Adult Movies

Looks like a typical action movie, doesn't it?

I like old movies because they’re different than today’s movies.  I like variety, I don’t want to be confined to the parochialism of the present.  Like Emerson with his unfiltered whims I want to be exposed to many different points of view, even those I disagree with or find foolish or repugnant.  Orwell said that all art is political.  Orwell was a socialist but he didn’t mean that it’s all political in some silly, overwrought, Marxisant way, as if every human action expresses either one side or the other in the ongoing class war.  He meant that every work of art expresses a way of thinking about life, a world-view, a sensibility.  The Wizard of Oz – to take an example Orwell would probably never have chosen – sees life as homey, warm and gentle; that’s the point of all the drama, fantasy and absurdity in the Land of Oz: it shows what life is not.  James Bond movies see life as a 13-year-old boy’s fantasy, bursting with cool gadgets, fast cars and easy women.

But so many of today’s movies – at least many popular movies – embrace that adolescent sensibility; they glorify easy pleasure and disdain deeper understanding.  In a modern action movie, beauty is found only in violence and wisdom consists only in the cool and concentrated determination to defeat your enemies.  These movies play up to adolescence, typically a cynical time, a time when the adult world seems constructed of hypocrisy and falsehood, when fun and exciting experience is the only real truth, when morality is a sham and nobility a joke.  If there’s nothing to believe in, nothing to fight for, then why not drive 200 miles an hour?  Fantasy movies – such as Lord of the Rings, Star Wars – do directly address issues of good and evil, but only in a pre-adolescent way: the good guys are all good and the bad guys are all bad.  It’s true that the bad guy who’s really a good guy underneath – Darth Vader, Gollum – is a common device in this genre, but typically such characters have turned bad because they’ve been tempted by power, the totalitarian state being the great nightmare of the 20^th century.  That is, such movies remain morally simple.

I like to see movies that 13-year-olds don’t fully understand!  The other morning I watched (for something like the 12^th time) The Guns of Navarone, a World War II action movie made in 1962, starring Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn.  Peck is the leader of a group of Allied commandos (Quinn being one of the commandos) who are assigned to sabotage huge guns the Nazis have placed on the Aegean island of Navarone, guns that must be removed if British destroyers are to pass by Navarone and rescue 2000 trapped British soldiers.  Overcoming overwhelming obstacles, including a traitor in their midst, the guns are blown up and the soldiers rescued.  Yes, the movie is guilty of its own adolescent fun, like the obligatory early scene where Peck goes through the list of the boys on his team, each one with his own special skills and weaknesses.  Sitting in the British commander’s civilized office, replete with maps, books and a tea-bearing man-servant, the scene feels like the start of an old-fashioned English adventure yarn, as if Peck’s team was planning to scale Mt. Kilimanjaro or traverse the Khyber Pass, rather than going forth to kill or be killed by history’s most destructive and evil war machine.  Good luck, old chaps!

But there’s more to the movie than adventure, though it does have plenty.  There’s genuine moral dilemma: how should brutal should we be in fighting a brutal enemy?  Is it OK to become as brutal as Nazis?  At one point while working their way across the island, Peck decides to leave behind one badly wounded commando comrade – the most idealistic one, nicely played by Anthony Quayle – to be found by the Nazis.  But before leaving him, Peck lies to him about Allied plans in the hopes that the Nazis will torture him and that he will reveal the false information.  He throws his friend into the Nazi hell in order to save 2000 other men.  Is that defensible?  And the Nazis will be deceived but Quayle will be destroyed by guilt, thinking he has betrayed his comrades.  The main character betrays and discards the idealist, the man who would rather die than betray and discard him.  Which one of them is the hero?

Now we look back and see that early scene in the tea-drinking English commander’s office rather differently.  We can no longer see it as planning just good old adventure, as just planning for physical danger and daring; it was planning for moral danger and daring as well.  And it is a somber undertaking.  Peck and his team got cracking without drama, without self-congratulation or self-aggrandizement.  The movie is not about how great or coldly violent they can be (Gregory Peck would never have walked away coolly in slow-motion without looking back toward a huge explosion he had just caused), it’s about how much crud and muck we must walk through to get to our noble goals.  It’s about how dirty we have to get, how hard it is to resist the temptation to needless violence, how hard it is to separate ends and means.  Can we walk the line of being good while not always doing good?  The movie doesn’t ignore hard moral choices, like the pre-adolescent movies do, and it doesn’t ignore noble goals, as the adolescent movies do.  It has the courage to address both.  When Peck plans his raid he knows he’ll have to deal with these issues and that they will confuse and confound him, that there are no easy answers, but that he must proceed anyway.  His job will be hard and it will require all his wisdom and skill and effort.  But the movie understands that this work is what we were made for: fighting the good fight that is never as clearly good as we would wish, but clear enough that we must still fight it.  This is the human responsibility.  The best art accepts the confusion and ambiguity that responsibility entails and does so with sobriety and maturity and humility, even with optimism and hope, but never with adolescent flash and bravado.