In Hitchcock’s Rope we are presented with the Übermensch idea and its repercussions. I would like to offer some of my own insights and thoughts about the film and the views it represents. To understand what is written here the film must be watched or a summary of it must be read.
The idea which the film revolves around is that “a man intellectual enough, can decide what good and bad for himself” and therefore “commit murder because it will solve problems” such as “Unemployment and poverty” and “standing in line for theater tickets”. These three sentences are enough to discuss some meaningful ideas around the film.
First sentence suggests that a man intellectual enough can decide his own values, that sentence is anyway applicable, in the end everyone has its own values, priorities and believes, only when we get to the second sentence it would prove ‘problematic’.
Second sentences suggest committing murder to solve problems. Well to a certain extent that also happens anyway, otherwise we wouldn’t have wars. But on a more serious note, it suggests not only that a man can get to decide if another is to die or to live but also reversing the order, like the perfect murder would prove someone’s superiority. Let us break it up: a man can decide if another is to live or die. First of all, a subject I can’t recall Nietzsche was even close to discuss, it comes only from the unfortunate events, to say the least of it, of WW2 and the harmful logic mistake to interpret murder as a tool of selective hierarchy which gets to decide what’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (which is anyway subjective). Murder is the ultimate act of destruction and negation, as such it can be considered to rule out any further positive development and construction not mentioning something like an Ubermensch. Like Dostoevsky’s crime and punishment, the act of murder, and especially in the case of a self-test of superiority is childish, foolish and to say the least that the chance that it would lead to something personally positive is nonexistent and non-presented, so why even suggest trying it ? From a collective level one can always read ‘The Prince’ by Machiavelli but from this individual point of view murder rules out itself even before getting to build any other theories on top of it, especially when the Ubermensch idea works bottom-up, first in an individual level, it will rule out any collective circumstances like in ‘The Prince’. If the path to getting better leads first to the worse of all things, logically it would contradict itself. The re-evaluation of all values that Nietzsche suggested is to find its way through thinking, music, philosophy, art, theater etc. Nietzsche had doubts about his own writing which he expressed in his writing, as shown in the film itself, even today it would be hard to explain how can one derive to such horrifying acts from misinterpretation. The second thing suggested by the character of the teacher Rupert is about the nature of words and their translation into actions which leads us to the third sentence.
Third sentence suggests that murdering people to solve problems would result in improvement because we will not have to stand in line for theater tickets. Here we can find the silver lining of the film and I will explain why. The humor that Rupert has, which also connects him to the other people in the film (sub-human or not) shows that he does not take his ideas or words one-hundred percent serious, it suggest that having a sense of humor does not make him a “paranoid psychopath”, where his ideas of solving problems with murder contradicts his idea of being social and having fun and empathy towards other people making him (a non-psychopath) human, susceptible to mistake of himself and others . Although the other side of the same thing, is that when he is talking about an ideal, a world without or with less problems even to the ridiculous extend of having no line to the cinema (another sophisticated joke by the director) which we would all like, could theoretically is possible… only if we get rid of some inferior people… the distance from just a few words to reality may look small to some (Brandon) but not for others, where words can easily convey an idea of a better world, they fail to deal with the implications of murder as a mean of achieving it, being philosophical, moral, humanist, psychological, utilitarianist etc. To put into simple words the implications are huge, and one can claim that with being intellectual one can have an understanding of it. Certainty and knowledge is something Nietzsche really undermined in his thinking. De omnibus dubitandum est, is a basic paradigm of the Existentialist approach.
When Rupert is talking about murdering to have less line in cinema, he his mostly concerned with the well-being of the superior people, which is art and intellectualism. Rupert suggests that by eliminating problems we will have less problems therefore be better. His humor and lack of conviction in addition to ending implies that he treats it as a sort of consolation idea, and not as an ideology or a policy, he his aware to a certain extend but fails to grasp fully the disastrous potential of such an idea.
When Brandon is talking about murdering people, he is simply following Rupert’s model, not overthinking it, not understanding that ‘eliminating problems’ is also a problem itself, logically simplified he cannot clean filth with filth (only with soap). He disregards all the people around him even when they are close to him, which makes him oblivious to the destructive force of his doing. He is being portrayed as detached and self-centered in a way of psychopath, he is oblivious to the emotional attachment between the other characters and therefore himself, suggesting he is not aware to the consequences of his doing lacking self-reflection, empathy, human or however you may call it.
The two categories – superior and inferior, are parallelto creation and destruction, giving life or taking life, (green and red) if you follow that logic taking life and destruction is reserved for the inferior, and there is not way out of that circle, which is the conclusion of Rupert in the end of the film, his catharsis because he will not kill Brandon and Phillip and even risk himself being questioned about the whole situation suggesting a Dostoevskian ending when Rupert accepts his mistake, guilt and punishment.
With regards to Nietzsche and what followed as a result from his thinking, first we should learn to understand the dangerous use of words and language and how it can misguide us applying it to reality. Secondly Nietzsche was looking beyond the dichotomy of good and evil, he suggested accepting your enemy as part of yourself (what C.G. Jung defined as shadow), by accepting your enemy you are also accepting yourself, and yes, that thought can also be dangerous if mis-interpreted. Being acceptable and tolerant to imperfection, is also a step in the way of improving. The re-evaluation of all values by Nietzsche suggested we should not use absolute terms a good and evil because they only get their power from one another, the dichotomic way of looking at things should be something of the past. You can show what is good is only if you put it against what’s bad, therefore the ten commandments are telling us not to do. We can only see the defects of others if we have it in ourselves, we can admire what others have or do to become better ourselves. Eliminating other’s defects would not eliminate our defects but striving to be better will always work and not just for ourselves.
In Rope we are confronted with the crisis of logic in the beginning of the 20th century, absolute terms of good and bad are opposites which are defined only by each other therefore as terms they are only an empty spectrum within language. To fill the empty spectrum within language it has to relate to our reality, reality for every individual is different therefore if we want to be able to communicate with language (which also in turn builds a reality individually) we have to define the two edges ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with something we can relate to the real world, so the basic methodology would be to replace good with life and bad with death, then you can have religion even stretching in beyond life and death with heaven and hell, we understand that we can build it as a social construct and call it morality, which is subjective. The point of heaven and hell is where psychology came into picture and with the help of emotion and the psyche allowed a richer spectrum of reality between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ which in turn does not only extend in boundary of good but also bad, in imagination and in reality. With the understanding that all humans do not share the same objective reality (theory of relativity, even before discussing emotion), the boundaries where left open, a period of trial and error came. Rope shows that period of trial and error, where thinking in philosophical (theological or cultural etc’) ways can expand or undermine our nature of reality to the core, raising skepticism regarding rationality, intellectualism and emotion and society, which should triumph? Who will or can decide the rules ? The film shows different answers possible to that question.