Male Violence, the End of Empire and 'Lawrence of Arabia'

I'm seeing David Lean's 'Lawrence of Arabia' tonight at the Carolina Theatre in Durham.  Again.  I've been fortunate to see it in 70mm (if you don't know what 70mm is, let's just say that it's what movies used to look like when you were a kid - HUGE and CLEAR and EPIC; and it's a format that's very rarely used these days).  This film is approaching fifty years old, but the last time I saw it - a year ago - it seemed so sure of itself and its themes so universal that it could have been made anytime.

Most of us who know it from TV screenings on wet Saturday afternoons, or because our grandparents told us about it may too easily disregard it; seeming like an artefact from the pre-CGI, pre-Tarantino, pre-indie witticism past.  But if what is past is prologue, then this film - about war, and the effects of war on those who try to make it happen - may demand our attention.

This is a film that evokes the end of the British Empire, and therefore the potential end of the concept of Empire itself; even though it's set during the first world war, it was made in 1962, by which time the notion of one monarch somehow ruling the world was fading into memory, and post-colonial theorists were beginning to make the case that Empire was a bad idea to start with.  The place where I was born and raised was about to take on the mantle of the last vestige of this Empire, and some of its people were about to take a leaf out of the revolutionary playbook that had been put to such awful use in places like Algeria, while tragically ignoring, avoiding or de-emphasising the tactics of the non-violent revolutionaries of India and the US Civil Rights Movement.  Turns out that those who wanted to hold onto Empire, and those who wanted to overthrow it were both wrong.

Killing people to prove that injustice is wrong may be the most contradictory paradox.  To keep Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, the government turned it into something like a security state; to make Ireland free, Irish people killed other Irish people; to keep Ulster British, British people killed other British people.  For decades.  And then we came inexorably to the conclusion that Empire (or an Independent Ireland) didn't matter as much as ensuring that every citizen has a stake in the governance of the society; that equality of opportunity should be enshrined in law; and that the only way to bring a violent conflict to an end is for someone to stop shooting first.

'Lawrence of Arabia' may have stirred a kind of nostalgic patriotism among British audiences in the 1960s - it is, on the surface after all, largely about how an English soldier helped Arabs defeat the Turkish army.  But it's much more subtle than a simple flag-waving exercise - its examination of Lawrence's psyche is deeply subversive in that it admits something that popular war movies tend to ignore: that killing can be addictive.  It foreshadows the recent amazing film 'The Hurt Locker' in Lawrence's admission that he 'enjoyed it' when called upon to execute a misbehaving nomad - but it actually goes further, in that it's clear that while he enjoyed it, he doesn't enjoy the fact that he enjoyed it.

He's deeply troubled, and at the end of the war is no longer the integrated, Noel Coward-esque wit we saw at the beginning.  Lawrence has 'a funny sense of fun' - and David Lean had a very sharp sense of the brutalisation that so many men embrace in order to feel alive, and how we have mislaid other rituals that used to pronounce and even convey adulthood.  The most well known line in the film is probably 'Nothing is written' - Lawrence's refusal to endorse the fatalism of pre-rational ways of doing religion; the human being is supposed to act on history, not be swept away by it.  I don't watch 'Lawrence of Arabia' to be thrilled by the violence or excited by the military 'victories' - they didn't last; and they certainly didn't produce a lasting peace in the Middle East; geo-politics is still dealing with the legacy of how Britain and what became Saudi Arabia tangoed a hundred years ago.  I watch it because, apart from the fact that it moves with grace and notes and a propulsive narrative, and imagery that has never been repeated, it tells the story of a man who faced a crisis, made a choice, and changed the world.  His was dangerous change.  I need to be reminded that I am subject to the male addiction to transformation through outer violence; because if I don't find a way to transform that violence into something that neither seeks to wound nor colonise others into my own little Empire of Self, my life will be dynamite, and not in a good way.

The Exodus of Henry Gibson

You know Henry Gibson.  He's one of those character actors who beefed up everything he was in, and indelibly so.  Fully worthy of Jett's appellation 'an OTG actor' (no matter how bad the movie, when he's on screen, your reflex is to say 'Oh Thank God').   You can't imagine 'Magnolia' without his Luciferian bar-loiterer Thurston Howell, stirring William H Macy to humiliate himself with his unrequited love Brad (evoking the sinister sliminess of Richard Burton in 'The Medusa Touch', Gibson here seemed to invest his voice with supernatural powers); 'The Blues Brothers' would be poorer (and the climactic, ridiculous chase sequence much less funny) without his absurd white supremacist; and, despite 'Nashville's status as a fully ensembled ensemble, it is his character, Haven Hamilton, who sings the overture and facilitates the coda.

He helped anchor work as various and memorable as 'The Long Goodbye' (which Elliott Gould told us recently may have a sequel on the way), and Joe Dante's wonderful homage to 50s kitsch sci-fi 'Innerspace'.  And who else played two different guest roles on both 'The Fall Guy' and 'MacGuyver'  (with character names like Meriwell Cooper, Milton Bach, and my personal favourite, Pinky Burnette; not to mention Reilly O'Reilly (you heard that right) in something called 'The Luck of the Irish.  To be sure.)  He also made it into 'The Littlest Hobo', which happens to have been my favourite show when I was eight years old.  In one of those eyebrow raising coincidences that actors of his generation seem to carry in their pockets, he got his stage name from Jon Voigt, an old roommate, who, along with others who have spoken to the press since his death on Monday, seems to have shared the view that he was one of the kindest men they knew; and, yes, it was a deliberate attempt to evoke the name of the author of 'A Doll's House'.

But I'll remember him most for 'Magnolia', in the dark velvet smoking jacket, sneering at all-comers, laying down the gauntlet to the universe, saying No to grace.  He clearly hasn't seen the weather forecast.  'Magnolia', of course, is soaked with references to the numbers '2' and '8', indicating the 8th chapter, 2nd verse of the book of Exodus (in case you haven't been doing scripture memorisation lately, that's a sentence about the potential for certain amphibious creatures to interrupt your day, make you look, and maybe even wise, up).  If memory serves, the introduction to the published shooting script for 'Magnolia' has Paul Thomas Anderson saying that he got the biblical reference from Henry Gibson, meaning that he had much more of a hand in that movie than simply sitting devilish and asking for another drink.

'It is a dangerous thing to confuse children with angels', says Thurston Howell, egging Macy's Quiz Kid Donnie Smith to shred a little bit more of his ego; 'It's not', says Donnie later, throwing up his embarrassment, not knowing that tonight will be a turning point toward his own redemption, and perhaps the end of his loneliness.  It is, however, a dangerous thing to confuse Henry Gibson with nothing more than a thesp-for-hire.  You can't imagine anyone else playing his roles.  Rest in Peace.

Andrei Rublev and Fear of Flying

I've been slowly captivated over the years by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky - the last scene of his 'Solaris' may be the closest the cinema has come to re-producing a mystical experience on screen.  His films pose questions that each of us is asking, all the time; they take some work and patience, but are ultimately deeply rewarding experiences.  I'm excited to be seeing his 'Andrei Rublev' in a cinema for the first time this Sunday at the Belcourt in Nashville.  My co-host on The Film Talk considers this the best film ever made; and asserts that it 'feels as if it were made in the Middle Ages'.  It's about the greatest painter of religious icons of the period; which either attracts you or makes you want to run a mile away from this film - but, trust me, watch this opening sequence and maybe I'll see you Sunday.  The opening minutes of 'Andrei Rublev' declare its intent: this is a film, like all of Tarkovsky's films, about the search for God, the desire to be met, and sometimes the confusion between the desire to meet God and the desire to be God.  In other words, it's about fear of flying.  Check out the clip below and you'll see what I mean.  I'd be glad to have a conversation on the blog about the film with people who've seen it.  (The whole thing's available online in pretty decent quality.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-R_P8qEwwQ]

Charles Darwin Can't Get No Respect (with a Jay Leno Minority Report)

And so we turn to the news on a Monday morning: Things are going just fine in the world of dumbed down culture – I just heard a story on NPR suggesting that the writers of Jay Leno’s new TV show might struggle to deal with the fact that they’re on just before the news.  Not because of ratings, but because it is assumed that the audience won’t be able to cope with the shift in tone.  Which leads me inexorably to evolutionary biology, one of the most interesting British film producers working over the past thirty years, and why I rarely go to the movies for pleasure anymore.  Three thoughts follow.

Read the rest of this post at The Film Talk....

'Unforgiven' and the Roots of Violence

I took another look at 'Unforgiven' the other day - one of those films whose original impact was muted by the fact that I saw it amidst hype, and, precisely half a lifetime ago, when I didn't know that I had no idea what I was talking about. The difference today, I suppose is twofold; I still have no idea what I'm talking about, but at least I think I know this; and I've seen a few more films and thought a lot about violence and masculine archetypes.

'Unforgiven' has the reputation of being the revisionist Western to end all revisionist Westerns; but this misses the point, and isn't quite accurate - 'Dances with Wolves', whatever you think of its aesthetic and philosophical merits, wasn't exactly a cowboys-beat-Indians actioner, the genuine masterpiece 'Heaven's Gate' shatters the myth of the glorious frontier, Clint had done revenge-as-a-living-hell before in 1973's 'High Plains Drifter', even the otherwise ridiculous and xenophobic 'Cattle Queen of Montana' had Barbara Stanwyck going off into the sunset with the unlikeliest pardners this side of the cast of 'Twins': Native American hero on one arm, Ronald Reagan on the other.  (See below for an analogy of how grating, if appealing, that particular contrast appears.)

So to see 'Unforgiven's strengths as merely relating to how 'different' it may be from other Westerns about men-who-might-as-well-have-no-name is to reduce its value to nothing more than an innovation. It's far more important than that: it reveals the gaping wound in the typical Western vision of the male psyche, exposes the roots of violence, and seeks to provide a serious answer to the question of why people kill, and why portrayals of killing constitute so much of our entertainment complex.  This answer, if taken seriously enough, could change everything.

The short version: people kill, and we like to watch portrayals of killing because we're afraid of death.

There are some fascinating thoughts about this at the International Psycoanalysis blog here.  If the author (Herbert Stein, M.D., in his “Double Features: Discovering our Unconscious Fantasies in Film” (EREADS, 2003)) has a point, and it seems pretty compelling to me, then the causes of violence can be traced to an attempt at asserting power over death; which opens a fairly large can of worms when it comes to considerations of what happens when fear is, itself, the dominant lens through which some of us have been wounded into viewing life.  This may all sound a bit flowery for the Film Talk or for a Friday, but I just wonder...if we accept the premise that politicised fear can lead to real death, can't cinematic fear give some grounding to that same fear, and that same death?  In that regard, would 'Unforgiven' be better seen as part of the pantheon of, or a kind of retrospective prequel to, films like 'A Matter of Life and Death', 'Wings of Desire', and 'Magnolia' where the notion of something transcendent gathering up the mystery of being human into a space that may not make sense as we understand it now, but constitutes an interruption of grace that cuts the poisonous flow that oxygenates the myth that violence fixes things?   Just a thought.