On View: Giants in the Earth

Men of steel. Men with icewater in their veins, with stout hearts and unblemished souls, men brave enough to confront evildoers, however overpowering in number or might, men who walk tall, straight into the lion’s den without flinching: We speak of heroes, known for their valiant deeds, not of celebrities, known for being known. We speak of “heroes” as if there were any to be found in an unheroic age embarrassed by if not actually hostile to genuine heroism. Ours is a society that devours its political leaders, whom we consider heroic when they come to office in a landslide and whom we consign to the rubbish heap mere months after they begin to take charge.

Gone, totally, is the sense we once had that mere mortals could in our own time stride the earth like giants; gone, too, our once common expectation that what other generations knew we could know: achievers without feet of clay. Little wonder, given the ridiculousness of those who pop up now and again to make waves or muscle into power, that only the pathetic find merit in our homegrown would-be saviours while almost everybody is drawn to those who claim nothing of us but adoration of their glamour.

Fact denies us comfortable familiarity with genuine heroism, repeatedly dashing any hopes we may have that so-and-so will somehow be less a fraud, less a knave, than the other so-and-so who came before him. We turn to fiction, to pulpy novels fit for the beach, to witless extravaganzas on television, to colossal motion picture epics to find our giants, and when the latter turn to dust (Clash of the Titans; Legend of the Lone Ranger—August LR) we shrug and come back next Saturday night, knowing that sooner or later we’ll get the real thing. On the whole the movies are increasingly dreadful, but there are enough of them that work, enough that satisfy our craving for someone to look up to, among them the two biggest hits of the year thus far and two lesser items that, albeit less directly, mine the same ore.

Superman II; Raiders of the Lost Ark

Neither Clark Kent nor Indiana Jones exemplify the heroic mode when they come before us in their civvies, in their business suits and spectacles. Giants don’t wear neckties, Nature’s noblemen don’t work in offices. But these mundane fellows have only to change into costume, the one, that garish red and yellow and blue flying suit; the other, the dashing though rumpled uniform of the great white hunter, and they are off, their destinies proclaimed first by what they are wearing, then by what they do. Superman II and Raiders of the Lost Ark immediately captured the affections of the moviegoing public for all the obvious reasons—their wit, humor, tongue-in-cheek quality, nifty tricks and derring-do—and also because they center on the exploits of men who are more than men. Kent in tights has the powers his Krypton genes programmed into him; Jones in pursuit of the Ark of the Covenant has, ultimately, the power literally of God rushing into the fray when all would appear to be lost. There is, I think, something more than simple coincidence accounting for the tremendous success of the two films this year that chronicle the adventures of men who without magic are the functional equivalent of geldings.

We are extremely uncomfortable with heroism flowing entirely from the essence of humanness. Not that otherworldly powers will alone make a film a winner—Perseus had Zeus, no less, on his side in Clash of the Titans, and the film came a cropper. But without the distancing from familiarity and the humdrum that a large dose of something greater than mankind presents, a hero capable of outstanding deeds would seem to moderns to be an extended joke. We would titter in disbelief if—even without the silly stuff at the end of Raiders, the religiosity that so jarringly made explicit what ought to have remained, in keeping with the bulk of the film, implicit and delightful because of the implicitness—Indiana Jones hadn’t always around him the obvious blessings of the Deity whose holy of holies he so gutsily sought to save from the Nazis.

Both films delight us with their special effects and their off-beat romantic diversions. Both perked up a dreary summer that confronted us not long before with the morose spectacle of both the President and the Pope targeted for death and that went for many weeks—I write this in early July—without the major national religious observance, professional baseball, to take our minds off inflation and Jerry Falwell. They came at the same time, a double dose of the yearly gift that Hollywood offers by way of the blockbuster magic movie in the latter-day tradition of Star Wars and Rocky and Close Encounters and the first Superman and The Empire Strikes Back. They are both exceedingly violent, but the violence is never for a moment believable or jarring, since only bad humans, Nazis, suffer in Raiders and only renegade bullies from Krypton take it on the chin for long in Superman II. And they both are graced by splendid casts: wonderfully resilient heroines (Margot Kidder as Lois Lane and Karen Allen as maid Marion in Raiders), deliciously hateful villains (Terrence Stamp and Gene Hackman in Superman II and Ronald Lacey and Wolf Kahler as Raiders' Nazis), and perfect heroes. Christopher Reeve has shown in one other starring movie role and on Broadway in The Fifth of July that he is not yet a very versatile actor, but as Kent/Superman he is flawless; flawlessly nerdy and ineffectual when mild-mannered, flawlessly virtuous when, shall we say, on the wing. And Harrison Ford, though not Steven Spielberg’s and George Lucas’s first choice for Indiana Jones, brought with him to Raiders the good will and heroic reputation he has built up as Han Solo in the two Star Wars films and brought off without error the difficult transformation of character from college professor to wry adventurer. This much, minus the verbiage, any ten-year-old will tell you.

More, however, accounts for the glorious triumph of these two movies. I am convinced that both films touch us at precisely the points of our greatest cultural vulnerability: our remorse that we have no real heroes, and our unease occasioned by our national loss of faith. The Moron Majority and its witch-hunting comrades in the battle against the twentieth century fall short in the heroism department (unless the Rev. Donald Wildmon and Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and Jeremiah Denton will suffice for you as heroes) but they have ingeniously allied a specific combine of repressive atavisms with the endlessly repeated claim to the blessings of God. Not only hillbillies and snake-kissing primitives in backwater gospel tents feel the lack of a certainty through faith that the neo-fascistic evangelist demagogues now offer. The rest of us, at least many of the rest of us, want somehow to square our sophistication with our childlike craving for Big Daddy Up In The Sky, and since we cannot, absolutely cannot, be soiled by anything so preposterous as hate-fear Fundamentalist crackpottery, we take half the loaf. We take a few hours of escape into fantasy, into magic, into powers, or if you will, The Power — this year’s version of The Force from Star Wars-Empire Strikes Back. What Clark Kent has always within him, save only for the brief period of powerlessness that comes when he voluntarily abandons his destiny in order to bed Lois Lane, what Kent manifests for all to see when he strips off his tedious business outfits and appears before us in his priestly vestments; what Indiana Jones is capable of because he is fighting the battle of The Lord; what, for that matter, The Lord demonstrates stupendously at the eleventh hour; what both these giants in the land possess is what secularized mankind devoutly desires: certainty, belief, and superhuman might, not to mention a large enough cause to engage our attention, something along the lines of striving, as Superman put it on his first outing on screen, for “truth, justice, and the American way.”

Dragonslayer

The abysmal critical failure of Excalibur (July LR) ought to do nothing to quench the cinema fires currently burning for medieval pageantry; for all that John Boorman’s stupefying retelling of the Arthurian saga left its audiences panting for release, it also revealed the photographic potential of the murky forests and sorcery-mystery of that time out of mind. Dragonslayer demonstrates how a less artsy and more spirited approach to similar material can work beautifully. Unburdened by the weight borne by any new approach to a classic tale, unburdened, that is, by the upstart aura pervading Excalibur, this joint venture from Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Productions starts afresh with a new story set in ye olde England before it grew merry and infuses that dimly known epoch with surefire ingredients. Dragonslayer has a ferociously terrifying villain, a dragon who flies, belches fire, lives in ooze and ’neath a lake of fire, mourns its young, and feasts periodically on a diet of tender virgin. It has an old wizard, Ulrich (Sir Ralph Richardson), who is cranky and visionary and sagely able to husband his resources for the time when a neat miracle will come in most handy. It has a dashing young wizard’s apprentice, Galen (Peter MacNicol), who is to Dragonslayer what Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker is to the Star Wars cycle, combiner of swain with beloved of the magic powers. It has lovely maidens, Caitlin Clarke and Chloe Salaman, the latter a victim of the dragon’s specialized appetite, the former a fit companion for the young blond avenger. It has eye-poppingly meticulous settings, gloomy landscapes, several awesome flights of fancy in the special effects department, and it has a script, by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, that straddles expertly the fine and often rickety fence separating camp from conviction.

Our young giant, Galen, is nothing more than a dreamy, idealistic teenager working on his first degree in wizardry, until his master confers upon him the power and arranges for his baptism by (literally) fire—dragon’s breath—in service to truth, justice, and (why not?) the Saxon way of life. Like Clark Kent, Galen is pleasant but ineffectual without magic; like Indiana Jones, his eye is turned by a comely maiden’s come-hither. Like both of the heroes of the two major movies before us, the hero of Dragonslayer is, if we squint our eyes and stretch our minds to the limit, us, if only we could fly or work for God or wear a glowing amulet that might make us immortal. Dragonslayer lacks the gusto and jocularity and dynamism and, for that matter, the star-power in its lead performer, of Superman II and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and its destiny is not to be numbered among the top ten grossers of all time. Moreover, it arrived when the other two movies came to the screen and is overshadowed by them. But its theme is their theme, in all but detail, and its heroic structure and its glorification of the intertwined glory of human bravery and superhuman grace and giftedness is unmistakably its prime claim to our affections.

Escape From New York

Manhattan for Superman is Gotham, your ordinary crime-ridden big city. Manhattan for John Carpenter’s latest screen venture is a maximum security prison, circa 1997, containing three million of the most horrid criminals in the land. The future doesn’t look so good to moviemakers these days, and in a later column I’ll have more to say about that. For the moment, Escape From New York comes before us as a sometimes chilling glance ahead into a world that is unfortunately far more plausible than the world the progressive-optimist brigade holds out for us. While the plot of Escape is silly—a terrorist seizes the American President’s plane, crashes it into Manhattan, leaving only the President alive, and the government in need of someone to go into the prison island to rescue Numero Uno—the vision is at once dyspeptic and convincing. The man chosen to find and rescue the President, and with him, somehow, not sufficiently cogently told to bear repeating here, to save the world, diverges 180 degrees from Superman and the sorcerer’s apprentice, veers even from the corrupted but still noble Indiana Jones. Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is anti-hero all the way, a very rotten apple indeed, just about to be consigned forever, as are all of Manhattan Prison’s inmates, to his fate in the urban jungle as gargantuan jail. He had, we learn, been decorated for bravery in the Battle of Leningrad—World War III, presumably—and the man responsible for patrolling (from across the rivers) the island prison, Bob Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), sees Snake as America’s one chance to save the President and humanity. There follows from this decision a suitably harrowing adventure in rescue, with the expectable confrontations with the scum-lord of the prison, Duke (Isaac Hayes), and a generous dose of bloodshed and savagery.

Snake is sinewy and snarly, one eye patched, the other glowering with hatred, and he is “heroic” because he will be killed in 24 hours if he doesn’t rescue the President. His only touch with magic is a handi-pak of electronic gadgetry, and he has only the usual plot devices of suffer-make to suffer-get out in the nick of time, to recommend him to the company of the other screen giants. His situation, however, and the status of a society that is so riddled with crime that it makes of our once greatest city our greatest testament to the failure of the American democracy, draw Escape From New York into this discussion.

All four movies share these elements: one man on whom everything depends; powers beyond that one man qua man that prove crucial to the happy resolution of the conflict; and a peril that is truly do or die. Superman must win or the world becomes the playpen of three villains with Kryptonite might; Indiana Jones must get to the Ark of the Covenant, containing the broken tablets of the Commandments and the majesty of Jehovah, or the Nazis will get it and, Hitler thinks, be invincible; Galen must kill the dragon or the dragon will gobble up the virgins of the village and the dragon’s children will, presumably, roam the land and wind up eating everybody; and Snake Plissken must get the President and the papers and tape cassette he carries or the world summit conference coming up will dissolve into another world war, presumably the final world war.

On Snake’s muscular shoulders, and through his forced compliance with a desperate plan standing little conceivable chance of success, rests the future. On many a thinner reed have the fates of nations depended, and as the old poem goes, for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the king was lost, and with it, the kingdom. Once there were heroes, all too mortal, often vicious, often, like Alexander, merciless to enemies, giddy when in love, prisoner to the noblest incarnation of the grape, but a hero just the same. Now there are only politicians and bureaucrats, game wardens in the human zoos we call metropoli, and public relations firms trying to make a silk purse out of John McEnroe. A week ago a young man, robbed of everything including his clothing, was chased by a crowd of 40 people hurling bottles and cans into a New York subway station. When he died, screaming, electrocuted by the live third rail, the crowd howled with laughter. That is New York City, July 1981. In Escape, when assaulting New York, 1997, Snake Plissken, for all that he is a vicious criminal, becomes a hero, a giant. It’s all in the timing.

LR’s film critic also reviews for WNAC-TV (CBS), WRKO-AM (ABC), and The Boston Herald American. He is host of “The David Brudnoy Show” on radio and of “Nightscene” on television, writes a nationally syndicated newspaper column, reviews books and restaurants, and lectures frequently on popular culture and politics. He serves as Deputy Sheriff of Suffolk County and also, again, as Deputy Sheriff of Middlesex County (Massachusetts). © Copyright David Brudnoy 1981