The Last Supper
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 look 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 book and not a film.
Nicola Machiavelli information was located on the Internet at
http://rhf.bradley.edu/~liberty/mach.html.
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