The Last Supper, by Dan Rosen, supposedly dares to take on deep subjectsin a vein of sarcastic humor. But, what it says is that liberals, because oftheir belief, have the right to pass death sentences on opponents. The story wasamusing at times and there was some comedy in the film, but it didn’t really goanywhere. The most famous actor in the film was Mark Harmon, and they showedhim for about one minute, before he got killed.
The movie takes place in Ames, Iowa. The film is about five liberalgraduate students living together, (three males and two females) that enjoyinviting different guest over every Sunday for dinner. The students indulgetheir sense of superiority by inviting those that they regard as being lessenlightened. They enjoy having different types of discussions dealing with alldifferent types of topics. Their first guest that we see, ends up being atrucker who gives one of the five students a lift home because his car brokedown. They invite the trucker in to eat, because they had an extra seat at thetable and their originally invited guest could not make it for dinner.
Thetrucker ends up being an anti-Semite and he is also an ex-marine. Immediatelyafter the trucker sits down at the table to eat he starts pointing out to thefive students that he hates Jews and that they always try to bargain downanything that they buy. All five of the students are stunned by the remarksthat the trucker is making, especially one of the students that is Jewish. Theyall 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 allshocked by this and they immediately attempt to calm the trucker down. Hereleases the Jewish student and then breaks an arm of another student who wastrying to free the Jewish student. The Jewish student picks up a butcher’sknife and stabs the trucker in the back, which eventually kills the trucker. Atthis point the movie picks up a little. They all begin to contemplate aboutwhat 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. Theyall 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 fromnow on they would poison their guest depending on whether they thought that theguest was harmful to society. Their next guest was a Priest, who really thought that the gay movementwas wrong. The priest believed that being a homosexual was really a disease andthat AIDS was the cure for this disease.
They quickly poured him a glass ofpoisonous wine and he was killed soon afterwards. It became sort of a gamebecause the guests wouldn’t even make it to the salad before dying. In totalthey had killed about eleven people including a seventeen-year old girl who wasagainst the distribution of condoms and the teaching of sex education in highschool. I think that at this point they all have realized that everything hasreally gotten out of control.
The director seems to miss out on a few flaws that I observed whilewatching 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 sceneafter that you see the student using a rifle and playing a game called skeetshooting. That is where a disk is thrown into the air and the person with therifle attempts to shoot it down. In that particular scene he doesn’t have acast on his arm. Two scenes later you see the same student playing a game ofskeet shooting again and all of a sudden he has the cast on his arm and he isfiring the gun just fine. Did the director forget to observe that scene? Iguess it was such a low budget film that they could not afford to hire someprofessional 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. Lateron in the movie the bushes had tomatoes growing from them. These tomatoessymbolized the blood of the people that the students had killed. These tomatoeswere extremely large, red and they were very sweet. This goes to show that thepeople that they had killed had so much hatred in them that they were blockingall the good they had to offer. Once they were dead there wasn’t any hatredleft and these tomatoes symbolize all the good within these people that wasstuck inside of them for so many years. It is also very interesting to pointout 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 thatis the trucker. Worst, meaning that it seemed as though he was filled with themost hatred towards society. The killings there afterwards were pretty muchpointless because a person shouldn’t be killed for something that he/shebelieves in. All of the people that died had a belief in something and thereare many different ways of changing somebody’s ideas without having to kill them.
The director has a problem: her narrative style remains conventional andunsurprising even as her story seeks to outrage. The film’s wide-angle dinnerscenes repeat one another without escalating much, and what leads up to them isof far less interest. Through viewing this movie you can determine that these five liberalstudents 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 fivestudents were thinking.
For example, he raises the point of a person who putsanother in power “is ruined himself: for that power is produced by him eitherthrough craft or force; and both of these are suspected by the one who has beenraised to power.” Note that he does not say that it only happens sometimes, butevery time. He states it without making excuses for that kind of action but putsthe 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 lettingany of the people killed, to have power in society.
The group mantra is a party-game moral dilemma: If you had met Hitler in1909, and knew what he was going to do, wouldn’t you poison him? The mantraflops 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 groupknows 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 alittle bit better, the director later lets us know that the truck driver was achild rapist and a murderer. These students are supposed to be ultra-rational.
Well, perhaps we are being shown the dangers of ultra-rationality and theability of not being able to control oneself. Finally, they then invite aconservative TV talker, who turns the tables on them. While they are eatingdinner 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 allloo k at her as if she has gone crazy. They all excuse themselves from thetable and leave the TV talker alone in the room. When they return he hasalready poured everybody some wine and proposes a toast. The five liberalstudents drink and they all die.
Nicola Machiavelli had a very interesting theory about his belief inhaving power, “By any means necessary.” That is exactly what these liberalstudents did in order for them to have happiness.I think that in society mostof us try to follow the Machiavellian theory on trying to do anything andeverything possible in order for ourselves to survive.
Machiavelli hoped that,”by helping the Prince rule more effectively, he might help Italy achieve thegreatness he hoped for.” Machiavelli believed that he didn’t need to beappointed 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 adanger 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 wouldhave nothing but chaos. I think that this film probably would have made moremoney as a b ook and not a film.
References
- Nicola Machiavelli information was located on the Internet athttp://rhf.bradley.edu/liberty/mach.html.
