Morality in Sling Blade

Does Sling Blade have a moral vision? Should art be moral?

For this blog I decided to re-watch Sling Blade, a movie I really liked the first time I saw it. Here's the premise for those who don't know: Karl is a mentally disabled man in a mental hospital. He gets out and meets a kid named Frank, who more or less adopts him. So he basically lives with Frank and Frank's mom, who has an abusive boyfriend. The climax of the film comes when Karl kills Doyle (the boyfriend). There is another important scene connecting to morality as well.

At one point in the movie Karl goes to visit his father. We learn that when he was around seven or eight, Karl's parents wanted him to murder their child because it was premature and unwanted in the first place. Karl begins to suffocate him, but instead buries him in a shoe box (all told, not shown). Where do ethics come into this, and how? Well, you have to consider a couple of things. Should Karl have killed the child? Can we blame him for what he did? He was young, he was essentially brainwashed by his parents, and he's already severely mentally disabled. Does that change anything about how we view him? He then says he wants to kill his father, who is basically a hermit at this point, but that it isn't worth it. What does that mean? I took it to mean that Karl judges situations and makes moral judgments by considering how he can end suffering, whether of himself or of others. The viewer is left to ponder this dilemma and Karl's personality only briefly, and the real moral centerpiece comes a bit later.

Then there's the climax, where Karl kills Doyle. Does he have the right to take action and do such a thing (he thought that something very bad would happen to these people that he grew to love)? Does his upbringing affect how we feel about him? I would love to tell you what Billy Bob Thornton (the director) believes, but he doesn't really tell us. The film gives us a situation, everything unfolds in a straightforward, easy to follow manner, and the film ends. There's little pondering or questioning. There's no line or scene where an overarching moral vision is presented. Everything is instead left to the viewer to decide where they stand. And where a viewer stands will depend on their position on the Absolutism-Relativism continuum. As a relativist, you would believe that how he was raised and the circumstances surrounding his life would excuse Karl from any moral wrongdoing, while an absolutist would believe that killing is wrong. Where do you stand? That's what you must decide. Karl has an absolute moral code--do what ends the most suffering. It is ironic because he is portrayed as extremely religious. This subtly changes how we may view him, but at the end of the day it comes down to relativism and whether or not it exists. Sling Blade is moral (see definition below), but "vision" seems to imply a clear message.

This segues nicely into the second question: should art be moral? I think it should be. Without having learned too much in ToK or having too much background knowledge is where I'm coming from when I say so. I will define moral as having a message or lesson. You can have a piece of art like Sling Blade where the consumer makes a moral judgement themselves, or you can have something like the Bible, where absolute truths are presented. Either way, there is something to be learned. I think that this is what makes art--we need to learn something about something in some way, or else there's no point.

To summarize: Sling Blade does not have an overarching moral vision. Instead it leaves a situation for the viewer to see and judge how they see fit. What the reader thinks will depend on whether or not they believe in ethical relativism. Art should be moral, and it can be moral in many ways.