Since the end of World War II, the United States has conducted over 200 military operations. The current struggle with terrorism and jihadism promises that war will continue its current character of perpetuity. Those who defend these individual acts of violence, or the whole destructive culture of perpetual war, reason that recourse to violence is sometimes the only means of stopping aggressors. True, but I very much doubt that all of our acts of warfare fall under the banner of justified self-defense. Nevertheless, even if all our wars have been just and noble causes against the aggression of evil, it remains true that violence has a price. It has a price beyond what we dehumanizingly call collateral damage. Violence damages the soul of the violent.
The human soul is by nature life affirming, yet its energies, powers, and resources can be focused on the destruction of life. Acting against its nature cannot but have ill effects upon the human soul. With every act of violence, the soul is diminished little by little. Grave acts of violence, such as murder, scathe the soul deeply.
The human soul is by nature life affirming, yet its energies, powers, and resources can be focused on the destruction of life. Acting against its nature cannot but have ill effects upon the human soul. With every act of violence, the soul is diminished little by little. Grave acts of violence, such as murder, scathe the soul deeply.
Three recent films of the action genre have explicitly explored the theme of violence’s destructive effect upon the soul of the violent.
Casino Royale, the latest entry in the James Bond series, tells the tale of how James Bond becomes James Bond, the soulless secret agent. We learn that in order to achieve 00 status, Bond must kill twice on behalf of the state. These assassinations occur at the beginning of the movie. The rest of the film depicts Bond’s first assignment as 007. However, James does not become the Bond we know until the end of the film, after what little he has left of his soul is drowned in the waters of Venice, and he lets his soul wash away and transforms into the famously effective James Bond. He becomes what C.S. Lewis called a man without a chest. Casino Royale presents a question that will unite and haunt every following Bond movie: Will James Bond ever get back his soul?
That question is at the heart of the Jason Bourne trilogy. Bourne has been called the anti-Bond, for whereas James gives his soul away to become a deadly weapon, Jason Bourne, a secret agent having lost his soul and his memory from a life of perpetual violence, strives to discover his lost identity. Finding his identity for Bourne turns out to require more than finding answers; the goal of his sojourn is the rediscovery of his soul and atonement for the violence he has unquestionably inflicted upon so many.
At the beginning of the dreary Children of Men, the few remaining people of the world mourn the death of the world’s youngest person, who happens to have been in his late teens. War has devastated most of the planet, leaving only Britain a somewhat livable environment, and to make matters worse, infertility is the norm with seemingly no exception. Hope is born with the pregnancy of a woman in the care of a rebel group. One would think that the real prospect of human extinction would give people cause to affirm life over death, but not so in the chilly vision of Children of Men. The film is about people’s responses to the unborn life and new-found hope for the human race. The rebellion hopes to use the pregnancy as a banner to further their terror-using cause against the totalitarian state. The state has no qualms about mass killings in order to protect those who live within its borders, even at the risk of extinguishing the dawn of new life. When a culture of life is so direly needed, a culture of death reigns supreme. In a telling moment, Clive Owen’s character escorts the mother and her newborn baby through a battle between the state soldiers and the rebels forces. At the unexpected and hopeful sight and sound of the baby, the violence stops, as each person looks with awe at the little life amidst the death and destruction. For a moment it seems the violence has lifted, but as suddenly as it ceased, it returns with sound and fury. The sight of new life is not enough to deliver these children of men from the hellish womb of violence and death.
None of these films deny that violence can save lives, but each in its own way explores the effects of violence, even violence for the good, upon the souls of the violent, especially those who give themselves over to and pour all of their energies into a life of violence and death. The pictures they paint are not pretty.