I have never had occasion to write about a film in this space. To me, movies that are not excessively violent or blatantly offensive are generally banal.
But there is one I have rented three times now, even bribing family members and neighbors with popcorn in order to have them watch one of the most powerful commentaries on sin, guilt, and conscience that I know: Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.
The film’s central figure is Judah Rosenthal, successful ophthalmologist, loving husband and father, and respected community leader. His pleasant life seems perfect—until one day he opens a letter meant for his wife. It is from his mistress, and it threatens to expose the good doctor’s darker side.
Judah isn’t a religious man, but in his panic he asks a rabbi friend for advice. The rabbi urges him to confess to his wife and to God, and to hope for understanding. But Judah won’t take that risk. God, he says, is a luxury he cannot afford; he has to live in the real world.
Besides, Judah is not looking for forgiveness. He is looking for an escape, particularly as his mistress’s demands escalate into blackmail. Remembering the teachings of his Jewish childhood, Judah fears the all-seeing eye of God, but his fear of disrupting his well-ordered life is stronger. He finally decides to risk the possible wrath of a distant God rather than the certain fury of his wife.
Judah confides in his mobster brother, who offers a shocking solution. For a price, he says, the woman can be killed.
Judah agonizes. But as the woman’s pressures continue, he finally agrees. She must be silenced.
Judah’s brother’s call comes one night while he is entertaining guests: His mistress has been shot while opening the door for a delivery man. As his guests clink cocktail glasses, Judah quietly hangs up and drops his head into his hands. “My God,” he moans, “I’ve done a terrible thing.”
But then concern for himself brings him to his feet. He leaves his guests at the dinner table and rushes to the woman’s apartment, to recover the evidence of their affair. His mistress’s body is lying on the floor in a pool of blood, her dead eyes searching the empty air.
From that point Judah spends his nights pacing through his darkened house, reliving scenes of instruction from his childhood. Memories of the dead woman’s blank eyes merge with images of the Holocaust and the all-seeing eyes of God. He teeters on the brink of either confession or a nervous breakdown.
But he doesn’t confess—and he doesn’t break down. As time goes by he is amazed to find that his wife never discovers the affair; the murder is eventually blamed on a burglar convicted of similar killings. Judah’s marriage prospers, his business thrives, and he learns to lie to his rabbi. Finally, even the nightmares stop.
With a smirk, Judah recounts his formula of how the real world works: rationalize sin, deny guilt, and then “life can go on better than ever.”
A Tale Of Two Murders
Crimes and Misdemeanors is, of course, not about one murder, but two: the murder of a woman and the subsequent murder of a man’s conscience, which follows a systematic progression.
First, Judah had to get rid of God. Though not a religious adult, he had been indoctrinated in orthodox Judaism as a child. He believed in God. But at the point of dissonance between the events of his life and the standards of God, he had to jettison one or the other. So, just as if Nietzsche had written his script, he killed God—not in an act of violent deicide, however. He simply behaved as if God did not exist.
Second, Judah had to redefine his standard of justice. Right and wrong could no longer serve as the absolutes by which justice would be measured; Judah’s operating standard became that of self-serving pragmatism. So justice was defined as that which preserved his status quo. Thus his petulant complaint to his rabbi, “What good is the law if it keeps me from getting justice?” (Significantly, in a period of religious coldness at the end of the eighteenth century, as belief in hell faded, crime escalated, as did capital punishment. When individual conscience and a sense of spiritual consequence no longer restrain a people, law can be enforced only by the threat of physical consequence: the gallows.)
Third, once Judah had dispensed with God and redefined justice, the only impediments left for him were his tiresome, anachronistic pangs of guilt. Curing those pangs was short work—and a great relief.
Dining With Wolves
Woody Allen’s cinematic postmortem on the death of one man’s conscience is a powerful commentary on our society today, which is traveling Judah’s three steps: dispensing with God, redefining standards of justice for personal gain, and ridding itself of those pesky notions of sin and guilt.
One need only read today’s popular magazines or watch Oprah or Phil or the other therapeutic talk-TV gurus, and you will see an amazing renunciation of personal responsibility in favor of conscience-free living—“I feel so much better.” So did Judah Rosenthal.
Take this attitude far enough and you have the story of the well-adjusted serial murderer. “I’m certainly saddened it happened,” he said. “But it’s time to move on now.” So much for conscience.
Dr. Samuel Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, recounts an evening of dinner conversation between the celebrated thinker and Lady MacLeod, a renowned eighteenth-century hostess. Lady MacLeod asked Dr. Johnson if no man was naturally good. “No, madam,” replied Johnson testily. “No more than a wolf.”
Crimes and Misdemeanors exposes the grim truth that wolves mingle at the most elegant of dinner parties. And there are handsome, well-adjusted wolves ranging about our society today who would have you believe that the killing of conscience is a mercy killing as socially beneficial as euthanasia. Indeed.
