We viewed a film noir, The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. One’s sense of viewing, the take-away from the film hinges as much upon what one brings to the screen, as upon Kubrick’s cinematic composition of the tale of a horse racetrack heist. The mastermind of the theft from the track counting room, Johnny Clay is a white male, just released from a stint in the penitentiary. Johnny Clay and each individual of Clay’s crew, crucial to the success of his caper is a flawed human, who nevertheless evokes empathy. Each in his/her own way is mesmerized to imagine a windfall of cash would mean alleviation of the day to day scrum. Each character, knowing not nearly enough, risk years of punishment/incarceration, even a prospect of death to move forward with the outrageous undertaking. At Kubrick’s masterful direction, a god-like narrator’s voice suggests Johnny and his crew are doomed from the very beginning. Advanced planning, delicacy of timing, measures of care, not even raw courage are enough to offset the precarity, the uncertainty of human nature.

In former times
people sought to show the feeling of man’s greatness
by pointing to his divine descent.

This, however, has now
become a forbidden path, for the ape
stands at its entrance,
and likewise other fearsome animals,
showing their teeth in a knowing fashion,
as if to say,
No further this way!

Hence people
now try the opposite direction:
the road along which humanity is proceeding
shall stand as an indication of their greatness and
their relationship to God.

But alas! this, too, is useless!
At the far end of this path stands
the funeral urn of the last man and gravedigger
(with the inscription, Nihil humani a me alienum puto).

To whatever height mankind may have developed
—and perhaps in the end
it will not be so high as when they began!

—there is as little prospect
of their attaining to a higher order
as there is for the ant and the earwig
to enter into kinship with God and eternity
at the end of their career on earth.

What is to come
will drag behind it that which has passed:
why should any little star,
or even any little species on that star,
form an exception
to that eternal drama?

Away with such sentimentalities!

The Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 49