considerations of desire.

But the existentialist point here raised by Costigan (DiCaprio) ends up transcending honor, because of the link between self-knowledge and his assertion of identity. All Costigan has is self-knowledge; there is no family, there is no money, really, and there is certainly is no power. That link between “I want to be just” and “honor” is coincidental; no one can say he didn’t lead a good life.

Which brings us to the concept of dignity, which we claim all men have, and place lower than honors given by the state. It is very clear that all men do not have equality in dignity, and that we extend such an equality to all means that we need to recognize the virtues that accompany truly having dignity, and recognize that we try to extend the concept of dignity to all because of those few who really do stand above.

technorati tags: scorsese, departed, movie, plato, existentialism

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