Prisoners and the Moral Path to Reciprocity

by Christopher Barr

Prisoners is about two little girls that go missing and the search to return them safely back home.  Hugh Jackman plays the father of one of the girls that takes his desire to get his daughter back to a very violent and extreme level.  Jake Gyllenhaal plays a detective assigned to the case.  He brings a suspect in, Alex Jones (Info Wars’s Alex Jones will surely see this use of his name as some sort of government conspiracy to associate his name with a perverted idiot) then has to let him go due to lack of evidence.  Jackman kidnaps Jones and brings him to an abandon apartment building and because he lacked information in his respective cognitive mapping, he resorts to violence and begins to brutally torture Jones until he reveals the whereabouts of the two little girls, Jackman is certain he knows.  Jackman enlists help of the other little girl’s father, Terrance Howard, to hold Jones while Jackman bashes his face in.  It’s clear that Howard’s character is the far more conflicted one of the two.  Howard doesn’t think that violence is the answer.

The film explores the notion of violence, faith and how far is one willing to go to get a loved one free from harm.  The how-far-are-you-willing-to-go was explored throughout the TV show 24, with Jack Bauer performing very violent acts on people he believed would get him closer to stopping the bomb or the assassination or the spread of the virus, or god forbid Kim Bauer is conveniently kidnapped again.

I think most people would act to help save a loved one.  How they would act would likely depend on it happening.  To me what was more important in this film was aside from the obvious, faith and the good book was used to justify acts of violence onto other human beings.

Religion has been used over many a millennia to help motive and exact violence, or it’s been used to help explain to the ignorant how atrocities come about in the first place.  Like in the case of vampires, ghouls and werewolves are but a few mythological creatures that were used in the dark ages to explain horrific crimes on people.  These creatures back then were something people actually believed in, sure today they’ve been glamoured up and put up on the silver screen, but back in the day they scared people into believing they were the ones responsible for stealing babies out of Romanian villages, only to slaughter them.  Then there’s the lunacy of Vlad the Impaler who tortured and murdered in the thousands, having his soldiers impale his many victims on top of pointed logs while he had lunch out in the field watching.   

Bram Stoker and history soon deified Vlad Dracula into the shadowy minds of millions.  People just couldn’t believe that human beings can be monsters, and I don’t mean the fictional kind, but just a man acting under his own volition, without any help from mystical things that aren’t actually there.  The Son of Sam, David Berkowitz blamed his killing spree on an evil demon dog giving him his orders.  There’s a good chance he was under a CIA program called MK-Ultra making him do it or that he simply had a screw loose.   

Religion over many years and civilizations fought to take control over our sensory perception of the world we are placed into.  By controlling our only tool we use to interact with that world, language.  Religion has become the answer to all the questions about the known universe and the creatures that reside on our blue planet.  That primitive way of thinking about the world still holds a binding grip on the majority of people in all countries.   

Religion and morality are not bound together; Religion is an ideological system of control that belongs exclusively to the symbolic order, where all is defined through language.  Morality is about how one interacts with the actual world with these symbolic rules.  One adopts a code of ethics to live by and navigate life through.  Immanuel Kant developed a central philosophical concept in his deontological moral philosophy called the Categorical Imperative.  This universal law suggests that there are certain objective ethical rules in the world, so there is a duty by the individual to recognize that and to act with reverence.

We should not treat others as if they are tools, this is the problem with what Jackman’s character in Prisoners did to Alex Jones.  By using Jones as a means to an end, he broke the fundamental principle of Kantian morality.  But religion was conveniently there to help fulfill his need to execute an eye for an eye code of justice.  Understandably Jackman was desperate, who wouldn’t be.  But to use religion to help fuel his need for a greater good was morally weak, as he mildly struggled with his actions.  That’s not to say what he did was entirely wrong, his bulldozer approach could have been less obvious but he wanted his daughter back.  The problem is how he morally justified it to himself rather than just doing it.  His reasons for capturing Jones were understandable to a degree.  The girls disappeared by his camper van and he was caught fleeing from the police, smells guilty to me.

Spoiler Alert!

But he wasn’t guilty, he was mentally disabled, but the girls got to his place via his camper van so that the real villain of the film could imprison them.  She wanted to do the work of the lord by exposing the sinners, who often hide in ordinary men.  She was using religion to satisfy a much sicker psychological need to hurt other people.  Jackman’s character does get punished for what he did because the religious hold over him didn’t have that good a grip, as it doesn’t with most people, the real guilt for what he did sunk in.  We also don’t see it at the end when Gyllenhaal hears the whistle blowing, it’s almost like the director wants us to know that he survived that pit but he did a horrible immoral thing to another human being, so let’s exit the film without seeing him freed.  I think that was a great idea because giving Jackman the satisfaction of seeing his daughter might have let him off the hook a little bit by the audience.  Because the moral of the story is the ends don’t always justify the means.