Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life 0262195674, 9780262195676

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MOVIES AND THE

MORAL ADVENTURE OF LIFE

MOVIES AND

THE MORAL ADVENTURE OF LIFE Alan A. Stone

Foreword by Joshua Cohen

A Boston Review Book the mit press Cambridge,

Mass. London, England

Copyright

© 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Boston Review

United States of America.

Designed by Joshua J. Friedman Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stone, Alan A.

Movies and the moral adventure of life

/

Alan A. Stone

;

foreword by Joshua Cohen.

cm.

p.

— (Boston Review books) —Moral and

isbn: 978-0-262-19567-6 (hardcover 1.

Motion

pictures

:

alk-

paper)

ethical aspects.

I.

Title.

PN1995.5.S75 2007

791.43—dc22

10

9

2007013762

7654

3

2

For Karen, Douglas, and David

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2015

https://archive.org/details/moviesmoraladvenOOston

CONTENTS Foreword 1

ix

Believing in Love

Un Coeur en Hiver 2

3

Hollywood and Holocaust Schindler’s List 19

3

A Second Nature Antonia’s Line

4

A Laughing Matter Pulp Fiction

5

53

Seeing Pink

Ma

Vie en Rose 67

6 Selling (Out) Lolita

Nabokov

77

7 Happily Ever After

The King ofMasks 91

.

8

Redemption American Beauty 105

9

Feet of Clay Thirteen Days 119

10

Moment

of Grace

Thirteen Conversations 11

139

Holy War The Battle ofAlgiers

12

. .

151

The Content of Our Character The Station Agent 165

13

The End of Remorse The Passion ofthe Christ 179

14 For

God and Country

Henry 15

V

191

A Forbidden Hope Water 205

Joshua Cohen

FOREWORD Alan Stone

is

and

a humanist,

in

these essays he writes about the exploration of

human cratic

and

in film

life

medium

—

the great modern,

for reflection

demo-

on our individual

collective lives.

Stone writes about art films and blockbusters,

domestic and foreign^ and he

commands an ex-

traordinary range of historical, literary, cultural,

and

scientific reference.

reflects his

His intellectual scope

unusual personal history: professor

of law and medicin e, football player in the late 1940s, director at

McLean

at

Harvard

of medical training

Hospital in the mid-1960s, and

adviser to the Justice

termath of the

Waco

Department

disaster (he

in the af-

was

a highly

critical

member of the behaviorial-science panel

evaluating the government’s action). Stone was

Freudian analyst

also a

who

broke from the

analytic tradition in a much-discussed 1995

keynote address to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. Arguing that “psychoanalysis

and Freud belong

and humanities,”

to the arts

he said that analysis would

live

on not

as sci-

on what he

called the

moral adventure oflife. Pursuing that

reflection,

ence, but as reflection

Stone turned his attention to

Alan Stone’s cipally

by

interest in film focuses prin-

on message

him, films are

their

by

and he

is

medium. For engaged more

their visual presentation,

their content than

their production,

us (and

rather than

texts,

their ideas than

more by

film.

by the mode of

more by their power

some of us more than

to

move

others) than

commercial success. To be

by

sure, issues

about pressures to commercial success inevitably

loom

large in discussions

of contemporary

movies. But while Stone sometimes expresses

skepticism about the aesthetic effects of such pressures,

he also understands their potential

moral significance. There

he agrees, some-

is,

thing particularly admirable about the achieve-

ment of a great director who and

risks a

reputation

successfully brings a large idea to a broad

audience. Thus, Stone can write of Schindler’s

“accomplishment

List that Steven Spielberg’s

cannot be gainsaid. director

He is vindicated

and a Jew. He made

his

both

as a

kind of film, a

film that

makes the Holocaust a part of popular

culture;

by celebrating the few

who

Spielberg has put unforgettable

on

survived,

human

faces

the nameless dead.” I

said that Stone

purpose of his essays to explore

what

it

is

a humanist: the large

is,

means

by

reflecting

to be

on

film,

human. Though

predisposed to melodrama, films provide particularly ration.

compelling occasions for such explo-

Ronald Dworkin distinguishes the view

that the value of a

nitude of

its

life lies

in the quality or

—

impact on the world

the

mag-

good

xi

from

that issues lies in

—from

the view that

its

value

the quality of an agent’s response to

challenge. gests,

it

life’s

As the phrase “moral adventure” sug-

Stone

is

drawn

to the latter view.

For Stone, responding to

life’s

challenge

begins in an honest appreciation of life’s sheer complexity.

It

continues through an open-eyed

recognition of the plenitude of human possibilities

and

—risking —

a willingness-

one of those sion

possibilities

all

with the

and mind’s conviction. And

throughout by a grip on the

to live

heart’s pasit is

reality

shaped

of other

people sufficiently strong to embrace love

and

resist

the temptations to moral skepti-

cism. Stone’s essays pursue these themes by reflecting

on characters

bitions of directors,

in the films, the

am-

and the experience of

audiences.

The importance of complexity

in

life’s

moral adventure comes through sharply Stone’s

more

critical essays.

Consider

in

his dis-

cussion of Lolita, Adrian Lyne’s 1997 film ver-

xii

sion of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Nabokov,

Stone reminds

was

us, detested Freud. Lolita

Nabokov’s great attack on Freudian simplifications of life.

By turning Humbert Humbert Lyne commits

simplifi-

cation through moralizing distortion.

Roughly

into a tragic pedophile,

a third of Stone’s reviews are about written texts “translated” into film,

and

issues

of fidelity to

the original often emerge in those reviews. But for Stone, a lack

of fidelity in

ficiency: the sin

of Lyne’s Lolita

differs

to

itself is

from Nabokov’s, but that

is

it

not a de-

not that reduces

it

life

manageable proportions.

But celebrating

life’s

complexity

is

not

enough. Stone’s enthusiasms run particularly to films that enlarge ties.

Marleen

our sense of human

possibili-

Gorris’s Antonia’s Line gives us

an

emotionally vivid grip on a social world beyond patriarchy. In Thirteen Conversations About

One

Thing, the Sprecher sisters forcefully express the

power of sheer contingency in human

life,

the frailty of our moral achievements, and the

xiii

possibilities

human

of redemption through the plainest

gestures.

American Beauty

reveals the

human

experience,

place of beauty in ordinary

shows how beauty draws us outside

ourselves,

but also reminds us that beauty and justice are distinct goods,

with no intrinsic connection.

Un Coeur en Hiver helps The King ofMasks to

man

nature,

us to rediscover love,

restore

our

and Ma Vie en Rose

faith in

hu-

to experience

an empathy beyond mere tolerance.

Alan Stones essays

are not, however, sim-

ply about complexities and enlarged possibilities: life is

on

a moral adventure,

Thirteen Days arguably

moral point. Stone football at

tells

and

Stone’s essay

makes the deepest

the story of his playing

Harvard with Bobby Kennedy and

Kenny O’Donnell. The young Bobby Kennedy,

we are told, mixed

ferociousness with a striking

confidence in his

own judgment and

self “too small to play football”

—

identification with the underdog. ties

xtv

came together

—him-

a profound

These quali-

in the terrible 13 days in

1962 that nearly destroyed the world. Stone considers that his classmate

“moral intuitions

may

Bobby Kennedy’s

have been a virtue in

this crisis”:

In his mind, the United States picking

was

like a big

guy picking on a

little

on Cuba

He

guy.

was not prepared to give up moral convictions in the face

of technical expertise. The best

in the film to

is

given to jfk, but

Bobby: “There

is

it

line

also applies

something immoral about

abandoning your own judgment.”

Whatever the

duced the

crisis,

—not

instinct

qualities

of judgment that pro-

Robert Kennedy’s

expertise,

human

but a profound con-

—helped

fidence and capacious decency save us

all.

No

surprise that the film

to

made

Alan weep. This

is

a large lesson

about personal and

political morality: a lesson

about democracy,

powerfully expressed in this supremely demo-

xv

cratic

medium, and

Alan Stone

as

passionately presented by

an essential experience in the

moral adventure of his

Joshua Cohen

is

own

the co-editor

life.

^Boston Review,

a professor ofpolitical science, philosophy, and law at Stanford University,

and

the director

of the

Program on GlobalJustice at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

xvi

MOVIES AND THE

MORAL ADVENTURE OF LIFE

Believing in Love Un Coeur en Un Coeur

en Hiver, written and Di-

rected by Claude Sautet, love story;

Hiver, 1992

and

in

is

the negation of a

our postmodern world, ne-

gation can have the deepest power of instruction.

Not

that this marvelous film

is

didactic

or ponderous. Like the fragile violins that the protagonist, Stephane, repairs,

beautifully crafted.

sophisticated its

work

It is

it is

delicate

and

an uncompromisingly

that never condescends to

audience. Sautet, an auteur, has joined a

psychological

drama with

ity play. All his characters

a medieval moral-

except for Stephane

are recognizable personalities; if we

dict their behavior,

modern

we can

cannot pre-

certainly under-

stand

it

after the fact.

They

psychological drama, and will

want

belong in the

all

many moviegoers

to see this film as

an old-fashioned

study of character. But Stephane’s personality

an unsolvable mystery, and one cannot say

is

about him that his psychology

is

his destiny.

As Stephanes character undercuts and

chal-

lenges settled conventions of thought, Sautet takes us

beyond determinist psychology and

into the moral adventure of life.

Stephane (Daniel Auteuil) and Maxime (Andre Dussollier) are partners in the violin business.

They

buy,

sell, repair,

and construct

the finest stringed instruments for a carriage trade of musicians.

Maxime

tiating, sensitive to the all is

—

worldly, ingra-

moods of others

the small talk that puts people at ease.

the classic outside

and expert artists

at dealing

who need

inside

has

He

man: expansive, engaging, with the temperamental

to be reassured

treasured instruments. Stephane

4

—

about their is

the classic

man: the master craftsman who can

find

and

repair the slightest flaws because he fully

understands the music as well as the instruments. less

He is enigmatic and socially insensitive,

than handsome but with an intriguing face

that Sautet

makes the most of through pro-

longed close-ups.

Stephanes late

life is

button-down

Unmarried, he

monachal. His immacu-

shirts are his clerical collar.

lives in

rooms behind the shop,

apparently desiring no pleasures beyond the satisfactions

of work.

for other people is

his

He seems to have no need

and no dreams of love. Music

only dream.

The

French,

who

can make

waiting on tables a high art form, have more than any other people preserved the tradition of dignified artisanship. Stephane, once a serious

student violinist,

man. But only

would allow us

is

French imagination

Sautet’s

to recognize

heroic qualities of a

Maxime,

obviously a master crafts-

man

in contrast,

and celebrate the

in his vocation.

is

a sybarite

who hap-

pily mixes business with the pleasures

of the

5

flesh.

ing

He

living the fast track: married, hav-

is

over Europe, hobnob-

affairs, traveling all

bing with concert

artists.

From

clear that the partnership is

the outset,

between these

it is

men

perfect.

The film opens with the meticulous Stephane gluing the top of a violin in place.

He no

utters

Maxime’s name. Maxime, needing

instruction, arrives

the correct in place.

from the front

office at

moment to screw the wooden vises

The

partners

quetball together, friendship.

work together, play rac-

and seem

to have an enviable

But Stephane does not appear

to

reciprocate Maxime’s affection. If home

and family

nary people’s center.

Many

are the center of ordi-

lives, Sautet’s

characters have

no

of the scenes in Sautet’s movie

take place in the

same restaurant

—

place for private conversations.

ners in the past,

their public

At such din-

Maxime had no compunc-

tion about describing his extramarital affairs

6

to Stephane.

this conversation

is

differ-

Something important has happened: he

ent. is

But

in love.

He

has kept this affair secret, even

from Stephane, because he wanted Camille (Emmanuelle Beart)

young concert

talented

—

a beautiful

and

Maxime

has

violinist.

been touched by grace; he admires loves Camille

and has decided

Stephane

for her.

is

less

to protect

as well as

to leave his wife

than gracious in his

response to these revelations.

A

standard psychoanalytic take on Ste-

phane’s reaction might describe

—

lover

who

a

woman

has

him

as a jilted

come between two men

have a latent homosexual attachment.

Sautet s screenplay permits such ideas to surface.

at

Thus, Stephane looks across the restaurant

Camille,

who

is

sitting

with her agent, the

mannish Regine, and pointedly

asks

Maxime

whether he has broken up a couple.

The gine

is

relationship

between Cainille and Re-

another variation on the theme of non-

reciprocal love that each of the relationships in

7

this

movie

woman,

presents. Regine, the strong older

has taken Camille, the

under her wing, cultivated her

young

talent,

artist,

promoted

her career, and lovingly fed her ego. But the relationship that once nourished Camille suffocates her. sert

She wants to break out and

as-

Maxime she

has

her independence. But in

found another older in

much

the

now

figure

who will care for her

same parental way.

It is

a change

without growth, and we soon see that

it

too

is

a non-reciprocal love that has not fully engaged her. If Stephane’s

question about Camille and

Regine was meant to provoke, Maxime quickly defuses the tension by insisting that Regine

is

the best friend of Camille’s mother. Stephane

then presses

Maxime about how his wife is deal-

ing with this

new

turn of events. But

refuses to be offended.

Maxime

With worldly wisdom

he declares that in relationships someone

ways

gets hurt.

If in relationships, too,

the

8

al-

someone always has

dominant hand, Maxime seems

to have

it

over Stephane.

He

wins their racquetball

games and has dismissed Stephane as a possible competitor in the game of love. But

now

Ste-

no longer willing

back

seat

phane to

is

Maxime. The

to take a

beautiful Camille

is

prom-

a

ising concert violinist, a high priestess in the

temple of music where the monastic Stephane worships. Indeed, each of the characters in this

movie worships is

God and

in that

music

is

sessing Camille, has altar,

same temple where

prayer.

found a place

and, perhaps for the

Stephane envies the It

Maxime,

less

first

art

in pos-

closer to the

time, the devout

virtuous man.

would be wrofig' to say

that he pur-

posefully sets out to seduce Camille. Stephane

never acts with clear motives. In that he

Camus’s

who

existential protagonist in

kills for

no

reason.

is

like

The Stranger

But the subtle Sautet

stops far short of Camus. His hero, Stephane,

has reasons and motives to

woman love him, his behavior.

make

to reject her,

this beautiful

and

to suffer for

They just do not seem

sufficient

9

to explain his actions, and, in that insufficiency,

Sautet creates the moral space that gives his fragile

movie

its

Camille, as

profundity.

it

turns out, studied as

a child with the same

Maxime and

violin teacher as

Stephane.

The main

both

characters

home for a dinner party,

gather at the teachers

and we see another non-reciprocal

relationship:

the elderly teacher’s middle-aged

companion

turns out to be his cook and nurse but not his wife.

Stephane

quarrels.

(There

here, with the

will overhear their desperate is

another musical metaphor

theme of couples overheard quar-

reling played out again

among

the major and

The

teacher

phane seems lect, faithful

is

and again

minor

in variations

characters.)

the one person

to admire.

He

is

a

whom

man

to the church of music

ing in his judgment.

The

Ste-

of intel-

and

exact-

teacher describes to

Stephane the young Camille, a

girl

he knew as

hard and smooth, with a considerable tempera-

io

ment behind Camille

She

at a critical

is

No longer a student, moment in her career.

the hardness.

preparing to record a sonata and

is

Though

Ravel.

in doubt,

trio

her technical excellence

is

by

not

Camille has a chance to prove that

she can achieve

artistry.

When Maxime brings Camille to the shop so that Stephane can find and violin,

it is

electricity is

fix

the flaw in her

impossible not to sense the instant

between Stephane and Camille. She

intrigued by his intensity, his exacting stan-

dards, his emotional unavailability.

He

fixes

her instrument and then attends her rehearsal to listen. His presence

concentration.

seems to disturb her

He leaves but returns later, and

with a subtle adjustment the master

man further improves the violin’s tone. is

crafts-

Camille

soon dependent on him. Stephane has be-

come her

the mechanical and spiritual catalyst for

artistry.

Having made himself

he absents himself

woman who

falls

—and she

is

necessary,

hooked,

like a

in love with her psychiatrist.

ii

We

She needs him, loves him, must have him.

begin to glimpse the temperament that will boil over in the scenes to

fined taste

come. Sautets

re-

and subtlety are present everywhere

in this movie, cast Auteuil

and

and

it

surely

Beart,

the roles of Stephane

was inspiration

husband and

to

wife, in

and Camille.

Camille reveals her love for Stephane to

Maxime, who, though incredulous, remains

man of the world

in the best sense.

pared to step aside, at

He

least temporarily.

is

Ste-

to attend the Ravel recording. Camille,

by her passion and believing

inspired

fully reciprocated

ecstatic

Filled

pre-

Indeed,

knowing Camilles intense feelings, he asks phane

a

music

by Stephane, plays

as never before;

it is

it

to be

Ravel’s

a triumph.

with confidence, Camille wants to con-

summate her love. But in her moment of glory,

when

she surrenders herself body and soul to

Stephane, he refuses her.

The

desolate Camille goes

on a drunken

binge and the next day confronts Stephane in

12

one of Sautet’s restaurant scenes. There she explodes in a public display. After shaming her-

and humiliating Stephane, she

self

Maxime replaces her,

restaurant.

leaves the

and, standing

over Stephane like an outraged husband, slaps

him

in the face

floor.

tim

all,

the situation

Maxime

is

is

slightly bewildering.

furious with Stephane be-

cause he did not sleep with the woman loves

to the

Auteuil plays the perfect bewildered vic-

—and

After

and sends him crashing

—

Maxime

and, of course, under the circumstances

Maxime

is

right.

Stephane’s rejection of Camille ends his partnership with

who

friend

Maxime. His other woman

has been his only companion an-

nounces that she has found a for her.

but he

man who

Stephane goes on with

is

cares

his vocation,

almost alone in the world.

For many people, love holds nthe only promise of transcendence. sexual

—

love

is

the closest

And romantic

—

yes,

most of us come

to

13

of that promise. So

realizing the fulfillment

when Stephane

rejects Camille’s offer

of love,

Sautet surprises and defeats our expectations.

The knee-jerk psychological that Stephane

we deny his

must be

sanity.

which he belongs,

But

crazy. In

would-be

of

fears

lovers.

Stephane does not

had told Camille

in

Maxime was not

his friend

an

the refusal

some other woman, has given his only love.

our dismay

own hopes and

fuse out of loyalty to his friend

of

to think

his mysterious negation

Why does he do it?

Nor does

is

in the morality play to

love can illuminate our as

reaction

Deep

people wonder

re-

Maxime. He

earlier conversation that

—only

his partner.

grow out of his as

love for

Camille imagines.

woman

friend

in their heart if they are

He

no promise

of hearts some

even capable of love.

Stephane might be one of them. Does he understand what has happened?

Stephane openly acknowledges

all

possible neurotic motives to Camille

14

of

his

— from

sexual hang-ups to deviousness

demonstrate that they are to the wise teacher, istential reasons

who

—from

insufficient. raises

other

He goes

more

But

ex-

those, too,

and the teacher and

mer student do not

to

a need to demystify

love to feelings of inadequacy. are insufficient,

—but only

his for-

solve the mystery. In the

end, neither Stephane’s character nor the

web

of relationships in which he and Camille are involved fully explain his refusal of this proud

and beautiful woman.

He

refuses Camille be-

He

cause he does not believe in love.

of rectitude, but without

By

sibility

man

faith.

left

open

of moral choice and

Stephane has

lost

adventure of his

for us the pos-

lost

opportunity:

an opportunity in the moral

—and one

life

that

we are made

may have been his best and only chance.

In doing so,

about

a

refusing a complete psychological ex-

planation, Sautet has

to feel

is

how

Un Coeur en Hiver raises questions the rest of us

make our

the moral adventure of our

choices in

lives.

15

a

Early in the movie Sautet shows us that Stephane’s relationship with his teacher is

of great significance to him

country home.

is

The man

death. Neither the

nor Maxime, will to

man sary.

called

who

a son’s admir-

Toward the end of

ing love for the ideal father. the film Stephane

—

back to the teachers is

dying a painful

woman who

cares for

him

has already arrived, has the

put him out of his misery. Stephane, the

without sentiments, does what

is

neces-

The dying man looks at Stephane and

then

looks to the bedside table where the medications are. Stephane, the ultimate craftsman,

approaches the task

with the practiced

One might Dr. Kevorkian really

hand and completes

at

skill

of a surgeon.

think that

moment

this

—

is

—

death scene

gratuitous, not

connected to the central dynamic of the

film. It

is

also quite implausible that

Stephane

would be adept with an intravenous Yet thematically,

The death of

16

it

it

ties

a loved

syringe.

everything together.

one reminds us of our

mortality, of missed opportunities for the ex-

pression of love, of

what

is

most precious

In Stephane’s decisive action,

life.

power of a

will

unmoved by

manuel Kant thought

we

see the

sentiment. Im-

that passion

ease of reason, but Sautet

in

was a

dis-

shows us through

Stephane that the absence of passion

a disease

is

of human nature.

The

final

question that Sautet asks

is

whether Stephane has been changed by these

The answer

experiences.

took

this reviewer

catch

it.

so subtle that

it

two viewings of the movie

to

The last scene,

Stephane

is

a coda, fittingly

shows

sitting in a festaurant talking

Maxime. Camille

arrives,

—they

to get the car

and Maxime goes

are a couple again. Briefly

alone with Stephane, Camille asks his feelings for the

with

him about

dead man. Stephane’s

reply,

wonderfully nuanced and appropriate to the delicate but rich tones

of the

film,

is

that he

used to think the teacher was the only person

he loved.

I

take

it

he

now realizes that he loved

17

Camille and that he loved his friend as well.

and

Camille tenderly

drives off with

the miraculous

Stephane

sits

moment

ered

18

its possibility.

is

that

irretrievably lost.

man who

and music

dream. By negating

him goodbye

Maxime. She knows

alone, a

lieves that love

kisses

Maxime

too late be-

are part of the

same

love, Sautet has rediscov-

Hollywood and Holocaust Schindlers List 1993 ,

Like every child in the ily,

Stephen Spielberg

And

his underlying

still

human

fam-

believes in miracles.

optimism and hope

are a

throwback not to Disney but to Frank Capra

and Preston Sturges

—

the great happy-ending

directors of Hollywood’s past. In fact,

nostalgia

when

is

movie

one of Spielberg’s trademarks. So

Spielberg decided to

the Holocaust he took

on

a

make

a film about

monumental

and one not obviously suited

task,

to his talents.

Furthermore, his personal Jewish identity was

on the

line.

He knew he was making the most

important film he had yet undertaken, and that

anything be a

less

failure.

than a sweeping success would

—

The Holocaust is in the history

ory

is

of world Jewry, and

sacred to any

—

his Jewishness

the most important event

mem-

Jew who acknowledges

sacred in

ambiguous ways of a

its

all

the complex and

fractious people. For al-

most three millennia, Jews of the diaspora have survived as an oppressed minority united in

—and not

suffering

minion.

Still,

in political or military do-

no one can deny

sen people” have prospered.

that the “cho-

And

the

mod-

ern world, overwhelmed by competing claims

of victimhood, has grown weary of the Jew as the specialist in suffering

and the Jewish

dirges about their Holocaust.

The non-Jewish

world wants no more of the Holocaust, and

many Jews,

for

including this writer, the subject

seems too painful and too sacrosanct for Hollywood. Yet Spielberg met the challenge before him.

He made the Hollywood movie about the

Holocaust; a distinctive achievement that by its

very terms

— Hollywood and Holocaust

seems impossible.

20

Spielberg’s

sure

on the

faith

it

achievement

meaand

leap of creative imagination

took to recognize that Thomas Keneal-

novel Schindler’s List

ly’s

rests in large

would make a

movie. Oskar Schindler, the protagonist,

great is

the

non-Jew who mediates the Holocaust experience for the audience. Because he

with for

whom

non-Jews can

identify,

them an emotional connection

of the

And

film.

is

a person

he creates

to the events

because of his otherness, he

keeps Jews at a safe emotional distance from their

own

terror.

really care

Jews

who

For the non-Jews

who do not

about the Holocaust and for the

care too

much, he

solves

two

basic

psychological problems at once.

Moreover, since Schindler was a minor historical character,

unknown to audiences,

Spiel-

berg and his actor, Liam Neeson, were free to create their

And was

own,

larger-than-life Schindler.

like Schindler, the Irish actor

relatively unfamiliar to

Neeson

American film au-

diences and so did not carry the baggage of

21

Neesons presence

past roles into his part. iconic.

His carved features and

some Roman projects the

statue of a

god come

Those

stars.

Oskar Schindler,

to

he

life;

who

qualities transform

businessman and bon

failed

vivant, into a mysterious

of the

size suggest

magnetism and authority of the

legendary film

sonality

is

and imposing per-

can carry the historical weight

film.

When we

first

encounter Schindler, we

see his back, his hands, his cache of

money,

and

his preparations for a high-stakes

We

watch him bribe a headwaiter. Schindler

is

throwing

his

money around

gamble.

to ingratiate

himself with Nazi authorities in the occupied

We

Polish city of Krakow. actly

why he

is

doing

it,

do not know

only that he

is

ex-

a kind

of magician, transforming the separate tables of a cabaret into one joyful drunken party of wine,

women, and song

We learn

that this

businessman;

22

it

is

for the Nazi officials.

Schindler’s only skill as a

allows

him

to set

up shop

as

a

war

profiteer.

He quickly establishes

contact

with Jewish operatives in the black market well, so

he can ply Nazi

officials

as

with luxury

goods: they will grease the wheels for his business ventures.

Schindler clearly intends to exploit the situation, living as

high

he can and pack-

as

ing away as

much money

followed the

German army

as

he can.

He

has

into occupied Po-

land like a carpetbagger, taking advantage of the war to exploit Jews, not to save them. will

be converted, but not

revelation as

on the road

he watches the

to

like Saul, struck

He by

Damascus. Instead,

atrocities, a

gradual process

—which he does not himself

of self-discovery understand

—

takes place. Jews beg for his help,

which he eventually

gives,

spending his entire

war profiteers fortune and taking personal to

do

risks

it.

How does this exploitative, high-living, selfindulgent

man become

the savior of so

—

Jews? Schindler’s character

many

in the old-fash-

23

—

ioned moral sense of the word

mystery of

this

amazing

and Neeson never ity

is

the deepest

and Spielberg

story,

really solve

is

it.

One possibil-

that just as the real Schindler seized the

easy opportunity to

make money, he seized

the

— not

be-

easy opportunity to save Jewish lives

cause he was a hero or saint but because he was a

man who

could not

He

grand gestures. lavish

apartment

owned

more than

just as

he takes over a Jewish-

with

he can deny him-

his talents

a thousand Jews.

conversion begins in what

human

opportunities and

takes over a wealthy Jew’s

factory. Like a child,

self nothing. Yet

save

resist

he manages to

As

may be

his gradual

the greatest

scene in this film, Schindler awakens

from what the Holocaust poet-philosopher

Elie

Wiesel has called the greatest sin and punishment: indifference. The scene believable because

one

is

sees the

convincing and

same

convivial

Schindler in this act of mercy. It is

a very hot day,

packed into

24

and the Jews have been

cattle cars at the train station for

The

transport to Auschwitz.

Nazis, joined by

Schindler, are sipping cold drinks while their

human

cattle are

tion. Schindler, bility,

dying of

officer,

(Ralph Fiennes) to allow him to fire

hose. His

amuses the Nazis, who know how

the train ride will end. But Schindler

from the

sin

is

saved

of indifference.

Schindler might be the kind of is

sensi-

Commandant

spray the desperate Jews with the futile gesture

suffoca-

awakened by a moral

convinces an SS

Anon Goeth

and

thirst

man who

neither born to goodness nor achieves good-

ness but has goodness thrust

moral adventure of

life

upon him.

he simply finds him-

self in the right place at the right

the hero’s part.

The

In the

time to play

case of Schindler

might

then demonstrate that acts of good and

measure fortuitous, that

saintliness

not required for great deeds, just

as the case

are in large is

evil

of the good

German

—

the dutiful

man who

goes about killing Jews efficiently because that is

his job

—demonstrates

that deeds of great

25

evil are

not confined to the wicked. Spielberg

gives us

many such good Germans, who chuck

children under the chin and

call

old

“mother” before they slaughter them Schindler

neither

is

good nor

evil.

women

like cattle.

His

sins are

those of the flesh, and his virtues are those of the

bon vivant who genuinely wants everyone

to enjoy the party.

This postmodern view of Schindler opportunist

who

as the

upon

has goodness thrust

him was certainly not

Spielberg’s intention.

His

own psychological interpretation of Schindler’s conversion

is

ambiguous, though, and

end so melodramatic that pointment

The

it is

the major disap-

in the film’s artful construction.

character of Spielberg’s Schindler

evolves in a sequence of scenes in interacts

in the

which he

with his accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben

Kingsley). Schindler

knows

that he

is

himself

incompetent and that he needs Stern to run enterprise. Stern recognizes Schindler for

he

26

is:

an opportunistic war

profiteer.

But

his

what

as the

world of Krakow’s Jews

collapses, Stern, a Jew

himself, realizes that Schindler can be useful

and becomes

his faithful

middleman, organiz-

ing and running the enterprise.

between

Stern’s discipline

The

contrast

and asceticism and

Schindler’s self-indulgence establishes both the characters.

At the same time,

Schindler’s indulgences

contrast increasingly with the

mad drunken-

and perverse violence of Commandant

ness

Goeth. But neither Stern nor Goeth are presented as rounded psychological characters. Stern has

no

private or personal

Although he has a

them and

is

all

in the film.

family, his relationship to

barely acknowledged.

of the

life

Above nepotism

ugly, self-interested motives,

he

uses his position with Schindler to save people only

on humanistic grounds:

musicians, rabbis

who

are to be exterminated

because they have no “essential is

intellectuals,

skills.’’

Stern

the “pure soul” of the film (no stretch for

the actor

who

played Gandhi). Goeth

is

put

27

smoke and

together with sadistic

madman,

mirrors.

He

is

part

and

part fop, part alcoholic,

part fool. These parts

commandant even

do not make a

in Hitler’s

believable

camps. But both

characters serve Spielberg’s purpose: to establish a

middle ground between good and

evil for

Schindler to occupy and within which he can

move toward

Stern

and save

his soul.

—

Yet Goeth’s unreal character

uncontrolla-

bly cruel and taking pleasure in his cruelty

on the screen

for another reason, too.

many horrors,

but the most obscene

—

is

War has is

the sa-

dism that pours from the hearts of so many

human

beings.

ment of those

Goeth

is

the

human embodi-

responsible for the Holocaust.

He kills arbitrarily without rhyme or reason. He kills Jews who try to help, and he kills Jews who obstruct. He kills randomly for sport and systematically for policy.

range range,

kills

with a long-

pistol at

point-blank

he

kills

with a

and he

kills

without remorse. His

rifle,

modern

28

He

figure of Satan in the guise

is

the

of a psy-

chotic sadist. Michel Foucault worried that

madness had driven

evil

from the world, but

Nazis like Goeth demonstrated that there

is

no

moral distinction. Surprisingly, Spielberg projected these ar-

chetypes of good and evil onto children as well.

Children have been a characteristic presence in Spielberg’s

counters ries,

major

films: E. T.,

Jaws Close En,

ofthe Third Kind, the Indiana Jones se-

and Empire ofthe Sun. Children powerfully

evoke sympathetic identification and intense emotions.

It is

no

surprise, then, that children

figure in Schindler’s List. Yet in a stroke

spired balance, Spielberg has used as victimizers

rable

and victims. There

image of a young Polish

“Goodbye, Jews”

in

is

girl

of in-

them both the

memo-

screaming

an ecstasy of hatred

as

And

an

her neighbors are taken away.

there

is

even younger Polish boy making the universal, grisly gesture

of the hand across the throat

as

the Jews pass in cattle cars toward Auschwitz.

These children

are Spielberg’s reproach against

29

those

who

“We

say

and “No

didn’t hate Jews”

one knew.” As counterpoint, there image of the Jewish boy

is

in the labor

the searing

camp

des-

perately trying to find a hiding place to escape the ovens. His toilet holes.

last resort is

the latrine under the

As the young boy jumps

other children

in

we

see

we recognize from earlier scenes

already hiding in the fecal sewage.

The merged

horror of this image of children subin

human

waste

is

tolerable only be-

cause of Spielbergs decision to use black and

white rather than color. So, too,

we

are spared

the redness of the gushing blood in the

many

scenes in which Jews are shot point-blank

through the head. Indeed, Spielberg’s

brilliant

decision to film Schindler’s List in black and

white

is

a key ingredient in the movie’s aes-

thetic success.

Color

intensifies

emotional values in film

—

as

most of the

though part of

our primitive brain were turned on by color information. Certainly this sex

30

is

true for images of

and violence, both of which

are portrayed

in the film

—but

shot in black and white, they

are less arousing to

our basic

instincts.

The lack

of color allows Spielberg to be explicit without

becoming

tastelessly graphic.

Spielberg’s black

aesthetic objectives.

and white It

also achieves

echoes newsreels and

documentaries of the Holocaust made time, thus establishing historical context feeling

at the

and a

of authenticity. Yet the film doesn’t com-

pletely lack color.

At one point a Jewish mother

and her daughter cross the screen, and the little girl is

wearing a red coat.

The signifier quickly

vanishes until the film’s most ghoulish scene.

The Nazis

are ordered to dig

up

all

the Jewish

corpses they have buried to incinerate the evi-

dence of the slaughter of the Krakow ghetto.

As the decomposing corpses wagons

to the fires

of the red coat

we

among

are trundled in

catch again a glimpse the dead.

Spielberg also brackets the film with color: at the

out,

beginning, as

we watch two

candles burn

and near the end, when a candle

is lit

and

3i

burns against the darkness. Both times, white

flicker

in the

of the flame we see the reddish-

orange glow of combustion

—

the sign of

life,

extinguished and then rekindled. There are other choreographed

how

moments

that indicate

thoughtfully the film was edited.

Spielberg also makes

good use of Krakow.

The surviving gem of Poland’s medieval Krakow

cities,

has a castle and cathedral that were

spared by the armies that for centuries marched

back and forth across the country. They are less

than a half day’s journey from the great

rail

crossings of Eastern

Europe that meet

Auschwitz, chosen by the Germans

as the

at

most

convenient location for their genocide. Anyone

who

has visited Auschwitz, as

ognize

I

have, will rec-

how much the artifacts of the slaughter

contribute to the images in the film.

around Auschwitz and wept

as

I

I

walked

saw heaps of

children’s shoes, gold dental fillings, eyeglasses,

human

hair, suitcases

addresses from

32

all

with Jewish names and

over Europe.

some of the most

Spielberg has also filmed

from high up and

lurid scenes

at a distance,

reminiscent of Breughel’s Slaughter ofthe Innocents,

which, in the very act of affirming God’s

existence, denies berg’s film

His concern for

silent

is

us.

But

Spiel-

on the subject of God. His

Jews go through the Holocaust without ever asking

how God

could do

people. For those

only god in is

on

this film.

their miracle.

from above

his

this to his

list

Schindler

is

the

His unexpected goodness

He is the one who looks down

at the

Krakow

slaughter. Perhaps

conscious of the limits of his

scope of his

chosen

own

medium and the

talent, Spielberg leaves the

problem of God to the

rabbis.

His film

is

not

a philosophy of the Holocaust.

But

if Schindler’s List

philosophical questions, answers.

Amon Goeth,

does not pose deep

it

does provide some

the locomotives steam-

ing into Auschwitz, the unrestrained hatred of the Poles, are

all

and the indifference of good Germans

concrete answers to

Hannah

Arendt’s

33

abstract question of

why

so

many Jews went

unprotesting to their deaths. That Schindler saved so

who

many Jews

is

also

an answer to those

claimed nothing could be done.

Spielberg insists

on confronting the explicit

horror of the Holocaust, but not in a

would

drive the Jewish

way that

members of his

audi-

ence out of the theater. Almost none of the Jewish characters

we

The children who

get to

know

well are killed.

hide in the latrine are saved.

And even in the most terrifying moment, when the

women and children on Schindler’s list are we

are spared:

and stripped naked they

are herded

mistakenly sent to Auschwitz, hair cut

into the showers.

the

first

When

water comes out of

shower head, and then

one weeps with

relief,

all

the others,

and we watch with them

while the lines of other Jews, not on Schindler’s list,

are led

toward the gas chambers. Spielberg’s

camera does not follow them to tion. Instead

it

their destruc-

pans to the ominous smoke

and cinders blown from the chimney of the

34

crematorium. to the

We are expected to bear witness

enormity of calculated genocide, but we

are not required to

watch

it.

But having restrained the bathos

for so

long, Spielberg gives in to his worst impulses in the last

few moments of the

film. Schindler

has not only taken heroic risks and spent most

of his fortune to save

his

Jews and provide them

sanctuary in his munitions factory in Czechoslovakia,

he has

also decided to

manufacture

only defective munitions and lose the his

money

fort.

to sabotage the

rest

German war

When the war finally.ends,

of ef-

the bankrupt

Schindler delivers a marvelous speech convincing the guards to go Jews.

As though

berg adds a

final

this

home without

killing his

were not enough, Spiel-

scene in which Schindler has a

convulsion of self-loathing as he berates himself for not saving

more

could have saved two lives.

and

He

his

lives.

His gold Nazi pin

lives, his

collapses in

automobile,

five

paroxysms of remorse,

Jews step forward to take him

in their

35

arms and comfort him. In the background, we vaguely discern someone taking off his striped

concentration-camp uniform and last

scene he

is

in Schindlers

wearing the inmate’s garb. His

transformation to heroic martyr

and

is

complete

utterly unbelievable. Yet this directorial

lapse can be forgiven. Spielberg’s risk-taking in the

what

end

it

is

what

saves Schindler’s List

could have been

—

from

a film that merely

manipulated filmgoers instead of leaving them in stunned silence as the final credits

There

will

be some

Spielberg’s movie,

and

who

roll.

find fault with

particularly those

who

cringe at Schindler’s last scenes. But Steven Spielberg’s

accomplishment cannot be gainsaid.

He is vindicated both as a director and a Jew. He made his kind of film, a film that makes the Holocaust a part of popular culture; by cel-

ebrating the few

who

put unforgettable less

36

dead.

survived, Spielberg has

human

faces

on the name-

,

A Second Nature Antonias Line 1995

Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris’s first movie, A Question ofSilence (1982), In the

three

women

berserk and

—

kill

—go

strangers to each other

the male proprietor of a dress

shop whose sexism unleashes their repressed rage.

Their lawyer

later argues that

they were

not responsible, since they were victims of the centuries of humiliation

and physical violation

that have scarred the collective unconscious of

every woman. This parable of justified rage put

Gorris in the forefront of radical feminism, a position she consolidated with Broken Mirrors (1984), a savage depiction

women

that

of male brutality to

combined scenes from

with scenes from the

cellar

of a

a brothel

serial killer,

—

photographing a victim

as she starves to death.

Together, these man-hating jeremiads earned

Gorris a reputation as “the apotheosis of angry militant Eurofeminism.”

For nearly a decade, that reputation appeared to have been a marginalizing curse to the promising filmmaker. .She disappeared into

the Eurofeminist underground;

and although

she continued to work, her career as a creative writer

and director seemed dead. But Gorris,

though missing, was

from dead; by 1988

far

she had completed the screenplay for Antonias Line, her astonishingly beautiful 1995 film that

won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. While her early films

the enemy,

—men were

were guerrilla warfare

and

women

took no prisoners

Antonia's Line imagines a truce in the gender

wars. Drafted if not dictated

by women, the

terms of the truce grow from a simple premise: that

women must

create their

own

identity

that they are not to be defined, as Gorris has said,

38

“through their roles

as wife,

mother, or

daughter.”

world

Men can be accepted into this new

if they are

willing to accept the matriar-

chal terms of the truce. Antonias Line

— communities— the

new world

the

lives,

look

like?

How will Gorris

How will women

they calls

comment on

live,

about

the families and the

created by that truce.

it

is

and how

What will

build families?

will they die?

her film “a fairy

tale”:

the possibility that

an ironic

women

will

actually achieve such independence, but also an

accurate description of her aesthetic method.

Transcending the bleak anger of her

earlier

films, Gorris has discovered in herself a sense

of

humor and used

it

to explore the

gamut of human emotions. Every tive

whole

introspec-

human being knows that emotions come in

unlikely mixtures feelings tears

and surprising oppositions:

of depression often lurk behind anger,

unexpectedly accompany laughter. In

portrayals

its

and provocations, Antohia’s Line is a

marvelous demonstration of the subtlety, complexity,

and

surprise of unfamiliar emotions.

39

Any that like

film can play is

on an audience’s emotions;

Hollywood’s

specialty.

Only a great

Antonias Line reveals a new way to

live.

As THE FILM OPENS, THE NARRATOR, we

will eventually discover

is

film

WHO

Antonia’s great-

granddaughter Sarah, matter-of-factly informs us that Antonia (Willeke

knows even before she will

be the

last

Van Ammelrooy)

gets out

day of her

life.

of bed that

There

explanation of how this knowledge

will

came

this

be no to her,

why or how she will die. But this knowledge is presented neither as a frightening premonition

nor

as a step

toward suicide. This simple, nu-

anced, and profound beginning for

an adult

women call is

fairy tale

sets the stage

about a world

in

which

have mysterious powers. Antonia

her loved ones to her side; and Sarah,

will

who

fascinated by death, will be given this pre-

cious opportunity to watch.

Antonia, weighed

and unbowed by

40

down

but

still

handsome

age, starts her last

day with

familiar ters,

morning

routines:

opening the shut-

feeding the goat. Then, as she looks out

memory flashes back

the kitchen window, her to the

end of World War

II;

Antonia and her

teenage daughter Danielle (Els Dottermans) are

returning to the

Dutch

village

where Antonia

was born to claim the farm she has

They

enter the

bedroom of her supposedly

dead mother, who,

it

turns out,

(though on her deathbed) and unfaithful “shitbag” of a

30 years

earlier.

inherited.

Her

final

still

is still

alive

cursing her

husband who died words, after she rec-

ognizes Antonia, are “Late as usual.” Antonia

and her daughter are more-curious and amused than sad. Gorris scripts and directs the mothers

death scene for laughs, with the priest as the straight

man.

When the dead mother suddenly sits up in her coffin during the funeral and bursts into

“My

Blue Heaven,”

we

realize that this

scene

takes place only in the mind’s eye of Danielle,

whose

creative fantasies

add a note of magic

4i

—

mood

realism to the film. In keeping with the

and the

affirmative feminine principle of the

on the

film, Danielle sees the tortured Christ

cross his

—

—

representing the male principle

turn

head and smile benevolently on the pro-

ceedings.

Running through Antonia’s Line is

a conflict

between these two principles. According male principle

—which

rejects life as a

to the

source of

unending misery, with death the only escape

man can suffer all his life because he is preoccupied with death and the search for meaning. In Gorris’s vision, patriarchy to

human

is

the

main

obstacle

freedom, dignity, and fun. According

to the life-affirming female principle, a child

can thrive on her curiosity about death, and a

woman expect

can enjoy living because she does not

life

to reveal

its secrets.

Gorris conveys these ideas in the develop-

ment of the stood in

characters,

“realistic”

who cannot be

psychological terms, but in-

stead as the incarnations of the

42

under-

two

principles:

Antonia

is

the earth mother

dispenses the not-so-simple as

who

absorbs and

wisdom of nature

she works her farm until she dies. She

matriarch of a

new

is

the

of women, and she

line

accepts the cycle of life and death because she

accepts nature in

counterpart, is

all its

plenitude; her male

Crooked Finger (Mil

Seghers),

a recluse with a house full of books

mind crammed with

learning,

poisoned by melancholy.

all

and a

apparently

A tortured Schopen-

hauerian character who, having absorbed the scientific male zation,

recent

is

wisdom of Western

finally driven to suicide.

memory

is

at

No

all

civili-

film in

once 'so rich in ideas and

so intellectually unpretentious.

We

are never

forced to recognize the intellectual daring and craft

of the filmmaker; we are carried along by

the surprising flow of the narrative.

We

first

meet Antonia’s daughter,

Danielle, as a dark-haired, nondescript teen-

ager in a shapeless dress.

Her

wish-fulfilling

43

imagination at her grandmother’s funeral pre-

She

figures her talent.

will

be an

artist,

Antonia unpossessively sends her off to school;

bonds between

to Gorris, but they

child,

artist

but

though

unfulfilled.

like her

mother she

who

any natural problem, takes her

city and,

by a happy mistake,

unwed mothers. At the home a hugely pregnant, vivacious

not necessarily

like getting

to a

She

is

to the

home

for

woman who does

pregnant or raising

and giving

defined not by her role as wife or

mother but by the

fructified state

of pregnancy.

Delighted to help Antonia and Danielle

fulfill

their mission, she introduces Danielle to

of her male

can

they meet Letta,

children, but loves being pregnant birth.

identity.

still

has no use for a husband. Antonia, solve

art

are important

do not constitute

Danielle returns an

She wants a

women

and

one

relatives.

Because of her passionate wish to be impregnated, Danielle

when

44

is

a

demanding

lover,

the willing but finally exhausted

and

young

—

man

falls asleep,

we

her head to help the sperm on

Back

way. For the

baggy dress she gaily runs from

in her

the hotel to join her

mother and

have been waiting patiently.

man

spirit.

Don Juan,

stood a naked

first

ingenuity, roles

affair,

though

can believe he

woman and on

feels

the conventional

their heads, Gorris has pre-

death and

now

sex with dazzling

thumbing her nose

and the

are

not one of his victims. Having

sexual escapade

sented

We

who

in their joy

has been used in this

without mean

Letta,

The women

and mischievous

conspiratorial

like

its

time the camera reveals her shapely body.

first

the

on

see Danielle standing

at patriarchal

institutions that legitimize

and

delegitimize children.

Danielle gives birth to a is

soon revealed to be an

girl,

Therese,

who

intellectual prodigy.

When her schoolteacher Lara shows up to discuss this prodigy’s education, Danielle takes

one look

at her

unglamorous

—

long-haired, blonde,

as Danielle

—and

it is

and

love at

as

first

45

Gorris presents their love with taste and

sight.

judgment. The

women

platonic nor swooning

are neither carefully

—simply

a

young cou-

ple “naturally” falling in love with each other.

Gorris

knows

to nature tion;

—

that

we cannot hold a mirror up

that nature

is

but Antonia’s Line

itself a is

and indeed the

this scene,

human

her fairy

inven-

tale,

entire film,

and

comes

close to a convincing realization of naturalness.

There

is

a feminist, perhaps lesbian agenda in

this portrayal

reassuring cal

of love. But Gorris’s

art,

good humor, transforms her

concerns into a moral project,

film

and

with

Gorris’s audience to a

its

politi-

lifting the

new acceptance

and understanding of difference. In this women-centered world,

Finger

is

not the only man.

Crooked

Some have entered

Antonias world, and others,

leftovers

from the

gender wars of Broken Mirror, lurk on ders.

There

is

46

bor-

one unforgiving example of pa-

triarchy: a father

silenced wife,

it

matched by two brutal

and

sons, a

a half-wit daughter Deedee.

Deedee

is

treated like an animal

her family. their

When

Danielle,

a pitchfork

just

who

in

has gone to

farm to fetch a saw, catches the brother

Pitte (Filip Peeters) raping

up

men

by the

and throws

Deedee, she picks skewering him

it,

where you would expect.

Pitte will disap-

pear from the village wounded, though (unfortunately) not permanently incapacitated,

with his hatred of women and his intact.

evil

nature

Danielle takes Deedee to Antonia’s farm-

house, where she

is

installed in a

growing com-

munity. Antonia has already saved the village idiot

Loony Lips

(Jan Steen)

from the torment

boys;

and he has followed her

faithfully thereafter.

He and Deedee become a

of nasty

little

devoted couple. Antonia’s dinner table further

expands

as the village priest

moves

in,

soon to

be joined by Letta of the pregnancy project. Recruited by Letta, the defrocked priest finally has a true calling

—producing

apostles. In this allegory

his

own

twelve

about the liberating

power of nature, Gorris makes us value the

47

eccentrics even as she spurns the patriarchal institutions that created them.

Antonia, the great matriarch, presides over her happy

commune, enjoying the rhythms of

the seasons and majestically sowing her seeds.

But

this

suitors,

handsome woman

is

not without male

notably Bas (Jan Decleir), a widower

with a string of obedient sons like ducklings. In yet sal

of gender

man

politics,

—proposes

who

follow

him

another ingenious reverBas

—

a

good and simple

to Antonia, explaining that his

sons need a mother. Antonia

tells

has no need for his sons. But

if

him

that she

Antonia does

not need a man, Bas seems to need Antonia.

So farmer Bas and

his obedient sons loyally at-

tend Antonia, helping with the chores, until she finally tires

of her self-imposed

chastity. Pre-

pared to offer Bas everything except her hand, she dictates terms: they are too old to impose their relationship

on

their families,

and

at their

age once a week will be sufficient (though they agree to negotiate should a need for greater

48

frequency

arise).

Bas builds a

little

hut in the

countryside and, in a charming scene, carries

Antonia over the threshold.

Soon lovemaking breaks out

all

over: the

buxom, middle-aged Antonia, cavorting the arms of her faithful Bas; Danielle

schoolteacher; butterball

Deedee and Loony

and he a

string

in

and the

Lips, she a

bean stretched out

over her; and Letta and her defrocked priest.

The

ardor of these couples grows until they

are all

making

so

much

noise that the

young

prodigy, Danielles daughter Therese, cannot sleep.

Into this natural joy

comes the serpent Pitte, who returns

many years

after elle

Eden of innocent women and

to revenge himself

by raping Therese. While Deedee consoles

Therese, Antonia takes up a Pitte

to

on Dani-

down

kill

that

in a bar.

rifle

and

tracks

Unable to bring herself

him, she puts her curse on hjm; and in

awesome moment, one has no doubt

that

Antonia’s curse carries the awful women’s power

49

the misogynist

Dominican

fathers feared

when

they wrote the Malleus Maleficarum. Pitte cruelly beaten

discover

home own

by the other young men, who

When

what he has done.

looking for help he

brother,

is

who

hates

is

he staggers

drowned by

him and wants

his

to in-

herit the family farm.

The narrator tells true:

us that the proverb

time does not heal

is

not

wounds. Therese

all

has been forever scarred by the rape. In this

Eden, rape

is

the primal sin, hardening the

heart against love. Therese has been tutored

by Crooked

Finger,

loves this girl her.

She

thers

—

who, despite

and has shared

loves him, too

—

as

his bi tterness,

his learning

daughters love

women

form the structure of Antonia’s Line. In-

deed, she

him.

fa-

in a relationship that Gorris allows to

undercut the primary bonds between that

with

is

incapable of loving anyone but

Letta’s oldest

son Simon has worshipped

Therese from childhood, and although she does not love him, she gets pregnant by him

50

and decides

to

—

have the baby

girl,

a

ButTherese has no maternal love

of course.

for her child.

She hands the newborn, Sarah, to Simon and turns back to her mathematics book. Simon,

the father, will mother Antonias great-grand-

daughter.

As new life comes in Antonias line, so comes death, sudden, surprising, but matter-of-fact

and even humorous. But when Crooked Finger hangs himself it

quite a different matter.

is

Gorris leaves us no emotional distance. Therese is

heartbroken, and as Crooked Fingers body

is

cut

down,

little

window, takes

Sarah, peering through the

in the

whole catastrophe.

But one day as Antonia and Bas,

now show-

ing their age, get up from the dinner table to dance, gift.

we

see that little Sarah has Danielle’s

She imagines

in her mind’s eye that the

dead have returned to

and Bas

are as

young

life,

as

and

when

Antonia has already told us that

that

Antonia

they, first met. life is

the only

dance we dance, but Gorris reassures us that

5i

Antonia’s line will go

on dancing

daughter’s creative mind.

created a

human

who

tells

identity.

and the

the

little

the story: each has

And

the hope of Antonia’s line.

is

her grand-

The earth mother,

painter, the intellectual prodigy,

student of death

in

that creativity

However

it

comes

out for them, Gorris has done what only a great film artist can do: created another world, with possibilities

we might

inconceivable,

and

otherwise have found

a naturalness

we might oth-

erwise have found unimaginable.

52

.

A Laughing Matter Pulp Fiction, 1994 If

you take no pleasure

culture, with

all its

manic

in

popular

excesses, then

you

are likely to be bewildered, even offended,

Quentin Tarantinos extraordinary

film Pulp

Fiction. Tarantino unapologetically enjoys

ular culture at the it.

same time

by

pop-

that he satirizes

Unfortunately, he.ahcF seems to specialize

in violence.

Violence in film

some

it is

is

a serious matter,

and

an inexcusable offense. For them,

there can be

the scene in

no

justification, for

example, for

which John Travoltas character ac-

cidentally blows a young man’s brains out.

worse,

for

when the movie played in

theaters,

Even

most

of the audience laughed despite the spatter of

blood and brain

tissue

—and with spontane-

ous amusement, not the nervous hysteria often

provoked by horror Fiction

knew

is

films.

essential to

that

its

many would

meant the audience Yet taken

on

its

The violence of Pulp aesthetic;

though he

complain, Tarantino

to laugh.

own

a rare accomplishment;

it

terms, Pulp Fiction

is

opens a new aesthetic

horizon in film. Deliberately violating the conventions of action films, Tarantino reimagines stylized

moments of violence and

exaggerates

them

until they are almost surrealistic.

most

directors

When

would be building tension and

suspense, Tarantino has his killers chatting.

When most directors would cut away from the violence, Tarantino stays with the aftermath.

What Tarantino

has crafted in this film can

be best appreciated in the performance he has extracted from John Travolta.

One might have

concluded that Travolta was too old, too

and too he

54

is

far

over the

hill

for Pulp Fiction.

brilliantly cast; everything

fat,

But

wrong about

him ter

is

right for this part. Seventeen years af-

Saturday Night Fever, his broad

high cheekbones are a

now bejowled,

mouth and but there

promise of sensuality in that ruined

still

face.

is

He

has a teenager’s winning vulnerability. His

appealing and familiar presence brings just the feel

of movie nostalgia Tarantino wanted. Travolta plays Vincent Vega, a laid-back,

get-along kind of guy

and drug-addicted

who is living a depraved

life as

a paid

killer,

but who

—

do most

has an astonishingly innocent soul

as

ofTarantino’s lowlife characters. This innocence in depravity

is

Pulp Fictions central theme.

It

keeps the film from being an exercise in sadomasochistic perversity;

humor and its

it is

creative energy. It takes the

genre of film noir and gives

The

film

title

new

dead

life.

when newsstands

an array of monthly the

it

its

Pulp Fiction harks back to

the 1930s and 1940s,

Among

the source of

featured

short-story.. magazines.

most popular were those about

hard-nosed private investigators. With authors

55

such dler,

as Dashiell

Hammett, Raymond Chan-

and James M. Cain, these stories were the

forerunners of the dark, urban crime movies that

became

gan

in the front

film noir.

The stories

of the magazine, competing

for the reader’s attention, in the back.

typically be-

and were continued

Though Tarantino would not be

old enough to

remember

this genre,

he has

constructed his film in a similar way.

We begin with one short story: up

British couple (played

and Tim Roth) decide where they do,

we

a

hopped-

by Amanda Plummer

to rob the coffee

shop

are having breakfast. Before they

turn the page

—

a dark screen

—

to the

next story, about Vincent and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson)

briefcase

going off to retrieve a mysterious

and

kill

some drug dealers who

didn’t

pay off their boss. Then another dark screen, to the childhood of

grows up

to

Butch (Bruce Willis)

be the boxer

who

refuses to

who

throw

the fight. Unlike the old pulp-fiction magazines, the triptych

56

of stories eventually comes

by coincidence and Tar-

together, interwoven

antino’s central theme. Set in

may owe more

to

Los Angeles,

it

Robert Altmans Short Cuts

or his brilliant Nashville than to pulp-fiction

magazines.

But Tarantino’s borrowings are no

He

is

winking

at his

audience; he wants

to be aware of his references.

out the puzzle, is

it

defect.

becomes

Once you

them figure

clear that Tarantino

playing with film convention, rather than

jecting or deconstructing

humor

takes the film

drawn from

it.

And

re-

his startling

beyond anything he has

others.

Yet there can be no-doubt that Tarantino

intends to shock his audience with graphic violence.

European filmmakers

that violence in

American

phy, appeals to the lowest tor and, like

American

America’s

and

concerned

film, like

pornogra-

common denomina-

fast

the taste for better things. believe that film

are

food,

Some

is

destroying

psychologists

television violence teach

young people

to be violent, or at

57

the very least inure

them

to real-life violence.

Perhaps a more troubling idea

is

that graphic

violence, like pornography, exploits a base instinct that degrades rather than edifies.

These

reactions to screen violence are too important to be dismissed, but

I

do not

tino has dismissed them. in

moral

believe that Taran-

He is

sensibility nor, even

neither lacking

though he wal-

lows in popular culture, a Philistine. If violence like

is

a

pornography

drawing

lines

form of pornography, then it

presents the problem of

between exploiting our passions

and edifying them. But recognized,

it is

as

modern

courts have

necessary to go beyond a sim-

ple categorical distinction

and ask whether an

admittedly exploitive work of art has redeeming social value.

This

is

not to say that Tarantino intends to

redeem the violence.

He

seems to be mocking

the arbiters of good taste with his “wicked’ hu-

mor. This

is

most blatant

duction to Butch’s

58

story.

in the

quirky intro-

Christopher Walken

makes

a brief appearance in Pulp Fiction as a

former Vietnam pow. his

He has come to deliver

dead cellmates gold watch

to the

young

The Walken

boy who never knew

his father.

character begins to

the boy what happened

tell

to his father in standard heroic rhetoric, but

then veers perversely into a description of the intestinal orifice

and the its

where the father hid the watch,

intestinal disorders that

complicated

concealment. It is

an account that no sane adult would

give a child.

And while

other directors are ca-

pable of imagining such a scene, Tarantino

was brash enough to keep" it in toilet graffiti

it

can be understood

ample of adolescent bad

taste,

knows

it is

is

that. It

irreverent,

is

his film. Like

“gross,”

as

an ex-

and Tarantino

inappropriate,

and one can understand why the

younger generation would be warning

fuddy-duddy parents about a surprising

it

their

this film. (Indeed,

number of my middle-aged friends

report that their teenage children love

it

but

59

have warned them that they

will hate

it.)

As

Tarantino’s script ventures into scatology, he gives the finger to the false nobility of war cliches.

But Tarantino

is

interested less in

making

an anti-war gesture than sending up a movie cliche. Similarly, this film. It

is

is

not an anti-violence

a send-up of movie violence.

One astute teenage that Tarantino learned

critic remarked

something from

film, Reservoir Dogs. All the

school loved the

not

much

guys in her high

macho violence but

in this film for her

friends. Despite

something

for

its

his first

there

was

and her female

violence, Pulp Fiction has

women,

particularly the scenes

between Vincent and Mia.

Mia (Uma Thurman) boss’s

white wife

is

the black crime

who Vincent

is

required to

man charged with

this

task gave her a foot massage; the boss took

um-

entertain.

The

previous

brage and had the massager thrown out of a four-story

6o

window. The Vincent-Mia episode

quickly turns into an over-the-top parody of a blind date. Vincent prepares himself by going to his

—

hit

drug dealer for a batch of the ultimate

a mixture of cocaine and heroin that only

a seasoned addict could tolerate. Vincent lines the stuff the

way

a nervous

main-

guy might

take a drink to boost his confidence before a date.

Meanwhile, Mia

because

she’s uneasy,

is

sniffing cocaine, not

but because she

is

a

man-

eater whetting her appetite.

Mia takes Vincent to a dance contest, where they do the twist, to the delight of Saturday

Night Fever fans. Tarantino’s elaborate

set fea-

tures vintage 1950s convertibles as booths,

pop-

icon look-alikes as servers, top-of-the-charts

music,

all

so extravagant in

nostalgia as to be surreal.

its

evocation of

The scene is somehow

true to the spirit of the film as a whole, parody-

ing popular culture without ever condescending to those

The

who

take pleasure in

it.

sexual tension escalates as

Vincent tango back into her

home

Mia and

at the

end

61

of the evening. But while Vincent toilet

(he

ments)

is

Mia

always in the

in the

toilet at critical

drug

finds his

is

stash, snorts

mo-

it,

and

overdoses. Instead of a sexual conclusion, the

evening ends with a slapstick resuscitation involving a huge syringe. In this scene clear that

Vincent and

it

becomes

his lowlife friends are

essentially overaged adolescents. Indeed, the

whole film has the of adolescence.

spirit,

the very

with motherfuckers.

to

Tim

sensibility

Roth’s

love

it.

scene

first

is

Amanda Plummer,

who was born to play Ophelia, Bunny

and

No wonder teenagers

The soundtrack of filled

energy,

is

a crazed

Pumpkin. They

Honey

are

two

waifs holding hands in the storm, strung out

on drugs and sticking up liquor stores ing. Jules, as Vincent’s

this tone.

Jackson

is

for a liv-

hit-man partner, sustains

a fine

match

for Travolta;

he has a face that looks different from every

camera angle, and he

and Jules engage

in

radiates strength.

Vincent

an earnest discussion about

the European nomenclature of American fast

62

food and then a subtle analysis of the sexual significance of the foot massage as they

make

their

way to

three

men. Jules miraculously eludes a fusillade

the apartment where they will

kill

of bullets. As they leave, they debate whether he was saved by divine intervention or simple luck. Jules,

who

binding effect

quotes from Ezekiel to spell-

when he

kills

people, suddenly

understands his Biblical text in a quite different way. As is

it

turns out, his

—

possible for a killer

by

life,

this

and perhaps

his soul, will

of the three

is

be saved

present in each

Butch-Fescues

stories.

the black crime boss, from

Butch,

ists.

if it

epiphany.

This theme of redemption

killer,

—

who was

Iris

would-be

honkey

rap-

to be their next victim,

has the opportunity to escape, but goes back.

Redeemed by

this act

of

solidarity,

he

is

for-

given by the crime boss for not throwing the fight

and

The

is

sent

on

his way.

British couple are also saved.

try to rob Jules,

who

They

has ended up in the res-

63

taurant where the film began. his

gun under the

them both away. and honor that this film, Jules

table

prevails

boss.

We

a killing

is

and could

among

down,

He

letting

dutifully returning to the crime is

in the restaurant

capable of

—Amanda

a remarkable sight standing

ing a Saturday-night special. the day before, Jules

them today

if

on

a

and wav-

We also know that

would have

killed

without blinking an eye, and that he

case.

stares

them take

restaurant table screaming obscenities

to kill

of justice

but not the mysterious brief-

rampage is

blow

the lowlifes in

believe that the couple

Plummer

drawn

easily

does the right thing.

own money

case that he

has

Instead, in the spirit

the amateur criminals his

He

will

them have

they try to take the brief-

But Jules sends the couple peacefully out

of the restaurant clutching each other and a trash

bag

filled

with stolen money.

But the best scenes of the film involve Jules

and Vincent.

When

are like college

64

they are not killing, they

sophomores

— both amateur

philosophers eager to share their ideas and experiences.

The improbable

their earnest dialogue

olence

is

juxtaposition of

and the homicidal

vi-

the stylistic twist that allows us to

laugh at the explosion of brains and blood in the backseat of their car. Vincent reacts like a

buddy for

teenager unjustly blamed by his cidentally spilling a beer.

And

like children

overindulgent parents, they have no idea to clean

ac-

of

how

up the mess.

Yes, they

seem oblivious

to the fact that a

But

their absurd dia-

person has been

killed.

logue unexpectedly transforms the meaning

of the violence.

If

Tarantino wanted to de-

fend his film, this could be the foundation of his strongest

the

arguments. Pulp Fiction unmasks

macho myth by making

it

laughable and

deheroicizes the kind of violence glorified by

Hollywood

violence. Tarantino

not didactic.

He

toon violence to

goes from sadistic

is

irreverent,

Road Runner

car-

homosexual rape that

silences the laughter. Tarantino will stop at

65

nothing and yet never into a nightmare

loses control.

He

and comes up with some-

thing funny, taking his audience up and

with him. play

is

Though Tarantino

funny and would be disappointed

comedy.

get the

He

is

quite right; but

humor, you may not

dinary movie.

66

down

thinks his screen-

one laughed, he doesn’t consider Pulp a

dives

if

if

no

Fiction

you don’t

like this extraor-

Seeing Pink Ma Vie en Rose 1997 ,

The Belgian-born director Alain Berliner’s

Ma

violence,

no romance, no

disasters

Vie en Rose has

—not even

certainly

no

aliens,

many

no

no natural

a recognizable

no comedy and, though

about children,

action,

star. It is

it is

a film

parents will not want

their children to see it-dtr fact,

one wonders

who

the target audience might have been. Yet

in a

world that genuinely prized, rather than

just tolerated, difference, this film

would have

been made by Disney. This story of a sevenyear-old French boy is

meant

first

in

to be a girl

who is,

to

is

convinced that he

my knowledge,

the

cinematic exploration of gender identity

young

children;

and

it

marks a new, truth-

departure in cinematic understanding of

ful

difference in

human

sexuality.

Films about sexual identity and difference are

now commonplace, and straight audiences

seem

to take

them

in stride.

Are we

more empathic, more

tolerant,

now more

able to respond

emotionally to gay and lesbian eroticism?

have audiences

come

—though more

tolerant

—

Or be-

inured to gay and gender-bending

as

they are to violence? Open-minded-

images

as

ness

not quite empathy: empathy demands

is

an identification with the other that permits a

and transformative experience. And

vicarious

film has the capacity to either deepen rify the

emotions or deaden the

The outcome depends on both and

sensibilities.

the filmmaker

his audience.

My Beautiful Laundrette ple,

and pu-

(1985), for

was a modern Romeo andJuliet set

London

in

which the

in

examSouth

star-crossed lovers were

and

two men,

a Pakistani

plumbed

the depths of every man’s uncon-

68

a skinhead; the film

and demanded

scious sexual feelings

response. feel

Gay men could go

a

human

to this film

aroused, and straight men,

if they

themselves, could understand

how

and

allowed

this

was

possible.

Ma Vie en Rose

not

is

Beautiful Laundrette.

as

challenging as

Still, it is

a

My

major achieve-

ment. Ludovic has the innocence of every other seven-year-old child.

It is

impossible not to

empathize with him.

Ludovic

is

the youngest of four children in

a French family that has finally its

financial problems.

father, Pierre, has

him

Pierres just

to solve

We learn that Ludovic’s

begonr€ friendly with his

boss (and neighbor),

sured

begun

who

has personally as-

that even in the face of downsizing,

good job will be

moved

secure.

The

family has

into the French equivalent of Lev-

ittown and are preparing for a housewarming. After years of skimping, Ludovic’s parents are in a celebratory

their

new

mood

as

they prepare to greet

neighbors.

69

From

the start Berliner shows us that every

family has

knots and tangles. In the

its

new

middle-class neighborhood

we

see glimpses

of the tension and grief that

lie

behind other

Pierre’s boss

and

their children.

The

familes’

ranch-house doors.

his wife

have

one of

lost

mother has preserved her daughter’s room a shrine to her inconsolable loss.

and son must bear

neighbors ting

on

we

are

watching a

his

As we meet the

large dangling earrings

lipstick in front

is

lives.

also see a long-haired child put-

on

this

Her husband

burden of grief at the

this

center of their shared

of a mirror.

little girl

and daubing

We

think

housewarming

playing dress-up. But

is

his girlish beauty.

to be his

this material, Berliner finds his

child’s perspective.

on French

way in

it

will

on

from

a

We see children’s programs

television

commercials.

The

“coming out.”

Rather than imposing a directorial

70

we

Ludovic, innocently preparing to impress

new neighbors with

like

as

and segments

We

that look

see Ludovic’s fantasies:

a

mix of television and

fairy tale created

out of

computer graphics. Berliner wraps his film in pink. suggests Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose”

about love.

how

life is

But pink

and from the

is

rose-colored

Its title

—

a

when one

also the color

is

in

of girlishness,

moments, the

film’s first

song

cin-

ematography indulges various shades of pink, including the pinks of the nursery and the “flesh-colored” pinks of plastic children’s dolls.

Ludovic’s television fairy in a haze

bosom

godmother comes on

of computerized pink, her ample pink

barely contained in

its

pink decolletage.

She moves from cartoon iigure to

real

person

before our eyes in imaginatively constructed

cinematography.

But girl-boys,

to use Ludovic’s term, are

just imaginative constructions.

boy,” as he ture,

is

is

known

not

The “effeminate

in the psychiatric litera-

one of the most persuasive demonstra-

tions that gender identity

The girl-boy has

is

biologically given.

the gait, habitus,

and gender-

71

distinctive all

and

girl-girl,

it

seems to be innate rather than acquired,

Ludovic’s his

mannerisms of the

own

imaginative theory

chromosomes came down

Ys accidentally got knocked

the

off.

is

when

that

chimney

his

Whatever the

explanation, girl-boys are a source of humiliation for their parents and objects of torment

world

for their peers; they retreat into a fantasy for consolation.

And

as this film

poignantly

suggests, neither the child nor his parents can

be blamed. Predictably, Ludovic’s

“coming out” shocks

the neighbors, though Pierre adroitly covers

up by declaring joker.

is

But Ludovic’s conviction that he

to be a girl tite,

that his youngest son

is

he puts

the back.

no

joke.

A determined

his short pants

He

is

fearful

is

a great

meant

transves-

on with the

and awkward

Worst of all, he picks the son of

it

fly in

at soccer.

Pierre’s

boss

to be his boyfriend, and, violating the shrine

of the dead daughter, puts on her communion dress

72

and

stages a make-believe

wedding. The

grieving is

mother discovers the ceremony and

devastated by the sacrilege. Pierre’s boss and

the neighbors turn ily.

The

pette

”

bewildered child

—French

the word’s

is

literal

is

fam-

his

derided as a “ta-

slang for “faggot.”

Ludovic’s innocence

why

on Ludovic and

One sign of

that he understands only

meaning, and asks

people are calling him a

his parents

fly swatter.

Ludovic’s parents are ashamed and indignant.

They try everything. They consult a child

psychologist,

who wonders whether

have wanted a

girl.

they

The psychologist’s

makes Ludovic’s mother to cut his hair, but

feel guilty

may

question

enough

hej>mOthering obviously

doesn’t explain his behavior. Eventually the

child psychologist gives up, acknowledging that therapy interest in

is

useless since her patient has

no

being cured. By then, Ludovic has

been thrown out of grade school.

He

is

the

moral leper of the neighborhood and the cause of conflict and resentment in his family since his parents

blame each other

for his behavior.

73

Pierres boss worries that his son

is

fond of

Ludovic and has been corrupted. The bottom falls

out

when

Pierre loses his job.

At the moment of total family is

disaster, Ludovic’s

round him: whatever he

rallies

their child.

they want

Still,

is,

he

him back

in

move

to

the closet. Escaping suburbia, they

Clermont-Ferrand, hoping that Ludovic able to suppress his girl-boy nature

them ily.

to

make

Though

makes an

it

he

is

and

to play

and allow

makes him unhappy, Ludovic

effort to act like a boy.

set

be

a fresh start as a normal fam-

the friendless child self,

will

is

day

as

mooning around by him-

upon by

reacts

One

a bully

who wants him

by retreating into

world: across the highway

is

his fantasy

a billboard bearing

the likeness of his television fairy godmother; a

ladder it.

left

behind by workers beckons him

In a dreamlike scene

we

see

up the ladder and escape into fantasy.

Ludovic climb a

happy pink

His worried mother goes looking for

him. Something

74

to

tells

her to go up the ladder,

and the sequence suggests

mother and

that

son will be united by sharing Ludovic’s imaginative world.

Who

can doubt the wisdom of

this unity?

might have ended

Berliner

his story in-

he continues until he

side the billboard, but

finds a kind of solution in the real world.

The young

bully

wanted him

who

picked on Ludovic and

to play turns out to be a

tomboy.

(As Berliner rightly recognizes, tomboys or boygirls are

much less shocking in our patriarchal

world than vites

girl-boys.)

The

mother

bully’s

in-

Ludovic and his family to her daughter’s

dress-up birthday partyrTTudovic has to wear a

manly costume, and the tomboy, misera-

ble in her princess

gown,

gets

Ludovic into a

shed, overcomes his desperate resistance,

changes clothes with him. gled Ludovic shows

up

When

and

the bedrag-

as a princess, his

out-

raged parents are ready to set upop him. This time, however, the tomgirl’s

and the bully confesses that

mother it

was

intervenes,

all

her

fault.

75

Ludovic and exile.

his family are saved

Clermont-Ferrand,

it

seems,

from is

social

more

tol-

The

erant of gender-bending than suburbia. boy-girl has saved the girl-boy.

But ending:

his

moment of symmetry is

we do not

an easy one.

expect Ludovics

And yet perhaps,

use his imagination to find

own

76

creation.

not a happy life

like Piaf,

to be

he

community

will

in his

Selling (Out)

Nabokov Lolita 1997 ,

Vladimir Nabokov, retire

who

from teaching on the

was able to

sales

of Lolita, said

he was being “kept by a 12-year-old a

way he was

ies

right. Lolita sold so

many

In

cop-

because of the double-barreled hype of ta-

boo-breaking sexuality and high all

girl.”

art.

Not

that

those copies were,re2ct. Lolita, despite

its

pedophiliac plot, offers no payoff, no pornographic (in Nabokov’s words) “copulation of cliches.”

What is sublime readers will find only

with considerable

effort.

Every paragraph

is

steeped in arcane literary-cultural-philological allusions.

One Nabokov scholar aptly described

Lolitas sexual appeal as an “erotic under lock

and

key, buried

deep in the library stacks.”

,

Why,

then,

sual images tlety

To

make

The

a film of Lolita ?

vi-

of film are an affront to the sub-

and complexity of Nabokovian language.

his credit,

Stephen

Schiff,

who

wrote the

screenplay, clearly recognized the problem. “1

would never claim Nabokov’s

Lolita.

that I

we are filming Vladimir

would

say only that

we

are

attempting to translate into a kind of exciting sign language

—

the language of film

one of the century’s

greatest masters

—what

of prose

rendered so incomparably on the page.” Unfortunately, everything greatest

about the master

has been lost in Schiff’s failed and bowdlerized translation.

To be

sure, perfect translations

from

lan-

guage into images are nearly impossible. But the tors

new Lolita fails even

to give

what the direc-

of Howard’s End, Sense and Sensibility, Lhe

Wings ofthe Dove and Les Miserables achieved: a feeling for the magic of the original.

the “sign language”

medium

Nor

is

of film implaca-

bly hostile to intellectual depth, as Hal Hartley

78

,

showed with

his brilliant

Henry Fool. But

Lolita

The commercial

is

and uncondescending relentlessly shallow.

success of the direc-

tor Adrian Lyne’s previous films

(

Flashdance

Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal) allowed to set his aesthetic sights higher.

him

When he chose

Nabokovs Lolita, he knew he faced a large challenge, greater

tinguish for

it

still

because he would have to dis-

from Stanley Kubricks 1962

which Nabokov wrote the Kubricks

Lolita,

Lolita,

screenplay.

now considered something

of a milestone in modern filmmaking, was notable for

mor

its

over-the-top acting,

fts

weird hu-

(Pauline Kael dubbecfit “black slapstick”),

and the decision

to foreground Peter Sellers as

Quilty. Shelley Winters gave a superb perfor-

mance no

film

as Lolita’s absurdly hysterical

makes

mother;

better use of her shrill talents.

James Mason was the Humbert Humbert of the novel

and an unexpectedly

foil for Sellers.

perfect

comic

The improbable contest between

the two pedophiles, which lurks in the shadows

79

of the novel, takes the spotlight film. It

in Kubrick’s

was not the novel, but one could hear

Vladimir Nabokov’s unmistakable voice

new medium. And Kubrick had

in the

the sly wit to

put a conspicuous but unidentified picture of

Nabokov on

the wall in the scene of the fatal

confrontation between Quilty and Humbert.

This

is

exactly the kind of allusion that

Nabo-

kov worked into every page of his novel.

When it was released, many critics thought that Kubrick’s surreal take ally reprehensible.

on

Lolita

was mor-

Even the most discerning

film critics were offended. Stanley

Kauffmann

blamed Nabokov for a screenplay that was condescending to the film medium. Pauline Kael reports that Reinhold Niebuhr, the leading

American theologian of the

day, obviously did

not understand Kubrick’s film or the novel, both of which end with a pregnant ried to a

young man who

oblivious to her sordid past. ers

80

of the novel

will

is

Lolita,

literally

While

mar-

deaf and

careful read-

know that Lolita the house-

wife

destined to die in childbirth, Niebuhr

is

wrote uncomprehendingly about

this

ending as

an obscured moral lesson of “Lolita’s essential

And Arthur

redemption in a happy marriage.”

Schlesinger Jr. weighed in for the American intelligentsia, declaring that

only inhuman,

it is

Kubricks film

“not

antihuman.” Kael was one

who got the joke.

of the few

critics

away

of her review she gave what

line

is

In a throw-

may

be

the most illuminating description of Nabokovs novel:

“A

satire

Moralists

on the myths of love.”

who attack Nabokov for flouting

basic moral values

and psychologists who want

to analyze his characters' might

realized that Lolita

was written

attempts seem foolish. in

much

the

do

—

to

make such

Nabokov says he wrote

way he composed

to support himself as a Russian

rope

better if they

chess puzzles

emigre in Eu-

delighting in planting misleading clues.

Perhaps even more telling of Nabokovs project is

his description in his novel

music-hall performance.

Ada of an English

An apparition comes 81

careening onto the stage, defying the laws of gravity flips

and the

backwards onto

human

of the

limits its

hands and

until at last a foot reaches

spine.

races

around

down, opening

baggy pants to reveal an acrobat

who

It

its

has bra-

chiambulated (Nabokovs neologism) onto the stage. is

The audience

bursts into applause. This

the essential Nabokov, and the characters in

Lolita are similar apparitions,

meant

laws of the moral universe and

human

psychology,

Nabokov was not able

real characters

real relationships

it

of artistry.

interested in creating believ-

Nabokov thinks describes

the limits of

for the sake

all

and psychologically

veloping

test

to defy the

in detail.

or de-

between them.

the unthinkable

and then

For those who doubt

this

and want to read Lolita as a love story, consider the novel’s study-hall scene. bert, sexually obsessed lita

and

65 cents to masturbate

Humbert Hum-

insatiable, pays

him while he

the white neck of her schoolmate

grossed in a book.

82

He

who

Lo-

ogles is

en-

confides to the reader

he cannot

resist

because he

have such an opportunity.

may

never again

The scene

is

typical

of the novel and seems to have been borrowed

from Havelock gard for

Ellis,

who

zarre particulars

the

same way

flies.

Lolita

Ellis.

Nabokov had

collected

a high re-

and recorded

of exotic perversions in

that

Nabokov

bi-

much

collected butter-

mocks middle-class convention

but even more the Freudian generalizations about the pedophile and

his victim.

Nabokov

famously despised psychoanalytic generalizations (Freud

was

“a hot-air balloonist”)

the entire “Viennese Delegation.”

on

a

all

of his writings.

He

and

carried

war of witticisms with psychoanalysis

Kubrick’s Lolita was true to this Lyne’s

in

spirit.

new Lolita gets almost everything wrong.

After commissioning and then rejecting screenplays

by Harold Pinter and David Mamet, he

hired Stephen Schiff,

who would hdp him turn

Humbert Humbert

into a tormented victim.

Theirs

is

a humorless tale of doomed passion

83

and unreciprocated love with osis: in

the

end Humbert

moral apothe-

a

he has

realizes that

stolen Lolitas childhood. It

would be absurd

to argue that the novel

contains nothing of this kind:

taken verbatim from the

film’s lines are

But Nabokovs

trick

—and

Humbert Humbert’s

sion. Readers

thy with

come

it is

a trick

human

put every possibility of a into

many of

Nabokov induced both

text. is

to

relationship

self-serving confes-

to have a certain

Humbert even

—

the

as

sympa-

they loathe him:

reactions.

By omit-

ting the loathsome half of our ambivalence

and the

bizarre

comedy of the

defeats Nabokov’s genius

novel, this film

and sentimentalizes

his acerbic wit.

Although the novel contains endless

layers

of irony, beginning with Humbert Humbert’s

name, Schiff ignores them

all

for the sake

of

psychological realism. Schiff, a longtime film reviewer,

knew that you cannot get your foot in

the door with mainstream American moviego-

84

ers unless

with.

you

give

them someone

Humbert Humbert is an

date for identification

meant

unlikely candi-

—former mental audience snob — but patient,

the

pedophile, alcoholic, is

to identify

to sympathize with him.

We see him

enslaved by love and then by the willful Lolita

—

the victimizer

made victim. Jeremy Irons

plays his tormented part faultlessly.

With Lyne s

misguided encouragement, he does everything he can to make Humbert Humbert a psycho-

and sympathetic

logically transparent

Schiff presents the

figure.

myth of the pedophile s love

as the real thing.

Nabokov would

havp-eriTiged.

His

Hum-

bert shares his disdain for the standard psy-

choanalytic cant about infantile sexuality, pedophilia,

and sexual

Humbert

thrives

psychiatrists.

pean asylum

He

false

they decide he

is

fixation,

and

naturally,

on playing games with

his

feeds the doctors of a Euro-

dreams and

is

a homosexual.

mocks the reader who

delighted when

The

novel also

believes such ideas.

85

Humbert’s charming explanation of

own

pedophilia

and not meant

is

psychologically ridiculous

to be taken seriously.

and Schiff take the account that

mer

bait,

accepting

But Lyne

Humberts sum-

ties his fixation to his first

girlfriend.

his

They begin

their tragic love

story with gauzy scenes of the 12-year-olds,

Humbert and Annabel,

playing on the Riv-

iera beach. In a voice-over Irons tells us

shocking death from typhus

and thus we

six

of her

months

later,

are given a psychological under-

standing of the traumatized

man who can only

break Annabel’s spell “by incarnating her in another.”

The misguided psychological realism

influ-

enced Lyne’s casting of Dominique Swain Lolita,

Melanie Griffith

and Frank Langella

as

as a

her angry mother,

degenerate Quilty.

Schiff has suggested rather snidely that in brick’s Lolita ,

Sue Lyon,

20-year-old porn

Swain, also

15

star.

when

He

Lolita

as

at 15

looked

thinks

Ku-

like a

Dominique

was filmed, has the

virtue of looking like a real

girl.

Yet she

tainly not diminutive or innocent.

is

cer-

She looks

one of those teenagers who have gone from

like

childhood to

womanhood by age 12, and share

On

their mothers’ sexual sophistication.

screen she

She

is,

is

the

almost as large as Irons.

however, a minor, and there are

scenes simulating sexual intercourse in this film that Kubrick avoided.

of it

is

Even though none

crudely pornographic, there should be

serious concerns about the psychological effects

on

a teenage girl of acting out a sexual affair

with a

man who

father.

And what we

reports that he

cutting room.

is

had

supposed to be her stepsee js~rn5 t

all

a lawyer with

of

it:

him

in the

We know that Kubricks choice,

Sue Lyon, had a troubled

life after Lolita,

Lyne’s press releases report that he sent

and

Swain

a fancy Swiss psychiatrist as a preventive sure.

Lyne

to

mea-

That guarantees nothing, and we may ask

—

whether Dominique Swains childhood

—

that of the film’s Lolita

like

has been stolen.

87

That question can

fairly

be asked of the

new

Lolita both because of the realism of the film,

and because Schiff s screenplay (unlike Nabokov’s novel or Kubrick’s film)

makes the emo-

between the stepfather and

tional relationship

the daughter the heart of the story. Nabokov’s

novel

is

fession,

located in Humbert’s self-serving con-

not in the

real

pedophile’s fantasy, is

world. Lolita exists as the

and although

his

nymphet

often described in obsessive detail (the

in her armpits as she

lifts

her tennis racket), the

picture of an actual child in those rare

down

comes through only

moments when Humbert

feels a

twinge of guilt. Kubrick cools the heat of the visual

medium by downplaying

Lolita’s role,

centering on the struggle between the pedo-

moviegoers

philes. Schiff, in contrast, gives

believable relationships in

psychologically involved.

which they can

They see

Lolita slowly

getting the better of her stepfather,

more money

in

get

demanding

exchange for her sexual

favors,

then driving him wild with jealousy and lead-

ing

him

with his trol

and

across

America so she can rendezvous

rival,

Quilty.

exploit

Not only does

Humbert but

in the

she con-

one great

(and tragic) irony of the film, she turns out to

—

be actually in love with Quilty

a degenerate

who wants her to act in his pornographic films. Again, there

is

nothing in the scenario that

not in Nabokovs novel, but

transforming

it is

is

out of context,

satire into tragedy.

In truth, the film

is

very

much in the spirit

of a short-story version of Lolita published by Nabokov’s son long after

his father’s death

and

presumably without

his father’s blessing. In

Humbert Humbert

seducesdris stepdaughter

and then commits suicide by walking onto busy highway lacks

all

at night.

of the wit,

manage basis

to

of this

new

style,

and mind-bending

Much

Lolita. If

enhance

a

This wretched story

imagination of the novel. be said of the

it

the

same can

Lyne and Schiff

their reputations

film, they will

have done

it

on the by sell-

ing out Nabokov’s.

89

Happily Ever After The King ofMasks, 1996

A

RECENT RUN OF SUCCESSFUL FOREIGN-

made

films features an affirming “love affair”

between parent and ners,

Two Oscar

child.

Burnt by the Sun and Life

celebrate fathers as Kolya,

who are martyrs.

Central Station, and

is

win-

Beautiful,

Others, such

now The King of

Masks, portray the falUng-Tfflove of an adult

and a young unrelated and unwanted This adult-child “romance” ematic theme, and

it

is

hardly a

staple.

And

my eyes

I

but

it is

came out of

after seeing

second time. This

is

new cin-

smacks of sentimentality.

Pauline Kael complained about trick in foreign films,

child.

it

years ago as a

also a

Hollywood

the theater drying

The King ofMasks for the a film

I

could see once a

month. ofMasks

is

Dickens

is:

human

What

is

The Masks

,

better than therapy. Yes,

The King

sentimental, but in just the

way that

It is

this

nature

is

a film to restore one’s faith in

—your own and other

people’s.

better than that?

director

and producer of The King of

Wu Tian Ming, is widely regarded as the

father of the fifth generation of Chinese film-

makers. (Better known to American audiences his protege

the

Zhang Yimou,

is

the director of Raise

Red Lantern, Red Sorghum, and The

Story

ofQiu Ju .) For years, despite the constraints of censorship,

Wu

economic space dios, to

make

created

enough

political

and

for his group, Xi-an Film Stu-

internationally acclaimed films.

Xi-an films are typically fables, period-piece films safely located in the

art

pre-communist era

that preserved the exotic images of old China.

Even Wu’s The Old Well and Zhang’s Story of

Qiu Ju, both

set in

contemporary China, were

timeless narratives about the

human

ment. Although some Western

92

predica-

critics

could

find political protest in these fables, the Xi-an

filmmakers seemed to have been inspired by the high culture of China’s past.

And

perhaps

because they were constrained by censorship,

Wu and

poured much of

his fifth generation

their creative

energy into their cinematography,

which has both the subtlety and the unexpected exuberance of Chinese

Wu

art.

community of accomplished

led this

film artists until the 1989

Tiananmen Square

demonstrations. As fate would have in the

United States

at the

it,

he was

time on a lecture

tour sponsored by the Chinese-American

munity. land.

com-

Wu resolved not to return to his home-

But

like other creative emigres,

he lan-

guished. After six years of self-imposed exile,

including a stint operating a video store, where

he subjected himself to a huge dose of American films his

—he

homeland

unsure about suffered

no

claims

900

—Wu went back

to

again.

Though he was

how he would

be received, he

to

work

political recriminations.

The

bot-

93

tom

had become more important than

line

ideology in the

new China, and

the Xi-an stu-

dio had been organized to run like a bureau-

Wu was free to bring in more

cratic collective.

talented people,

and be

less

make

deals in

concerned about

sorship. In this climate

Hong Kong,

politics

Wu’s protege, Zhang,

broke loose with a new-edge urban Cool. it

a

and cen-

film,

Keep

When the international community gave

unanimous thumbs-down, Zhang accused

Western

critics

of trying to pigeonhole Chi-

nese filmmakers. But

it

may be that the artistic

achievement of the Xi-an studio

is

an example

of creativity emerging against the tensions of restraints.

Whatever the temptations of the new

dom,

Wu Tian Ming seems immune to them.

The King ofMasks tional

is

an allegory about

Chinese values, the place of the

society,

and the

tion. It

is

at the

possibilities

same time a

artist as survivor.

94

free-

tradi-

artist in

of human connecself-portrait

The King of Masks

is

—

the

set in

Sichuan Province

in 1930, a

time of conflict

between regional warlords and Chiang Kaisheks Nationalist troops.

It

was

also a

natural disaster, as rivers flooded

were

left

The

starving

time of

and the poor

and homeless.

screenplay as filmed has a familiar,

most operatic

structure. All the characters are

introduced in the overture.

al-

There

is

first

few scenes in a cinematic

love at

first sight,

tragic mis-

understanding, character transformation, and a play within the screenplay that

the plot

may

is

crucial to

and coda of a happy ending. There

be nothing

new

in the parent-child ro-

mance, but The King ofMasks evokes an

as-

tonishing emotional intensity of the theme’s greatest portrayals.

According to Hegel, the original portrayals in

Western culture

tic art

—were

—and indeed of

the paintings of the

all

roman-

Madonna

and Child, where the beholder wa$ invited to enter into the sacred spirit of love depicted in Mary’s gaze. In life as in art,

romantic love

95

means entering union

—

into

and sharing an emotional

love as a transcending of the

mantic love between adults to achieve because

it

is

more

self.

Ro-

difficult

entails reciprocity in the

transcendence of self. In the 20th century, such

romantic love

the utopian antidote for our

is

existential loneliness. it,

Everyone

is

looking for

and, indeed, lasting reciprocal love between

adults today

is

a miracle.

and have returned

in life

Many have lost faith and

in art to the par-

ent-child variation.

In Wu’s version, the King of Masks, an old street performer, has learned

practice to change skill

a

masks with the speed and

of a magician. To the people

around him is

through years of

it is

a trick.

consummate

artist

who

gather

But the King of Masks

and the

last practitio-

ner of a traditional art form that will die with

him

if

he finds no

disciple.

His tradition also

requires that the secrets of his art be passed to a son.

and

96

But

his

his wife has

on

only son died in childhood, long since abandoned him.

The King of Masks moves through uan Province in a houseboat on the

monkey

trained

is

his

Sich-

river.

His

only companion.

Wu

seems to have exploited every mannerism of animal actor to a good purpose.

his

genius ofWu’s direction. There

is

pacing back and forth, used by

almost

empha-

hope of suggesting the uncanny

size this in the

vey the

I

mood

human

the frantic

Wu

to con-

of desperation; the quizzical, expression that asks

what these

people are doing; the shrieks and jumping up

and down when the child accidentally sets the houseboat on the film if it

is

fire.

Every emotional passage in

marked by

this" trained

monkey

as

were a kind of Greek chorus.

Wu cast Zhu (of the Beijing Peoples Artistic

Theater) as the King of Masks and the eight-

year-old

were

Zhou Renying as Doggie because they

in real life

Zhu is tall,

what they were

lean,

and aged but not bent, with a

missing front tooth that dignity.

He

to be in his film.

somehow adds

to his

has been performing for over 40

97

years

and has endured every

adversity, includ-

ing the Cultural Revolution.

Zhou Renying

was a member of the Xi-an Acrobatic Troupe. Sent there by her very poor family

was three years

film,

The

Zhao Zhigang,

she

grew up without pa-

old, she

rental nurturing.

when

third central actor in the is

of the Shaoxing Opera.

in real life “the Prince ’’

ter Liang, the celebrated

Wu cast him as Masfemale impersonator

of the Sichuan Opera. Zhao conveys a sense of resignation and regret

though

as

culinity has been imprisoned in an if celebrated,

some

his

mas-

unwanted,

female identity. All three are in

sense social outcasts, the lonely street

performer, the unwanted

girl,

and the

famous Master Liang trapped

rich

and

in his female

impersonation.

The King of Masks knows

his

own

is

value even

a

proud

if

no one

But behind the old man’s pride we

ows of

his loneliness. In a

artist,

who

else does.

see the shad-

Sichuan Province

shaken by war and ravaged by floods starving

98

parents are selling their sons and giving their

daughters away to anyone

the daughters

who

— out “Yeh Yeh”

“Yeh Yeh”

will

this film, as

Then

a child’s voice

echo in your mind

Doggie

their

“grandfather” in Chinese.

utters

it

after seeing

with every

ent emotion of which a child

is

differ-

capable. This

“Yeh Yeh” causes the King of Masks to turn

back and behold

Here is

him by

are thrust at

mothers; he wants a son.

first

promises the

home. The King of Masks does not want

child a

cries

who

is

just the little

the miracle of love at

boy he wants.

first sight.

A price

agreed upon, and, after buying Doggie

clothes, little

he triumphantly takes the child to

his

houseboat on the riverbank.

The monkey

—

of displeasure

greets the child with a

sibling rivalry?

The

rival.

child

warms

when

the crucial

to the

new

ar-

to the King’s kindness,

and both allow themselves is

show

—but soon man

and monkey have succumbed

This

new

to be vulnerable.

moment in every love affair,

the defensive

armor

is let

down. This

99

does not

come easy to

even though

lovers,

it

in heaven. Doggie, as

either

looks like a match

we will soon

a girl pretending to be a

could

sell

in several

of these would-be

made

discover,

is

boy so that the dealer

her for a price. She had already been

homes where she had been abused,

so

she has reasons to be defensive and distrusting. Like

she

many would-be lovers,

is

not prepared to

tell.

taking Doggie into his

of

self-sufficiency.

his

she has a secret that

And

life, is

Now,

as

the King, in

giving

up

years

Doggie scratches

back where he cannot reach, he throws

his

backscratcher into the river to seal his commit-

ment to

their love affair.

When he discovers the

deception he will be outraged.

The King ofMasks

is

ability to give structure

about traditions

—

and meaning, and

their

their

tendency to oppress. The King of Masks and Master Liang may be outcasts, but they practice traditional art forms that bring a to cold reality.

tions

ioo

is

what

Their belief in their

unites

little

warmth

artistic tradi-

and protects them from the

self-interested cynicism that

(One can not help but director’s

surrounds them.

believe that this

the

is

account and justification for what he

has done with his

own

life.)

But tradition

also

has the King of Masks believe that he cannot

bequeath his

and wants

Doggie. She has his talent

to be his apprentice.

two were made

these his

art to

and China’s

We can see that

for each other,

and only

patriarchal tradition interferes

with their union. Part of Doggie’s irresistible

she

is

tion

charm

is

both naive about the power of the

and indignant

as to

that

tradi-

why. a “teapot spout”

should make such a difference.

Wu sets this in-

nocent conviction against China’s patriarchal tradition,

and

its

history of female infanticide,

that echoes into this century. Will this indig-

nant

little girl

conquer an age-old tradition

for

everyone’s benefit?

The

resolution of Doggie’s gender impos-

ture will require the intervention of Master

Liang,

who

lives

between the categories and

IOI

mediates between male and female. Master

Liang befriends the King of Masks and invites

him and Doggie filial

love in

to a

which he

Chinese Opera about plays a daughter

who

leaps into the pits of hell to save her father

and

is

reborn as the living Bodhisattva. In the

Buddhist tradition of China, the Bodhisattva is

worshiped

as a deity

because on the verge of

Nirvana the Bodhisattva renounced

bliss

out

of compassion for others.

The Chinese language for love

of a parent: xiao.

respect,

and obedient

has a special

love.

It

word

conveys honor,

Doggie,

who

has

never had a parent’s love, has become stubborn,

determined, and defiant, causing lamities to befall the to

all

King of Masks

sorts

of ca-

as she tries

make him accept her. But after learning xiao

from Master Liang’s performance, she life

to save Yeh

risks

her

Yeh from death. She does not die

or turn into the living Bodhisattva, but she does

make the proud old man unbend and love her. As the

102

film ends

we see her practicing with

the

King of Masks.

We know that his

art will

not

die

and

that there will be a happily ever after.

We

also

know

that both

Yeh Yeh and Doggie

have broken out of the cage of their characters in order to achieve lasting love.

Confucius said that

human

nature

same everywhere; only the customs ent.

This

was

right.

is

a film that will

is

the

are differ-

make you hope he

103

—

Redemption American Beauty 1999 ,

Most see

critics

and filmgoers appear to

American Beauty

as a black-comic, ironic

caricature of dysfunctional suburbia culminat-

ing in a weirdo looking at a dead guy and apparently enjoying

It is

it.

movie could produce such “decent” people in a tax attorney,

they seem at ties.

it

reactions.

how

the

The only

are a couple of gay

and an

home

easy to see

men,

anesthesiologist; only

in their

suburban identi-

Virtually everyone else lacks a sense of

authenticity

and pretends to some quality

self-control, self-confidence, worldliness

he or she

lacks.

—

that

American Beauty unmasks

these pathological deceptions

all

and exposes the

hypocrisy of middle-class morality.

—

Rut there first

and

is

more

film for both its

to

its

American Beauty

—

the

Sam Mendes,

director,

screenwriter, the playwright

Alan

Ball

than meets the eye. Indeed, the movie

extended meditation on beauty

—

its

is

an

mean-

ing and deep importance. In exploring this

theme, the film

in effect enacts the

views about

beauty and ethics advanced by the Harvard literature professor Elaine Scarry in her

On

Beauty and Being Just.

I

suggest that the filmmakers Scarry’s ideas.

canny

do not mean drew

directly

in parallel, Scarry

and American Beauty have touched mass consciousness

meaning

—

a

chord of

a millennial search for

in beauty.

Scarry has two sets of ideas. felt

on

something more than

mere coincidence. Perhaps,

the

to

But the resonances are so un-

that they suggest

spiritual

book

One

is

about

experience of beauty: the “surfeit of

aliveness,

the “decentering” of the self in con-

sciousness,

and the

body

106

flicker

from the mind

that validates the sentient

to the

moment. This

is

beauty as a wake-up

call to

the plenitude of

American Beauty presents a similar mes-

life.

sage.

We

ley), a

hear

from Ricky

it

teenager

who

everything he sees.

(Wes Bent-

Fitts

compulsively videotapes

And we

hear

at the

it

of the film in a voice-over by Lester

who

(Kevin Spacey), fully,

has died for

not before he enjoyed a few

end

Burnham

—thank-

it

moments of

moral enlightenment. Scarry’s other set

of ideas

is

about the con-

nection between beauty and moral insight. Beauty, she says, “ignites the desire for truth,”

and

is

deeply connected to symmetry, fairness,

and justice lar

itself.

American Beauty makes simi-

connections and goes further, suggesting

that spiritual redemption begins with the expe-

rience of beauty.

Look at beauty and something

looks back: perhaps

God

Himself.

American Beauty’s paradigm of beauty is

neither the

young girl who

is

the

American beauty nor anything else

eponymous that

is

con-

107

ventionally beautiful. a plastic bag.

and dead

Ricky has videotaped some trash

leaves

caught

in the

wind; their dance,

of nature, choreographs inanimate

a miracle litter

improbably enough,

It is,

into beauty. Ricky

tells

us that

it is

the

most beautiful thing he has ever seen. The New York Times critic Stephen

image

as

Holden

identifies this

being borrowed from Variations, an

avant-garde silent film by Nathaniel Dorsky

about unconventional and unexpected glimpses

of beauty.

Ricky of beauty. tal

Fitts is the

this religion

He has survived two years in a men-

hospital,

father,

prophet of

where he was incarcerated by

an ex-Marine colonel. Colonel

his

Fitts

(Chris Cooper) makes George Patton seem like a is

teddy bear. All his militaristic manliness

fueled by a repressed homosexuality that ex-

plodes and destroys. cal

He

is

the most pathologi-

example of a conventional American man.

His wife has been driven into catatonia, and

Ricky has escaped into the

108

bliss

of beauty.

Like

many

literature,

of his predecessors in film and

Ricky, the strange outsider, exposes

the madness of normal

life.

Drugged

bie-hood by psychiatrists, he the best marijuana

vocation

and

—capturing

zom-

into

now “parties” on

sells it

to support his

the world and

its

unex-

pected beauty in his video camera. This beauty transcends the quotidian world, aesthetic conventions, the ugliness of the

even the horror of death

commonplace, and

—and he

captures

it

because he has what the philosopher Stuart

Hampshire, in a review of Scarry’s book, called “the arts of attention.”^,—

Beauty has driven

fear

out of Ricky’s world.

He will look into the eye of the murdered Lester

Burnham with

a strange smile of pleasure

signaling the “surfeit of aliveness” in the face

of death, the validating to the

body

as

he saw

film’s script carefully

anic ter

flicker

God

from the mind

looking back.

The

prepares us tor this epiph-

moment. Ricky has

told Lester’s daugh-

Jane (Thora Birch), with

whom

he

is

in

109

beauty grounds the world and his

love, that

own is

being. Sometimes, he

aware of

vert

in. is

feels as

though

begins as

conversion

will end,

it

ter’s spirit:

con-

is

the black

comedy

The

in

film

with a voice-over by Les-

“My name is Lester Burnham. This

my neighborhood. This is my street. This my life. In less than a year be dead. Of I’ll

course

I

don’t

know that yet.

already.” Lester

is

a

work can he

failure.

is

become

climb the ladder of commercial

a control freak

rule her family

Neither in love nor

a real-estate agent desper-

success. Feeling inadequate

has

and vulnerable, she

whose compulsions

and make intimacy impossible,

jane, their only child, despises

no

way I’m dead

find meaning. His wife Carolyn

(Annette Bening) ately trying to

In a

man whose moral adventure

seems to have been a in

real

Lester.

the foreground of American Beauty.

is

is

his heart will

Jane loves him, but his only

Lester’s

is

when he

the beauty in the world, he

all

overwhelmed and cave

tells her,

them both.

If ever a

ness, Lester

man needed a strong dose of aliveBurnham

does.

Dragged by

wife to a high-school basketball

support for Jane, ers,

he finds

his

who

is

game

his

show

to

one of the cheerlead-

beauty in another cheerleader,

Angela (Mena Suvari), a traditional American beauty and the best friend of his

ventionally beautiful daughter. But

pens

is

exactly as if Scarry

Scarry writes, “At the

than con-

less

what hap-

had staged the scene.

moment one comes into

the presence of something beautiful,

you. as

It lifts

it

greets

away from the neutral background

though coming forwaxd to welcome you

though the object were designed to perception.” Just so,

‘fit’

—

as

your

we enter Lesters mind and

watch

as all the other cheerleaders disappear

and a

spotlight

gel”

on Angela. And

seems to welcome him

out of her is,

falls

his “an-

as rose petals

pour

bosom toward him. This moment

of course, not innocent. The middle-aged

father smitten

friend

is

by

his daughter’s high-school

the nightmare of suburbia, and the

hi

movie builds tension around the its

possibility of

consummation.

The American

beauty,

dysfunctional as everyone

it

turns out,

else.

is

as

Angela thinks

that sophistication consists in the easy use of foul language

and

talk

about sexual experiences.

She presents herself as an aspiring model and feigns a worldly willingness to sleep her to the top.

But her coarseness and cynicism

conceal an immaturity and utter lack of confidence. She ordinary.

way

is

terrified

Her friend Jane

pretenses until Ricky

self-

of being plain and

accepts

all

of Angela’s

comes into the picture

and, with his discerning eye and his nonstop

video taping, reveals the truth. Jane becomes the swan, Angela the ugly duckling. Still,

beauty ignites Lester’s desire for some-

thing better.

He quits his job, thumbs his nose

at his wife’s

compulsions, and retreats to his

last

remembered time of happiness, even

ness

—

adolescence, in the 1960s. Ricky helps

him along by introducing him

112

alive-

to the best

weed

on the

He

planet.

gets high,

works out, buys

a red Pontiac, finds a job in a fast-food drive-

through, and generally chills. All this animation

who

outrages his wife,

starts

an

affair

charged

with excitement but devoid of love or beauty.

Her

father’s

cynical advice

—

behavior and her mother’s in life

you can only count on

—drives Jane into the arms of Ricky

yourself Fitts.

When Jane wishes her father dead,

offers to kill

him.

Ricky

he bluffing? Meanwhile,

Is

Lester’s wife has learned the ecstasy

gun from her partner

in adultery

of firing a

and has mas-

tered a motivational tape-mantra: “I will not be

a victim.” She, too,

And

Colonel

Fitts, after

seeing

what he

takes

homosexual encounter between Ricky

to be a

and Lester ters his

(it is

really a

drug transaction), bat-

—and then

son in a homophobic rage

succumbs

to his

extraordinary kisses Lester

When

thinking of killing Lester.

is

Lester,

own homosexual

urges.

The

moment when he embraces and

on the

lips is difficult to forget.

now as

chilled out as a

man

can

get, gently refuses his sexual

nel suffers the

advances, the colo-

kind of humiliation that engen-

ders homicidal thoughts.

While everyone him, Lester

finally gets his

American beauty. the

girl

of his dreams reveals that she

moment

his

He

ment.

was a wake-up

the

call, this

more powerful decen-

has an even

becomes aware of his

instinctive goodness.

young

girl’s virginity,

He

refuses to take

and

this act

another world to him. Suddenly he to the beauty to his love

distracted

more she

is

of life, to truth, to his

far

now

it.

family.

He

allows her a

when she sets

is

alive

and

Beauty has not

reassures

—

opens

justice,

the world but

from ordinary

—and

intimacy

own

him from

attentive to

beautiful

is

of

a vir-

is

of grace and moral enlighten-

tering experience as he

own

chance with the

When the seduction begins,

gin. If discovering her is

thinking about killing

is

made him

Angela that

that she

is,

in fact,

moment of human

aside her pretenses.

He

able to think about his daughter Jane

as a real is

person and

is

in love with Ricky.

and we

his family,

delighted to learn she

He

see

picks

up

mind

of

him enthusing about

beauty and having that ecstatic the

a picture

flicker

from

to the body.

In that instant, he

is

shot.

As Ricky peers

into the dead man’s eye, Lester’s conversion to

the aesthetic of redemptive beauty to us.

The moment

us in his stant in

—

you

before

spirit’s final

you

the

moment

of life, and with “the

life

now

was

passes before

arts

Out of

about the beauty

of attention”

now at

filled

with beauty. Like Ricky,

speaks of seeing the beauty behind

everything.

He

reprises Ricky’s version

world’s overflowing beauty in a

way: there

he

not an in-

command, he describes how every moment

of his

he

life

is

goes on and on.

this infinitude Lester speaks

his

revealed

die, Lester tells

voice-over,

which your whole

is

is

so

is

more hopeful

much beauty in the world that

feels his heart will burst

there

of the

and then instead

rain everywhere.

115

Leo Tolstoy wrote that unlike happy families,

are

who

are

unhappy

all

the same,

ways.

in different

filmmakers today, as

it

ticulars for a believably

unhappy

What

happy

of something

redemptive

moment

eludes

did Tolstoy, are the parfamily.

Beauty does not have a formula, but possibility

families

it

American offers the

better, if only for

one

might go on forever

that

in a possible hereafter.

The remaining

my interpretation

and

mystery, however,

of it,

that

is

for

most of the au-

dience does not see beauty in the miracle of the trash dance. Garbage a

wanna-be

sophisticate,

is

garbage, Angela

and Ricky

is

a

is

wacked-

out drug dealer. Most viewers cannot adjust their aesthetic perceptions.

Art and beauty have

always been about finding the universal in the particular,

but sometimes

it is

not easily found.

Scarry and Ricky Fitts find beauty because they are artists in the arts

beauty

is

in the praxis

an effort of the

116

of attention;

will,

in that sense

of the beholder.

It

the heart, and the

takes

mind

to experience the nite

all

sorts

suggests that nature,

of

wake-up

desires,

call.

Beauty can

ig-

but American Beauty

some other alchemy of human

something more than beauty

itself, is

needed to draw virtue from the flames.

Feet of Clay Thirteen Days,

No MORE THAN

2000

TEN PEOPLE WERE IN THE

audience at the afternoon showing of Thirteen

My brother and I had gone to the film to relax. We had both lived through the 1962 Cu-

Days.

ban Missile

Crisis,

when America had been on

the brink of nuclear war wjth the Soviet Union,

and you wondered whether you were to have built a

bomb

shelter for

But the events had been replayed before.

The Cuban

among

the

most

of the Cold War. So

your family.

many times

Missile Crisis

carefully

now

ranks

documented events

how could

be made suspenseful? But

a fool not

it

Thirteen Days

was.

My brother

and I emerged from the movie dewy-eyed with tears

of

relief as

we once

again realized

how

close the

world had come to Armageddon.

my

Despite

emotional reaction,

cal faculties told

my

me I was watching a

Comics” docudrama

in

which the

cast

criti-

“Classic

was not

—and not

acting but impersonating real people

doing a good Jack

job.

Bruce Greenwood played

Kennedy but could not summon up

president’s aura; Steven

Kennedy with

sistant

Culp played Bobby

a disconcerting effeminacy;

Kevin Costner,

who

the

and

starred as presidential as-

Kenny O’Donnell, had a ridiculous ver-

sion of a Boston accent and, in a

rewriting of history, in the crisis. Still,

became

my

Hollywood

a central player

reason failed to protect

my psyche. my

In part, logical craft

son. But lived

it

reaction

owed

to the psycho-

of the director, Roger Donald-

was

also a

consequence of having

through the days when the possibility

of nuclear holocaust seemed

real (in fact, as

the financial backers had feared, the younger

audience stayed away). Such experiences are

120

never completely forgotten; they settle into the unconscious.

Atomic explosions became

an archetypal vision of the apocalypse, and they are the dramatic crux of the film.

opening image cloud,

is

mushroom

a special-effects

somehow more

beauty. This

its

is

The

horrifying because of

followed by the rapid firing

of a swarm of surface-to-air missiles, an

icbm

launch, and a mysterious projectile hurtling

through space. Before the mind can assimilate these images, the brain ity

jumps

to the possibil-

Then

of a world-ending nuclear war.

that

mysterious projectile swoops away.and resolves into the fuselage of a it

fly

siles,

Uz

spy plane.

We watch

over Cuba, photograph the Soviet mis-

and

set the crisis in

motion.

And lest your attention wander, the director uses this psychological device at repeated intervals.

Halfway through the

film,

he suddenly

interposes another atomic explosion. This time

a massive hydrogen

plumes

bomb

lifts its

man-made

until they tower over the natural clouds.

121

Has Donaldson gone overboard? Are we be shown

how

ended? No,

to

the war of nerves could have

this

is

not

fiction.

David

Self’s

screenplay narrative has based each of these

moments on

terrifying visual

the

actual events:

Atomic Energy Commission went forward

with a scheduled hydrogen-bomb Pacific

during the

possibility that

it

crisis

test in the

without considering the

might seem

a provocation to

nervous Kremlin generals.

There were other provocations that jfk never intended

—

indeed,

Some were

rector includes.

premise of Thirteen Days

and other hawks

in the

is

more than the di-

accidental, but the

that

Maxwell Taylor

Pentagon were eager to

provoke the Russians into World War

would

have,

had

Kennedy and

it

III

—and

not been for Jack and Bobby

their only loyal friend in the

White House, Kenny O’Donnell. In

Thirteen

Days, these three Irish Catholics from Massachusetts save the world

122

from nuclear holocaust.

And

they have to fight the

own cabinet,

establishment, their

—

Congress

wasp Washington the cia,

Khrushchev

as well as

—

do

to

and it.

(The film unfortunately says nothing about the events leading

up

to the crisis. In Thirteen

Days Soviet hard-liners move offensive to

Cuba without any American

No

one doubts that the

provocation.

crisis is real

something must be done about strike

it:

,

secretly taped

America.

icbms

He

first strike

hour.

40

of

missiles

difference, given

that were already

all

the

aimed

does not get a direct answer,

but Soviet missiles in

Americans in

a

White Housgjdeliberations, the

make that much

other Soviet

sites,

transcripts

president asks his experts whether

sian

a surgical

of Cuba, or both. Yet in

The Kennedy Tapes a book of

at

and that

by the Air Force on the missile

full-scale invasion

really

missiles

Cuba meant

that a Rus-

could destroy the majority of

five

minutes rather

Of course, America had

tfian half

an

missiles in Tur-

key that could do the same to them. Both sides

123

ultimately backed

on the Turkish

though our concession

off,

was not made public

missiles

jfk had not been

at the time,

as

tough

as the

public thought.)

The worst warmonger

in the film

gie-chewing Air Force General Curtis (Kevin Conway). Like

is

sto-

LeMay

Dean Acheson (who was

brought in because he knows the Soviets), Le-

May

thinks the

father,

who

Kennedy boys

as U.S.

take after their

ambassador to England

favored American isolationism and appease-

ment of

Hitler.

When

about preemptive these

the

on

strikes

warmongers think

Kennedys

the missile

it is

the same. Their naive caution

supposed experts the cia,

hesitate sites,

simply more of is

set against the

—Acheson, John McCone of

and the Joint Chiefs of Staff

ready to bring on World

War

III.

—who

are

In the film,

jfk has to bypass the military chain of com-

mand

to keep the chiefs

a war.

The

president takes

give direct orders to

12 4

of staff from starting it

upon himself to

American military men

on the

scene.

Kenny O’Donnell

shares part of

that responsibility in the film: he calls

mander Ecker before over

his low-altitude flight

Cuba and warns him

that he

is

not to be

shot at because General

LeMay

and

indeed, shot

start a war.

upon landing

Ecker

Com-

is,

will retaliate at,

and

attributes the bullet holes in his

plane to a flock of sparrows.

The O’Donnell telephone

may the

conversations

be the best part of the film: they bring

crisis

into the

compass of ordinary human

experience. Costner, as the president’s assistant, calls

from the White Housejust

as the pilots are

about to go off on their missions. They they are risking their

lives to

do

their job,

Costner gives them something to die for prevention of World

We

War

know and

—

the

III.

have no reason to believe that Kenny

O’Donnell

actually did

any of the things he

portrayed doing in this film.

is

McNamara and

Sorenson both report that he was never in the

room during their deliberations. And I doubt,

125

for example, that he

had the kind of personal

relationship with jfk that

But Costner’s

film.

He puts

role

is

is

depicted in the

to be the

his faith in his best friend

makes the

crucial deal

everyman.

Bobby, who

with Anatoly Dobrynin,

the Soviet ambassador, that convinces Khrush-

chev to remove the Soviet missiles.

There’s

more though, to my emotional

response to the film. In

my office

I

have a pho-

tograph of the 1947 Harvard varsity football team.

The good

in real life

friends of the film as they

— Bobby Kennedy,

the attorney gen-

and Kenny O’Donnell, the

eral,

—

sistant

row;

I

are seated

am

on

either

president’s as-

end of the second

in the back. Football players

connections that

were

make

last a lifetime.

Thirteen Days set off a confrontation be-

tween the

film’s fictive characters

membered around?

Or was

it

my

the other

Had my memories become

while the

126

real ones.

and

Bobby and Kenny up on

re-

way

fictions,

the screen

were the

realities? I

my own mind

had never reconciled

the two

young men of the

in

past

who had been my Harvard teammates and men

the

on the

of historical consequence portrayed

screen.

When

you know

of clay before they become idols to reimagine them. Thirteen that

people’s feet it is

difficult

Days put

me

to

test.

Anyone who knew Bobby Kennedy knew he was too small to play football. Nonetheless, his football career at

Harvard has been made

into a legend. According to a recent book, as a

senior in 1947 he scored a

touchdown

against

Yale with a broken leg. His teammates will

you

that he did start the

first

tell

game of that sea-

son, even though there were at least eight big-

ger and better players at his position.

He

then

disappeared from the starting lineup with a mysterious injury, although he kept coming to practice. It

seemed

his

Harvard football career

was over when he broke last

scrimmages of the

his leg in

year.

one of the

But the coach put

127

him

in for

one play against Yale so he could

get his varsity letter.

He

hobbled down the

on a kickoff with

sidelines

his leg in a cast as

everyone on the team held his breath

seemed

and

a

at

by the coach,

to be an insane decision

measure of the Kennedy family’s

ence. (Teddy, as

it

was told

to avoid contact

on

that

one

size

and

be a varsity football player even

on

Bobby Kennedy was

that team.

he

play,

but

in.

Although he lacked the

College,

Bobby

a fighter, almost foolhardy;

on diving

insisted

influ-

turns out, was the only real

football player in the family.) Certainly

Kennedy was

what

still

at

ability to

Harvard

a presence

He was the first rich and famous

person most of us had met.

He wore

a Ches-

Kennedy

terfield

overcoat and talked with that

accent,

which revealed more about the years

Brahmin

private schools

James than

at

and the Court of St.

it

did about the family’s Boston

Irish heritage.

But he was no snob. Even then

he was drawn to the have-nots; psychologically

128

he must have

felt like

one of them.

He seemed

to care particularly about the returning veterans

of World

War

most of them second- and

II,

third-generation ethnics

been

Harvard were

at

Through his

father,

who would never have not for the gi

it

Bill.

he got several of them sum-

mer jobs and he lent

(gave)

them money.

Still,

he was not exactly at ease with them or with any other group.

He was painfully shy, and despite

the trappings of social sophistication, he was a childlike outsider

who seemed

belonged to a

peer group. In retrospect,

real

never to have

Bobby probably labored un^er a Kefinedy-sized inferiority litter,

and

complex.

The

runt of the

Kennedy

he was too small to be a football player

far

from a good student.

dyslexic,

He was probably

and he struggled with

his studies at

Milton Academy and then Harvard and then the University of Virginia

Law School. Bobby

had no pretensions about

his iq, particularly

in

comparison to

his brother Jack.

surely have laughed out loud, as

I

He would did,

when

129

Stephen Culp, the actor impersonating him in Thirteen Days, utters the line, “I

hate being

called the brilliant one.”

Like his mother Rose,

Bobby was of

my

was

whom he resembled,

serious about his Catholicism.

One

unforgettable memories of those days

a religious debate

the football team

between the captain of

and Bobby.

We football play-

ers ate together at the Varsity

Club

after prac-

tice,

and when Bobby joined

shy,

he was forever getting into arguments.

this

occasion he was arguing with the captain,

us,

though he was

On

Vincent Moravec, about whether he could go to heaven.

human

am

Moravec, one of the most decent

beings

confident

I

—an opinion

have ever met

Bobby shared

and according

to

—was

Bobby he had

I

a Catholic,

irrevocably

sinned by marrying a Protestant. Moravec was a

huge man with the innocent eyes of a

deer,

and he was almost weeping as he defended himself against

Bobby’s inquisitorial arguments.

When Moravec refused to concede that he was 130

doomed

to rot in hell, an irate

Archbishop Cushing to

settle

Bobby

the matter.

called

Bobby

not only knew the phone number by heart, but the archbishop took his it

was almost 11:00

even though

call,

pm The .

prelate

was

less

doctrinaire than his parishioner; the disgruntled

Bobby had

“It all

to report that the answer was,

depends.” This hot-headed and narrow-

minded Bobby Kennedy gave no hint of the stature

he would eventually achieve.

Yet Anatoly Dobrynin,

whose meetings

with Bobby were crucial to the resolution of the

Cuban Missile Crisis, seems the

man I knew.

In his message to Khrushchev

he described Bobby’s missiles

to have recognized

final proposal: get the

out of Cuba and the president will

secretly agree to take

American

missiles out

of Turkey. Trying to impress Khrushchev with the seriousness of Bobby’s proposal,

wrote,

“He didn’t even try to get

Dobrynin

into fights

various subjects as he usually does.” The

we knew was

changing.

on

Bobby

Still,

his obstinate

In his mind,

have been a virtue in this

crisis.

the United States picking

on Cuba was

big guy picking

on

a

may

moral intuitions

guy.

little

like a

He was not pre-

pared to give up moral convictions in the face

of technical expertise. is

given to jfk, but

“There

is

ing your

The

it

best line in the film

also applies to

something immoral about abandon-

own judgment.”

Bobby continued

to

grow

his brother’s assassination, still

tify

Bobby:

as a

man

after

but at the core he

saw himself as an underdog, able to idenwith

the underdogs and they with him.

all

But the film

fails

to develop Bobby’s character,

and focuses instead on Kevin Costner’s Kenny O’Donnell. Like

Bobby Kennedy, Kenny O’Donnell

seemed an unlikely football to

Harvard

II.

He had

after serving

player.

Kenny came

during World

been a bombardier, and received a

purple heart and several medals for the flights

132

War

he had flown over Europe.

many

He was even

smaller than

Bobby and looked

like

he might

be blown away by the next strong breeze. But

he was an uncanny pass defender, the best on the team, and his interceptions often kept our losing

Harvard team

in the

game. Even

he was prepared to do anything

tice

win.

He was

it

in prac-

took to

a master at concealing the illegal

holding he used routinely to get an edge on bigger players.

No one got angry with this leprechaun; fact,

we

all

respected

ering sardonic wit. in 1948,

who

him and

It

feared his with-

was Kenny, our captain

scored the winning

against Yale while playing

on

a

touchdown

broken

leg.

But

Kenny was not a happy hero. There was an of desolation, a missing

was drinking too

in

much

tinued throughout his

vitality.

—

air

Even then he

a struggle that con-

life.

The friendship between Bobby and Kenny was

like the prince

and the pauper, each envy-

ing what the other seemed to have. At the same time, their friendship was a paradigm of the

133

Kennedy

family’s political alliance. Jack

would

build his political organization by reaching out to

World War

II

veterans, especially working-

class Catholics, for

royalty.

It

whom

the

Kennedys were

was Rose, the queen mother and

daughter of Boston’s legendary mayor,

knew and could rub

And

stituency.

who had ers.

it

shoulders with that con-

was Bobby, the shy prince,

to reach out to the

Bobby’s friendship with

other returning veterans

was the

campaign work-

Kenny and

on the

football

the

team

he needed for

his

campaign manager. Bobby

felt

crucial experience

role as Jack’s

who

comfortable bantering with Kenny.

They were

psychologically similar: overshadowed younger brothers, Irish, believing Catholics, obsessed

with throwing and catching a football, and

unimpressed with anyone

who

claimed to be

better than they were.

Kenny’s 1952,

Kennedy

career began in

when Bobby, who was managing

campaign

134

official

to unseat

Jack’s

Henry Cabot Lodge

Jr.

in the U.S. Senate, prevailed

work on

the campaign.

upon Kenny

to

Kenny dropped out of

Boston College Law School, which he hated,

and never looked back. After Jack won the election,

nedys;

Kenny worked full-time for the Ken-

when

there wasn’t a political campaign,

Joseph Kennedy gave him a job. Eight short years later

Bobby Kennedy took his

fia” (several

from that Harvard

Washington lic

—they had

president,

guard

at the

secretary.

and

football team) to

elected the

first

Catho-

White House as jfk’s appointment

He had

seems to

a

new nickname, “Cobra,” Kennedys was

me that

ny’s service to the

his

Ma-

and now Kenny O’Donnell stood

his loyalty to the It

“Irish

absolute.

the high point in Ken-

Kennedys can be found

in

testimony to the Warren Commission, jfk’s

corpse lay in a Dallas.

under

room in the Parkland Hospital in

The Texas authorities were determined their laws to

do a

local autopsy. Jackie

Kennedy would not leave the president’s body; she wanted to take her dead husband back to

135

—

Washington. With help from a Secret Service agent,

Kenny hustled

body out

the president’s

of the hospital past the protesting officials into

an ambulance and told the driver not to stop until they

man

I

were on Air Force One. That

Kennys

funeral.

Kenny O’Donnell’s life, pose in

life,

tion of the

came

to

or at least his pur-

an end with the assassina-

Kennedy brothers. His daughter says

he died of a broken heart and the alcoholism.

Ironically, the

Kenny with

Cuban

Irish

cancer

Now Kevin Costner has made him

larger in death than

the

the

knew. Jackie Kennedy never forgot: she

paid for

ited

is

he ever was in

only person

who

ever cred-

playing such a crucial role in

Missile Crisis was his

Bobby Kennedy.

good friend

After jfk’s death,

O’Donnell came back ran for governor.

life.

Kenny

to Massachusetts

and

He was a terrible candidate

he could not bear the humiliation of asking people to vote for him. in his desultory

136

The only

bright spot

campaign was when

his friend

Bobby came and made Without batting an

a speech

eyelash

audience that “During the sis

on

his behalf.

Bobby assured

the

Cuban Missile Cri-

[Kenny] was one of the two or three major

advisers to President Kennedy.” Thirteen

turns Bobby’s political white reality

and

friendship

lie

gives world-saving I

Days

into historical

powers to the

witnessed taking shape.

/

137

Moment

of Grace

Thirteen Conversations

About One Thing 2002 ,

Thirteen Conversations About Thing

is

One

the second film by the Sprecher

ters (their first

was Clockwatchers), who

sis-

are a

refreshing presence in the egomaniacal world

of moviemaking. Jill Sprecher

else.

a shy

and self-

who hands

out credit to ev-

Now in her 40s,

she continues to

effacing director

eryone

is

be animated by philosophical questions about transience, contingency, life

and the meaning of

that puzzled her in college.

Karen Spre-

who coauthored the screenplays with her

cher,

older

sister, is

trained as a psychiatric social

worker and gives the characters

Vho

ponder

these questions in Thirteen Conversations psy-

chological depth.

—

Perhaps because the Conversations break the ics

and Thirteen

sisters

Hollywood mold,

crit-

have tried to locate their work in relation to

other filmmakers. Those who like

it

find echoes

of Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and Robert Altman. don’t like

Eyes

it

see outtakes

Wide Shut and a

Anderson’s Magnolia.

Those who

from Stanley Kubricks

rip-off of Paul

What

Thomas

runs through the

work of this disparate collection of filmmakers is

an interest in the dark side of the psyche

where people

(all

of

ing and worry that

it

us) question

has none.

life’s

mean-

How you find

happiness after you ask yourself that question is

one of the subjects of this unusual

film.

Neither the plot nor timeline of Thirteen Conversations

is

linear. Several stories are told,

linked by coincidence, and the sequence of 13

segments that make up the film

Mobius

strip.

John Turturro plays a fessor

140

circle like a

whose rule-ridden

college physics prorigidity keeps life at

He

a distance.

seems to

know

this in the

a patient can correctly describe his his psychoanalyst

without ever

way

problem to

really getting

it.

Every attempt to break out of his prison simply

narrows the space between the

bars.

When we first meet him he is having dinner (Amy Irving). Although

with his wife

they still

go through the motions of marriage, neither has anything

sentment. is

left for

the other except veiled re-

Only later do we understand that he

having an

to him, has

affair

and that

found out.

she,

He was recently mugged

and pistol-whipped, and when

Instead of confronting him, she asks

affair.

why he

is

He, with a

it is

that he asks,

physicist’s objectivity, allows

shook him from

his routine.

obvious from every bite of asparagus is

unshakable. His wife despairingly

“What

swers,

him

not angry or upset about the mug-

that the incident

But

his discarded

was returned she found evidence of the

wallet

ging.

unbeknownst

is it

that

you want?” and he an-

“What everyone

wants: to experience

to

life,

wake up enthused,

to be happy.”

No

real

person, not even a physicist, talks this way.

But

if the lines are

not

realistic in

any sociocul-

tural sense they are certainly true to

and

to the part of us that

And

the Sprechers are in-

narcissistic character

identifies

with him.

Turturro s

an examina-

terested in that truth: their film

is

tion of how the self suffers

survives.

Jill

and

Sprecher has told her personal story of

trauma and survival

in several interviews.

While

walking near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in

New York,

she was clubbed over the head

in an apparently

random

attack.

She needed

emergency brain surgery and took months

to

recover from her injuries. This counts as psychic trauma in anyone’s book, but she to forgive her mentally later

someone

ill

attacker.

close to her “did

ally small that just cut

A few weeks

something

re-

me like a knife,” and she

has carried the scar of that painful years.

was able

moment for

Sprecher realizes that psychic trauma

is

not objectively quantifiable but can only be un-

142

derstood in terms of its subjective meaning a personal in

crisis.

One will

not find

this insight

modern textbooks of psychiatry. But

Sprecher

is

as

surely

and she has played out that

right,

idea in several of the characters in her film.

The

Sprechers are also interested in what

may be

the most fundamental question in

human

psychology:

changes a person? in the consulting is

One

room

is it

that actually

can ask that question or in daily

life.

And

it

not just a question for the psychotherapist.

It is this

to

What

spiritual question

answer in his

classic \jzrieties

Experience. James’s analysis

William James

book is

less

tried

of Religious

a philosophical

of religious experience than a collec-

tion of personal accounts of life-changing en-

counters with in

its

faith.

So Thirteen Conversations,

understated way, offers a fundamental

psychological and spiritual inquiry into the

human

condition.

The physics professor,

like Jill Sprecher, has

been mugged but has suffered no psychic

in-

143

jury; his

of the vignettes,

all set

next scene features

young assistant

in a

and

the

first

New York City. The

Matthew McConaughey as

district attorney, Troy,

some of his

on top of his world,

and

in

more

who

is

Manhattan saloon celebrating a successful

prosecution with is

in a

The brief dinner scene is

intimate way.

a

come

trauma, like hers, will

at the

colleagues.

Troy

professionally successful

same time doing something

—punishing

useful for society

right

the guilty. At

the bar he encounters a seeming misanthrope

(Alan Arkin)

who begrudges the young lawyer

his happiness

and sense of accomplishment.

Driving home, Troy accidentally (perhaps he

had too much to drink)

on a deserted of his

BMW,

hits a

young woman

street in the Village.

looks at

He gets out

what he thinks

is

her dead

body, and leaves the scene of the crime. Secret guilt begins to

torment him.

A

small cut

his forehead, sustained in the accident,

teriously does not heal. Later

he

144

is

we

on

mys-

will see that

using a razor blade to keep his

wound

from healing. His black-and-white world lapses into shades

col-

of gray when he interviews a

murderer. As the young criminal describes the radically contingent circumstances that led

to the killing,

Troy

realizes that “there

the grace of God go

I.”

up

but for

Troy will eventually be

driven to attempt suicide; indeed the possibility

of suicide

—

the death of the self

—haunts

the film.

In subsequent vignettes

hit-and-run victim

is

we learn that Troy’s

the angelic, unassuming,

generous Beatrice (Clea DuVall),

who

is

the

Sprecher “self” in the film. She and her jaded girlfriend

work for

cheerfully does

all

a cleaning service; Beatrice

the

work while her

friend

slacks off. Beatrice,

who sings Bach in a church

choir, has faith that

good things happen, while

her lazy friend fair.

Like

Jill

tells

her that the world

isn’t

Sprecher, Beatrice requires emer-

gency brain surgery, yet she survives and maintains her faith in benevolent providence.

comes a small cutting remark

Then

that causes her

145

personal

crisis.

One of Beatrices jobs

is

clean-

ing the apartment of an architect, and she has a crush

on him

reciprocates.

apartment

that she wishfully thinks he

When

she goes to the architect’s

after her recovery to return a shirt

she had promised to reveals that

mend, he inadvertently

he had thought she had stolen his

watch. That he would have such a thought destroys her

dream and her

of life. Like Troy she their lives

and

their

is

faith in the

goodness

on the edge of suicide;

“happy” outlooks have

been changed in an instant. Both

will get a

second chance. Unlike them, a middle-management insurance claims adjuster

named Gene

(Alan Arkin)

has already learned to expect the worst from

When he first appears at the saloon, he announces his distrust of happiness: “Show me a

life.

happy man,” he says, “and I’ll show you a disaster

waiting to happen” (another fortune-cookie

line).

Arkin gives a virtuoso performance

bitter,

146

hardworking

as the

New Yorker, tormented by

an employee who of

is

son

his children (Gene’s

and always smiling. Gene but in the end

it is

he

is

a drug addict),

treats

who

of gold, or at

his heart

proud

relentlessly cheerful,

him

cruelly,

surprises us with

least his conscience.

Like William James and the Sprechers,

wonders

if it

for the better.

is

Gene

possible to change one’s

life

He remembers leaving home to

attend a career-training program near the end

of his marriage. ting along,

He and

his wife

and he happened

were not

to see her stand-

window watching him

ing at the

leave.

he wonders, would have happened

waved

at

get-

if

What, he had

her instead of walking away? Might

his entire life

have been different?

Thirteen Conversations loneliness

is

partly about the

and alienation of its

some, there

is

no hope:

characters. For

Turturro’s professor

is

eventually forced to confront himself. His lover delivers the ultimate indictment as she ends their affair.

Her husband has found out about

them and has

told her he cannot live without

147

“What, compared

her.

she asks Turturro. face

tells

The

saved.

stricken look

us that the narcissist has

and never will. Other

you

to that, can

characters circle

we glimpse an th rough

his

no answer

the question of what to expect from

redemption

on

characters, however, are

As the Sprechers’

each other,

say?”

answer:

around

life

and

momentary

an act of grace.

Troy survives a suicide attempt, learns that the

woman

he ran over survived and that he

can make amends. is

now

The

suicidal Beatrice

who

ready to step intentionally in front of

an oncoming car picks out a street to focus her resolve.

man

across the

She catches

his eye

— and then unexpectedly “he must have my mind”— man spontaquite

read

the

smiles at her,

neously restoring her faith in benevolent providence.

The Sprechers juxtapose

Beatrice’s story

with a shot of Gene’s always-smiling employee

walking along the sidewalk. Surely the

man

he was

he did not read her mind; he smiles

at everyone,

148

if

annoying some but perhaps saving

Beatrice. ers’

film

The mystery of grace is

captured in these

moments

and perhaps

entirely contingent

yet in such

moments human

hope and meaning

in the Sprech-

that are

unreal,

and

beings can find

in their lives.

Thirteen Conversations feels like a miracle.

The

acting

is

superb, the editing

is

inspired,

the noirish cinematography resonates with the oneiric

mood. And

realistic,

if

the characters are not

they are worth believing

in.

The

measure of the Sprechers’ achievement

some of

is

true that

us will leave the theater convinced,

at least for the

moment, of

thd possibility

of grace.

149

Holy War The Battle ofAlgiers, 1966 “People practically never experience the great events of history with their

own eyes,”

explained the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo; they experience

the “200 dia.

them only through

mm or 300 mm lens” of the mass me-

Applying this insightj^ontecorvo captured

one of the most important anti-imperial conflicts

of the 20th century by filming The Battle

ofAlgiers

in black

and white, using

camera angles to simulate that

era’s

Pontecorvo succeeded so well that ers

lenses

and

newsreels.

many view-

thought they had watched a documentary

about the revolutionary struggle of the Algerian National Liberation Front (fln) against their

French colonial oppressors.

— —

Pontecorvo succeeded on a

political level

he convinced middle-class audiences

as well:

that terrorism

—

deliberately

bombing inno-

cent people in order to pressure political op-

ponents

— might be

necessary. His case

was

so emotionally compelling that Pauline Kael

described The Battle ofAlgiers as “the rape of the doubting intelligence.” She

dubbed Pon-

tecorvo the most dangerous kind of Marxist: a “Marxist poet”

who

uses the

power of film

to persuade his audience that “terrorism

is

a

tragic necessity.”

The Battle ofAlgiers was the political film

of the

left.

first

European

Pontecorvo wanted to

portray the Marxist understanding of history as

an inevitable process that “once begun can-

not be stopped.” In the film,

of the fln

fln ers

is

seem

when

played by the actual leader of the

captured and the French paratroopto have

broken the back of the secret

revolutionary organization, he fore a press conference

152

the leader

is

paraded be-

and asked

if

the

fln

is

now

“the

my opinion,”

defeated. “In

he

replies,

nlf [fln] has more chances of beating

the French Army than the French have of stop-

ping history.” Pontecorvo, a committed Marxist,

we

commented on

that line.

believe this to be right, but

the idea

it

was

right.”

a certain way,”

“Not only did

we

really liked

History was moving “in

and the

class struggle

would

continue in the Third World with colonized peoples taking up arms against the colonizers. It

was Frantz Fanons psychiatric gloss on Marx-

ism, endorsed by Sartre. earth, the black faces

The wretched of the

condemned

to

wear white

masks, would assert their identity through acts

of violence and

when

it

rise

up

came from

against oppression even

“super-civilized France.”

The French had been

defeated by that

march

of history in Vietnam, and Pontecorvo wanted to depict the last futile stand lonial

his

of the French co-

empire in Algiers. Pontecorvo claimed

filmmaking was ruled by the “Dictator-

ship of Truth,”

and

his version

of Truth cer-

153

tainly disturbed the French, film. Certainly

many

critics

who banned saw

of Algiers the power of truth ers

in

his

The Battle

revealed.

Oth-

—most prominently Kael—saw not

truth

but ultimate propaganda. The Battle ofAlgiers, she said, “ranks with” Triumph ofthe Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s deification

of Hitler. Whether

re-

vealed truth or ultimate propaganda, The Battle

of Algiers

some 9/11

is

a text that might give Americans

perspective

—both through

through

its

Pontecorvo

as a

situation after

its official

unintended

Kael was not

his

on our own

message and

insights.

wrong when she described

Marxist poet, but he meant

poetry as a celebration of humanity.

scribed himself as

man and

the

He de-

“someone who approached

human

condition with a feeling

of warmth and compassion.” His film and

his

poetry were an attempt to connect himself and his

Western audiences through

humanity

what

154

is

their

to Arabs of the Casbah.

different

common

He embraced

about the Arabs, including

their Islamic traditions,

and made them

human to

us. Yes,

necessity.

But Pontecorvo’s inspiration

revolutionary terror

pian. Revolution held for

him

is

fully

a tragic is

uto-

the promise of

community and comradeship. He made

his

audience share that feeling of community so that

we might

accept the possibility of justi-

fied terrorism.

After 9/11 the moral imagination of most

Americans could not conceive of a Pontecorvostyle justification for

such acts of terrorism.

President Bush spoke for the passionate convic-

American public when he prom-

tions of the

ised retribution. Overnight,

many leftist doves

turned into war hawks. Something had to be done, and

it

seemed more than reasonable

to

invade an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban,

who were

cruel to

women,

sheltered

Osama

Bin Laden, and hated Americans. Since 9/11

we have been

tecorvo script: threatened by as the

following a Pon-

Muslim

terrorists

French were in Algeria, we have been

155

caught up in a spontaneous burst of patriotic

More than

solidarity.

ulate ourselves for

Soviet

Union

a year later

doing

in

we

congrat-

months what

the

accomplish in years in

failed to

Afghanistan, and the march to war continues as President

called

Bush perseveres

in

what

is

now

“Operation Enduring Freedom.”

Pontecorvo’s film cally instructive

Ignoring

on

all legal

is

that

perhaps most ironi-

American

restraints

rallying cry.

and using torture

to gain the information necessary to destroy

win the

the fln, French paratroopers

of Algiers, but

war

as

we

are

shown, they

Battle

lose the

French colonial empire. Without

for the

warning, two years after the French victory, the entire Arab population swarms out of the

Casbah

to

march on

Algiers.

The French

re-

spond with every brutal technique of riot control at their disposal

tanks

—

and fog

to drive the fall

—

gas,

machine guns, and

Arabs back. Then,

over the

city,

a French police au-

thority addresses the invisible

156

as night

mob

through

a

megaphone. “What do you want?” he asks

in

bewilderment. In response, Arabs emerge

from the fog demanding and celebrating

their

freedom. Pontecorvo had imagined this scene as

an

ecstatic ballet, the

camera focused on an

Arab woman pushed down again and again by the French police; each time, she rises

up

in a

dance of freedom. This was the revelation to

Western audiences: the Muslims of the Casbah were freedom

fighters.

In her 1972 review, Kael wrote that Pontecorvo’s historical-determinist film

how

showed us

“the Algerian people were spontaneously

turned into Marxist revolutionaries by historical events.”

But The Battle ofAlgiers conveys

another message that was lost on contemporary audiences,

himself. first

and apparently on Pontecorvo

Watching the

time in

film recently for the

many years, I saw that Pontecorvo

had achieved something beyond artistic

and

political intentions.

who wanted

to

show

hi$ conscious

Like Tolstoy,

the evils of adultery in

157

Anna Karenina but

created a character that

transcended his moralistic agenda, Pontecorvo’s

The

Algerians transcend Marxist categories. historical turn

to traditional Islam, not en-

is

lightenment progress. If Pontecorvo could

now

—

we

revisit his

own

film,

he might recognize

can with the hindsight of 9/11

—

the essential

place of Islam in the film’s setting that

as

and how

background context has now become

its

central message.

To

appreciate this other message one

must

look past the original script (which has been

published) and consider what Pontecorvo

put into his finished product. With his writer Franco Solinas, Pontecorvo created a screenplay

out of a Marxist-Fanonian screed, and that

what the audiences saw he filmed shows

at the time.

is

Yet what

how important Arab-Muslim

fundamentalist identity was for the mobilization of the people of the Casbah. first

fln communique

to the people

The very of Algiers

in the film (not in the published screenplay)

158

proclaims,

“Our

revolt

against colonialism,

is

our goal to restore independent Algeria within the framework for the basic ligion.”

And

Islam, not

ofIslamic principles with respect

freedoms regardless of race or

re-

throughout The Battle ofAlgiers,

Marxism, provides the yeast of the

revolutionary solidarity.

The

film portrays a

cleansing of the Arab peoples by a return to Islamic principles

and

to a puritanical Islam

that blames the French colonizers for impos-

ing European decadence on Algiers.

French tutes,

the

who

the

have made the Arabs their prosti-

undermined the

Muslim

It is

traditional authority of

brought cigarette smoking,

family,

alcoholism, and drugs to their community.

The fln ing

begins

its

campaign not by teach-

Marxism but by preaching

understands that

its

Islam.

The fln

recruits are marginalized

outcasts with every reason to hate the French

and with nothing to

lose.

Both these

recruits,

and the Arabs of the Casbah, must be purified before they can undertake guerilla warfare; that

159

come through

purification will

a return to Is-

lamic traditions, and through violence in the

name of Islam. this process

an

is

Pontecorvo’s central example of

the

young Arab,

illiterate juvenile,

and street criminal. after

chanting “Tahia ria).

Ali

is

To

his prison

trick

the

fln

window

Djezair ” (Long

to kill a

grifter,

the

goes to his death

join the revolutionary

must agree

fln

He is ready to join

man who el

La Pointe,

sometime boxer,

he witnesses from

guillotining of a

Ali

live

Alge-

underground

French policeman. The

him with an unloaded gun:

only to prove that he

is

this test

not a French double

agent. His real rite of passage into the

fln

will

come when he kills a friend, an Arab pimp who controls a string of brothels. All this it

is

now so obvious and

undeniable,

seems strange that even the clear-eyed Pau-

line Kael

could not see

more astonishing tecorvo created

is

all

what he was doing.

160

it.

What might be even

the suggestion that Ponthis

without appreciating

How did so much Islamic fundamentalism find

its

nation Saadi,

fln

way into in the

lies

who had

in Algiers,

rector to

Pontecorvo’s film?

The expla-

way the film was made. Yacef

been the military head of the

came

to Italy looking for a di-

make a movie of the Algerian struggle

from the Algerian point of view. Pontecorvo was third on the the

first

provide

list,

and was chosen only after

two declined. The Algerians could not

much money,

but they could give the

filmmaker access to any

crowds of people

site

he wanted and put

at his disposal.

good use of what he was

given.

And he made

Crowds became

the protagonists of the film. Pontecorvo had

been a journalist and a he decided

—with one

still

photographer, and

notable exception

—not

to use professional actors.

With

a photographer’s eye Pontecorvo

chose people whose faces are visually arresting; the actors, at least in appearance, are authentic.

But such actors could not be expected

to

give convincing expression to Marxist slogans.

161

Pontecorvo’s one prominent professional actor,

Jean Martin, plays Colonel Mathieu,

fought in Vietnam and

is

sympathetic with

movement. He

the liberation

who had

is

given

all

the

polemical lines about Marxism; that frees rhe Algerians to speak and to act out their

own

Arab-Islamic identity. So Pontecorvo gave them lines natural to

terviews with

them, the product of long

in-

fln members and Algerians who

had participated

in the events depicted.

One

could almost say Pontecorvo psychoanalyzed the participants and distilled their collective

memories into

his dialogue.

As Pontecorvo began

to film

and

edit,

he

continually added touches to convey the particulars

of Algerian

life

in the Casbah. His

impulse was to convey “the feelings and the

emotions shared by a multitude.”

What

Algerian actors and extras shared was their

lamic tradition. In the

final

his Is-

scene where the

Algerians appear out of the night and fog and

demand

their freedom,

Pontecorvo had

origi-

nally intended to have

but

political slogans,

not work

traditional ululation It

later

he decided

Then he

artistically.

of having the Arab

the extras chanting

all

women

hit

it

on the

did idea

erupt into their

— rhythmic

piercing cries.

has a powerful effect, but the effect

is

of the

unifying claim of Arab identity rather than

of the brotherhood of revolution. Pontecorvo thought earlier

it

worked

so well that he used

moment of the

it

in

an

film as the rallying cry

of the Casbah.

At another lice

crucial

— —

supervisor

terterrorism

destroying

in

moment,

a French po-

an unofficial act of coun-

sets off dynamite in the

homes and

killing

Casbah,

innocent people.

In the explosion s wake, three Arab

women are

shown cutting their hair and putting on makeup and French-style doubt that

this

is

dress.

a ritual

There can be no

moment of Western

degradation as these modest

Muslim women

are being transformed into sexual objects. as

they deliver their retaliation

And

—hidden time 163

bombs hit

—some French

on them. Each

soldiers

woman

crowded places that

looks around the

bombs

their

One woman’s gaze lingers on ing his ice-cream cone her

bomb. Each

and other men

will destroy.

a small

—and then

boy

lick-

she leaves

fully appreciates that there will

be innocent victims. Watching them today,

seems

clear that Islamic faith,

solidarity,

made

it

not revolutionary

their mission sacred.

Pontecorvo thought that the French torture

of their captives was worse than any Algerian

now also

terrorism, but his artistry

reveals the

holy-war horror of the Casbah uprising against the decadent west.

As America

rallies

behind

President Bush’s crusade against the axis of evil,

there

is

more horror

to

a “doubting intelligence,”

come.

it is

If you

have

time to look

at

the lessons of history revealed in Pontecorvo’s

The Battle ofAlgiers and think

164

for yourself.

The Content of Our Character The Station Agent 2003 ,

Hollywood usually relegates dwarfs to fantasy-world caricatures, cheerful grotesques,

most famously the Munchkins

in

The

Wizard ofOz. Given Hollywood’s current enthusiasm for imaginary realms, dwarfs willing to play these roles have lots of work.

But Peter

Dinklage, the star of The Station Agent, has always refused to be stereotyped.

The Station Agent didn’t

start

out

as a film

about a dwarf. The aspiring filmmaker

McCarthy had been working on that he

hoped would become his

Tom

a screenplay

first

film

when

he suddenly had the idea of castirfg Dinklage,

who

he had directed on

man. Enlisting Dinklage’s

stage, as his leading

help, he rewrote the

screenplay, incorporating Dinklage’s accounts

of his

experiences and

making them cen-

In the early scenes of The Station Agent

tral. is

own

,

it

obviously McCarthy’s intention to have Din-

klage’s size fect the

But

—he

is

four feet six inches

tall

—

audience as well as his fellow characters.

as the

movie unfolds

it is

the actor’s under-

stated performance, his personal dignity, his

handsome I

af-

face to

which one

is

and

drawn.

cannot claim to have immediately ap-

— collaboration should be emphasized — had what McCarthy and Dinklage

preciated

achieved in their quirky film.

The

first

the

time

I

saw The Station Agent I was prepared to dismiss it

as

sentimental pandering to political cor-

rectness.

a

The good guys were

the dwarf, Fin;

Cuban, Joe (Bobby Cannavale); an African-

American

girl,

woman on

Cleo (Raven Goodwin); and a

the verge of a nervous breakdown,

Olivia (Patricia Clarkson).

The bad guys were

rude and insensitive white men. But The Station

1

66

Agent stayed with me, perhaps because of

its

quirks,

logically tantly,

I

and

I

began to recognize

nuanced power

—

its

psycho-

and, most impor-

understood that McCarthy had never

condescended to nor exploited Dinklage.

The

inescapable questions of The Station

—and of Dinklage’s

Agent

life

—

are

how

people respond to his dwarfism, and

will

how will

he react to their gawking, head-turning, wisecracks,

and occasional

cruelty?

Each

person’s

reaction reveals something psychologically significant

about him or

her,

and Dinklage’s

re-

sponse defines his psychological identity.

Dinklage has the defiant nobility of the court dwarfs captured by the 17th-century

Spanish painter Velazquez. Look carefully and

you

will see that

he depicts them

as equal

hu-

man beings to the Spanish nobility who are his usual subjects. But such

of the film

medium

is

that

the elemental power it

can have greater

impact than the genius of Velazquez. Film can

compel empathy.

can

lift

their settled convictions

and

It

audiences out of let

them glimpse

167

something of themselves

in the alien other.

Carthy has used that power so that we in

Mc-

will see

Dinklage not just a “short-limbed dwarf”

but an everyman in a morality play of face-toface encounters with other

human

beings.

Erving Goffman made us recognize the importance of what he called “the presentation

of self in everyday it

feels like to

center of

life.”

All of us

know what

be slighted in public, to be the

unwanted

attention, to

worry that

people are whispering about us and laughing at us.

And some

of us know, or

at least sense,

the cruelty in the derogatory reactions to the

shamed victim. like

We can only imagine, and films

The Station Agent help us to imagine, what

face-to-face encounters are like for people stig-

matized by nature. McCarthy’s film

is

a medi-

tation

on how Finbar McBride, a proud man,

comes

to terms with the humiliation

to-face encounters

—

a

domain

in

of face-

which psy-

chology and morality are inextricably linked in the challenge of treating the other as an equal

168

human

being. McCarthy’s film goes deeper,

exploring

grief, loneliness,

and the impulse

to find a utopia in solitude or at least a haven

from the

heartless

When we

first

world of others.

meet Fin he seems

He works

to have

Henry

Styles

(Paul Benjamin), the African-American

owner

found that haven.

for

of a model-train store in Hoboken, sey.

Both

New Jer-

are alone except for each other, their

shared interest in trains, and their mutual spect

and understanding.

suddenly, Finbar

is left

When Henry

train sta-

boondocks of Newfoundland,

Jersey, that

dies

unemployed, with no

one and nothing but afCabandoned tion in the

re-

Henry has bequeathed

New

to him.

How Fin gets to Newfoundland is never clear. We see him walking next to the tracks as trains

until

thunder he

walked

by,

and walking on the

arrives at his desolate station. all

the

way from Hoboken?

know, but these images occupation

—

tracks

Has he

We

can’t

establish Fin’s total pre-

his obsession

—with

trains as the

169

mark of

his isolation.

a remarkable

director

There must have been

working relationship between

McCarthy, cinematographer Oliver

Bokelberg, and film editor Tom McArdle. erating

on

Op-

a small budget, they decided to use

their resources to explore the felt experience

of the characters rather than lay out every step of the narrative. trains

is

The man juxtaposed with

the

an important and recurring cinemat-

ographic theme. In one scene Fin will stand

on top of an abandoned

man

carefully positioned

the top of the passenger resting.

Like

,

still

a lonely

little

toward one end of

car.

this

The image

scene has

photograph. Similar

film together

—

ar-

is

much of the cinematography

The Station Agent a

train

all

in

the force of

moments hold

the

and show us how the team used

Dinklage’s size to create powerful images that

challenge viewers’ voyeurism or simple

Once

in

Newfoundland,

chain-smoker in a black

suit

Fin,

pity.

an orderly

and white

shirt,

structures his solitude with routines. Fin

170

is

we

grieving for Henry, but

also sense that

does not expect to find another such

minded

friend.

alone. Solitude

ence to others

He wants most of all is

is

to be his

and more meet

will I

in

like-

be

left

anodyne. Indiffer-

to be his studied defense. His

make him seem stron-

psychological armor will

ger

to

he

self-sufficient

than the people he

Newfoundland.

have no knowledge of what McCarthy’s

screenplay looked like before he hit

of casting Dinklage. But

I

suspect

been premised on a character

on it

the idea

may have

much like the one

Dustin Hoffman played in the Oscar-winning film Rain trains goes

Man.

Finbar’s preoccupation with

beyond a hobby or avocation. Psy-

chologically, his obsession resembles the fixed interest

of the idiot-savant form of autism. For

reasons not yet understood, idiot savants like the Rain

Man character are not capable of emo-

tional development. Their inability to share the

human emotions that connect us is tragic; opting for Fin instead created the possibility that

—

the character might develop emotionally, and also the

opportunity for us to understand

Fin’s

obsession not as a peculiar limitation of mind

but

monastic vocation

as a

retreat

anchorite’s

from the cruelty of others.

If Fin

has

—an

wants

come to

the

it

turns out that he

wrong place.

In another gap in

isolation,

the narrative logic of the screenplay, a catering

truck

sits in

station.

the parking lot of the

But emotions move

and Joe Oramas, the

empty

train

this film along,

driver (filling in for his

sick father), belongs there because

he

is

an ex-

troverted

man desperate for company. Joe,

everyone

else

Fin meets,

his

own

size.

and

But

first

reacts

like

only to his

loneliness, his conviviality,

his insatiable curiosity quickly lead

to try to befriend Fin.

He

will

him

even become

interested in trains. Cannavale’s character

—

both innocent and raunchy the

humor

brings most of

to the film.

Fin soon encounters other inhabitants

of Newfoundland, most significantly Olivia,

172

who

is

so flustered

him on

when

she catches sight of

the road that she nearly runs

him

over.

Clarkson was awarded a Special Jury Prize for

Outstanding Performance Olivia,

had

I

and

I

Sundance

at

for her

might have appreciated her more

not seen her recently in Pieces ofApril,

where she

woman

an overwrought

also plays

near breakdown. In The Station Agent she

is

the

emotional antithesis of Fin. Her only child, a boy, died in a playground

of inattention. She

is

fall

filled

during a moment

with grief and

guilt.

Like Fin, she has retreated from others, in her *

case to the solitude of hfer

she

is

summer home, where

trying to paint.

After nearly running over Fin twice in one day, she brings a bottle

of whiskey to

ment

an apology.

gets

in the station as

drunk and

falls

asleep

his apart-

When

and Joe

she

sees her

emerge the next morning, he assumes the obvious and suggests a threesome. Joe’s estimation of Fin’s sexual prowess inflated

when

a dipsy

young

becomes further librarian

named

173

Emily (Michelle Williams) spends the night

in

the station. In truth, Fin wants nothing from these

women and

respectful

offers

demeanor.

with Fin, both

nothing but

And

rather than sleeping

women begin

Olivia eventually

tells

his usual

to confide in

him about her

her fear that she can have no

more

him.

loss

and

children.

And Emily, who has told no one else, confesses to

him

that she

pregnant.

is

Is it

because Fin

is

a dwarf, or does his willed emotional detach-

ment,

like a

psychoanalysts professional de-

meanor, allow them to reveal themselves? Fin’s wall

of reserve begins to melt in the

warmth of Joe’s determined charm and growing little

feelings for Olivia.

Cleo has broken through

off to an

awkward

start

nocently what grade

when

he’s in,

his

Along the way, as well.

she asks

She gets

him

in-

and then, “Are you

a midget?” Fin good-naturedly explains that he is

a dwarf. Cleo’s

candid questions are without

malice or mockery; she, like him, seems to be a loner interested in trains.

174

With a

life

in

these friends Fin has

begun

Newfoundland, but there

problem of the

larger

make

to

is still

the

community’s reaction

to his dwarfism. In the only

moment

of ba-

thos in the film, Fin goes to the local bar and gets

drunk after letting down

Olivia and being rejected.

tachment

gives

way

his defenses

At the bar

with

Fin’s de-

to angry defiance at the

gawking strangers. The camera makes him look grotesque

—

a

—

huge head on a tiny body

he climbs on top of to everyone

a

who

his barstool

as

and shouts

has been eyeing him, “Take

good look.” Several

movie reviewers found

this scene, as

though

of keeping with the

Fin’s

rest

fault

with

humiliation was out

of the film. But to

me it

seems crucial to the psychological development of Fin’s character and to the staggers out

tracks as

of the bar and collapses on the

one of his beloved

on him. He

film’s project.

trains roars

Fin

train

down

gives a ghastly smile of welcome to

his annihilation.

But morning comes and he

is

175

alive.

Was

Then he

notices

watch he used

to time

the train a dream?

that the precious pocket

Was he

the trains has been crushed. miracle?

man

Be

it

dream or

miliation

He

miracle, Fin, as every

and the

up

human

of the

in this morality play

counter, has faced

saved by a

en-

to his worst fears

of hu-

own

death.

possibility

of his

has survived, and he has changed. Later,

when Cleo

asks

him

to

come

to

school and talk to her class about trains, he declines, explaining that

first

he would have

to face the reflexive cruelty of children. Cleo,

wise beyond her years,

tells

him

that if he cares

about her he can and will come. Fin shows

up

in Cleo’s class

anticipated.

and endures the cruelty he

But he

is

also asked a surprising

question by one of the children:

What about

Why

trains?

zeppelins?

Fin does not find love at the end of this film,

but he has

tected

the

let

down

the barriers that pro-

him from being wounded by

last

others. In

scene Joe, Olivia, and he seem to be

enjoying a newfound friendship, and Fin secure

enough

to repeat the question:

is

“What

about zeppelins?!”

The Station Agent reminds us

that,

is

a

charming film that

be they kind or nasty, other

people are our only possibility of happiness.

1

77

—

The End of Remorse The Passion of the Christ 2004 ,

Most people I talk to are boycotting The Passion ofthe

Christ.

vinced that the film mitic and that

assume that in

dangerously anti-Se-

would be an

it

to contribute to

is

They have been con-

its

act

commercial

of betrayal

success.

They

my reason For going was to weigh

with another denunciation of Mel Gibson

the films writer

—and

and director

his

Holo-

caust-denying father. In fact

I

decided to see and review the film

for three very different reasons. First, sion

is

one of the

rare

movies that

important cultural event torical it,

moment.

—

is

The Pasalso

an

a significant his-

My friends may be boycotting

but audiences across America and around

—

the world are attending in record numbers,

and many Christians are coming away with seems to

sense of restored faith.

It

take to turn one’s back

on a

this

me

a

a mis-

cultural event of

magnitude. Second,

I

hoped

to

understand the deeply

contradictory reactions to the film by

gent people of good Republic,

New

Writing in The

Leon Wieseltier denounced the small-

minded Gibson and soaked

will.

intelli-

his sacred “snuff film”

in blood, reveling in torture,

urrecting anti-Semitism as religious

and

res-

dogma.

Wieseltier, the child of Holocaust survivors, bitterly

complained that Gibson’s

literal

ing of the Gospels omitted Christ’s

read-

most im-

portant message: love and forgiveness. But a distinguished Catholic colleague confided to

me

that she

had wept through the scenes of

Christ’s flagellation

away from the

and

crucifixion.

She came

film with a deeper sense of

Christ’s suffering

and

felt

regret that she

not been a better Christian. She assured

180

had

me the

film

was not anti-Semitic and sent

me a review

from the interreligious journal First Things that described The Passion as “the best movie ever

made about

Jesus Christ” while confidently

denying any “concerns about the film

stirring

up anti-Judaism.” Finally,

many of

the greatest filmmakers

have wanted to do a version of the Christ It is

story.

perhaps the most important story ofWest-

ern civilization, and film

medium our rytelling.

is

the most powerful

civilization has invented for sto-

But

how do you

translate a sacred

text into a screenplay? Pier Paolo Pasolini did a

Marxist version, Franco

Zeffirelli

did a Sunday-

school documentary, and Martin Scorsese used

Nikos Kazantzakiss

existential novel, a

book

on the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books,

make The Last Temptation of Christ

,

to

a remark-

able but anti-Church telling of the story. Gib-

son,

who found

religion as

he struggled with

alcoholism and suicidal depression, wanted to portray the Catholic faith that saved him.

181

He describes him

—an

As

I

filmmaking

as

—and

waited

to advise

me

what was

a

that

I

had ever seen was the

me in

an

out stopped

would need two handkerI

stunned,

sat dry-eyed,

growing sense of dread

for

believe

in line to enter the theater,

She was wrong:

and with

I

of faith.

woman who was coming

elderly

chiefs.

act

his

as

I

watched

the most anti-Semitic film

my life.

realization that

I

I

Even more horrifying could not dismiss The

Passion as a second-rate film. All of the snide

put-downs of Gibson’s filmmaking are view unjustified.

Yes,

in

my

one can connect the dots

from the torture scenes of Mad Max to Lethal

Weapon son

is

to Braveheart to

a serious person

ful film.

The Passion, but Gib-

who has created a power-

The cinematography is an

accomplishment inspired by great It is

also the

astonishing

religious art.

most cruel and bloody

I

have ever

seen. Episodes of sadistic brutality establish

the

rhythm of the

film, taking the

audience

again and again to the limits of its capacity to

182

endure

its

bloody vision of Christ’s suffering.

Yet neither

I

nor anyone

hushed theater walked

else in that

out.

Lines from Isaiah

familiar

53:5,

Handel’s Messiah, preface the film:

wounded for our transgressions.” this follows the

crowded,

more famous

“He was

In the Bible,

lines

of Isaiah

53:3:

“He

man

of sorrows, and acquainted with

is

from

despised and rejected of men; a

Surprisingly, the quotation

is

grief.”

accompanied by

a specific date (742 B.C.): in other words, this suffering

This

is

was prophesied, and

it

came

to pass.

serious religiosity. Through a blue haze

we discern Jesus

(James Caviezel) praying in the

Garden of Gethsemane. Caviezel

is

not asked

or allowed to act the part of Jesus; he exists

only as the is

he

human body

in

which the Christ

incarnate and will suffer. For that purpose is

superbly

cast.

Gibson wanted his cinema-

tography to pay homage to Caravaggio, and Caviezel’s

body

is

very

much

great painter’s Flagellation

like Jesus’ in the

of Christ.

183

But on Caravaggios canvas Christs body is

entirely

unmarked. While Gibson’s film may

have started with Caravaggio,

tortured, flayed Christ of the naissance.

he

is

From

the

first

ends with the

it

Northern Re-

moment we see Jesus

God and

in agony, praying to

wrestling

with the temptations of an androgynous Satan, played by a

woman

salinda Celentano). trayal

with a shaved skull (Ro-

We will witness Jesus’

by Judas and see him taken in chains to

the high priests of the temple. If there

note in Gibson’s depiction, at once, as his Christ

is

it is

who

pleasure in inflicting pain.

cudgel

a false

sounded almost sadists,

take malicious

The temple

guards

him even before he has been judged.

the

Roman

soldiers exhaust themselves

in the brutal pleasure

of whipping and scourg-

ing the “King of the Jews.” Christ

made

is

surrounded by

be they Jews or Romans,

Then

be-

to suffer

is

not only

beyond human endurance, but

under Gibson’s direction he refuses to surrender to the pain and loss of blood. Incredibly, he

184

struggles to his feet, only to incite the

him down

soldiers to beat

more

violence, using

away flesh.

tear

macho, but the sacred

also a

cumb. The torture film until

it

Christ asks is

was

to

who

is

reaches

why he

precisely as

is

prototypical Gibson-

compelling depiction of

incarnate

spirit,

again with greater

vicious instruments that

Yes, this

it is

Roman

and refusing to suc-

sustained for most of the its

apogee on the cross

as

has been forsaken. All this

Gibson intended. His purpose

—

make Christ s suffering visible

Christ,

suffered for the sins of mankind.

What one

sees in this_protracted torture

depends on whether you came into the theater believing in Christ.

one might

see, as

proclivity for

Without

Wieseltier did, only Gibson’s

sadomasochism. Yet Roger Ebert,

a onetime altar

boy who participated

Lenten and Easter

“What Gibson time in

in

many

services, described his quite

different experience of the very

first

that faith

same

scenes:

has provided for me, for the

my life,

is

a visceral idea of what

185

the Passion consisted of.” Ebert’s report

re-

is

markable, and, for me, entirely believable.

We

have no more powerful demonstration of the

axiom that everyone

in a theater sees a differ-

ent film. I

thought about

how my

experiences had

determined the frightening anti-Semitism that I

saw.

What immediately came

my best friend telling me

—

years old at the time

by

his priest that

mind was

—we were both

that he

“you Jews killed Jesus.”

tion or even whether

I

should

tell

my

lens,

think you too will be horrified.

I

had

parents

The Passion through that

it.

see

I

to that accusa-

about

If

eight

had been taught

no idea what response to make

you

to

Other alarms went off

in

my

head.

The

high priests look and behave like

all

the fa-

—

the

selfish,

miliar anti-Semitic stereotypes obstinate, unforgiving Jews

one

tries to

past in the great religious paintings.

not be ignored life

186

on the

when Gibson

screen. Wieseltier

look

They can-

brings

them

to

was particularly

incensed that Gibson had told Diane Sawyer

on

television, “Critics

with

and

me

who

don’t really have a

this film.

They have

a

four Gospels.” Gibson has, ter

problem with

me

problem with the I

argument than Wieseltier

difficult to find a scene in

have a problem

fear, a

much

allows.

It is

bet-

very

The Passion that

is

not in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Gib-

son has placed his filmmaking gloss on the text,

but with great

fidelity to its

although the Vatican has

Pope pronounced as

it

after

words.

now denied

he saw the

that the

film, “It

was,” he might welljjave said that.

Pope saw the film that many Catholics ing, the

one

in

which the Son of God

for their sins before their very eyes

And

is

The

are seesuffers

through the

magic of film. Gibson has given the Catholic Church what it

wanted and perhaps needed: an occasion

embrace

its

own fundamentalism.

to

Certainly the

Church has neither rejected nor distanced itself from The Passion.

Priests

took whole congrega-

187

tions to see

the film

on Easter Sunday, and viewing

it

may

well

become an annual

ritual in

the tradition of Passion plays. Set aside the question of personal lenses

and one

is still

son’s film

left

marks the unofficial return to the

pre-Vatican

II

catechesis of Church doctrine.

In following the reasserts the

menical

with the concern that Gib-

literal

words of the Gospel

dogma that the Vatican

moments

that can be traced

in

its

ecu-

has qualified, but a

dogma

back to the

days of

earliest

—

Catholicism: extra ecclesiam nulla salus side the to

Church

it

there

is

no

salvation,

out-

no way

God the Father except through his son Jesus.

And

it

vividly recreates the images of the

necked Jews

who

stiff-

instead of embracing salva-

tion

pronounced a sentence of death against

their

own

Messiah.

Gibson has been

faithful to his

cal

form of Catholicism, which

II,

with

its

own

rejects

radi-

Vatican

affirmation of religious toleration.

His Passion gives us that traditional faith with-

188

out the

spirit

ism, Islam,

of ecumenical respect for Juda-

and other

Church pledged pledge that

left

for everyone II

was

and

Vatican

It

II.

was a

of salva-

possibility

Church and of

made

in large

locaust

itself in

open the

tion outside the

which the

religions to

forgiveness

in God’s image. If Vatican

measure a response to the Ho-

to the Church’s

own

history of

anti-Semitism, then the success of The Passion is

a cultural event that signals the end of that

Christian feeling of remorse. If it does nothing else,

The Passion should remind us

all

that the

impulse of fundamentalism- now sweeping the

world

more

is

dividing humanity even as

it

seeks a

sacred community.

189

For

God and Country Henry

Legend has

it

V, 1944, 1989

that Winston Churchill

asked Laurence Olivier to

of Shakespeare’s Henry

make

V to

a film version

help raise British

morale during the worst days of World War It

was not an

ish

entirely original idea.

have had a tradition

of, throwing

“once more unto the breach” to zenry for war.

By the

The

II.

Brit-

Henry

V

rally the citi-

19th century the play had

been transformed into a spectacle of patriotic pageantry celebrating imperial Britain. By the turn of the 20th century and the Boer War, Shakespeare’s

Henry was back on

tional stage, but with flags

waving and raucous

London audiences standing St. Crispin’s

the tradi-

to cheer the great

Day speech. During World War I,

as Britain suffered

of

fice

through the horrible

young men

its

in the

muddy

V

of France, an invincible Henry audiences that

God was on

sacri-

trenches

reminded

their side.

Olivier accomplished everything that

Churchill asked of

with

him and more. Working

the resources that wartime England

all

could provide, including one of the Technicolor cameras, Olivier inspiring

Henry V and

first

made

good

the most

the greatest Shakespeare

film of his time. Olivier’s

1944 film had

its

American pre-

miere in 1946. James Agee, reviewing

for

it

Time, was unstinting in his praise: “Sometimes ... it is

improves on the original. Yet

graceful, never self-assertive.

serves, extends, illuminates

speare’s

poem.”

the Allied

war

Olivier’s

effort

and

It

its

brilliance

simply sub-

liberates

Shake-

Henry Khad helped

and made Shakespeare

accessible to the masses.

The

Allies

had

just

defeated an axis of evil, and no one questioned that

192

God

was on

their side, the atrocities

on

the others’, or doubted the justice of the cause,

or begrudged the sainted glory of their leaders. Olivier confirmed the people’s faith

and proved

“When

the banner

the old Ukrainian proverb, is

unfurled,

all

lywood basked

reason

is

in the trumpet.”

in Olivier’s reflected glory

awarded him an honorary Oscar his

work on

Hol-

and

in 1946 for

the film.

But Shakespeare scholars noted that the original play

was interlaced with

against Olivier’s

lines that cut

theme of martial glory and

royal heroism. Like his

banner-waving 19th-

century predecessors, Olivjier had performed drastic cosmetic surgery cc

poem.

To

on Shakespeare’s

»

appreciate Olivier’s makeover one has

to read the play with care

and then watch the

refurbished video. Anything in the text that

might diminish the glory of Henry justice

V or

the

of his war has been bent to Olivier’s

purpose or simply excised. The pivotal con-

—whether Henry V had

sideration of the play

193

a just cause for

going to war or whether,

William Hazlitt wrote

in 1817,

as

he had simply

been given carte blanche by the “pious and politic

Archbishop of Canterbury

and murder

— home” —

to rob

of latitude and longitude

to save the possessions of the

abroad at

in circles

...

church

has been turned into brief, farcical

stage business.

The

original

first

scene of the

play has the Archbishop of Canterbury worrying to his sycophant, the Bishop of Ely, that the

new king and his parliament are

reconsidering

the passage of a law urged during his fathers reign.

The law would

the wealth

To avoid

is

by the devout

to the

this financial disaster the

points the there

left

take back for the king

far

all

Church.

archbishop

young king toward France, where

more wealth than the Church of

England can provide. The archbishop expounds on the law and the Bible

to assure the

king that he has a legal claim to the throne of France. Such

chapter in the

194

is

the casus belli of

Hundred

Years’

Henry

War.

Vs

and

Olivier edits out the offending lines

makes the warmongering episcopates into laughable fools.

Gone

completely, too, are

Henry

the lines at the siege of Harfleur where

threatens the French governor with atrocities if

he

shall

fails

be

to surrender:

all

“The

gates of

shut up”; “look to see

and bloody soldier with

foul

/

hand

/

The

by the

silver beards,

/

blind

Defile the /

Your

And

their

locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters; fathers taken

mercy

most reverend heads dash’d

to the walls,

naked infants spitted upon

pikes.”

/

Your

The speech

women three

threatens mass rape of Harfleur’s

times. Omitted, too, are the disturbing lines

during the Battle of Agincourt when Henry orders,

“Every soldier

saintly

kill his

prisoners.” Oliviers

Henry is an unspotted king who

reacts

instead to French atrocity only thus: “I was not

angry since stant.”

I

came

to France

/

Until this in-

So the audience will share

anger, Olivier has the French act

ing the boys and the luggage.

his righteous first,

attack-

He presents

this

195

episode as led by the cowardly French dauphin,

who

thus becomes the

enemy. The

most

list

striking

is

embodiment of the evil

of omissions goes on, but the Shakespeare’s epilogue, which

speaks to the futility of the war:

made

France and

Dame

Judi

when asked

his

“They

lost

England bleed.”

Dench quoted

to judge a

epilogue

this

May 2004 debate

—

be-

tween Christopher Hitchens, David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Arianna Huffington, and

Ken Adelman, among others

—about

the merits

of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq informed

by competing interpretations of Henry

V.

Orga-

nized as a fundraiser for the Washington, D.C.,

Shakespeare Theatre, the debate seems to have

been a friendly pre-election joust between Republican hawks and Democratic doves, with

on some version of

the

hawks

er’s

sanctimonious interpretation.

Dench,

relying

herself a

winner. As

it

Dame Judi

Quaker, refused to declare a

happened, she had appeared

Mistress Quickly in

196

Olivi-

Kenneth Branagh’s

as

darker,

post-Falklands movie version of the play, re-

famous

leased in 1989. (She speaks the

lines

describing Falstaff’s death and blaming the

king for breaking his heart.) Branagh shows us

much of what Olivier did not be a mix of good and

evil

—

that there can

on both

sides

that innocent people bear the greatest

and

burden

of suffering. Viewed side by side with Olivier’s version,

Branaghs

time, history,

is

the obvious winner, with

and the

Branagh’s FIenry film

text

V

is

all

on

his side.

a far superior

and a more sophisticated reading of Shake-

speare, but

it

must have taken a self-confidence

bordering on arrogance for a young actor to

attempt to match Sir Laurence’s monumental

achievement. Branagh explores the psychological

—

dimensions of the character

formation from the wild young Falstaff loved to the

tavern friend (“I

grows into

his trans-

man whom

King who repudiates

know thee not,

his

old man”) and

his royal responsibilities.

Whereas

197

Olivier orates in his verses.

first

His episcopates are not

shortened

lines

young King Henry

The

Branagh con-

fools,

but with

they are not as conniving as

their entire speeches

vice.

scenes,

might

reveal.

clearly relies

on

Branaghs their ad-

film includes scenes that emphasize

—

the king’s break with his past

for example,

the execution of three traitors, one of a lord fies

who

shared “his bed”

—and he

rati-

the hanging of Bardolph (one of Falstaff’s

lower-class tavern fraternity) for stealing

French church.

of Agincourt, his fear that

claim,

from a

On the night before the Battle

as the

king prays, he expresses

God may not recognize his fathers

and thus

In Branagh’s

his

own,

to the English throne.

St. Crispin’s

Day

quisite than Olivier’s but

he

them

tries to lift

speech, less ex-

more compelling,

himself up as well as his men.

His character has to earn the kingly glory with

which Olivier begins the is

fought in a

play. Branagh’s battle

muddy field on a rainy day where

arrows strike their victims and blood

198

is

spilled.

The iconic war scene has Henry carrying in arms the dead body of one of the boys

killed

Jacobi, delivers the epilogue of futility.

and

by

Derek

the French, and in the end his chorus,

Branagh’s

his

But

Henry V, though more psychological

darker, does not break with the tradition

that portrays this

Henry

as the “star

of Eng-

land” and Shakespeare’s greatest king. It

was a tradition

criticized

from the time

of Hazlitt: “Henry, because he did not

how to

to govern his

make war upon

speare’s text,

know

own kingdom, determined his neighbours.” In

Henry

Shake-

speaking from his

IV,

deathbed, urges this strategy on his son.

It is

not always clear whether Hazlitt was describing Shakespeare’s king.

Henry

V or

the historical

But there can be no mistaking Stephen

Greenblatt’s 1988 characterization: deftly registers every

ruthlessness,

“The play

nuance of royal hypocrisy,

and bad

faith

—

testing, in effect,

the proposition that successful rule depends

not upon sacredness but upon demonic vio-

199

lence

— but

ebration.”

it

does so in the context of a

One

cel-

can almost sense T.W. Craik,

Arden edition of the

the editor of the

play,

cringing as he dutifully cited Greenblatt’s “new historicist” reading rejects

He

a reading he

with every fiber of his loyal British soul.

blames Hazlitt for initiating the

critical

which

find so

political readings

much

irony in

Irony

is

of the

good

a magic

as

into evil,

wand of literary

two

hate,

and truth into falsehood. free to

One

surmise

Shakespeare himself provided in

“patriotic

history of Henry

romps.” But

as the recent

V productions suggests, such

judgments of irony depend on litical

interpre-

words of love into

Harold Bloom suggests,

how much these

play,

it.

tation that can turn

is,

—

of the play

directors’

opinions about contemporary wars.

po-

An

American production of the play during the

Vietnam War made Henry V an ignoble Lyn-

don Johnson destroying in order to save

200

the vineyards of France

them. After the invasion of

Iraq,

Nicholas Hytner, in his

production

first

as director

of the National Theatre in London,

reinvented

Henry V as Tony Blair,

a

honey-tongued politician complicit colonization and trying to justify

modern fervor,

dress

handsome, in a

it.

war of

Staged in

and stripping away the

patriotic

Hytner ’s production emphasized the hu-

man cost of war. The king’s speeches were presented as press conferences, and the chorus was

Henry Vs

spin doctors broadcasting

television sets

Here

mounted around

in the

Bush who

is

United States

large

the stage.

it is

George W.

compared ttf Henry V, despite the

president’s limitations as a speaker. lels

on

The

paral-

between the king and our president are

intriguing and even disturbing. Both leaders are hard-drinking playboys

mended

their ways,

into office.

II

and followed

Both men’s claims

were sullied Richard

who found God,

— Henry V’s by

their fathers

£o that office

the

murder of

and George W. Bush’s by the Su-

preme Court’s

intervention.

Both

men

were

201

heavily reliant

enced

church

dubbed “theocons” by David Brooks

Shakespeare Theatre debate, seem not

unlike those the

their fathers’ more-experi-

advisers. Henry’s self-interested

advisers, in the

on

who

told

George W. Bush about

weapons of mass destruction

that

would

be found in Iraq. Both teams of advisers

as-

sured their leaders that they could win their

wars using

much

less

full

measure of

And

both teams

than the

their available military force.

promised easy victories and long-term

benefits.

Out of Henry Vs conquest of France would come Joan of Arc and for the first time tion.

has

a

war of resistance that

would unify France

Out of George W.

as a

Bush’s conquest of Iraq

come a Sunni insurgency and an energized

Islam with

new

One might

leaders treated as saints.

take

torical coincidence,

ators.

There

is,

all

this as far-fetched his-

of interest only to bardol-

however, a deeper and more

frightening resonance between Harfleur Fallujah

202

na-

and

and between Henry V and George W.

Bush.

The Shakespeare scholar Herschel Baker

noted that in Henry ^patriotism

is

presented as

an aspect of religion, and the same frightening conjunction his

is

made by George W. Bush and

own theocon advisers. To

W. Bush and

his Iraq

war

is

be against George

God

to be against

and country, a heathen and a

traitor.

cannot claim that Shakespeare had

I

issue

this

of patriotism and religion in mind when

he wrote Henry

V

But

I

do think that

his play

has a particular importance for our times and

our America. Yes, Shakespeare’s text

is

filled

with contradictions—^contradictions that Olcut out and that Branagh used to explore

ivier

the psychological development of the king.

Harold Bloom

is

young

doubtless correct that

both films ignore the blatant hypocrisy and

bad

faith

and send the audience away

feeling

nostalgic for the glory of imperial England. Directors like

Hytner work the

tions and, wielding the

textual contradic-

magic wand of irony,

lead their audiences to the opposite moral con-

203

elusion.

The

that in

Henry

critic

Norman Rabkin

“Shakespeare creates a work

V,

whose ultimate power it

suggests

is

precisely the fact that

points in two opposite directions, virtually

daring us to choose one of the two opposed interpretations

who

T.W. Craik,

quotes Rabkin, doubts that “a spectator

can preserve still

requires of us.”

it

this state

of moral suspension and

receive satisfaction.”

Yet

much of Shakespeare,

including the

sonnets, has this quality: there

no

antithesis but

sense

demands

the sonnets

thesis

and

When common

the satisfaction of a conclusion,

become

with Rabkin

—

state

banal.

I

want

to disagree

think Shakespeare

I

us not to choose.

and that a

synthesis.

is

And

I

hope Craik

is

daring

is

wrong

of moral suspension can be

deeply satisfying to Shakespeare’s audience in the 21st century. For to yield to easy

Shakespeare’s

Henry Vin

204

it is

precisely the refusal

moral conclusions that makes

work

in general

and the

text

of

particular relevant for our times.

A Forbidden Hope Water 2005 ,

In February 2000

and begun filming on the ghats

built her sets

that run along the city

Deepa Mehta had

Ganges River

in India’s

holy

of Varanasi (Benares). The location was

critical to

her story of a widows’ ashram on

the banks of the river where 14

women

live in

penury and constant prayer, condemned by their husbands’ deaths

nary people saris

as

omens of bad

and shaved heads,

traditionally

and shunned by

sick

come from

all

luck.

and

ordi-

With white

elderly

widows

across India to Va-

ranasi in the belief that if they die in the holy city

and

their ashes are spread

on the sacred

waters of the river they will find salvation.

decade

earlier

Mehta had seen such a widow:

A a

skeleton-thin old lady on her hands

and knees,

blindly searching for her lost spectacles while

the passing pilgrims avoided her. Mehta’s un-

shakable like a

memory of that widow,

“bent over

shrimp,” would eventually inspire the

screenplay for Water. Following her films Fire in 1996

and Earth

what she

in 1998,

it

was

to

complete

called her Elemental Trilogy.

Mehta set the

film in 1938 during the rise of

Gandhi. Although by then the infamous tion of suttee

—

the burning of women

husbands’ funeral pyres

—had long

abandoned, widows were

Hindu and

religious

live a life

cording to

beliefs

on

their

since been

required under

law to retreat from the world

of mourning and penitence. Ac-

Hindu

their past lives

husbands.

still

tradi-

The

belief,

the sins of women in

had caused the deaths of their harsh consequences of these

were compounded by the practice of

arranged marriages, in which young

girls

could

be given as brides to old and even dying husbands. Mehta’s ashram on the Ganges includes

an eight-year-old widow, destined to entire

life

in severe discipline

old matriarch

who

—while

rules the

live

her

the obese

ashram supports

her appetite for forbidden sweets and bhang (a

form of hashish) by

beautiful

widow

other side of the

Mehta has

selling the services

to rich

of a

Brahmin men on the

river.

said that the Indian Ministry

Information and Broadcasting

—which

of

censors

and approves screenplays before they can be

—granted her

shot

all

the necessary permits.

But Hindu fundamentalists,

who had been ful-

minating about MehtaVsacrilegious treatment of holy scriptures ever since sets,

torched the

threw them into the Ganges, and burned

Mehta in dia,

Fire,

effigy.

When Fire was released in In-

they had thrown Molotov cocktails at the

screen

and closed down

theaters.

preemptively threatened to riot filming.

The local

This time they

if Mehta

began

authorities of Uttar Pradesh

were unable to guarantee adequate protection,

and Mehta had to look

for alternative sites.

It

207

took her four years to find a substitute for Varanasi,

Lake

but beside the

in Sri

still

waters of Bolgoda

Lanka, Mehta created a timeless

Varanasi of the imagination.

The

set

design

is

one of the many stun-

ning accomplishments of the film; every shot

of Giles Nuttgen’s cinematography

is

a

work

of art, and there are

moments of serene beauty.

Indeed, Water

and away Mehtas

is

far

greatest

achievement and deserves to be compared with the masterwork of Indian cinema, the

Apu tril-

ogy of Satyajit Ray. Mehta’s earlier films, and particularly those in the

one

Elemental Trilogy, would not have led

to expect the

deep humanism, epic power,

technical mastery,

With

this film

and sheer beauty of Water.

Mehta

nesses into strengths.

has turned

settling a personal score

expansive portrayal of the

— though she —become an as

here

human

Her stock storytelling device

208

her weak-

The psychological themes

she has worked and reworked

were

all

—

in

condition.

which every-

—

seen through the eyes of an innocent

thing

is

takes

on

narrative force through the rebellious

eight-year-old child, Chuyia,

cept her

fate.

who

refuses to ac-

Mehta’s earlier attempts to create

epic scenes lacked verisimilitude; in Water the

reenactment of Gandhi’s train station

is

visit to a

totally convincing.

thronged

And Mehta’s

own ironic and condescending attitudes toward Hindu traditions ters struggling

are here

with their

Mehta was born family in India.

mother, she

mediated by characfaith.

into a well-to-do

Hindu

Her own widowed grand-

says, far

from being an

outcast,

was a tyrannical matriarch. Mehta’s father was a film distributor

spent

and theater owner, and Mehta

many afternoons with her friends watch-

ing films.

The

family was ambitious: her older

brother Dilip was an internationally renowned still

photographer by the time he was 24, and

Mehta

set

her

—

losopher

a

own

sights

on becoming a phi-

more common route

to

filmmak-

ing these days than one might suppose. Like

209

many graduate students, Mehta could not settle on

a

Ph.D.

thesis topic,

and when someone

at a

dinner party offered her a job as a gofer

in a

documentary-film studio she jumped

at

the opportunity. She started honing her film-

making

skills

and made her

first

documentary

about the arranged marriage of a 15-year-old girl,

an untouchable,

in the

Mehtas’

who

cleaned the floors

own home.

She married the Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman and immigrated to Toronto. The couple started

making documentaries

about her brother Dilip, with them. In her 1991, she cal

and

her

life.

first

who

together,

often

one

worked

feature film, released in

acknowledges exploring psychologi-

cultural issues that

The

film,

were important

in

Sam and Me, was about

young Muslim Indian who has immigrated

a

to

Toronto and gets a job taking care of an old Jew,

Sam Cohen. Sam

in life

and wants only

His family does not

210

is

no longer

interested

to be buried in Israel.

really

want

to bother with

him. But something unexpected happens: the

young Muslim and the old Jew

discover that

they enjoy each others company. Their friendship upsets both families,

who

interfere

with

unhappy consequences.

The success of Sam and Me brought Mehta to the attention of

her to ries

make two

George Lucas, who hired

episodes of the television se-

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, one of

them

set in Varanasi, circa 1910. It

was during

the filming of that episode that she saw the unforgettable image of the old widow.

And

was during that production that she worked the

first

it

for

time with Giles Nuttgens, the talented

cinematographer

who would

film the entire

Elemental Trilogy. Mehta’s career was launched, but her marriage disintegrated.

up

During the months leading

to her divorce she

threw herself into writ-

ing Fire, set in modern-day India. Returning to India to film, she

was not the prodigal child

asking forgiveness and embracing the traditions

211

that

still

require

women’s subservience. Her

Elemental Trilogy was to be a challenge to the

chauvinism of Hindu orthodoxy. Fire is a story of sexual hypocrisy in a lower-

middle-class

—an

ily

two

Hindu family in

elderly

Delhi.

mother disabled by a

sons, their wives,

and

a

The fam-

stroke, her

—

male servant

live

together above their takeout restaurant and video store. rejected

by

The wives are unloved and sexually male servant

their husbands; the

repulsive in his

prides himself

own

on

way.

The

living a life

nence, brahmacharin, based lief that desire is

older brother

of pious

whom

absti-

on the Hindu

be-

the root cause of rebirth into

the cycle of suffering. In reality he his wife,

is

is

punishing

he blames because they have

been unable to have children. She accepts the

blame and works hard ily

and the

restaurant.

sordid nature of the

to take care

of the fam-

Having established the

men

of the family, Mehta

draws the victimized wives into a lesbian love affair.

212

Mehta

affirms this sexual relationship.

Rebelling against her servitude, the elder of the

two wives

tells

her pious husband that she

has chosen to live a

life

instead of penitently

waiting for death.

What had

fundamentalists firebombing

movie screens was

that in addition to

religious asceticism

and affirming lesbianism,

Mehtas screenplay parodied

Hindu scripture.

mocking

Sita,

a

famous story

in

the goddess, proves that

she has been sexually faithful to her husband, the god

Rama, by going through

nonetheless, she

is

older sister-in-law,

of the ers

trial

by

her lesbian

fire

is

fire;

subjected to an enactment

when

her husband discov-

She survives the

abandons her husband and lover.

leaves

The

rounding Fire had a longer itself

by

exiled. Mehta’s heroine, the

affair.

dezvous with her

a trial

fire

but

home to ren-

controversy sur-

life

than the film

and made Mehta’s reputation.

Earth, the next film in the trilogy, was based

on Bapsi Sidhwa’s

best-selling novel Cracking

described,

from a child’s point of view,

India.

It

213

the tumultuous year of 1947, partitioned

when

India was

and millions of Muslims, Hindus,

and Sikhs were turned out of their homes and slaughtered by their neighbors. Unfortunately,

neither the acting nor the epic scenes were

compelling enough to make the novel to

life

on the

screen.

Water could have easily been Earth. She was preparing to use

same

actors

come

much

like

many of the

and many of the same themes.

But when the fundamentalists forced her to temporarily set that film aside, she turned her attention to a lighter film that

new

have brought

life

may in

to the trilogy.

the end

That

film

was Bollywood/Hollywood, a thoroughly entertaining musical

comedy

commercial success in the

Indian diaspora.

conflicts

a huge

Canada and elsewhere It

gives

Mehta still

them

love conquers

214

became

playfully engages the

of Indian identity and assimilation,

conflicts that

and

in

that

a

all.

struggles with herself,

comic resolution

in

which

For Bollywood/Hollywood she needed a

glamorous leading

actress,

and she

cast Lisa

Ray, a woman of Indian and Polish descent

has

become

India’s

who

foremost fashion model.

When Mehta

returned to Water she brought

Ray with her

to play Kalyani, the beautiful

widow who

sold into prostitution. There

is

a love story in Water. Narayan, a

from a wealthy Brahmin in the street,

and

it is

young lawyer

family, sees Kalyani

love at

first

sight

that transgresses the taboo against

Mehta gave

the caste system.

is

—

a love

widows and

the part of

Na-

rayan to a Bollywood starand India’s most celebrated male model, John Abraham, a

man who

had appeared on the cover of as many magazines as Lisa Ray.

Although he plays the

role

of

a recent law-school graduate circa 1938, he appears in the film sporting the kind of three-day

beard that currently seems required of young

male

actors.

That

said,

Ray and Abraham

winning performances that do Kalyani

is

a simple,

credit to

give

Mehta.

uneducated woman, the

215

lotus that preserves

is

who and

superb. Narayan

is

a

Gandhian

is

not just a fool

actress to play

—and he

idealist

Chuyia, the

succeeds. selection of the

who

feisty girl

challenge the traditions of the ashram.

the film begins

we

riage

is

A man

later will

we realize

the child’s dying husband.

The mar-

feet;

only

seems never to have been consummated,

and there has been no wedding, but is

this little

about to become a widow. Her parents

abandon her

piously

head

on

on the wagon bed, and she

cheekily pokes his that he

When

and riding on the back

of a wagon through the countryside. stretched out

will

see the child sucking

a stalk of sugar cane

girl

it

has to convince us that he truly feels love

More daring was Mehta’s

is

as

Within those parameters

floats in corruption.

Ray

innocence even

its

shaved in a

in the ashram,

and her

ritual

of degradation. Since

Mehta would be filming

in Sri Lanka, she be-

is

gan searching there for a child to play Chuyia.

The

216

girl

she discovered, Sarala, did not speak

Hindi and had she

is

that

to learn

her lines by rote. But

all

who

a spirited presence

one imagines

“Where

are

all

speaks the lines

are closest to Mehta’s heart:

the male widows?”

Mehta’s ashram

is

peopled with crones out

of Fellini movies, and their ensemble acting superb.

Madhumati, the obese matriarch of

the ashram appetites,

—

ity

But

who exploits

is still

Kalyani to satisfy her

shown to

us in

all

her

human-

a tribute to Mehta’s and the actress’s talent.

it is

the

widow

great Indian actress

Shakuntala, played by the

Seema Biswas

Western audiences for her in

is

role as

—known

to

Phoolan Devi

—whose

Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen

per-

formance holds the film together. Shakuntala is

the conscience and quiet strength of the ash-

ram. She

is

the one

between deep

who

mediates the struggle

religious faith

she sees and understands to resolve this not out

cepts her

own

it.

and the truth

And she struggles

—

of self-interest

—but out of

fate

as

she ac-

her concern for

Chuyia and Kalyani.

217

When,

parents’ high social position,

marry the beautiful

to

and

despite the religious taboos

edy ensues.

He

across the river

Narayan

resolves

widow,

illiterate

escorting her to his

is

when

his

trag-

home

she recognizes the way:

she has been his father’s prostitute. She insists

on turning back and

later

drowns

herself in

the river where she has so often cleansed her

body and her that can

soul.

happen

And

this

is

not the worst

in Mehta’s tragic imagination.

The obese crone, not to be denied her luxuries, sends the innocent Chuyia across the river to the rich Brahmins. is

The

waiting at the dock

now devastated,

is

finds

it

is

in

hope

is

to the railroad

making

a brief stop.

in this corrupted world, she religious tradition

With Chuyia in her arms

she

with the throngs of people to Gandhi’s

message.

218

the feisty child,

arms

Gandhi, not the

she has followed. listens

in her

where Gandhi

If there

when

returned the next morning.

She takes the child station

horrified Shakuntala

He

reenters the train,

and

it

slowly

begins to leave the station. Shakuntala

knows what

now

to do: chasing the train with the

child in her arms, she spots Narayan,

who

is

leaving with Gandhi. Desperately, she hands the ruined child over to his care. Preposterous, yes! Melodramatic, yes! But in this

it is

like

many great movies. There was not

a dry eye in the audience as that train into the distance. that she

is

Mehta

moved

has proved in Water

more than an angry

iconoclast. In

the darker passages of the moral adventure of life,

films like Water allow us to hope.

BOSTON REVIEW BOOKS Boston Review Books are ideas seriously. equality,

They

are

accessible, short

books that take

animated by hope, committed to

and convinced that the imagination eludes

cal categories.

The

editors

aim

politi-

to establish a public space in

which people can loosen the hold of conventional preconceptions

and

reason together across the lines others

start to

are so busily drawing.

The End of the Wild

God and

the Welfare State

Making Aid Work

The

Stephen m. meyer

lew daly

abhijit vinayak banerjee

Story of Cruel and Unusual

colin dayan

What We Know About Climate Change Movies and the Moral Adventure of Life

kerry emanuel

alan

a.

stone

film/psychology

Whether writing about foreign Fiction or

Ma

films or blockbusters, Pulp

Vie en Rose, Alan A. Stone

shows us how great movies capture what it means to be human. Stone, a psychiatrist and scholar, judges films by the quality of their engage-

ment with the universal struggle against the constraints of character and circumstance. With him, we applaud directors such as Sam Mendes, Marleen Gorris, and Wu Tian Ming who not only resist cynicism but offer us an enlarged sense of

human

possibility.

"Wise, humane, and deeply intelligent. This

is a book everyone who loves the movies." -Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice

for

"An astute physician, teacher, and essayist, Alan Stone shows us how movies address our moral and spiritual yearnings, and in so doing, he helps us understand who we are and what we hope to accomplish in life." -Robert Coles, author of The Moral Life of Children "A splendid collection of essays that illuminate a wide range of memorable films and offer compelling insights into the significance and potential of cinema.”

-Sissela Bok, author of "This brilliant book

is like

Common

Values

that ideal conversation after a movie.

Few film critics have Alan Stone's moral and spiritual subtlety, or even his patience and scope. And with his psychologist's eye for complex elemental human relationships, Stone is an inspired guide through American and foreign films. You'll want to watch, or watch again, every movie in this book." -Elaine Scarry, author of On Beauty and Being Just

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