Under the mast of destiny
I sail away, far and wide
in an unpathed seaway
with or without luck’s aide
to uncharted shores
where my voyage anchors
in love’s meetings.
Blog
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Jaws (1975) – film essay
Often, we find an answer to an existential dilemma in a situation that defenestrates us to an ocean of choices. How to respond to a challenge may change the compass of the fortune’s wheel. Patience and fortitude conquer all things in the mastery of fear in defense of the sovereignty of life against inconveniences and losses in existential selfhood. In this regard, “Jaws” (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg, shows how Man fights against the Leviathan of Life with will and courage.
“Jaws” is a cinematic feast of horror and adventure that brilliantly blurs the genre of the movie fashioned in minimalist realism as regards to the storyline, characters, and leitmotif. Only the thematic lynchpin is larger- than- life: a hybrid of sea monsters, ranging from Johan’s Big Fish to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and to Ernest Hemingway’s Mako that loves to swim around by the teeming shore in New York. In fact, the peaceful resort seaboard of Amity in New York betrays our idea of a Great White Shark as a dweller of the Pacific Ocean where tall palm trees and suntanned surfers are part of the landscape. Also, the appearance and roles of the characters in the movie do not carry Hollywood glamour. Police chief Martin Brody (played by Roy Schneider) is a mild-mannered family man who has recently moved from New York City but has aquaphobia due to childhood trauma. Oceanographer Matt Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss) is a wealthy neurotic scientist who is determined to get the formidable man-eater. Seasoned fisherman Quint (played by Robert Shaw) has all the characteristics of the choicest seaman with bravado sealed in unhealed fear. The ad-hocish triumvirate team formed mutual allegiance to defeat the predator that not only threatens the lives of people in the water but also agitates their fears buried in the waves of minds’ mains. Jaws is the contender of life’s challenge that the three characters must face and fight.
Spielberg is ingenious in using music as a leitmotif in expressing the intensity of emotions in scenes that produces suspense held in abeyance of impending danger that tantalizes our ready expectation of sequential segments of the story. He uses a recurring theme without the grandiose scale of orchestral tunes, signaling the menacing presence of the predator lurking in the uneasy equanimity of ordinary leisure. Spielberg also defies casting high-billed actors and actresses to create the verisimilitude of reality. The result produces relatability of the characters placed in situations where the ordinary people might have behaved in such extraordinary circumstances, asking us what we would do if we were in the position.
The stupendousness of the big predatory fish and the nuanced emotions of trepidation is akin to reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, where the seasoned fisherman Santiago’s serenity amid the battle against the man-eater in the ocean alone testifies to the steadfastness of human will and courage. Jaws is a film version of it that says, “Man can be destroyed but cannot be conquered.” “Jaws” is a masterpiece cinema that has become a classic in the history of cinema with its legacy. Now I know why people love to watch it anew and again across the oceans.
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‘Hawaii’ (1966) – film essay
Religion is a man-made institution that has a hierarchy with a set of values and norms as dictated in protocols. Even the reformation trailblazer Martin Luther, who protested against institutional abuses of the Church, is not entirely free from the criticism. Thus, I hold a healthy amount of preconception about a religious individual whose outwardly practice of faith incongruent with his or her inwardly reflection of personality, which is a view shared by Gandhi’s opinion attesting, “I admire Jesus, not the followers of his.” The movie “Hawaii” (1966), an American drama about Calvinist missionaries and the Hawaiian natives directed by George Roy Hill, echoes the sentiment conflated with the profundity of religious zeal and the nature of humanity laid bare in the clash of cultures.
The epic adventure story is structured around stern Calvinist Reverend Abner (played by Max von Sydow) with his faithful and delightful wife, Jerusha (played by Julie Andrews). Abner’s devotion to the religious cause at the urge of young Hawaiian prince Keoki at the Yale Divinity School brings them to the beautiful heathen islands of Hawaii. Abner is a good man disoriented in the realm of dreary religiosity and ethnocentrism. He sees the beauty in his wife Jerusha and the land of the people he comes to serve but averts his eyes from it with the Bible on the one hand. He keeps all-natural feelings of love, joy, sadness, and even jealousy locked in his puritanical castle of mind and preaches the ire of God that imbues the natives with fear, not love. One look at him will make a man like Captain Hoxworth (played by Richard Harris) infuriated with contempt for the loss of her beloved Jerusha to such ungainly zealot. Abner is, in short, a man of God and would like to think him so as the will of God he serves.
Max Von Sydow’s skillful performance of the role of Abner invokes both contempt and sympathy for the character who does not know how to act in the intimacy of human relationships. It seems that Sydow is particularly good at playing a clergy as he also did as veteran Jesuit Father Merrin in “The Exorcist” (1973). The tall slim figure carries the intellectual air without the pretentiousness that separates him from the mass, giving him the likeness of a suffering philosopher in the wrong place at the wrong time. In playing the internal character in the external context of reality, Sydow does a beautifully nuanced job of capturing all the inner conflicting emotions ranging from joy to disappointment, to ire mixed with envy, and to sorrow. Thus, Abner’s follies and foibles are forgivable and, in fact, a medium for his new conversion into the religion of Charity, Hope, and Faith.
The movie portrays a realistic portrayal of a missionary living in a foreign land. The excellent Jesuit method of enculturation is possible only when he is celibate without a family to support. Then, even mastery of enculturation guarantees no eradication of racial and cultural pride of the actor. Perhaps, the wish of an entirely benign messenger of the Gospel is vain mother to the thought in the ideation of an impeccable man of God. The best thing is to accept our human fallibility by which the meaning of God and the purpose in life come to a realization. “Hawaii” shows us a process of conversion into the mystery of faith occurring not in the pagan natives but Reverend Abner in the beautiful kaleidoscope of nature’s sceneries and the people living in them. This movie deserves its merit on the list of great films of all time for the posteriority.
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Moon World
The luminescence of the lunar beauty alone
Quells the untamed roar of the wild ocean,
Illuminates the somber kingdom of the shore,
And pours the perched heart with pleasure.
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ambivalence
I think myself awake when I dream
Of the vivid visions of the world
I am in – as I have never been;
Of the fleeting faces of the crowd
I see – as I have never seen.
In the Forest of Arden
I dream alive, today, again.
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‘Major Dundee’ (1965) – film essay
Ambition, made of sterner stuff, is the solder’s virtue that chooses gain, which darkens him. Bravery, comprised of nobler spirit, is the solder’s honor that elevates the soldier’s merit to the echelon of Homeric virtue of arete, the excellence of man leading to achieving a supernatural feat of heroism. An excellent soldier with arete knows no boundary of political, religious, social, or racial division and transcends the subjectivity of time. Major Dundee (1965), an American western film directed by Sam Peckinpah, cogently translates a balanced, objective equilibrium to test the validity of the soldiers’ virtues on the continuum of the Homeric arete in the background setting of the American Civil War.
Major Amos Charles Dundee of the Union Army (played by Charlton Heston) is a man of primitive ambition of glory sent to head a squalid prisoner-of-war camp in the New Mexico Territory. There he meets his former friend turned foe Confederate Captain Benjamin Tyreen (played by Richard Harris), who bears a grudge against Major Dundee for his betrayal of friendship. The notable tension between the two always remains even after their uneasy but necessary collaboration. Still, the esprit de corps consisting of unlikely but able-bodied characters sets to take out the Apache War Party in the new territories. Major Dundee sets out for the campaign not of pure divine patriotism but his glory despite his contentions with Captain Tyreen, who is more morally honorable and culturally sophisticated than himself.
It is Captain Tyreen, the renegade leader of the southern rebels who embodies the model of the arete, combined with moral integrity and soldierly fitness fabulously demonstrated in his effortlessly stylish habiliment. He is a dandy gentleman with decency and learning and an exemplary soldier and leader with justice and bravery. The refinement of civility as incarnate in the figure of Captain Tyreen is vividly contrasted with the rough intransigence of Major Dundee through the exterior appearances and actions of the two opposite characters. Even Captain Tyreen’s attitude toward the colored Union soldiers surpasses Major Dundee’s languid attitude toward his colored soldiers fighting for the same cause.
“Major Dundee” is a new type of western that abandons its common thematic elements consisting of noble savages, self-righteous lone gunslingers, the arch-villains, and beautiful women in pursuit. It is a new type of western that begins to be aware of the societal changes in the reflection of the nature of humanity with bold actions of likable bravado and admiring characters that are not circumscribed in the extreme ambit of norms and conventions with an artistic touch of vivid realism. Despite the rather unsatisfying commercial success of the film when it first came out, I find this film both entertaining and thoughtful in the historical background of the Civil War, showing true bravery equipped with respectful integrity of a person, friend or foe. There is no better sign of excellence in man than the bare demonstration of the act.
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