The Lily, The Sword and Jonathan Rhys Meyers
The film ‘Disquiet’ presents the most important choice you can make
This vale of tears contains few enough pleasures, but one is discovering so-called high culture in so-called low culture. Surfing Netflix one night and despairing of finding anything worth my time, I stumbled on the film Disquiet (2023). It certainly didn’t look like it was worth my time, but it starred Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and he’s a fav, so I pressed play and hoped for something edifying. As it turns out, the film delivers a simple but powerful ethical message.
After a car accident, JRM wakes up in a hospital. All is dark and no one is around except an old guy asleep in the next bed, so JRM rips out his IV and heads for the hall . . . only to fall victim to a vicious attack by the old guy. It’s a hell of a fight that spills into the hallway and doesn’t end until JRM sticks a scalpel in the old guy’s neck. The next moment, however, the old guy is back in bed sound asleep. What the hell? So begins two hours of insanity involving berserk patients, malevolent hospital staff, sexy nurses, and monsters. It isn’t half as entertaining as the Silent Hill video games and films that are surely its inspiration, but it’s twice as clear in making its point: have courage.
Courage, since ancient times, has been one of a tetrad of prominent virtues. Greek philosopher Plato names valiance — with wisdom, justice and temperance — as qualities of the perfect state in the Socratic dialogue The Republic and explores it in depth in Laches.¹ While the exact words used and their connotations may differ by context, the basic ideas have remained central to discourse about virtue throughout Western history. Aristotle addresses them in The Nicomachean Ethics, as have the Stoics from ancient Greece and Rome up to the present day. Ryan Holiday of The Daily Stoic mentions them regularly and has written an entire book devoted to courage.
Many people are familiar with these four virtues as the cardinal virtues of Catholic theology. The Vatican designates them prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. These have a grounding in the ancient world via scripture: the Bible, Deuterocanon and Apocrypha.² Catholicism has no crowning virtue, but for 20th-century German-American existentialist philosopher and Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich, courage was the foundational virtue, because it defines our most basic disposition. Do we face life’s challenges or shrink away? Do we or do we not embrace the world in spite of everything?
Courage is, as Tillich writes in The Courage to Be (1952), far more than a quality behind right action:
“Courage is an ethical reality, but it is rooted in the whole breadth of human existence and ultimately in the structure of being itself.”
Medieval and Renaissance Christian symbolism represented the precarious state of the human soul as a dichotomy between the lily and the sword. In a woodcut circa 1500 to 1534, we see Christ with a sword sticking out of one ear, a lily vine sticking out of the other. The same imagery appears in the center portion of an earlier triptych by Flemish painter Hans Memling titled Das Jüngste Gericht (The Last Judgment). The lily represents the Lord’s mercy, the sword his judgment — a choice between redemption and paradise on one hand and damnation and Hell on the other,³ but you don’t have to be Christian to see faith (in something, not necessarily a god) over despair as more conducive to well-being.
JRM confronts this choice in Disquiet. Stop reading here if ***spoilers*** bother you, because it turns out that two of the people with whom he’s been running around the hospital are actually mysterious beings in disguise. They function like the angel and devil in old cartoons, each trying to influence the soul’s progression. The good one tries to influence the people who wake up in the hospital to choose hope and life despite adversity. The patients who affirm life survive their near-death experiences in the real world and return to their lives amongst the living. The bad spirit tries to make the patients choose desperation and death. The way JRM wields IV stands and bedpans, it’s clear he has courage, but can he keep it to the end?
As far as the art form goes, Disquiet isn’t destined for even a footnote in film history, but there’s plenty worse out there. It has hot zombie(-ish) nurses, and, as if that wasn’t enough, it has an unexpected dose of ethical heft, more to say than many a movie more superficially cerebral. Next time you have a movie night but can’t commit to anything, remember Disquiet, press play, and dig in with courage.
References:
[1] Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1 (Random House, 1892), 55, 690.
[2] “Cardinal virtues,” Wikimedia Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_virtues
[3] Horvat, Marian T., “The Lily & Sword in the Last Judgment,” Tradition in Action: https://traditioninaction.org/religious/f033_Lily.htm
