The Edge: Faithless Trophy Wife, a non-Character

And now, the wife. How am I going to write 500 words about a non-character?

Last time, I commented that The Edge seems at first like a Jack London story: man-against-nature--and I do not mean "people" against nature--with no character development. But either David Mamet intended it to be unexpectedly deep, or else Anthony Hopkins happened upon the cuckold husband role and transformed the movie.

I tend to think the latter. I read that rumor in a biography of Hopkins, in fact. I learned that the Morse character, as originally written, was something of a jerk, himself: he was Cameraman Bob's own age, more or less, and, like Bob, American, and he was something of a prig. A needler. Rich, smug, and arrogant.

Gives the trophy wife's "Bet you can't stump 'im!" comment a whole new ring, doesn't it? (See The Edge: Bookworm) And it changes everything about the way the two men face off, when they do--but that's to come. Here, I must mull over the character of Mickie, Elle MacPherson's character. The trophy. There is resoundingly nothing to mull over!

Let's recap the tale: A photographer named Bob sets off on a wilderness photo shoot with his girlfriend (the model), his crew, and her husband, Charles Morse, who's footed the bill for the trip and provided the transportation. Things go wrong. The male two-thirds of the triangle are cast in sharp relief upon a mountainscape, and they have to find their way back to civilization, stalked (chillingly) by a man-eating bear. Along the way, animosity outs: the younger man's envy--and his affair--come to light and are resolved.

Meanwhile, the woman that my dad identified right away as the faithless trophy wife (MacPherson) is back at the lodge, awaiting the men's rescue and presumably twiddling her thumbs. She is about as cardboard as they come. Even she has some dignity, however; she's faithless, but she's not conniving. She seems to have some genuine affection for the old billionaire she married, considering that she's stabbing him in the back; big words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘ethics’ appear not to have occurred to her.

                                                                                                                         

What more to say?

Well...we could move to the feminist perspective.

<full stop>

I picked this movie out of the discount bin, did I not mention that? It's not popular! It's...well, it would be dismissable, but for Hopkins. Hopkins steps in, adds 20 years to the husband's age and gives him a barely-perceptible-but-no-less-distinct accent--and he drags the whole cast up to his level! More and more, I wonder what the original book or screenplay must have been like!

Gess and I agreed not to write movie reviews, but you need this information to see why I’d bother to take The Edge apart, again and again.

Or maybe I was just trying to understand a certain type of male mystique.

This movie flip-flops from male ... rutting ... to male bonding (and back, but let's save the spoiler for the subsequent posts). There's really nothing else there! If I start wagging my finger about the depth that Elle MacPherson's character lacks, I'll never get done--but, maddeningly, if she were any other way, this would be another movie! This one gives its characters simplistic treatments, because...because their author sees the world that way: Woman as anything more than foil, in a movie that examines … dueling … requires other than The Edge, for vehicle.

The End!

Two Men, Two Mummies

What is it about the The Mummy films, of 1932 and 1999, that frighten viewers? It can't be the Mummy itself; it's only seen for a very short time. The dried husk in the one and the “juicy” specimen in the other are on screen for only a few seconds. These are “monster” movies, but it's not the appearance of the monster that frightens. Both Mummies are hard to look at, but neither is wrapped in decaying cloth, dried up, and wrinkled for long. It's their power that frightens the fictional characters in the film and the live audiences in theaters and homes.

In the 1932 film, Boris Karloff's dessicated face and hands make viewers yearn for a damn good balm. Karloff's Mummy wakes in eerie silence, with deliberately slow movements. The camera lingers on his slowly opening eyelids, on the drop of first one bandaged hand and then the other, on his gentle caress of the Scroll of Toth that revived him, and lastly on his trailing wrappings as he exits. He takes what he needs and leaves the lone human present untouched. “He went for a little walk,” says the so-called “young Oxford chap” who awoke the Mummy, laughing maniacally. “You should have seen his face.” We have; it made us itch.

When next we see the Mummy, he is a man; old and dry, but clearly a man. Karloff's thin limbs and stiff posture are covered in long robes with high-necked dickeys. He is still dessicated and brittle, but definitely human. More important though, his eyes are alive and knowledgeable. It's immediately clear that this man/Mummy has knowledge and contempt of which to beware. Viewers know to fear him even before he says meaningfully, “We Egyptians are not permitted to dig up our ancient dead. Only foreign museums.” When you laugh, it's with a little worry. He calls to Anck-se-ne-Amun in a soft chant that only her reincarnated subconscious can hear and heed. With a similar quiet menace, he forces others to bend to his will or suffer the consequences. With beaming eyes and spells whispered through rigid jaw, he bends commands, “Return that scroll to me, or die.” From his lodgings decorated with only Egyptian antiquities, he watches, controls, and kills by apparent heart failure. And when death reaches him once again, it's only a sudden decomposition that occurs; his dried remains crumble into bones and dust. Not at all scary.

In 1999, Arnold Vosloo's Mummy is an altogether different creature. The scene of Imhotep's live mummification is an homage to Karloff in the same scene. Both men wear the same bewildered expression as their body is wrapped. Beyond that, they share only two characteristics; they are both devout and devoted. In flashbacks we see the men they were; devout high priests and devoted lovers.

In the first sight of Vosloo's Mummy, its gamy consistency, empty eye sockets, and gaping mouth are thrust at the audience with a screech. This Mummy awakens with an angry roar and lunges into action. He surges forth on an immediate hunt for the body parts he's missing and for those who have taken them. Vosloo too wears long robes, but his are gauzy and flowing, open to reveal an increasingly chiseled physique interrupted by a mere gauzy loin garment. Soon, this Mummy is healthy, strong, supple, and still royally angry. His movements are swift and powerful. And he doesn't waste time with requests, duplicity, or explanations. His rage is obvious. And his vengeance is wicked.

Neither Mummy truly frightens. Karloff's pacing and glowering are as amusing as Vosloo's loping run and protruding chest. Still, as the 1932 trailer says, “There is nothing on Earth like the Mummy.” So sit back and enjoy them both!

The Edge: Younger Man, Envying

Let's try to see this from the Younger Man's point of view, shall we?

[For those who just tuned in, we’re discussing The Edge, starring Anthony Hopkins as Charles Morse, a wealthy older man, and Alec Baldwin as a bitter, young photographer named Bob, who’s having an affair with the Hopkins character’s model-wife. The three, plus photo-shoot entourage, have trekked into the Alaskan wilderness aboard Morse’s private plane. It is a working vacation for the photo people; it is a distinctly uncomfortable moment, for the older man.]

Y.M. (Younger Man) relishes his photo-shoot moments, the stated purpose of their trip to the Alaskan inn, for then he has the Faithless Trophy Wife all to himself, sort of. Under normal circumstances, Morse would not be along; he's generally off being a financier of some kind, and they—or she (actually, it's never quite clear who thought this would be a good idea)—decided it would be good for the billionaire to take a break from running the world, and come with.

Once at the inn, Y.M. can be found bristling and envying, or else lamenting his lot as talented and underpaid. He pontificates, making himself an object of mirth to everyone, including his insignificant beloved. Everyone laughs at Y.M.—everyone, that is, except Mr. Billionaire, who seems not to get the joke. This does not help Y.M.’s disposition. Y.M. is developing quite a head of steam.

Y.M.’s goal seems to be to belittle, to embarrass, to drive a wedge—in short, he's an everyjackass. His motives regarding the trophy wife are transparent: there’s no love, there. Y.M. just wants to be a billionaire, and the closest he can get is to pick off the young wife of one.

I wonder, does this happen a lot, in real life?

<jk>

I spent many viewings of this film wondering who else I’d cast as Bob. Mel Gibson, perhaps. Now that Baldwin turns out to be a jerk in real life, too, I guess he’ll do.

So, here's the much-older husband, doddering around in his greatcoat, surrounded by feather-bundled youngsters. He smiles beatifically; he reads a book about survival in the wilderness, about bear traps and building fires, fishing in streams—all the things they end up needing to know how to do, later. Mister Bill(ionaire) is a sympathetic character, and I can’t help wondering if David Mamet drew him that way to begin with; I think he did not.

Y.M. wants it all: the plane, the wife, the respect, and the leisure time to stuff his head full of wilderness trivia. Whatever it is, he wants it. And he wants it bad enough to kill, for it. At first, anyway.

The Edge fooled a lot of people into dismissing it as a Jack London-like tale, but it isn’t. It’s a classic story about envy. The characters are sketchy, as are London’s—but so sketchy are they, that Hopkins stands in relief. And, up there on that pinnacle, he shines.

Trink is engrossed in this story again. It takes so little…!

In the Interest of Science

Do you ever wonder about the sanity of some scientists? For “knowledge,” some of them are willing to go to lengths most people deem unreasonable. They perform tasks like diving to dark, heavy-pressure depths; enduring bone-chilling cold; traveling through areas riddled with deadly animals and insects; even laughing in the face of ancient, life-threatening curses. Who are these people?

They are people who don’t allow obstacles of any sort or size deter them. They are the zealous and overzealous who accomplish the seemingly impossible. They are studious and dedicated. They are meticulous and obsessive. And they are a little bit crazy.

They are people like Sir Joseph Whemple of the 1932 “The Mummy,” who makes heartfelt statements like:

“Our job is to increase the sum of human knowledge… Not to satisfy our own curiosity.”

And:

“I can’t permit your beliefs to interfere with my work.”

And:

“In the interest of science, even if I believed in the curse, I’d go on with my work.”

He does go on with his work, to the detriment of others and, eventually, himself.

The same do-or-die spirit is displayed in “The Mummy” of 1999, in which the Egyptian museum curator makes egoistic declarations such as:

“We are scholars, not treasure hunters.”

And:

“For over three thousand years we have guarded the City of the Dead. […] to do any and all in our power to stop the High Prince Imhotep from being reborn into this world.”

Okay, maybe that last one is a bit much. But he, too, eventually pays the ultimate price.

These are people who live in a world where every question can be answered, every puzzle can be solved, and every evil overcome. Theirs is no world for the skeptical, doubtful, or irresolute. For people like these, we have many reasons to be grateful.

The Edge: Bookworm

I learned from reading a biography of Anthony Hopkins that the working title of The Edge was "Bookworm," referring to the billionaire cuckold character. The logic evidently was that, without a bookworm in their midst who'd internalized a wilderness survival skill or two, the eminently foolish photographer and his gender-bending sidekick would have simply died in the wreck of the Beaver. Or that's the implication. It's a pretty macho movie, and my first thought was "Ick." It grew on me, when it shouldn't have. And it's stuck there.

Charles Morse's most-bookwormish lines stick with me, is why. Here are two that keep cropping up in my life:

1. [somewhat petulantly] Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.

When he gets him alone, Bob--the Younger Man, the transgressor, the third leg of the love triangle—takes his opportunity to needle his lover's husband, by way of appearing to pay him a compliment. He says, basically, "It must be tough to be so rich." (Envy, again.) The above line is Charles Morse's reply.

I used this line once, on a retired Air Force pilot, when he was telling me that someone was jealous of him. He laughed politely. I will always wonder what he must have thought. One has to be careful, when quoting lines from movies.

2. (Why is the rabbit unafraid?) Because he's smarter than the panther.

This one takes some describing. The inn-keeper, a Good Ol' Boy played by L.Q. Jenkins, is lamenting not being able to go huntin', and he's nonplussed when Charles Morse (billionaire bookworm) responds by giving him a useful suggestion on how to get his rifle sighted in. Now, this is good ol' boy territory! What's a bookworm doing making a useable suggestion? G.O.B. says as much:

Morse: "Well, an ironing-board makes a good bench rest."

G.O.B.: "No disrespect; I'm surprised you know what a bench rest is."

F.T.W. (Faithless Trophy Wife): "Charles knows what everything is! Got a question? Ask him! Charles knows everything!"

G.O.B.: "Take a mighty accomplished man to claim that."

Morse: "I didn't claim it."--looking glum--"I don't claim anything."

"Betcha can't stump 'im!" continues The Wife.

"Betcha I can!" says G.O.B., taking the bait. He takes down a shellacked wooden paddle from the wall. On one side is painted a black panther. "I will give you FIVE DOLLARS, if you can tell me what's on the other side of this blade!"

There's a hush.

Morse: "It's a rabbit, smoking a pipe."

"A rabbit smoking a pipe," says the transgressor. "My, my, my! Why in the world would that be, Charles?"

"Ah, oh."--Hopkins is magnificent, here, just as when he was William Bligh, being cross-examined by the English court in The Bounty. He has just the right, self-effacing touch. "Oh,” he says, “it's a symbol of the Cree Indians. On one side, the panther; on the other, his prey, the rabbit: he sits, unafraid; he smokes his pipe. It’s a traditional motif."

G.O.B. "Why… is he unafraid?"

Morse, significantly (as it turns out): "Because he's smarter than the panther."

Ah: This is what the movie is about! And, even though it might have struck me quicker, were I a man—as quickly as during the opening credits, were I my father—I guess I got there fast enough.

Traditional motif, indeed.

Life After Death

“It comes to life!” is the tagline for the 1932 film The Mummy. It seems a pretty straightforward statement. But although death does not appear in this tagline, this statement is really about death. “The mummified remains of some dead person are now alive again, freed from death.

“Death is only the beginning” is one of the taglines for the 1999 version of The Mummy, in which Imhotep speaks those very words as he succumbs to death for a second time. And I wonder, “The beginning of what exactly?”

For millennia, people have claimed knowledge of what came before and what comes after. I do not profess any such knowledge.

Per my Catholic upbringing, I should believe in either a lovely or a terrible hereafter based on the life I'm living here and now. Hindus believe in reincarnation and karma where the goal is to escape that very cycle. The ancient Egyptians believed in arriving at the afterlife with a well-mummified body, a guilt-free heart, and the right knowledge from the Book of the Dead in order to live again.

Here is the truth that I do know:

I don't know what the heck happens after death. I don't know if I'll be needing any or all the parts of my body. I don't know where my soul will go or whether it will need my body, a body, any body. And I don't want to know.

Just as I don't want to dwell on how I'll die, I don't want to dwell on what, if anything, will happen afterward. I don't want to live this life always planning for, worrying about, or hoping for the next.

Here are some other truths I do know:
- I want to be now the best that I can be instead of having regrets later.
- I want to enjoy this level/life/existence because in any other that may come I'm not likely to know that I'm there rather than here, remember what came before, or wonder if there will be another.
- I want to enjoy this life in present sight instead of in hindsight because coulda, woulda, shoulda doesn't make anybody happy.

Now you, you can believe whatever the heck you want.

The Edge: Our Story

Our Story Begins...

with a model (Elle MacPherson) and her photographer/lover (Alec Baldwin), headed to Alaska in search of a memorable photo shoot. Tagging along with them is the guy whose Challenger they're riding in, a billionaire guy who happens to be the model's husband. Anthony Hopkins plays that guy.

Charles Morse begins the film as a wealthy cuckold, a bit of a sad sack. He's distant, well-dressed, dignified. (Can Hopkins ever not be dignified? Even Hannibal Lector was dignified--creepily, but still.) Morse "knows everything," because he's curious (and, presumably, because he has the leisure time to indulge his curiosity--envy is one of our themes, here). His secretary has given him a slim volume on survival in the wild, and he's reading it on the DeHavilland Beaver trip to the lodge where they'll stay. The other, younger folks are chattering away; Morse is a loner. And it's his birthday: the book is a gift.

Next day, Morse and Baldwin and Baldwin's assistant (played by Harold Perrineau, Jr.--who had played the gender-bender Mercutio, the year before, in Baz Luhrmann's movie remake of Romeo and Juliet) set off still deeper into the wilds in search of photographical fame and fortune for Bob Green (Baldwin's character). It's a bad plan. The plane crashes (poor Beaver!), and there they are. And now they have to get back.

Simple story.

Now, about the soundtrack: I've been playing the soundtrack from The Edge, in my head, since I bought the film. It became symbolic of the Freezing North, long before I knew I'd actually relocate my base of operations there (to the Freezing North, that is). When I did move to Olympia, Washington, and later to Seattle, the soundtrack from The Edge went with me. Living in the area it depicts made the music seem more right for the territory, not less so. It's spooky and majestic. Jerry Goldsmith wrote it, and, in a serendipitous twist, Jerry Goldsmith also wrote the soundtrack of the original Mummy, another of our "Movies for Life"! (Hey, Gess!)

I made my dad watch The Edge with me, back when I was luxuriating in this watch-a-movie-a-hundred-times business. "I see something new in it, every time I watch it!" I gushed. After helping me unpack the moving van, Dad settled in, in Olympia, with an Organic Fish Tale Wild Salmon Pale Ale in his hand. He watched for exactly two minutes and twenty seconds. He watched the opening credits roll. He watched the Hopkins character disembark the Challenger in his greatcoat, followed by the model-wife, the little photographer, and the shutter-snapping entourage. He watched the camera linger for a moment on MacPherson, in her fur hat and her lime-green parka.

"Ah," pronounced Dad, in a voice that said he needn't watch further: "The faithless trophy wife."

That pretty much sums it up. It is going to be my job, in posts to come, to explain to you what it is I could find to watch so many times, in this film!

Tink is signing off!

What a Way to Go!

A lesson from "The Mummy" films of 1999 and 1932

I don't like to think about how I’m going to die. I imagine most people are like me in this respect. My demise was inconceivable at age 10, purposefully ignored at age 20, and now at age 40 peeking up for my attention.

Why do I fear Death, shun Death, ignore Death? Three little reasons: pain, deterioration, long death throes. Think about how these aspects of death worked out for Imhotep in "The Mummy" of 1999.
- Pain: mummified while still alive; eaten very slowly by scarabs
- Deterioration: from handsome to decayed and "juicy"; from religious leader to hunted prey
- Length of Death Throes: 3 millennia!

What does this all lead to? Think about the worst-case scenario. In the 1932 film "The Mummy," of unearthed Imhotep it is said that he “looks as though he died in some sensationally unpleasant manner.” Just so we are all clear on this one point, let me spell it out: I do not want to have that said about me. Nope. No way. No, thanks. I’m aiming for something more like “peacefully at home surrounded by close family and friends”; or “suddenly while swimming in the turquoise waters off Bermuda”; or “calmly while penning the last line of her highly-anticipated next novel.”

What would I see as an acceptable death? Something that is quick, happens while I’m having fun, and causes no suffering for my family and friends. But on that, and any further details of any sort of “ideal” death, I still refuse to dwell.

The Edge: Another Testicular Pelicula

(That's my new term for 'guy flick'; I was looking for something that rhymed!)



Yes, another testicular pelicula. You'll think I'm a tomboy. Well, I am, but only sort of.



Another of my movies for life--and I don't know about Gess, but I'm grabbing these out of the mind-box in no order, chronological or otherwise--is a little-remembered film called The Edge, by David Mamet, directed by Lee Tamahori. It stars Anthony Hopkins and an extra-specially-annoying Alec Baldwin as the male two thirds of a (heterosexual) love triangle, cast alone together upon a hostile Alaskan wilderness. They spend most of the movie fighting for their lives, and of course they bond in the process--but only sort of.



The absolutely only thing that sold me on this movie before I'd seen it, was Hopkins. That, and the price: two dollars. I picked The Edge out of the sale bin at the movie store in a strip mall next to Sun Harvest grocery in El Paso, Texas, in 2001. As I recall, I had ducked in there to avoid somebody I didn't feel like running into, and so I deliberated quite awhile over those videocassettes! (I also bought Dead Man Walking, but found it pointless. It didn't survive the move, when I moved.)



I picked The Edge because I was collecting movies with Anthony Hopkins in them. Hopkins gives me a warm, family feeling. He has an air of my Grandfather Lyman about him, and I am, in fact, Welsh, on that side of my family, which means almost nothing at all, aside from the physical characteristics. He seems to play good guys, too. He plays one in this movie: he's the hero. (Never mind about Hannibal Lector; those days are gone.)
Baldwin plays--there is no other way to put it--a jerk, and I found him quite believable in the role. I thought Alec Baldwin was a jerk even before he came to our attention shrieking at his daughter when he thought nobody was taping his phone conversation. The character Baldwin plays in this movie would probably do something like that, if he had a daughter.



The Edge was more or less overlooked, by reviewers, I hear. Back when I was beginning to fall in love with it, I found a bunch of online reviews, and they all dwelt on its status as an adventure tale and not at all on its message of survival of the virtuous: Hopkins plays a survivor, humble, successful, unappreciated, underestimated, and, in the end, triumphant. Reviewers entirely missed character development, likely because these characters are purposely underdeveloped--as are the characters in No Country for Old Men, come to think of it!



It's not a guy flick; it's a one-guy flick: the movie is entirely carried by Anthony Hopkins--and a most excellent trained grizzly bear, named Bart. Reviewers said more about Bart, than I am going to. It's my movie-for-life, after all!



I’ll write five posts about this film, in addition to this introductory one:



1. Our Story
2. The Bookworm
3. Younger Man, Envying
4. The Faithless Trophy Wife, a non-Character
5. The Accidental Victor




Onward!

(Instant) Karma

A Brief Meditation on (Instant) Karma from "The Mummy"
Or Why You Needn't Worry About Getting Even

You know that urge you get to retaliate at, say, a driver who cut you off at 70 mph? Let it ease on down the road.

That fantasy you have of sending door-to-door solicitors to the cornfield? Send it packing to the next house, the next street, the next neighborhood.

Your plan to gift the neighborhood's howling dog to friends with a ranch 20 miles out of town? Save it for holiday gift-giving instead.

The voodoo doll and the sparkling sharp needles intended for your inept boss? Keep them for the religious fundamentalists trying to gain political office.

A curse you want to hurl at the leader of your home owners' association? Forget about it!

You needn't risk your life, limb, or soul to engineer payback. For as Evy wisely points out, “Nasty little fellows [...] always get their comeuppance. [...] Oh, yes. Always.” (Don't you just love the word “comeuppance”?)

That's right. Everything has a consequence. Every action has a reaction. Every vibe spreads like a ripple through still water. And since the Earth is a sphere, what starts in one person comes around back to that person.

The consequence of a misdeed can take any form. It can take a mighty long time in manifesting, too. And its sufferer is not likely to know why some calamity has befallen him or her. And you are even less likely to know anything about it. It's not for your benefit or prurient thrills, after all.

Just don't worry yourself with tricky machinations. Don't risk your ever-lasting soul with ill intentions. Let Karma do her thing as she always does. Always.

Dread Simple

I titled this post before I wrote it. That's what I get: now I can't think what to write. The Coens made another movie, Blood Simple; that's where I got the idea. I used the word "dread" to describe the effect the violence of the single-minded killer, Chigurh, had on me, when first I watched No Country for Old Men. I often wonder how I made it through this movie once, but, mercifully, the killing scenes don't haunt me.
That's because the Coens didn't dwell on them. Eureka! The violence, in the end, is not the point. Once we're subjected to a taste of it in the opening scenes, is largely assumed. Implied. Horrific, and yet not splattered before us. This leaves the viewer to dwell on the desert, instead.
So here I am, sitting down to have my final say on this Coen movie, and suddenly I'm at a loss. (Gess and I have agreed: it's five blog posts per film. Then we move on to another one.) What this is, is reluctance to leave the theater! And why should this surprise me?!--I, who've watched this movie, as I've said, on an excess of occasions.
McCarthy's prose suits the landscape; the landscape suits the tale; the Coens kept that spareness going. Here are some examples where characters drop just a few syllables around a reaction, or an emotion: simple. Chilling.
Chigurh to Man from Dallas: "Could you step out of the car, please? I need you to step out of the car."
Wendell to Bell: "Aww! They even shot the dog!"
Dying Mexican drug runner to Llewellyn: "Cierra la puerta! Hay lobos!"
But something gets through the violence. Sheriff Bell, the Force for Good, says to Molly, his secretary: "What's that Torbert says about truth and justice?"
    Molly: "We dedicate ourselves daily anew. Somethin like that."
    Bell: "I think I'm gonna commence sayin it twice daily.
    It might come to three times, 'fore it's over."

...
But, of course, my favorite understatement is the final scene, where Bell, now retired from the police force, is describing a dream he just had. His wife listens, indulgently, wryly (wry, because they have this joke about his being retired, having time to dream, and she has to go to work, and he's detaining her to tell her about his dream). Bell has been struggling with being defeated by whatever this great evil is that has overwhelmed his county, his state, the world. He was forced to retire, over this Chigurh business, over this string of crimes that he could not stop. There are a number of soliloquies in the book--and, in the book, all soliloquies belong to Bell--where he muses on the drug trade, how come it was able to take such hold, and so on. The Coens analyzed all these, and sprinkled pithy bits in scenes, maintaining McCarthy's focus.
Here's the dream. It's about Bell's father, who died when he was twenty years younger than Bell is now:
"It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up."
The book ends right here. So does the movie. I know exactly what I make of it, but I'll let you decide for yourself. It makes me take heart, somehow.

Of Heroes and Hotties in The Mummy

(For a certain friend of mine, for any woman measuring up a man, and for all the boys who like boys.)

Looking for a good man? Let the heroes and hotties of The Mummy help you identify him. Just ask yourself these questions about your potential hunk.

1.Is he willing to do anything whatsoever for the woman he loves?
“For his love, Imhotep dared the gods' anger by going deep into the city, where he took the Black Book of the Dead from its holy resting place.” And then “he was condemned to endure the hom-dai , the worst of all ancient curses; one so horrible it had never before been bestowed.” He risked and lost. And was then sentenced to be “an undead for all of eternity.” Now that is commitment!

2.Is he honest even to a fault?
When asked by Evy why he kissed her, O'Connell admits simply, “I was about to be hanged. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” And when Evy storms off, he's oblivious about why she is angry. You can't fault a man for being honest, can you?

3.Does he know the value of a good woman?
O'Connell very subtly admits Evy's great value when he explains to Jonathan that he probably could have gotten their camels for free by simply giving Evy to the trader. On the surface, this seems like an insult. But the look on O'Connell's face and the tone of his voice belie his true feelings.

4.Is he an old-fashioned gentleman?
Every lady wants a gentleman, whether she knows it or not, whether she notices or not.
O'Connell: You're in her seat.
Beni looks at O'Connell and chuckles.
O'Connell: Now.
Beni hops up and leaves.
Evy sits down chattering about scarab skeletons.

5.Is he brave through and through, perhaps to the point of cockiness, recklessness?
Ardeth Ray: I told you to leave or die. You refused. Now you may have killed us all. For you have unleashed the creature that we have feared for more than three thousand years.
O'Connell: Relax, I got him.
Ardeth Ray: No mortal weapon can kill this creature. He's not of this world! [...] We must now go on the hunt and try and find a way to kill him.
O'Connell: I already told you I got him.

And for extra credit:
Does he maintain his rugged good looks by keeping his teeth pearly white regardless of... anything?
I love a man of good grooming. He doesn't need to be a metrosexual, or fit any other trendy monicker. He just needs to maintain a basic level of hygiene. And the heroes and hotties of The Mummy apparently do. O'Connell, Jonathan, and Ardeth Ray cross the Sahara repeatedly, do time in a Cairo jail, deal with biblical plagues, and fight off and outwit powerful mummies, all the while complementing their handsome faces with bright white smiles.

Rurality

If you do a Google search on 'No Country for Old Men, stills', you call up a ream of images, few of which have anything to do with the rural scenery that sticks with me most. What you get, instead of the marvelous series of photos that the Coens open the movie with, is a window on how much the ghoulishness in this film is what has held people's attention. I guess I forget that.

I had to go to YouTube and post the whole first scene (see below). That's sort of cheating, but there it is. 

Did we as modern people dive right into the gore, and miss the transcendental point altogether? It's like riding a rollercoaster, this movie; it's like sticking your finger in a light socket: it just feels so good to be scared. Is that it? If the Coens had decided to clip every murder scene just before it got bloody, it would have made no less an impression on me. I'd've watched the film seven hundred times anyway, starting from the moment when the Tommy Lee Jones character monologizes:

I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old.

Where others were shocked to attention what they might call reality, I went straight for the rurality.

I have allowed the language of the rural people in this film to become mine. I use this, in moments of frustration:

Well, Wendell? With all due respect, that don't make a lot of sense!

Sometimes I just say, “Well, Wendell?!”—like when I lose my keys. I appreciate the gravity—and the reality—of the tale. It's just that I let its spindly, positive message be the one that gets through, again and again, to me.

What's that message? It's that people whom the rest of the world calls simple-minded have nothing to fight true evil with except their simple-mindedness, and they can cope, that way. They can survive small skirmishes. And, when they die, their deaths are not in vain.

What do you suppose would have happened to Beehive Hair Woman at the trailer court, if she’d not planted herself in simple opposition to Chigurh when he demanded to know where Llewelyn worked? (Her husband flushing the toilet off-screen is of course what turned the tide—Chigurh evidently decided that blowing her away was not worth it—but d’you think she’d’ve let him get close enough to put that little thing against her head? I think not.)

                                                                                                              

Chigurh: Where does he work?

BHW: I cant say.

Chigurh (more slowly): Where… does he work?

BHW: Sir, I aint at liberty to give out no information about our residents.

Chigurh: Where does he work?

BHW: Did you not hear me? We cant give out no information.

                                                     

Then the toilet flushes, and just as Chigurh is changing his mind, Beehive Hair Woman makes a tiny, animal move. She throws her shoulder forward, as he’s backing out the door. It’s a “Harrumph!” gesture, relief at the breaking tension mingling with “…and stay out!”

Real.

[N.b. Dialogue punctuated as McCarthy would have—did, in fact.]

No country for old men - Intro voice over

Either You're In, or You're Out

Much has been said, by professionals and nonprofessionals, about self-destructive behavior. I'm of the nonprofessional party, but that won't stop me having my say. Here it is: You want to be self destructive? Do it all the way, or don't bother with it. As Yoda in another great movie said, “Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try. ”

Like any endeavor, there is no point in taking on self destruction haphazardly. Self destruction is not a hobby, it's a way of life. The keys to good self destructive behavior are commitment, style, and enjoyment. How do I know this? From watching The Mummy. Where did I find my models? In The Mummy. Who are the best examples? Two characters from The Mummy, Jonathan and Beni. They are the antithesis of the movie's heroes. Watch their antics, and you'll see.

Jonathan is self destructive in many different ways. He's a thief and a liar. He's a coward, and he's weak. He's a drunk who pretends to be a missionary. Maybe he's just a very bad missionary. (That's got to be some sort of sin, or blasphemy, or something.) Jonathan is not nearly as successful an archaeologist as his sister Evy is, or as their parents apparently were. He even has a death wish. (Remember his wish to join the dead when he brings the key to Evy at the museum.) Jonathan has all the self destruction bases covered. But he wears natty British archaeologist chap clothes and is having a damn good time self destructing!

Then there is Beni. What can we say about Beni? One simple sentence is all that's needed to sum him up. Beni is one greedy so-and-so. His commandments seem to be: Make money any way you can and save yourself any way you can. How to make money? Swindle, any and every body. Cheat, the American treasure hunters for one. Sacrifice, your friends, your enemies, any random stranger before yourself. (“You're my only friend” he tells O'Connell. Yeah, right!) Make deals with the “devil,” in this case a powerful, lovelorn mummy. And for the CYA maneuvering? First, lie, lie, lie; to your buddy O'Connell, to your living-mummy master Imhotep. Second, cover all your bases, even if it means wearing a fistful of amulets and memorizing as many prayers to the appropriate deities. Third, run away early and often. Fourth, run away fast and far!

If you're planning to pursue self destruction as a way of life, don't look to drug-addicted actors and underpants-shunning singers for pointers. Turn to the guiding example of the scoundrels of The Mummy.

Tommy Lee Jones's Texas (Spoiler Alert!)

I'll admit it: what stuck me to No Country for Old Men was nostalgia for Texas. I'd lived in El Paso; Big Bend National Park had been my home page since I left the region; I'd changed my life completely, and nine years' worth of diaries drone my angst. To hear the diaries tell it, I always knew I'd come back. And this movie plopped into the hotbed of my grief, where it sizzled, happily, no doubt hastening my return. I’d walked in all the places where this movie was filmed. I'd been to Presidio and Sanderson. I'd drunk whiskey from a flask, in campgrounds just yards from that international border, and had my clothes and all my gear soaked time after time by the West Texas squalls. Without knowing it, I left my taproot stuck in caliche, and so I came back, like badly-weeded grass. If these people will have me, I'm theirs.

So, what's this story? It's simple: PTSD meets Mexican mafia, and they clash (where else but) on the border. The enormity of evil overwhelms the locals—all but two. One, the traumatized Vietnam vet, fights back using all his soldier wiles and holds his own longer than he can be expected to, but his intentions are not pure, and eventually he succumbs. The other, the good and simple sheriff, muses, plods, has God on his side. That's the way McCarthy ends it. He might as well have said, "and God will help you."

I like everything about the Sheriff Bell character: his wry relationship with his wife, his palms-up affable nature around his colleagues, his dogged progress as he makes his way, Columbo-like, along the trail of bodies, in the direction of the demonic Chigurh. I knew guys like Bell, when I lived out there. I imagine Tommy Lee Jones had a lot of fun playing this guy.

As much as I like Tommy Lee Jones, and always have—from the Loretta Lynn story, through The Fugitive and of course Men in Black I and II—my favorite scene’s the one he does with Barry Corbett (Northern Exposure’s Maurice, himself a native Texan just like Jones). Corbett plays Bell’s Uncle Ellis, a wheelchair-bound ex-deputy, living out his last days on the West Texas plain in the company of an infestation of feral housecats. Bell pays him a visit in a moment of despair, and here’s what Ellis tells him.

Ellis:    What you got, ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin. It ain’t all waitin on you. That’s vanity.

There’s a lot going on in the book, that doesn’t make it into the movie, here, and that’s fine. No Country, the movie; No Country, the book: the more times I watch and read, the more distinct the two become. Here, my challenge is not to define, or explain, or judge, the one in terms of the other.

But just this once, I have to type a passage from the book.

In the movie, as Ellis says, “This country’s hard on people,” Bell tips his chin and looks out the window, along the bleak, beloved horizon. It’s just an instant. In the book, Ellis goes on in this vein, for awhile. “This country will kill you in a heartbeat,” he finally adds, “and people still love it.”

I know I do.

Zingers

You know that one friend of yours that always has a clever comeback for any quip? You know the one. We all have that friend with the gift of precision use of the zinger. What’s the perfect one-liner for the surly morning barista? Your buddy drops it like the coins he won’t drop into the tip jar. And the sarcastic reply to some inane question? Your pal delivers it like a sweet song from honeyed lips.

Zingers are a handy tool for urban living. See the above examples if you’re in doubt. And they’re another tool for life that I’ve learned from The Mummy. Wondering what to say to the librarian who has knocked down every bookshelf? “Compared to you, the other plagues were a joy!” Hell yeah! And after her apology? “When Ramses destroyed Syria, it was an accident. You are a catastrophe!” Why can’t I ever think of good comebacks like these!?

I love a good zinger, but I can never think of one at the right moment. Maybe it’s that strict upbringing with no “talking back.” *sigh* Something else to blame on my parents. But I digress.

One of my favorite features of The Mummy is the zingers. From the very first scenes, the movie is filled with zingers.

“My body is no longer his temple!” –Anck-su-namun
--
“Your strength gives me strength.” –Beni
--
“Have you no respect for the dead?” –Evy
“Right now, I only wish to join them.” –Jonathan
“Well I wish you’d do it sooner rather than later[...]” –Evy
--
“You lied to me!” – Evy
“I lie to everybody, what makes you so special?” –Jonathan
“I’m your sister.” –Evy
“That just makes you more gullible.” –Jonathan
--
“You’re gonna get yours, Beni! You’re gonna get yours!” –O’Connell
“Like I haven’t heard that before.” -Beni

Zingers are fun; no question about it. But sometimes you don’t need to speak to zing. Your actions can do a lot of zinging all by themselves.

“What does a woman know?” asks the Egyptologist. In response, we are shown Evy explaining all sorts of nifty tidbits to O’Connell and the rest of her treasure hunters. Asked and answered. But Evy knows so much more than those tidbits.

Regardless of the Bembridge scholars’ complaint that Evy hasn’t spent enough time in the field—a detriment swiftly remedied as the film progresses—Evy is a fount of information about ancient Egypt. Pay attention; you’ll see. Who identifies Jonathan’s find? Evy. Who gets O’Connell out of prison? Evy. (Okay, not until after he’s hanged, and the noose doesn’t snap his neck.) Whose plucky camel gets to Hamunaptra first and wins the $500 bet? Evy. (Alright, that was more luck than knowledge, but who cares?) Who thinks to dig at the foot of Anubis instead of in his chamber? Evy! Need I go on?

Is the entire film the answer to “What does a woman know?” Maybe. And that is one good zinger.

Moral Violence?

I said in the last post that I studied this movie. In fact, I couldn't have done a better job of thinking about it, if I'd taken a class in the subject. But that's my point: I didn't take a class. I've never taken a class in cinema, never wanted to.

I watched, noted, read, noted—and all this was so far off my customary moviegoing behavior that I decided what I needed to do was "branch out"—into other similarly violent movies, and into Cormac McCarthy’s other violent books—but I failed, on both counts. I watched the Coens' famous Blood Simple exactly once, and spent a good portion of that viewing, making muffins in the kitchen, away from the blood on the DVD player. I did get all the way through McCarthy’s border trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain), underlining and scribbling as I went, pretty much as I had when reading No Country. Also, I stumbled through The Road, but it was hard to keep the thread of that dark tale, and often, I wanted to quit. In all four of those books, the dark topics overwhelmed the story lines, for me, and I found myself skipping whole scenes in search of a bit of nourishing verbiage about West Texas and Northern Mexico. I’ve not yet found a need to return again and again to any of those books the way I did, to No Country.

The Coens made No Country for Old Men vivid. They brought the violence home, even to people like me, who don’t especially want to watch it, and they demonstrated its point. That’s no mean feat, when half your audience wants to excuse itself forever at the first entrance of the stunbolt gun. I respect the film and trust the filmmakers, because, though they don’t flinch from the grisliness of the tale, neither do they make a fetish of hideous close-ups.

The Coens’ role, here, is even more delicate than McCarthy’s, for, when we read, we set our own boundaries. If we don't like what's happening, we can go get a glass of water. Since we are building the image, we can build at our own pace—in fact, every reader builds a different one! The writer just facilitates the image-building process. Where the writer is triggering images in us, the filmmaker is...picking one for us. As such, the Coens must’ve held their collective breath a lot, walking, as they were, that fine line between ‘ineffective’ and ‘overkill.’ I’m gonna be honest. I think they nailed it. In No Country for Old Men, the violent episodes are unforgettable, and yet they are hedged ’round with real dialogue, real people: small-town West Texans. The painful parts are shocking, indelible, then gone. We have both McCarthy and the Coens to thank, for this restraint.

Gess reminds me that darkness is sometimes a part of the tale, saying, “You don’t set out to write the dark parts of a story. You let it take you where it takes you.”

No Country for Old Men is … quite a ride.

The Virtue of Patience

“Patience is a virtue!” So chants Evy in the 1999 film The Mummy after her brother Jonathan exhorts her to hurry along her search for the golden Book of the Living to stop the regenerating mummy who is after them. And I wonder, “What kind of answer is that? Hurry up, woman!”

I’ll be the first to admit that Patience and I are not friends. We’re barely acquainted. The one major thing I know about Patience is that I’m sorely lacking in it. Up to now, I have managed to gain a minuscule amount of it. I know I need it; I can identify exactly when Patience has and would do me good, but it is difficult to engage it at the right moment. I know too when Patience has been and would be useless to me; like if I were being chased by a living mummy and its mob of minions. I would not, in that crucial moment, sing jauntily: “Patience is a virtue!”

What is a virtue anyway? I turned to the ever-reliable Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11^th Edition) for the answer.

vir·tue \’vǝr-(͵)chü\ n [E vertu, virtu, fr. AF, fr. L virtut-, virtus

strength, manliness, virtue, fr. vir man – more at VIRILE] (13c)

1a : conformity to a standard of right: morality

b : a particular moral excellence

2 : pl an order of angels – see celestial hierarchy

3 : a beneficial quality or power of a thing

4 : manly strength or courage : valor

5 : a commendable quality or trait : merit

6 : a capacity to act : potency

7 : chastity esp. in a woman

Now, let us not get distracted by the sexist manly strength and womanly chastity. In the death-defying race against a creature bent on regenerating his mummified flesh, returning to life his centuries-dead beloved, and—oh yeah!—destroying the world, Patience is a virtue. Really! It’s “a particular moral excellence” that forces its bearer to help fight evil. And that “manly strength or courage” business? Yup, Patience is that, too. It’s even “a commendable quality or trait”! And most important in a mummy-chase situation, Patience is “a capacity to act.” When is it more important to do what’s needed than when saving your hide and all of humanity from a vengeful, not-quite-dead, very powerful mummy?

I’m with Jonathan on this one. When a mummy and his minions are closing in on you, speed is of the essence. Whether or not (cue Evy’s sing-song tone) “Patience is a virtue,” that is the time for a little haste not deliberation. Using Patience earlier would have been better, like when deciding whether to flee Egypt or defend it; or later, like when choosing to sacrifice oneself to save others.

So when is the right time to engage good ole patience in your life? Maybe the time is when you’re in line at a cashier behind a person who has apparently never written a check before. Or better yet, the time for Patience is when you grudgingly follow a car moving at 10mph below the speed limit until it approaches a yellow light and races through the intersection, leaving you smoldering at the red. You get the idea.

Patience may not always be emotionally satisfying, but I say remember how handy it is and use it... judiciously.

No Movie for Normal People?

My Seattle friends, a good number of them, went to see No Country for Old Men in the theater, when it came out. One by one, they came back shaking their heads and wondering if violence in America had really come to this. They guessed it had, then went on with their lives.


Me, I went once with a friend (who saw nothing but the blood and never wants to see Javier Bardem in anything at all, ever)—and then I bought another four tickets to see the show by myself. I watched it three times in the U. District, and twice at the cheap theater in North Seattle. When it came out on DVD, I rented it another six or eight times. I downloaded (a version of) the screenplay. I bought the book—after the fact—and underlined passage after passage, and made notes in the margin like this:



"!!"

and this:

"WHERE is this, in the film?"

and this:

"This is war."

"He hasn't got long to live."

"Texasism."

"How does he get the briefcase, in the movie?"



I even found the place, on page 211 (which I marked, of course, with a "!!" and a pithy comment), where McCarthy connects his story to the Yeats poem, as if flicking a fountain pen at the careful reader.

But I digress.

The more times I watched the movie—I own it, now, of course—the less I found myself insisting that the Coen brothers “hadn't really done anything!!" The more I watched, the more respect I gained for the choices they’d made, through the lens, and the more times I hit 'pause' and sprinted for the bedroom to check one detail or another against McCarthy's authoritative written word, the more I trusted the men who brought this story to the screen: If you can stand the dark parts, or find a way to tune them out (I recommend whistling), No Country, The Film, turns out to be a great lesson in knowledge of craft and in respect for a great tale—over and above the numerous lessons that are in McCarthy’s book, to begin with.

I simply never get tired of No Country for Old Men. I do, I confess, skip over the violence as often as not, these days, just as I thumb through the much-loved book. I have cranked up the DVD player probably a hundred times in the past three months, to study this film, and only once or twice have I watched it through; I no longer need to. It plays in my head all the time, and informs my life. There are only five or six movies I can say this about, and I intend to discuss them all here, one after the other.

I’m not a movie buff. I just feel as though I stepped in a hole called ‘Ethan and Joel Coen’ and got stuck there, for awhile.



Five posts:

1. No Movie for Normal People?

2. Moral Violence?

3. Tommy Lee Jones’s Texas

4. Rurality

5. Dread Simple

FirstPost

We are a couple of girls who met in a writing group. Not a film club; a writing group. One day, we fell to talking about movies. We discovered that we each had one or two that had stuck with us, that we'd finally had to buy, in order to watch them again and again. Not like critics. More like zombies. We are the audience those movies were designed for: we apply them to our lives because we can't stop. We decided to share our fixations, and here's the result.

What We Are Up To

We are two chicks who've managed to find lessons for life in a handful of movies we'd like to tell you about. We aren't movie critics; we're not even movie buffs, and yet we discovered in conversation that we'd become glued to a couple of movies, The Mummy and No Country For Old Men.


And it turned out that it wasn't just those two movies; we each had a backlog! (You might have one, too.) We decided to take turns writing about them. At first we thought we'd change movies at the same time, after a designated number of posts. Well, that didn't work. Sometimes we had a semester's worth of lessons learned from one of our faves; other times, we took away just a couple of notions.

We liked the idea of taking turns posting, however. We kept that.

Why watch a movie more than once or twice, if you're someone like us? Well, sometimes the movie just grabs you and won't let go.

But more about that, on the blog.