“I had a feeling they came here for him.” Zero, a recently hired novice bellboy at the Grand Budapest Hotel, is aware of its reputation as the best institution. As a young man with no experience, he looks upon a world he hopes to join. He notices how guests flock to the hotel, of course, but more interestingly, he notices that this is because of M. Gustave. The movie unfolds around this observation, acting as an inquiry into why Gustave's way of life is so enticing and why he is a conduit of the “faint glimmer” in the ice-cold landscape that backdrops the frigid, calculating way of life that hounds the main characters and whoever gets near them.
There is a stark contrast between the oppressors and the protagonists in this film. The movie takes a look at the "faint glimmer"—not focusing deeply on the "why," although there is one instance of short dialogue regarding the assessment of virtue vs. vice—but simply observing characters who, as Gustave says, "get it." They understand the significance of human sacredness on a rudimentary level; it is not necessarily a specific dogma, but rather a general position of loving others. Gustave routinely demonstrates this, most notably in his stance on immigrants from a war-torn country, as a privileged, relatively safe citizen in a rich nation, but also in the way he puts his own comfort, safety, and reputation on the line protecting the young Zero, who is an immigrant with no family. The film achieves this by making the plot simple: the "bad guys" are dehumanizing, while the "good guys" are humanizing and affirming people's humanity. Ultimately, the biggest "bad guys" is the over arching dehumanizing systems that reduce human beings to "zero," putting Zero (whose name is significant in the way the oppressive society sees him) in the precarious position he finds himself in.
The Ethic of Christ and the Grand Budapest Hotel
In The Grand Budapest Hotel, the narrative defines greater and lesser sins. To many viewers, sexual relations out side of marriage and perversion would be considered a sin, maybe even one of the greatest, but the sexual perversion intentionally takes a back seat to greater evils such as all-consuming, murderous greed, fascism, and war. This distinction stands out because it mirrors a specific ethic in an imperfect way.
Just as the ethic of Christ prioritizes loving others and loving God as the highest values that lead to a life lived right, Wes Anderson portrays a similar hierarchy. He shows this through a flawed lens, suggesting that even if human love and our concepts of loving humanity can be perverted, a glimmer of goodness remains visible, in this case, in M. Gustave. This is because his sins are minor compared to the willful, hateful, and malicious sins of the characters who terrorize others throughout the film. This is ultimately shown in Gustave's sacrifice for Zero at the end of the film. Like the Bible says, the greatest act of love is to die for a friend… and Gustave embodied that. Ultimately, the movie suggests that the nature of evil is the pursuit of what you want without caring about dehumanizing others, while goodness, or at least the twisted, imperfect version of it, is caring about the humanization of others.
In Confessions, Saint Augustine quotes text from the Sermon on the Mount: “Whosoever shall say to his brother, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hellfire.” The original word in Hebrew for "hellfire" is Gehinnom or 'Valley of Hinnom', which was a name of an actual place in ancient Jerusalem—a valley where idol worship and child sacrifice took place. It was known as a bloody, filthy, ever-smoking valley where Jerusalem's children, the weakest and most vulnerable, burned alive in an ever-smoldering rubbish dump. This dreadful valley is used by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:21-26 to criticize anger and insult, saying not only to not murder but do not get angry—the seed of the sin of murder that can be found within each human heart in lesser or greater degrees. The seed manifests in consequences like treating others without dignity or causing others physical harm, and even in seed form, is deserving of the hellish landscape of Gehinnom.
In each commandment on the Sermon on the Mount, there is an implicit connotation and a negative one. If we are called not to murder, what are we called to do? It is not always just to not cause your neighbor physical harm or be angry or hateful towards your neighbor, but in its positive connotation, to be concerned over the well-being of your neighbor—which is what Gustave embodies: concern over his neighbor's well-being, a clear humanizing orientation.
The Hierarchy of Evil in The Grand Budapest Hotel
This is not to say M. Gustave is perfect. There is a lesser evil within him—an evil nonetheless—that is opportunistic in nature: stealing the painting and the motivation of financial gain to attend to Madame D.’s funeral, or a perversion of God's design for love between men and women. However, his flaws are humanizing, whereas the villains' flaws are dehumanizing. C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, remarks about how love, even when perverted, is better and seems better than the cold dehumanization that humans participated in.
When C.S. Lewis was young, he noticed that a perverted orientation of love can be much more easily empathized with when contrasted with the cold nature of social climbers or the calculation that leads to dehumanization.
“A perversion was the only chink left through which something spontaneous and uncalculating could creep in. Plato was right after all. Eros, turned upside down, blackened, distorted, and filthy, still bore the traces of his divinity.”
C.S. Lewis is not remarking that perverted sexuality in "specific" instances is good, but rather that it is the lesser of two evils. He compares it with the cold, cruel dehumanization that was prevalent among the upperclassmen—the aptly named "Bloods"—at the school he attended in his adolescence. Both are evil, but one type of evil is a greater evil. Both should be dealt with, but one leads to dehumanization, while the other leads to a shadowy realization that is still humanizing, where individuals can be seen even if it is only their shadows on the "cave wall".
Parallelism and Symmetry in Themes
Because this movie is a story within a story, it echoes faintly the concept of a parable like Jesus told, or even other biblical stories with significant names like “Zero,” further echoing biblical writing patterns. Ultimately, the movie’s “bad entity,” the “ZZ,” parallels the theme and the biblical concept of Babylon, the overarching force that dehumanizes and oppresses people on a mass scale of dehumanization.
In parallel, M. Gustave embodies a way of being in which humanity can thrive when sheltered by humanization; even if imperfect, it shows humans trying to do the right thing and caring about humanization.
As Christians, we are called to this ethic and called to walk in the "third way," meaning we are called to live with the ethic of humanization as well as giving our allegiance to God while living in the world, in places ruled and governed by those like the "ZZ" or individuals under the influence of Babylon. This is what Jesus means when he says to live in the world but be not of it (John 17:14). The third way focuses on the moments where we draw the line, choosing faithfulness to God instead of bowing down to the influence of Babylon. True loyalty to God and his Kingdom, the "third way," means to show critique to institutions and dehumanizing behavior that Babylon perpetuates, but seeks the well-being of all people, including those in Babylon's thrall and participating in its ugly system.
Conclusion
Like how The Grand Budapest Hotel suggests, even on earth, "There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity." And as Christians who are supposed to be salt and light in a chaos of humanity, embodying and becoming more refined faint glimmers of the highest virtues of loving God and neighbour, we become more and more like Christ who calls us to participate with him in humanizing others, leading to an echo of St. Augustine as he says:
“And woe, even unto the praiseworthy life of men, if, putting away mercy, Thou shouldst investigate it. But because Thou dost not narrowly inquire after sins, we hope with confidence to find some place of indulgence with Thee. But whosoever recounts his true merits to Thee, what is it that he recounts to Thee but Thine own gifts? Oh, if men would know themselves to be men; and that ‘he that glorieth’ would ‘glorify the Lord’.”
Works Cited
Anderson, Wes, director. The Grand Budapest Hotel. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2014.
Augustine, Saint. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey, Oxford University Press, 1952.
Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955.
"Sermon on the Mount E10: How Is Anger the Same as Murder?" BibleProject Podcast, hosted by Jon Collins and Michelle Jones, 4 Mar. 2024, https://bibleproject.com/podcasts/how-anger-same-murder/.
"3 Ways to Choose to Live in 'Babylon' (and Which Jesus Chose)." YouTube, uploaded by BibleProject, 1 Nov. 2018, https://youtu.be/XzWpa0gcPyo.
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