Gilmore: Crimes and Misdemeanors 1

Gilmore’s essay is challenging and certainly more complicated than Conard’s reading of Crimes
and Misdemeanors. In reality, though, it’s actually not too bad and is manageable once you
realize that you don’t have to pay too close attention to all the philosophical context in order to
get something out of the essay. Gilmore probably draws on too many philosophical figures
you’re not familiar with in his discussion of Crimes and Misdemeanors (Danto, Nietzsche,
Dewey, Plato and Aristotle).

For our purposes, let’s stay focused on one of the issues we touched on in class on Wednesday:
what happens to ethics and values and meaning in the absence of God? If God is dead, is
everything permitted? This is how Dostoevsky poses the issue:

Rakitin now—he doesn't like God, doesn't like Him at all. To people like him, God is a
sore spot. But they hide it, they lie, they pretend. 'Will you,' I asked him, 'try to develop
these ideas in your literary criticism?' 'They won't let me do it too openly,' he said, and
laughed. 'But tell me,' I asked him, 'what will happen to men? If there's no God and no
life beyond the grave, doesn't that mean that men will be allowed to do whatever they
want?' 'Didn't you know that already?' he said and laughed again. 'An intelligent man can
do anything he likes as long as he's clever enough to get away with it. But you, you got
caught after you killed, so today you have to rot in prison.' He's real swine to say that to
my face; a few months ago I used to throw people like that out of the window. But now I
just sit and listen to him. (Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov 1983 translation
by Andrew R. MacAndrew, p. 788)

Conard poses the question of how we find meaning and significance in an indifferent universe.
I’d like us to think about several different ways of interpreting Allen’s film. Recall that Conard
considers several different ways of “seeing” the movie:
• Mary Nichols: the Levy voiceover at the end of the film articulates a middle ground
between Ben’s pious blindness to reality and Aunt May’s nihilism (pp. 120 – 121).
• Sander Lee (who Gilman also considers): Lee takes Crimes and Misdemeanors to be
optimistic.
• Conard’s view: Recall that we reconstructed Conard’s argument in support of this claim
in class. Conard argues that the film endorses Aunt May’s position: God doesn’t exist and
there is no moral structure to the universe and no inherent meaning to life. The film has
an essentially pessimistic message, Conard argues, and optimism is not warranted.

Conard rejects the view of Sander Lee that the film’s ending, with its voiceover by Louis Levy,
is optimistic. Interestingly, Gilmore agrees with Conard on this point. He too rejects Lee’s
interpretation of the film. On pages 90 - 91 he rejects what he takes to be Lee’s account of the
unambiguous moral lesson of the film. But while Gilmore agrees with Conard’s critique of Lee,
does he agree with Conard’s claim that the film is essentially pessimistic?
Gilmore: Crimes and Misdemeanors 2

Gilmore agrees with Conard that the film is about morality and the meaning of life. He points out
the connection to Plato’s account of the Ring of Gyges: how genuine is any person’s
commitment to justice (think of Judah here, page 86 in Gilmore’s text)? Do humans naturally
tend to justice or injustice? Would the Ring of Gyges be of any interest to the truly virtuous
person? Is there anything inherently desirable in the good? And like Conard, Gilmore recognizes
the importance of visual metaphors in the film (seeing and being seen, sight as a stand-in for
knowledge).

But Gilmore is interested in an issue that Conard does not touch on: the nature of art and
aesthetic experience and he wonders about the role of the aesthetic in giving meaning to one’s
life. Here we might wonder, how can we use art to justify our lives? How does art serve to give
meaning to our lives? The important passages here come on pages 87 [bottom paragraph] – 90.
Pay closer attention to those pages. I think the metaphor of the mirror (art as a transfiguring
mirror) is really interesting here. We have talked about how we might see reflections of
ourselves in the movies and Gilmore suggests that one way we might work to give meaning to
our lives is by turning our lives into a story or narrative and finding possible narratives for our
lives in the movies. Recall how Cliff spends his afternoons watching old movies and how these
movies inform the story of Crimes and Misdemeanors—film narratives help to give structure and
meaning to our lives. So rather than looking for meaning and value in God (some metaphysical
hypothesis) perhaps we should look for meaning and value in the stories we tell, or the movies
we watch. Gilmore suggests that “the good…is just the imaginative process, the narrativizing
process that explores the varieties of ways of being and thinking that are available to us.”

What do you think this suggests as far as Gilmore’s understanding of the ending of the film?
Does he agree with Conard that the film is essentially pessimistic? Consider the contrasts
between the interpretations of the film offered by Sander Lee, Conard, and Gilmore. We might
wonder who gets it right, if there is a right to be had.

As I mentioned earlier, don’t worry too much about trying to figure out Nietzsche or Dewey or
Danto. Focus on how Gilmore treats the film and how he is trying to address the issue of how we
generate meaning and value in our lives.