Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Then there are the imminent “moments of death” brought about not by judicial execution, but by choice or circumstance, characters who know they are about to die, and it will be minutes, seconds from now, not in some hazy, safely distant future, and how are they going to go out? Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford), in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , may be reprobate outlaws, but their lithe, blithe beauty, their abiding bromance love, their willingness to risk death for each other, and their flair with screenwriterly quips, have won our hearts; now, at the end, they are trapped, out-manned, and outgunned in a Bolivian marketplace, wounded and fully aware that this is it, the closing credits of their story loom. 77In their final moments they mock-plan and mock-bicker where they will travel together next — Butch pushes for Australia; Sundance is skeptical — while they load their final rounds, knowing without saying a word, in the intuitive intimacy of true love, that they are going to die, and right now, and they will go out together, guns blazing. Cut to their bursting outside, together, firing. A sepia-toned freeze-frame captures their final moment alive — the sound of the Bolivian army’s gunfire mowing them down continues — and elevates them forever, in their death, to a victoriously stylish, iconic, antihero buddyhood.

Similarly, Thelma and Louise, in Thelma & Louise , are cinema’s iconic outlaw gal pals, for whom a shared death is an expression of empowerment, newfound self-determination, and an unbreakable sororal bond. 78Pursued by cops across the Southwest, after Louise (Susan Sarandon) killed a man threatening to rape Thelma (Geena Davis), the women find themselves trapped in their blue Ford Thunderbird at the edge of the Grand Canyon, a helicopter swirling above and an army of police with raised guns behind them. What to do? “I’m not getting caught,” Louise says, although they already are. “Okay, then. Listen. Let’s not get caught,” says Thelma, gazing imploringly at Louise. “Go,” she says. “You sure?” Louise asks, but they both already are. They smile. They kiss. They have each other. Louise floors it; they clutch hands and zoom in a cloud of thick orange dust off the edge of the world — another for-the-ages freeze-frame of that blue Thunderbird soaring into empty space above the Canyon, not quite yet beginning its parabolic fall. Unlike Butch and Sundance, Thelma and Louise had a choice — good cop Harvey Keitel had begged them to give themselves up peacefully and live — but they choose death as a liberation from both societal oppression and actual imprisonment, their final shared statement of Fight-the-Power sisterhood. I am angry at them — was that a cowardly choice? I cheer them on — I would love to have that kind of courage, the willingness to choose death over a compromised life.

The young Australian soldiers in Gallipoli have no real choice; they are pawns, cogs, peach-fuzzed cannon fodder in the failed Battle of the Nek against the Turkish army in World War I. 79They huddle in the trenches awaiting their fate, the bodies of their already-butchered comrades sprawled inches above their heads. Their turn to die in vain is next. They are dazed, and they are so, so young: They scribble good-bye notes to parents and girlfriends, they take their last look at mementos, they share a last cigarette, a last recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, they suck the dusty air into their panicking lungs, they embrace. Our young hero Archy, a former world-class sprinter, takes off his prized medal, hangs it from a bayonet driven into the dirt. Elegiac music plays. There is no spirit of bravery in this dirty ditch of a waiting room and certainly no question of beauty or fineness; they are terrified and powerless and doomed, shaking and trying not to, and perhaps having the “chance to be ready” is not always a gift. Perhaps at one time they thought they were fighting for honor; now they are dying simply because they are ordered to. And the order is given— wait, wait , perhaps they think one last hopeful, futile time — they climb obediently from the trench and over the dead bodies, they run blindly headlong into a faceless and brusque annihilation. Archy loses his gun but keeps running: “What are your legs? Springs. How fast can you run? Like a leopard. How fast will you run? As fast as a leopard!” he had murmured to himself in the trench, his own version of prayer; maybe he can outrun those bullets, maybe, but no; the film’s final shot is his body arched backward by gun blast at the instant of a pointless death, a truncated, eyeblink life, and I am left despairing and angry at this waste.

The soldiers in Glory are a different lot; this is the story of the first all-black regiment to fight for the Union in the Civil War, and while their white Colonel Shaw (Matthew Broderick) is almost as young as the soldiers at Gallipoli, these men are already seasoned veterans of a different kind of battle: Private Trip (Denzel Washington) and Sergeant Major Rawlins (Morgan Freeman), like most of the regiment, are runaway slaves, men who have chosen to live, fight, and perhaps die “ like men ,” Rawlins has vowed, with bayonets and guns in their hands. 80When the Confederacy announces captured black soldiers will be immediately executed, the men are offered an honorable discharge; none of them accept. The regiment has primarily been used by the Union for show, and for free labor; in the campaign to capture a foothold in Charleston Harbor, they are given their first chance for actual combat, and it is a suicide mission — their real function is to clear the advance for the white troops who will follow, and they all know that. But they are recarving history, reforging the future, and they know that, also: “O Heavenly Father, we want you to let our folks know that we died facing the enemy!” says Rawlins, praying with his men the night before battle. “We want them to know we went down standing up! Amongst those that are fighting against our oppression. We want them to know, Heavenly Father, that we died for freedom!” In battle, they charge with ferocious, concrete purpose; there is no hesitation, no wait, wait , for the raw adrenalized power of their anger, honor, pride, and dignity overcomes fear. When Shaw is gunned down, Trip seizes the Union flag, exhorts his comrades to surge ahead, and they do. In the end: Dead bodies, a failed military campaign. Shaw’s body is dumped in a mass grave by Confederate soldiers, Trip is tossed in after him. And yet — the empowerment, the victory, was theirs, they created their own destiny rather than awaiting their fate. They went down standing up, and for something larger than self. I am awed, humbled, educated by their sacrifice.

Like Glory and Gallipoli, Saving Private Ryan portrays death on an epic scale: The wide-angle battle scenes, the countless massacred bodies, the use of fictional characters caught up in true events to create both validating historical relevance and dramatic narrative force. 81 Saving Private Ryan ’s opening half-hour depiction of the WWII invasion of Normandy and the slaughter of American troops on Omaha Beach is horrifying but avoids numbing us out by skillfully personalizing the soldiers, many of whom are left dead in the bloody sand and sea, some of whom have the luck to survive, and whom we will follow for the rest of the story, hoping their luck holds out. But the most haunting scene, for me, comes two and a half hours into the film; a minor character, Private Mellish, a wise-cracking, gum-chewing, volatile Jewish soldier — he has pointed at himself and yelled “Juden, Juden!” at captured Germans, his proud, self-defining taunt — has found himself in hand-to-hand combat with an enemy soldier. They are alone and isolated inside a building, no one is coming to help, and there is an intense intimacy to their grappling, their bodies pressed together like lovers as they tumble and roll over the freshly killed body of Mellish’s comrade. Mellish is able to draw his bayonet but the enemy soldier wrenches it away from him, and, now lying on top of Mellish and murmuring almost reassuringly in incomprehensible German, presses the tip of the bayonet over Mellish’s heart. And Mellish’s instinct at this moment — face to face with Death, it is his turn, now, after seeing the butchered bodies of his friends, and the maybe-guilty hope that maybe, just maybe , his luck would hold and he would get out of this alive, because don’t their deaths somehow appease, fulfill a quota, don’t they count as escrow monies for his life, hasn’t he been alive, until now, isn’t he still alive, this very second, so how can he possibly die? — is to protest, stall, try to freeze-frame this last second of his existence: “Listen, listen, listen to me,” he says, “no, no, stop, stop!” He is being so reasonable, listen , can’t we talk this over, listen , can’t we work something out? Stop , just for a moment, please. But the German slowly drives the bayonet into his chest—“Shh, shh. .,” he whispers soothingly. It is not a brutal stab, it is delicate and slow, so slow, it is a forever moment and there is no one to hold his hand, Mellish aware of Death’s gentle, obliterating entrance into his body, of Death’s indifferent victory, until it is over and he is still.