The Kiddy Pool: Finishing School, Oceans 11, and Cheering for the Unethical

Every Tuesday in The Kiddy Pool, Erin Newcomb confronts one of many issues that parents must deal with related to popular culture.

My husband and I just finished re-watching Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s 12, and Ocean’s 13; he loves the logistics of heist movies and I dislike violence, so the film series’ focus on comedy and ensemble cast works well for the two of us. Don’t worry—my husband’s interest in heists is purely intellectual, not professional. The strength of the films comes down to the characters, the ways that each member of the group requires the relationships with the others to really shine. It’s the group dynamics and the evident love between the characters that makes their criminal activity seem excusable, if not endearing.

Indeed the contrast between their deviant activities works, in part, because they adhere so strictly to codes of manners and loyal friendships. Even as criminals (and this too, has a lot to do with the limited violence in the movies), they are likable characters. What happens, then, in the films, is a kind of ranking system of criminals and criminal behavior where viewers are asked to accept as ethical, or at least to ignore the questionable ethics, of theft, fraud, property destruction, etc., because the villain somehow deserves it. This theme is best summed up by “the code” in Ocean’s 13 between those who “shook Sinatra’s hand.”

My thoughts about these heist movies dovetails nicely with my current reading—Gail Carriger’s Finishing School Series—a set of YA steampunk stories about a girls’ school of espionage. Like the characters in the Ocean trilogy, protagonist Sophronia Temminnick and her friends are rather likable, in part because of the loyalty, creativity, and gumption they show in breaking the law. Like the heist movies, the context of the stories establishes good grounds for their spying and subterfuge within a political climate rife with conspiracies and rival factions. Among Sophronia’s friends, several of them struggle with not being wicked or devious enough for their educational institution. Yet, when Sophronia achieves one of her missions in Curtsies and Conspiracies, she feels “riddled with guilt” and admits “I ruined one man and by doing so nearly killed another, all so you could go to school. You had better earn the sacrifice.” Even good intentions in the criminal world come with casualties.

These examples are, of course, extreme ethical contexts, set up in fictional worlds where audiences suspend our understandings of the world in order to explore an alternative vision; that is the very premise of steampunk with regard to history. These stories can be entertaining partially because the conflicts characters face so radically differs from our own world, where villains are not always so easy to identify or defeat. Despite the backdrop of crime and the suspense about characters’ motives and affiliations, in the worlds of fiction, we either know whom to like or we know there aren’t high stakes for getting it wrong.

Reality is not usually so forgiving, which explains the appeal of escapism in literary worlds that radically reimagine our own. And while I am not by any means a moral relativist, it’s hard to escape the fact that ethics exist in context in the real world too, yet the line between criminals or between deviant and not get a bit hazy. Even murder, which most cultures agree is unethical, takes on shades of meaning in conscience as well as law when we account for self-defense, premeditation, and acts of war. Some of these behaviors can be excused or justified, and we ask judges and juries to deliberate on the severity of ethical breaches across a spectrum of right and wrong.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard addresses this issue with regard to God in his concept of “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Using the example of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard explains that we must accept that Abraham, because of his intention, is a murderer, or we must understand that God’s intervention in the act of murder is also an intervention into the system of ethics itself. Kierkegaard sees “the ethical is the universal and as such, in turn, the divine.” Like the authors and producers of heist and spy stories, who can choose to disrupt our vision of the world through sympathetic criminal characters, so too can God disrupt our understanding of ethics.

Abraham must position himself as a criminal in order to obey God, yet God stays Abraham’s hand, foreshadowing the Christ and demonstrating that all ethics, ultimately, return back to God. The heist movies suspend ethics where theft is acceptable but breaking the thieves’ code is dishonorable. In the spy stories, there are multiple ethical contexts to consider among the factions, all of them self-interested and proud of their deviousness. But while we can playfully suspend our sense of right and wrong for the sake of exploring a fictional world, ethics in reality must always look to God. And our forays into fiction and faith can disrupt the ways that we construct right and wrong, asking us to obey God even when, or especially when, His words conflict with our cultures.