Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris)

by Steven Erikson

  I constructed a special sabre out of two sticks of wood in the barn and painted it grey and blue. A tattered pair of white pajamas and my father’s brown belt became my Jedi tunic. I practiced in secret, in the woods behind my home, where I built an obstacle course with balance beam and climbing rope, and I blindfolded myself while I climbed and swung over bottomless pits and battled endless lines of Storm Troopers. And always, just as they were closing in and things looked hopeless for me, I found a way to use my powers to overcome them and escape.

  It was destiny. I was going to save the world.

  Later that summer, I finally revealed my secret to my teenage neighbour. I led him to my training ground and showed him my skills. He shrugged, looked mildly disgusted, and told me I was stupid. ‘Give it up, little dude,’ he said (or something like that). ‘Life’s gonna kick you in the balls. You’re gonna have to grow up.’

  I had hoped he would become my Yoda, but obviously he had been turned to the Dark Side. I ignored him and continued my training. Life would indeed kick me in the balls, and soon, but I didn’t know it yet. My imagination grew more elaborate, my stories more complex.

  I started to write them down.

  Enough has been written about Conrad and ‘The Hero’s Journey’, Beowulf, The Hidden Fortress, The Lord of the Rings, Flash Gordon and Lucas’s supposed prejudice against women, and I can’t add much to that in the space I have here. But let’s talk about why Star Wars, with all its flaws, was such a successful film and what it captured in our national consciousness. I want to make that point a more personal one too. I want to talk about why Star Wars meant so much to me, and how it may just have saved my life.

  Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977. This was a year before my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and two years before my father was killed in an automobile accident on the way home from work, sliding off a slippery winter road into a telephone pole. It was the last summer that I recall being an ordinary little boy.

  I remember my neighbour’s parents telling us about this amazing film that we simply had to see, and I remember standing in a long line at the little three-screen theatre in Augusta, a line that snaked all the way through the lobby and into the parking lot. We had to buy tickets for a later show, but when we finally made it into the theatre and found our seats, the lights went down and those words began to scroll up the screen, I was forever transformed, as millions of others were across the country. This was a movie unlike anyone had ever experienced before. It was immersive and overwhelming, an epic storyline with effects that made the plot live and breathe. I was terrified and exhilarated and overwhelmed. I wanted to be a Jedi Knight. And I wanted to make up stories just like George Lucas.

  To understand exactly why this particular movie struck such a chord with America, we need to look at where we were at the time. The Vietnam War had recently weakened our national mojo, and our country was still recovering from the radical cultural shift of the 60s. Many were no longer sure whether the United States government was the good or the bad guy. To make matters worse, we were deep into the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. We were in desperate need of a hero. Order had to be restored to the universe, and as an allegory Star Wars certainly fitted the bill.

  In Star Wars, as in many other modern myths, losing yourself to the machine was a metaphor for evil. In the late 70s and during the build up of the Cold War’s nuclear arsenal, our perception of the Soviets’ obsession with the mechanics of war was about essentially the same thing. Luke, in the end, abandons his head’s up display and trusts the Force to guide his missiles to the target. Whether it was the Rebels against Darth Vader, and the destruction of the Death Star, or our Laser Defense System against the USSR’s warheads, good would triumph over evil was a message we sorely needed to hear.

  How deep was this embedded into our culture? The Strategic Defense Initiative was nicknamed ‘Star Wars,’ while Reagan started calling the USSR the ‘Evil Empire’ (not to be confused with the more recent usage by Sox fans to describe the New York Yankees).

  I understood very little of this at the time, of course, but I probably sensed just enough to feel its undertow. Nuclear weapons were bad, the Soviets wanted to kill us, but if Luke Skywalker were here, the world would be saved. I saw Star Wars in the theatre seventeen times (I know, I counted), and to me, the story became a springboard for my imagination.

  A year later, it would become a blessed escape.

  Life’s swift kick to the balls came soon enough, as my neighbour had predicted. But even he probably couldn’t have imagined how severe that kick would be. When my mother’s cancer was found she was given six months to live. About six months later my father was killed. I don’t remember much of how I felt at the time, but I do remember my role-playing getting more intense, and my stories more elaborate. I didn’t just write about Star Wars, but I did write about heroes, and heroic battles and victories. They also nearly always included some sort of higher power that controlled the hero’s destiny. I wasn’t a religious person, but the idea of divinity was ever present, whether it was the Force or a benevolent alien race. I needed that illusion of control. Terrible things could (and would) happen, but goodness would prevail over evil, and I would be at the centre of it. Such was the order of things.

  My mother lived far longer than the doctors predicted, another five years, in fact. But it was an often difficult five years for me, both because of her health problems and simply through living in a one-parent household as an awkward pre-teen. She loved us deeply, I didn’t doubt that, but a child’s natural belief in all-powerful parents had deserted me far sooner than it should, and I saw her as mortally wounded.

  Star Wars, on the other hand, restored my faith in the natural order of things. The real world might be unpredictable, but in the Lucas universe, things were as they should be. What’s more, I came to understand that through the power of storytelling, I could control my world as well; as a writer I could make things right.

  And that’s the reason I think of Star Wars as something more than just a movie. It’s an essential part of my childhood, woven into the fabric of who I am more than any other film. It played a central role in my development as a storyteller, but more than that, it kept me believing in the power of good over evil in a universe that had become far too unpredictable to a little eight year-old boy. Star Wars (and, by extension, my own stories) allowed me to believe that I could play the hero and save the world, and whatever higher power that might exist (including, I suppose, my own parents) would be proud of me and my accomplishments.

  Is Star Wars a perfect movie? Not even close. But what movie in recent memory has inspired more young children to rush out into their backyards and role-play? Star Wars is about imagination and inspiration, the potential in all of us, our own murky and unexplored futures, about who and what we might be. It’s about the strength to overcome. It’s about (dare I say it) hope. Joseph Campbell would agree that the best myths provide a cultural base for understanding right and wrong, and they give people a roadmap for the decisions they will make in their own lives. George Lucas understood that well.

  More recently, as an adult with children of my own, I’ve come to gain a better understanding of my childhood. Part of this understanding came after finding my father’s journal, buried among boxes full of old mementos in my attic. One passage he wrote in particular sticks with me; he’s writing it shortly after my mother’s cancer was diagnosed, and only a few short months before his own death.

  ‘I have found peace, wonderful to say it, more wonderful to live it. I hope my grandchildren read this, someday after I have gone, and take the lesson to heart: search hard, and trust – some great force for good, within and without ourselves, will lead us to where we belong.’

  I’d like to think that Lucas couldn’t have said it better himself.

  QUINTET

  (Director: Robert Altman; starring: Paul Newman, Vittorio Gassman, Fernando Rey, Bibi Andersson - 1979)

  Gary A. Braunbeck />
  For love of God seems dying

  Tonight, His frost will fasten on this mud and us,

  Shriveling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp.

  The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,

  Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice…

  Wilfred Owen – Exposure

  The burying party in the world of Quintet consists not of men armed with picks and shovels, but of enormous snow-drifts created by perpetually groaning, gusting winter winds that are further assisted by packs of large black dogs that dig through the drifts searching for the bodies of the fallen that, when discovered, are eaten in a starved frenzy. That caveat aside, Owen could have been describing the world that Altman and crew so painstakingly created: a place of endless snow, deformed distant shapes sheathed in glass-like layers of hoarfrost, and ice-flows that move, but never, it seems, in any particular direction – this last being a condemnation many critics leveled against the film itself.

  Most of Quintet was filmed in the deep chill of a Montreal winter, on St. Helen’s Island, in the abandoned Man and His World Pavilion – an astonishing, labyrinthine structure originally built for Expo ‘67 that was left to stand derelict against the elements. As presented by Altman, it’s a tarpaulin covering an open mass grave where those who have not yet succumbed to whatever form of death awaits them go about their daily existence (notice I didn’t say ‘lives’) with hunched shoulders and eyes that never quite meet those of whomever they interact with. They are transients with no place left to go, prisoners (as is everyone) of the second ice age. (One of the most audacious chances taken by Altman in the film is that whatever brought about this second ice age is never revealed; it’s not even hinted at, because here the only thing that matters is your next step, your next meal, your next breath.)

  The film’s title refers to a game that is always played with five chosen participants, but when someone ‘dies’ in the game, that person is later killed by one of the remaining players, all of whom have a list of their fellow gamers’ names that can be crossed off one by one. Think of backgammon with a death penalty. The game is watched over by Grigor, the self-appointed ‘adjudicator’ of all Quintet games. Grigor is elegantly portrayed by Fernando Rey (who most American audiences will remember as ‘Frog One’ from William Friedkin’s The French Connection, as well as John Frankenheimer’s excellent sequel).

  The story, unpretentious and nihilistic as it is, focuses on a man named Essex (a rugged-looking Paul Newman, working here with Altman for a second time after the box-office failure of the underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson) who is traveling to what is only referred to as ‘the city’ where his brother lives, and where perhaps employment awaits. Accompanying him on this journey is his wife, Vivia (the luminous French actress Brigitte Fossey, in a rare American film appearance). As Quintet opens (with what is, in my opinion, one of Altman’s most amazing shots, subtle though it may be), we see nothing but white, yet there is some sense of movement among the near-blinding brightness. That’s because the camera is slowly panning downward from the sky to focus on what at first looks like a large wall buried under the snow. Not content to cut away from the image, the camera then begins a slow, deliberate pan along the wall until we begin to notice that what we thought was a wall is actually an abandoned passenger train, and there is most definitely movement nearby: we can see two figures emerging slowly like ghosts from the swirling snow, and the camera then brings its focus closer to the ground, rounding the front of the train as Essex and Vivia complete their materialization, and the camera joins them as a fellow traveler.

  Both Essex and Vivia are bundled in heavy coats, hats, leggings, and boots that are nearly as white as the snow above, below, behind, and in front of them – and it is here that Altman delivers the first and most important clue to the viewer about the POV of not only the characters, but the film itself: as the camera moves closer to Essex and his wife (who we can now discern is pregnant) everything around begins to fall out of focus, as if the camera’s lens is falling victim to encroaching frost until, at last, the only thing we can see in full focus is whatever occupies the direct center of the screen. The viewer has now become something of a voyeur, staring through the glove-cleared area of an ice-encircled window. The effect (achieved by cinematographer Jean Boffety rubbing Vasoline around the outer areas of the camera’s lens) is a little off-putting at first, but once Essex and Vivia reach ‘the city’ and begin meeting its inhabitants, we become all too aware of the reason behind this tunnel-vision view: for the inhabitants, there is no Heaven above, no Hell below, no past behind them, and no future ahead. All they choose to see is whoever or whatever is before them; this is how the fatalistic microcosm of Quintet’s claustrophobic world materializes for the viewer.

  ‘Why there?’ Vivia asks Essex.

  ‘It’s a place to go,’ he replies. Nothing more of the subject is spoken between them, and it’s shortly after this scene that the viewer begins to realize that no one in the film ever refers to the past, nor do they discuss the future: there is only the game. There is only Quintet to help pass the hours; there is nothing to strive toward or reminisce over. The ice-edged camera-eye sees the world as the characters do – only in the moment, moving steadily with false purpose from one event to the next. All the characters remain as enigmatic at the end of the film as they are at the beginning, except for those who die. At the moment of their individual deaths, something of the true Self is revealed, as if each of them realize that in Quintet, life is the only prize.

  There are two societies that live here. The lowest class – the crippled, the terminally ill, the mentally deficient, and so on – exist in the bowels of the city, in Sector 4. There they are watched over by the charismatic Saint Christopher (Vittorio Gassman in an electrifying performance), whose homily to the broken and hopeless promises them not salvation and peace, only more suffering. Beneath a sign proclaiming ‘The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever,’ Saint Christopher speaks to them of the 5 stages of the Universe: the Pain of birth, the Labor of maturity, the Guilt of living, the Terror of aging, the Finality of death. Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon would be right at home amongst such fatalism. At the conclusion of his sermon, Christopher directs all of the ruined and damaged denizens to a huge, boiling cauldron in the center of their dwelling place. As they crowd around, each holding up a tin cup that is filled with a ladle of whatever concoction exists in the cauldron, one cannot help but recall the Reverend Jim Jones’s doomed followers in Guyana as they crowded around with paper cups for a drink of the cyanide-laced grape Flavor Aid (which had to have been Altman’s intention). The faces of the actors in this sequence are a wonder to behold: each one contains the promise of a heartbreaking story, one that no one has ever asked them to tell (stories of the past do not exist anymore, nor do hopes for better days to come). The second society that exists here is composed of the idle rich (though what exactly constitutes wealth here is never really established). These characters are so bored (or frightened) by their existence that the only pleasure, the only excitement they have is to take a chance on gambling that existence away.

  Essex finds his brother, Redstone (the jovial Craig Richard Nelson) and is greeted by warm smiles and embraces, and the women are wide-eyed at Vivia’s pregnancy. ‘It’s been so long since new life has happened here,’ says one of the women, and then all glance at one another with more than a little wariness in their eyes of ice. As they gather round the hearth, it’s discovered that more firewood is needed. Essex leaves to purchase some, and no sooner does he leave than a bomb goes off in Redstone’s apartment, killing everyone. A shattered Essex carries the body of his wife to the edge of an ice flow (followed by a pack of dogs, of course), kneels down and – in a moment reminiscent of Uncle John Joad setting Rose of Sharon’s stillborn baby adrift on a raft near the end of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath – gently places her bod
y into the water and watches as it is carried downstream to eventually vanish beneath the surface. Returning to the city, he discovers – almost by accident – that his brother was one of the players in the most recent game of Quintet, and Essex must now take his place.

  Quintet ultimately raises more questions than it answers (if indeed it can be said that any answers are offered), but like all (justifiably) enigmatic works of art, it is the exploration and presentation of themes, not the resolution, that is the point. In the world of Quintet there is a series of opposing staircases, filmed from above, that branch out in several directions and, regardless of how many times one views the film, they seem to defy the basic laws of physics: it’s Escher’s The Waterfall brought to chilling life.

  In the end, with Essex the reluctant champion of this round of Quintet, there is an exhilarating confrontation between him and Grigor, each of them standing on opposite sides of a fire pit where the body of the last player now lies burning. Both Rey and Newman are at the top of their form, and the dialogue is hands-down the most poetic in the film. As Grigor uses all of his considerable charm and powers of persuasion to convince Essex to remain (‘You could be the greatest Quintet player of all time!’), Essex is having no part of it.

  As he turns to leave, Grigor asks where he will go.

  ‘North,’ replies Essex.

  ‘North?’ says Grigor. ‘There is nothing there. There is nothing anywhere. You will not make it. You will freeze to death.’

  And Essex responds with what is, for me, the single most powerful line (which is also the final line) in the film: ‘You may know that, but I don’t.’ And he walks away, having rejected the counterfeit reality the players of Quintet invented and embraced; he has now invented and embraced his own seemingly phony reality – but with a renewed, if ephemeral, sense of purpose. In a potent bookend image, Altman shows us Essex as he walks north, wearing the heavy coats and carrying the deadly weapons of the game’s now-dead players. As he first appeared to the viewer, he appears again: a ghost gradually dematerialising into the snowdrifts, searching for another place to go where perhaps he will find some promise of genuine solace. The moment is given an almost glorious radiance by Tom Pierson’s score, one that consistently and affectingly vacillates between the operatic and atonal: the music reaches its grand finale and fades out at the same moment as does the image of Essex, and the closing credits scroll upward, accompanied by no other sound than the groaning wind.