A Discussion of the Film Sicario based on Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba
Modern Action Movies
A curious particularity of modern action films is that they are mostly watched by bourgeois audiences who have no personal experience with violence beyond perhaps the occasional unarmed schoolyard fight. This is a marked contrast with martial, action-packed works of drama like Aeschylus’ The Persians, which would have been shown to men who had direct personal experience with the actual battles portrayed in the work. Similarly, Germanic warrior sagas like Beowulf began as oral traditions to be shared around a campfire of warriors who would have had analogous—albeit perhaps more prosaic—exposure to the kind of fighting that the stories depict.
Some action movies ignore this particularity and present their stories exclusively from the point of view of professional soldiers or citizens who otherwise occupy a strange niche in bourgeois society that allows them to have extensive experience with armed combat. But other, more refined action movies take a different approach. These movies implicitly acknowledge their historical particularity by including a character who represents the perspective of the contemporary bourgeois citizen: someone who lacks experience and instinctual comfortability with lethal violence. This character weaves the viewer’s own historical position into the work by directly depicting the conflict between the everyday bourgeois aversion to violence and the alien world of men whose existence is made up by frequent outbursts of fighting, killing, and dying.
A good example of this is the ship’s doctor in the film Master and Commander. The movie portrays British naval officers pursuing an enemy French vessel during the Napoleonic Wars. It features uncouth practices like child soldiers (in the protagonist British Navy—not some subaltern non-Western tribe) and a commanding officer who exhibits utter disregard for the lives of the crew in comparison to the success of the mission. The ship’s doctor, who is in but not of the military life, constantly resists and questions these practices, thereby representing the perspective of the bourgeois viewer who finds them appalling.
One question we can ask about the demand for these kinds of characters in action movies in a bourgeois era is whether they add or subtract from the integrity of the work. Would it not be more coherent to tell a story exclusively focused on the conflicts and human tendencies that emerge within the honorable world of warriors? Does including a character who constantly questions the entire moral framework of this world not detract from the artist’s presentation? Is it anything more than an annoying aside to make bourgeois viewers feel acknowledged?
German Aesthetics in Hamlet or Hecuba
In some degree of contrast to Anglophone philosophy, aesthetics was an arena of questioning that was mandatory for a serious German philosopher in the 19th and 20th centuries to address. Carl Schmitt, who was no doubt obeying this mandate, discussed the German philosophical conversation over aesthetics and made his own contribution to the conversation in a work of Hamlet criticism called Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play.
Schmitt’s title already indicates that he is interested in the theme I introduced above: for Schmitt, the question of the “intrusion of time” is the question of to what degree the historical position of the artist and his viewers interferes with, contributes to, or is completely irrelevant to a great work of art like Hamlet. This inquiry bears directly on whether in action movies, the bourgeois cutout character—which is demanded by the historical position of the filmmaker and his viewers—detracts from the integrity of the stories that such movies tell.
Schmitt describes two poles that make up the axis around which the German philosophical-aesthetic conversation revolves. First, there is the view that in great works of art, time never intrudes into the work. Great art is distinguished precisely by its quality of successfully banishing any influence from whatever historical accidents were taking place at the time of its creation and instead ascending to the level of timeless, universal beauty. Schmitt writes of the German formalists:
Philosophers of art and teachers of aesthetics tend to understand the work of art as an autonomous creation, self-contained and unrelated to historical or sociological reality—something to be understood only on its own terms. To relate a great work of art to the actual politics of the time in which it was created would presumably obscure its purely aesthetic beauty and debase the intrinsic worth of artistic form…in the free and sovereign creative power of the poet…historical and sociological questions become tactless and tasteless.
The polar opposite of this attitude, a kind of crude historicism that saw art as merely an expression of its own sociological and historical conditions of creation, was also present:
A strictly historical approach originated after the First World War, primarily in Anglo-Saxon countries, that pointed to the indisputable contradictions and shortcomings in Shakespeare’s plays, his dependence on literary predecessors, and his ties to the socio-economic order of his era. The traditional understanding of the strict unity of his characters and the artistic perfection of his works was destroyed. Shakespeare was now above all a dramatist of the Elizabethan age, his plays written for his London public.
As the harsh framing of both of these positions suggests, Schmitt adheres to neither of them. But then what role does he think history plays in a great work of art? In what particular way do time and historical phenomena intrude into the play?
Schmitt’s position is that in a work of art like Hamlet, the intrusion of time is absolutely present—Shakespeare is not the naïve “free and sovereign” poet about which Schmitt’s proverbial German aesthetes fantasize—but rather than constituting an unwelcome and regrettable interference with his artistic freedom, the intrusion of time is for Shakespeare an opportunity.
In the case of Hamlet, the similarity of the protagonist to the life of King James I, particularly the potential involvement of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, in the death of his father, requires Shakespeare to carefully elude either exonerating or depicting as guilty Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. This is in order to avoid offending both James and the factions that supported her late husband Henry Stuart. But rather than taking away from the story he is telling, this politically-motivated elision elevates the intensity and tragic potential of the work:
The basis of the seriousness of tragic action, which, being impossible to fictionalize or relativize, is also impossible to play. All participants are conscious of an ineluctable reality that no human mind has conceived—a reality externally given, imposed and unavoidable. This unalterable reality is the mute rock upon which the play founders, sending the foam of genuine tragedy rushing to the surface.
Shakespeare’s incomparable greatness lies in the fact that, moved by reserve and consideration, led by tact and respect, he was capable of extracting from the confusing richness of his contemporary political situation the form that could be intensified to the level of myth. His success in grasping the core of a tragedy and achieving myth was the reward for that reserve and respect that honored the taboo and transformed the figure of an avenger into a Hamlet. Thus, the myth of Hamlet was born. A Trauerspiel rose to the level of tragedy and was able to convey in this form the living reality of a mythical figure to future ages and generations.
For Schmitt, Shakespeare’s achievement is not reaching a timeless aesthetic realm untouched by the minutia of history. It is that rather Shakespeare remains to some degree in the here and now but appropriates his historical particularity to intensify the meaning of his work. It is precisely the untouchability of the question of Gertrude’s guilt, demanded by history, that makes Hamlet into the powerful tragic figure that he is. Historical circumstances at the time of a work’s creation are not a barrier around which an artist must maneuver to reach the promised land of pure aesthetics; they can be part of the raw material out of which an artist fashions a great work and thus a positive aesthetic contribution.1
Schmitt’s theories in Sicario
Denis Villeneuve’s 2015 film Sicario automatically invites in Carl Schmitt by considering the conflict between a rule-of-law society and adversarial forces that seem to require the use of extralegal violence to successfully combat them. But it is less the exhibition of Carl Schmitt’s legal philosophy that interests me here. Instead, I want to discuss how Emily Blunt’s character constitutes an example of how—as Schmitt argues in Hamlet or Hecuba—a successful work of art appropriates the intrusion of time in order to intensify its theme.
Emily Blunt’s character, FBI Special Agent Kate Macer, is a classic example of a bourgeois cutout character in an action movie. As men who are presumably members of the CIA’s Special Activities Center / Special Operations Group run wild on their Mexican cartel adversaries, engaging in torture and outright murder, Macer constantly insists on doing things by the book and clearing uses of violence with the proper legal channels. She represents the informed and mature bourgeois citizen who knows that state violence is sometimes necessary to maintain order but is nonetheless committed to the principle that such violence ought to be constrained by constitutional and bureaucratic procedures overseen by an independent judiciary.
Is the presence of Macer in the story a mere distraction from a timeless and universal story about groups of armed men struggling to the death? Does it represent an unfortunate compromise—a surrender, even—that Villeneuve forges with his viewers in order to achieve critical acceptance and sufficient box office attendance to recoup his investors’ costs in financing the film? If we take Sicario seriously as a work of art, then Schmitt’s answer has to be no. Instead of considering time to be a foreign intruder that interferes with his story, Villeneuve uses the demand for a bourgeois cutout character precisely to elevate the intensity of the human conflict that he wishes to portray.
One way of telling the story that Sicario depicts would be to focus exclusively on the men who actually fight and drive the conflict between the U.S. government forces and the Mexican cartels. But this isn’t exactly the full story: part of what it means to fight for the U.S. government is that the fighters are working on behalf of an entity which regards itself as superior because it is governed by legal procedure backed up by attractive normative principles. So Villeneuve would be leaving something out by writing some sort of Iliad redux driven exclusively by the internal logic of honor-driven male revenge cycles.
There is something productive about Macer’s role that goes beyond merely comforting Villeneuve’s audience. At the same time, Macer is very much in the story to do precisely that. We might also note the contemporary pressure on directors to increase gender diversity in their casts. But by representing the bourgeois aversion to lawless violent struggle (and the related societal commitment to diversify traditionally male spaces like law enforcement) Macer’s presence transforms Sicario from Trauerspiel to genuine tragedy.
To put that claim in plain English, we might recall Schmitt’s view that great art does not seek to escape from the historical circumstnaces of its creation but rather weaves them into the meaning of the work. In confronting historical circumstances (such as an audience that believes in gender diversity and constraining violence with the “rule of law”), Villeneuve does not retreat into a pure but fantastical aesthetic realm. Instead, he succesfully connects the aesthetic spectacle of violence with the real public sphere of his viewers. As Schmitt says of Shakespeare:
In relation to every other form, including Trauerspiel, genuine tragedy has a special and extraordinary quality, a kind of surplus value that no play, however perfect, can attain because a play, unless it misunderstands itself, does not even want to attain it. This surplus value lies in the objective reality of the tragic action itself, in the enigmatic concatenation and entanglement of indisputably real people in the unpredictable course of indisputably real events.
I think something like this is going on in Sicario. The movie becomes more than an entertaining spectacle of revenge, honor, and struggle because it explicitly takes something from its historical circumstances of creation. Specifically, by including Macer, the movie relates those aforementioned themes to the actually-existing viewer who exists in a similar relation of tension to them as the character does. The struggle that Macer undergoes–both as a woman and as a bourgeois legalist–is more than play: a pure aesthetic phenomenon. It is our own story as a bourgeois civilization striving towards gender equality. The inclusion of this uncanny reality in an action movie–a realm in which we do not expect to find ourselves but rather to be entertained by a fantastical diversion–creates an intensity that no pure play ever could. In that sense, Sicario exhibits Schmitt’s theory by showing how the intrusion of time can serve as a source of vitality and greatness in art.
The gender issue to which I alluded earlier is a good example of this. We can imagine a stodgy formalist film critic complaining that Macer is an unrealistic and distracting injection of female empowerment into a story that was meant to focus on masculine warriors struggling to the death. Perhaps our hypothetical reactionary might even call Macer a “girlboss” and invoke the specter of “wokeness” as an explanation for the undesirable diversion. One way of responding to this argument would be to defend the character on formalist grounds: we could say she is an interesting character in her own right and does not detract from the other characters’ more traditional masculine developmnent schemes.
But a response in the spririt of Hamlet or Hecuba would want to say that something even more than this is going on. Consider how Macer relates to the other men in the story. On the one hand, there is her partner, a J.D.-holding fellow FBI agent who shares Macer’s commitment to the rule of law. Although Macer agrees with his legalistic impulses, she usually ignores his advice and dismisses his concerns. There is even a moment in which she undresses in front of him but brushes off his flirtatious advances. She clearly does not respect him very much professionally or romantically.
On the other hand, Macer finds the world of cartel killers and their CIA SOC adversaries morally appalling, but there is also a degree of fascination she has towards these men. She rejects many opportunties to end her ties with the CIA operation of which she becomes a part and openly states her curiosity and drive to understand the meaning of what they are doing. She is easily seduced by a cartel operative, in sharp contrast to her lack of interest in her FBI partner.
Again, it is possible to justify these character developments on purely formalist grounds: perhaps they are just an interesting part of the story. But part of what merits the inclusion of these elements in the film is the fact that they are connected to the actually-existing community of the artist and his viewers. Macer’s ambivalent attitude to the violent amoral masculinity of the CIA and cartels is not just a good story about a character’s psychology; it is our story. Americans would overwhemingly agree that governemnt kill squads should not be allowed to run around shooting whomever they want, nor would many of them sympathize with violent organized crime groups that sell drugs, but this moral rejection does not prevent this world from having a certain allure. We implicitly admit this feeling when we go to watch action movies which portray a more morally-unconstrained and violent world than the everyday bourgeois life that sometimes bores us.
Macer’s attitudes, and the relation they have to her femininity, are certainly formally justifiable as interesting story elements. But they also have what Schmitt would call a kind of “surplus value” insofar as remind us that the story we are seeing contains themes that our society must and does confront as concrete historical phenomena. All I am trying to say is that Macer’s character functions in a similar way to Shakespeare’s historical imperative to avoid the question Gertrude’s guilt: it constitutes a wonderful example of Schmitt’s argument that the intrusion of time can be an asset to an effective artist. It seems clear to me that Sicario would be a lot weaker without the inclusion of Macer and her connection to the bourgeois and feminist world of the film’s viewers. I find it amazing and mysterious that Sicario is a great illustration of both Schmitt’s legal and aesthetic philosophy.
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Although comparative exegesis is not my aim in this post, I would be remiss not to point out how similar Schmitt sounds here to Heidegger in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” There, one of Heidegger’s key arguments is that an enduring work of art “does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth…into the Open of the work’s world.” If we are willing to make my metaphorical leap of considering historical particularity to be a kind of raw material, then a work which allows its historical particularity to make up an important part of its meaning meets Heidegger’s definition. At the very least, Heidegger’s insistence that a work of art addresses itself to a “world”—an actually existing communal public sphere—is in the same vein as Schmitt’s critique of the traditional German aesthetic attitude. ↩