Essay/Term paper: Movie: the last supper

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Philosophy

Movie: The Last Supper


Directed by Stacy Title

The Last Supper, by Dan Rosen, supposedly dares to take on deep subjects
in a vein of sarcastic humor. But, what it says is that liberals, because of
their belief, have the right to pass death sentences on opponents. The story was
amusing at times and there was some comedy in the film, but it didn't really go
anywhere. The most famous actor in the film was Mark Harmon, and they showed
him for about one minute, before he got killed.
The movie takes place in Ames, Iowa. The film is about five liberal
graduate students living together, (three males and two females) that enjoy
inviting different guest over every Sunday for dinner. The students indulge
their sense of superiority by inviting those that they regard as being less
enlightened. They enjoy having different types of discussions dealing with all
different types of topics. Their first guest that we see, ends up being a
trucker who gives one of the five students a lift home because his car broke
down. They invite the trucker in to eat, because they had an extra seat at the
table and their originally invited guest could not make it for dinner. The
trucker ends up being an anti-Semite and he is also an ex-marine. Immediately
after the trucker sits down at the table to eat he starts pointing out to the
five students that he hates Jews and that they always try to bargain down
anything that they buy. All five of the students are stunned by the remarks
that the trucker is making, especially one of the students that is Jewish. They
all get into a heated argument and the trucker goes out of control; in addition,
he grabs the Jewish student and puts a knife to his throat. They are all
shocked by this and they immediately attempt to calm the trucker down. He
releases the Jewish student and then breaks an arm of another student who was
trying to free the Jewish student. The Jewish student picks up a butcher's
knife and stabs the trucker in the back, which eventually kills the trucker. At
this point the movie picks up a little. They all begin to contemplate about
what to do with the body. They decide on burying the body in the back yard.
They said it would cause a lot of problems if they contacted the police. They
all agreed at this time that killing the trucker was only good for society.
After they had buried the trucker they all sat down and they decided that from
now on they would poison their guest depending on whether they thought that the
guest was harmful to society.
Their next guest was a Priest, who really thought that the gay movement
was wrong. The priest believed that being a homosexual was really a disease and
that AIDS was the cure for this disease. They quickly poured him a glass of
poisonous wine and he was killed soon afterwards. It became sort of a game
because the guests wouldn't even make it to the salad before dying. In total
they had killed about eleven people including a seventeen-year old girl who was
against the distribution of condoms and the teaching of sex education in high
school. I think that at this point they all have realized that everything has
really gotten out of control.
The director seems to miss out on a few flaws that I observed while
watching the film. When the trucker breaks one of the student's arms,
nonetheless, you see the student with a cast in the following scene. The scene
after that you see the student using a rifle and playing a game called skeet
shooting. That is where a disk is thrown into the air and the person with the
rifle attempts to shoot it down. In that particular scene he doesn't have a
cast on his arm. Two scenes later you see the same student playing a game of
skeet shooting again and all of a sudden he has the cast on his arm and he is
firing the gun just fine. Did the director forget to observe that scene? I
guess it was such a low budget film that they could not afford to hire some
professional editors. The director shows some very symbolic scenes in the movie,
and that is were small bushes begin growing from each grave in the yard. Later
on in the movie the bushes had tomatoes growing from them. These tomatoes
symbolized the blood of the people that the students had killed. These tomatoes
were extremely large, red and they were very sweet. This goes to show that the
people that they had killed had so much hatred in them that they were blocking
all the good they had to offer. Once they were dead there wasn't any hatred
left and these tomatoes symbolize all the good within these people that was
stuck inside of them for so many years. It is also very interesting to point
out how the director chronologically places each death into a certain order.
The first killing in the movie begins with the worst of all the people, and that
is the trucker. Worst, meaning that it seemed as though he was filled with the
most hatred towards society. The killings there afterwards were pretty much
pointless because a person shouldn't be killed for something that he/she
believes in. All of the people that died had a belief in something and there
are many different ways of changing somebody's ideas without having to kill them.
The director has a problem: her narrative style remains conventional and
unsurprising even as her story seeks to outrage. The film's wide-angle dinner
scenes repeat one another without escalating much, and what leads up to them is
of far less interest.
Through viewing this movie you can determine that these five liberal
students were in a way followers of the Machiavellian theory. Nicolo Machiavelli,
was a celebrated political and military theorist, historian, playwright,
diplomat, and military planner. His theory can be related to the way these five
students were thinking. For example, he raises the point of a person who puts
another in power "is ruined himself: for that power is produced by him either
through craft or force; and both of these are suspected by the one who has been
raised to power." Note that he does not say that it only happens sometimes, but
every time. He states it without making excuses for that kind of action but puts
the rule for as fact. The students were thinking, and they concluded that,
through execution these people would never have anything to do with in society.
Figuratively speaking, these students were avoiding anyway possible of letting
any of the people killed, to have power in society.
The group mantra is a party-game moral dilemma: If you had met Hitler in
1909, and knew what he was going to do, wouldn't you poison him? The mantra
flops in two ways. Unlike most such party posers, it has no link with reality:
How could you possible have known what lay ahead of Hitler? Second, this group
knows no such vastly horrible future about any of the people that they killed:
Each is just a soldier in the ranks of rightism. Although, to make us feel a
little bit better, the director later lets us know that the truck driver was a
child rapist and a murderer. These students are supposed to be ultra-rational.
Well, perhaps we are being shown the dangers of ultra-rationality and the
ability of not being able to control oneself. Finally, they then invite a
conservative TV talker, who turns the tables on them. While they are eating
dinner one of the guys decides to pour the TV talker some wine; consequently,
one of the girls grabs the bottle and says that the wine is very old. They all
loo k at her as if she has gone crazy. They all excuse themselves from the
table and leave the TV talker alone in the room. When they return he has
already poured everybody some wine and proposes a toast. The five liberal
students drink and they all die.
Nicola Machiavelli had a very interesting theory about his belief in
having power, "By any means necessary." That is exactly what these liberal
students did in order for them to have happiness. I think that in society most
of us try to follow the Machiavellian theory on trying to do anything and
everything possible in order for ourselves to survive. Machiavelli hoped that,
"by helping the Prince rule more effectively, he might help Italy achieve the
greatness he hoped for." Machiavelli believed that he didn't need to be
appointed leader to run things in Italy back then. These student are the same,
they believed that through killing off these few people that they thought were a
danger to society, that it was going to make a difference in our government.
Maybe it's a good thing that Machiavelli wasn't the actual leader of Italy,
because if these five liberal students were leaders of this country we would
have nothing but chaos. I think that this film probably would have made more
money as a b ook and not a film.

References

Nicola Machiavelli information was located on the Internet at
http://rhf.bradley.edu/~liberty/mach.html.