Love versus honour: Donnie Brasco and Sling Blade
104.1Abstract (summary)
Two excellent new films provide contrasting takes on an archetypal conflict: between love and honour. In Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, the dilemma involves a kind of love between a Mafia functionary and an FBI undercover agent posing as the eponymous hoodnik. In Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade, a retarded murderer finds a way to unite love and honour when he kills the town bully. In some respects, these new films deal with a dilemma as old as humanity, in which love and death are destined for a romantic rendezvous. IF this theme seems familiar, perhaps it is because Thomas Hurka touches on many of these issues in the preceding article. He opines that Casablanca is a more moral movie than The English Patient. In the old classic, the hero (Bogart) eschews his one great passion (Bergman) to go fight the good fight (versus the Nazis). In Anthony Minghella's widely esteemed new film (and in its source, the Michael Ondaatje novel), the spin-coat (i.e., a turncoat who keeps on turning) Hungarian Count Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) betrays his current people (the Allies) for a plane, in order to return to his now-dead beloved in a desert cave. Professor Hurka inspired a heated debate on the editorial page of the Globe and Mail, and most readers sided with the newer movie. They argued that humanity and love are more important than the slavish pursuit of national causes, however idealistic. They did not cite the Nuremberg convention. Of course, this love-honour debate is one of our oldest dilemmas. One assumes that King David rassled with it for a few seconds before going for Bathsheba -- and dispatching her inconvenient hubby. Even before that, the esteemed patriarch Abraham may have worked through it before passing off his beautiful wife Sarah as his sister so that a powerful king could enjoy her more freely. Or maybe not: he did it twice. If not then, perhaps he felt torn between his love for his only begotten son Isaac and his sense of duty towards Jehovah, when God demanded the boy's sacrifice. But our biblical texts don't spell out for us motives and psychology. Those are modern inventions, like fibre-optics. The implicit conflict between love and duty was left for later literature to propound. When it did, the preferred value was usually duty. That is the safer moral to wave. It proffers a value other than self-indulgence. As usual, Shakespeare covers it all rather thoroughly. For example, there's a five-line transition scene in Othello (III, ii) where we see the island ruler coolly at work. Nothing much happens. The Moor is efficiently doing his job before his jealousy overtakes him and he puts out Desdemona's lights. He even claims to kill his beloved because of the call of duty: "Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men" (v, ii). Again, Professor Harold Goddard has sharply summarized Antony and Cleopatra as "the power of personality [A. and C.] versus the impersonality of power" [the Caesarean section]. For John Dryden, on the other hand, if those lovers' story was All for Love, it was The World Well Lost. We don't always get Shakespeare's complexity in the debate. When Jonathan Swift, impatient with literary conventions, visits the romantic heroine, he comes away shocked that "Celia, Celia, Celia -- !" performs a bodily function that apparently generations of shepherds and their poetasters never realized. Unlike the many historical cases one might adduce (the Duke of Windsor, for example, or Eddie Fisher), in the perennial film myth a code of honour usually transcends the personal interest -- i.e., Love. Indeed when we do get a hero who is nakedly self-interested, such as Budd Schulberg's Sammy or Mordecai Richler's Duddy, we're supposed to strike a critical detachment from them. Perhaps it's because in life our self-indulgence prefers us on the low road that in fiction we pretend to the high. There may be something in us that does not like the truth. Hence, "The truth shall make you flee." Hence mythopoeia, and the proliferation of codes in popular arts that blatantly contradict reality. In days of yore, when women were vessels -- the weaker vassal and preferred objects of plunder -- the literature perpetuated the code of Courtly Love. This hid the systemic abuse of women behind platonic ideals and the selfless worship of fair damsels. Armed with his rhyme book, the swine was hidden in the swain. And so to Hollywood, which has diligently flogged codes of honour in its attempt to ennoble the human animal -- and in the process make a fast big buck. Many a tear has been shed over the contrary pull of honour and love in the movies. Back in the 1950s, in My Son John, Helen Hayes played a mother who had to wrestle with her discovery that her son was -- a closet communist! Her duty toward her threatened country loomed against her motherly love.
Two excellent new films provide contrasting takes on an archetypal conflict: between love and honour. In Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, the dilemma involves a kind of love between a Mafia functionary and an FBI undercover agent posing as the eponymous hoodnik. In Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade, a retarded murderer finds a way to unite love and honour when he kills the town bully. In some respects, these new films deal with a dilemma as old as humanity, in which love and death are destined for a romantic rendezvous. IF this theme seems familiar, perhaps it is because Thomas Hurka touches on many of these issues in the preceding article. He opines that Casablanca is a more moral movie than The English Patient. In the old classic, the hero (Bogart) eschews his one great passion (Bergman) to go fight the good fight (versus the Nazis). In Anthony Minghella's widely esteemed new film (and in its source, the Michael Ondaatje novel), the spin-coat (i.e., a turncoat who keeps on turning) Hungarian Count Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) betrays his current people (the Allies) for a plane, in order to return to his now-dead beloved in a desert cave. Professor Hurka inspired a heated debate on the editorial page of the Globe and Mail, and most readers sided with the newer movie. They argued that humanity and love are more important than the slavish pursuit of national causes, however idealistic. They did not cite the Nuremberg convention. Of course, this love-honour debate is one of our oldest dilemmas. One assumes that King David rassled with it for a few seconds before going for Bathsheba -- and dispatching her inconvenient hubby. Even before that, the esteemed patriarch Abraham may have worked through it before passing off his beautiful wife Sarah as his sister so that a powerful king could enjoy her more freely. Or maybe not: he did it twice. If not then, perhaps he felt torn between his love for his only begotten son Isaac and his sense of duty towards Jehovah, when God demanded the boy's sacrifice. But our biblical texts don't spell out for us motives and psychology. Those are modern inventions, like fibre-optics. The implicit conflict between love and duty was left for later literature to propound. When it did, the preferred value was usually duty. That is the safer moral to wave. It proffers a value other than self-indulgence. As usual, Shakespeare covers it all rather thoroughly. For example, there's a five-line transition scene in Othello (III, ii) where we see the island ruler coolly at work. Nothing much happens. The Moor is efficiently doing his job before his jealousy overtakes him and he puts out Desdemona's lights. He even claims to kill his beloved because of the call of duty: "Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men" (v, ii). Again, Professor Harold Goddard has sharply summarized Antony and Cleopatra as "the power of personality [A. and C.] versus the impersonality of power" [the Caesarean section]. For John Dryden, on the other hand, if those lovers' story was All for Love, it was The World Well Lost. We don't always get Shakespeare's complexity in the debate. When Jonathan Swift, impatient with literary conventions, visits the romantic heroine, he comes away shocked that "Celia, Celia, Celia -- !" performs a bodily function that apparently generations of shepherds and their poetasters never realized. Unlike the many historical cases one might adduce (the Duke of Windsor, for example, or Eddie Fisher), in the perennial film myth a code of honour usually transcends the personal interest -- i.e., Love. Indeed when we do get a hero who is nakedly self-interested, such as Budd Schulberg's Sammy or Mordecai Richler's Duddy, we're supposed to strike a critical detachment from them. Perhaps it's because in life our self-indulgence prefers us on the low road that in fiction we pretend to the high. There may be something in us that does not like the truth. Hence, "The truth shall make you flee." Hence mythopoeia, and the proliferation of codes in popular arts that blatantly contradict reality. In days of yore, when women were vessels -- the weaker vassal and preferred objects of plunder -- the literature perpetuated the code of Courtly Love. This hid the systemic abuse of women behind platonic ideals and the selfless worship of fair damsels. Armed with his rhyme book, the swine was hidden in the swain. And so to Hollywood, which has diligently flogged codes of honour in its attempt to ennoble the human animal -- and in the process make a fast big buck. Many a tear has been shed over the contrary pull of honour and love in the movies. Back in the 1950s, in My Son John, Helen Hayes played a mother who had to wrestle with her discovery that her son was -- a closet communist! Her duty toward her threatened country loomed against her motherly love. In the hardier thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, the nightmare element inhered in the fact that war hero Laurence Harvey's mother (Angela Lansbury) is the arch-villainess, brainwashing him to assassinate the president. When the opposite poles of the Love-versus-Duty debate elide into one here, chaos is come again. Set George Stevens' idyllic pastoral Shane beside Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider. Scene by scene, Eastwood exposes the Alan Ladd saint as just a literary ideal, about as close to realism as fair Cloris is to Roseanne Barr. Alan Ladd wouldn't shoot a man in the back, punch first, or seduce the homesteader's wife, even though her hots for him are clear from across the pasture. But when the debunking Eastwood figure blows through the farm, the crudities of real life replace the niceties of the myth. Not just the homesteader's wife but his daughter succumbs to the interloper. Of course, for all its relative grit, Eastwood's film is still a fantasy itself -- of potency rather than saintliness. In war films, the societal cross-section jammed into one foxhole always melt their differences to fight the common enemy. Here duty overwhelms that opposite indulgence, hatred. In musicals and other team-sport epics, America tries to balance the egotism of the extraordinarily talented individual with the lip-service payable to the collectivity. In fact, this tension lies at the heart of the American experience. The hero has special abilities and an unusual drive to succeed. Yet America insists on subordinating the individual to the community. How to reconcile the heroic outlaw with the dutiful, submissive servant? In America's most characteristic genres it is the dullards who live by social conventions and the exciting heroes who transcend (i.e., violate) them. In the musical (think of 42nd Street or Singin' in the Rain) the vainglorious star is replaced by a stand-in who emerges from the chorus line, trailing clouds of populist humility. In Shane it's simple; the hero knows he can't stay in civilization, fuelling the homesteader's wife, so he rides wounded into the mortal sunset, leaving behind his tow-haired disciple, Joey. ("Come back, Shane. I love you. Mother loves you.") A whole Western subgenre explores the paradox. On the one hand, the community needs the gunman to ward off savagery. On the other, that very law 'n' order requires that the gunman take off, eh? Gregory Peck as Henry King's Gunfighter provided one of the earliest of these exorcisms, and John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence the most circumspect. This tension also animates the gangster film. Whether criminal or private eye, the hero of the mean streets is an ambitious individualist whose egotism threatens the public good (often represented by plodding, dull, incompetent cops, whether of the straight persuasion or the bent). Whether it's a gang's rules of supportive conduct or a dick's existential ethic, again the human beast is hidden behind a fictitious code of honour. AND so back to Donnie Brasco, the latest major film treatment of that theme. Based on a true story about an FBI agent who went underground to nab some Mafiosi, the film centres on two men who develop a bond as idealized as any shepherds at home on the Hollywood range. (Or microwave, for those who want their mythopoeia instant.) Al Pacino's Lefty repeatedly moans that he has been "busting his hump for 30 years" and what has he got to show for it? Johnny Depp plays Joe Pistone, the FBI guy who (as "Donnie") insinuates himself into Lefty's cell and heart. But he's a snake-in-the-grass with honour: he's a snake for the FBI (which is probably one up on Dana Andrews' commie). We're told that Lefty and Donnie come from two different worlds. Donnie was a college man. But as he dribbles his "ain'ts" and his "youses" he's indistinguishable from the other New York gunsels. In more ways than language he is defiled by the pitch he touches. In his growing impatience with his wife, he hits her. As she points out, her civilized husband has turned into the macho savage of the underworld. Paradoxically, the gangsters have a fuller set of behavioural rules than the FBI representation here. The two men form the film's most passionate -- albeit unconsummated -- love affair. As if to affirm the superiority of the male bond, both are abusive to their wives. Lefty's insults keep his in a constant semi-cower. Donnie just stays away, initially to protect his family, but later because he seems to have lost interest in his spouse. In order to perform his duties for the FBI, the snake has to stay in the jungle, away from his domestic Eden, before he can grass on the hoods. In this respect, Donnie places his community responsibility ahead of his own desires. But as his bonding with Lefty intensifies, Donnie swings the other way. He stops checking in with the buggers (a wiretapping term, that) at the FBI office. He stashes an ill-gotten $300K with which to let his love (Lefty) sail away from the criminal life -- and fights his wife to retrieve the money. Here Donnie subordinates his FBI duty to his male love, the very priority that he denied his wife and family. To Lefty the Mafia "family" is a responsibility and bond that outweighs his domestic family. Newell emphasizes this point by cutting between Donnie's two families. From Donnie being "made" (adopted/promoted) by the cell-leader Sonny Black (Michael Madsen), Newell cuts to Donnie's daughter, disappointed that her dad missed her communion. "Who made you?" he asks her after arriving late. In another verbal parallel, Donnie's angry "You don't leave!" to his wife recalls Lefty's "You don't walk out on me!" when he first meets Donnie. As usual in Hollywood, the love that dare not speak its name plays itself out as an idealized macho bonding. Plato was not so shadowy about it all. In one of her (understandable) outbursts, Donnie's wife calls his cohorts homosexual; she intuits the element of rivalry with Donnie's work. Lefty introduces Donnie to his family, as if to assure his new mate that he's straight as a razor. But seducer Donnie hides his wife and kids -- ostensibly to maintain his cover and their security, but also to appear available to Lefty, if not romantically, then with the macho independence that the "wiseguys" require. As "left-handed" used to be a colloquial euphemism for "unusual," "queer," "gay," Lefty's name (like his other noms de guerre: a dangling participle of a horse and the same appendage half-sized) relates to Lefty's sexuality. Lefty's sexual vulnerability is imaged in his passing reference to his cancerous organ and in his advice that Donnie should keep his girlfriend's "eyes off your balls." Director Newell stresses the two themes of latent homophilia and the eyes. The two heroes engage in a pattern of seductive courtship that begins with visual attraction and edgy banter. Their first engagement is over a diamond ring -- emblematically false. Newell's most dominant image is the eyes: people spying on others, people afraid of being seen. Lefty takes Donnie away from one meeting because "there are too many eyes there." The film opens and closes on eyes. Our first image is of Lefty's luggage eyes. The opening credits appear over a series of "sights," photographs taken by a spying camera. Throughout the film Newell's camera circles and peers as if viewing from the perspective of a spy -- or a suspicious lover. We have to guess whose viewpoint we have. When Donnie uses an infamous Abscam yacht, "The Left Hand," to woo Florida mobsters, Sonny Black arrives to cut himself in on the action, and to cut Lefty out. Lefty watches Donnie win Sonny's favour, while Donnie's eyes are hidden behind dark glasses, inscrutable. When we first see him after he has betrayed Lefty and the gang, Donnie is on an FBI shooting range wearing transparent goggles. With male love at its centre, here it's men who are the objects of vision. For once, it's the usually privileged males who squirm under the gaze. The narrative starts with a close-up of Donnie's eyes, younger, more energetic than those of Lefty. The last shot of the film is a similar close-up, but now Donnie's eyes are tired as he returns to his wife and kids, Lefty having been executed by the mob for admitting the rat. Although Lefty sees the clues, he can't believe that his Donnie would be false to him. Lefty sees Donnie as the son he never had. His real son is a junkie who has not responded all that well to his father's beating up on him. When Lefty is at the hospital with his son, comatose from an overdose, Donnie comes to share his vigil. Lefty tries to send him away. With his own son dying in front of him, Lefty can't pretend that Donnie is like his son. It's here that Lefty tells Donnie "I love you." Because of this love, when Lefty imagines Donnie's betrayal he thinks of killing himself rather than Donnie. When he goes off to his death, Lefty tells his wife to tell Donnie that he's glad it was he who betrayed him. This is the lover's unrealized kiss of death. In the film the Mafia world has its own moral and behavioural code. Lefty teaches Donnie the ropes, on which most filmgoers are already well versed. Whether by the Maria's undertaking or by Hollywood's, the organized underworld has been semi-legitimated by its detailed code of conduct. They're not uncivilized brutes, that is to say, bent upon breaking every law in the book. No, they're upstanding citizens who just happen to stand for slightly different laws than the rest of us. Paradoxically, Italy's filmmakers have tended to shy away from dealing with the Mafia. With the notable exception of passing references in some films (for example, those of Lina Wertmuller) and the brilliant political canon of Francesco Rosi, the Mafia has not been analysed in Italian films as fully as it has in those from America. Maybe Hollywood feels more secure. Pacino's casting evokes Hollywood's most illuminating Mafia film. Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy appeared to provide a privileged experience of the Mafia life. And guess what? They're just ordinary American businessmen! In fact, the first line in The Godfather is "I believe in America" -- spoken by an undertaker who asks Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) to provide a justice that the courts have denied him. Legitimizing the criminal then curves around to expressing cynicism about America's legitimate corporate and government operations. In The Godfather Al Pacino played the "civilian" member of the Corleone family. In the course of the film he converts from innocent outsider ("That's my family, Katie, that's not me") to leader of the clan. In Donnie Brasco Pacino plays the longtime hood teaching a new apprentice the ropes. Where earlier Pacino grew from soft to hard, here his character moves from hard to soft. This role is a reversal of his earlier success. This revival of the Love-versus-Honour debate may have wider implications, especially as reflected in the debate over The English Patient. How moral should our film heroes be? Is a film with an immoral hero dangerous? After all, it's hard not to sympathize with a film's central figure, however culpable. That's because we identify with the character we watch the most. Not the character whose physical perspective we assume -- as Robert Montgomery found when he filmed The Lady in the Lake from the detective's point of view. In the dreamlike recesses of the cinema we tend to drop our moral scruples. Alfred Hitchcock observed that his audiences could easily be made to side with the criminal. We hope the deaf cleaning woman won't catch our Marnie safecracking. With Norman Bates, we catch our breath when the car (containing corpse and money) goes glub, glub, glub down into the swamp -- and then suddenly stops, visible -- before its last, assuring drop. Such films appear to encourage our amorality. THIS dynamic is exercised in Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade, the most interesting American independent film of the year and a strong Oscar contender for the author/director's lead performance. Thornton plays the retarded Karl, released from the state asylum twenty years after he murdered his mother and her lover. His friendship with a widow and her son leads him to kill again. But when he eliminates the vicious brute (Dwight Yoakam) who is taking over her household, he fulfils the desire of most of the other characters -- and the audience. The film's black humour belies its allegorical implications. Karl is a Forrest Gump version of the Grim Reaper. However much an innocent, he wields his blade in an act of undeniable justice. All he owns is a belt-wrapped package of books, of which three are named: the Bible, A Christmas Carol, and instructions on carpentry. Like the Dickens story, this film is about the spiritual awakening of an unlikely figure. Karl invites Christian associations: he awakens with a hammer in his hand and announces his wish to be baptised. He continues his process of purification, to prepare for his climactic deed. He divests himself of his possessions, secures the innocents, prepares his instrument, then confronts his victim, pausing to prepare for the aftermath and to declare his intentions. Throughout this sequence, the audience knows what is likely to happen. Its length allows, perhaps requires, the viewer to take a position on the imminent murder. Karl often reminds us of the biblical injunction against murder. But everyone who knows the villain would prefer him dead; he is a blight on humanity. As the boy, his mother, her gay boss, all have their last chats with Karl, though they may sense the foreboding signs, none of them prevents his deed. Nor do we want them to. Sling Blade makes a saint out of a perverted young man who has committed a particularly brutal murder. This is antithetical to the demonizing of Norman Bates, the matricide in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Thornton's hero wears his religion profoundly. He knows that Hell is really Hades and that his "sling blade" should properly be called a Kaiser (King). His mental deficiency preserves him from understanding the corruption of the outside world. When Karl sacrifices his freedom to save his friends, he assumes a moral responsibility that transcends both the Bible and his society's conventions. In the last scene, back in the mental hospital, he dissociates himself from the salacious killer who besieged him at the film's opening. Now Karl radiates light, relieved at last from the darkness of the world outside. Sling Blade depicts a clash between codes of honour. One is the morality of convention (as represented in the Bible and in the laws of the asylum). The other is his chivalric defence of the boy and his mother. This latter honour is related to Karl's expressed love for the boy and his mother. That is the honour that wins out. This is not the familiar love -- self-indulgence -- but an alternative form of honour -- selfless love. In his simplicity, Karl achieves a transcendent union of love and honour where popularly we have them at odds. Thus the film allows us to relish someone committing murder. Does this mean that when we watch a film, we have to suspend our morality along with disbelief? If we do, the movie won't work on us. These films assume that we have a particular moral position -- and then test our fidelity to it. They serve our morality by challenging it, by requiring us either to reaffirm it or perhaps to modify it. An unconsidered reflex can become a considered commitment. Perhaps this subversive cinema serves to test the depths of our virtue. Hitchcock's playful dialectic exposes the shakiness o f our sense of right and wrong, or -- as his Catholic upbringing would suggest -- the profundity of our Original Sin. When we watch Wolfgang Peterson's Das Boot, our emotional engagement is rather undermined when we remind ourselves that these endangered heroes were actually our enemies, Nazis, trying to kill us. Why should we cheer them on? Of course, if we're Nazis, there's no problem. The film's emotional manipulation is consistent with our inherited morality. The film works as simple propaganda. But if we assume, say, for the sake of argument, that we are not Nazis, then our moral experience of this film is quite unsettling. We are torn between our habit of refusing to identify with the Nazi navy and the emotional impact of the drama. Perhaps this exercise in national propaganda serves a different function: it reminds us that the battle lines of a war should not obscure our recognition of a transcendent humanity, with which we should remain open to sympathize and to identify. Especially after the brawl is over. The film may challenge our reflex values and identification, but it draws on them nonetheless. AS Sling Blade, Donnie Brasco, and The English Patient prompt fine moral distinctions and often fervid debate, our popular arts raise the ambivalent possibilities of our life choices, whether moral or fictional. Inflections of traditional codes and debates do us a real service in provoking re-evaluations and re-positioning. They use the powerful manipulative aesthetics of film to alert us to the continuing (and widening?) gap between the morals we profess to follow and the values that propel us where it counts: in the reflexes of the heart. that propel us where it counts: in the reflexes of the heart.
Word count: 3744
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Spring 1997
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