The Sunset Limited
The Sunset Limited is a 2011 HBO production of a theater-piece by Cormac McCarthy. The play was first performed at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in 2006 and, then, ran for a time in New York City. Tommy Lee Jones directed the HBO adaptation. The play is subtitled "A Novel in Dramatic Form" and some critics have suggested that the work is not theatrical in any respect – there is no action depicted in the piece and the work consists of a ninety-minute dialogue between two characters invested with symbolic weight.
Production Notes
The Sunset Limited is shot on a digital Sony F 35 camcorder. The digital images are readily manipulated for color balance. In the commentary on the film, Tommy Lee Jones notes that almost every image has been carefully adjusted to enhance or suppress certain color values. He notes that the Sony F 34 avoids "clipping whites" – that is, overexposure the decreases detail in bright parts of the image – and "crushing blacks" (the collapse of detail into an amorphous shadow.)
Jones notes that his chief challenge was to "keep the frame alive." He uses off-balance compositions and the motion of the figures in the picture field to prevent the enclosed two-figure dialogue from becoming static or predictable. The picture was shot very efficiently on a set with specially designed fly-walls and a sliding ceiling – the ceiling could be manipulated to cover half the set while the other half provided light. Jones says that the budget for the film didn’t allow time for changes in camera set-up. On a conventional production, Jones says "it can take a half-day to fly (remove) a wall." The set design for this production allowed changes in camera angle and configuration of walls and ceilings on the basis of ten-minute long adjustments to the scenery – the set was built to break apart at 11 locations.
The picture was shot at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico, apparently in the school’s theater. (Cormac McCarthy owns property in Santa Fe.) To fit HBO time requirements, the play was shortened by twenty minutes. A startling line spoken by the Black character, about "ladling benediction on commuters," cites a series of speeches that was omitted from the play for the HBO production. The phrase seems "out of character" for Samuel Jackson’s role and may refer to something that the Professor said in the omitted part of the play.
Jones notes that urged Samuel Jackson to employ Commedia dell’Arte pantomime techniques in parts of his performance.
McCarthy’s Dramatic Works
Cormac McCarthy, who is now 80, is one of America’s pre-eminent living novelists. (He is part of the generation of writers that produced Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.) He has worked only infrequently in the theater.
In January 1977, PBS broadcast a southern Gothic play called The Gardener’s Son as part of its Visions series. The play is a two-hour made-for-TV work about a murder in a Carolina mill town. From descriptions, the play seems like a combination of Eugene O’Neil’s Mourning becomes Electra and Faulkner’s The Hamlet. The Gardener’s Son, which starred Ned Beatty, was apparently impressive enough to garner a number of Emmy nominations.
In 1995, McCarthy wrote a play about an African-American family called The Stone Mason. The play involves a downwardly mobile young man who eschews an opportunity to attend college in order to become a stone mason. From descriptions of this work, it seems to be influenced by August Wilson’s plays. The Stone Mason is a five-act play and rarely performed.
McCarthy worked with the Coen brothers on an adaptation of his crime novel No Country for Old Men. In the last couple years, he wrote a screenplay for the crime film The Counselor, the first time McCarthy has written directly for the screen. (A short part of the script was published in The New Yorker.) The film was not successful, although I haven’t seen it and rely on published reviews for this assertion.
Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones was born in Texas in 1946. He is the son of an oil man. He attended Harvard where he was famously close to Al Gore. Jones has won four Oscars.
His proper milieu seems to be the Western. Thus, he is an example of a highly creative film-maker and actor slightly marooned in modern dress and urban settings. The first film that Jones directed, The Good Old Boys, (1965) is a cowboy movie. His second film, the highly regarded The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a brutal Western, albeit one set in the present – the film is heavily influenced by Sam Peckinpah. Jones offering at the Cannes’ Film Festival in 2014 was also a Western, The Homesman.
Famously ornery, Jones lives in San Antonio, speaks fluent Spanish, and raises horses on several ranches.
Samuel L. Jackson
The ubiquitous Samuel L. Jackson was born in 1948, raised in Chattanooga, Tennesse, and, after involvement as an organizer in the Civil Rights movement, began acting in the late seventies. He has been in more than 100 films from prestige vehicles like The Sunset Limited to Snakes on a Plane, a movie in which agreed to star on the basis of its title alone.
Jackson, who seems like a nice fellow, was a heroin and cocaine addict for many years. He became famous for his role with John Travolta in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. He is by far the best thing in Tarantino’s Djanto Unchained (2013). The villainous house-slave in Django is modeled after Clarence Thomas.
In the commentary to The Sunset Limited, Samuel Jackson remarks on his religious upbringing – he was raised Methodist – and tells Cormac McCarthy that he reads thrillers full "killing and stuff" but, also, has read Moby Dick three times. Jackson manfully tries to keep the conversation going by addressing questions to "TL" and "Cormac", but they mostly sulk.
Commentary
The DVD version of The Sunset Limited has a commentary track by Tommy Lee Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, and Cormac McCarthy. The idea of superimposing a commentary track over a film that consists of nothing but vehement dialogue seems questionable to me – you either listen to the dialogue or listen to the commentary. The film doesn’t have any silences or action sequences over which a commentary can be offered without disrupting the narrative continuity of the movie.
Obviously, no one prepared for the session in which the commentary was taped. Jones is overtly sullen and uncommunicative. Samuel Jackson tries heroically to keep the patter going but doesn’t succeed. McCarthy seems embarrassed by the whole enterprise. There are long uneasy silences and most of the discussion is surprisingly banal and trite:
Jones:
That rain looks pretty good.
Jackson:
Yeah, looks good.
McCarthy:
That it does.
Interpretative Comments:
The Sunset Limited is influenced heavily by two previous works – Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (also written by Wallace Shawn). The fact that McCarthy is strongly influenced by Shawn’s scripts is a testimony to his importance and influence – Shawn’s work is not widely known, but disseminates into wider culture through productions like The Sunset Limited. White’s discourse on the death of culture echoes the words spoken by the character presenting Shawn’s great and despairing monologue in The Designated Mourner (in the film version of that play, Mike Nichols performs the part). The collision between two opposing world-views, worked out across a ninety minute dialogue, of course, is the essence of Shawn’s script for the Malle film My Dinner with Andre.
Furthermore, the broad structure of The Sunset Limited mirrors the form of My Dinner with Andre. In my Malle’s film, the two characters are defined as opposites: Andre is sophisticated, questing, experimental, dissatisfied with the ordinary roles that society imposes on people – he seeks the excessive, the perverse, and intentionally deranges his senses to achieve visionary states. By contrast, Wally is conventional, generally satisfied with his life, his domestic arrangements, and, slightly contemptuous, about Andre’s need for spiritual adventures. Most of the film consists of Andre’s monologue, interrupted periodically by short skeptical remarks by Wally. But, at the end of the film, Wally speaks and delivers a long, basically uninterrupted monologue, a peroration defending his life that comprises the emotional core to the film. In The Sunset Limited, Black, Samuel Jackson’s character speaks at length for the first three-fourths of the film. Tommy Lee Jones’ interlocutor, White, is skeptical. The form of the film is a lengthy dialogue in which Black is the aggressor, intensely questioning White, preaching to him, and seeking to persuade him that life is worth living. At the climax of the film, in its final fifteen minutes, White speaks, more or less, uninterruptedly, utilizing high-flown Faulkernian rhetoric to describe his despair. White’s speech, more or less, silences Black.
The character of Black in The Sunset Limited risks racial caricature. Black calls himself an "old country nigger" and he seems to represent a common sense connection to the earth and reality that is sorely lacking in the hyper-intellectual and suicidal White. There is a trace of the life-affirming Uncle Remus in the character of Black and the notion of a ex-convict highly religious African-American attempt to save the soul of a Caucasian male has patronizing elements make me uneasy.
The terms of the conflict presented by The Sunset Limited are extreme and, probably, philosophically untenable. The two disputants debate across an enormous void, an abyss that seems unrealistically wide and abstract. Black’s argument is that without faith in a personal Jesus, all men are irredeemably lost. Although Black bases his belief on an experience in prison (he imagines Jesus has called his name) and Bible study, he is willing to accept the notion that the entirety of his religion is contained within the injunction to "be (your) brothers keeper" and that people must love and care for their weaker brethren or die. Curiously, Black’s arguments about compassion and empathy are never met, or, even, really acknowledged by the literary and philosophical White. A frustrating, if realistic, aspect of the debate is that the two men speak past one another – they don’t ever really address the other’s objections. White doesn’t seem to understand that the heart of Black’s belief is not Jesus or the Bible, something that Black says explicitly ("you don’t even have to know about this book," he says), but rather his conviction that people are fundamentally good and that they deserve mercy and kindness not justice. White never responds to these arguments. All that he says about the fundamental basis for Black’s beliefs is something to the effect: "I don’t understand anything about that." Rather, White chooses a "straw-man", he focuses continually on Black’s piety, his belief in the truth of the Bible, and tries to shake him with respect to that conviction. But this attack fundamentally misconstrues what Black has been arguing – Black’s central thesis, that men need require love and kindness not justice, may not be dependent on his religious faith at all.
White’s elaborate and bombastic speech about despair baffles Black. And this is because White is speaking past Black; he isn’t talking to his interlocutor but to himself. And, so, Black’s ingenuity is confounded. He can’t reply to White’s monologue because it doesn’t really connect with anything that he is said – White’s monologue is not only the rejection of everything that Black has said, but, also, a violation of the very premise of Black’s preaching, namely his belief that men can aid one another as friends. If you can not communicate, you can’t be friends.
McCarthy seems to suggest that we are confronted with an either/or situation: believe in a personal loving God and love those around you or believe in a meaningless existence, seek death as oblivion and an end of suffering, and remain indifferent to the suffering of others. McCarthy’s "black and white" depiction of these issues verges on the childish – although the writer, certainly, accepts and embraces this peril. For many viewers the all or nothing aspect of the drama will present a philosophical dilemma that is unconvincing: is the choice really between loving God and, therefore, loving men or rejecting God and, therefore, despising yourself and your fellow men? This alternative, although dramatically effective, seems unconvincing.
Cormac McCarthy is, often, compared to William Faulkner. I think this analogy is misleading. McCarthy writes in the tradition of Hawthorne and Melville – he is fundamentally an artificer of allegories. (This is most obvious in McCarthy’s signature work Blood Meridian.) Black and White are allegorical figures engaged in a duel to the death in an allegorical setting. The locked room represents the world or hell or purgatory depending upon your interpretation. It is always a shock when Black laboriously unlocks the door and opens it...revealing...just a bleak hallway in an urban tenement – the viewer expects there to be nothing outside the room, some kind of eerie abyss or howling wasteland. Some viewers think that White has successfully killed himself under the steel wheels of the Sunset Limited and that the dialogue is supernatural, something occuring after White has died. And, indeed, both characters seem to have vaguely supernatural characteristics – Black can perform complex multiplication operations in his head and seems to be able to read White’s mind. White seems to be satanic at times, an allegorical devil sent to tempt Black away from his faith.
At the end of the commentary track, after 88 minutes of sullen silence, Tommy Lee Jones comes briefly alive to explain the film’s ending. Characteristically, Jones starts by rather opaquely, and reluctantly, remarking on the complexity of the final shot, identifying the lens used for the image and noting that the shot combines a dollying track inward and a zoom. But Jones, then, says that the ending is "not pessimistic." He says that the final shot ends with an image of the sun rising, a "symbol across all ages", Jones says, for god and the divine. Over the closing credits, Jones commissioned music designed to invoke "all the world’s religions" – we hear Buddhist chanting, a Hindu hymn, Methodist and Black Baptist choirs. The film’s ending suggests that the hero of the movie is Black, that Black is a man of faith who is tempted by a sort of devil, White, and that Black survives this trial with his faith intact. Although he has not converted the devil sent to tempt him, he has, nonetheless, prevailed in this ordeal – he has not succumbed to despair and remains a believer.
Notes
"Sunset Limited" – The Sunset Limited is a passenger train that runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles. In the play, White has attempted to commit suicide in a subway in New York City. Accordingly, the name of the play is primarily symbolic.
D -Train – The "D" train or Orange Line is New York Subway that runs from Coney Island to Norwood in the Bronx. The train operates mostly as an express train through Manhattan where it travels 6th Avenue.
155 8th Avenue – This is the last stop that the D train makes in Manhattan. The stop is located in Harlem.
The image on the wall, hard to identify in the film, is a picture of Martin Luther King protected by a tightly stretched plastic baggie. Samuel Jackson selected that image for the set and played a significant part in the design of the apartment interior in which the film takes place.
Both characters accuse one another of trying to "put (me) in a trick bag." "Trick bag" is African-American slang for a dilemma or a complex situation likely to lead to a disastrous outcome. On the commentary to the DVD disc, Samuel Jackson asks Cormac McCarthy how he learned the word. McCarthy evades the question and suggests that he "may have made it up." Jackson discounts this explanation and says "it’s a word used by my kinda people." In the broadest sense, the closely confined space, the single room where the action takes place, may be thought of as a kind of "trick bag."
The monologue by White about refusing to visit his dying father may be autobiographical. White says that his father was a lawyer, "a government lawyer". McCarthy’s father was an attorney employed by the Tennessee Valley Authority and involved in the acquisition of land for that project.
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