The Decalogue is a series of episodes that cover situations in which you should interpret to represent the ten commandments of Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Bible. The first episode of The Decalogue that we watched was to represent the commandment of God being in control of your life and having no other God's that you worship. This episode displays that in that the main character's God that he worshiped was science, logic, and technology. The main character trusts these things so much that they eventually lead to his son's demise after a miscalculation which represents the fact that other Gods don't work. The second episode represents the commandment that you should not kill. The plot is this man who decides to murder a cab driver then gets caught and is put on death row. The true message of this episode is that the state was just as calculated in the killing of the main character as he was in killing the cab driver and the state is not justified in killing him.
The term midrash means focusing on interpretation of legal and homiletical Biblical texts and provides relevant meaning to the scriptures to people (Redick). The visual medium of film explains midrash in a very unique way in that it makes the Biblical issues very relevant because they pop in up in situations that we would see today thus making it easier for use to practice hermeneutics, which is the practice of interpreting the Bible (Redick). Both episodes of The Decalogue do a really good job of making these Biblical principals relevant to today. In the first episode, talking about worshiping other gods, they do a very good job of showing another God that a lot of people cling to day which is science, logic, and technology and showed that it, much like other foreign gods, will undoubtedly fail you. In the second episode about not killing they cover more than just a murder that you could expect when discussing this but show how the death penalty could also be considered killing considering it is the premeditated taking of someone's life. These episodes both have a good amount of symbols that help to bridge the gap of understanding. In the first episode, the biggest symbol is the symbolic value of weeping. In this episode the main character weeps when his son dies, the god symbol wipes a tear which I interpret to be because of the main character separating himself from Him, and the madonna portrait in the church begins to weep when the main character destroys the altar in rage against God. All of these weepings are because of losing a son: the God character losing the main character, the main character losing his son, and when Mary lost Jesus. In the second episode the fact the God character came in several different forms and the main character's reaction to him in each way is very symbolic. The first instance is in the rest room when the main character sees him then shoves him into the urinal to represent turning from God, the second is when he's working the stop sign and the main character remains hidden from him to represent hiding from God in your sin, and the third instance when he is carrying a ladder to symbolize his ladder to heaven since he would soon die. They also used symbolism in this episode in the way the character interacted positively with the little girls representing his relationship with his deceased sister. I believe the film related feeling to meaning in that the Bible can be hard to interpret so they used relevant issues to the people of today that they would have an emotional attachment to to show the way these issues would be addressed or responded to Biblically. The episodes incorporate the code into people's lives by showing relevant issues with an address to them that is rooted in the word of God with the purpose of showing that eternity without God would be chaotic and upsetting to anyone that isn't centered in Him.
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