Imitation of Life

 Imitation of Life wallows in excess.  There's just "too much" of everything:  too much emotion, too much conflict, too much suffering, too much super-saturated color -- at times, the screen looks like an open wound.  The acting is hyperbolic and, in the last half hour, when there is a sort of morbid triumphal procession, a death bed scene, and garish night-club imagery coupled with huge, expressive close-ups the picture slips into a sort of excited delirium.  In the opening scenes in which a little girl is lost at Coney Island, the  establishing shots feature a hundred-thousand bathers crowded into the image with a thousand embedded in brilliantly blue ocean.  (The sequence is so grandiose that the director, Douglas Sirk, can't sustain it -- after these spectacular establishing shots, Sirk has to use rear-projection to isolate his characters from the throng.)  Shots are punctuated with flares of brilliant red and the leading lady wears elaborate garments with pearls and diamonds.  Even when she is supposed to be poor and struggling, the heroine's platinum blonde hair is done up in a metallic coiffure that makes her skull look like its wearing the Sydney Opera House.  The movie is relentless.  When a teenage boy angrily confronts his girlfriend about her racial identity, he doesn't just sneer and sulk, but, instead beats her bloody, slapping her so in hard that she ricochets across the street and, then, viciously hitting her again and again until she falls into a gruesome pool of slime underfoot.  Her face is hidden behind gouts of blood.  There are no quiet moments in the picture -- if the plot isn't spinning melodramatically out of control, the decor and set decoration bellow at you.  It' bullying, like being screamed-at for two hours.  I suppose it's an accomplishment to maintain this level of wild expressionistic hysteria.  The subject matter is fundamentally unpleasant and it's creepy to have this stuff howled in your face.  But this picture is a classic of its kind and worth seeing and the subject matter -- the film is largely about race relations in this country -- is by no means inconsequential.  

Imitation of Life in its 1959 version is an adaptation of bestseller by Fannie Hurst, previously made into an estimable movie in 1934.  The two adaptations differ markedly with racial themes predominating in the earlier picture (starring Claudette Colbert):  the theme of the young woman who can "pass" as White has always been alarming to Hollywood censors at Hayes Office -- such a character is said to imply miscegenation, something forbidden in the thirties and problematic when Sirk made his much more glamorous and upscale version of the story in 1959.  It is interesting that the 1934 picture casts an African-American actress, Fredi Washington, in the role of the girl who can pass for White; Hollywood was less bold in 1959 -- that role is played Susan Kohner, an actress with a Latino background.  In the later picture, Lana Turner plays Lora Meredith, an ambitious and, somewhat, haughty blonde, who yearns to become an actress.  Lora is a widow with a young daughter and an important element in the film is the suggestion that she is too old to play ingenue roles -- in fact, she admits to having "lost five years" raising her daughter.  At Coney Island, Lora's daughter Susie goes missing.  Susie has been playing with a slightly older child, Sarah, the daughter of a Black woman named Annie.  Lora and Annie meet, their encounter also including a "meet cute" with Lora's love interest throughout the film, the aspiring art-photographer, Steve Archer.  Lora and Annie are both struggling financially -- Lora is behind on her rent and payments to the milkman; Annie and her daughter are homeless.  After some initial reservations, the two women agree to pool their resources and live together in Lora's cramped flat.  Lora hikes around Manhattan trying to find modeling jobs.  After much hardship (which includes repelling the sexual advances of Lora's smarmy agent), she achieves success and becomes a famous Broadway actress.  At her school, Annie's daughter is "passing" as White; she is appalled and ashamed when her mother comes to school.  Little Sarah refuses to play with Black dolls and asserts that she is "White".  Annie doesn't think it is prudent to Sarah for pass as White but admits that it pains her to know that she gave birth to her daughter "only to have her hurt" -- obviously, she is ambivalent about her daughter's light complexion and the advantages it confers upon her.  

Lora pursues her career in theater aggressively, cuts off her relationship with the poor photographer, Steve, and, ultimately, marries a famous playwright.  After ten years or so, Lora breaks with the playwright -- he wants her to continue playing leading roles in his comedies; she wants to be recognized for serious theater.  She renews her relationship with Steve whom she has always loved.  Sarah has a love affair with a White boy.  When the boy learns that she has a Black mother, he calls her a "nigger" and beats her up.  Sarah, then, tells the noble and long-suffering Annie that if they ever meet on the street she is not to admit knowing her.  Then, she runs away from home.  (Annie tracks her to a dive bar where she is employed as a singer -- in fact, Sarah is very good and seems to have real talent.)  Lora's relationship with Steve is again hampered by her ambition.  She has to go to Italy to shoot a film with an Italian director who is clearly intended to be Federico Fellini.  Lora asks Steve to watch over Susie who is now a senior in High School.  Steve is kind and sophisticated and Susie falls in love with him.  When Lora gets back from Italy, mother and daughter clash over Steve.  Susie realizes that Steve loves her mother and, so, she plans to depart for college in Denver -- Lora lives in an elaborate modernist house, seemingly in Connecticut; she has stables and thoroughbred horses.  By this point, Annie is dying.  She flies to LA to see her daughter performing in an glitzy night-club act.  Again, Sarah repudiates her mother.  Annie returns to Connecticut where she dies.  Annie has planned an elaborate funeral and the final fifteen minutes or so of the film involve her obsequies -- a spectacular service in which Mahalia Jackson sings majestically, then, followed by a procession along the city streets in Manhattan with a marching band and four white horses pulling a Victorian hearse in which Annie's casket is displayed like a particularly luscious wedding cake.  Sarah appears on the street, throws herself through the police cordon, and cries out that the dead woman was her mother.  The family is reunited in a limousine with Steve and Lora together again and Sarah and Susie weeping in one another's arms.  

The movie is full of startling effects.  In the dive bar scene, hideous patrons (they look caricatures from a Goya or Bosch painting) occupy the foreground while the glamorous Sarah taunts them seductively.  In a later night club scene, Sarah, as a show girl, does an elaborate dance, half-naked and miming that she is opening champagne, on a huge gaudy turntable.  The house in Connecticut is full of angular white balustrades and austere,clinical-looking stairwells.  Characters are trapped in geometric cages.  Annie watches her daughter perform in the clubs from behind baroque scrolls of ornamental iron. Hallways and bed chambers are militant (and suggestive) with big phallic beams and posts. The funeral scene involving all the characters in film (including the milkman whom Annie has sweet-talked in any early scene) is disproportionately lavish -- it's like the funeral for a head-of-state with Mahalia Jackson operatically singing over dark-suited congregants and ranks of lodge members, dignified Black gents with dark shirts ornamented with metals and ribbons.  The funeral demonstrates that the most notable person in our society is the least appreciated -- the humble, kind, hardworking, and efficient colored maid.  The suggestion is that presidents and movie stars and captains of industry are all well and good, but that the true laurels for achievement must be awarded to people like Annie, good and loyal servants.  This is really the only way the spectacular funeral scenes can be interpreted.  The point, I think, is that we don't know who is truly important in our society -- there may be classes of persons in our world upon whom everything depends but we don't know anything about them.  At one point, Lora muses with Annie that, perhaps, no one will come to her funeral.  Annie replies that she knows hundreds of people  Lora can't believe this is possible.  "Who do you know?"  Annie replies:  "Members of my Baptist church and I'm a member of many lodges and societies."  Lora is surprised:  "I didn't know."  Annie replies:  "Well, you never asked."      

Silent Souls

 I watched the Russian film Silent Souls (2010) last night.  The film is a mainline injection into those veins through which dreams circulate.  I awoke before dawn arguing with a scene in the movie, something about a throng of Meryon people, an ethnic group in west-central Russia, gathered together in a sort of crater for some sinister reason.  I was convinced that this scene was a part of the movie, although I couldn't exactly grasp how it informed the picture's subject matter, broadly speaking an account of exotic mortuary practices in that community.  But since the scene doesn't exist in the movie, of course, the argument was fruitless.  Silent Souls affects you in such a way as to render it impossible to distinguish between what you saw in the movie, what you thought you saw and now remember, and what you may have only dreamed. Shot on a micro-budget and only 75 minutes long, the film is strangely memorable and, also, deeply disorienting.  It's a curious experience, so remote from everyday reality and concerns, that it, somehow, embeds itself in your imagination as a troubling foreign object, an irritant that can't quite be dislodged.

Silent Souls is the film's English title.  The Russian name for the picture is The Buntings, referring to a species of small, rather drab songbirds.  (The movie derives from a novel of that same name.)  The picture begins with a man named Aist riding his bicycle over a muddy lane in the woods.  Aist has bought two buntings that he carries in a cage suspended from his bike.  The camera either tracks behind him, shoots from his vantage rolling forward , or shows the lane receding behind the moving bicycle in long takes.  Throughout the film about a third of the shots show the buntings in their cage, generally at the center of the image.  Since the film is a kind of "road movie" about half of the images are shots from inside a moving car, unobtrusively composed to show the road from the vantage of the driver and passenger or, as with the introductory bicycle shots, watching the highway as it recedes behind the vehicle.  The landscape traversed is wooded and flat; there are enormous turgid-looking rivers.  The weather is perpetually drizzly and grey.  (We learn from the dialogue that it is an unseasonably warm November.)  Aist is a writer, the son of a "very odd man" (as he calls his father) who was also a notable regional poet.  Aist claims to be ethnically Meryon, explaining that these were Finnic tribes long since wholly absorbed into the local Slavic population.  Aist says that place names in this area are artifacts of Meryon words that have otherwise vanished.  Aist works as a photographer and has some sort of affiliation with a paper mill in the town of Neya, one of many villages that have Meryon roots.  We see him in the paper mill taking pictures of female workers -- perhaps, he has been commissioned to make a plant directory although this is pure speculation; the film is very focused, laconic and doesn't provide any real explanations for much of what we see. Aist flirts with one of the women.  We see him in his gloomy flat, trying to write on a laptop.  One wall is covered with a photo-montage that shows the nearby village and terrain pieced together from individual photographs.  This photo-montage rhymes with a huge photographic mural of the paper mill that covers a wall in the office of the plant manager, Miron, the picture's other protagonist.  The mural of paper-mill is strangely lit, surrealistically detailed, and imparts an aura of the uncanny to the scenes with Miron.

Miron calls Aist to his office and tells him that he needs his help.  Miron says that his wife Tanya has died.  The two men go to Miron's home where Tanya's naked corpse is lying on the bed.  Miron combs her hair and washes her body, apparently with vodka.  Then, the men tie colored threads into her pubic hair -- we are told that Meryon brides have their pubic hair adorned with threads of this sort that are removed by the groom, woven into a bracelet and, then, tied to an alder tree.  This is represented to be a Meryon wedding custom that is also used in burial ceremonies --  dead Meryon women are buried as brides.  The two men carry the corpse in a colorful blanket to Miron's car and, then. set out along empty highways, driving through the great, grim-looking forests.  The movie has almost no plot and there are no intriguing digressions or encounters along the way to the vast, shallow river where the two men set the dead woman on a funeral pyre, pour gallons of high-proof vodka on her and burn the corpse to ashes.  (The river is near the place where Miron and Tanya spent their honeymoon.)  Returning to Neya, they stop in a big city where they meet two prostitutes and spend the night with them.  The next morning, Miron and Aist are driving across an enormous bridge over a river when the buntings escape from their cage and "kiss" (as Aist, the narrator says) the eyes of the two men causing the driver to lose control of the car and crash it into the river.  In the depths of the mile-wide icy river, Miron merges with Tanya whose ashes were scattered in the water; Aist finds his father's lost typewriter and on which he types the novel The Buntings (the movie' source text) "on the side of a fish."  The old typewriter is at the bottom of the river due to an earlier death.  The film flashes back (although without immediate explanation) to Aist's childhood.  His mother died in childbirth and, with his father, the "odd poet", they row across one of the huge rivers with the corpse wrapped in a blanket.  Later, Aist's father, smitten with grief, cuts a hole in the ice of the river and "drowns" his typewriter --  it is this instrument that the Aist, who is himself drowned, later encounters.  (The scenes with the young Aist are heavily stylized:  we see the boy's saturnine face artificially lit while a rear-projection shows the landscape of the river over which Aist's father, like Charon, is conveying the corpse of his mother and dead infant sister.)

Although the movie purports to objectively portray the mortuary customs of the Meryon people, I suspect that many of those details are hallucinated.  The texture of the film suggests documentary realism, but what happens in the picture is uncanny and follows the logic of a dream.  Miron feels compelled to engage in what the Meryon's call "smoking" -- that is, recounting the sexual exploits of the deceased in graphic detail.  (The director Aleksei Fedorchenko provides us with a few sentences of these obscene reveries, but, then, discretely cuts away to an exterior shot of the car; we see Miron's lips moving but can't hear what he says.)  Tanya's pyre is comprised of 120 shovel handles, 80 long axe-handles and 20 short axe-handles -- all purchased in a hardware store somewhere.  Tanya is a plump, pink corpse -- she doesn't look even remotely dead and there is no hint of decomposition or any sign of the illness that has untimely killed her:  she seems to be about 45.  (Her body shows no rigor mortis and, when she is rolled over to be washed, there is no sign of blood pooling on the back of the corpse.)  The prostitutes are portrayed in a peculiar tracking shot that pans up over their naked bodies as they rest against what seems to be a wall of slatted timber, something that you might imagine in a building by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen.  There is a slight intimation that Aist may have had an affair with Tanya, but nothing overt is shown.  (There are some graphic sex scenes in flashback.)  The long bridge at the end of the movie rhymes with a very strange, crooked bridge crossing a more narrow river at the beginning of the film -- crossing water and bridges seems emblematic of death.  The men attempt to retrieve ancient Meryon customs but, in fact, everyone seems to acknowledge that nothing really is known about those people -- no words in the language (except the names for rivers) have survived.  The script equates love with poetry with drowning with death.  Death by drowning is said to be the best way to perish and large, shallow bodies of water fill enormous basins extending out to rims of pine at the horizon.  The towns through which the men pass are all wretched with decaying wooden houses and antique concrete and steel factories set in clearings in an endless green pine forest.  The bodies of women are said to be rivers in which men drown or wish to drown.  The film expresses the forbidden thought -- namely that there should be no death, that our loved ones should be immortal, and we should live in joy and peace with them forever.  But no sooner is the forbidden thought spoken than the buntings peck out the eyes of the men and send them careening into the bottom of the river.  Nothing is immortal; everything flows and ebbs and wanes and passes away.  The film argues that the ancient Meryon culture somehow persists in its customs and folkways.  But the movie argues with equal force that nothing at all remains of those people but their blood, the landscapes where they once lived, and a few fragmentary names for bodies of water.  (There is a German poet named Johannes Bobrowski who wrote, at length, about the lost tribes of the Baltic, particularly the Sarmatians -- although he invokes their ancestral spirits, he also must acknowledge that nothing remains except a few words for fish, birds, rivers.  Other antecedents to the film include Sokurov's The Second Circle in which someone has to manhandle the corpse of his father out of a cheerless high-rise apartment building in Moscow and Tarkovsky's great The Mirror.)  Although the picture seems to take place in a timeless realm of vast slow-moving rivers, muddy river banks and sand bars, and dark forests, some of the shots are made in what seem like the Russian equivalent of Walmart and, in the final scenes, heavy traffic crosses rivers into large, dark cities.  

 

Film note on Odd Man Out

 Odd Man Out

Via Dolorosa

The Canadian critic, Hugh Kenner, wrote that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot arises from the author’s experiences in the Maquis or French Resistance.  Two underground fighters are assigned a dangerous and lonely mission.  They are supposed to meet their anonymous contact at some rural crossroads to learn the final details for the operation.  But the Gestapo or SS have intervened.  The third fighter with logistical information has gone missing.  Either he is dead or being tortured in a cellar somewhere and no one will see him again.  Should resistance continue?  “I can’t go on. I will go on.”  Beckett, Kenner argues, has excised the circumstantial details of specific time, place, and person from his grim anecdote.  By omitting factual circumstances, Beckett has transformed a particular experience into something that is universal.

Carol Reed’s 1947 Odd Man Out demonstrates this process: the film depicts a manhunt for a wounded IRA gunman during the troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  But Reed’s ambition is that the wounded terrorist’s plight show us something universal about the human condition.  And, so, the action takes place after dark in an unnamed northern city; the dying gunman works for the “organization”, a shadowy enterprise that clearly represents the Irish Republican Army.  The masonry stake of a big clock tower looms over the gunman’s desperate plight. The snow that falls during the last quarter of the film reminds us of the final paragraph in James Joyce’s “The Dead”: “Snow was general all over Ireland...His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and falling faintly, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

By abstracting and making universal, the dying gunman’s sufferings, the film evokes the notion of the pilgrim’s progress, the way of suffering that leads through this vale of tears to death.  Everyone endures pain and despair.  Our great enterprise runs aground.  We are all betrayed.  The clock tower looms over the shadowy and cold labyrinth of the world.  The forces that will destroy us are knocking at the door.  Reed’s film noir becomes an allegory for the fate of all of us.  

Context

I have argued that Odd Man Out generalizes the fate of its passive and doomed protagonist.  An ugly technical term for this strategy is “decontextualizing.”  Sometimes, a film or other art object may seem “decontextualized” simply because we don’t know the historical matrix in which the work is embedded.  Arguably, a United Kingdom audience in 1947 would have known the exact historical circumstances to which Odd Man Out refers.  Therefore, Reed and his screenwriters didn’t need to supply information as to facts that would have widely known when the film premiered.  But in 2025, eighty years (and a continent) distant from the events depicted in the film, a little additional information may be helpful.

As early as 1169, English and Norman forces invaded Ireland, attempting to annex the territory to Great Britain.  What is now Northern Ireland was part of the kingdom of Ulster, an area of nine counties in the northeast part of the island.  A long series of uprisings and wars characterized the relations between England and Ireland, but the English maintained control over Ireland for more than 800 years.  After the Protestant Reformation, Ulster possessed a large population of Anglicans; of course, the remainder of Ireland was overwhelmingly Catholic.  By the late 19th century, progressives in the British parliament argued that English hegemony over Ireland was ultimately unsustainable and, so, preparations were made to establish “Home Rule”.  These efforts were stalled by World War One, a conflict in which Germany actively supported rebellion in Ireland and, indeed, provided munitions for that struggle.  Things came to a head during Easter Uprising of 1916 in which the Irish rose en masse to fight the British.  The Uprising was suppressed and many of its leaders publicly executed.  A guerilla war erupted between the Irish Republican Army and the British in 1919 and continued, a campaign of bombings, ambushes, and murders, through 1921.  Complicating the situation were the Unionists, pro-British enclaves located, primarily, in Ulster that opposed IRA (and Catholic) control over the country.  In order to end the fighting, England and the pro-Independence Sinn Fein agreed to partition the country.  Twenty-six predominantly Catholic counties were designated as the Republic of Ireland.  Six majority Protestant counties (“Unionist” counties), all of them in Ulster, remained part of the United Kingdom.  These six counties became known as Northern Ireland.

The partition that divided Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland was contentious and, ultimately, bloody.  Irish Republican Army fighters infiltrated Northern Ireland and embarked on campaign of terrorism in that place.  Communal sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants led to massacres, arson, and other atrocities.  Fighting continued throughout the later twenties and thirties with the IRA conducting guerrilla operations in Northern Ireland.  During World War Two, the Republic of Ireland was publicly neutral, although circumspectly supporting the Germans.  IRA sympathizers in Northern Ireland were rounded-up on suspicion of collaborating with the Germans and thrown into internment camps.  

The Republic of Ireland declared its neutrality in World War Two and maintained relations with Berlin; there was a German legation in Dublin.  Northern Ireland, however, as part of the United Kingdom was not spared German air raids.  In fact, during the Belfast Blitz (April and May 1941) hundreds of Luftwaffe planes dropped bombs in the capitol city.  Four separate aerial attacks occurred and a total of about 1100 people were killed in the bombardment – the Easter Tuesday raid on Belfast was the second most deadly air attack on British territory during the War.  Large sections of Belfast were bombed-out and not rebuilt until much later.  (In Odd Man Out, a critical scene occurs in an air raid shelter and Johnny McQueen is seen fleeing through desolate ruins remaining in 1947 from bombing six years earlier.)

After the War, the British released IRA fighters and their sympathizers from the camps where they had been detained in Northern Ireland.  This led to increased violence when the IRA men commenced another low-level guerrilla war in Belfast and its environs.  

At the outset of Odd Man Out, Johnny McQueen is hiding out in a safe-house in a Catholic neighborhood in Belfast.  We learn that he has been in jail for an extended period, probably interred during the War as a German sympathizer.  Contemporary audiences would have understood that McQueen is an IRA terrorist and that the “organization” is the Irish Republican Party.  Most British police don’t carry guns.  However, due to the sectarian violence in Belfast, police in that town were, in fact, armed as shown in many scenes in the film.  Johnny McQueen argues for a parliamentary solution to the “Troubles” in the opening scenes and seems prepared to relinquish violence – he is openly worried about the firearms that he and his comrades carry during the raid on the mill, apparently, an effort to rob the mill of payroll proceeds so as to finance IRA activities.  

A British audience in 1947 would recognize Belfast from the opening aerial shot of the city. (The city’s iconic landmark, the Albert Memorial Clock, is prominent throughout the movie.)  However, neither the clock tower nor Belfast itself are ever named in the movie.   The director Carol Reed created a replica of Belfast’s famous Crown Bar.   The replica, appearing in the film as the Four Winds Bar (with frescos by the mad painter Lukey), was built as a set at Denham Studios in London where some of the film was shot.  

Sources

Odd Man Out is based on F. L. Green’s 1945 novel of the same title.  Green’s novel was hostile to the IRA and contemptuous of their activities.  Carol Reed’s approach to this material is much more sympathetic to the “Organisation” as it is called in the film.  R.C. Sherriff worked as script doctor on the screenplay.  Sherriff was a prominent British playwright, best known for his World War One drama Journey’s End (1928) – a theater work that has been filmed several times (including a 1930 production starring Colin Clive made by James Whale) and often revived.  Sherriff was a successful screenwriter – he received a BAFTA award for The Dam Busters and wrote a number of important British films.  Both the novel and original screenplay end with Kathleen shooting Johnny and, then, killing herself. Depiction of suicide was verboten in the 1940's and the American Hayes’ Office demanded changes in the picture, eliminating Kathleen’s outright suicide by changing her death to “suicide by cop.”  

The movie is indebted to John Ford’s The Informer (1935), a movie about an IRA man doomed because he has informed on members of his cell. Much of the film’s night-time imagery imitates German expressionist films from the twenties but, also, derives from French poetic realism, particularly Julien Duvivier’s crime film Pepe le Moko (1937) in which the title character is hiding out in the Casbah and commits suicide as the dragnet closes around him in the final scenes.  Homages to pictures by Carne and Prevert are also evident to those who know how to look for such things. 

Odd Man Out, in turn, influenced many later films.  The ticking clock aspects of the movie appear in several films, most notably Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon.  Roman Polanski lauds Odd Man Out as his favorite film.  The great British director John Boorman also is a fan of the picture.  The last sequence in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the wounded “hooligan’s” escape from the city and his final death among the horses in Kentucky’s blue-grass country is clearly derived from Odd Man Out; a doctor recruited to treat Sterling Hayden’s doomed gunman says: “He won’t get far; he doesn’t have enough blood to keep a chicken alive.”  Carol Reed’s own 1949 picture The Third Man starring Orson Welles imitates many of the effects in Odd Man Out, most notably the low-key lighting and the nightmarish chiaroscuro scenes. 

Carol Reed

I have written at length about Carol Reed in my film note to Outcast of the Islands.  Reed won the Oscar for best director in 1969 for his film version of Dicken’s Oliver Twist.  Oliver! was well-reviewed and also won an Oscar for best picture, but Reed is famous today, primarily, for three pictures he made in quick succession: Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948 with script by Graham Greene who greatly admired Odd Man Out), and The Third Man (1949 starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime).  It is thought that Reed began to lose his way with his Conrad adaptation The Outcast of the IslandT (1952), although it’s my view that this picture is also mostly excellent.  The Man Between (1953), a thriller set in ravaged Berlin is said to be a “rehash” of The Third Man.  I haven’t seen the picture and can’t comment.  Reed worked in Hollywood with Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lolabrigida on the circus film Trapeze (1956), a big widescreen technicolor production that was well-received at the time of its initial release.  Reed worked again with Graham Greene on an adaptation of his novel, Our Man in Havana (1959), starring Alec Guinness.  Bad trouble in the form of Marlon Brando afflicted him on the project Mutiny on the Bounty from which he was fired.  Reed recovered with the large-scale production of The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965 with Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison).  This was followed by the musical Oliver! and a couple of inconsequential films.  Reed is the only British director (apart from producer-director Alexander Korda) to be knighted – this was in 1952 when Reed was acclaimed for having restored prestige to the British film industry.   

Production Notes

About 20% of Odd Man Out was filmed on location in Belfast – most of these shots were made during the day, that is, before the heist  Many of the atmospheric night cityscapes were shot in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London.  Reed hadn’t been able to afford night-shooting in his previous studio-bound films – he made so-called quota quickies in the thirties and war years (that is, films produced to be shown as “quota” with more popular American films as double features – the “quota quickies” were made to protect the British fim industry from being wholly colonized by the Americans.)  Odd Man Out was a prestige production with top-notch actors and expensive production values, including the lustrous and evocative night shots on location in Belfast or Shoreditch.  Robert Krasker, Reed’s director of photography, distinguished himself with ingenious ways to shoot sequences in the darkness.  

Many famous actors were recruited from Dublin’s famous Abbey Theater including Robert Newton who plays Lukey, Cyril Cusack, Denis O’Dea, F.J. McCormick who plays Shell, and W. G. Fay as Father Tom. However, none of the accents in the film are authentic to Belfast with one exception, the hackney driver Joseph Tomelty who plays ‘Gin’ Jimmy.  The rest of the speech is accented in a variety of ways, perhaps, intentionally, to emphasize the universal elements of the plot.  (This is a feature of the film inaudible to American audiences but much commented-on in Great Britain.) 

James Mason  

James Mason appeared in innumerable movies of every kind.  After Odd Man Out, he was continuously in demand until his death at 75 in 1984.  Born in Yorkshire (West Riding), he was a classically trained Shakespearian actor and began his career in the West End (London) theaters, playing roles in Shakespeare, Chekhov, and other repertoire works.  For a decade, he appeared on-screen in supporting roles, mostly silky, suave and sadistic villains.  He became famous for a part of this kind in 1945's The Seventh Veil, a psychological drama in which her torments a beautiful pianist (played by Ann Todd).  Odd Man Out was an enormous success both critically and at the box office, winning the first BAFTA award – England’s equivalent to the Oscar in 1947.  Mason won an Golden Globe for his leading role in A Star is Born (1954) with Judy Garland.  He was notably cast as Rommel in The Desert Fox (1951) and appeared as Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 adaptation of Lolita.  He reprised his suave villain persona in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and was in many other notable pictures – for instance, he played Brutus in Joseph Mankiewicz’ Julius Caesar (1953).  He worked with Sam Peckinpah in the war film Cross of Iron (1977) and is superb in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, a bizarre film about cortisone addiction released in 1956.  His final movie, The Shooting Party, features an excellent performance – Mason was hired to replace Paul Scofield who was badly injured in an accident on the first day of production.  Mason died before the movie, shot in 1984, but only shown a year later, was released.  I first saw him in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) – this movie is important to me because it is the first film that I ever saw in a theater; I attended the movie with my father in a movie palace on the amusement park pier at Asbury Park, New Jersey.  (I also recall seeing Mason as Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea first released in 1954, probably when that movie was broadcast on the TV show The Wonderful World of Disney.)  It suffices to say that I have been a fan of James Mason all my life. 

Mason is buried in Vaud, Switzerland a few feet away from Charley Chaplin’s grave.  

On the passive protagonist

International film noir is arguably a reaction to the experiences of millions of soldiers and civilians in World War Two.  French film critics were the first to notice a new strain of pessimism in American crime films – these pictures portrayed characters caught in a web of fatality and doom.  Pre-war crime films featured tough-talking aggressive mobsters who built criminal empires and suffered as a result of arrogance and pride.  Post-war film noir focuses on ordinary men who are trapped by circumstance.  Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, both featuring the nebbish Edward G. Robinson, exemplify this trend: pre-war, Robinson played aggressive mob bosses; post-war, Robinson plays mild-mannered clerks, “salary-men” lured from the straight and narrow by femmes fatale and destroyed.  These scenarios arise from the characteristic experience of soldiers in a mechanized war: troops anxiously wait, helpless in the face of orders that will send them to their death.  The experiences of civilians wasn’t much better – people hiding like rats in subways and cellars powerless against the aerial bombardment destroying their city.  Far from encouraging heroic action, war induces a sense of helplessness and passivity in its victims. Johnny McQueen’s one attempt at action goes awry and he spends the last three-quarters of Odd Man Out laboriously dying.  He doesn’t act but is acted-upon.  (Of course, the character’s helplessness and quiescence poses a challenge to the film maker – it’s hard to maintain audience interest in a figure that is wholly passive; for this reason, Odd Man Out always seems to me to be about fifteen minutes too long – it’s the tedious proof of a theorem that we accepted as true before the film’s midway point.)

It is interesting to compare the post-war film noir with both pre- and post-war Westerns.  Westerns, of course, take place outdoors, action occurring across great expanses of beautiful, if desolate, landscape.  Film noir customarily are urban.  Westerns proceed under the glaring light of the sun; film noir are nocturnal.  The core of the Western, from Stagecoach to McCabe and Mrs. Miller, is action, a hero who takes arms against evil; film noir are about protagonists whose attempts at action are thwarted, helplessly waiting to be destroyed.  Consider 1950's The Asphalt Jungle in which a botched heist leads to everyone’s death versus Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in my Crown from the same year in which a corrupt town is redeemed by the heroic action of a reformed gunslinger.

Where is this dance-hall?

In Odd Man Out, Kathleen stumbles into a crowded dance hall.  The place is packed with people who swarm the dance floor.  As Kathleen makes her way across the floor, various dancers grope at her or try to seize her arm, hoping to enlist her in the orgiastic frenzy that is underway.  An orchestra blares a shrill four bar motif over and over again.  There is a big sign prominently displayed that says: “No Jitterbugging,” but every dancer that we can see is performing the jitter-bug, hurling their partners head-over-heels into the air.  Kathleen fights her way through the crazed mob and stumbles outdoors where the screaming motif sounding in the dance-hall pursues her.

This dance-hall is located in Hell.    

A post-war emblem

The cabdriver deposits Johnny McQueen in a zinc bathtub in a scrap yard.  The ground is black and muddy and the rain has turned into a cheerless, hostile snowstorm.  A white angel, perhaps funerary sculpture, beckons to the wounded man.  It’s an emblematic image of passivity and hopelessness worthy of Beckett: a man bleeding to death in a metal bathtub next to a pale, mutilated angel.  

 

Good Night and Good Luck

 Good Night and Good Luck is a Broadway play, presented on June 7, 2025 on CNN.  It's a vanity project for George Clooney who directs and stars as Edward R. Murrow.  Clooney presents Murrow as a saint, an unambiguously virtuous crusader for truth and justice.  The ostensible subject of the play is Murrow's clash with Senator Joe McCarthy around 1954 in the context of the HUAC hearings on Communist infiltration of American institutions.  The play shows Murrow, an anchorman and reporter for CBS, attacking McCarthy as a proto-fascist demagogue notwithstanding resistance from the head of the network, Bill Paley.  In the end, Paley does the right thing, supporting Murrow's advocacy of the rule of law, although he does exile Murrow from prime-time to a Saturday afternoon slot.  A married couple -- the wife has a questionable background with Leftist causes -- has to pretend that they are not married; the wife reminds her husband to remove his wedding ring before going to work.  Everyone, however, knows that the couple are married and, when McCarthy is somehow vanquished at the end of the two-hour play, they can admit their relationship.  One journalist persecuted by McCarthy kills himself -- exactly why this fellow resorted to suicide is not explained.  McCarthy's demise is also never really explained. Clooney as Murrow makes a speech that constitutes a ringing endorsement of the free press and the show ends with a montage of events covered by news services from '54 to yesterday that doesn't really make sense -- I think Clooney means the montage to show that broadcast journalism has broken and reported-on many important stories to the benefit of our Republic, but the exact gist of the montage is unclear and mainly intended to enforce parallels between Joe McCarthy's reign of terror and our current plight during the second Trump administration.  (This is an elliptical way of making a point about the fact that Joe McCarthy's depredations should educate us as to President Trump's evil intentions -- in fact, I think that the montage is a cowardly way of drawing parallels that could be much more explicitly made.  In other words, Clooney's play evidences the exact sort of self-censorship that the show otherwise decries).  The show features musical interludes, a female jazz singer performing tunes that are only vaguely relevant to the story -- I think these interludes are intended to provide cover for scene changes.  

There are a number of things wrong with the production.  First, the over-declamatory and exuberant sort of delivery favored by Broadway actors (and people on the so-called "legitimate" stage) doesn't work well on TV.  Lines are spoken in a way intended to play to the back rows of the 1200 seat Winter Garden theater on Broadway where the play is running.  This means that the TV audience first has to acclimate themselves to a style of acting that makes perfect sense in a theater but no sense at all when filmed from a variety of angles in close-up -- it took me a half-hour to get used to the prosody and diction.  Second, the show is heavily dependent on newsreel footage of the HUAC committee hearings and TV interviews with the sinister and bullying McCarthy.  By contrast, Murrow is never shown in documentary footage, although, of course, he was a famous broadcast journalist and well-known to everyone.  Since much of the dialogue and speechifying in the play comes directly from Edward Murrow's interviews and broadcasts, this begs the question as to why not just show Murrow in contemporary footage as well and dispense entirely with Clooney's very good, but tendentious, impersonation of the man.  Third, the HUAC footage is often strangely undramatic -- in the climactic moment a questioner (Joseph Welch, counsel for the Army) denounces McCarthy for having no shame:  "Senator, have you no decency?"  You might imagine this as a thunderous moment, an epic climax to the battle in the Senate, and a highlight in American history.  But the interlocutor who pronounces those famous words has a high nasal voice, speaks in a sort of whine, and, appears on camera, as a stooped, wizened old man.  (Welch was, in fact, something of a performer -- he later was in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder in which he played the Trial Judge.)  In other words, the transcript of this confrontation is better than the actual footage.  Finally, the show is completely lacking in any real tension, suspense, or conflict.  Murrow never doubts himself; his side-kick Fred Friendly doesn't doubt the integrity of their stance against McCarthy.  Everything proceeds to a climax that is never in doubt and a fait accompli. Murrow is a plaster saint, a TV news Jesus who can do no wrong and Clooney plays the part in a smug, sanctimonious way.

The most dispiriting aspect of the show, however, relates to the parallels between the McCarthy era and Trump's kleptomaniacal and lawless regime.  McCarthy was a creature of the institutions that formed him and relatively easily discredited.  Trump controls all the levers of power and is infinitely more dangerous -- he is backed by an entire political party that has formed as a cult around him.  Further, he advances a culture war that doesn't seem to have been part of McCarthy's agenda.  Until this week, Trump enjoyed the support of the world's richest man. Simply stated, Trump is vastly more dangerous than McCarthy, poses a much more serious risk of damage to the United States, and enjoys far more support than the Junior Senator from Wisconsin.  On the evidence of Good night and Good Luck we are in a far more desperate moment right now than anything involving Joe McCarthy.  In fact, there are almost no parallels to much of what Trump is doing -- McCarthy didn't control the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, didn't have a private army of pardoned thugs to do his bidding, wasn't deporting people to foreign concentration camps, and didn't enjoy the support of a majority of the Supreme Court and much of House of Representatives and Senate. If, in this perilous moment, we must place our trust in resistance mounted by George Clooney and his like in the form of a mildly controversial Broadway play, we are in desperate straits indeed.  

(Good Night and Good Luck is a revival of a 2005 movie written and directed by Clooney.  Clearly, it's resemblance to events of today are purely coincidental.)

Rosemary's Baby

 I must have seen Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby at a drive-in movie theater around 1970 or 1971.  (The movie based on a big bestseller by Ira Levin was released in 1968).  I recall a single shot from the film, a languorous tilt down into the sepulchral cradle in which Rosemary's baby is apparently resting -- the shot dissolves before the infant can be seen, melting into an image of labyrinthine dormers, pointy roofs and the gloomy chimneys of the Dakota apartments.  That image must have made a deep impression on me because I have remembered it for more than 50 years -- the rest of the film, like that shot, had dissolved in my imagination without leaving a trace. 

Rosemary's Baby is very well-scripted, brilliantly acted, and, rather, slow.  It isn't frightening in any way.  Contemporary audiences have been damaged, and their attention span eroded, by the popular cinema spearheaded by Steven Spielberg, thrill a minute movies with bravura set pieces every fifteen minutes and periodic explosions of gore.  Rosemary's Baby is leisurely paced, brooding and ominous, but not particularly horrible -- in fact, viewed in a certain light, the picture has aspects of campy comedy.  It's a serious endeavor as witness the superb acting that Polanski wrests from his cast, an ensemble mostly comprised of very experienced and accomplished Hollywood and Broadway character actors. Hollywood now attempts to gross you out or thrill you every few minutes -- Polanski develops his effects over the entire running time of the movie; it's all of a piece and, ultimately, quite disturbing, but, nonetheless, a civilized entertainment.  

A young couple move into a sinister haunted house of a cooperative, the Dakota although called the "Bramford" in the film.  Their next door neighbors are a much older couple, portrayed as wacky eccentrics, although, in fact, they turn out to be the leaders of a coven of Satanists.  There's an inexplicable suicide -- a happy-go-lucky former drug addict (now in recovery) hurls herself out of a seventh story window.  She is a protegee of the Satanist couple who are, at first, presented like sit-com comic relief.  Ruth Gordon plays the neighbor, Minnie Castevets (she won an Oscar for the role) and she is probably the best thing in the movie, although all the performances are very good.  She seems to be a good-natured, officious ding-bat (to use Archie Bunker's locution) and, although there are sinister aspects to her character she retains that aspect up to the end of the movie -- she is obviously upset when Rosemary drops a knife that mars the hardwood surface of one of her floors and, while the coven are admiring the infant Satan, she serves the heroine a steaming cup -- "what's in it?" Rosemary demands; "it's just Lipton tea," the old woman replies.  Dressed like a flower-child, Minnie is weirdly helpful and accommodating but, of course, this is part of the coven's plot to have Rosemary impregnated by the devil and, then, bear his spawn.  Minnie's husband, Roman, is played by an accomplished Broadway actor with a deep mellifluous voice, a performer named Sydney Blackmer, and he's a suave, courtly old gent who happens to be a sort of traveling agent for the devil.  The coven, in general, are comprised of professional people and their dour wives; they're nondescript appearance and, generally, inoffensive manners are similar to the rather bourgeois satanists in the great Val Lewton horror film, The Seventh Victim -- this is a group of devil-worshipers who also have the mildly irritating aspect of overly intrusive and bitchy next door neighbors.  Evil is, indeed, wholly banal as portrayed in Polanski's film.  Mostly, the picture is about acting -- John Cassavetes is also very effective as a struggling theatrical actor who has done a few commercials and is willing to make a Faustian bargain to advance his career -- his rival goes blind after being cast in a role for which Cassavetes' character, Guy, was vying.  Of course, it's sorcery and Rosemary's baby is the quid pro quo.  Cassavetes is sinister in a darkly handsome manner -- like many actors, he is obviously highly self-centered and ruthless with respect to his thespian ambitions.  Mia Farrow plays Rosemary.  She is also excellent.  She embodies three aspects of the character's pregnancy:  anxiety as to the conception of her child (as a result of a rape by the devil), haggard misery during the first trimester while she endures terrible pain (Polanski, who knows about these things, cuts off her hair and films her like a gaunt concentration camp inmate), and, at last, a frenzy of vigorous paranoia at the climax of the film in which she tries to save her unborn child from the coven's clutches.  This section of the movie is very effective -- Rosemary is surrounded by a conspiracy of witches and those who are not part of the cabal interpret her pleas for help as evidence of mental illness.  The picture resembles Polanski's 1965 horror movie, Repulsion, in which Catherine Deneuve descends into murderous insanity -- Polanski uses the same devices and ambiguity to keep his audience guessing whether Rosemary and her pregnancy are, in fact, at the center of a vast, lethal conspiracy or whether she has simply lost her mind.  The movie is at its best when it is most suggestive -- for instance, many of the aspects of the cabal are not really spelled-out, the motives of the Satanists are generally left obscure, and we never see the devil baby.  As with Val Lewton, whose spirit inhabits this movie, things that are unsaid or unseen are scarier in their implications than anything that is baldly and directly depicted.  This is a very good movie, but too slow for modern audiences -- you have to attend to the implications of the action and dialogue and the film's focus is on the fine performances that it showcases.  There's no gore, no jump-scares, no bloody confrontations.  The horror is metaphysical in nature, anxiety about sex and reproduction and how our bodies trick us into doing things that we would never rationally attempt.  There's a cameo by Tony Curtis, but he never appears before the camera -- he plays the part of Cassavetes' acting rival who goes blind, a voice on the phone speaking with Mia Farrow.  (Apparently, the actress recognized the voice but couldn't quite place it when the scene was shot-- hence, her bemused appearance and demeanor.)

The Asphalt Jungle

 There's no asphalt visible in the opening shot of John Huston's 1950 heist movie, The Asphalt Jungle.  Curiously, the first thing that we see is a low-angle expanse of what seems to be cobblestones tilting gently up to a curving promenade where a couple of taxi-cabs are moving.  The cobblestones are pointillist, little units each similar but independent from the other -- this field of cobbles represents the film's narrative strategy, small differentiated units of story each assigned to a various characters and assembled into a mosaic.  Huston's film has many characters and the directors take great care to delineate each of them individually, to give them salient features and a rationale for their behavior.  The film's crooks are all sympathetically observed, given quirks and character traits, and, therefore, lifted above the cliches and stereotypes that film noir of this era customarily employs.  It's a beautiful movie, impressively shot in documentary style black and white, although with some images heightened with a faint trace of German expressionist shadow and fog -- the frames are composed with angular geometric shapes, profiles arrayed against characters in full frontal appearance and interesting contrasts between fore- and background, deep focus in which different planes of action can take place.  With the exception of the last two minutes, the entire film takes place at night, in the grim solitude of vacant lots, empty warehouses, and dark mean streets.  It's an unnamed nightmare city, the city of dreadful night, swarming with armies of belligerent cops suddenly intruding on thoroughfares that are otherwise curiously deserted and desolate.  Some of the action centers around a cafe next to a hulking slum tenement labeled PILGRIM -- perhaps it's a Salvation Army outpost in the poor part of town; the cafe, run by a criminal fixer and hunchback named Gus, is so disheveled and rundown that it seems amazing that such a place even exists or could have customers.  A cab laps up milk from a bowl on the counter as the criminals, who haunt this place conspire.

A renowned professional jewel thief, called "the Doc" has just been released from jail.  The "Doc" speaks with a heavy German accent, but has continental good manners and a courtly demeanor.  Evidently, his eight years in jail didn't rehabilitate him -- his first act on the outside is to contact the local mobster and start raising funds for an epic jewel heist.  Doc says he needs a "box man", a driver, and "hooligan" (that is muscle).  The box man is a safecracker, ethnically Italian, who lives with his wife and small infant son in a squalid, dismal apartment -- he's a lower middle-class crook who is looking for a way to a better house and a little more money for his growing family.  (All the crooks are supplied with details as to the economies and their place in the local criminal ecosystem.)  The "hooligan" played by Sterling Hayden is a country boy whose "Rosebud" is the bankruptcy of his family farm in old Kentucky and the loss of a particularly fine black colt with whom the boy had bonded.  Embittered and, probably, homosexual, the hooligan lives alone, now and then, employed as a collection agent to make desultory threats against deadbeats.  Gus, the hunchback and cafe proprietor (who is a cat lover) will drive the car used for the heist.  A local mobster who runs gambling rackets puts the team in touch with a corrupt lawyer.  The lawyer's role is to finance the robbery and arrange for the hot merchandise, diamonds and other gems, to be sold to a fence.  Unfortunately, the lawyer is underwater with debt himself, probably due to his expensive moll, a glamorous blonde played by the very young Marilyn Monroe -- even at this stage in her career, she's iconic. The lawyer also has an elegant bedridden wife with whom he plays cards in bed -- she pathetically spruces herself up with earrings and a lissome negligee to revive the wretched lawyer's interest in her.  (He's obsessed with blonde who he's keeping on the side, a little girl who calls him "Uncle Lon.")  The lawyer is so crooked that he can't be trusted even by his fellow criminals and, ultimately, he betrays the enterprise out of his own panicked greed.  

Huston is anxious to give everyone on screen their "reasons' for both their criminality and their various loyalties.  (It was Renoir who said that the tragedy in life arises because everyone, even the most vicious, "have their reasons.")  The heist goes wrong -- the poor family-man, the "box man" gets shot in a scuffle in which a dropped gun fires; it's a pure accident, the first of several in the film.  The movie insists that accident prevails over planning -- men are at the mercy of malign coincidence and mishap.  For some reason, a burglar alarm, apparently in a nearby building, sounds and the grim streets with their classical colonnaded facades of banks and big empty avenues are suddenly aswarm with cops.  The police are corrupt -- in fact, one cop is in cahoots with the mobster running the gambling dives and it's cheerfully assumed that the police will beat confessions out of anyone that they catch.  The police commissioner views the robbery as an affront to his conception of law-and-order and he mobilizes an army of cops to hunt down the burglars.  Crime doesn't pay and the criminals, who are far more sympathetic than the relentless Kafkaesque police, are all arrested or gunned down.  The picture is episodic and the narrative has to dart from one character to another to make its melancholy points -- there's not much of a through line since all the crooks have different motivations and traits.  Several sequences stand out:  a small-time hooker who goes by the moniker of "Doll" loses her place to live and has to bunk with the hooligan -- he seems absolutely terrified of her, a very odd reaction for such a big bruiser and there is some implication that the woman's sexuality alarms him; she obviously likes him and remains loyal to the end although we don't ever see them touch and they sleep in chaste twin beds.  In a huge close-up, she peels off her fake eyelashes, an image that is strangely repellent.  The final scene with the hooligan bleeding to death in a field with several beautiful horses is memorable -- I saw this movie on TV fifty years ago and the concluding scene in the Kentucky pasture has always stayed with me.  There's a bizarre McCarthey-esque scene in which the police commissioner is confronted about the corrupt cop; in a political savvy move, the commissioner deflects the criticism away from his agency, switching on a police radio with various channels in which dispatchers are sending cars to crime-scenes.  "All of these are calls for help," he says.  Then, he melodramatically shuts off the radio -- "what would happen if the channels all went dead?" he says.  It's an example of Huston's "just the facts" approach to this film -- we don't know if we are to read the Commissioner's ploy as a serious endorsement of law and order or as a cynical non sequitur.  Another scene in which the German jewel thief, a character right out of an Erich Kaestner novel, delays his escape to watch a girl dance to juke-box music is also extraordinarily memorable -- the police apprehend him because of this little indulgence, either an indictment of a moment of weakness or folly that is to be praised; we have to make up our own mind about this.  

Lone Star

 

Blood only means what you let it.

Manifest Destiny

Fifty years ago, no one would have predicted that the destiny of the United States would be decided by events at our southern border.  I’m old enough to know this.

In 2025, the current political regime is largely a product of what has happened on the frontier between Mexico and the United States.  The current dysfunction in our political parties and the present assault on our institutions stems from an election that was decided, in large part, on the basis of what people imagine happening on the border.  Immigration from the south into the US has largely driven policy, and dominated the political debate since Donald Trump descended a gold escalator in his tower and declared that Mexico was flooding our country with murderers and rapists.  These issues resonate with voters in many ways – the border is the ultimate focus for fantasies involving law and order as well as paranoia as to American national identity.  One might argue that irrational anxiety about the Mexican border in the American southwest has brought this country to the brink of fascism.  The argument would be wrong in one crucial respect – we have already crossed the line, another politically significant frontier, into totalitarian territory.  

John Sayles’ Lone Star is now thirty years old.  The picture was made in 1995, but released in 1996.  This sprawling, messy epic about the frontier in Texas is prescient in every respect.  In fact, the issues raised by this film have a greater urgency and significance than they possessed when the movie was first released.  We are living in a distorted reality created by the experiences depicted in the film. 

With the massacre at Wounded Knee, Frederick Jackson Turner declared that the manifest destiny of the United States had been realized and that this was a sort of end of history.  America as agon, as the struggle to import European civilization into the wasteland, had reached its end-point.  When the real West closed and the permeable, wavering border between the wild and the settled dissolved, the movie Western was born.  Sayles’ Lone Star, of course, is a kind of Western fused with film noir and a murder mystery.  The frontier imagined as an invisible line between the wild Indians and encroaching villages with merchants and schoolmarms didn’t vanish completely.  Instead, as Sayles shows, the frontier shifted south to the contested terrain where the United States collides with old Mexico.  Turner thought America’s destiny was forged by the nation’s experience of the West; our contemporary political ecology is a product of the nation’s experience with migration across the southwestern border.  

Film as novel

John Sayles’ roots lie in literary fiction, specifically novels and short stories.  He began his career with The Pride of the Bimbos (1975), a much-acclaimed first novel about baseball.  He seems to be ending his career writing novels as well.  Since 2020, he has written three novels but does not seem to have directed any films.  

Sayles’ films frequently are “novelistic” in character.  This is particularly true of Lone Star, a film with a large cast, many subplots, and a complex, almost Proustian, time-traveling structure.  Lone Star raises a theoretical question – is there such a thing as film-novel?  (Of course, novels are often adapted for the screen; however, those adaptations generally prove the point that the novel and feature film are two widely disparate forms – ordinarily film versions of novels greatly simplify and streamline their source materials, eliminating digressions, sub-plots and minor characters.)  Like many novels, Lone Star presents a very complicated plot and takes care to develop the “back stories” of its characters.  There are many subplots and, even, digressions that don’t really contribute to the narrative – examples are the school board scene in the first part of the film, a dramatic and interesting sequence but one that has no narrative role in the plot; similarly, the allusions that the film makes to the community of Perdido (“Lost”) submerged under the waters of the reservoir is a digression that goes nowhere.  We learn that the military base at Frontera, the border town where the story is set, is going to be closed.  The townspeople fear the economic effects of this closing.  But this element of the story, also a subplot, is abandoned.  As with classical novels, the web of relationships, including secret consanguinity is central to the novel.  Sayles’ point is that everyone is bound together, connected by occult ties.  This aspect of the story relies heavily on concealed identities and various types of coincidences.  One intriguing and showy episode in the film, Sheriff Sam Deeds visit to his ex-wife, Bunny, is a showcase for Frances McDormand’s acting “chops” but has next to nothing to do with the film’s narrative.  In short stories, a form that Sayles has also mastered, plot is everything.  In the novel, atmosphere, milieu, and character for the sake of character are integral – these are the features that animate Lone Star.  

The great film critic, Siegfried Kracauer, begins his book The Theory of Film with the proposition that every esthetic form has an excellence that is particular to that art.  (For instance, painting is about depicting reality plausibly in two-dimensions until the advent of photography.  Post-photography painting is about the decoration of a two-dimensional plane defined by the canvas.)  Kracauer struggles to find a definition for the nature of film and its particularly metier, that is, the characteristics of expression that can be accomplished in film and only in film.  Arguably, Kracauer doesn’t succeed. Nonetheless, Lone Star which is, in effect, a large-scale novel realized visually in film is a test case for the cinema – can a movie achieve the effects that we associate with the literary form of the novel?

Sayles

John Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York in September 1950.  He initially distinguished himself by writing short stories for The Atlantic.  (These stories were collected in a 1977 book, Union Dues.)  Sayles was interested in film and went to Hollywood where he was hired to work with the exploitation director and producer, Roger Corman.  Corman taught Sayles to write terse, perfectly crafted scripts and, throughout his life, Sayles has held “shadow employment” as an uncredited “script doctor”.  For instance, he wrote dialogue and scenes for Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.  Sayles prefers writing to filmmaking in one respect – the writer controls entirely everything that appears on the page.  Sayles has tried to adapt this approach to making movies: he writes his films, directs them, and, then, edits the picture into its intended final form.  (Sayles says that if he could, he would shoot the movies as well, but this would distract him from directing the actors – nonetheless, photographs of Sayles on-set show him holding up his arms to “frame” the shots that he is directing.)

Sayles wrote a string of successful genre films for Corman’s studios, most notably Piranha and Alligator (knock-offs of Jaws).  With the money earned from this work, Sayles independently produced his first feature The Return of the Secaucus 7 (1979).  This low-budget Indy film depicts a weekend gathering of seven college friends, several of whom were campus activists.  (If the film’s premise seems familiar, this is because Lawrence Kasden’s The Big Chill, a successful and much more expensive studio film, imitates Sayle’s movie.)  Sayles wrote some more scripts including for the horror film The Howling, and, then, was able to use the proceeds paid to him to make Lianna (1983), a film about a lesbian love affair and, then, a conventional romantic comedy Baby its You (also released in 1983) starring Roseanne Arquette.  Over the next dozen years, Sayles made a string of independently produced films (the movies are produced by his companion Maggie Renzi) on which his critical reputation rests – these movies include Matewan, The Brother from Another Planet, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Lone Star.  Other estimable films include Men with Guns (1997), Limbo (1999) and Sunshine State (2002).  During the last twenty years, Sayles has made fewer movies and they have achieved less critical success.  However, he continues to write, acts occasionally, and directs, mostly cable TV episodes.  

Sayles is politically progressive and his films show a strong liberal bias.  Generally, his features explore some social or political problem.  His cinema, accordingly, can be considered “engaged” – he addresses problems such as racism, immigration, bigotry against sexual minorities, corruption in society and politics, and America’s culture of greed.  Sayles’ artistry, however, prevents him from dogmatic or ideologically doctrinaire presentations of these issues – his novelistic inclinations make his characteristic work exceedingly complex and intricate with a multi-faceted approach to the subject that he is studying.  His films are intriguing because he infuses them with the genre zing and sizzle that he learned working with Roger Corman on exploitation films.

Genre

Lone Star alludes to various previous films and genres.  The picture’ style is that of a classical Western, highlighting vistas of desolate terrain and saloons full of armed men.  Stuart Drybaugh, Sayles director of photography for Lone Star shot the film in wide-screen cinemascope format, using Panavision stock.  The first confrontation between men with guns in the flashback to the tavern is staged in the manner of gunfights in Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West, a model, Drybaugh says, for much of the film’s camerawork.  Once upon a Time in the West features Henry Fonda playing against type as a vicious murderer (he shoots a child at point-blank range in one scene); Lone Star cast the avuncular Kris Kristofferson against type as the murderous and bigoted sheriff Charlie Wade.  (Kris Kristofferson, of course, was indelible as the gunfighter Billy the Kid in Peckinpah’s masterpiece Pat Garret and Billy the Kid.)  Lone Star’s themes relating to history becoming legend invoke John Ford’s The Man who shot Liberty Valence.  The border setting dominated by a corrupt sheriff alludes to Orson Welles Touch of Evil, another picture set on the Mexican border near Tijuana in which Welles himself plays the part of the racist and brutal District Attorney – in that film, Welles’ corrupt Hank Quinlan “frames” a Mexican kid who turns out to be guilty.  There is a puzzling subplot in Lone Star involving a Chicano village named Perdido that is callously drowned when a reservoir is built – this part of the film, complete with diagram maps as to the location of the dam and the submerged village seems derived from Chinatown.  Miriam Colon, the Cuban actress who plays the restauranteur Mercedes Cruz was first featured in Marlon Brando’s art-house Western, One-Eyed Jacks.  Sayles’ script plays with audience expectations based on our recollection of these earlier films – we understand the Lone Star’s genre aspects and this understanding contributes to our interest in the movie; the political anti-racist aspects of the film are fed to us in a format that dissolves ideology in a welter of allusions to other movies.  

Frontera

Initially, Sayles planned to shoot Lone Star in Austin, Texas.  The script had a long gestation – Sayles recalls writing early drafts as far back as 1979.  (Sayles recalls that he was in Austin, Texas to play a small role in exploitation film that he had written Piranha.  Joe Dante directed the picture.  On his day off, Sayles went to San Antonio to see the Alamo.  At that time, Chicanos were protesting at the historical site, carrying banners that said “Tell the whole story.”  These experiences inspired some of the script.)  In the mid-nineties, Sayles returned to the project, initiating efforts to raise funding for the movie.  At that point, the script was not yet complete. However, once he secured the money to begin making the movie, he worked quickly – he had his script substantially complete in about 2 months.  Sayles recruited Stuart Drybaugh, a New Zealand cameraman, to shoot the movie after seeing two of Drybaugh’s films at the South by Southwest festival in Austin – those films were The Piano (Jane Campion) and Lee Tamahori’s Once were Warriors.  Drybaugh recalls the shock he felt, at first, encountering the vast Chihuahuan desert in west Texas.  “I had come,” he says, “from New Zealand where everything is green and wet and, suddenly, I was surrounded by cactus.”

Drybaugh and Sayles quickly concluded that Austin, Texas was too urban and Anglo to represent the fictional border town, Frontera.  So the production was moved to Eagle Pass where almost all of Lone Star was shot.  Eagle Pass, of course, is a real border town on the Rio Grande river across from Piedras Negras in Mexico.  The old downtown had been emptied-out by a Walmart “big box” on the edge of the village and Sayles was able to cheaply rent some downtown buildings for his locations – this includes the restaurant operated by Mercedes Cruz in which much of the action takes place.  The only significant set built entirely for the movie is the Vaquero Drive-In, an abandoned outdoor movie theater that Sayles had constructed from the ground-up.  (This location, also, alludes to Peter Bogdanovich’s modern Western, The Last Picture Show.)  The scenes of migrants crossing the border by wading in the Rio Grande (to Mexican’s the Rio Bravo el Norte, “the wild river of the North”) were actually shot with handheld cameras in the river itself.  In 1995, the Border was not militarized.  Sayles was able to easily pass back and forth across the border.  In one sequence, the audience is shown a turnstile at the border that people crossing activate by paying a dime to cross between old Mexico and Texas.  Matthew McConaughey, who was not an important movie star at the time this film was made (he had appeared in one previous movie, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused) knew the area well; he was born and raised in Uvalde, the site of a notorious school shooting about 60 miles to the northeast of Eagle Pass.  Sayles remarked that he cast McConaughey as Buddy Deeds because he needed a charismatic actor whom he could afford, that is, someone who was not a movie star yet, but with sufficient gravitas to effectively play against Kris Kristofferson.

Flashbacks

Lone Star is notable in that its flashbacks are not signaled by any kind of camera dissolve or, even, edit.  Sayles just tilts the camera away from the scene posited to take place in the present (the mid 90's)  to reveal actors who are performing in scenes imagined to occur forty years earlier.  This is a device that appears frequently in Tarkovsky pictures.  Sayles’ use of this technique is another form of “border crossing” – just as the border between Texas and Mexico is porous so, similarly, the border between past and present is completely permeable.  The past is always present and insistently available, coloring everything that occurs in the here and now.  In one scene, involving a confrontation over a basket of tortillas, Sayles moves the camera from the face of the mayor (and previously sheriff’s deputy) Hollis down toward the tortillas that a waitress has set on the table.  When the camera tilts back up to the right from the table surface, the background has changed and we are in the restaurant as it looked in the late fifties with the corrupt sheriff Charlie Wade reaching for the tortillas – these effects are all “practical”, accomplished by off-screen grips simply moving away and out of the frame painted flats, beige brown for the present-day café and dark blue for the same place as it existed in the fifties. The actor playing the town’s mayor, Clifton James, was too old and stiff to get off-screen before the camera tilted back in his direction and, so, several other grips simply lifted him up in his chair and hustled him off-screen.

Incest

Alert viewers will likely perceive that the relationship between Pilar and Sam Deeds is incestuous long before the definitive reveal in the last scene at the abandoned outdoor movie theater.  The shadow of incest hangs over the entire picture and represents a fundamental truth about the American enterprise.  We are all brothers and sisters despite apparent differences.  The film presents incest, and the acceptance of incest, as the solution to the dilemmas of our history.

Epilogue

In 2023, Sayles went back to Eagle Pass.  Things on the border were far worse than they had been in 1994 -1995 when the film was made.  “The border is now a nightmare,” Sayles said.  He recalled that,  in the old days, the border patrol agents would shout at Mexicans crossing the river or desert: no hagas correr – that is, “don’t make me run.”  The illegals would, then, stop and allow the border patrol to apprehend them.  Border patrol would drive to the nearest bridge over the Rio Grande, escort the undocumented immigrant to the Mexican side.  “Maybe, I’ll see you again tomorrow,” the Border Agent would politely say.  “Maybe,” the illegal might say in return.  

The border is now militarized.  Sayles walked up to the wall.  He said it looks like a bizarre piece of conceptual art, something on the order of Christo’s “Running Fence”.  Sayles and his buddy urinated on the wall, got in their pickup and drove back to ole San Antone.         

Grand Theft Hamlet

 Years ago, when I was addicted to playing the computer game, Doom, I read about people who had mastered play to the extent that they could "do a Gandhi".  This meant darting through the digital labyrinths infested with fire demons and goblins without killing a single adversary.  Apparently, if you were skilled enough, you  could defeat the murderous purpose of the game -- it was a first-person shooter -- and run through all levels without ever firing your weapon.  There are apparently idiosyncratic and ingenious ways to approach digital gaming not self-evident to the casual player.  Grand Theft Hamlet (2024), a 90 minute movie entirely filmed within the atmospheric landscapes of "Grand Theft Auto", a famous video game, represents an extreme (and, apparently, very difficult) appropriation of the grungy, hard-boiled characters and brilliantly sleazy locations featured in game.  Two players decide to stage an abbreviated, but, nonetheless, substantial version of Shakespeare's Hamlet using the game and its avatar-characters as their platform.  It's a gimmick and, most likely, the virtuosic aspects of this endeavor were lost on me -- I've never played the game.  But the movie is mildly entertaining and has some emotionally effective moments.  

Two actors, Sam and Mark, are out-of-work -- the theaters are shuttered due to the Covid pandemic.  To pass the time, they are obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto ("GTA" as it often called in the movie).  GTA is a multi-player game in which characters, inhabiting exotic avatars -- space aliens, knights in armor, big-breasted hookers -- interact, mostly violently by kicking each other to death or gunning other players down.  After crashing some cars and running from police chasing them with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, Sam and Mark come upon a sylvan glen where there is a big amphitheater -- they take advantage of the setting by trying out some soliloquies from Shakespeare (mostly from Macbeth) before getting clubbed to death by other players.  This inspires Sam and Mark to recruit players to play roles in Hamlet which they intend to stage entirely on locations, and with characters in GTA.  The first third of the film involves recruiting players to perform in the show.  This turns out to be very difficult -- as someone says the Venn diagram showing the intersection between enthusiasts of GTA, a violent, amoral, nihilistic game, and Shakespeare is a vanishingly slender sliver.  Nonetheless, after lots of bloody confrontations (the pavements and floors in the game are always puddled with blood), Mark and Sam doing manage to put together a cast willing to perform the play -- some of the actors are a bit unreliable, including a figure who appears as a strutting naked alien with bare buttocks and who has the tendency to either vanish unpredictably or kill everyone else on location.  The second and longest part of the film shows rehearsals staged at various locations with the landscapes and sordid interiors presented by the game.  In the last ten minutes, we see excerpts of the play as actually presented.  There is a short epilogue in which the characters say goodbye to one another by engaging in a shoot-out blood bath that leaves everyone gory and "wasted" as the game describes it. (Revived, they go to a bar to dance the night away.)  During the closing credits, we see the actual players at an awards  ceremony at the Royal Theater on Drury Lane where Mark, Sam, and Pinny Grylls (Sam's wife and one of the directors of the show) are given a prize for their successful Shakespearian adaptation.  This is the only glimpse we get of live people and its unassuming, apparently shot on a cell-phone. Needless to say, the rather mousy actors and actresses bear no resemblance to their heroic, square-jawed counterparts in the game, big muscular brutes who stalk around, moving back and forth in a seemingly random way, and women with big breasts toting machine guns and machete knives.  

The rehearsals are afflicted by many set-backs.  In some respects, the film has the logic and character of an old Mickey Rooney / Judy Garland comedy -- a bunch of enthusiastic kids get together to put on a show.  At first, random interlopers obstruct their rehearsals by killing everyone.  During casting, trolls show up, infiltrate the production, but, then, refuse to speak, undermine the show, and, of course, once again murder everyone in sight.  There's one guy, named Dipo (everyone uses pseudonyms in the game) who claims to be half-Finn and half-Tunisian, who is very talented actor.  But, midway through the film, the Covid lock-down ends and he gets a job -- he can no longer play Hamlet but is now relegated to a minor role.  Pinny, who is directing the show (from her tough gangster moll persona) and Sam have marital problems.  Sam is obsessively scouting locations in the game and not spending enough time with his wife and kids.  They fight but make-up.  The actual production of Hamlet at the end also poses some problems.  The appearance of the Ghost (Hamlet's murdered father) is staged for some reason on huge airship, a big blimp, and people keep falling off of it.  During the show, the blimp crashes and everyone dies, of course, only to be brought to life.  The audience has to be ferried by speed boat to a floating casino where some of the action is staged.  During the ride over the waves, Horatio gets knocked into the water and drowns.  The action zips all over the apparently enormous cityscape of Los Santos, a stand-in for LA, and the "to be or not to be soliloquy" is tried out in various settings, including a spectacularly seedy dive-bar full of morose, depressed drunks and hookers and a small embattled rock in the middle of a raging sea.  (In general, the landscapes in GTA are incredible, immensely detailed, and, often, beautiful lit -- some of the vacant lots and dumping grounds around Los Santos have a dewy luminous presence that reminds me of paintings by George Innes.  The characters have to be in perpetual motion, but most of it is completely pointless, pacing back and forth or circling one another, and all of the figures have dead, inert eyes.  Their lips move randomly but don't match the words that they are speaking.  Helicopters hover overhead and, sometimes, characters jet around in planes.  From time to time, there are motor vehicle crashes.  Of course, it is all staggeringly violent:  characters burst into flames and are incinerated, others are vaporized by rocket-propelled grenades, run over by cars, riddled with machine gun bullets by the cops and people randomly bludgeon one another, hack each other apart, or fall from immense heights exploding into moist clumps of blood when they land on the ground.  Someone says that the mayhem is perfectly appropriate for Shakespeare -- 'it's a mix of unearthly beauty and savage murder.'  I don't exactly get the point of this movie, an amusement devised during co-vid and, apparently, representing an enormous expenditure of time.  I thought the picture was reasonably compelling and the landscapes incredibly impressive.  My wife couldn't stand more than ten minutes.     

The Rehearsal

 Nathan Fielder is a Canadian comedian who practices a highly conceptual form of "cringe" comedy -- this is a genre developed, I think, from an unsettling aspect of "stand-up".  Some stand-up comics specialize in insulting their audiences -- this aspect of verbal combat between comedians and hecklers evolved into the work of stand-ups comics like Don Rickles and, also, the institution of the celebrity "Roast" in which a bench of comics mock some famous person (and, then, in a turn-around are mocked themselves.)  Comedy isn't pretty.  Ridicule and insult can turn nasty quickly and the "cringe-factor" (that is, discomfort arising when the comedian has seemingly gone too far or become too personal or objectionable in his or her mockery) has always been an implicit aspect of the art.  Fielder exploits the "cringe-factor" associated with his peculiar appearance and dead-eyed, seemingly autistic indifference, to ordinary human interactions -- his work is cringe-worthy because apparently tone-deaf to the sensibilities of those with whom he interacts.  All comedians approach their art from the stance of an outsider, someone who is uniquely positioned to see the grotesque and absurd in human behavior that otherwise goes unnoticed (or, at minimum, unspoken).  Oliver Sacks, also an outsider, homosexual and drug-addicted, once wrote a book called An Anthropologist from Mars, Seven Paradoxical Tales (seven case-histories of neuro-divergent people).  Fielder's persona seems to be similar -- he's an alien, radically disconnected, it seems, from the norms of human interactions, obsessive, and with a bizarre affect:  he's robotic, like some kind of machine pretending to be human.  Fielder's physiognomy is peculiar:  he has a square-head with big wet eyes and large, swollen and reddish lips -- his appearance is a weird combination of mannequin handsome and the clownish.  His features are cartoonish, inexpressive -- he emits an aspect of slightly bemused and baffled anxiety.

Fielder's magnum opus to date is the second season of the HBO show, The Rehearsal (six episodes varying from 35 to 58 minutes in length).  The show is highly cerebral but strangely affecting -- Fielder's awkward and baffled deportment is an external representation of what most of us feel from time to time:  we don't fit in, we're misunderstood, we can't quite read the emotions of those around us.  He embodies certain Kafkaesque anxieties that everyone has experienced but that may be difficult to express in words.  I'm casting around for meaningful analogies because Fielder's The Rehearsal is essentially indescribable, unlike anything else on TV and creates an emotional aura that is distinct, and, even, oddly moving but hard to identify.  There may be some aspect of Wittgenstein's late philosophical investigations in The Rehearsal -- this is comedy so removed from social norms that it seques into philosophical inquiry.  The premise for The Rehearsal was established in a prior HBO series bearing that name -- Fielder maintains that casual and, even, important human interactions can be improved, even perfected if they are rehearsed in advance.  If you want to ask out a girl, you should first prepare a script to that effect and, then, rehearse it with someone representing the target of your affection.  The simulation that you are rehearsing should replicate the conditions in which the act or encounter will occur to the greatest extent possible.  Therefore, Fielder devises huge sets, including entire bars and, in the second season, an immense soundstage representing an airport down to the smallest possible detail.  For Fielder, rehearsal equals simulation and, in the astonishing finale to the second season, a flight simulator is used to train the comedian to pilot an actual Boeing 737 with more than 150 people (paid actors) on the airplane for a scary two-hour flight.

Fielder starts with an inquiry about cockpit communication in commercial passenger planes under emergency conditions.  It's Fielder's thesis, based on review of cockpit transcripts documenting dialogue between pilots and their first officers (co-pilots), that power relationships inhibit the first officers from criticizing the pilot in command of the plane; the co-pilot is authorized to provide input and, even, take the controls to stave off a disaster -- but, as it happens, the first officers tend to defer to the pilot to the extent that avoidable catastrophes occur.  Therefore, Fielder proposes to devise strategies that will empower the subordinate co-pilots to engage more proactively with the jet pilots.  Fielder has engaged an old fellow who is a retired FAA official and student of plane crashes, and with this guy as his advisor aims to make reforms in legislation and training so as to empower the first officers to correct errors that they witness their pilots making.  This premise sounds both abstract and bureaucratically dry, but Fielder rapidly expands the scope of his inquiry into experiments of the most bizarre and disquieting kind.  He decides to train co-pilots with respect to "difficult conversations" by having them audition contestants for an American Idol sort of competition, here called Wings of Song.  Fielder knows that 90% of the contestants will be turned aside at the audition phase and he wants his co-pilots, his test subjects, to be comfortable with hurting people's feelings.  (During this experiment, he discovers a woman co-pilot who universally liked by the people that she auditions; Fielder tries to discover her particular quality that makes her so good at delivering bad news to people.  Then, he sends her aloft, flying with an aggressive male pilot who makes weird and suggestive banter with her as they are zoom through the skies).  Determining that Sully Sullenberger is the perfect pilot (he successfully landed his disabled plane on the East River after a bird-strike) Fielder acquires his autobiography, excerpts key passages, and, then, tries to replicate those experiences -- this requires Fielder to shave off his body hair, be diapered as an infant, and interact with surrealistically huge figures representing Sullenberger's parents -- he breast feeds from a huge mock-up of Sullenberger's mother.  In this section, Fielder concludes that Sullenberger's favorite song is a tune by the band Evanescence and notes that there is a 23 second period of silence when the pilot shut off his radio while descending to land on the East River.  Fielder hypothesizes that Sullenberger was either listening to the chorus from that song or, perhaps, singing it to give himself courage -- the chorus to the tune turns out to be 23 seconds long.  Fielder experiments with "pack psychology" -- that is, emboldening one co-pilot to kiss a woman that he likes by having him "hunt with a pack", that is, travel everywhere with 12 people who all mimic his every expression and gesture.  Fielder is told that his notion that all human actions should be carefully rehearsed before being attempted is a method of helping autistic people navigate through a world that they have difficulty decoding.  (Fielder is administered a test as to decoding mood from visual signals and fails dramatically, suggesting that he is autistic himself.)  A group of autistic people use his mock-up of the airport to rehearse traveling through that environment where they are otherwise apt to experience sensory overload.  Fielder meets with a congressman assigned to an oversight committee involving aviation -- this is cringe comedy of the most explicit type.  The congressman is a conventional civic booster and glad-handing politician who can't wait to get away from the earnest and baffling Fielder who argues to him that encouraging co-pilots to kiss their dates has something to do with aviation safety.  In the final hour, we learn that Fielder has been taking pilot lessons.  After months of not making progress, Fielder has, in fact, learned to fly and, indeed, has a commercial license and is instrument-rated.  He applies for a license to fly large-scale passenger planes and recruits actors to ride on his maiden-journey from San Bernadino an hour west to the Nevada border and, then, back again to original airport.  (The actors are all willing to fly on the 737 although they are told that Fielder has never flown a plane like this before; upon learning that no one has turned down this gig, one man mutters "Actors!")  The camera follows Fielder as he acquires a 737 and provides his actors with their lines:  he is such a control freak that everything they say on board is scripted, included responses to the beverage service.  Fielder is able to fly the plane, although he has only 300 hours time in the air because it is not carrying paying passengers, but rather actors who have been paid themselves to take the flight.  Cringe comedy involves the audience's fear and discomfort that something humiliating or embarrassing might occur as a result of the comedian's insults or other interactions with the public.  Fielder ups the ante -- the viewer's fear here is that he will crash the airplane and cause almost two-hundred deaths.  With an obliging co-pilot, the 737 takes off.  As it turns out, the scariest things that occur during the flight are close encounters with another aircraft carrying HBO cameras and tracking along the 737.  Fielder has been agonizing over whether he should consult with a physician to determine whether he is, in fact, autistic.  In fact, he goes to a clinic and has an MRI that is said to be able to detect whether the subject of the study suffers from autism.  But the results aren't available before his inaugural flight and so he answers "no" to the FAA health survey question about mental illness and unusual neurological conditions. After successfully landing the aircraft, Fielder embarks on a second career flying empty 737 to various locations all around the globe -- we see him landing the big planes at night and in fog.  He watches The Wings of Song competition.  The winning contestant sings the song by Evanescence that Sullenberger may have listened to or hummed himself when he was landing his plane on the East River. Fielder gets a text message that the study results from his MRI are available.  But he deletes the message.  He says that only the best and brightest and most skilled (and normal) people are allowed to fly big passenger jets.  He flies big passenger jets and, ergo, there can't be anything wrong with him.  (This scene correlates to an earlier episode in which he asks a girl whom he has rejected as a Wings of Song contestant to rate him as a judge.  She writes down a number that we can't see. Fielder looks at the scrap of folded paper that seems to show "6" but, then, turns it over to give himself a "9".)  

Fielder was instrumental in scripting and filming The Curse, an extraordinary Showtime series.  In the final episode of The Curse, gravity somehow gets reversed with respect to Fielder's character.  As his wife is giving birth, he falls upward, desperately trying to remain earthbound, but, in the end, hurled into the icy cold of outer space.  In other words, Fielder's character is inadvertently flying and, indeed, ascends to his death.  It's hard not to see various tensions and themes linking this visionary sequence in the Showtime series with the flying scenes in The Rehearsal.