Film: Nuremberg (2025) directed by James Vanderbilt

Can evil be understood? Should it be? Let's begin here, with this impossible question that has no answer but demands we try anyway.

Dr. Douglas Kelley sits across from Hermann Göring in a prison cell. What he sees there destroys him. Not immediately—no, nothing is ever immediate when it comes to real destruction. Slowly. Like cyanide dissolving in bloodstream. Which is exactly how Kelley dies thirteen years later, by his own hand, same poison Göring took to cheat hangman.

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I have been descending too, all my life. Maybe you have been too. Maybe that's why you're reading this.

When I watched this film, in that moment when Rami Malek's eyes betray first crack in his certainty, I understood something I'd been circling around for years. Nietzsche wrote that line everyone quotes: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." Yes yes, we all know it. But Kelley lived it. He looked into Göring. Göring looked back. And in that mutual gaze—God, in that gaze—something shattered. I know this shattering. Felt it in my own ribs during my Le Grey Bastion days, when I thought I could stare at darkness and remain untouched.

What fools we are. What beautiful, doomed fools.

Katha Upanishad asks: "By what light does man see?" Kelley thought he would illuminate evil with science, psychiatry, rational inquiry. Instead evil showed him the light itself gets contaminated. Understanding doesn't redeem. Knowledge is poison, sometimes more lethal than ignorance.

What a discovery! What a terrible, beautiful, unbearable discovery!

Russell Crowe plays Göring and he's not the monster we expect. He's witty. Charming, even. Intellectually formidable in ways that make you uncomfortable. He quotes philosophy. Discusses art. Loves his wife and daughter with what appears to be genuine tenderness.

This is what breaks Kelley.

Because if Göring is monster, then monsters are not Other. Monsters are us. They sit at dinner tables, appreciate Wagner, read Goethe, speak softly to their children before bedtime. They are not fanged creatures from nightmares. They are men in suits who sign papers.

Artaud knew this. His Theatre of Cruelty tried to show us. This prison cell IS that theatre. Every conversation between Kelley and Göring strips away another layer of civilized pretense until we see—truly see—that architects of genocide were just men. Smart men. Cultured men. Men like us.

Göring plays a game. He helps Kelley evaluate Rudolf Hess. Shares insights. Becomes collaborative, almost collegial. The relationship inverts so slowly neither man notices until it's too late. Examiner becomes examined. Doctor becomes patient. Hunter becomes hunted.

I walked this path myself once. Not with Nazi war criminals but with my own darkness during those years I don't talk about much. You study something you think is outside yourself. Then one day you realize—the horror of this realization still makes my hands shake—you've been studying yourself all along. Shadow you chase turns around. It has your face.

Kelley chased evil to understand it. Found recognition instead.

Here's the part that keeps me awake: Kelley's evaluations reveal Nazi leadership is sane. Normal intelligence. No psychosis. No delusion. No convenient madness to explain away the inexplicable.

Ordinary men committed extraordinary evil.

Hannah Arendt wrote about banality of evil years later when she covered Eichmann trial. But Kelley discovered it first, in that prison, with his notebooks and questions and naive belief science could explain anything. It shattered him.

If evil needs no madness, we're all capable. If monsters are psychologically normal, monstrosity is choice available to anyone. Upanishads teach Atman is Brahman—individual soul is universal soul. But what happens when universal soul shows its capacity for systematic murder? When you see yourself in eyes of man who signed death warrants for millions?

You break. That's what happens. You just break.

Heidegger called it Angst—not fear of specific thing but anxiety of confronting Being itself, nothingness at core of existence. Kelley felt this every time he sat with Göring. Every conversation was confrontation with void. And void spoke back in perfect German. Void told jokes. Void was charming.

How do you fight that? How?

There's a moment—electric, dangerous—where Göring and Kelley laugh together. Not friendship laughter. Something worse: laughter of intellectual equals, two brilliant minds appreciating shared joke. Michael Shannon's prosecutor watches from corner. You see concern in his eyes. He recognizes what's happening before Kelley does.

He sees the seduction.

Evil doesn't seduce with obvious wickedness. It seduces with intellectual flattery. Göring makes Kelley feel seen. Understood. Respected as thinker. Reichsmarschall is lonely in prison, surrounded by inferior minds. Finally, someone worth talking to! And Kelley—ambitious, brilliant, hungry for recognition like all of us are hungry—cannot resist.

I understand this hunger. Felt it myself. To be truly seen by someone, even if that someone is monster. Is that not its own damnation?

Chandogya Upanishad warns: "Where there is duality, there is fear." Kelley tried maintaining duality—himself and Göring, psychiatrist and patient, good and evil as separate categories. Göring dissolved those boundaries. Showed Kelley they shared same human substrate. Under different circumstances, different choices, roles could reverse.

Could you resist if you were there? Could I? I don't know. God help me, I don't know.

Film's deepest wound is this: understanding evil doesn't neutralize it. Understanding becomes complicity. Knowledge becomes contamination. Touch poison long enough and it seeps through gloves, through skin, into bloodstream.

Yes, there's a trial. Michael Shannon delivers justice rhetoric. Richard E. Grant adds British legal precision. But courtroom scenes feel—what's the word?—perfunctory. Like going through motions.

Real trial happens in those prison interviews. That's where judgment gets rendered. Not on Nazis. On Kelley himself.

When they screen concentration camp footage—actual documentary evidence—Göring says: "It was all going so well and then they showed that awful film."

Listen to that. "That awful film." Like he's critiquing cinematography. Like it's an aesthetic problem, not moral catastrophe. This is monster's voice and it sounds disturbingly human. Sounds like me complaining about movie pacing. Sounds like you critiquing camera work while bodies pile up in frame.

Sartre said we're "condemned to be free"—can't escape burden of choice. Göring chose. Again and again he chose. His sanity makes every choice an indictment. No insanity defense. No escape hatch. Just man who decided, clearly and rationally, to build empire on corpses.

Just a man. Not monster. Man.

Film rushes through what should be its deepest tragedy: Kelley's descent after Nuremberg. He spends rest of his life warning about future regimes like Nazis. Nobody listens. They never listen, do they? Turns to alcohol. Becomes obsessed. 1958, he takes cyanide. Same poison Göring used.

This is NOT coincidence. This is identification taken to logical conclusion. Kelley didn't just study Göring. He became him in only way that mattered: self-destruction. Monster won after all. Not through legal victory but psychological contamination. Thirteen years after Göring's death, he claimed his psychiatrist's life.

When I first read about this years ago, I wept. Not pretty crying. Ugly, broken weeping. Because I understood. Not in head. In bones.

Artaud: "The body must be broken open to find its spirit." Kelley broke himself open. Found not transcendence but horror. Horror of recognition. Horror of shared humanity with inhuman. Horror of discovering line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Including his. Including mine. Including yours.

My own encounters with darkness—not this magnitude, never this magnitude—but moments. Moments when I saw in myself capacities I wished to deny. We all carry this, don't we? Even if we never speak it aloud: under what circumstances would I collaborate? When would I look away? When does survival override morality?

Kelley couldn't answer these questions. Or worse—he answered them too well. What killed him wasn't Göring's evil. It was his own recognition that he couldn't guarantee his own goodness under sufficient pressure. That's the ultimate terror—not fearing death but fearing what you might become before dying.

That you might sign papers too. That you might turn away. That you might choose comfort over conscience.

If Kelley's tragedy is not encountering evil but understanding it—achieving intellectual penetration he sought while losing moral certainty he needed—what does this say about understanding itself?

Is there knowledge that destroys the knower?

Film says yes. Some things can't be understood without being changed by understanding. Some mirrors shouldn't be looked into because what reflects back isn't monster but yourself. And recognition is unbearable.

Kelley wanted to map evil. Discovered evil has no separate territory. Lives in same psychological country where we all reside. Same city. Same neighborhood. Same house. Same room. Same skull.

That discovery killed him more surely than any bullet.

Cyanide was just formality. Just paperwork. Just signing off on what already happened inside.

I'm tired tonight. Tired like Colonel Slade was tired in that film I wrote about before. Tired like Kelley became tired. But watch this film anyway. Watch it even though it hurts. Watch it because it hurts. That hurt is truth, and truth—even terrible truth—beats comfortable lie.

Even if it kills us. Even if it killed Kelley. Even if understanding is its own poison, at least we looked. At least we saw. At least we didn't turn away.

That has to count for something. Doesn't it? Please tell me it counts for something.