Salt: Let's pretend.

Rating: 8/10 (9 August 2010)

Let's play an interesting game. First, let's pretend we are Americans, and now we need a politically right evaluation on Evelyn Salt. Hands down our final evaluation showed that she's highly emotional, sensitive therefore even she's a female Jason Bourne minus the amnesia, she still stands for the basic ingredients of humanity, that all she did in the entire movie was for her husband, which provided the very soul of the Salt character. Without this love for her husband, Salt wouldn't have gone rogue on her Russian superiors. Therefore, the American values again prevailed, saved itself from within, that everyone deserve to preserve human loves. This is something that would never become a part of the calculation of Russian red baddies.
Let's pretend again, that we are Russian red baddies. Now we need a politically right evaluation on Evelyn Salt, or comrade Chenkov. Name: Agent Chenkov, alias Evelyn Salt. Identity: Russian super spy(or Super Russian Spy). Status: Defected. Reason of defection: decades of corruption from evil Western Capitalism and so-called humanism. Although our top cognitive trainer and personality-modification specialist had brainwashed her 100 times during her childhood, we can still only control the time of her activation. Our opponents, the top USA brain-washing specialists had inserted a fail-safe program into her, a husband. Therefore, whenever we activate her, the evil USA had ensured she 100% goes rogue upon activation because of the death of husband. Evaluation Conclusion: more authenticated brainwash mechanism needed. Ho ho ho!
Had fun reading my evaluations? So did I. Now comes a more interesting question for die-hard secularists:which evaluation do you like to believe? That's because, if we choose to believe the Russian's, just like a lot of post-modernists believed that humans, on earth, are only puppets of ideological projections and biochemical reactions, we would have to accept the logical conclusion that Russian baddies are just quantitatively inferior to USA, and someday they are gonna come up with this more authenticated brainwash mechanism which no Americans can hide from. That comes to my point, that my USA side of evaluation, though pervasive in illustration, provided some truth on some level.
In Timothy Keller's "The Reason For God", the author had come up with this intriguing argument as a response to the staggering individualism that "is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior?" All those, who until the last minute, believed everyone has the right to decide what's right and wrong for himself/herself, has to say, "yes". In return, Mr. Keller would ask them to reflect on if there's some common moral reality that is there not decided by any individuals but by the divine holiness. In my opinion, Salt is a very similar case in which the secularists, post-modernists, liberals can have a good opportunity to think about the very basis for their paradigms. After all, there are too many assumptions for the whistle-blowers to push things in the right direction. That they essentially believe in the American values is just one of these assumptions.
Maybe we can pretend again, that we are actually Russian goodies. Then the evaluation conclusion would be: we admit we have made mistakes, terrible mistakes that stretched human natures too far in violence, cold-bloodiness, etc. Maybe humans have ultimate good ways to follow, ways that are more important than defeating another nation. Maybe even someone as robotic as Salt can still be returned to who she's supposed to be, in God's eyes.