On Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven
Fire and Brimstone: Clint Eastwood Goes to Hell in Unforgiven
In a review of Unforgiven, Harry Brod argues that Eastwood himself should remain “unforgiven” by the public and the film industry because of his past transgressions of making violent films (30). Brod essentially argues that we should refrain from admiring Unforgiven because of stains on the soul of Eastwood himself. I have several problems with this particular form of passing judgment. First is the fact that if we demand sainthood from our artists before accepting their work, we’d have to discount the great majority of the literature, art, etc. produced throughout the history of the world. Second, if we insist on assuming a moralistic attitude, it’s rather hypocritical to deny forgiveness to someone genuinely seeking it. Third, it’s a bit silly to take Unforgiven as a literal quest for atonement anyway. Eastwood was not stepping up to the confessional to request absolution, but making a film. Obviously the film references his own career, but it’s not so much a literal bid for forgiveness as it is an artistic work exploring particular themes. It’s called Unforgiven, not Forgiven. Fourth, since film and culture are interdependent in ways that are so complicated that it would be far too maddening to ever try to figure it out entirely, it’s a bit simplistic to blame film for real world violence. Brod suggests that we should do a “poll of all the surviving victims of male violence during the years Eastwood was one of the top box-office stars in the world, with those closest to deceased victims empowered to cast their votes. Then we’d know if Eastwood should be forgiven or unforgiven” (30). Well, if we really did ask all those individuals, I doubt very many of them would think Clint Eastwood had much to do with it one way or the other. Most people are aware that violence has enormously complicated causes. And anyway, what about all the other violent stars and films in Hollywood? Eastwood certainly hasn’t been the only one in that particular line of work. And what about socio-economic factors in violence? And so on. Though it would be nice to have a whipping boy, Eastwood didn’t invent violence. He’s just a film actor/director who ended up early in his career filling a role within representations of violence that were already well on their way of being perpetuated by others.
My point (if a bit sarcastically stated) is just that I think it’s entirely appropriate to look at Eastwood exceptionally, and grant him “forgiveness” or “respect” or whatever it is that he’s looking for in his films of recent times. The truth is, very few stars who end up as masculine icons closely associated with violence (as Eastwood did) ever question it or veer from it. It’s quite unusual for someone to have built a career on that particular base, and then to have both the guts and the brains to question it. Further, Eastwood is in a particularly effective position to be able to make people look at violence more thoughtfully. Very often, reformed criminals and addicts make the best and most convincing advocates for change. So if some people are going to consider Eastwood a kind of “film criminal,” then we should grant him an opportunity to tell us how he’s changed. With luck, he might change the minds of some other “film criminals.” In any case, I personally find it inappropriate to decide whether or not to condemn Clint Eastwood to eternal damnation. I’ll leave that to some higher power and focus on the subject of damnation in his film instead.
In “Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven,” Carl Plantinga offers a summary of Unforgiven which seems to represent the general consensus about the film: Unforgiven “represents a violence that leads to a cycle of senseless revenge and retribution,” and “follows the descending trail of an old gunfighter whose journey offers the possibility of redemption but ends in the life of drunkenness and murder he thought he had left behind” (71). Divergence of opinion about the film, where it exists, seems mostly to focus on the climactic confrontation in Greeley’s saloon, along with the final graveside scene of the film. The arguments say that in various ways these final scenes undermine the careful condemnation of violence of the earlier parts of the film, and therefore diminish the overall power of the film. I will argue that these final scenes are in fact entirely consistent with the rest of the film, and do a very effective job of conveying the damnation of violence through the depiction of William Munny’s “damnation.”
Since there is little debate that the violence up until the climax is presented in a manner meant to condemn it, I won’t dwell on it too much. Of all the sources I looked at, only Paul Smith condemns the entirety of Unforgiven in terms of its depictions of violence, saying “Unforgiven suffers from being unable to criticize convincingly the very violence that it itself is involved in and that it does not shrink from re-representing.” He complains that Munny fails to exhibit conscience and is “given little opportunity to reflect upon such sentiments and consequences” (267). But Allen Redmon (and everyone else who cited Smith) disagrees with him. In “Mechanisms of Violence in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Mystic River” Redmon points out that Eastwood could have more overtly condemned violence in his film, but “explicit denunciations would have come at a price.” That is, “Eastwood would not be able to implicate his audience in the mechanisms of violence in the way that his films can when the violence is loosely veiled in the same fashion that all violence is concealed” (318). In other words, the whole point of the film would have been lost if it had been “preachier.” Platinga also points out that our allegiance toward William Munny and his violence is actually quite conflicted throughout the film, and while Munny “may reflect little upon his actions, the film nonetheless encourages conflicted responses in the spectator and in so doing initiates a questioning process” (74).
However, Platinga then goes on to state his opinion that the film only maintains an effective anti-violence stance up until the climactic shootout at Greeley’s at which point “the film satisfies the spectator’s desire for the dramatic violent purge and emotional release by granting the hero his killing” (79). Many others agree. In “Writing the West: Iconic and Literal Truth in Unforgiven” Catherine Ingrassia says that the film “ultimately affirms rather than resists the conventions of its genre” and that in this climactic scene Munny is “swift and deadly (and consistent with any number of Eastwood vehicles)” (53,57). Brod in his article even sarcastically calls this scene the film’s “final shoot-‘em-up scene, so much like that of Shane that I kept expecting [Beauchamp] to run after Eastwood, yelling “Come back, . . .” (30).
These reactions are all puzzling to me, because every time I’ve seen the film the climactic shootout has been the scene that delivers the full tragedy of the movie to me, and has never failed to bring me to tears. Some of the problems of the interpretation of this scene seem to be connected with the limitations Eastwood’s persona places upon him. As Tim Groves points out in “’We all have it coming, Kid’: Clint Eastwood and the Dying of the Light,” Eastwood’s past films are “inscribed with belligerent, sarcastic, preternatural heroes and cathartic violence.” Many seem to view the climactic scene of Unforgiven in terms of these past Eastwood incarnations. When Richard Corliss reviewed Unforgiven he said, “The movie takes its time letting you watch Clint turn into Clint” (66). That is, many people apparently “see” Clint turn into the “cathartic violence version” of Clint in Unforgiven, as he had in so many movies in the past, rather than “seeing” Clint turn into a vicious murderer, as I seem to.
Ingrassia brings up further problems of expectations, relating not only to persona, but also to genre: “Once in Greeley’s Saloon, Munny (now a fully formed Eastwood character) provides the spectacular explosion of gunfire the genre’s narratological grammar demands” (57). Plantinga also points out that “the western myth assigns a supreme value to the climactic gunfight,” and claims that the shootout is “a compromise and throwback to the conventional western myth, a dissonant chord within an otherwise consistent revisionism” (77). Ingrassia and Plantinga both talk about the end of the film as a “shift” and discuss it as though it exists separately from the rest of the film. But it seems to me that it’s only understood if it’s “felt” in connection to all the other parts of the film and seen as completely organic with everything that has come before it. Ingrassia refers to Ned Logan’s death as the event that causes “the film’s shift into revenge narrative” (57). But as Redmon points out, as Ned is beaten we’re shown the whores’ reaction to the sounds of the whip, reminding the audience “of their responsibility for the violence” and therefore connecting this act to the same stance that has been taken toward all other acts of violence in the film leading up to it (321). If Ned’s death were shown to us explicitly, it would be a more conventionally motivated revenge plot. But what’s shown to us is the senselessness of Ned’s death (i.e. with the emphasis on Little Bill’s sadism), not the death itself. Therefore it does not represent a “shift,” but a continuation of the tragic acts of violence of earlier in the film. Likewise, we are to understand the senselessness of Munny’s subsequent act of vengeance in terms of every act that has preceded it; his actions are as meaningless and pointless as everything that’s come before, including innocent Ned’s own death at the hands of the sadistic sheriff.
Other interrelationships of the film also strongly suggest that the shootout should be read as a condemnation of William Munny, and of violence. As Redmon points out, “In many ways, the final scene is a collection of each of the individual charges that have been brought against the mechanisms of violence throughout the film” (323). Munny’s rivals are unarmed and unprepared, violating the codes of the “good guy” gunfighters of traditional westerns. Unlike all the characters earlier in the film, Munny rejects Beauchamp’s myth-making in regards to violence. And by having established Munny and Little Bill as similar men throughout the film, “Eastwood creates a situation in which the murder that is sure to take place of one of these two characters at the film’s conclusion cannot be entirely celebrated” (320). We’re forced to stare into the shotgun with Little Bill before Munny blows him away. And so, “by working to ensure that each of the acts of violence in the film is portrayed from the perspective of the victim, Eastwood has ensured that the film’s final act of violence is an honest description of the ramifications of the mechanisms of violence” (322).
In regards to genre, no one can argue against the fact that a final confrontation between gunfighters (like the scene in Greeley’s) is an expected convention of the Western genre. But it’s certainly possible to argue about the overall effectiveness of this scene within Unforgiven’s interrelationships. Redmon believes that “critics who have found fault with the final scenes in Big Whiskey have failed to recognize what Eastwood is representing in this final sequence, and that this representation is the only way in which one can ultimately expose the mechanisms of violence for what they are” (322). Since this scene represents our strongest expectations for the genre, it’s the most powerful way possible to show the futility of violence. The ultimate statement of the film - its damnation of Munny - is contained in the very act that we traditionally associate with the gunfighter’s crowning glory, the scene that makes him a hero. I personally can’t imagine a more ironically tragic way to show the culmination of all the acts of violence in Unforgiven than through a carefully revised form of this “traditional” scene. As Platinga points out, ”The complexity of the Greeley’s debacle . . . stems from its combination of dramatic satisfaction with emotional and thematic ambiguity” (79). For him, this is a count against the film, but to me, it’s this complication that makes the scene work. It’s more challenging and asks more questions about our relationship to violence than if the scene were either entirely abhorrent or (obviously) entirely cathartic. And so the scene serves to emphasize the film’s points in a way that little else would have. If, for example, Munny simply walked away as a pacifist after Ned’s murder, the film would have had a very difficult time showing the repercussions of violence for the killer. And Eastwood has made it plain that he wanted to show the “consequences to the violence . . . [for] both the perpetrator as well as the victim” (Plantinga 66).
These consequences of violence for the killer are made plain in the final graveside scene of the film, which shows what happens to William Munny following the shootout. However, Redmon claims that because of this scene, Unforgiven fails to “successfully expose the mechanisms of violence” and capture “the ‘hell’ that exists for those caught in these mechanisms.” His complaint is that the text on the screen tells us that Munny uses the money from his killing to take his kids to San Francisco, where he then prospers in dry goods. Redmon objects that “this advancement comes at the expense of a handful of cowboys, a sheriff, countless unnamed townspeople, and his dear friend,” and refers to this ending as “the promise of a new beginning” (323). But I beg to differ; this text is not meant to be taken literally, and is most certainly not the promise of a new beginning. It is ”a coded summary the viewer recognizes as both true and utterly false” (Ingrassia 59). As Ingrassia writes, “Unforgiven literally and repeatedly imposes a textual account over the cinematic landscape to reveal the gap between sign and signified” (53). Unforgiven explicitly teaches us how to look at this gap between words and reality throughout the course of the film, just as it teaches us how to look at each of its acts of violence. The character of Beauchamp, the Schofield Kid’s confusion between the myth and the reality of death, Little Bill’s debunking of the myth of the “Duke of Death,” and the exaggerating of Delilah’s wounds as the assassins retell her story, are all examples of this. Since this “gap” is emphasized throughout the entire film, there shouldn’t be any real mystery about how to interpret the text at the end. We’re not supposed to believe the words on the screen, but to recognize that they contain a great irony and sadness, and that they have no relation to who William Munny really is or how he really feels.
Among my sources, I was surprised to find how little had been written about the effect of this final scene in relation to the rest of the film. Eastwood has said, “Unforgiven gave me a chance to sum up what I think violence does to the human soul,” and the final scene is rather key to this effect (Jardine 75). Though it’s subtle, to me a great deal of the power and meaning of the movie is contained in this simple ending, as well as the ramifications of the film’s title. Anyone who has ever committed any large act(s) against his or her own conscience knows the great sad irony that life goes on beyond hell, and that this is where most of the pain lies – in a living hell. In fact, the “gap” of the words on the screen point out Munny’s knowledge of living a lie, as it were – knowing that he is “damned,” but that he has to keep putting one foot in front of the other anyway. And just as Mrs. Feathers knows that her daughter “married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition” without adequate explanation, Munny now knows that the soul is prone to committing evil acts with or without adequate explanation; there is no more explanation of evil than there is of love. When personal ethics go out of control, it usually doesn’t make any sense – to the victim or to the perpetrator. Poetic justice doesn’t necessarily follow, and the jaws of hell don’t open up and swallow “villains.” In short, after some grand and tragic act, life doesn’t end and the curtain doesn’t fall, as much drama and film would sometimes have us believe. I praise Unforgiven’s honesty, and yes, realism (which Eastwood is supposed to be so fond of), in using this simple scene to show that ordinary life continues on beyond the torment and hell of guilty deeds. The scene conveys an ineffable sadness that the film would lack if it were simply to end after Greeley’s. And since Eastwood wanted to show the effects of violence “on the soul,” this scene provides a fuller realization. Not only has he shown the effects of violence on all of the other characters earlier in the film, but with this final scene he also suggests the living horror of it for the murderer, which continues on in the mundane words and actions of daily life long past the deaths of all the victims.
As Tim Groves points out, Eastwood’s recent characters are “often beset by regret and remorse, and seek, but do not always find, redemption in various forms.” Though I’ve been arguing that Unforgiven effectively “damns” William Munny and violence, I also have to conclude that Unforgiven is ultimately about redemption. Not long ago my brother was talking about Mystic River and told me that that in spite of its darkness and cynicism, it had the effect of redemption on him by challenging him to look at the events depicted in the film, and then do something about it in relation to himself and the world. This is precisely how I feel about Unforgiven – that though it’s about damnation (not in the religious sense, but in the purely humanistic sense), it’s ultimately about redemption. The message isn’t one of hopelessness, which would be very depressing indeed. Instead, the intent is to ask questions of its audience and present challenges to masculinity and violence.
In his article “Clint Eastwood Goes PC,” Richard Grenier says he thinks the American public can “forgive Eastwood his feminism,” but not his “going soft on the punishment of evildoers.” At the end of the article he asks, “Who will see [Eastwood’s] pictures?” (53). This, I think, has been answered adequately by the passage of time. Grenier was writing in the wake of A Perfect World, which didn’t seem to connect with audiences. But A Perfect World proved to be the exception, not the rule. The majority of Eastwood’s films, since and including Unforgiven, have performed admirably for films of their type, and have all dealt with issues of feminism, masculinity, and/or violence, to varying degrees. A significant portion of the American population does in fact seem to trust Eastwood to provide them with “revised” messages. And frankly, it would be rather foolish of the critics to damn Eastwood to hell when he has so much to say that can have a strong impact on so many people.
Works Cited
Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Brod, Harry. “Unforgiven.” Tikkun 8.3 (May/June 1993): 30.
Corliss, Richard. “The Last Roundup.” Time 140:6 (August 10, 1992): 66.
Grenier, Richard. “Clint Eastwood Goes PC.” Commentary 97.3 (March 1994): 51-53.
Groves, Tim. “’We all have it coming, Kid’: Clint Eastwood and the Dying of the
Light.” Senses of Cinema. January 2001. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/12/unforgiven.html
Ingrassia, Catherine. “Writing the West: Iconic and Literal Truth in Unforgiven.”
Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 53-59.
Jardine, Gail. “Clint: Cultural Critic, Cowboy of Cathartic Change.” Art Journal 53.3
(Fall 1994): 74-75.
Plantinga, C. “Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven.”
Cinema Journal 37.2 (Winter 1998): 65-83.
Redmon, Allen. “Mechanisms of Violence in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Mystic
River.” The Journal of American Culture 27.3 (Sept. 2004): 315-328.
Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1996.
Smith, Paul. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1993.
How Walter White and Doctor Who Saved My Life
Strange bedfellows, right? Or maybe not, reflected in this article title from Variety: “‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Doctor Who’ Top Home Media Magazine Awards.” Apparently they share a bed more frequently than would be expected.
They probably also have more of an overlapping fandom than a first glance would suggest. This is not the first time I’ve discussed something of which I am a fan, but I should explain that I am not a proper fan in any sort of modern sense. I am not really interested in knowing every detail of something – if I happen to find out a few details accidentally, I might be mildly interested, but I have never had any interest in buying books and finding out everything there is to know about something. Nor do I belong to any websites or discussion boards. Nor do I ever check social media, nor even look for anything in a search engine to find out what others think. Nor do I listen to DVD commentaries (not these days, anyway). Nor do I ever leave my house to go to a concert, nor to any conventions. Nor do I most of the time have any interest in commenting on anything or even speaking of it. Nor do I have the sort of encyclopedic mind capable of memorizing fictitious languages or recalling fascinating trivia. There are some things of which I am more than a passing fan, based on the impact they’ve had on me. But I’ve never bothered to keep my finger on a pulse. I find the vast glut of opinion and obsessiveness and the need to keep up with it all exhausting and overwhelming. As a woman of limited energies, I have to choose my battles, and that just can’t be one of them. Unlike for most people, for better or for worse, art for me is not a social experience – it’s a personal experience. And speaking of “for better or for worse,” it’s what I happen to be married to, rather than to any flesh and blood social creature. It’s my partner in life, and I’m in bed with it, and not with others. I do not share with other fans, and to end on a particularly rude note, do not really care what they think.
I am content to experience something. My qualifications are that I have been deeply moved by certain things. That’s it.
Forgive me some of my disaffection, which partly comes from isolation. I would probably be friendlier than the current impression I’m making, if I ever had occasion to be.
My friend Rob Stilwell has a quote, which I will set off to make it look as pretty as it should: “Art really only has one great work: to heal the sick and to raise the dead. It has other work to be sure, but that is the one great work.”
Where Rob identifies this business of dead-raising as art’s one great work, for me, it’s a bare minimum necessity. If it doesn’t have the potential to re-animate me, I will just have to stay lifeless in my tomb. I acknowledge that it’s unreasonable to demand work to do nothing less than bring you back to life. But that’s what I have to ask.
For many years, I didn’t watch much TV. People tried to tell me that it was a good medium for me – that if I gave it a chance, its style of storytelling would appeal to me. Still, I resisted and refused to believe them. (Sorry about that. You were right, I was wrong.)
Breaking Bad and Doctor Who are, of course, both TV shows. I used to like movies more than I do now. I’m not making an original observation when I say that structurally and emotionally speaking, movies are commensurate with short stories; meanwhile, TV and novels share a similar kinship. By design, and dictated by temporal factors and spatial factors and other fancy-sound factors, both short stories and movies tend to be a bit intense – they are meant to be a lot of power tucked into a tight space. TV and the novel, in contrast, are forms that you can unpack in and stretch out – move in for a while, waste a little time. I like that and I need that. It takes me a while to process things. I also just really like and need the structure of the longer forms, because it’s something I can trust not to shift out from under me. It’s like praying in a cathedral versus the terror of being on a runaway train hurtling down the tracks.
When I was in undergrad, I wrote a creative nonfiction piece about the fact that I found movies to be a difficult experience, though without much self-insight at the time. I think I was partly talking about the fact that all storytelling media can take us through scary and unexpected emotional experiences. That’s part of its power – and more power to it.
But for me, the complications that come with this are apparently more pronounced. My emotions as well as my senses are hyper-tuned. I have mentioned before that I need my art to come with a buffer, and in general, I find that I am so susceptible, so over-receptive, so responsive, that many modern art forms are too much for me. Furthermore, they just keep getting louder, faster, brighter, flashier, and more invasive. For me, going to a movie is like intentionally choosing to leave a perfect shelter – warm, quiet, and safe from the wind – to walk out into a hurricane.
I recall (with quite some hilarity, actually) trying to watch Christopher Nolan’s first two Batman films in the theatre years ago. I have respect for these films as art, but whatever it is about their aural design, they registered for me as actual physical pain, much as an extended torture session might for another person. I’m going to assume that for the “normal” person, experiences such as these Batman films register as thrilling, interesting, stimulating, pleasant, and exciting, rather than as painful.
I did sit through both films, the first time out of loyalty to a friend, the second time because I was in a completely sold out theatre, was there with a date and, faced with the dilemma of choosing between pain or the humiliation and uncoolness of leaving the theatre because I couldn’t “take it,” I chose the pain. I now kind of wish that I’d had some integrity toward myself and chosen to leave. The date certainly wasn’t worth it. (Heath Ledger’s performance was, though.)
Maybe all of this just sounds like someone “getting old,” except that I am currently in my 30s, which isn’t yet ancient, and I was born this way. In fact, it was even worse for me in childhood than it is now. Back then, I just accepted all the pain of movies and other similar experiences because I thought that’s how it was for everyone. That’s what we do in childhood: accept. For a long time during our first years, we just suppose that this is the way life must be, and if it so for us, then it must be so for others. I thought that was what all people did – endured it. At points when I did break, I just thought that everyone else was very brave while I was a contemptible coward.
When I was 13 years old, my brother and his girlfriend at the time took me to my first rock concert, an experience that most adolescents at that age would exult in – indeed, a great indulgence and luxury that most adolescents would know how to run with and would not waste. But not I. No, I had to be taken out shortly after the concert began because the lights – and especially the sound – were too much. It’s not as though I cried. Not at 13. I just caved in, collapsed in on myself. I cannot recall any moment of my life that I experienced a more terrible shame than that night. I pretended to be asleep in the back seat on the ride home. In many ways, the mortification and depression of this experience (and many others like it) never passed. Even from earliest childhood I understood that I was “no fun” – that I stood as some monumental failure to the values of the rest of the human race.
All modern movies (in the theatre) are like Nolan’s Batman films for me; those films are just the most notable example. One of the things I’ve always most loved are comic book films and the like – but this is exactly the kind of movie that keeps getting bigger, louder, and flashier. And I know that part of the overall strategy and belief of the film industry is that they must keep making their product bigger, louder, and more intense in order to compete with other media and keep people consuming films. But this is the type of strategy, and these are the types of films, that have most effectively excluded me. (I am told they are really only marketed to and intended for 13-year-old boys anyway; my dollar is not the one studios are looking for.) But if I try to go to something fairly harmless-seeming that lacks the bombast of a superhero film, like a comedy, even this sensory experience is too much.
I will still go to a film in the theatre if it is something I desperately want to see, but I know that it will hollow me out, that I will leave the theatre with a headache, and that I will have to plan to be unable to function for the rest of the day – not from the headache, but from a sense of complete exhaustion and overwhelm, as though I had been sucked into the film as one of its characters, forced to actually run through the gauntlet of whatever trials and travails the absurdly over-dramatic plot demanded of them.
I’m not very good at boundaries, so maybe I really have been invaded by the film in these instances. I have trouble locating where the line is between myself and the work, or myself and another person. I’m either too near or too far. I either keep my distance or close in too fast.
So I can only risk all of this when the commensurate gain is going to be a very, very big deal – when there’s a good bet the experience is going to save my very life. And there have been very few movies that have come along to do this for me in recent years – to my knowledge. Buffeted as I am, I haven’t been in theatres much, nor have I even invited movies into my living room – because even there, though not quite as overwhelming to the senses, movies still strive to be as intense as they can in a very short amount of time, and to buffet and punch you emotionally with no intention of being gentle about it. My emotions are already heightened 24/7, and I’m already far too intense without needing any more of this.
So I’m choosy about films because, unlike in childhood, I feel a stronger sense of control over my life and my experiences. There are countless difficult experiences in life that I have no choice but to weather, and I have to choose my battles. It isn’t even a choice, really. If it’s between steeling myself to teach a class or steeling myself to watch a movie, I must steel myself for the class, because that’s my paycheck.
It does make me sad, because there was always much I loved about going to movies, and certainly I love movies very much as a storytelling medium. I’m glad if it is a pleasurable experience for others, but it’s necessary that I stay home with my TV where I’m in control of the sound and the images and everything else. One great benefit to this is that I don’t need the expense of a home theatre system – that would be far more invasive than anything I would ever need. So a simple device that emanates a tiny bit of sound is more than sufficient for me.
Because of these bizarre extenuating circumstances, it is the gentler and more patient medium of TV that saves my life far more often these days than film. But even in that medium, when I am complete seduced by something, it is only because it has done nothing less than save my life. Just because it’s gentler and more patient doesn’t make it easy.
This obviously isn’t really a piece about Breaking Bad or Doctor Who. I don’t know what it’s about, really. Maybe about the intersection between an individual’s inner emotional life and that very private, sacred relationship with what great art can do. About our limitations and what can reach us in our limitations. About isolation. About what in this world has enough compassion and generosity to reach us, like stopping to say a few gentle words to a child alone and crying on the playground.
When you have failed all companions, when all plans have been defeated, when you are alone, when all bridges have washed out and no one will dare an approach, the work is all that is left and willing to come to you.
Now that I’ve reached this point, I’ve realized I don’t want to talk about this. This hasn’t turned out as I thought it would, and I’m not sure what to say below. What heals us and raises us from the dead is a highly personal matter. For some people, it’s Chris Nolan’s Batman films.
I’ve had a couple of dark summers. Circumstances are not important. Dark summer #1 was the summer of 2012. Enter Walter White.
I can’t speak to why the rest of the world found Breaking Bad seductive, but I can say that from my own perspective, it’s probably because the humiliation and underachievement and failure and desperation of Walter White’s life mirror my own life, and the way it plays out is the darkest – and because of that, somehow funniest – possible expression of that. The tone of the show is the tone of my life, if not, obviously, the plot points.
Strangely, I jumped on the bandwagon without knowing I jumped on the bandwagon; apparently, I started binge-watching Breaking Bad around the same time that everyone else started binge-watching it. I had happened on the pilot purely by accident while switching idly through channels, and knew absolutely nothing about others’ preoccupation with it. All I knew was that the pilot knocked me on my ass.
I’m often attracted to work that is entirely unlike my own, and Breaking Bad suited me because it’s my antithesis. My own work is comic in nature, and the inner life and emotions I portray in it are not realistic, nor meant to be. Or rather, those emotions are the “truth” of our inner world and inner desires, rather than those of the outer world. Outside of my own writing, I often yearn for work that feels emotionally tied to the outer world. And in terms of what I consume, sometimes I need unmitigated darkness.
Darkness and seriousness are not the same thing. Breaking Bad spoke to the darkest part of myself because it spoke with the darkest of humor. That pitch black absurdist sensibility never left the show entirely, though the tone definitely developed a more straightforward dramatic or tragic sensibility toward the end of the series. The first half to three-quarters of the show spoke to me more fully because it spoke my language – the language of absurdity.
Much has been said in recent years about the phenomenon of binge-watching. I can say that being able virtually to live inside that tone, hour after hour, gave me solace. My father always used to say that the darkness is our friend. It certainly can be.
Perhaps nothing else in the world other than Breaking Bad in all its blackly disturbing (and entertaining) aspects would have spoken to me at that time in my life. I feel as though it were somehow the only thing left in the world that might have reached me and stirred my interest – in anything. In living, in continuing with my own writing. Whatever night that was that the pilot was re-aired, I’m grateful to AMC for making the scheduling decision. I acknowledge they weren’t thinking about me. They had no intention of saving my life. They were thinking about demographics, and money, and marketing, and who would have the TV on at that time, and new viewers they might hook on the show. I probably wasn’t even the person they wanted to reach. If they knew I was one of the people who had tuned in, they would probably sigh and say, “Well, that was a bad decision.”
Even so.
That was the beginning of Breaking Bad for me, and now I find my thoughts turning to the end of it, perhaps because when a show has ended, there appears to be some customary obligation to obsess on that final episode and to nitpick. A permanent cloud of controversy forms around the final episode and moves with it forever throughout time. Though I understand why this happens, I’m not sure I entirely agree with it. As a storyteller, I know well enough that at any given time, you have a myriad of choices – a myriad of directions in terms of what scenes to execute, what ways to send the plot and the characters. Sometimes perhaps you make the best choices, sometimes perhaps there were better choices. But you make the best choices you can with the time, resources, and faculties you have, and as long as the storytelling is of a high enough overall quality, you will have something meaningful and perhaps even powerful for the right audience. Vince Gilligan and company delivered on that count.
Further, I will always argue that it is the imperfections in any work that are part of what make it truly great – perfection doesn’t exist, and the choices that might have been somehow better are intrinsic to a work just as its greatnesses are, and they give it character; sometimes they are even the most interesting aspects. The reasons those possibly inferior choices were made is something you can love and understand about the work. In all of my favorite stories, there are parts I don’t like quite as well – but without those parts, they would not be that story. If I am to love the story, then I am to love those parts.
Then, too, life has its seasons. I engaged in abundant nitpicking up until my early thirties, and I believe this is part of the process of learning craft. But in my late thirties, my tendency is to regard the gestalt.
That said, something important that I took from the final moments of Breaking Bad, as Walter White caresses all that equipment that represents what he loves, is that when you die, this is the last you will be left with. Even if we are loved and surrounded by people, we all die alone. Our last conscious moments will be spent with whatever was our greatest love affair on an internal, intellectual, or creative level during our life. For Walter White, that was chemistry. For me, it would be, purely, story, and my internal world of story where I spend most of my time and that I started constructing from my first conscious moments. For others, it might be music, or dance, or architecture, or certain memories from the past. But whatever it is, this true lover and companion of our mind and soul is worth thinking about now, while we’re still able. Chances are, it will be our last honest companion at the very end.
I thank Breaking Bad, and I thank it for being so far outside my own sensibilities, which is why it was so kind to me. In truth, I almost never seek out anything that is close to my own sensibilities. Most of the time, I’ve had enough of myself, and the last thing I need is any more of it.
And so, Doctor Who is the great exception to the rule for me. It may be the closest to my own sensibilities of anything I have ever encountered (though it is not my sensibilities entirely). I have somewhat less to say about Doctor Who than about Breaking Bad (at this time, anyway). This may be because I feel slightly ornery towards it. The sort of close relationship I have with Doctor Who, sharing so much creative temperament, can be as fraught with difficulties as it can be rewarding. Inevitably, there will be not only deep respect and affection, but envy and melancholy and other unseemly feelings. The show is actually difficult for me to watch because I wish I had written all of it. I wish it were mine instead of my own work – and Doctor Who is actually the first and only time in my life that I have ever felt that way. Of course, above all, I wish the Doctor would arrive in the Tardis and take me away with him as his companion.
And yet, I guess he sort of did. I think the Doctor came along for me at just the right time. I think that if I had spent another summer immersed in the darkness I’d been immersed in the previous summer…well, I’m not sure what would have happened. Doctor Who came along and reminded me of who I was, as works can sometimes do for us. Dark summer #2 for me was the summer of 2013.
Whereas Breaking Bad was love at first sight, I had for years channel-surfed and come across Doctor Who and flipped immediately onwards. In fact, any time I was watching BBC America and Doctor Who came on, my reaction was deep disappointment, and I would immediately start looking for something else. (This especially breaks my heart now, as these would have been the David Tennant years.) If I did leave it on for a time because I was doing the dishes or some other activity that I couldn’t get to the TV remote right away, my impression was that the show was annoying and alienating and overly arch. Being an Anglophile, I watch BBC America and other Britishy things all the time, and I often seem to understand British sensibilities better than I do American sensibilities (as one might expect from someone who has been a Monty Python fan since the age of 11). But I admit, shame-faced, that I had no luck with Doctor Who for the longest time. I think this can partly be ascribed to the need with this particular show to get a solid grip on its mythology in order to be able to follow it. Others may differ, but I am of the opinion that you need to start from the very beginning (of the modern incarnation) and go straight through chronologically.
I think also that with some shows, you need to be brought in with particular episodes that happen to speak to you. There were two Stephen Moffat/Matt Smith-era episodes that finally brought me to the show just prior to the summer of 2013, when I started my binge-watch proper. I experienced them as reruns on BBC America, probably on some desolate weekday afternoon. One was “The Beast Below.” I just loved the sad, lonely old beast with the weight of the world on its shoulders and the metaphor of the Doctor as a sad, lonely old beast. The other was “The Girl Who Waited,” and specifically the moment when Amy proclaims she will break time apart for Rory. From these episodes, I understood that I had been deeply mistaken in my first impressions of the show. I understood that it was all heart and innocence and everything good in this world and inside of us – the best of us. I started at the beginning and never looked back.
More on the Doctor again one of these days.
The point has been that I need work to do no less of a task than save my life. It isn’t that I don’t care about other work. I have so much gratitude for all that exists out there. But I can’t consume it or it would destroy me. I will crawl out of my hidey-hole for the greatest miracles in all of humanity. Otherwise, I will need to keep myself tidily tucked away in the quiets of Muller’s Mile.
Nothing has come along to save my life in this summer of 2014, and I kind of don’t expect it to. But that’s ok. I’ll save my own life.
Cinephobia (2005)
Fear of music: melophobia. Fear of poetry: metrophobia. Fear of books: bibliophobia. But in all my searching I can’t find anything about the fear of films. How could compilers of phobia lists overlook the abject terror brought on by Dumb and Dumber? Books are frightening, too, but it’s easier to escape a book than a film. A book you can set down. Once eight dollars is forked over and your rear is seated in a theater, it’s hard to escape a film. You’re held captive, and sitting through until the bitter conclusion is inevitable.
While driving to the theater, I always wonder whether I really want to see the movie du jour badly enough to go through all the expense and trouble. Once I pull into the parking lot I don’t immediately enter the theater. I sit in the car for ten minutes, engaged in a deep philosophical soliloquy worthy of Hamlet. Up until the moment I buy my ticket, I still consider turning around and walking out. The ticket purchase is the point of no return. Then, and only then, am I resigned to stay in my seat and suffer through the ordeal. But even as the opening credits start, I wrestle with unwieldy existential questions, degenerating into nihilism: “Does it have any meaning?” I ask myself. “It’s only a string of images after all. It has no purpose. I have no purpose sitting here, do I? I have no meaning.”
Cripes, all this doubt and turmoil can’t stem merely from high box office prices and two hours of my life lost to a potentially bad movie. It can only come from some kind of fear. An irrational fear, right? What could possibly happen as a result of watching a harmless little flick?
Well, first of all, there’s a whole group of risks associated with failing to connect with the movie, with your fellow moviegoers in the theater, with the cinematic collective unconscious. Hating a film that was loved by all the critics and the entire population of the United States can be quite embarrassing, like walking around a Star Trek convention without any Klingon gear. Somehow this is more traumatic than liking a film that the critics panned. That phenomenon has always had an aura of populist “cool.” But you really begin to question your instincts when everyone except you was impressed. Though I’m not anti-movie musical, I never did understand what everyone saw in Chicago. I thought it made more sense left on the stage. And my experience with an indie film called Primer was especially jarring. A friend and I had gone to see it because of the nearly universal rave reviews from the critics. Neither of us are total slouches in the IQ department, but we left the movie so confounded by the convoluted plot that we sat in the car for a long time just shaking our heads and making strange squawking noises of disbelief. We double checked the reviews to make sure we hadn’t accidentally read the wrong ones. We hadn’t. That night I doubted both my intellectual powers and my understanding of my fellow film-watching creatures. A truly demoralizing failure to connect.
But matters could be worse: one can fail to connect with what even makes a film a film. I found this out after taking several courses for a minor in film studies. “Not to stick Elisabeth in a category,” said my professor one day, “but what she’s saying about High Noon reveals a literary sensibility, not a cinematic sensibility.” There I sat in the dark, mostly empty auditorium, excluded from the universe of film with my lousy literary sensibility. Take and shove my damn literary sensibility, I wanted to tell him. I want to connect instead with this mysterious and magical phenomenon known as the cinema.
Though connection failures are distressing, I think most of the worst risks of cinephobia are associated with successful connection with a film. Usually the movies I love most are the movies that repel me the most. As a result, in the past, I often bought the movies I loved on DVD and then never watched them. Once seated in a theater, money paid, there’s little way to escape the experience without looking foolish. But at home there are a thousand ready excuses not to watch a movie. Sometimes in years past, I spent an embarrassingly large percentage of my tiny income on DVDs, only to opt instead for the thrilling Friday night entertainment of doing the laundry and reorganizing my desk.
Successful connection can result in a certain kind of unwanted, or at least unbidden, inspiration. Once inspired, one has to go through the terror of being roused out of complacency toward awareness and action. I guess for some cinephobiacs, this kind of stimulation might come from political films or documentaries. But being the romantic that I am, I get motivated by big, sweeping epics with mythic themes. I recall watching Lawrence of Arabia for the first time around age fifteen. Afterwards, I stood in my backyard in small town southern Indiana, fists clenched, staring straight ahead, eyes glazed, mind on fire with the ambition to do something noble, all while chlorinating the swimming pool. I got some chlorine on my jeans and had to hurry into the house to wash it off. My brush with greatness had been foiled again.
Suffering from overwhelmed senses sometimes results from successful connection with a film. It’s a kind of over-connection and is a fairly plausible fear since it even has concrete and measurable physical effects. I often leave movie theaters with a headache from eye strain, or from being browbeaten by the digital audio. I left in that condition after Batman Begins, a virtuoso movie which was essentially about fear, and which used arhythmic visuals and a grating soundtrack to create a sense of discomfort and paranoia. It worked. After about an hour of gunfire, screaming, and fists hitting batsuits, I went to the bathroom just to massage my temples and have a break from the assault on my senses. By mistake I walked back into a different theater with a later showing, and experienced a nightmarish repeat of scenes I’d already had to suffer through once.
Though obviously the sound advances of recent years are a great leap forward, and most moviegoers (including me) are thrilled about it, I seem to be a little high strung. It’s like putting headphones on a Chihuahua and turning the volume up all the way. After awhile I’m physically exhausted by the sound. Then I just feel embarrassed and wimpy, like going to the movies should be some kind of gladiatorial feat of derring-do and I deserve to be annihilated for my lack of fortitude. Though I respect digital perfection and a good sound design, I’m happier sometimes to have lower quality in order to simply relax. That’s when I decide to go to a comfortably primitive drive-in with its distant screen and its sound filtered through viewers’ car radios.
Another well-known type of over-connection is the fear of losing oneself in the gulf of a work of art. I rarely cry as a result of life, but I cry very often in response to movies or books. My emotions run the whole gamut, from grief, to powerful desire, to utter outrage. Depending on the nature of a movie, I sometimes leave emotionally exhausted. And when I achieve especially successful connection, an empty feeling inevitably takes hold when the movie is over. I don’t need to elaborate on this kind of post-coital emptiness. We all know what it feels like to wake up from the dream.
Delving inwardly a little deeper, a movie may also have a powerful and anarchic effect on one’s inner creative life. Watching a film is not a passive experience. I become the experience, if the experience has won me over completely. And if I give myself over to it completely, I don’t know how much of my old self I’m ever going to get back. There may be a coup. A new actor that I find provocative might throw out an old character in my head or institute himself as the inspiration for a new character. A director may present a story so vividly that it establishes an entirely new paradigm that I feel compelled to build on for months or years. Or a thoughtfully explored idea may cause me to wrestle with, and try to answer, question after unanswerable question. While this upheaval is exciting, it’s also demanding and exhausting, and once it happens there’s no choice in the matter. I find that being moved to this degree is fairly rare, but as I prepare to enter a movie theater I always know it’s possible. When I come out again, my mind might have to work overtime and all my internal workings be rearranged. Once I’ve left the theater, nothing may ever be the same again.
Though this last risk is particularly challenging for me, I experience all of the different aforementioned fears at different times. The type of risk depends on the film. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m an idiot because I didn’t understand a movie, and other times I’m terrified of being engulfed by the lead actor’s charisma. These are not rational fears, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re useless fears.
Even though he hadn’t seen Batman Begins, Spinoza once said that fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. I guess I’m always hoping for connection when I experience a movie – or any type of art – but fearing that the connection will be so successful I’ll get lost in it. Maybe fear, rather than pure appreciation, is my best homage to movies, my highest compliment, my acknowledgement of the worthy risks involved in the attempt to connect. After all, I desperately love film. There’s a lot of fear in love.