Sometimes reality invades the movies, and at others, the movies invade our perception of reality and show us that maybe we aren’t quite the centres of the universe we would like to imagine.
SEEING that today’s instalment of Silver Scream falls on National Day, my first thought was to talk about movies that celebrate freedom and independence. But then, I figured it might be more appropriate to look at movie moments that encourage us to view our place in the universe from a more realistic perspective.
After all, this seems to be in short supply in today’s world, where anyone with an attitude and a bit of leverage begins to act as though he/she has been granted some form of divine right. For all the exaggeration and credibility-stretching that movies do, they can still manage one earth-bound task well – the act of slapping us in the face with a cold wet fish and reminding us to get over ourselves.
Question of worth: Gene Hackman’s Sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven puts the notions of ‘rights’ and ‘dues’ in their rightful place. That could happen when we’re watching a movie like the good but little-seen Lawrence Kasdan film Grand Canyon (1991).
In the film, Danny Glover’s character talks about the Grand Canyon, and how its magnificent, age-old expanse has a humbling effect on anyone who looks upon it.
To the canyon, mankind hasn’t even been around for a split second in the Earth’s history, “a piece of time too small to even get a name,” he says.
Faced with the Grand Canyon, he “feels like a gnat that lands on the @$$ of a cow chewing its cud on the side of the road you just drove by doing 70.”
A humbling thought, isn’t it, when we start to get too deluded by our sense of self-importance?
Fresh from splitting the atom and unleashing nuclear devastation upon his fellows, Man thought he was really something, messing with forces that could destroy this planet many times over.
Jimmy Stewart (middle) learns a poignant lesson in It’s A Wonderful Life. In response, the movies gave us The Day The Earth Stood Still (the good one from 1951, that is – not Keanu’s 2008 furrowed-brow fest).
Here, the point was made that Man is but one of many occupants of the universe, yet even so, life is rare enough to be a highly precious gift. The film’s unseen federation of extraterrestrials reminded us that we were being watched, and judged, to see if we needed to be slapped down.
Net effect on the planet: zero, or maybe even less. After all, we can now destroy the Earth many times over, times a hundred. Hey, we just said some movies give us cause to think; that doesn’t mean people are compelled to use their grey matter.
If some movie aliens deemed us worthy of being given a chance, the “prawns” of the sleeper hit District 9 (2009) must surely feel otherwise.
What District 9 does is showcase, in 110 intense minutes, all the arrogance, greed and brutality of mankind.
Throughout the film, we see how the members of a highly alien species are victimised. But these acts of inhumanity are just mirrors of what happens in real life every day, perpetrated by men upon other men, and to even more horrifying extremes.
Simply put, the perspective District 9 offers is that Man is a colossal piece of sh*t, with a long shot at redemption and changing for the better.
Speaking of redemption and transformation, Casablanca’s (1942) Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) had his perspective straight when he gave that whole noble “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world” speech to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). What’s a love triangle when the world is being torn apart by war, anyway?
And Blade Runner’s (1982) doomed Replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), frustrated in his search for meaning to his woefully short existence, still found it in himself to regard any life as precious – even to the point of letting his enemy-by-circumstance, Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, live.
Sometimes it’s not our conceits but our frustrations that prevent us from seeing clearly, a lesson seldom more poignantly taught to anyone than George Bailey (James Stewart) from It’s A Wonderful Life (1946).
Frustrated by a wicked old man to the point of contemplating suicide, George is shown – by a wingless angel, no less – just how much his life has meant to the people around him.
Similarly, the crusty old protagonist of Pixar’s brilliant Up (2009), Carl Fredricksen, is so obsessed with that one great adventure that never came along, he fails to realise what a beautiful adventure he and his late wife had shared for so many years.
But to me, the one movie moment that best illustrates the movies’ knack for reminding us to get over ourselves, and puts us our notions of “rights” and “dues” in their place, comes at the end of Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece Unforgiven (1992).
As its main antagonist, we had Gene Hackman’s Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett, backed by his guns and his bully-boys, supremely confident in his position at the top of the heap.
For all his power, privilege and righteousness, there he is at the end, bleeding to death from a bullet out of William Munny’s gun.
Facing down the barrel of the coming coup de grace, he says, partly in lamentation and partly in disbelief: “I don’t deserve … to die like this. I was building a house.”
Munny’s response: a contemptuous hiss: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
And indeed, it hasn’t. Because “deserve” is just a state of mind we build for ourselves. Daggett, by most accounts, should be the good guy, because he’s just trying to keep his town clear of assassins and bounty hunters – heavy-handed as his methods may be.
Munny, given his past predilection for brutal, senseless killing, should be the villain.
Yet we willingly cheer on this “known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition” because he is serving a visceral need in us to see retribution served.
So the righteous man loses sight of the spirit of justice through his violent and overzealous methods; and the repentant, whiskeyed-up sinner finds redemption if not in his soul, then at least in the eye of the beholder.
It could only happen in the movies, right? Right. Best get over that notion, too.
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