The Failures of Public Administration by Franz Kafka and Alfred Hitchcock

Cinema and Literature are used from time to time to criticize various aspects of our present. Generating criticism in various aspects of social life, the authors strive to colorfully demonstrate the paradoxes that a person encounters throughout its life. There is no doubt that public administration systems are becoming perhaps the most desirable target for filmmakers, writers and other artists, in order to be criticized. The inability to function effectively to ensure justice and security is the main narrative that artists use to criticize public administration systems. This essay will consider examples of failures of the public administration system from the perspective of Franz Kafka's classic novel "The Trial", also relying to a certain extent on the aesthetic and artistic achievements of the most famous film adaptation of this work by director Orson Welles. Also, as a kind of antipode example, we will rely on Alfred Hitchcock's movie "Rope", which is also based on literature, the basis of which was a real criminal story. Both works illustrate the failures, shortcomings and dark sides of public administration, while at the same time demonstrating two hyperbolized issues of public administration. Firstly, what if, in its desire to maintain the actual order of things, the bureaucratic system turns into an absurd-grotesque repressive machine that tries to fulfill the function of "establishing order" even before this "order" is violated? Secondly, what if the violation of “the current order” by certain individuals is so absurd and illogical, from the point of view of the bureaucratic system, that it simply "cannot see" this violation?

In Franz Kafka's novel "The Trial", the main character Josef K. faces a bureaucratic and confusing judicial system that condemns him to fight the accusation, the reason for which remains unknown. This work is one of the most vivid images, not just dehumanized, but also absurd system of public administration, where the lack of transparency and justification in decisions leads to the fact that decisions are made simply because they have to be made. The novel, and especially its film adaptation, which, in addition to being close to the original source, also provides an unsurpassed visualization of the "bureaucratic labyrinth" into which Josef K. falls, very juicyly demonstrate the extensive, but literally confusing in itself system of public administration. It literally exists for itself, simply in order to exist. The demonstrated system of public administration is literally an independent organism that exists not to fulfill the classical tasks of public administration systems, such as solving strategic tasks in the terms of state and social regulation, but only to simply exist. At the same time, this system of public administration, although it is independent, is not self-sufficient, because for its further functioning it is forced to "absorb" people like Josef K. - "violators who have not yet violated anything, but can violate, therefore they are violators". On the example of Kafka's "The Trial" we see that when the system of public administration, instead of recognizing its own failures, actually makes the average citizen a "failure", it turns into an infernal monster that ceases to be a system of public administration, neither in the classical nor in the practical sense.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" in some way explores the other side of the topic of failures in the system of public administration, in particular by demonstrating how, from the point of view of society, as the creator of this system, an absurd violation of order can go unnoticed. The plot of the film centers around two young and wealthy men who commit the murder of their acquaintance in order to prove their own intellectual superiority and sense of "right" to the life or death of others. Taking into account the social position of the murderers and the circumstances of the murder, this crime may be absurd from the point of view of the system of public administration: the motive for the act is abstract and at the same time does not include elements of the classic motives for such acts, such as "murder for the sake of material enrichment" or "murder out of hatred". Two men kill the guys only for the sake of this act, nothing more. Throughout the film, we see how other characters in the film, who join the party that the murderers throw at the crime scene, can hardly imagine what is about to happen. Through these secondary characters, we see how Hitchcock demonstrates that the system of public administration can literally lose the ability to recognize and stop a crime in time, because it is not set up for such “failures”. The murderers literally test the system of public administration for vulnerability, as hackers currently test information systems for vulnerability. We see how certain mechanisms of the system fail, demonstrating its weaknesses, such as its unwillingness to such “absurd violations”. The film “Rope” emphasizes that such a breakdown in the moral basis of governance can be extremely dangerous for society, because then moral boundaries are erased, allowing violations to remain unnoticed or even unrecognized as such.

So, both masterpieces approach the problem of the inability of the governance system to act effectively from different sides. In both works, one can distinguish “the individual” and “the system”. By Kafka, “the system”, which supposedly should work to ensure the vital activity of “the individual”, absorbs him, because in reality it exists only for the sake of existing. By Hitchcock, two “individuals” literally “break the system”, which turns out to be unprepared for the moral perversions of the “individuals”. In a combination of senses, both works give us the idea that the “the individual” and “the system” are proportional to each other, but in the works of Kafka and Hitchcock we see exactly the inverse proportionality, when: “the system digests the individual”, or “individuals digest the system”.

The failures of the public administration system in Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial” and Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “Rope” serves as an important reminder of the need to build effective public administration systems. The need to introduce accountability, ethics and transparency in the functioning of state institutions is important. Demonstrating the inverse hyperbolized failures of the system, Kafka and Hitchcock, intentionally or intuitively, prompt reflection on the need to build balanced public administration systems that will effectively perform the functions assigned to them.