Was Sophie's Choice the Correct Choice?

Renata Sayão

Block 5 TOK

Ms. Hunt

October 20, 2013

Does the film Sophie’s Choice (1982) have a moral vision? Should art be moral?

            Important Note: This response contains spoilers of this movie. If you’re interested in watching the movie on your own, do not read this response.

For the purposes of this response, I will focus exclusively on the scene where Sophie is forced to choose between her two children. Also, before really analyzing morality, it is crucial to understand the context in which Sophie was when she was forced to make her “choice”. Stingo is the primary narrator in the movie, and a close friend of Sophie’s, yet a large part of the plot is composed of flashbacks and monologues by Sophie, memories of her days in Nazi Germany. She is incarcerated because her husband was involved with the robbery of Gestapo documents. She and her two children are sent to Auschwitz, and while they are in line waiting for the Germans to decide which prisoners will live and die, she begs one of the officers to let them go, justifying that since she was the daughter of a prominent anti-Semite and was a Catholic, she should have preferential treatment over the other prisoners. The officer instead makes her choose one of her two children, a young boy and even younger little girl, to be sent to Children’s Camp while the other would be cremated right there. A panicked Sophie begs to take both children; still the officer pressures her by adding that if she did not choose, both would be executed. In the heat of the moment, she notices there is nothing she can do to save them both and decides to spare her older son and watches as her little daughter is sent to crematorium II.

The moral dilemma here is clear: If she were thinking clearly, what would be the best or less awful option that Sophie could have taken? Looking through the lenses of three different philosophers will shed some light on what would be “morally correct” in this gruesome and heart-wrenching situation: John Stuart Mill would most likely tell Sophie to save one of her children, which would ultimately save a life instead of losing two, Machiavelli would instruct her to let both children go because she should not trust the Nazi Officer in the first place, and still Camus would tell Sophie to do whatever she felt like doing, since there is no right or wrong in any situation. John Stuart Mill, who pioneered the philosophy of “utilitarianism”, believed that the best choice would be the one that would cause most good or most happiness to the person who is making the decision. In Sophie’s case, losing one child might be less traumatizing then surrendering two at the same time. Thus, choosing one child would be the best option. Which child she would choose depends on who she “likes more”, although it is expected that a mother not have a preference for one child over the other. Machiavelli, on the other hand, would advise her to let both children go because he would tell Sophie not to trust the Nazi Officer in the first place; defending that mankind is greedy, fickle, and hypocritical. Thus, by choosing one child over another, she would make herself feel bad for letting one go, but the Nazi Officer could just as easily take the other later anyway. It would be better to not fall into the Officer’s hands and instead let both children go at once instead of prolonging the suffering of losing one and then the other. And finally, radical author and thinker Albert Camus would probably tell Sophie to do whatever she felt like, because there is no meaning to her life nor her children’s lives, and there is no right or wrong choice she could take in this situation, as in any other situation in her life. Thus, he would say that her choice was correct, as any other choice she made would also be correct, a mindset known as the absurd. This is the moral dilemma described in the title and central to the plot of the story and the character of Sophie.

The film, in and of itself, has a clear moral vision: to present and describe experiences like those of the Holocaust survivors, and shock the audience by demonstrating what this situation did to this poor woman. The director tries to demonstrate the aftereffects of this nerve-racking situation by making most of the movie a flashback instead of a movie based in Nazi Germany, and therefore portrays Sophie years later. By doing this, he shows how her life was impacted by this event. First there is a flashback of when Sophie met Nathan: she was weak, reckless, lost in New York City without a purpose for her life. As the story develops, it is revealed that Nathan is mentally ill and abuses of Sophie. The fact that her only relationship is with an emotionally unstable man really shocks the audience; a consequence of the traumatizing events in her life is that she cannot build significant and healthy relationships. In addition, Sophie makes up different versions of why she was taken to Auschwitz, what happened to her father and her mother, of her life before immigrating to America. She is unable to come to terms with the memory of her real life, of the real events in her life, and instead makes different versions for each person she tells her story to. When she does tell the true story to Stingo, Sophie kills herself. This disturbing and depressing ending brings about the moral vision of the director, a revelation about what happens to holocaust survivors or survivors of any torture this extreme. Now there are treatments for Holocaust survivors, especially in the area of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Neuroscience, a technology that was not available in 1982 to be used in the movie, or any time after the war. Instead, it was expected for the survivors to cope with the experiences they were put through individually. All in all, the movie uncovers the effects of torturing someone.

Finally, this leads me to the last part of the question. Art can be moral, but it does not have to be moral. To me, art is a means with which a person uses images, sounds, words, smells, texture, anything that triggers the five senses, to spark a desired emotion. It does not have to be aesthetically pleasing, nor does it have to follow a certain set of rules, and this is because it is so personal and so unique that there should be no laws imposed on art. Film is an art I find particularly exceptional, since it has the ability to put the audience wherever the director wants them to go. Through mirror neurons and other human factors, we are able to be put in any character’s point of view and feel any person’s emotions in a given situation. The sensations, however, do not have to be pleasant or socially approved, they can be taboos or extreme and can provoke strong sensations in the spectator, and that’s what the artist intended therefore it cannot be banned or hidden. Sophie’s Choice is a clear example of the effect that such an art has on the viewers. “Oh that’s such a Sophie’s Choice” is now a common expression used to describe a very difficult dilemma, which to me perfectly exemplifies the impact that such a movie has on it’s viewers. They are put in Sophie’s place, oppressed in a Nazi Germany society in 1939, they are put in Sophie’s place some years later when she recalls these gruesome memories, and they take away from the movie the emotions she felt, her catharsis moment.