I was recently reminded of the movie “Collateral” starring Tom Cruise (as Vince) and Jamie Foxx (as Max) that was released in 2004 AD.
Max is a bit of an underachiever in that while he has big dreams he just cannot seem to realize his plans. Thus, he has been a taxicab driver for 12 years whilst telling himself, and others, that it was really a temporary gig that will allow him to save up enough money to launch a limousine service.One fateful night Vincent enters his taxi and away they go. Upon reaching the location Vincent asks Max to wait a moment while he takes care of some business. It quickly becomes clear that Vincent is a hired hand who has flown into the city in order to murder five people who were due to testify as witnesses in a case involving an offshore narco-trafficking cartel.Needless to say, the movie may be too violent for some tastes. Yet, what interested me about it, and the reason that I am mentioning it here, is that the movie revolved around worldviews. Obviously, being a hit-man, Vincent has a very dismal worldview and this is actually his ultimate downfall. In one particular scene Max and Vincent are in the taxi together and Max is expressing shock at Vincent’s profession. It is nighttime and they are driving overlooking a typical big cityscape: the darkness of night bespeckled by various light from buildings, houses, streetlamps, etc.
Let us, in part, follow the transcript (the notes in the transcript are about as fascinating as the dialogue, I have italicized these and also put “—” between superfluous dialogue):
VINCENT: _blood, bodily fluid and death get to you? Try deep breathing. Or remember, we all die anyway_MAX: You had to kill Fanning?!VINCENT: (blass&#a9;) Who’s Fanning?MAX: That cop! Why’d you have to do that? You couldn’t wound him? The guy had a family, maybe parents, kids who gotta grow up without a dad, he was a good guy, and he believed me_VINCENT: I shoulda saved him ’cause he believed you_?MAX: No, not just that.—MAX: Whyn’t you kill me and find another cab.VINCENT: ‘Cause you’re good. (shrugs) We’re in this together. You know_fates intertwined. Cosmic coincidence. All that crap_—MAX: What’d they do?VINCENT: How do I know? But, they all got that ‘witness for the prosecution’ look to me. It’s probably some major federal indictment against somebody who majorly does not want to get indicted_ I dunno.MAX: That’s the reason?VINCENT: That’s the ‘why.’ There is no reason. No good reason; no bad reason. To live or to die.MAX: Then what are you?VINCENT: (looks up) _indifferent.
Vincent hesitates, then [looks] back out the window_
VINCENT: (CONT’D) Get with it. Get over it. _millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars and a speck on one in a blink…that’s us. Lost in space. The universe don’t care (about you). The cop, you, me? Who notices?—
MAX: _’Cause you are low, my brother, way low_ and some standard parts that are supposed to be there? _with you, aren’t. So what happened to you, man? What happened to you?VINCENT: _all the cabbies in LA, I get Max, Sigmund Freud meets Dr. Ruth…—VINCENT: _And one night you’ll wake up and discover it all flipped on you. Suddenly you’re old. And it didn’t happen. And it never will. ‘Cause you were never going to do it, anyway. The dream on the horizon becameyesterday and got lost. Then you’ll bull**** yourself, it could never have been, anyway. And you’ll recede it into memory_and zone out in a Barcalounger with daytime TV on for the rest of your life_Don’t talk to me about killing. You’re do-in’ yourself. In this yellow-and-orange prison. Bit by bit. Every day.
EXTREMELY CLOSE: Max is soaking up every word.
VINCENT: (CONT’D) All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln Town Car. What the hell are you still doing in a cab?
The needle on the speedometer is creeping past forty_
MAX: ‘Cause I never straightened-up and looked at it, you know_?VINCENT: Slow down.MAX: (ignoring him) _myself, I should have. My brothers did_ Tried to gamble my way out from under.(That was) Another born-to-lose deal! Then, ‘it’s gotta be perfect to go!’ You know? Risk all torqued-down.
Needle pushing sixty…
MAX: (CONT’D) But you know what? It doesn’t matter. What’s it matter, anyway? ‘Cause we are_insignificant out here in this big-*** nowhere. Twilight Zone ****. Says the badass sociopath in my backseat. So that’s one thing I got to thank you for, bro_ Until now, I never saw it that way_
The cab goes blasting through an intersection on a red light. A LOS ANGELES TIMES DELIVERY TRUCK SLAM ON ITS BRAKES as Max swerves, barely avoiding a collision.
VINCENT: That was a red light!
Max glances in the rearview.
MAX: …not until now. So what’s it all matter? It don’t. **** it. Fix it. Nothing to lose. Right?
Vincent’s H+K’s aimed at Max’s head. Max almost laughs.
VINCENT: Slow the hell down!MAX: Why? What are you gonna do? Pull the trigger? Kill us? Go ahead, man! Shoot_my ***.VINCENT: Slow down!MAX: Vincent?
Their eyes meet in the rearview mirror. Vincent is arrested by a look in Max that he’s not seen before. It’s the even, confrontational look of a man with nothing to lose.
MAX: (CONT’D) Go **** yourself.
Max slams on the brakes and cranks the steering wheel hard right… hits a low divider…rear end comes unstuck, rotating over the front right and flipping the cab into a violent roll onto its roof, spinning down the street, SMASHING off other cars, pieces falling off, spewing glass_ _and then settling upside-down, revolving slowly to a creaking stop, antifreeze spilling across the pavement. And then everything goes silent, motionless, still. 87A INT. CAB 87A Wreckage. Steam from the ruptured radiator. Crumpled metal. Missing hood. Disintegrated windshield…shattered glass. Max is trapped upside-down in his seatbelt, his roof half caved in, one side of his face streaked with blood. Alive but dazed. Movement in the back. Sharp intake of breath. Then a voice…
—
Max pushes painfully to his feet. Looks around. A surreal moment. Max standing by his overturned cab, the empty city all around him, breathing the cool night air. Alive. It strikes him in that moment. He’s survived the night. The blood pumping through his veins is a fact. It stuns him. Overwhelms him. How good is life? [underlining in original]
Having such a dim view of human life afforded Vincent a certain advantage in his chosen line of work. To him, his victims were mere specks to be discarded at will and to his benefit. Vincent’s worldview gained him power over his victims because they cherished their lives and sought to protect them but he had power over them because to him their lives equaled a paycheck.This is one of the ways in which atheism not only does nothing about evil and is not only impotent against evil but actually makes evil worse. In an absolutely materialistic universe a person such as Vincent commits evil acts, beneficially enjoys the fruits of his labor and as long as he manages to evade the judicial systems of this world he will eventually die and be annihilated having suffered no consequences whatsoever.Once Max granted Vincent his worldview and incorporated it into his thinking Vincent lost his power over Max and now Max became a danger to Vincent since now Max did not care if he, himself, died while seeking to discard Vincent. Vincent could have no power over a person who does not value life.Vincent made the statement about the “millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars and a speck on one in a blink_that’s us” while looking out of the window at the darkness of night bespeckled by the various lights. This was meant as juxtaposition: the darkness of night was the darkness of the vast universe and the lights were the galaxies and their stars. This got me thinking about looking over a cityscape at nigh and who would notice if one of the thousands of lights went out, who indeed? Well, the person who noticed would be the person who is responsible for that light, the person whose way is lit by that light, the person who felt a little safer at night knowing that their home was lit up, the person whose job it is to ensure functioning lights that produced safer roadways, et al.I was reminded of Dan Barker by the statement, “Lost in space. The universe don’t care (about you). The cop, you, me? Who notices?” which is virtually a word for word description of Mr. Barker’s worldview as expressed in his debate with Paul Manata, “There is no moral interpreter in the cosmos, nothing cares and nobody cares.” He refers to Jesus as “a moral monster” and makes a point to the effect that what happens to us or a vegetable ultimately does not matter and he states, “_what happens to me or a piece of broccoli, it won’t the Sun is going to explode, we’re all gonna be gone. No one’s gonna care.” His ultimate point here was that we should care in the here and now because that is all we have. However, this is obviously atheism’s consoling delusion about a subjective purpose to life in what is ultimately an objectively purposeless universe.
Everett Dean Martin makes the very same point, in virtually the same words:
“At the end of all our striving and efforts sees our world a frozen clod whirling through emptiness about a cheerless and exhausted sun, bearing on its sides the marks of man’s once hopeful activity, fragments of his works of art mixed with glacial debris, all waiting in the dark for millenniums until the final crash comes, when even the burned out sun shall be shattered in collision with another like it, and the story shall be over while there is no one to remember and none to care. All will be as if it had never been.”
The movie certainly does not describe Vincent as an atheist. Yet, it seems like a valid inference, in which case he does not have to make excuses for his action such as a theist may make to the likes of “God told me to become a hit-man.” He merely took whatever step he chose based on his assessment of life in an absolutely materialistic universe. He functioned as a bio-organism surviving as the fittest over other bio-organisms until an even fitter one put his lights out.
In fact, athe”ism” has nothing to say to a Vincent being a hit-man. To what then is he to turn in order to forego malevolence? In this case, in the end, he met someone who survived as the fittest and simply did away with him-the strongest won. Individual atheists have certainly concocted various subjective systems of morality but they could not ultimately and absolutely condemn Vincent’s actions. Impotent arguments from outrage are all that atheism has to offer in the face of evil.