Emily LaBrie The Decalogue

I believe that these films work very well as Midrash in conveying the meaning of the commandments they represent. The first commandment, I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me does much more than portraying a simple command. The viewer gets to see the terribly tragic results when one holds something else other than a belief in god in a higher respect. The item that is held in such high esteem in this episode is a reliance on technology, or a computer system to be more specific. Several times during the episode we see the reliance on the computer in the father and son’s apartment. There is the time when the son asks the computer the answer for a math problem, this grows into the computer being asked to do simple tasks like lock the door and turn on the water. The boy also ironically has questions about religion and God while he also wonders if the computer can know what his distant mother is dreaming. (Something only God could know) Finally the reliance reaches its tragic point when the boy and non-believing father go to the computer to check if it is okay to skate on a frozen pond. The computer said it was fine; this is why it was so hard for the father to believe that his son had fallen through. How could the piece of technology he put so much faith in prove him wrong? The message of holding God above all others is conveyed through Midrash by showing the pain a father feels when he loses his son for trusting in something for knowing a fact only God could control. You should not obey the commandment because God said so; you should do it to possibly preserve those who you love the most.
The Midrash in the other commandment episode does not convey true meaning through the tragic sadness of losing a young life, but the tragic regret that follows in the disregard of the commandment that follows though shall not kill. It seems very simple in the film that the young man who kills the taxi driver is breaking the commandment. However, we see through his actions and those of the driver that they are both not very different. They are both not exemplary human beings to say the least. The taxi driver purposefully makes a women lose her dog, degrades a young woman, and ignores the needs of a young couple. The young man pushes a man in the urinal, ignores a man in need during a mugging, and makes a woman’s bird sly away. However, they are both not completely bad. The taxi driver shares his meal with a stray dog while the young man plays with girls at the window in the café. The young man is not completely immoral either, when he sees the “angel of death figure” while in the cab, he hides in the shadows knowing what he is about to do is wrong. We see the horror of the young man taking a life, not only for the driver’s sake but for his own. The next meaning of Midrash is conveyed through the similarities found in the carrying out of the execution of the young man who killed the taxi driver. There are so many similarities, from the detail in planning of the death to the reluctance and fight put up by the man about to die. The angel of death shows up for both victims, not just the taxi driver. The desperation against such a process is given voice through the lawyer of the young man as he fights against the death penalty sentence. Through his suffering and the regrets expressed by the young man before he dies the audience can feel the true meaning of thou shall not kill; not only through the murder of the taxi driver, but through the state murder of the young man. The director makes you feel the same sorrow for both victims in the process.
When said “It very quickly became clear that these would be films about feelings and passions, because we knew that love, or the fear of death, or the pain caused by a needle-prick, are common to all people, irrespective of their political views, the color of their skin or their standard of living” he meant to convey that though we are different, we all feel the same pain. Though the father refused to believe in powers that were not in his own control, we still felt the pain he felt when he lost his son and turned to God for any type of solace in the end. Though the young man was a murderer, he still had the attitude of the child when he ate the cake, played with the girls. We can all imagine what it would be like, the desperation, the regrets from the past we would feel if we were put in his situation.
Because of the Midrash in these episodes, because of how we can relate to the pain people feel in the films, the film does work to contextualize the code of the Ten Commandments to every person. They were not just come code given to Charlton Heston in some movie we had to watch every Easter. The symbols of the different lives, like I previously pointed out, helped bridge the distance between feeling and meaning because while we may never know what it feels like to we trust in computers above all or know how it feels to lose a loved one to murder, we can relate to the pain of losing a loved one, or maybe imagine how it would feel to fear for your life. One symbol that touched me the most was how the “angel of death figured” appeared to all characters involved. Whether they lived or died. I would like to focus on the second Decalogue shown. The “angel” was there not only in the beginning for the departed taxi driver, but also for the murderer before his execution, even after the murderer had pushed him in the urinal. The director tried to prove from this ethereal figure that all life when interpreted through the commandments is sacred.