"Dead man walking!" In the empty, silent and narrow aisle, only the touch of the iron door and the sound of shackles echoed. The footsteps are dull and slow, time is magnified at this moment and strikes people's hearts like never before, because for every living person, the most common and boring passing has become the most precious treasure that can replace the entire world. The symbol of life became the messenger of death, calling its prisoners with every minute and every second appearance.
The positive and detailed description of the death penalty scene appeared in two movies I have seen, one is the famous "Dancer in the dark", the singer of the soul Bjork sinks into her musical fantasy land for the last time in the footsteps of this death , Let the beauty she loves in her life accompany her through this road, but she still can’t help crying and crying with fear, even if she knows she is not the real murderer; in another "Death Row", The fierce-faced Matthew Ponchette was also forced to put on a diaper and wear slippers, and was carried forward by the jailer. Behind him, Sister Helen put her hand on his shoulder with all her strength.
Facing death-even if it's just a death reappearing in the fiction of the image, when he sees Bjork being snuggled into the noose and struggling hoarsely, when he sees the needle sticking into the arm of Sean Penn whose limbs are tied, his instinct is instinctive. With fearful eyes, how can we not be shaken, and how can we dare to be frivolous in life? I don't know how to die, but I don't know how to live. It takes great courage to face the essence of life itself.
Regarding the scene of awakening life by showing death, I don't know how to use non-life "rationality" to explore it. Language and thinking are too pale before the impulse of life's emotions. However, since life has to continue in time and space, life must be an inescapable form of life, so we can only listen to Socrates's words-live to death, use the mouth of the living to speak for the living .
Sin
He was a sinner from the beginning.
This is the initial setting of the movie. Matthew, the convicted criminal, wrote to the diocese nun Helen, requesting a meeting with her and asking for help. People around Helen reminded her not to be used by Matthew in order to achieve his purpose of appealing for a reduction of sentence. What the audience saw was just as said, Matthew refused to plead guilty, looked cynical and asked Helen to appeal for him. As the plot of the film unfolds, the facts of the case are gradually revealed. Helen gradually understood this through talking with Matthew and handling petitions with lawyers. We learn that Matthew is not an innocent person. He is at least one of the two participants in the crime. So this film is not those suspenseful detective films-the protagonist of the bizarre case is unjustly unjustified and the crime is finally eluted. Like Sister Helen, we faced a sinner in the moral and legal sense from the beginning, and he was not a gentle or upright criminal who was full of bitterness. He was extreme, rude, cynical and vicious, in short. , No Bo people sympathize. Matthew himself didn't expect this, because he didn't think he was guilty. Although he knew what he did, whether he verbally admitted it or not, he knew best in his heart, but he had no regrets.
The true sense of guilt is imposed on the soul, so only oneself can truly convict oneself as a sinner, otherwise, facing the prestige and severe punishment of a thousand men, he can also be righteous and awe-inspiring. In a sense, sin is a person's knowledge of oneself, and this knowledge is subject to self-reflection and has a certain result. The person mentioned here is a person in a cultural sense. He is not only an isolated life, but also a biological, chemical or physical phenomenon such as the activity of organic systems. In a cultural sense, everyone includes the relationship between the entire human society and the history of all human civilization. Human beings become a whole through relationships, and each individual person is condensed with human characteristics and burdens with his kind responsibilities. Such kind of characteristics and kind of responsibility constitute human sin. To be a human being is his/her original sin. When we face the Christian doctrine of original sin, don't regard it as being taught to a single individual. It was the ancestor of all mankind that was convicted, so the original sin was imparted to all mankind through each type of individual. Sin is the sin of all mankind, but as long as we are human, we can hardly escape the blame.
As mentioned above, sin is subject to self-knowledge. Only when one realizes the kind of responsibility that one must bear as a person can one understand that sin is an unavoidable destiny, and only then can one know that one’s sin is one. Sinner-from the beginning.
The beginning of the film contains such a metaphor of original sin, which makes the appearance of religious themes inevitable. Sister Helen did not refuse to help Matthew because of his status as a sinner, and she even regarded it as a very important part of her work. Here, as the incarnation of Christianity, Helen Siu confronts and saves the guilty, and constitutes a symbolic language that interprets the true mission of Christianity.
——We are guilty, but the Lord has not forsaken us. The crime of
evil
Matthew was convicted from the beginning, but his evil gradually emerged as the case unfolded. The film cleverly uses people’s retelling of the case, the flashbacks of the frontal depiction of the crime scene, and the meticulous depiction of the emotional pain of the victim’s family, to show the movie audience bit by bit. Dig) out. We have seen that criminals are extremely vicious and extremely cruel, but their purpose is only a temporary vent, which can be described as utterly conscience. The two families who were victimized lost their young lives, lost their future, and lost all the possibilities of joy and happiness. First of all, death is caused by its consequences, which brings strong fear and sorrow to the living, and indelible injuries. Young people have lost all possibilities due to death, their families have only hatred and pain due to death, and criminals have to pay the price of their lives due to death. Here, death is the evil result and the true form of evil.
Death is evil, and death is the evil of man, because death exists in the characteristics of man. Man is a finite thing, and finiteness cannot avoid death. When a person knows that he is alive or dead, he knows good and evil (eats the fruit of the tree of knowing good and evil), and he has the original sin. Sin and evil are closely linked. Evil exists in the person himself, and sin is the knowledge of the person himself. Therefore, sin is actually the knowledge of evil.
Except for the most primitive evil, all evils can also be derived from death. Looking back at all the evil deeds in human history, which one has nothing to do with death? Those who create evil for survival are an escape from death, those who create evil for life (name, profit) drive away the fear of death, and those who create evil for the pain of emptiness are the wailing of oppression of death, and those who create evil for the sake of evil The evil-makers attempt to contempt death and transcend it—it's impossible in the end.
Death has been entangled around people from the day they were born. It arouses people's desire for survival and struggle for survival-in this sense, there is no evil and no manifestation of good. The history of human struggle for survival is a history of creating evil. Although goodness has been continuously shown in this process, it cannot compensate for it. No amount of goodness will allow us to deny evil. Therefore, as long as people realize this, sin is added to them.
However, in reality, many people cannot recognize the true evil, nor admit that evil is a matter for the whole of mankind. No one can be excused. Externalizing and objectifying evil, shirks one's own responsibilities, and cannot recognize the face of evil, and creates evil without knowing it. This makes many avoidable evils not avoided, intensified, and sins intensified. Human beings have no way to avoid evil and eliminate sin, but they have limited possibilities for evil to stop sin. In the usual sense, it means not doing evil—the evil in the world is the greater evil in the deep sense.
But this is not a problem that can be solved by personal choice. Because human beings are social beings and representatives of species, personal choices are full of social and historical factors, not a single isolated will at work. In the film, we can find some forming conditions for Matthew's viciousness. His family, his living environment, his character and prejudice created by the discrimination he suffered, the people he associates, his lifestyle (why should he take psychedelic drugs? Why should he vent?)...every point Can pull out the problems of the whole society. So if we have the courage to pursue the origin of evil, we need the courage to reflect on ourselves, the society we live in, and the moral standards we believe in. Can we really?
Punishment? Redemption?
So there was a penalty. Because of the emotional hatred and rejection of sin (whether it is the sin of all mankind as the essence or the concrete evil act as the appearance), people use punishment to find a way out.
Penalties have a dual function: revenge to vent their anger, deterrence, elimination, and punishment to protect themselves. The punishment of the first function is of course only applied to the criminal itself; the second function is applied to both the criminal and the whole society. In particular, the deterrence is the most important social benefit of punishment. The death penalty is an extreme case of punishment, so it can demonstrate the role and influence of punishment to the extreme.
In the film, Matthew and his family tried to exonerate him from the death penalty, but the families of the two victims wanted him to die because of hatred. We can understand both attitudes emotionally. Although Sister Helen has been running for Matthew's exemption, her real purpose is to make him confess his sin and repentance. For Matthew, the death penalty did not make him regretful. Although we can say that because his sentence is not near, there is still a glimmer of hope, so he has not yet felt the fear of facing death. But if Helen did not show up to do his spiritual counseling, it is hard to guarantee that he would not be just angrily and fear during the execution, or shouted timidly, "I will be a hero again in twenty years." The film shows us the process of Matthew's gradual repentance, which is induced by Helen's love. Religious feelings removed the illusory hatred that had blinded Matthew's soul, and made him have the heart to admit evil and repent of his exposed soul. The punishment of death eliminates this guilty individual, removes the evil in this individual, and soothes the hatred spirit of the victim's family. However, the death penalty does not eliminate the evil itself, nor can it make up for the victim's grief.
From the perspective of the negative impact of the death penalty, deepening people's fear of death through the fear of man-made death may encourage certain evil deeds (the previous article analyzed the inseparable relationship between death and evil deeds); through death The extreme form of punishment is to conceal the origin and social causes of evil deeds, so as to excuse the living sinner, and so on. I am not proposing this to deny the extreme effect of the death penalty as a penalty. I just want to show that we cannot completely rely on punishment. It may hinder our introspection.
In this film, it is the love of religion that really makes sins known and redeemed. At the end of the film, the two deaths (the murder of two young people and the death penalty of Matthew) are presented simultaneously through screen switching. In the end, the photo of the two victims smiling when Matthew stops struggling is used as a phantom background, suggesting that With the realization of salvation, Matthew finally made atonement through his death (under repentance). The purpose of the film is to show that Christian love can eventually affect the soul, and God will eventually redeem his sinful people. It achieves this through the complete narrative of the story. However, how can people in reality do it?
The death situation provided by the death penalty itself has a kind of deterrence and appeal, because of the relationship between death and evil. The previous analysis said that criminals sentenced to death have not repented, and ultimately rely on religious enlightenment. But then I thought about it, what would happen if Matthew had not been executed? The death penalty plays a role no less than religion in the process of repentance.
Epilogue:
Returning to the shock of death described at the beginning of this article, we have to sigh with a heavy sigh. After all, death is the original form of evil, and it is death that allows us to experience sin and evil the deepest, so that we can obtain salvation and have the good of life. Fang Sheng Fang death, Fang Sheng Fang life, sin and evil, punishment and redemption, the world will never be able to get rid of the contradiction, can the words be able to express it all?
References:
"Life to Death-Comment on the Movie "168 Hours on Death Row"" (online film review, author unknown)
Qiu Xinglong: "The Philosophy and Jurisprudence of Penalty"
Qiu Xinglong , September 2003 Edition of Law Press : "About Punishment" Philosophy-On the Basis of Penalty" Law Press, December 2000,
Hu Yunteng: "General Theory of Death Penalty", China University of Political Science and Law Press, January 1995
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