The British director Sam Mendes ("American Beauty," "Road to Perdition," "Revolutionary Road") has at times trapped his American characters in visual and moral schemes that hampered their freedom.
Moral schemes and emotional consistency were things Lawrence feared, seeing life as a Hegelian conflict of opposites - not just of creation and destruction, or of the self and the other, but also of man and woman, as different as sunlight and moonlight.
In a universalist moral scheme, if two people have different opinions about the morality of an action, both cannot be right -- there's only one right answer.
Katharina, by contrast, brings the ominousness to the surface, completely upending Wagner's moral scheme.
Adam's story is unsettling; his is such an unfamiliar perspective that we don't know how to fit him into our moral scheme.
In the moral scheme of "Tears of the Sun," however, Nigeria itself is, if not entirely irrelevant, at least a temporary convenience.
Ambivalent, vain, a target of bullying who grew into a bully, Snape, played with such subtle mastery by Alan Rickman, was a brilliantly gray exception to the black-and-white moral scheme of the Potter universe.
In the movie's moral scheme, the Halls, Californians whose children are all artistic and academically disciplined, are threatened by the chaos pouring out of Nevada, on the other side of the lake.
The French in Mr. Weir's film, like the Japanese in a 1945 submarine picture, are simply the enemy, and as such deserve both hatred and respect, since they are, in combat if not in a larger moral scheme, the mirror image of the good guys.
Their ride, shot from inside the trolley, is a famously lovely introduction to industrial and urban life; and the city itself turns out to be not the sink of corruption one would expect from the movie's moral scheme but a buzzing, unsettling, and quite thrilling modernist playland of hyperanimated people and streaming automobiles.
At least, she said it was her doing at the time, and not long afterwards Lawrence wrote his famous letter in which he renounced "the old stable ego - of the character" and claimed that "that which is physic - non-human - in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element, which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent".
