November 28, 2009 at 1:00 P.M. This essay was damaged over the Thanksgiving Holiday. It is likely that other writings have been mutilated. I will do my best to make necessary corrections over the weeks and months that follow. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
As a Cuban-American, I am embarassed that, probably, members of my own ethnic group in America are involved in this betrayal of U.S. Constitutional principles. This is especially true in light of the daily list of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan where young people are dying for these same principles, such as free speech, that are violated before your eyes. Many of those young people happen to be Latinos. Despite being a victim of these criminal tactics, I believe it is the families of those young service men and women injured or killed in battle (and the victims of 9/11) who deserve the apologies of these state censors and their protectors. Any financial recovery from such persons should, mostly, include donations to these families and other charities. The bulk of any recovery will not be kept by me. This is when you may wish to insert another "error" in this essay. Is this about envy?
The English Patient, Miramax, 1996, Director Anthony Minghella, Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristin Scott Thomas, Willem Dafoe, Naveem Andrews, Colin Firth, Julian Wadham. Script: Michael Ondaatje & Anthony Minghella. 9 Oscars. Another 41 awards were won globally.
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Random House-Vintage, 1992).
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt brace, 1924). ("The Cave.")
American cinema is not very good at tragedy these days. For a brief moment, however, Miramax and a few other film production companies elevated movies in the Hollywood tradition to the level of high art by depicting tragedy and complex portraits of life on screen honestly, yet in a manner that was, somehow, still commercially successful.
The English Patient may be the best movie of the nineties. I say this being well aware of the many fine films that appeared during that decade. The multiple layers of the story, the wisdom and pathos, comedy -- also diverse images of love -- and the play of symbols, the rich understanding of human relationships, together with an unflinching look at the profound suffering to which love can lead, to my knowledge, has not been surpassed in American films.
Anthony Minghella, Harvey Weinstein (Miramax's New York connection is a plus), developed this project from a novel by Michael Ondaatje. They succeeded in their efforts thanks to outstanding performances from a "star-studded" cast of internationally celebrated actors and artists, together with a first-rate script. (A new "error" was inserted in this essay review since last time I edited the work. I have corrected the "error" until next time.)
The English Patient speaks to me in powerful scenes that are so emotionally devastating that they are difficult to watch. I will focus on the plot and suggested associations with other narratives, both cinematic and literary. I will then turn to some Sufi verses recalled by the lush visual passages in this film and haunting musical soundtrack. Music does much of the work for the director in this "movie experience." The movie contains literary references to everything from Sir Richard Burton (translator of The Arabian Nights) to T.E. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and John Fowles ("Daniel Martin" in the Egyptian desert).
I am in the midst of a wonderful novel by the excellent American writer, Ward Just. This work explores many of the dilemmas of passion and loss depicted in The English Patient. I recommend Ward Just's Forgetfulness (New York & Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 2006). Anybody who makes movies should look to the works of Ward Just.
Cinematic references to David Lean and other great directors are also beautifully placed in the movie. The tribute to Lawrence of Arabia is clear with the train crossing the desert in what used to be known in the pre-digital era as "the third reel." The philosophical and psychological associations to the various "theories of love" (Plato, Dante, Freud) provide contrasts that may be located, first, in Shakespeare's comedies as well as tragedies, then, in Carl Jung, Irving Singer, Alfred Adler, George Santayana, Marcel Proust and many other explorers of extreme passionate states.
No one is better at communicating yearning or loss than Proust in Remembrance of Things Past. Memory is also a theme in this film. Time is another theme. Are these two themes really one? The contrast between relationships or kinds of love Almansy-Katharine versus Hana-Kip gestures at Shakespeare's contrast in "Much Ado About Nothing" and "As You Like It" between innocence and experience in romance. William Blake's "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience" may be another reference. Kris Kristopherson's early songs are redolent of the Romantic poets, epecially Blake, and were among the favorites of Anthony Minghella. ("What is Memory?")
Ralph Fiennes ("Count Lazlo Almansy") carrying the dead Kristin Scott-Thomas ("Katharine Clifton," spelled with an "a" in that classy English way) suggests King Lear holding the dead Cordelia. One cannot avoid thinking of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or Juliet in our tradition of "star-crossed" lovers.
9 Oscar nominations and nearly 100 million dollars at the box office provides ample proof that people still like to cry at movies. This is probably because we all do so much weeping in our "real" lives that no realistic cinema should spare us many tears, leaving us with a measure of solace and catharsis after the nightmares of history.
Seeing this movie post 9/11 is a different experience from my first encounter with the work in a movie theater during the happy-go-lucky nineties. This is one of the few movies from which I have seen men emerge in tears unable to exit the theater. Not me. Justified rage helps one to direct all energies of retribution towards the monsters who destroy the lives of others.
I once saw a man who had served in Italy during the war exit a movie theater where this film was shown. He was visibly moved and shaken by the experience of the movie. You never know about people's inner lives.
Most fittingly, war "produces" a blasted library -- where a partly destroyed piano is surrounded by unread books covered in dust -- the piano keys are touched, lovingly, to produce the notes of Johan Sebastian Bach's very Christian music. The sounds of civilization float into the air amidst the madness of war, only to be interrupted by the need to disarm a bomb in that broken piano. This image is what is known as a symbol. Each of us may produce his or her most beautiful music in a physically (or emotionally) broken condition. ("'Oblivion': A Movie Review.")
We are the broken piano. We are "The English Patient" who is not English.
I. "Each night I cut my heart out -- but in the morning it was full again."
"July, 1936."
"There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire."
The English Patient, p. 97.
"The heart is an organ of fire." A plane floats above a surreal desert landscape. "The desert is an ocean," Arabic folklore teaches this wisdom. To cross the desert is to navigate an ocean. At several points in the story the desert serves as metaphor for the ocean of time, which we must cross, as indeed humanity has crossed and re-crossed this desert made of centuries. Swimmers are depicted on a cave wall navigating through history which is a "river of becoming." Cave paintings are found near a "mountain in the shape of a woman's back." This imagery is prophetic for the journey that we are undertaking in this movie. "What is that place at the base of a woman's throat?" It is the place where we must live.
A man (Almansy, played by Mr. Fiennes) pilots an airplane with a single other passenger, a dead woman. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, "in the end is my beginning." The plane is shot down by German soldiers. The wreckage of the plane contains a badly burned survivor, rescued by Arabs and delivered to English and Canadian forces. Almansy is kept alive in order that he may die slowly, painfully, in the condition of a fragment of charred flesh. Amidst this enormous effort at murder on a mass scale, global warfare, there are persons working -- just as diligently -- to keep the wounded alive. This is civilization in a schizoid condition. Once they recover, the wounded are sent back into battle to kill or be killed. Pat Barker's novels are an obvious reference for those interested in this insanity.
American physicians assist in keeping alive persons who are tortured at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo by other American physicians. This allows for the continuation of the tortures on an indefinite basis. Only on very few occasions have the tortures resulted in death. This is insane and evil. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "American Doctors and Torture.")
Similar reasoning may be involved in the continuing defacements of these essays, planned persistent infliction of nerve damage, frustration through censorship, or destruction of healing and truthful literary work. These "methods" of sustained psychological torture are usually combined with economic harm and slanders aimed at destroying both self-esteem and personal relationships for victims. These crimes are only possible because of the complicity of guilty bystanders and corrupt institutions, or officials who judge the "ethics" of victims. This is also insane and evil. ("What is it like to be tortured?")
I know what it is like to experience efforts to destroy one's identity and peace of mind as well as occasional kindness and sympathy from friends. Such a besieged state is a prescription for psychosis and disintegration. It is the condition of our divided Western culture, torn between loyalty to traditional values that once held us together against the allure of a trendy and dangerous nihilism that licenses cruelty by calling it a "post-humanistic" and "scientific" theory of "human animals." ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "Is Humanism Still Possible?")
This is the nihilism that breaks the piano of civilization, producing only discordant and shrill noise where once there was music. On 9/11 persons cared for the injured, made coffee for firefighters and police officers, as others in this same city, only days later, sought to hunt for valuable items, like gold watches, that might be stolen from corpses. Many were arrested for such crimes. This is when you should insert another "error" in this work, New Jersey. ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
Recollections by Almansy permit the director to use time-spirals and flashbacks to flesh out the story of this unusual "Englishman," who speaks German and cannot remember what happened to him or why. Amnesia is a common reaction to great emotional trauma. Many victims of 9/11 have been forever altered by the effects of events unfolding on that Tuesday morning. A man with tears in his eyes spoke of losing his young wife in Tower One without the opportunity to say goodbye. ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")
If you are a resident of a country incensed at the actions of the United States government, who silently approves of the terrorist actions because you hate Americans -- many Americans also disapprove of their government's policies by the way -- would you care to explain to that weeping man why the murder of his wife is justified by your political opinions? How would you explain to a Pakistani why the murder of his or her family by a robot bomb is just fine? ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles.")
The English Patient is an eloquent articulation of humanism. The artificiality and cruelty of powerful nations and abstract causes, experiments, theories, and the ordinary as well as "real" persons who must suffer because of such blindness and stupidity by powerful men and governments. This insight about the universality of decency as well as the opposite of decency is John Le Carre's great subject. ("America's Holocaust" and "Dehumanization.")
"You cannot explore from the air, Maddox." Life would be easy if persons were abstractions who did not love or suffer. Men and women are the only real countries. Nationalities are created (by us) in relationships that become communities. One or two women in a lifetime are permitted entry within my national borders.
In "The Third Man," Orson Wells as "Holly" sees people as ants from the great height of a ferris wheel. "Would you care if someone offered you $15,000 for one of those ants to stop moving?"
I know lawyers in New Jersey who would not hesitate to take the money, sleeping like babies afterwards. Right, Alex Booth? Jose Ginarte? I will be happy to name them. Many have become judges or ethics officials. Some are probably among my censors.
Unfortunately, I have been obstructed in my efforts to reach my site today. Censorship and suppression of Constitutionally-protected speech is my daily reality. This merely allows me to renew my commitment to struggle for the rights that are guaranteed to me under the Constitution. I cannot say how many essays have been damaged today, again. I will do my best to make all necessary corrections.
The narrative lines of the movie are "intertextual" and overlapping. They are woven together in the end. A nurse loses everyone she loves to war and must withdraw to breathe in peace. She will care for the "English" patient alone, until his death. Gradually, Almansy begins to recover his memories. Romantic love, eros, is contrasted with filia and caritas, the compassion and concern of the healer. Brotherly affection and "fellowship" expressed by "Kip" (Naveen Andrews) for "Hardy" (Kevin Whately) is balanced by his romance with "Hana" (Juliete Binoche).
Layers of complexity add to the mystery of identity. Who is this "English patient"? Does it matter whether he is really English? E.M. Forster says:
"One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract -- that is the main difference between the world of personal relationships and business relationships. It is a matter for the heart which signs no documents."
"What I believe," in Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966), pp. 68-69.
"If it comes to a choice between betraying my country or betraying my friend," E.M. Forster writes, "I hope that I should have the courage to betray my country." ("Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin" and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
How much do you love a woman? How far will you go for your child? What is your "country"? If you remain true to the principles of the U.S. Constitution, then I doubt that you will ever face these dilemmas. One lesson of this film is that such conflicts disappear when we realize that humanity transcends nationalities, races, creeds, and that love of our neighbors, respect for their humanity, makes betrayal and evil impossible. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
From the air, persons are abstractions, wooden soldiers, things, Posner's "objects," rats in a laboratory -- Americans, Germans, Hungarians, Canadians, Cubans, Africans, Indians.
From the ground, there are only persons who hunger and thirst, suffer, love, fear, long for and need one another, persons who are also dying, slowly, as pieces of charred flesh -- like me -- and maybe, like you. Care for a condensed milk sandwich? ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
A visitor arrives named "Caravaggio" (Willem Dafoe) who has lost his thumbs to a torturer. The torturer represents the "new world order" ushered into history by the Nazis. "You give me something, information; and I give you something, your thumbs." Contract. Bargained for consideration. Offer and acceptance. Eminently rational. Not legally valid, alas, as the transaction is against public policy. Nevertheless, the agreement is representative of the "impersonal" world in which we live today. Nothing done to you by the State is ever personal. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?" and soon: "What is it like to be raped?")
"Let us have no nonsense about ideals," I was told at an Internet forum. Values are relative. There is no love, only sexual impulse. Religions are nonsense. Science is what makes Hiroshima possible. Men and women are only animals. Only a fool risks dying for a woman he loves. There are plenty of women in the world. Everything is relative because right and wrong is all about power. This is non-relativistically true even though there is no truth other than relative truth. History has made all of us characters in a novel by George Orwell: "Slavery is freedom." "This is for your own good." "Weapons of Mass Deception in Iraq." "You are unethical!" is spoken by a torturer and thief. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Caravaggio has come to kill Almansy who is mistakenly believed to have spied for the Germans to whom he gave a map in exchange for an airplane to rescue his love. Almansy has recovered enough memory to explain that his goal was to reach the woman he loved, who was allowed to die, painfully, through the stupidity and malice of idiotic as well as cruel bureaucrats. Katharine was an English woman killed by British efficiency and rules, by impersonality, indifference, disdain for a foreigner with a funny name and unusual social pedigree:
"He thinks he's better than everyone. He is a loner. He is weird. He reads too much. He likes strange paintings and music. He is a fool. He is a child. He is Romantic. He is never going to get ahead. We must not trust him."
Almansy has betrayed the English? Or is it the Germans? The International Sand Club? Hana betrays her oath with the mercy killing of her patient. Kip betrays his partner by not accompanying him on his final mission.
Almansy's memory returns only when he does not betray his love, choosing the unbearable agony of lost love, suffering, the mortal condition, becoming St. Sebastian pierced by the arrows of his desire and self-giving, kenosis, in order to own the truth of his own life. The man who abjured possessions is his own possession in the end: "Love can only be kept by being given away." ("'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
II. "A man shall be as rivers of water in a dry place ..."
"... whatever the state of Anthony's specific faith, he retained a far deeper one in a universal absolute. His seeming obliviousness to time, interval, to all the outward rest, was in fact a mere function of that: what I ask is timeless ... a preposterous, but true, demand of personal moral being. You may wonder at me, laugh at me, despise me for professing both a faith and a discipline the world increasingly despises: but that is neither who I am at this moment nor yet why we are here. Perhaps it was the proximity of death; yet it seemed to Dan as if he had always been mistaken in one assumption: that this man was a philosopher merely by intellect and a cast of mind. Underneath, and movingly, lay something very primitive and simple, of the innocence of childhood; and also of true adulthood, of that other philosopher who had once preferred hemlock to a lie."
John Fowles, "Catastasis," in Daniel Martin (New York: New American Library, 1977), p. 189.
Ralph Fiennes is magnificent as Count Almansy. He is consumed, besotted by love for a woman, overwhelmed, shattered long before his accident. The passion for "Katharine Clifton" who is played with great sympathy and compassion by Ms. Scott-Thomas -- who is equally divided within her soul between conflicting emotions and loyalties -- is symbolic of the divine calling to love-through-self-emptying, which is the theme of Sufi mysticism, evoked (deliberately) through allusions to the great poetry of Islamic devotion. The poet Rumi offers an image of unmistakable "same-sex love" as metaphor for the love of man for God and God for man: "In Arabic, the meaning of Shamsuddin is 'Sun of the religion'; and that Sun is the Sun of the universe, or God. [The desert?]"
The poet pours his soul into this verse:
"Not alone I keep on singing
Shamsuddin and Shamsuddin,
But the nightingale in the gardens
sings, the partridge in the hills.
Day of splendor: Shamsuddin!
turning heaven: Shamsuddin!
Mine of jewels: Shamsuddin,
and Shamsuddin is day and night."
Here is the key passage, typically associating romantic love with love of God:
"Although he sang of Shams, Rumi continually found replacements for his mentor, human beings through whom he could pass away into God. One of these, an illiterate goldsmith named Salahuddin Zarkub, was particularly repugnant to Rumi's followers. Rumi, however, defended him as the means of fana [disappearance] into God:"
Notice the beauty of these verses, as well as those which follow by Nizami, the Persian Sufist whose inspiration is a woman:
"He who came in a red frock [feminine] in years past,
He came this year in a brown garb [masculine].
The Turk [enemy] about whom you had heard that time
Appeared as an Arab [friend] this year ...
The wine is one, only the bottles are different --
How beautifully does this wine [eros] intoxicate us!"
Nizami writes:
"Love, if not true, is but a plaything of the senses, fading like youth.
Time perishes, not true love. All may be imagination and delusion,
but not love. The charcoal brazier on which it burns is eternity [now]
itself, without beginning or end."
John R. Haule, "Romantic Love and the Love of God," in Pilgrimage of the Heart: The Path of Romantic Love (Boston & London: Shambala, 1992), pp. 6-15.
Islamic Sufism is among the most profound metaphysical poetry in world literature. In the Sufi view:
"Everything in the world is in some mysterious way connected with Love [Love is capitalized like a proper name!] and expresses either the longing of the lover or sings of the beauty and glory of the eternal beloved who hides his [or her] face behind a thousand forms." (Haule, p. 3.)
The aesthetic and religious impulses are aligned. This is dramatized in the scene where Hana is lifted on a rope to contemplate the frescoes by Giotto, I believe, or perhaps, Mantegna. The entry into the womb-like space of the cave where prehistoric man worshipped and created art prepares viewers for the church, where art restores the spirit of a woman in wartime.
Finally, the return to the mythical cave is the return to the earth, in death, where the cave-mother receives us in a final embrace. The symbol of the cave is one of the richest in Western literature and philosophy, since Plato's allegory in The Republic to Dante's ascent in The Divine Comedy, all the way to E.M. Forster in A Passage to India. Christ is resurrected and exists in a tomb (or womb) that is a cave. The "English" patient's acceptance of death comes with the full restoration of memory as the choice of eternal suffering for the love that he both releases -- as his life ends -- and keeps forever, now, and from which he will not be parted. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")
