We all have them. Some of us have them. Our September 11 memories.
Brock University. I was just back from sabbatical. First class. Scheduled film to introduce shot-by-shot analysis: John Ford's My Darling Clementine. A three-hour class on a 90-odd minute flick.It's an accessible popular genre film -- just right to show how much can be pulled out of what seems simple. That was my thinking.
Students and faculty were up on the 13th floor and in the cafeteria and in residences and some halls glued to tv's. I'm trying to shift my focus from that reality screen to the one impending in class. Hard.
The class meets. I open with an obvious acknowledgment of what we should really be thinking about instead. How our world will never be the same again. That we've been radically shaken in our confidence of a future.
But we're here, in a class, and perhaps the analytic skills we use on a film -- yes, even an old Western -- may be just what we need now and tomorrow more than ever.
But I'm feeling a little guilty that I picked this film as a starter. Haven't watched it for a while but remembered it as both rich and ready, accessible.
Now it seems mainly escapist. The simple days of the Old West, amiable virtue in Henry Fonda, the innocent America.
Then the comic relief kicks in. The town drunk, Indian Charlie, is running wild in the saloon. Sheriff Earp (of whom I'm Fonda) has to go restore global order. Simple. Strides in, kicks him in the pants, out the door.
Wham -- we're in the new reality. The "Indian Charlie" as unrestrained threat immediately provokes our sense of historic racial discrimination and dehumanization. But today he's more than what we called pre-civilized. He's the terrorist. The disrupter of order. And he's an enemy from within.
So there we went. The comic margin took us anew to the political/philosophic heart of the film. We weren't imposing a political context om Ford, because his Westerns are rich in that. We found a new, immediate currency there.
I hope I didn't credit myself with foresight.
