Theeb

Theeb is a coming of age film with two key differences from our familiar genre.

The Bedouin boy’s maturing into an adult involves different criteria than those in the West. Essentially, the adulthood this boy assumes is tribal loyalty not our overriding value — personal fulfilment. As well, our culture’s “manhood” often centres upon learning to relate to women. There are no women in this film. Manhood is strictly between, among and for men. 

Theeb has no mother, but also no father, just two authoritative older brothers. When he mischievously follows his brother Hussein into a desert mission he for the first time abandons his childhood security. His adventure is premature because he has not yet learned to shoot, just to try to aim. In the crunch, then, he cannot help Hussein, just hinder his self-defence against the thieves. 

Theeb shows his growing ingenuity when he escapes the bandits, hides in and escapes from the well, and manages to deal with the wounded thief. First Theeb serves his dead brother, protecting him from the vultures by burying him in sand and marking him with stones. This tribal gesture proves his sense of duty and service.

Then he and the outlaw negotiate a relationship, gradually outgrowing distrust. The boy learns stoicism by helping the bandit remove his bullet and cauterize the wound. They share bread. Theeb accepts the outlaw’s story when they pass Arab soldiers. He may even admire the man, as when he learns from him how to navigate by the stars. He may be slipping into a filial relationship. That stops when the bandit tells the Turkish officer Theeb is his son. The pretended connection reminds Theeb of their difference.

The Bedouin boy has no experience with money. He discards the bag of coins he finds on a corpse. Most dramatically, he rejects the Turk’s offer of a coin, even after his “father” has ordered him to accept it. Instead Theeb goes back out to the camel, finds the bandit’s pistol and when he emerges from the army outpost kills him. “He killed my brother,” Theeb explains, at which the Turkish officer lets him go free.  

In the last shot Theeb rides off on the bandit’s camel with the authority and posture of an adult. When he earlier rode behind his brother Theeb looked like a bundle, a babe, just hanging on. When he first tries to ride off the camel refused his control. At the end the camel obeys him, as if sensitive to Theeb’s adult authority — or aware he killed and replaced the camel’s master.

In the West a boy becomes a man by learning self-control, responsibility, forgiveness and an honour based on established moral principles. The honour Theeb recovers in the Turkish office is the overriding value of family honour, which here means tribal vengeance. Tempted to survive as the bandit’s protege he instead acts upon his tribe’s implicit command to avenge his brother. Theeb assumes the risks of returning home across a vast, impersonal and dangerous desert. 

As ‘Theeb’ means ‘wolf,’ our hero is caught in the tension between the lone wolf, which is our modern hero, and the pack, which here would be the tribe. Lines like “the strong eat the weak” emphasize the tribe’s pack and primitive mentality.

The second difference is that this coming of age applies not just to the hero Theeb but to the Bedouins as a people. Their society is presented on the turning point between their traditional life and the modern. As the film is set during WW I, the nomadic Bedouins are themselves a rootless, borderless society ill-adjusted to the modern (aka Adult) world. Their simple lives and ancient ways connote a childlike, undeveloped society. They don’t use money. Their last jobs are guiding pilgrims but the new phenomenon of the railroad is ending that. 

  Trapped between two more developed cultures, the British and the Turkish imperialists, the Bedouin seem even more childlike in their unfamiliarity with those societies’ ambitions and conflicts and with their equipment (like cigarettes, a lighter, a sentimental locket — and the detonator the Brit drives Theeb away from). 

The imperialists shrink the Bedouins. Theeb’s bandit friend seems heroic in his survival, self-healing and swagger. But he shrinks to a junk-dealing beggar when he enters the Turk’s office. The Brit was planning to blow up the Turkish railroad, the Turk pays a few coins for the stolen detonator, and the adept Bedouin is a helpless unaware innocent caught between them. 

When Theeb rides homeward to emblematically crosses the intersection of the camel prints and the railroad tracks, the old natural and the looming technological.

How would the Bedouins come of age, as Theeb does? How is maturing into a higher level of maturity and knowledge different for a class than for a boy?
     The society has no models, no trustworthy family seniors, from whom to learn how to negotiate among the alien and destructive cultures. Unless the unworldly tribes find a way to mature into the modern world they doom their children to the archaic values they’ve inherited — and wasted lives. In this light, the film about the Bedouins hovering on the edge of modernity the way a boy hovers on manhood is as pertinent to the contemporary Middle East as to the early 20th Century. Their world, after all, has since then not changed as much as ours has.
     And yet, as our wars continue to rage there -- and we continue to abet the suppression of the powerless in the Arab world, indeed everywhere but in Israel -- we haven’t matured much either.

The Witch

  Robert Eggers’ first feature film is an astonishing achievement: It’s a Seventeenth Century film. If a 17th Century American colonist had our technology this is the film he would have made. 

Everything in it is 17th Century: the characters, the language, the world view, the life, the clothing, the props, the lighting, the faith. 

Mainly the world view. There is no sign of modern knowledge, science or medicine within the film. The only modern understanding is what some members of the audience may bring to it. Not anyone from the Republican/Tory Right, though — it’s their knowledge and belief the film depicts in its total fidelity to the 17th Century. That, of course, is why the film was made today. Our current political debate makes Puritan religion a perfect emblem of contemporary pre-Enlightenment America. 

The film reminds us that America’s putative independence remained rooted in religiosity. When the constitution deliberately separated the state from religion its intention was not to privilege any one religion over the others, not to free the land from all religion. In God they still trusted but they didn’t want to advantage any one god or path. This the ultra-Christian modern demagogues have self-servingly forgotten.

The religiosity smacks through the opening scene. A Puritan court — black and white in its religious morality and duds — banishes a family from the plantation because the father has been even more religious and demanding than they are. 

The banished William and Katherine, with their five children,  carve out a homestead in the wilderness. At first they seem the model of self-reliance. But when things go wrong, when they make mistakes, when nature proves noncompliant, they can only blame the devil and his spawn. That’s why we have religion: to blame the devil for our failures and to court God with our arrogant humility. 

Because this is a 17th Century film we watch the witch ritually abuse the stolen infant, we see the siren tempt son Caleb and choke him on the forbidden fruit (a desiccated Delicious), and we hear the witch descend in the wind to kill the goats and carry off the twins. What in a modern film would be supernatural horror in this 17th Century world is nature. 

What begins in nature ends in supernature. First the ram Black Phillip kills the father. That’s natural, what often happens when an animal previously out-rassled by his master, gets a chance for revenge. 

But then nature is ratchetted up to superstition (aka religion). We hear the black devil ram seduce the oldest, Thomasin, and carry her off to join the powerful coven of sexually free women that terrifies domestic normalcy.  That sexual paranoia, of course, is the psychological source of the legends of witches. They represent a rampant female sexuality that no man can control — so they must be demonized. 

Certainly never elected.

Labyrinth of Lies

The original German title of Labyrinth of Lies is Labyrinth of Silence (Schweigens). It’s an important distinction. A discrete (aka cowardly) silence may prove more evil and more conducive to evil than lies are. And lies are bad enough. 

Oddly, this German film marks the directorial debut of an Italian actor, Giulio Ricciarelli. Germany so embraced the film as to nominate it for the Oscars. As Italy was an Axis partner of the Nazis, the Italian director has his own national point to make. Indeed Germany stands in for any nation with a shame in its past it can either bury or confront.  

Set in 1958, the film records the difficulties that an artist, a journalist, a young prosecutor and a courageous district attorney overcame to bring 19 former Auschwitz SS officers to justice.  Of the 19, 17 were convicted but none expressed remorse. The trial made a complacent and ignorant public aware of what “Auschwitz” meant, the horrors committed there and its guilty perpetrators, now free and thriving in the new Germany. 

Of course, unlike Austria, Germany since then undertook an intensive, painful examination of its Nazi past. The film reminds us that the nation’s current sense of responsibility was a hard-fought campaign. The social and political establishment was determined to bury its horrid secrets, to leave its criminals unpunished, in the name of moving forward. But as the DA insists, democracy is poisoned not by exposing its secrets but by burying them. Expediency rarely proves moral.

Here the historic film reflects upon the present Germany. Angela Merkel is undertaking a tightrope act, admitting hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees yet trying to preserve Germany’s modern culture. Offering the refuge is generous, but the attendant problems should not be buried in silence. The refugees bring along a new antisemitism, a new sapping of social and economic resources, a new threat to the nation’s culture and identity. Dealing with this challenge requires the openness and courage that confronting the nation’s old Nazis did. 

The heroic young prosecutor Johann Radmann begins as a young traffic case handler with a firm sense of justice and a willingness to invest himself in justice. That’s why he insists the young woman pay the mandated fine but gives her the money to make it.  The handsome young Aryan is a proper image of modern Germany confronting its past.

As he pursues the investigation into the Nazis’ buried past, his external obstacles are joined by some personal ones. His boss scolds him for single-mindedly pursuing Mengeles instead of prosecuting the lesser villains he can. For justice Radmann still has some ego to rein in. 

The files so overwhelm him they leave barely enough room on his single bed to admit his new girlfriend, Marlene. That she’s the girl he initially bailed out at court proves that virtue is sometimes not its only reward. That she becomes a dressmaker for the rich ex-Nazis’ wives represents the country’s restyling of itself, with willful denial of its past. The women like the economy flaunt a pretty front to hide its ugly source.

Radmann destroys this relationship when he confronts Marlene with her father’s Nazi past. She suspects enough when she recoils in disgust from his monthly drunken songfests with his old army buddies. But the full cruel truth drives her away. When she later brings Radmann his patched but irreparable jacket, she’s suggesting the possibility of redemption not just in their relationship but in Germany. The German drinking song contrasts to the young peoples’ German versions of US rock’n’roll (e.g., “Tweedle Dee Dee”) and the haunting strains of a ghostly Hebrew prayer.

Radmann also alienates himself from his journalist friend for having been a passive 17-year-old at Auschwitz. At their artist friend’s insistence they reunite to say Kaddish on the artist’s behalf at that site. As with Marlene’s father, Radmann must learn that people are imperfect, that circumstances can contaminate them. 

Radmann briefly leaves the trial project when he learns his own father was a Nazi party member. “All the lawyers were,” he’s told, but he can’t bear his disillusionment with the man he’d revered. 

Redemption means that even the flawed can seek justice. We can’t expect purity. “The lesson of Auschwitz is that we have to do the right thing.”

The campaign begins when an artist recognizes a schoolteacher as an Auschwitz guard. The police and school officials decline to punish him, with various excuses. Radmann’s insistence that the SS guard should not be teaching children is borne out in the arrest scene. There he’s separating his charges into two lines, right and left, as he separated the Jews at Auschwitz into lines either for work or to be gassed. He hits a student in the head for confusing his direction. Unchecked evil only repeats itself.

Radmann is briefly tempted to abandon his quest for justice for a rewarding career in corporate law. Behind his new boss’s desk is an abstract painting, like a horizontal Rothko, where a vast black dominates a gray side, an emblem of the company’s morality. He recoils at having to work with the scumbag who tried to free the teacher. 

Before Radmann can return to his idealistic mission he has to rediscover humility and the moral compass he had briefly lost. To err is human, to pursue even an imperfect justice the best we mortals can do. 

Hail, Caesar!

The Coens’ Hail, Caesar! may be the most serious comedy in the theatres today. It confronts our essential dilemma: how to live a life of faith and service in the corrupt modern world. 1950s Hollywood, of course, is the essence of modernity, projected images of virtue and the fantasy of piety.

The two historic figures in this fiction embody two competing faiths. The Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is a practising Catholic. In the opening and late scenes he’s at confession, seeking absolution for having lied to his wife and relapsed into smoking. Even the priest advises that his daily confession is too much. Ironically, his confessed sins — however deeply troubling to him — are rather trivial for a man engaged 24/7 in abetting all sorts of sins and crimes, bribing the cops, paying off kidnappers and blackmailers. Not to mention neglecting his family and principles. Mannix’s religion is quite safely detached from his daily deeds. But he is ardently faithful. 

The other, more marginal historic figure is Prof. Marcuse (John Bluthal), presumably Herbert Marcuse, the influential Marxist philosopher who advocates social revolution against the suppression by organized religion. Instead of rendering unto Caesar (that’s the historic Caesar, not the one in the Hollywood world inhabited by the actor George Clooney plays) the things that are Caesar’s, or giving them to the church, the communists would grab them to share out among the citizenry. For that they need to overthrow the religious, economic and political order.  (Aside, pace G.K. Chesterton: The trouble with socialism as with Christianity is that it has never really been tried.)  

Mannix’s dilemma takes the form of a choice between two jobs. He can continue as the amoral and illegal Hollywood fixer or he can accept the far easier and financially more rewarding career offered by Lockheed Airlines. Mannix asks which job would better serve God’s will. Flying the civilian skies or the even more secular job of protecting the Hollywood stars in the profane Hollywood galaxy. Spoiler alert: he picks the latter profane.

Confirming the film’s religious core is the scene where Mannix convenes a panel of religious leaders to advise upon (i.e., throw their public support behind) the film about Christ. The Greek orthodox priest doesn’t “believe” the chariot race. The Protestant accepts it all. The Catholic priest quibbles over the nature of Jesus. Of course, the rabbi finds the whole discussion pointless but won’t skip the chance to debate and kibbitz. Still, an end credit respects the rabbi’s first argument: "This motion picture contains no visual depiction of the godhead.” That should also appease Islam. The director’s version was “Squint against the grandeur.” 

Mannix realizes his calling when he slaps the kidnapped star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) out of his newly injected Communism. Serving God is serving man. And vice (so to speak) versa. Mannix finds a religious fulfillment in maintaining the public’s dream life and his coworkers’ and bosses’ rewarding careers. He will serve God on earth not in the Lockheed skies or the religions' heavens. The secular faith emanates from the last shot, a water tower reading “Behold” against the (unusually) clear Hollywood skies.

Two scenes validate Mannix’s choice. His pitch from Lockheed’s rep includes the promising future the company sees in the recent atomic bomb tests on Bikini Beach. So the easier job may not be cleaner after all. 

And for all its tawdriness, greed and sinfulness, Hollywood is still capable of enriching its audience’s spiritual lives. This we see when the crew and cast members are individually enrapt and moved to tears by the climactic speech by the converted centurion (Clooney as Whitlock as the centurion). Whitlock smashes the illusion by forgetting the essential word: “faith.” But until then, his performance has created a moment in which even the most hardened observers, the people working the falseness of the set, are delivered into belief. Hollywood’s illusion can be as spiritual as the religions’. 

Mannix’s division within himself has two parallels. Tilda Swinton plays two twin sisters, Thora and Thessaly Thacker, furiously rival gossip columnists, who mask their difference with their posturing and garb. As Mannix is a man torn in two, the twins are two in one. That's a secular parody of the contentious division of the Trinity.  

The film itself is a division. It bears the title of the film the Clooney character is making. But frequently a scene erupts from another film, another genre, like the underwater ballet or the sailors’ homoerotic dance number.  Initially we don’t know if the scene is “life” or a film staging. The film is less the traditional “film within a film” than an exercise in cinematic illusions, a celebration of classic Hollywood fantasy. Hence the variety of popular genres, like the musical, western, romance. 

We’re always watching the artifice of reality here. In “real life” scenes actors do their performance pieces, like the actress with her illicit photo shoot, the cowboy star entertaining himself with his lariat act, then his date with a noodle version. Though an executive not an actor, Mannix spends his life “performing” to keep his vagrant charges’ private lives on the studio script. Hence his machinations around an unwed pregnant star. 

When the classical actor played by Ralph Fiennes tries to coax a salon performance out of the drawling cowboy star, we have two superb actors performing bad acting. “Would that it were so simple” proves impossibly complicated.

But there is also the reality of artifice, like the dramatic effect of Whitlock’s performance. More deeply, the film presents Hollywood as the dream factory that sustains the ambivalent social effects of capitalism. When the Communists abduct and brainwash Whitlock their naive idealism threatens the fabric of American life. So there is virtue and social responsibility in Mannix’s recovery of the vacuous star, his defence of American capitalism and his choice of serving God through Hollywood rather than through Lockheed.

This is a very timely film in two respects. First, it rebuts Trumbo, which sanitized its hero by downplaying the foolishness of the Hollywood communists whose faith ignored the shocking reality of Stalinism, the show trials, the dangerous spies. They were the blind idealists Lenin had called “useful idiots.” This film presents Hollywood’s Communist scriptwriters as those idiots, dazzled by their own cliches and rhetoric. When the sea swallows their $100,000 blackmail money their useful idiocy proves futile and absurd.
     Secondly, the film’s treatment of Hollywood piety is a timely corrective to the Republican campaign for the presidency. Their entire slate, especially leaders Trump and Cruz, project the fake faith and spurious piety the commercialized religion of Hollywood plays out here. They’ll feel unjustly justified that the gay director proves a Commie.