为什么有些电影在哲学上很重要?人们通常认为这个问题只有一个答案:因为它们揭示了关于生活的重要真相。但这种假设是深刻而重要的错误。尽管我们中的大多数人从小就习惯于认为所有的小说都能传授经验、传递信息、提供道德，但事实证明，世界上许多最老练的小说家和电影制作人往往瞄准的是完全不同的目标。

Large numbers of great artists have made this point. Virginia Woolf said “art is being rid of all preaching”; Caryl Churchill said “the role of the playwright is not to give answers but to ask questions”; Toni Morrison said “I just cannot pass out these little pieces of paper with these messages on them telling people who I respect ‘this is the way it is’”; A. S. Byatt said “I do not have a message to give to the world”; Vladimir Nabokov said “I have no social purpose, no moral message”; Friedrich Schiller said “it is only a bad reader who will enjoy a moving poem as though it were a sermon”; Kaitlyn Greenidge said fiction “is not didactic”; Milan Kundera said “novelistic thinking… does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs”; Imbolo Mbue said “my job is to tell the story and let the reader decide”; Jorge Luis Borges said “many writers from here tell me, ‘We would like to have your message.’ [But] we have no message at all.” Add to that list Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Tom Stoppard, Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Syrian poet Adunis, and any number of others. It’s not that artists haven’t been telling us what they’re trying to do; it’s that we haven’t been listening.

In the world of film, perhaps the most eloquent statement I know comes from Charlie Kaufman, the genius behindBeing John Malkovich,Adaptation, andEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind这个人说:“我不喜欢命令人们应该怎么想。我不能忍受那些教人如何活得更好之类的电影。首先，我没有资格这样做，其次，这就像垃圾一样。”

I’m not saying that filmsnevertry to teach lessons. But many of them don’t—and they can still be philosophically important even then. Some raise questions to which we, the viewer, have to offer answers. Some provide thought experiments that can spur our thinking. Some help us feel less alone. Some help us to understand ourselves. Some offer access to the inner world of another human being. (Being John Malkovich是通往“成为查理·考夫曼”的必经之路)有些帮助我们了解我们所知道的，看到我们所看到的，感受我们所感受到的。有些课程让我们在某些重要的方面练习运用思维。还有一些人做其他的事情。

One of last year’s greatest movies,Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is a brilliant case in point. I won’t give anything away—you should watch this amazing movie for yourself—but suffice to say that it keeps pulling the rug out from under our feet, over and over again. It is constantly destabilizing our judgments, constantly making it impossible for us to say with certainty “this is good and that is bad.” And this kind of destabilization isgood for us: while there is clear value in being able to make decisive moral judgments, there is surely also real value in being able to revise our opinions, to question our own beliefs, and to accept the limits of our knowledge.

Disappointingly, if predictably, some viewers and critics reacted with impatience. There’s a valid worry to be raised about the treatment of an African-American character, but concerns about the ending derive from a mistaken understanding of what kind of film this is and, in general, of what film is for. Just look at this emblematic headline: “‘Three Billboards’ backlash flows from debate over its message．” What message?Three Billboardsdoes not have a message; that is the point. A world in which all films are assumed to be message-delivery systems is going to be a world that will never understand movies likeThree Billboards．

Milan Kundera said it best: “Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is itsmorality．道德是反对那种对每个人都立即、不断地进行评判的不可磨灭的人类习惯的;在理解之前和没有理解的情况下做出判断。从小说智慧的角度来看，狂热的判断是最可恶的愚蠢，最有害的邪恶。”