Synopsis of the movie
The capo of a Chicago mob, in need of new hit man, sends a young potential hit man (Tony Greco) to California to be trained by a master assassin (Steve Rosellini).
Rosellini (a.k.a., “the Rose”) is portrayed as “California-cool.” He lives in a beach house of Japanese decor, believes in reincarnation, spouts Zen Buddhist quips, eats veggie burgers, advocates recycling, and, of course, respects and quotes Nietzsche. The training guide Rosellini hands to Tony is Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. During the movie we also see Tony having to thumb through other books by Nietzsche, such as The Portable Nietzsche with its distinguishing purple cover.
As part of his training Tony must kill an innocent victim picked at random from the telephone book: Angelica (Angel) Chaste. A mortician who works the graveyard shift at a mortuary, Angel is, to say the least, a “strange women.” She is intelligent and very resourceful. Coincidentally, she is also acquainted with Nietzsche’s books.
Angel’s resourcefulness and strangeness bode ill for Tony. After Tony bungles his first attempt to kill Angel, she becomes proactive. She changes her appearance, buys a gun and personal body armor, learns to shoot with accuracy, and even makes an attempt to shoot Tony and Steve. As the film progresses we see Tony losing his motivation to kill Angel and in general his desire to be a hit man, while we see Angel assuming the coolness and skills of a professional killer. After killing four of the men who set out to kill her and also killing Tony, who tires to intervene on her behalf and confesses his love for her, Angel teams up with Rosellini and performs the assassination desired by the capo of a wayward accountant turned states evidence. The movie ends with Angel and Rosellini riding off in his sports car and a famous line from the movie Zorba the Greek, another cultural classic: “what is life if not the dance.”
Philosophical background
Students should have a prior acquaintance with some of the basic notions of Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as the will to power, nihilism, the cultural critique of Europe, the “ubermench” (overman or superman), and the eternal recurrence.
A good source is Halley Sanchez, Cuatro Enfoques de la Etica: Apuntes para una Introducción a la Etica, but since this book was written in Spanish to aid the understanding of students whose native language is Spanish and since it has not yet been translated into English, the non-Spanish speaking student will have to use some other source. There are many books available on Nietzsche, some of which can be considered introductory. Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is an old classic. Historians of philosophy, such as Frederick Copleston also have chapters on Nietzsche (see Vol. 7, Part II).
Contemporary students who unfortunately are more inclined to surfing the internet than to reading books may also access the internet where overviews are available, such as in wikipedia. There are many specialized books on Nietzsche, some of which are esoteric, such as those written by so-called “postmodernists” (e.g., Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy), but it is recommended that students leave the reading of such books until they have a basic acquaintance with Nietzsche.
