[Quick Summary: During a court martial, a French colonel defends his regiment over refusing to shoot at fellow French officers in a suicide mission that was ordered by a General.]
Every villain doesn't think he's a villain. He thinks he's justified for what he's done.
This script does a great job of exploring how a villain thinks, and ends in a great summation speech at the end (below).
In this scene:
- Gen. Rousseau called for the suicide mission.
- Col. Dax is a lawyer who was drafted into the war.
- The "guilty" regiment was ordered to choose a few soldiers to be punished for the whole regiment. They were to be shot with a firing squad.
- After the soldiers were absolved, Rousseau and Dax walk together.
- Note how Rousseau's musings show that he's thoughtful, but not particularly moral. He rationalizes away what he has done.
EXT. VARIOUS ANGLES - PARADE GROUND
...They walk along in a friendly silence.
GEN. ROUSSEAU (expansively): Which one of us was on the side of the angels, I wonder.
COL. DAX: I'm not sure I follow you, sir.
GEN. ROUSSEAU: Well, take, for instance, the case of the early Christians. What was it, perhaps more than anything else, that strengthened and solidified them? -- persecution, wouldn't you say? The cruelest kind of injustice. Tyranny gave birth to the Manga Carta. Callousness and indifference to human welfare brought about the French Republic. And so on through History. It may be that progress comes really through a kind of challenge. And who is to say that if those men had been shot today, that it wouldn't have been a step towards the end of a certain kind of despotism in the army?
COL. DAX: General, you have a very strange theory there. I am not at all sure that I agree with you.
GEN. ROUSSEAU: I'm not at all sure I agree with myself. You know, perhaps when they say man is a rational animal, what they really mean is that he has a limitless ability to rationalize, to make excuses for himself, to feel self-righteous no matter what he does. I don't know why I'm rambling on like this. Probably because there's nothing left for me to do but talk. You know, Colonel, I am undoubtedly a very wicked man - but I don't feel wicked inside. Though, I suppose that's a prerequisite for being labeled truly wicked.
WHAT I'VE LEARNED: I thought these last two lines were particularly chilling because Rousseau is rational yet has lost a moral center.
The Paths of Glory (1957)(undated draft)
by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson
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