Midnight Express: What is a crime

Intense and mind-boggling. A seemingly deserving punishment from a stupid mistake turned out to be violating humanity. Sometimes people weren’t treated as people - sometimes they’re benefits, sometimes cannon fodders, or just flickering head counts for the accountants. Why is it so simple for people to lose mercy yet so hard to retain justice and good ethics?

The monologue stuck in me is this:

What is a crime? What is a punishment? It seems to vary from time to time and from place to place. What’s legal today is suddenly illegal tomorrow because some society says it’s so and what’s illegal yesterday is suddenly legal because everybody’s doing it and you can’t put everybody in jail. I’m not saying this is right or wrong. I’m just saying that’s the way it is…And you, I just wish you could be standing where I’m standing right now and feel what that feels like because then you would know something that you don’t know Mr. prosecutor. Mercy! You’d know that the concept of a society is based on the quality of that mercy, its sense of fair play, its sense of justice.

The movie passes a sense of magical reality with the downhill scene switching from the airport to the ghettos, then to the prison, and finally to the psychiatric house. Nothing felt realistic yet everything had happened for real. Both the acting and the shooting were blatant and bold to bring up that realistic and absurd feeling, like the brutal fighting between the protagonist William Hayes and his fellow indiscreet prisoner Rifki, whose tongue was cultishly biten off. Besides, you got to see a showcase of environmental homesexuality, the raw sexual desire and psychiatric decomposition from the prolonged detention.

Lastly, another monologue struck me is this:

Loneliness is a physical pain.

One last reminder, I watch this film because of Giorgio Moroder and Querelle.