Decalogue 1 - Elizabeth Roy

In the first segment of Kieslowski’s The Decalogue, a small boy drowns due, in part, to his father’s reliance on calculations. This segment is meant to be an interpretation (midrash) of the first of the Ten Commandments: I am the Lord thy God, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me. To me, this was a deeply disturbing film. The horrible guilt that the father feels was apparent, even though I think it would be a mistake to say that the father ‘caused’ his son’s death. I think that human beings find security in illusory correlations. We do not like events that are random or that don’t make sense to us. Whenever possible, we prefer to find a ‘cause’ – in this case, the father sees himself as causing his son’s death. Although it is clearly painful for the father to feel this way, it is a way to keep order in his universe. On the other hand, his aunt does not seem to feel the same way. She feels grief, but she does not try to make sense of the event like the father does. In the world’s conflict between order and chaos, the boy’s father finds order through calculations, technology, and his own actions. The aunt’s sense of order and reason in the universe is found through faith instead. She can give up her need for order in a way, because she relies on God to keep His own kind of order in the world, that she may not understand.