Last Monday, the death of Dean Potter was announced in the international press. Best known as a rock climber and an "extreme sports" participant and advocate, Potter died with a partner, Graham Hunt, while engaged in a "BASE-jump" in Yosemite National Park. They were wearing wing suits that enables experienced users to virtually fly as they break their fall with a suit resembling the skin flaps of a flying squirrel. They were also equipped with parachutes (in French "para" [stop] "chute" [fall]) but they were never deployed. It must've been an astonishing ride, all the way down - until, of course, the very last terrifying moment.
The "BASE" in BASE-jumping stands for the structures from which a jump might be attempted: Building Antenna Span Earth (i.e., cliff).
According to the Los Angeles Times, the two men jumped at nightfall on Saturday from Taft Point and were trying to clear a "notch" on a mountain between their jump site and Yosemite Valley. Their bodies were found Sunday on the rock face. According to a Yosemite spokesman, Potter had already jumped twenty times from the same point. Because of its particular hazards, however, BASE-jumping has been banned in Yosemite Park.
Potter had pursued rock climbing, slack lining (walking across chasms on a length of nylon rope [see above]), and BASE-jumping as "a form of art." On his blog, he wrote of BASE-jumping: "Though my body is warm inside the nylon suit I start to shiver and wonder if what we're doing is right. Wingsuit BASE-jumping feels safe to me but 25 wingsuit-fliers have lost their lives, this year alone. There must be some flaw in our system, a lethal secret beyond my comprehension."
Potter sometimes took his dog, Whisper, along with him on his jumps until he admitted that "It wasn't until I started having to think through the likelihood of something happening to Whisper that I finally got it. This is really serious stuff that we do." Whisper wasn't with Potter on Saturday.
These so-called sports are nothing but death-defying, daredevil stunts. Exactly why people engage in such activities would require a closer psychological approach that brings into question the value of individual lives and the thrill of ever-approaching death. I first broached this subject in my review of the film Touching the Void, which dramatizes (fantastically) the near-death experiences of two British mountain climbers in the Andes. Mountain-climbing is also commonly mistaken for a sport. While it requires great skill and knowledge - and expensive equipment - it is, at best, a questionable sport. For one thing: in what way is it competitive? I suppose that the winners are the men and women who manage to survive the climb? Or, perhaps more revealingly, the winners are the ones who die trying.
What is it about these pursuits that attracts increasing numbers of people to take part? To call it simply a death wish is insufficient. When I leave my house and take a drive into town, probably the last thing on my mind is the idea that I might die on the way. People do sometimes die in their driveways or within a mile or so of their homes - many more than one might think. But I don't walk out my front door with the thought of possibly dying in the back of my mind. The chances of dying while simply living a normal life are extremely slim - while the chances of dying while BASE-jumping or mountain climbing are considerably greater. So, why is the vast majority of people perfectly happy, theoretically at least, living their normal lives when some people aren't happy unless they are pushing the envelope - deliberately risking their own necks jumping off a cliff in a wing suit?
I think there is a physiological explanation that either isn't yet known or isn't being publicized. I think there must be a chemical deficiency in the brains of extreme sport practitioners that prevents them from finding fulfillment in simple daily activities. In order to feel alive - as alive as I feel at home sitting in my underwear watching television -they have to feel the proximity of death, to bring themselves as physically close to death as they can get, short of simply jumping off a tall building (without a wing suit) or throwing themselves in front of a bus. Isn't it possible to "live life to the fullest" - the very words that friends of Dean Potter used to describe him - while not practically trying to kill oneself? How many more people will be attracted to BASE-jumping by of the deaths of Potter and Graham?
I remember a creative writing class I took in college in which a fellow student submitted a clever story about a man who is obsessed with a recurring nightmare. He consults a psychologist who tells him to describe the dream. In the dream the man is standing still on a country road at night when a pair of approaching headlights appears in the distance. The man stands somehow rooted to the spot as the car gets closer and closer until he is hit by the car and he awakes in terror. The doctor decides to re-enact the dream and takes the man to a secluded road after dark. He drops him off and tells him to stand in the middle of the road and not to move, no matter what. The doctor then drives his car down the road out of sight, turns around and heads back toward his patient. The man sees the approaching headlights and, just like in the dream, he finds that he can't move. Just as the doctor is about to hit his patient with his car, he turns the wheel to avoid hitting him and slams on the brakes. The doctor jumps out of the car and yells to his patient, "Well?" The man tells him, "That's not how it happened. "
As children, when we read of voyages, we always prefer the voyage out to the voyage back again. If we're lucky, we introduce ourselves to Homer's heroes, and the thousand ships that carried the Greeks to Troy, as well as the return voyage of Odysseus. But it's no accident that The Iliad is the poem preferred by young readers, especially in the many highly readable (if flatfooted) translations into English prose available in paperback. The Trojan War lasted ten years, and Odysseus's voyage homeward lasted another ten. There are other tales of "return" telling of how the victors of the war fared upon arriving at home. Agamemnon's return to his cheating queen Clytemnestra became the centerpiece of Aeschylus's tragedy. There were probably many more such stories that have since been lost. Odysseus's story is the more famous, whether or not it was composed by Homer, by some bardic predecessor of his, or, as Samuel Butler claimed, by a woman whose name has been lost to history.
It's quite amazing that this man and this woman, Odysseus and Penelope, one married couple from an Iron Age tale whose names have come down to us across millennia, could have inspired so many poets to relive events that took place some time around the thirteenth century BCE. Scholars and adventurers have speculated about the course of Odysseus's voyage home, knowing only two points for certain: the exact locations of Troy in what is now Western Turkey and of Ithaka in the Western Aegean Sea. Because of the disfavor of one god or another (Poseidon is always angry), the voyage, which is a distance that a sailing ship could cover in a few days, took Odysseus ten years.
But why is it that some famous readers and at least one translator (T.E. Lawrence) of The Odyssey cared so little for the conclusion of the poem, with Odysseus and Penelope at last reunited on Ithaka? In his poem, "Ithaka," Constantine Cavafy (whom E.M. Forster described as "a man in a straw hat standing at a slight angle to the universe") wished for Odysseus many more adventures, drawing out the moment of his eventual return almost indefinitely:
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
and may you vsiit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor,Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experiences,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.(1)
This is all very lovely, but it's pure fancy. Odysseus didn't set out for Ithaka wanting to see any sights, other than the welcome sight of his island kingdom. He wasn't seeking experiences or wisdom, and would've gladly traded all the ones he hazarded upon for a non-stop ticket home. Why do so many readers always short change the beauty of Penelope and Odysseus's love for her? Cavafy wants us to believe it was Ithaka - not Penelope - to which Odysseus was striving. I won't speculate on Cavafy's (or T.E. Lawrence's) distaste for the heterosexual happy ending that Odysseus finally wins and so richly deserves. And let us not forget Odysseus's shipmates, every one of whom perished on their way home. Would they have wished for further perils to divert bored readers? When Odysseus is given a glimpse of Hades and he meets his dead shipmates there, they didn't sound very keen on another chance at life if it meant more endless struggle toward an unreachable goal.
Another Greek, but a much lesser poet, Nikos Kazantzakis, even wrote a "sequel" to The Odyssey, spiriting the hero away from home in a series of utterly spurious adventures. Kazantzakis must've known Tennyson's poem, "Ulysses," in which the old man sits on the shore of his island and proudly (if a little ridiculously) boasts of voyages to come:
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments.
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is topause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me -
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the Western stars, until I die.(2)
For an old man, how long-winded Tennyson's Ulysses is! And how unlike him. It is one thing to be proud of one's name and one's accomplishments, but to mistake them for frolics is nothing but the bored musings of a man who has led a life in idleness. And when Tennyson's Ulysses calls on his "friends," it's clear that he's lost it.
How far Tennyson was from Lermontov, who lived the life of romanticism (he died in a duel), and who, through Pechorin, confesses his affliction in this diary extract from A Hero of Our Time:
I am like a sailor born and bred on the deck of a pirate brig: his soul has grown accustomed to storms and battles; but, once let him be cast upon the shore, and he chafes, he pines away, however invitingly the shady groves allure, however brightly shines the peaceful sun. The livelong day he paces the sandy shore, hearkens to the monotonous murmur of the onrushing waves, and gazes into the misty distance: lo! yonder, upon the pale line dividing the blue deep from the grey clouds, is there not glancing the longed-for sail, at first like the wing of a seagull, but little by little severing itself from the foam of the billows and, with even course, drawing nigh to the desert harbour?
Tiresias, the Seer of Thebes, tells Odysseus in Book XI of his final voyage:
...
'But once you have killed those suitors in your home - by stealth or in open fight with slashing bronze - go forth once more, you must ... carry your well-planed oar until you come to a race of people who know nothing of the sea, whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars, wings that make ships fly. And here is your sign - unmistakable, clear, so clear you cannot miss it: When another traveler falls in with you and calls that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain, then plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea, Poseidon - a ram, a bull and a ramping wild boar - then journey home and render noble offerings up to the deathless gods who rule the vaulting skies, to all the gods in order. And at last your own death will steal upon you ... a painless death, far from the sea it comes to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age with all your people there in blessed peace around you. All that I have told you will come true.'
(Fagles)
Clearly, the happy ending of The Odyssey is something of a disappointment for some readers who thrill to near-lethal encounters with gods and monsters. But to deny Odysseus the glory (and relief) of his homecoming is to misread The Odyssey. It would be just as unedifying to spare Agamemnon his homecoming to Clytemnestra. If one feels - implacably - that Agamemnon had it coming, then hadn't Odysseus, too?
Robert Fitzgerald, who wrote one of the finest translations of Homer into English verse, proclaimed in his introduction that "The Odyssey is the story of a man who loved his wife and wished to return to her." The proof of this can be found in Odysseus's long sojourn on the goddess Calypso's island, when she offers him immortality if he will stay with her forever:
"Ah great goddess, don't be angry with me,
please. All that you say is true, how well I know.
Look at my wise Penelope. She falls far short of you,
your beauty, stature. She is mortal after all
and you, you never age or die . . .
Nevertheless I long - I pine, all my days -
to travel home and see the dawn of my return.
(Fagles translation)
A man who refuses an offer of godlike immortality because he wants nothing but to return to his mortal wife is something few people today are able to comprehend. The reunion of Odysseus and Penelope is an overwhelmingly heartening and justifiable conclusion to the tale, and not at all the anticlimax that some readers have called it. What some readers object to, I think, is that there should be a conclusion of any kind to Odysseus's marvelous adventures.
Only Wallace Stevens, of all people, felt sorry enough for Penelope to imagine how twenty years of waiting for her husband's return must have affected her:
The World as Meditation
Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? . . . Someone is moving
On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.
She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.
She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.
But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.
It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet's encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.
She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.
Today is my birthday, the eighth that I've spent here on my island of exile. I know too well what Odysseus must have felt on Calypso's island. I, too, am beguiled here by a goddess, who wishes me to remain with her here for the rest of my life - a lot shorter than eternity, but just as interminable. When choice is taken away, even a paradise can seem more like a hell. I live here against my will, too poor to escape. And, like Odysseus, all I can think about is home, the contours of a certain familiar landscape and the faces of my brother and sister and my friends. Like most Americans, they are spread out across the country, but being home would make such distances as that between Alaska (where I am from) and Maine (where two dear friends miss me) seem familiar and manageable. I've crossed the country by car so many times, its distances - though great - are known to me, whereas the great gulf - an ocean and a continent - that separates me from home seems unbridgable, impassable.
When Odysseus found himself shipwrecked in a stormy sea, he cried out, "Rag of man that I am, is this the end of me?" But the gods, who had ordained his homecoming, spared him once again. Foundering on the shore of Nausicaa's island, having been roused to consciousness, Odysseus appeals to the princess, "Now some power has tossed me here,/doubtless to suffer still more torments on your shores./I can't believe they'll stop. Long before that/the gods will give me more, still more."
No more, gods. Let me go home.
(1) Keeley/Sherrard translation. The full poem can be found here.
(2) Tennyson continues at some length. The full poem can be found here.
World War II in Europe ended seventy years ago today. In a country shattered by Allied armies from the east and west, Germans had nothing left but to pick up the pieces and slowly rebuild - with considerable help from the very people who just weeks before had knocked everything down. In films of the period, we were shown the extent of the devastation, but given only glimpses of its effects on ordinary Germans. Roberto Rossellini's film Germany, Year Zero used images of a German city (Berlin) reduced to rubble as a backdrop for a melodrama that ended with the suicide of a young boy who - quite unbelievably - threw himself off a ruined building after having wandered through the seemingly inescapable destruction. In A Foreign Affair, Billy Wilder, who escaped Germany before the war and established a successful career in Hollywood, used location footage shot in Berlin as literal - rear-projection - backdrops for a black comedy of American-German relations among the ruins.
Two years before Year Zero, Rossellini made what is easily the most famous film of the immediate post-war period, Open City (1945). It was filmed with no money in the streets with black market cameras and film stock that was sometimes put together from 35mm rolls of still camera film. Every country that took part in the war had their own stories of what they had endured to tell.
German film production wasn't restarted until 1946. Authorities of the American Office of War Information Overseas (OWI) Motion Picture Bureau imposed its anti-Nazification agenda, which included the collection and confiscation of all Third Reich propaganda films and the screening of newsreels depicting the horrors of the concentration camps to remind Germans of their culpability. But aside from these attempts to reeducate the German people, there was a far more crucial takeover of the German film market, which included its international market, by Hollywood. Within three years of the war's end, about seventy per cent of German cinemas were showing American films. The West German film industry wouldn't recover until the 1970s.
In the years immediately following the war the whole of Germany, like Berlin, was partitioned among American, British, French, and Russian sectors. Anyone who has seen The Third Man, which was filmed in a partitioned Vienna in 1948, will have a good idea of what a bureaucratic nightmare daily life must have been like for ordinary Germans. Since the German film industry was centered in Berlin, a partitioned city well within the Soviet sector, the first postwar German film, Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are Among Us (1946), was made in what soon became known as East Germany. Filmmaking in West Germany was complicated by actors and technicians from Berlin having to acquire transit visas between sectors that, as the Cold War kicked in, grew increasingly impossible to get.
Despite the eagerness of many Germans for sheer escapism in films, and to see American films, like Gone With the Wind, that had been banned by the Nazis, there was a need for German-language films that mirrored (and validated) the experience of ordinary German people coping with everyday life. One of the first of what became known as Rubble Films licensed by the OWI, Helmut Kautner's In Jenen Tagen (In Those Days), is what the British called an omnibus film of seven separate stories about Germans, tied together by an automobile that two scavenging German ex-soldiers - Karl (Erich Schellow) and Willi (Gert Schaefer) find in a bombed-out building and begin to dismantle for its scrap metal and glass. As they methodically take it apart, the car begins to speak (the voice of the car is Kautner himself) and takes us all the way back to 1933, when it was first manufactured. (A kind of unofficial subtitle of the film is Geschichten eines Autos - "History of a car.")
Helmut Kautner (1908-1980), who made films for the Third Reich that managed to avoid blatant propaganda, and that earned him a reputation with Nazi censors as "pro-English," (1) tried to establish a film company in Hamburg. Casting local actors, using equipment acquired on the black market, he managed to shoot In Jenen Tagen during the bitterly cold winter of 1946-47 on outdoor locations. The result is a deceptively comprehensive portrait of the experience of Germans through twelve years under Nazism. Some of the seven episodes are obviously more effective and more powerfully revelatory than others. But this has more to do with our expectations rather than those of the German people, for whom the film was made in the first place.
In the film's first flashback, we are shown the "birth" of the narrating automobile in a bustling factory. It's first owner is Sybille (Winnie Markus), given to her as an engagement gift by Peter (Karl John). Sybille's and her friend, Steffen (Werner Hinz), drive to a secluded spot under the trees where he tells her that he can no longer stay in Germany now that the Nazis have taken power. Later, when Sybille and Peter drive through the city, they are stopped by a crowd watching a Nazi procession. Pete takes off Sybille's diamond engagement ring and scratches the date "30133," 30 January 1933 on the inside of the windscreen - the very day that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
As they continue to strip the car, Karl hands Willi a woman's comb that was once worn by the car's next owner, Elisabeth (Alice Treff), a woman pianist. Her daughter, Angela (Gisela Tantau) discovers that Elisabeth is having an affair with a composer named Wolfgang (Hans Nielsen) when she finds her mother's comb in his car. Angela broods over this discovery, clutching her mother's comb obsessively in her hand. There is a beautiful, idyllic scene by a lake at which Elisabeth learns from her husband that Wolfgang's compositions have been banned as "subversive." In tears, Angela stuffs her mother's comb in the car's glove box.
An older couple, art dealers (Willy Maertens and Isa Ehre), reaffirm their love for each other just before Kristallnacht. They have kept her identity as a Jew a secret. But when her husband watches as the other Jewish businesses on his block have their windows smashed by Brownshirts and others in a crowd, who leave the windows of his shop unmolested (because he is Aryan), he picks up a piece of pavement in disgust and throws it through his own window. The couple are found dead from apparent suicide in the morning.
Peter from episode one shows up again in episode four. By now he is a common soldier, and he recognizes the car, now being driven by Dorothea (Erica Balque) whose husband is in the hands of the Gestapo. Peter begins to tell her the story of how he scratched the date on the windshield, but she drives the car away when, calling from a phone booth on the Swiss border, she learns that her husband is dead.
In what I think is the best sequence of the film, the car, now painted in camouflage, is somewhere on the Eastern Front. A Young German lieutenant (Fritz Wagner) needs a driver (Hermann Speelmans) to take him by night through snowbound partisan territory. On the way, with only the car's headlights to define the frozen landscape around them, the driver and lieutenant take turns at the wheel. In their conversations, the driver speaks his mind about the war and about the partisans' cause, which he bravely declares to be just. But when a flare suddenly illuminates the road, a sniper's bullet kills the driver. His arms around the dead driver, the lieutenant steers the car forward through the boundless dark.
Late in the war, amid air raid sirens in a wrecked city, Erna, a machinist (Isa Vermehren), learns that an old woman she knows (Margarete Haagen) is the mother of one of the conspirators in the Stauffenburg plot to assassinate Hitler. She piles her into the car, now riddled with bullet holes, and attempts to drive her to safety - wherever that might be. On the way, the car breaks down, and Erna leaves the old woman with the car while she goes to fetch some fuel. A policeman approaches the car and asks the old woman for her papers. Her name sounds familiar to him, so he begins to go down his list of wanted conspirators. Just then, Erna returns with a gas can. He asks for a lift and climbs into the back seat. Before Erna can even start the car, the old woman tells the policeman who she is. She takes Erna's hand in a show of gratitude and support.
The final episode Is about Josef, a deserting soldier (Carl Raddatz) and a woman (Bettina Moissi) and child he encounters in a country barn. Attracted to each other, they form a relationship. As they lie together on a bed of straw, they can hear bomber planes winging overhead to Berlin. The soldier takes the woman and child as far as he can safely go into what's left of Hamburg. He leaves her there and speeds away, but is stopped by military policemen. When they ask him questions and aren't satisfied with his answers, they order him out of the car. Walking away in the twilight, he suddenly laughs and runs away from the policeman down a riverbank and the scene fades.
Unlike some recent films that seemed to suffer from a kind of retroactive amnesia (The Book Thief is probably the worst offender), In Those Days doesn't offer excuses for the war or try to change history. The film accepts the fact that what happened happened. The Germans in Kautner's film saw it coming and could do little to get out of its way. If there is a false note, its the pervasive gloom that soon takes over, as each of the automobile's owners meets his and her end. The film passes over the elation with which Germans greeted the Wehrmacht Army's first astonishing victories in Poland and France. Even if the conquest of the whole of Europe was militarily impossible, Hitler came awfully close to doing it. It would help to explain the stoicism of Germans when the bombs began to fall on them in '42 and didn't let up until everything was destroyed.
Due to the total absence of sound stages in the British Sector of West Germany, the film was shot mostly on outdoor locations (by Igor Oberberg). The images are sharp and well framed, using direct lighting (apparently in the early mornings or late afternoons). The rawness that gave Open City much of its power is surprisingly lacking. There is instead a polished appearance to the images which somewhat belies reports of the film's haphazard shooting schedule.
There are some minor technical problems in the film. When Sybille and Peter are prevented by a large crowd from driving the car across a broad avenue down which a Nazi procession is passing, it is all too obvious that the marching Nazis are being projected onto a none too carefully erected rear-screen. There is also an occasional shadow cast by the camera in a few shots. But given the difficulties of its making, In Those Days is often quite beautiful to look at, even if it tries to capture episodes from the worst period of human history.
(1) One such film directed by Kautner in 1944, Unter den Brucken (Under the Bridges), was considered devoid of propaganda and was released in 1946. Seeing it now, and remembering how hellish life must have been like for German civilians in 1944, reveals how extraordinarily film can be used to disguise reality.
Of all the conceivable angles from which a response to Albert Camus's novel L'Etranger could've been written, probably the most surprising concerns itself with the nameless Arab whom Meursault murders on the beach. Kamel Daoud, author of The Meursault Investigation, who gave the name "Moussa" to Meursault's victim, is an Algerian journalist living in Oran, the city that Camus hated and which he used as the setting of his second novel, The Plague. Significantly, Daoud wrote the novel in French. He did so, he said, to enable him to "take one by one the stones of the old homes of the colonists and make of them a home of my own, a language to myself." His novel, published in Algeria in 2013 and in France last year (an English translation is due to be published in June) gives me a perfect excuse to return to the scene of the crime, to Camus's brilliant first novel.
The cause of all of Meursault's problems, even if, later on, he refused to see it that way, was his friendship with the petty criminal, Raymond. It was Raymond who pimped for an Arab girl and then beat her when she tried to cheat him. When the police showed up, the girl filed a complaint against Raymond. Later, Raymond asked Meursault to give a statement in his defense. It was this besmirchment of the girl's honor (so to speak) that compelled the girls's brother to follow Raymond and Meursault to the beach and confront them there. Because of a strange coincidence of timing and the weather, Meursault murdered the Arab.
The scene at the beach where this act of violence unfolds is impressively written, and Camus's language certainly makes it seem as if Meursault's frame of mind, so extremely affected by the sun and the heat, made his crime possible. After they had already confronted the Arabs, whom Meursault, as narrator, made no effort to particularize, he accompanied Raymond back to Masson's bungalow.
"When we reached the bungalow Raymond promptly went up the wooden steps, but I halted on the bottom one. The light seemed thudding in my head and I couldn't face the effort needed to go up the steps and make myself amiable to the women. But the heat was so great that it was just as bad staying where I was, under the flood of blinding light falling from the sky. To stay, or to make a move - it came to much the same. After a moment I returned to the beach, and started walking.
"There was the same red glare as far as the eye could reach, and small waves were lapping the hot sand in little, flurried gasps. As I slowly walked toward the boulder at the end of the beach I could feel my temples swelling under the impact of the light. It pressed itself on me, trying to check my progress. And each time I felt a hot blast strike my forehead, I gritted my teeth, I clenched my fists in my trouser pockets and keyed up every nerve to fend off the sun and the dark befuddlement it was pouring into me."
But when he walked toward a rock from which an inviting stream of cool water was flowing, Meursault came face to face with "Raymond's Arab." That time, however, Meursault had Raymond's revolver in his pocket. The two men - although the Arab seemed hardly human - barely moved, as the sun and heat went on pressing down on Meursault. Then the Arab pulled a knife from his pocket: "A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs."
Then Meursault found the revolver in his pocket: "Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver. The triggergave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging well of light. I knew I'd shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing." ("Et c'etait comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du malheur.")
As I said before, it's quite impressively written. But, honestly, Camus doesn't convince me that, as Meursault says towards the end of his trial, that the murder was "because of the sun." The shooting of the Arab is not even convincing as simple manslaughter. Incredibly, once the Arab is dead, he is never mentioned again. Meursault's trial is about whether or not he loved his mother, and not about his murder of the Arab.
Really, as existentially "cool" as Meursault seemed to me the first time I read L'Etranger when I was 19, he strikes me now as something of an oddball. I am now unconvinced that he was so unmoved during his trial that he couldn't say something to save himself, that he could've been so indifferent to his own fate. While he loves his life and gets as much pleasure out of it as he can, Meursault's relationship with the world around him is provisional to the extent to which he never feels at home there. Things are expected of him that he doesn't understand and cannot supply. He is unable to find in himself the emotions expected of him on various occasions. Because he is like that, he often strikes people as strange. He is a stranger among people, with no understanding of the correct reactions, the right words, the amour propre that lubricates society. And because, as Camus said later, he refuses to lie, he is condemned.
Kamel Daoud spoke of his reasons for writing The Meursault Investigation: "My basic idea was to start with Albert Camus's The Stranger, to question the work, but to move on from there - to question my own presence in the world, my present and today's reality. It was also a matter of analyzingCamus's work, of 'rereading' it, of having it reread by an Algerian and by contemporary readers. Camus still provokes polemics in Algeria.I wanted to pay tribute to his work and his thinking, but also to provide another version of the story. The Stranger is Camus's character, but also a symbol of the philosophical and human condition. It was valid in 1942, the year the novel was published,and it's still valid today. I wanted to take another look at that strangeness. I'm not responding to Camus - I'm finding my own oath through Camus."
The plot of Daoud's novel concerns the life of Haroun, a man in his late seventies who was just seven when Moussa, his elder brother, was murdered by Meursault. Daoud cleverly interweaves the identity of Camus himself and the novel L'Etranger into Haroun's narrative. It is Haroun's deep resentment over the way that Moussa and his family were ignored by Camus, and the French colonial court throughout Meursault's trial. Haroun squandered his life in a futile quest for vengeance on Camus, whom he confuses with Meursault. But the novel is also critical of Algeria's corrupt post-independence government and of the power of Muslim religious leaders.
In her New Yorker interview with Daoud, Deborah Treisman points out that "In response to the novel - or perhaps to your journalism - an imam with a group called the Islamist Awakening Front issued a fatwa against you. Is it a threat you take seriously? Do you believe that the novel is or could be offensive to Muslims?"
"Offensive to Muslims? No. Offensive to Islamists? Yes. They are offended by our life, by difference, by women, by desire, by laughter. They are lovers of death, not of life. The threat is serious, but it is serious for everyone: you, me, the tourist, the cartoonist, the dancer, the woman, the Nigerian schoolgirl."
There are places in America, whole regions, that exist almost exclusively in our imaginations - until a filmmaker comes along and reminds us that they have substance, that they are actual places with specific dimensions. American film, even now, is almost always located in California or New York City. To filmgoers around the world, the Hollywood hills and the Brooklyn Bridge are as familiar as the places they call home. Only occasionally have filmmakers ventured into that undiscovered country that lies between - to the Nevada desert or the Susquehana Valley, the Great Plains or the Mississippi River. Cities and towns in the Deep South or the Rust Belt, in the Midwest or Southwest, have largely been terra incognita. If you looked for them on the American film map, you would find a great blank zone, with the warning, "Here there be dragons."
While I wasn't exactlt waiting with bated breath to see another film by Alexander Payne, his work is certainly much closer to what I think should be a film's greatest concern: the faces and fates of real people in a world that closely resembles our own. Payne is what one might call a "niche" director. American film has had them before - ones who find a personal subject (aka style) early in their careers and have the good sense to stay there. Woody Allen, despite his once vaunted ambition of becoming an American Ingmar Bergman, is another of the type.
Payne is a native of Omaha, and has placed the action of many of his films there, including - most memorably - About Schmidt. So it didn't surprise me when he made the film Nebraska (2013), which starts out in Montana, where an old man named Woody Grant gets a publisher's sweepstakes letter - as we all have - with his name on it informing him that he has won a million dollars. The attention-getting promise of a fortune in cash is intended to entice the uninformed to purchase magazine subscriptions. But old Woody (played by old Bruce Dern) is convinced that he won the million dollars and all he has to do is go to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect it. When no one offers to drive him there, he decides to walk. It's him we see in the opening shot of the film, stubbornly trudging down a highway. He reminded me of Alvin Straight, who was so determined to visit an ailing brother in Wisconsin that he drove a riding mower all the way there from his home in Laurens, Iowa. His journey, based on fact, was dramatized beautifully in David Lynch's The Straight Story (2000). In Nebraska Woody is reunited with his brothers in their hometown of Hawthorne.
Eventually, Woody's younger son, David (played by SNL alumnus Will Forte), decides to appease Woody, and they make the long drive from Montana to Nebraska via Wyoming. Distances in these huge states are made to seem worse by the almost total absence of people. I drove across Nebraska in 2001, and, not knowing any of the local radio stations, I had to push the "scan" button several times on my car radio whenever one of them faded out of range. At one stretch, in the middle of the state, I pushed the scan button and got nothing from one end of the band to the other. The radio just kept scanning for - without finding - a single radio station with a strong enough signal. This went on for an unaccountable distance, making me wonder if I'd fallen off the map.
On arriving in Hawthorne, news of Woody's good fortune gets around the small town. (The film was shot in Plainview, a town whose name says it all.) The local paper, run by an old girlfriend of Woody's, wants to run a story on him. An old drinking buddy (played by Stacy Keach) suddenly remembers a sum of money that Woody owes him and threateningly tries to collect it. When Woody visits his brothers, their two grown sons - who seem to do nothing but claim to drive great distances in unlikely short amounts of time - conspire to steal the winning ticket from him.
My sister related to me how our mother, in her late seventies, had been so taken in by a similar letter from Publisher's Clearing House that she was convinced she had won a cash fortune. When my sister told her that it wasn't true, that identical letters are sent to millions of people, my mother broke down in tears. For awhile, a few hours perhaps, she had been swept up in an exquisite dream that, at long last, all her problems, and all the problems of her children, were over. Late in Nebraska, Woody is asked by his two sons what he planned to do with his fortune. "Buy a new truck," he tells them, "so I'll have something to leave you."
When Woody and David finally arrive at the sweepstakes office in Lincoln, and learn that the ticket is worthless (the woman gives him a hat as consolation prize), David allows him a triumphal return to Hawthorne in a (nearly) new pickup truck. It's a muted victory, but the only one this muted film could bear.
Payne's choice of a black-and-white palette puzzled me. Everyone asked Peter Bogdanovich why he used it in 1971 for The Last Picture Show. I don't recall how he responded, but I doubt that his response was good enough. I suppose he was trying to make the film into an automatic artefact, already a thing of the past like the town's old cinema. I seriously doubt that the landscapes in Nebraska would've been enhanced by color cinematography, but neither would it have lessened the film's impact.
But what is the impact of Nebraska? Payne gives us a somewhat painfully accurate portrait of an American family, spread across two or three states, whose members only ever see one another every decade or so. But About Schmidt did it better. Payne avoids the predictable poignancy of Woody re-visiting his deserted boyhood home. Woody's very reticence precludes any possible poignancy. And the shots of the family all facing an unseen TV screen are, by now, too true to be painful.
Bruce Dern, who made a name for himself playing wackos, was nominated for an Oscar last year for his performance as Woody. He is less of a presence in the film than an absence - like his vacant boyhood home. Will Forte suffers from the same problem that most comics suffer from when they play a serious role (including the late Robin Williams). Everything that came to their aid when they tried to be funny forsakes them when they reach for seriousness. I was surprised, though, when he got up the gumption to punch Stacy Keach in the mouth. The sad element of the film is that David doesn't even know his own father. His long drive to Nebraska with Woody may have brought them closer, but it failed, I think, to contribute to our understanding of fathers and sons.
There seems to be an unusually large number of sad anniversaries this year. Over last weekend, the anniversary of beginning of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975 was marked, which led me back to Roland Joffé's film, The Killing Fields (1984), which is the "true" story of New York Times correspondent Sidney Schanberg and his Cambodian go-between, Dith Pran. Our obligation to watch such films is, thankfully, not just a historical one. The Killing Fields is a bristling, challenging - if slightly flawed - work of art.
No single film can hope to encompass the human calamity that the Khmer Rouge inflicted on the people of Cambodia. Only estimates can tell us the number of those who perished under Pol Pot's regime. 1.7 million people, something like one-third of the population, died in what became known as Cambodia's "Killing Fields" - an enormous and unprecedented genocide, that started as yet another Communist social experiment, carried out by an ethnic group on itself. American culpability in the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge is plain: Nixon's massive bombing campaign on alleged Vietcong supply lines succeeded in destabilizing the already shaky regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
But Joffé's film, which was his first feature film, manages to encompass a great deal of Cambodia's murderous past by limiting itself the fates of two people, Schanberg and Pran. It begins with a picture of what an idyllic backwater Cambodia was before hell broke loose, with news reporters basking by the pool of their Phnom Penh hotel (the film was shot in Thailand) as the war in Vietnam raged across the border. The only reminders of that war that the foreign correspondents encounter are occasional exploding bombs in the cafes in which they breakfast. But then Pran hears about an "accident" - the dumping of a B-52's entire payload on a village called Neak Luong. Schanberg sees in it the potential for a scoop. Using Pran's connections, Schanberg risks both their necks getting there.
From this scene forward, events are telescoped a little, as it seems that the bombing somehow let the Khmer Rouge genie out of its bottle. In the space of just a few scenes, they are in Phnom Penh, and the American Consul (played by Spalding Gray) is shredding documents and preparing to leave. Pran manages to get his wife and children to safety in the States, but opts to stay with Schanberg in Cambodia. It's this decision, which Pran made from loyalty to Schanberg, that some would later use against Schanberg. Within days (or so it seems in the film), everyone, and especially the Cambodian people, learn something of the Khmer Rouge's real intentions, as everyone in Phnom Penh is ordered out of the city. Foreigners hole up in the French embassy, the only remaining foreign agency still open, and wait for their evacuation. Any Cambodian nationals among them are ordered to give themselves up. Schanberg and photographer Al Rockoff (played by John Malkovich) try to create a fake foreign identity for Pran - a British subject named Ankertill Brewer - replete with a passport, but the poor developing conditions make his passport photo fade. Schanberg and Pran say goodbye in April 1975. It takes Pran four and a half years to escape to Thailand.
Watching the film, as I did recently, with Roland Joffé's commentary for the DVD enriched my experience, without necessarily making the film seem better than it is. Joffé spends most of his time talking about the time and the place he was trying to evoke, but his comments don't exactly help with the experience of watching the film, which is remarkable enough without commentary. Apparently, he felt that his film was fulfilling some historical purpose, even though he insists that it is a love story he's telling, and not a story of war. In a sense, I think the film would've been more effective if it didn't try so hard to establish its historical context. All the events in the film happened to Schanberg and Pran, and they were responsible for Pran being unable to escape Cambodia, but the complexity of emotions that the actors reveal to us are inevitably dwarfed by history.
The ending of the film, the reunion of Schanberg and Pran at a refugee camp in Thailand (which was still there when the film was made), is somewhat shaky. Pran's purposeful walk to the Thai border looks longer and more far more circuitous than it probably was (Cambodia borders Thailand on the west and south). When he finally reaches the crest of a hill from which he can see the large tent with the big, beautiful red cross emblazoned on it, the film is, for dramatic purposes, virtually over. The final shots of Schanberg and Pran, accompanied by John Lennon's song "Imagine," are rather unnecessary, and more than a little mawkish. What was Lennon singing about if it wasn't a socialist paradise on earth - a paradise that Pol Pot somehow mistook for hell on earth? (One of Pol Pot's favorite books was Mein Kampf.)
Sam Waterston, despite Joffé's praise, was an unfortunate casting choice as Schanberg. He is generally awful, and this happens to be one of his finer performances. So much of the emotion he shows us seems worked up. When John Malkovich confronts him in the rest room at an award ceremony, accusing him of coercing Pran to stay with him in Cambodia, Waterston's reaction is so forced and unbelievable that it gives credence to Malkovich's argument. This is not as damaging to the film as one might think, simply because the film belongs to Haing Ngor, credited by the film as "Dr. Haing S. Ngor," who had never acted before this film. (He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance.)
It's important, I think, to remember that the story related in the film ended just five years before the film was made. How terrible it must've been for Haing Ngor to have to relive something that was still fresh in his memory. Joffé explains how reluctant Ngor was to do these scenes, and how he persuaded him to it for his countrymen.
At the end of his commentary, as we watch the closing scene of the film, Joffé gives a brief tribute to Ngor. The story of his life after The Killing Fields is one of both great triumph and ultimate catastrophe. After appearing in a handful of other, lesser films, including Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth, Ngor wrote a moving memoir that he called A Cambodian Odyssey. In it, he told the story of his wife, Chang My Huoy, who was also a doctor, trapped with him in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. She was pregnant, and since the Khmer Rouge would've killed them both if they'd known they were doctors, Ngor, who was an Obstetrician and Gynecologist, could do nothing to save her when she miscarried and died. Haing placed a picture of her inside a gold locket and swore to always wear it. A photo of the open locket is on the dust cover of the book. Because Ngor refused to surrender the locket to some Asian gang members who held him up in a parking garage near his home in Chinatown in Los Angeles in 1996, they murdered him. Joffé said that it was perhaps fitting that Ngor should've died violently, like so many of the people he loved.
So many factors contributed to the success of the film. David Putnam, the head of Goldcrest, produced the film and hand picked Joffé to direct it. Bruce Robinson wrote a workable script from quite unwieldy material. Chris Menges contributed superb cinematography, making Southeast Asia look quite different from Francis Ford Coppola's or Oliver Stone's (they shot their films in the Philippines, which incidentally doesn't look anything like Vietnam.) And Mike Oldfield, of "Tubular Bells" fame, wrote a very nervy, arresting and sometimes uplifting musical score. Because it's such a superbly made film, thirty years after it was made The Killing Fields has become an indelible part of how we think about Cambodia's tragic history.
When the Kenji Mizoguchi production of The 47 Ronin was begun in 1941, Imperial Japan was at the height of its power in Asia. But by the time the two-part film was finished in 1942, the United States had declared war on Japan after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Tokyo had been bombed by Doolittle's daring raid, and the Battle of Midway had turned the tide of Japanese expansion in the Pacific against them. It might seem strange to us that, at a time of foreseeable national peril, such a major film production should've been undertaken, telling the story of a feudal lord in 1701 being forced to commit suicide (seppuku) and the suicidal revenge of his masterless samurai (ronin). But, as anyone who has read Ivan Morris's splendid book, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan knows, the Japanese often found great victories in catastrophic defeat. How else can one explain the kamikaze attacks later in the war, when young pilots crashed planes loaded with explosives into American ships? They were intended to inspire such awe in the hearts of Americans that it would provoke us to sue for peace terms. Instead, we called them "baka bombs" (idiot bombs). Americans, with no emperor but FDR, didn't see the point of killing themselves if defeat was already a foreseen.(1)
Mizoguchi's film, Genroku Chushingura, has an imposing stateliness and elegiac tone about it that becomes overpowering as the drama moves to its inevitable conclusion. Mizoguchi was making no attempt to make the past live again. To audiences of the film, that past was still very much alive in 1942 - although not, thank God, for much longer. Loving the Japanese film as I do, though, I found watching this film a perplexing experience.
For fans of the latest 47 Ronin, for whom a Japanese tale of honor and loyalty can be palatable only when the lead is played by a Caucasian actor (after all, wasn't Tom Cruise supposed to be the Last Samurai?), Mizoguchi's two-part version must seem thoroughly deracinating. Having seen several of Mizoguchi's films, I didn't watch his 47 Ronin expecting great action scenes. It isn't really about action. But I didn't need to know that the film is based on a play, since the climactic revenge on Kira takes place off-screen, as does the finale, in which all forty-seven of Lord Asano's loyal samurai commit seppuku, one at a time. Mizoguchi was wise to use tracking shots frequently. Otherwise, this seventy year old film would seem, even to the initiated, as unbelievably static as one of Carl Theodore Dreyer's late, late films.
The story is one of the best known and most beloved in Japan, as The Song of Roland once was among educated Westerners. It tells of Lord Asano, who is so thoroughly insulted in the opening scene, set within the Shogun'sprecincts, by Kira, the Shogun's Master of Ceremonies, that he feels impelled by outraged honor to attack him with his sword.(2) Lord Asano only manages to wound Kira before bystanders restrain him. Whether provoked or not, Lord Asano's attack is condemned by the Shogun and he is ordered to commit seppuku as punishment. Later, when Asano's house is abolished as well, all of his samurai begin to plot their revenge on Kira. But in feudal Japan, even revenge must obey the rules, so Asano's masterless samurai Have to wait more than a year to carry out their plan.
Mizoguchi's production (designed by Hiroshi Mizutani) is splendid and obviously costly. It reminds one of the expensive productions that were mounted in Nazi Germany in the middle of the war intended to boost the public's morale while bombs were falling on their heads. But this 47 Ronin is not escapist entertainment. It was a celebration and reinforcement of the same feudalism that got Japan into the war, that induced the Japanese people to follow their emperor all the way to the near-total destruction of their country, and that the postwar occupation authorities, headed by Douglas MacArthur, sought to eradicate. The Japanese learned their lessons. Within a few years of the war's end, filmmakers as diverse as Kurosawa, Kobayashi, and Okamoto were inspired to create scathing satires and bitter denunciations of the samurai spirit. Simply compare Mizoguchi's stately glorification of medieval Japan to Kobayashi's overpowering attack on it in his film Seppuku, containing a harrowing scene in which a young ronin whose poverty has forced him to sell his steel sword and replace it with a bamboo one, is forced to commit harakiri with it.
Mizoguchi continued to make films after the war, and contributed much to a certain mystique in the West for historical dramas illustrating what was considered a uniquely Japanese fatalism - The Life of Oharu, The Crucified Lovers, Sansho the Bailiff, and especially Ugetsu. Watching The 47 Ronin, with its wondrously detailed sets and costumes - period settings that represent Tokugawa-era culture in full flower, a world of custom and comportment, of rigid structure and refined aestheticism, capable of extreme delicacy and savagery simultaneously - with Japan living under what is now known as "existential threat," one feels that, if such a threat had been realized, if Japan hadn't surrendered after the atomic bombs, and if the Japanese had followed their emperor (as everyone feared) and fought to the last Japanese, perhaps this film could stand as a memorial to the history and traditions that inspired it and the people who thought so much of it that they went to such pains to make it live again.
(1) We now know that Hitler scrapped plans to launch manned V1 rockets against England, and that, late in the war, there were German "self-sacrifice" pilots who flew suicide missions.
(2) Kira's insult is to say of Lord Asano loudly enough for him to hear that "Reception Committee member in name only. I doubt he can carry out his various functions. There was no one so ignorant or so rude." I think the point to be taken is that the substance of the insult isn't important.
