Guilty as Sin

There is an old conceit now relegated mostly to sensational and comic-book level works involving the sins of others and our ability to detect them with a touch.  The idea will strike the non-believer as preposterous, and as well it should: determining the concealed wickedness of the human race is not ours to worry.  We may espy something in the demeanor of a certain person that betrays him – a wink, a smirk, an irreverence towards any form of prosecution – and again I stray into the wide white path of spiritual fantasy.  So many times have we sought to review the crimes on another's conscience so as to justify our intuition that something is very wrong.  A luxury that would have come in handy in this film.

The protagonist is Jennifer Haines (Rebecca De Mornay), a strangely unobtrusive name for a woman we come to understand as one of Chicago's finest young attorneys.  Her ambition is documented in an opening scene that is standard fare in these sort of movies, an in medias res trial about a fantastic client and a stunning victory that will cement her reputation – and I think you know the rest.  Unlike the menu we are usually served, however, we are given little run-up to our first viewing of David Greenhill (Don Johnson at the height of his smarminess) sitting in the courtroom with a smile as broad as that of an omniscient showstopper witness holding himself back just for fun.  "Your fan is back again, he's been here every day," says a co-worker to Jennifer, and the two women indulge in giggly speculation.  Greenhill may be handsome and a sartorial pleasure, but his infamy will stem from his headline arrest for the murder of his very rich wife.  "The police are looking all over for him, and he has the nerve to walk into a Superior Court and watch a trial?" says Phil, Jennifer's nerdy boyfriend whose unkempt hair and moustache provide a strong contrast to the green-eyed lady-killer he will come to despise.  Despise because after a brief interview with Chicago's scandal of the year, Jennifer decides not only that Greenhill is innocent but that she will provide him with the best possible legal defense.

A brief aside: given the nature of the works reviewed on these pages, a production such as Guilty as Sin would seem to be an unlikely candidate for further examination.  The plot, after all, recycles many of the elements of other noir films about a seductive man or woman (usually the latter, a stereotype to which Greenhill alludes in one of his "soliloquies") who uses every ounce of her guile and sexual attraction to manipulate an otherwise good person compromised, as in this case, by unbridled ambition.  Yet the resemblance to other films is only superficial for two reasons: the slow twists of the plot, or I should say, the very slow twists, and the casting.  For a film that declares itself to be a thriller and even takes on a provocative if boilerplate name, a typical feature of pulp noir novels, very little actually occurs.  There is a lot of talk, a lot of innuendo and sidelong glances, and, perhaps most curiously, very few characters.  We tend to see such productions more often in European cinema, an industry far more dependent on budget and good taste. 

We see, for example, nothing of Greenhill's deceased spouse apart from a letter she allegedly composed and mailed the day of her death to implicate him in what he insists was a suicide.  "My wife was a very sick woman," Greenhill tells his increasingly repulsed attorney, "two years ago she had to be institutionalized for seven months.  Clinical depression.  And she swore that she'd get back at me even if it meant from the grave."  It is unclear from this statement why Mrs. Greenhill would have any reason to avenge herself against her husband; one may guess for the process of institutionalization itself, but this matter is never addressed again.  On another occasion, Greenhill emerges from the sauna within his fabulous penthouse to greet Jennifer who has come by to ask him, among other things, what the hell he might be doing dropping off his clothes at her dry cleaners, one of the many indications that their client-counsel relationship has taken a turn for the sleazy.  While listening to her complaints, Greenhill makes himself a sandwich with such relish and hunger (and splashing on so much mayonnaise) that we are immediately struck by all the motivations this man might have on this earth.  He is, without a doubt, the greediest and most conniving Casanova the world has ever encountered – or at least gaining such credentials remains his tacit aim.  It is at this point that the accused defends himself with some long-practiced sophistry, again winning enough of Jennifer's sympathy to stave off notions of turning him in with the additional information he casually provides about his prior activities. 

The film also features Leo (Jack Warden), an old friend of Jennifer's whose link to her is made explicit in our opening minutes ("If your mother hadn't turned me down nine times, I'd be your father"), as well as a couple of other witnesses and laborers whose collective testimony doesn't do much to sway our convictions (at one point, one of the witnesses who are supposed to incriminate Greenhill compliments his attire, leading the dandy to stand up for the admiration of the entire courtroom).  While Phil's every clenched fist and jealous accusation feed into a general portrait of someone not really cut out to accompany a very famous and very pretty attorney through life, Greenhill exudes a certain low-key surgical confidence that has always worked on women and also seems to be working on us.  More than once does the hunky philanderer confess to a crime that he rescinds soon thereafter just to see whether he can read the expression on Jennifer's face.  Somehow we laugh as he laughs; somehow we are indignant as his rage explodes; and somehow we cannot wait until he reappears on our screen.  Perhaps we should think twice.  But since when have we resisted aesthetic pleasure, guilty or otherwise?

Rilke, "Und einmal lös ich in der Dämmerung"

A work ("Once I release at twilight's gleam") by this Austrian poet.  You can read the original here.

Once I release at twilight's gleam     
The shoulder and the lap-borne stakes
From my dark dress, a lie undone,                  
And pale and bare, dive at the sun 
And show my youth to my old sea –  

The breakers will in waves atone
And ready me for solemn days.
And each will tremble, each will shake, 
So how should I shout back alone?     
It scares me so ...                

Yet I know light-wrapped waves entice
The last remains of freshest wind;
And there again my arms will rise, 
And once again will it begin. 

Minority Report

Readers of these pages may be surprised to learn that one of my favorite books as a child was a hardcover collection of science fiction posters.  Not movie posters, mind you, which were hardly as interesting, but depictions of art with a science fiction theme.  At the time they seemed more fantastic than what often excites people of my disposition, the art and worship of Greek and Roman gods (whose magnificence, admittedly, I have still not come to accept).  Yet the reason was clear then and even clearer now.  However bizarre the portraiture, however odd and evil the extraterrestrial contours, and however soulless the gizmos and gadgets, there was an underlying humanity about the drawings that could not be denied.  Over time, of course, it lost its allure and ultimately ended up on the bottom of a shelf at my familial home never to be consulted again, relegated to a part of my experience as a child that means little if anything as an adult, and unmolested by sentimental curiosity.  Summoning its images to the surface only makes me smile because I remember childhood's innocence and simple pleasures, its unknowing sweetness and endless future.  For that reason do so many writers venerate their childhood: children are immortal beings, the walking future, their dreams all visions of options, roads and possibilities.  Nevertheless there is something vital that children's notions of the world invariably lack, and that is context.  As a child, these posters and drawings seemed fantastic, as did any story that truly involved an investigation of the blackness that surrounds us.  But what I didn't know was that the stories that accompanied these pictures were of two sorts: those which actively sought to break from human language yet used language and its concomitant values to try to express this break (a fruitless task that even the greatest of geniuses could not fully overcome), and those which told tales that featured oddities from this galaxy or another but which essentially were integument for plain stories of love, hatred, war, peace, jealousy, desire, memory and homeland.  Humans and non-humans bound in inexplicable and unending conflict with nothing in common except their weapons may sound like a wild fantasy, but as historical allegory it is one of the most repeated events in our existence.  So is, for that matter, the conundrum of crime and punishment, which brings us to this remarkable film.

The premise is a favorite of Hitchcock's – the wrongly accused man framed for a murder he did not commit – but we'll get to that.  The year is 2054 and the American capital, once renowned as the bloodiest in the world, is now free of violent crime thanks to the labors of three psychics called "precogs" ("precognitives" doesn't quite roll off the tongue).  In our age of wretched skepticism it would seem unreasonable to assume that a film could portray a psychic as anything more than a half-possessed freak, a conduit for some higher force to vent hints of its grandeur.  For that reason alone is the appearance of the precogs explicable: they all look like sick, bedridden adolescents constantly assailed by nightmares (there is a lot of twitching, shaking and yelping, as if demons were gnawing at their lobes), their terrible fate being to reimagine death in all its iterations every single night.  And every night their three young minds see what malice man keeps in his heart and what he plans to do about it: they can tell you the name of the future criminal, the name of his victim, and give you an almost exact appointment with death, but the remaining details will have to be inferred by the crack investigative team headed by John Anderton (Tom Cruise).  On the basis of this information absorbed and processed into a rather sadistic machine that then spits out murderer and victim like lottery balls in blood red, PreCrime, an organization run by the stately but unplump Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), intervenes in a timely manner and jails the future criminal without his ever having killed anyone.  Now no longer permitted to operate in secrecy because of whispers of conspiracy (the official line is that we should all celebrate PreCrime's accomplishments), the organization plans on making its systematics available to public scrutiny.  But before it does, a Justice Department auditor by the name of Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) must make sure that everything is legitimate and safe, which of course it cannot possibly be.

The noir origins of this tale – a setup against an innocent man, a fallen world where no one can be trusted, money and power as the only incentives, a city fraught with suspicious looks and dangerous shadows – promote two potential plot lines.  Anderton could be a robotic bureaucrat whose machine does not work in time or at all and who has to become more human to compensate for this glitch; or Anderton the super-cop can have his own name roll out from the computer on a red ball.  That last path bifurcates into whether he will be the victim or, much more deliciously, the killer.  Why would Anderton, by all indications a model citizen, be plausible as a murder suspect?  Simply because even good men have their weaknesses.  Anderton's is the disappearance of his son owing to parental negligence a few years back at a public pool, a personal motivation to develop PreCrime to its maximum capacity.  Now estranged from his wife and addicted to a powerful descendant of current anti-depression medications, Anderton may be a fine officer but he is a nearly unapproachable human being.  He waltzes through the motions of his "busts" on the verge of a regrettable loss of self-control, and it takes no great leap of faith to envision him on the giving end of some nasty business.  And that is exactly what the three precogs – named Agatha, Dashiell, and Arthur in homage – see him doing in thirty-six hours to a man called Leo Crow.

The rest cannot and should not be revealed, except that the title refers to a dissenting opinion among the precogs, usually from Agatha (Samantha Morton) towards whom Anderton feels a great deal of parental tenderness.  To be sure, there will be chases, impossible traps, and an ingenious explanation to all this mischief; but it is Anderton's slow discovery of his own thoughts and desires that separates the film from the pack of futuristic allegories of freewill, and in the case of the precogs, of hell itself.  The philosophy behind the original story may be summed up in the following citation from a pleasingly anonymous internet source:

The precogs are kept in rigid position by metal bands, clamps and wiring, which keep them attached to special high-backed chairs.  Their physical needs are taken care of automatically and it is said that they have no spiritual needs.  Their physical appearance is somewhat different from that of ordinary humans, with enlarged heads and wasted bodies.  Precogs are deformed and retarded, "the talent absorbs everything"; "the esp-lobe shrivels the balance of the frontal area."  They do not understand their predictions.  Most of the data produced is useless in preventing murders and is then passed on to other agencies.

Should this remind you of a similar perspective on a different subject, I will not persuade you otherwise.  Suffice it to say that Minority Report's success as a crime thriller is buttressed by the profundity of the questions it hesitates to ask, but for which it provides more than ample speculation.  And amidst the rubble of good intentions gone horrifically awry, there are true moments of artistic insight.  Burgess, for example, quips: "We don't choose the things we believe in; they choose us."  And if the inevitable guilt of man has chosen John Anderton, why should he, a man, be any exception?

Miss Jéromette

The advent of the sexual revolution, or whatever it chooses to call itself, has brought with it the promise of equal rights in equal endeavours – a noble aim, regardless of its feasibility.  It is not so much that men and women cannot or should not be equal; in intellectual matters there is no distinction apart from what detractors will impose.  Rather, we face the age-old question of the physical equality that cannot be, simply because man will always carry an advantage of violence that cannot be reciprocated by his female counterpart.  As a result, two unbalanced sides will necessarily obtain, as in this story. 

The initial conceit involves two brothers sitting together one lonely night after dinner and poring over "a collection of famous Trials, published in a new edition and in a popular form."  True crime has always fascinated us because our repulsion contains some elements of attraction and curiosity, as much the case one hundred thirty-five years ago as it is today.  It is the second brother, the non-reader in this case and a clergyman, who turns pale upon beholding the book as it reminds him of a famous trial from his youth, a trial in which the accused was ultimately acquitted.  And what does the clergyman aver about this wicked time?  "I know this," he said, "the prisoner was guilty."  They speak no more about what happened, although the clergyman also indicates that there were "circumstances connected with that trial which were never communicated to the judge or the jury."  Only on his deathbed does he become more voluble and reveal what he had concealed within his heart for almost an entire adult life.    

It is many summers ago when his brother "was on [his] way to India" that the preacher, from whose perspective the tale is now recounted, has completed his studies at this university.  He chose law instead of his father's preference, which would have been for his son to join the clergy, and with this familial disappointment hanging as a black cloud over his everyday existence, he regales himself on what he can of the urban and urbane existence his choice permits ("I had no serious intention of following any special vocation.  I simply wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of a London life").  One fine evening, walking through the public gardens that can only be properly enjoyed at high summer, he hears a foreign female voice warning an unseen male to take his leave.  He steps in and averts further confrontation (the perpetrator, in any case, is drunk and quickly accompanied off the grounds by a policeman), and then turns his attention to the voice and the shape from which it emanates:

Her figure was slight and small: she was a well-made miniature of a woman from head to foot.  Her hair and her eyes were both dark.  The hair curled naturally; the expression of the eyes was quiet, and rather sad; the complexion, as I then saw it, very pale; the little mouth perfectly charming.  I was especially attracted, I remembered, by the carriage of her head; it was strikingly graceful and spirited; it distinguished her, little as she was and quiet as she was, among the thousands of other women in the Gardens, as a creature apart.     

Other colors are added to her portrait: she is impoverished, "resigned to her lonely life among strangers," and without her parents for many years now.  She is French, of course, and yet, particularly in one cruel instance, "her temperament had little of the liveliness which we associate in England with the French nature."  They begin what could loosely be termed a courtship, although their relationship at every moment becomes more and more tenuous owing to the presence of another man in her life.  Our narrator asks as timid lovers tend to ask while being very afraid to know, and learns next to nothing: "He might be living, or he might be dead.  There came no word of him, or from him."  It is only when the narrator's mother, on her own deathbed, presses him to change his vocation that he quits Jéromette, abetted by the fact that she has just received a letter confirming that her love will soon return.

Unless you rank among the most ingenuous of readers what happens next cannot really be spoiled by commentary.  Our narrator, now indeed a man of the cloth, is appointed to a benefice in the West of England.  His steady income does not satisfy him, so he takes on a few students in need of help to gain entrance into the prestigious universities whose names their families covet.  The first two students are harmless teenagers, but then our narrator gives a sermon at his church about "the discovery of a terrible crime" which has held England in its thrall.  After this passionate lecture, of which, alas, we are given but a quoteless summary, the narrator receives a note written in pencil from a young man, "a member of my congregation, a gentleman," who wishes to see him as soon as the preacher has an opportunity.  The man leaves his own father's name as a reference, and it is verified as belonging to "a man of some celebrity and influence in the world of London" – the world, we remember, that our narrator wishes he had never left.   They meet and the narrator tells us all we need to know:

The women, especially, admired his beautiful light hair, his crisply-curling beard, his delicate complexion, his clear blue eyes, and his finely shaped hands and feet.  Even the inveterate reserve in his manner, and the downcast, almost sullen, look which had prejudiced me against him, aroused a common feeling of romantic enthusiasm in my servants' hall.  It was decided, on the high authority of the housekeeper herself, that 'the new gentleman' was in love – and more interesting still, that he was the victim of an unhappy attachment which had driven him away from his friends and his home.

The man in question is in his late twenties and yet has never been a college student.  And how could this be?  A dissolute life of excess is the hardly contrite explanation.  But our clergyman has been trained to detect human motivations in the depths of our being, and we can say without fear of perjury that, with this fellow, he does not like what he sees. 

Without going further, it is remarkable how the narrator is presented with both sides of an equation, but at different times and from the perspective of different professions, so that the fabulous structure of an otherwise simple tale becomes more involving without becoming more intricate.  Collins is most famously the author of two other works, a superb if overly long novel of suspense and one of the great literary mysteries of the nineteenth century, both of which can be recommended without reservation.  To Collins's great credit, there is little difference in style between the passages that develop his characters and the passages that develop his plots.  The same sure, curious hand instructs all forces to act and obey his whims.  I have always told myself that my predilection for Victorian storytelling has to do with the comity of its personages, who act with full acknowledgment of the laws of both beauty and morality, even if at certain times they choose to transgress them.  There is a gallantry to our clergyman narrator, an odd adherence to basic human goodness that should not strike us as odd at all.  But in our times of cynicism and vulgarity, little space is allotted to the simple virtues that we have not only taken for granted, but cast by the wayside with no small contempt.  That is not the reason, mind you, that I have omitted the story title's second half – the reason for that was its sounding a bit too quaint for my taste.  Far more quaint, however, than the notion of falling in love with a woman whose soul is hopelessly and dangerously possessed by another.  That tale, I think, we all know far too well. 

The Crime of the Communist

Readers of these pages are aware that my views on political animals and other fauna tilt distinctly to the left – the pleonastic sinister left – in no small part because on the right lies the megaton chain of unchecked survival.  What smirking men of science call evolution we may accept as historical fact, if that fact is not undone by the plethora of unknowns that render it a small and murky corner on a endless canvas.  On the right also lies the status quo as perpetrated by those who most directly benefit from the here and now.  These characters know who they are: the robber barons, the humbug gazillionaires bereft of culture, imagination or anything resembling humanity, those who claim that rich people are more valuable when, in truth, no one on earth needs to have ten even five million dollars at his personal disposal.  My contempt for their relentless justifications of their relentless greed may lead the hasty categorizers among us to lump me together unceremoniously with the crimson firebrands of yesteryear – but of such affiliation I want no part.  I am a content, left-of-middler and nothing more or less.  Which makes the damnation of the title character of the story in this collection all the more pertinent.    

The communist in question has the name of a sea monster – but we'll get to him presently.  We begin in the middle, so to speak, with a triptych of walkers amidst the fictional lawns of Mandeville College, Oxford, and two other men utterly out of place on those same greens.  They are, we are told, even out of place next to one another.  It is also somewhat of a surprise, on a campus of such repute, to behold two moneyed dandies lollygagging on garden chairs:

The only excuse was that they were foreigners.  One was an American, a millionaire named Hake, dressed in the spotlessly and sparklingly gentlemanly manner known only to the rich of New York.  The other, who added to all these things the outrage of an astrakhan overcoat (to say nothing of a pair of florid whiskers), was a German Count of great wealth, the shortest part of whose name was Von Zimmern.  The mystery of this story, however, is not the mystery of why they were there.  They were there for the reason that commonly explains the meeting of incongruous things; they proposed to give the College some money. 

Money has the distinction of being both the great equalizer and the object that keeps most of the human race at no closer than arm's length, but we know enough about money to proceed (we should also know that Chesterton evinced a particular disdain for astrakhan coats).  Predictably enough, our two contributors are restless tourists – rich people often believe that traveling from one luxury resort to another, even more exotic location steadily makes them cultured – and, therefore, one may be generous and declare their lounging to be well-merited.  Well-merited until they are tipped over by the shortest member of our promenading trio, a curious clergyman by the name of Brown, and display the onset of rigor mortis.

Preceding this horrific discovery is one of those British University dining hall scenes which some people automatically admire without once ever having visited such a chamber.  Let me state for the record that if you do not admire the brilliance and wisdom contained in these same institutions' libraries, you will surely not enjoy their food.  Father Brown and the two other men – the Master of Mandeville, a tall and lithe fellow, and the Bursar, precisely his opposite – sit down to lunch only to anticipate another arrival, this time of someone outside the school's immediate control.  This is Craken, our communist in the flesh:

A shadow shot or slid rapidly along the panelled wall opposite, as swiftly followed by the figure that had flung it; a tall but stooping figure with a vague outline like a bird of prey .... it was only the figure of a long-limbed, high-shouldered man with long drooping moustaches, in fact, familiar to them all; but something in the twilight and candlelight and the flying and streaking shadow connected it strangely with the priest's unconscious words of omen .... his hanging hair and moustache were quite fair, but his eyes were so deep-set that they might have been black.   

Why a Communist could lack the convivial and positive spirit with which his manifestoes allegedly imbue him may remind the reader of a famous quote about one's face at the age of fifty – but I digress.  Firstly, Craken is not fifty; secondly, we are not concerned about his face even if that may be his sole and besetting sin.  Our Craken, you see, is a revolutionary in the same way that a rock star is a revolutionary: both dislike the soothing calm of the status quo.  Joining the mainstream may be impossible and, admittedly, not something anyone with a few sparks of creativity might wish to do, yet humanity in all its flaws and fluff cannot be equated to a lump of ignorant clay.  When you stop caring about the rest of humanity, any theory you may have of revolution will inevitably suggest that you are great enough to accomplish this coup, and therefore are entitled to the concomitant rewards.  Craken proposes bloodshed, which he gets in the form of the two philanthropist businessmen with whose murder he is to be charged.  The very classic crime by the very red killer of the very rich and un-red – and the rest of the plot can come in due time.

A casual reader of Chesterton may find the treatment heavy-handed, in particular the ending, but there really should not be any casual Chestertonians, anyway.  What separates Father Brown from the common detective is not only the priest's refusal to do anything that would not be for the greater good of humanity, but the author's willingness to embrace the ethical quandaries that such openness entails.  So when the clues fall into place, it is Father Brown who defends Craken with passion that such a lout could not possibly deserve.  And, as it were, it wouldn't match his face.