By the end of each film, infidelities and face tattoos have been swept aside, replaced by an all-encompassing bromance that renders those mistakes forgivable; the overarching message being that shared suffering brings us closer together.
The emphasis on individual action is tempered, however, through the emphasizing of a point that brings the latter parts of Eclipse back to one of Horkheimer's earliest views; solidarity can be formed through the experience of shared suffering, and philosophy should "translate what [those who suffer in the face of oppression] have done into language that will be heard" (p.109).
Cultural memory tends to obey the gravity of "shared suffering," Rieff writes, more than it does common aspirations or universalist principles.
Tens of thousands of Vietnamese, many of them former soldiers who once battled the United States, poured into the streets of Hanoi today to welcome President Clinton, waving to his motorcade and watching on television as he told the nation that "shared suffering has given our countries a relationship unlike any other".
But even this optimistic note is tinged with a pessimistic note, as "the aim of a future happy life for all" arises only "out of the privation of the present" (Horkheimer 1933b p. 34); it is the existence of current shared suffering that could lead to revolutionary social change.
But citizenship is not just an abstract idea about rights and duties; for most of us it is something we do not choose but are born into - it arises out of a shared history, shared experiences and, often, shared suffering; as the American writer Alan Wolfe puts it: "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard".
Indeed, their shared suffering was one of the things that had brought them together.
There is much shared suffering in America and the world right now, with many problems that need fixing and many holes that need to be filled.
