The Spanish Prisoner

The opening shot in this film features that oft-ignored airport security sign about not taking packages handed to you by strangers, which implies that there will indeed be a stranger and a package. In a much later scene, the x-ray scanner betrays a horrible secret. The cards are all on the table from the very beginning, but we cannot quite understand what suit is being played or who the dummy is. Actually, that last question we can indeed answer: the man helplessly watching all the cards being placed is an engineer by the name of Joseph Ross (Campbell Scott).

Ross's unspecified corporate job is why he finds himself "traveling for business" to the Caribbean island paradise of Saint-Estèphe, which I am pleased to report does not exist in our reality, and barely so in Ross's. He heads there with his friend and colleague George Lang (the redoubtable Ricky Jay), and the two present – to a snarling, cigar-chomping board of directors – the industrial breakthrough known simply as "the process." In lesser films the process would be explained in pseudo-scientific detail; but Mamet wields the power of omission like few others, and wisely has Ross and Lang finish each other's sentences so that the operation in question remains a complete mystery. Even our periodic glimpses into Ross's red notebook – yes, his bright red notebook containing the greatest industrial secret in the world – yield nothing more than equations, indistinguishable sketches, and a lot of chicken scratch. The directors' first post-presentation question ("How long can we hold on to it before the competition steals it?") cloaks a parallel, far more sinister implication. And in an iconic vignette, Ross indulges the directors by silently writing out the expected profit margin – an exercise that takes several delicious seconds. We never see the exact figure, of course, but the wolfish grins exchanged, especially from Ross's supervisor Mr. Klein (the late Ben Gazzara, who in his role recalls this actor), reinforce our suspicion that greed is the most overwhelming of human sins. Klein parries Ross's later question about his bonus with the perfect insincerity of a man who has been lying for so long that he could only disclose genuine facts by accident or error. "I'm in the same position as you," he tells the young engineer, which could not be on a farther planet from the truth. We realize that corporate avarice, endless gains stripping in front of old, cigar-smoking businessmen, is the end of the world as we know it to be good and redeemable. "They keep me in the dark, too, yes they do," adds Klein, as if preempting Ross's utter disbelief. What he means is: they keep me in the black, the very, very black. And with dim prospects of tasting the fruit of his labors, Ross has an island encounter with another member of the wealthy elite, a shady businessman by the name of Julian "Jimmy" Dell (Steve Martin).

What Dell does and does not do for a living is never substantiated; all Ross knows is that Dell, unlike Klein, appears to have some traces of human blood coursing through his veins. Is it remarkable that Dell, who so wants Ross to believe that he came to Saint-Estèphe on a sea plane, has a poster of a sea plane and a wooden propeller as the only wall art in his office? Yes, it is remarkable. Is it also remarkable that Dell, allegedly a multimillionaire, would send his sister a ragged, dilapidated edition of this book, a near-mint copy of which Ross quickly tracks down at the local bookbinder's? Maybe not quite as remarkable, although when Ross unwraps the book in expectation of contraband, he stumbles on an implicative note from sibling to sibling. Why Ross befriends Dell is not immediately clear unless you consider his rather unenviable position as an inventor of genius on the verge of being mulcted of a fortune he alone has earned. At the same time, he is accosted by the new girl in the office, an undersexed sparkplug called Susan Ricci (Rebecca Pidgeon). In the film's best scene, Susan, who exhibited unabashed carnal interest in this engineer "in line for higher things" when they first met in Saint-Estèphe, happens to be "accidentally in the vicinity" of his Manhattan apartment. Susan bets Ross that Dell did not emerge from that sea plane as the latter asserts and produces photographic evidence to that end. Yet the pictures only show a married woman allegedly involved with Dell, one he claims is a "princess" of a "country that barely exists any more." It is also Susan who alerts the staggeringly naïve Ross to the possibility of Dell's package having an ulterior aim. And so, a lonely and brilliant engineer engages in two, perhaps mutually exclusive relationships, while George, a font of made-up adages and recondite quotes (he paraphrases this work when hungover) doesn't think either one of them will long live enough to regale his grandchildren on the discovery of "the process."

This Othello allusion notwithstanding, we have not spoken of Spain or of prisoners, and that is because our title is a famous confidence game ("the oldest one on the books," says one character) that the curious can easily research. With a protagonist named Joseph and an operation called "the process," however, one cannot but think of this famous novel, which likewise features a conspiracy that appears to have enlisted everyone except its victim, Joseph K. College term-paper writers may also wish to point out that klein is German for "small," and lang for "long," indicating – well actually, perhaps that minor exegesis might indeed reveal something out of the ordinary. Suffice it to say that Ross will be approached by many actors, all of whom claim to be benevolent, and his ability to distinguish truth from lie will rest squarely on his limited knowledge of human nature. Less experienced viewers may deem The Spanish Prisoner strikingly novel, but it actually follows plot economy rules and pacing almost to a fault, a tidy, polished sonnet that insists on reinspection. Mamet's strength as a writer is to oblige his actors constantly to imply something else – even, at times, to themselves – leading them to speak the same language, yet accusatorially, as if others simply didn't speak it with sufficient correctness. The easiest and most obvious manifestation of this technique is sexual innuendo; far less detectable is a dark hint of someone's character or intent. The serpentine soundtrack is well-employed in this regard, punctuating looks and phrases with more substance than they otherwise would have garnered. As it were, Mamet has turned political coats in recent years, rendering works like The Spanish Prisoner either ironic or tragic depending on your notion of social justice. So when Ross quips at one point, half-resigned to his fate, "All I want is an umbrella in my drink," he would do better to consider that cautionary poster in Klein's office of a drowning man captioned, "Someone talked!" After all, a mere umbrella can only deal with so much water.          

Borges, "Ausencia"

A work ("Absence") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Life's vastness I will have to praise,
Vast life which forms your mirror pane: 
With each dawn reconstructed life.
Since you left me and went away, 
So many places have seemed vain,
Bereft of meaning, yet alike 
To day's long beams of humdrum light. 

Those eves which were your carven niche, 
Those melodies which always held
Me there, words of that time awake, 
With my hands I will have to break. 
Where deeply will I hide my soul
So that your absence it won't see, 
That terrible, unsetting sun, 
Aflame for harsh eternity? 

Your absence so surrounds me whole, 
Just like a rope upon my throat, 
The sea in which we sink, and choke.

bré de levantar la vasta vida

que aún ahora es tu espejo:

cada mañana habré de reconstruirla.

Desde que te alejaste,

cuántos lugares se han tornado vanos

y sin sentido, iguales

a luces en el día.

Tardes que fueron nicho de tu imagen,

músicas en que siempre me aguardabas,

palabras de aquel tiempo,

yo tendré que quebrarlas con mis manos.

¿En qué hondonada esconderé mi alma

para que no vea tu ausencia

que como un sol terrible, sin ocaso,

brilla definitiva y despiadada?

Tu ausencia me rodea

como la cuerda a la garganta,

el mar al que se hunde.

The Arrow of Heaven

He's a mystagogue .... there are quite a lot of them about; the sort of men about town who hint to you in Paris cafés that they've lifted the veil of Isis or know the secret of Stonehenge. In a case like this they're sure to have some sort of mystical explanations  ..... [Yet] real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude.

You will have heard much in recent years about our having solved a number of centuries-old mysteries, and you may wonder how on earth or beyond did we become so adept at deciphering the cryptic riddles that have plagued thinkers for thousands of years. The short answer is, of course, that we really haven't; the long answer involves what can be economically called arrogance and more properly called modernity's love affair with itself. The technological breakthroughs of the last one hundred fifty years have indeed been remarkable. Yet what is even more remarkable is how much our lives have improved considering that we still know precious little about our universe. Pundits of the new religion, the grizzled, shabby makers and breakers of theories that don't seem to make much sense even to the people who propound them, will give you specific data on thousands of stars and planets, their proximity to us at every moment, the chances that an asteroid will raze a major city in minutes, the brightness of a comet, and so forth, but think that miracles or divine intervention are patently absurd. They will oppose all forms of religious dogma while insisting that they have scientific proof for all their statements, which makes them to a great degree irrefutable. And since most actions and emotions can be stripped down to and explained by their chemical motives, they will scoff at those who still employ a deep and wide knowledge of human nature and personality evaluations to make their decisions. Fine logic all of that, if the blackness of the skies seems to you more logical than the blackness of our hearts; and logical except for the fact that little thought and a lot of assumptions do not really inform us about our destiny. Which brings us to this tale of motives, revenge, and a man named Brown.

From the story's first line we are duly aware of a layer of irony that should rid us of any sympathy for the three victims whose fates are described famously and cruelly:

It is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. This story, I am happy to say, has to begin with a murdered millionaire; in one sense, indeed, it has to begin with three murdered millionaires, which some may regard as an embarras de richesse.

The triptych in question boast some rather ridiculous names that Chesterton did not so much make up as cobble together to sound as ridiculous as possible: Titus Trant (suggesting a despotic Roman); Brian Horder (a nasty Celt); and finally, we are told and then shown, Brander Merton, who at one point in my edition is referred to as "Brandon," a more average name immediately eschewed for the Germanic oddness fit only for a robber baron. These three men have more than death in common: they all were in possession of a fantastic treasure called the Coptic Cup. If you know what a Copt is you can imagine that this name was never one used by the natives; what makes the nomenclature even more laughable is the worship inflicted upon that jewelled chalice which seems, like gold itself, to reflect at once everything and nothing. Idolatry gives way to bloodlust, and soon enough, Merton has himself barricaded in an impossible mansion that cannot be entered or quit without inspection, with only fifteen minutes a day to consecrate to the adoration of his ancient prize. And that's where, naturally, we get our arrow.

I should mention there is also a man called Crake, Hickory Crake as it were, which is ridiculous even among this cast, another man called Wilton, although his last name is revealed to be something else, Blake, an attorney (not to be confused with Crake, who has "a brown face that looked almost too brown to have ever been white"), a pilot named Wain, an Asian-looking fellow who goes by Drage, and an African mountain with the plain name of Harris. There is also one other character, whose name has much to do with his function: Daniel Doom. Daniel Doom is so clearly someone who does not believe in his cause that we wonder, apart from the two and then swiftly three cadavers, whether a person that serious about death would take the very serious matter of pseudonyms so lightly. Doom writes a few letters to Trant and, upon his decease, to Horder, and "it soon became clear that the writer of the threatening letter did not confine himself to threatening." Merton is struck down by an arrow that modern forensics might find rather fascinating, and Father Brown, being suspiciously open-minded, has little to go on until Crake – who resembles the stereotype of a Red Indian in demeanor and appearance – nonchalantly utters the following:

I've seen an Indian stand under a hundred guns with nothing but a little scalping-knife and kill a white man standing on the top of a fort ....[he] threw it [the knife], threw it in a flash before a shot could be fired. I don't know where he learnt the trick.

The moral here would be lost were it not for the unwanted interference of Drage, who is neither to be trusted nor disbelieved. It is Drage who picks up the small, lumpy priest on the latter's first trip across the pond to the now-most populous Anglophone country in the world; it is also Drage who seems to partake in a secret that he cannot share. As he brings Brown to a place that "was obviously their destination" (a magnificently pithy description), there is something so mandarin about his person and mannerisms that leads our protagonist to wonder why a gentleman so off-putting would also be sufficiently versed in the Bible as to try and impress him. He wonders and wonders and then thinks of Red Indians, airplanes, millionaires, frontier morality, and that allegedly Egyptian cup, and it all becomes horrifically clear. The only thing that never gains in clarity is why Daniel Doom did not call himself Daniel Scratch.

Dead Ringers

The original source of this film has been claimed and disputed, sometimes unpleasantly, although the curious researcher can cite a novel, another film released only a few years before it (that treats of a very different situation), as well as the case of real-life twin gynecologists. I have always found the Greenaway claim as spurious as the garbage it perpetrates; I know nothing of the book (actually mentioned as the film's basis) or of the now long-deceased brothers. Whatever the inspiration, it is the final product that justifies its ingredients, and that product is nothing less than exquisite.

Our twins are first seen in 1954 in what, owing to their British speech, we imagine may not be their native Ontario. Nerdiness, light-brown hair, glasses, and a peculiar fastidiousness in manner distinguish the twins from the rest of humanity, but not in any way from one another. They approach and proposition a coeval, perhaps around eleven, and she responds with the two missiles children always launch at one another: threats from a parent and the very plausible assertion that the twins do not know the slightest thing about copulation. As it were, our lads are precocious enough to end up thirteen years later at Harvard Medical School; they are also perverted enough – perverted might not be the ideal choice of words – to provoke suspicion among their supervisors for their unusual methods and tools. After this brief introduction we come to the present time and place, 1988 Toronto. The two men, identified in a school awards ceremony, are Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons in bilocation) who have grown into identical copies of one another in profession and appearance. Gynecologists with their own clinic, their bizarre, almost sadistic devices now standard issue in the industry, the brothers' success is reflected by their enormous modern flat, a favorite expensive restaurant where they are served as if they never leave, and a certain insouciance towards the cares of lesser beings. In time, two important facts are revealed: Elliot, or Elly, is the gregarious, schmoozing sort who handles all public relations matters, finances, and teaching; Beverly, or Bev, is the researcher and normally the fellow in the office examining patients. One suspects that their female-sounding hypocorisms (no one else addresses them as such) may be akin to odd nicknames used in turn-of-the-century British literature, but I digress. Now and then when one of them is tired, unwell, or otherwise indisposed, the other fills his shoes and no one notices anything awry. Even if the fabulous Mantle brothers are known in Toronto for many things, one of which is women.

The Mantles' pursuit and conquest of women, often their own patients, becomes the barometer for the sole distinction between the brothers: that of temperament. Elly is the smarmy bastard who enjoys serial love affairs without incurring anything more than an occasional slap in the face; Bev is the quiet, retiring academic trapped in a state of perpetual discomfort. While Bev's research generates the lifeblood of Elly's operations (as well as his eventual professorship), Elly's Lothario schemes get Bev laid. "If it weren't for me," says Elly in a moment of amazed recognition, "you'd still be a virgin." It is therefore of no particular importance that Elly has most recently gotten himself involved with a well-known actress by the name of Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold). Claire has always wanted children; as Elly so succinctly puts it, she typifies that typical headline, "Celebrity actress says life incomplete without children." Of course, she has solicited the aid of Dr. Mantle, whom she, unlike most of Toronto, knows as one person, implying that circumstances have gotten rather dire. Upon examining her Elly learns the cause: she has a trifurcate cervix, a freak mutation that is "fabulously rare." Googling such a term yields entries almost exclusively referring to Dead Ringers, which might indicate that we are dealing with medical fantasy. Whatever the case, the notion of mutation will plague the brothers for the entire film – they will find neither a way over nor around it. Elly does what he wants to do with her then, at the next opportunity of casual gratification, gleefully recommends that Bev replace him. He does and arrives at Claire's as shyly as Elly seized her hips and reminded her that every fiber of her body can be linked in palpitating bliss. One detail suggests that Claire perceives the difference from her very first embrace with Bev, but will be officially informed at a lunch with a friend later on. Her first scene with Bev remains, however, paramount to the developments that will occur, and includes one of the greatest lines in the history of cinema ("I've never used contraceptive devices; I've never even thought contraceptive thoughts"). But over time she notices that there exist two distinct personalities, the sweet caring one and the human excrement – which is how she addresses the brothers when she finally meets them together.

What occurs thereafter has garnered the Dead Ringers praise as a horror film, perhaps because the opening credits emit something of the macabre. Some reviewers have even sided with Claire – for reasons, I admit, I could not possibly imagine: she is not compelling, interesting, or even comely. Past her prime and obsessed with the child she cannot bear, she annoys us as much as she annoys Elly and Bev. Well, actually, that's not quite right. Bev takes to her more passionately than he's likely taken to anything or anyone in his life apart from medicine; Elly, on the other hand, grows jealous of her command over his brother. At the film's midway point Claire summons the elder twin to her makeup trailer to talk about Bev and, in a very starlet-like gesture, to discover whether Elliot, too, can't be convinced to love her. We initially see one side of her face, which is untouched by rouge or powder and rather masculine in its ferocity – but she turns to Elliot and we see what violent embellishments her role calls for, the career-resurrecting role, mind you, for which she abandons Bev to his own devices for ten long weeks. Therefrom we proceed down a swerving, troubled path, but we do realize why women are allowed to come between these two men only when they are patients or prey (Bev is "no good with the frivolous ones," Elly "no good with the serious ones"). So the dénouement should not surprise anyone except the lovers of melodrama – which would be, in a way, the vast majority of those frivolous or serious women. And you may do well to remember that old adage about the gun on the wall.

Geneviève Bujold

The Bottle Imp

If you were lucky enough to be read fantastic tales as a child and regaled on the plenitude of the world's legends and myths (a distinction made elsewhere on these pages), you will surely have heard of the genie in the lamp. You were also probably told at some point during your scholastic trials that genie and genius are from the same root, since they are indeed found interchangeably in our books. But here lies the untruth of the matter. Genius, the effervescent spirit of wisdom and creation comes from the same Greek root as genesis, or of birth and origin itself; genie has a much nastier source. The OED thus comments:

The word génie was adopted by the French translators of The Arabian Nights as the rendering of the Arabic word [more precisely given as jinn; jinni is the adjective] which it resembled in sound and sense. In English, genie has been commonly used in the singular and genii in the plural.

This split etymology, the drifting of a word already in the language to accommodate a near-homonym from a foreign tongue, is common enough in our modern age of calques and wordplay, but let us be sure: the genie of the lamps of Aladdin and other wanderers are not the protective spirits born to guard our souls. Jinn in Arabic has, as older words often do, the capacity to refer with equal authority to one word and its complete opposite – in this case angels and whatever your mind tells you that complete opposite might be. A terse introduction to this dark fable.

Although we will spend almost all of our story in the Hawaiian isles, we begin our tale in this Western city. Our protagonist Keawe is a young and impecunious man who "could read and write like a schoolmaster" but who has seen little of the world. His education and lack of exposure to other ends of the earth conspire to lead him to San Francisco, and here he is amazed by what he sees. He notices one house in particular:

This is a fine town, with a fine harbour, and rich people uncountable; and in particular, there is one hill which is covered with palaces. Upon this hill Keawe was one day taking a walk with his pocket full of money, viewing the great houses upon either hand with pleasure. "What fine houses these are!" he was thinking, "and how happy must those people be who dwell in them, and take no care for the morrow!" The thought was in his mind when he came abreast of a house that was smaller than some others, but all finished and beautified like a toy; the steps of that house shone like silver, and the borders of the garden bloomed like garlands, and the windows were bright like diamonds; and Keawe stopped and wondered at the excellence of all he saw. So stopping, he was aware of a man that looked forth upon him through a window so clear that Keawe could see him as you see a fish in a pool upon the reef. The man was elderly, with a bald head and a black beard; and his face was heavy with sorrow, and he bitterly sighed. And the truth of it is, that as Keawe looked in upon the man, and the man looked out upon Keawe, each envied the other.

Were our story merely an allegory, a couple of repartees about the inevitable unhappiness of those who chase money and wealth could end the narrative right here. Yet we are not as enmeshed in allegory as in the imagination of a warning brought out by the sweeping interest in the fate of the human soul and the choices it is allowed to make over a lifetime. Keawe enters this beautiful house and ultimately purchases for a small amount the source of the old man's prosperity, "a round-bellied bottle with a long neck." Glass in appearance and touch, it cannot be shattered; the glass itself "was white like milk, with changing rainbow colors in the grain," and inside Keawe sees "something obscurely mov[ing], like a shadow and a fire." A careful reader will note the equanimity of the spectrum beheld, as if all the colors, including white – which is all colors combined – and black – which is the absence of color – were contained, and therein were contained as well all possibilities of all things on this earth. So came the old man into the fortune Keawe sees before him, and so plans he to leave it all behind. Forces of evil will impose contracts because only they, in eternal damnation, will have the time to read every last clause. For that reason there are ground rules to the purchase of this bottle: it must be bought at a lower price than what the current owner paid for it and cannot simply be given away or abandoned; and if the owner dies still in possession of it, he will burn for all eternity in the slow flames of hell. With this in mind, Keowe has a palatial home built back in Hawaii (the money inherited from suddenly deceased relatives) and then finds Kokua, a woman beyond his wildest dreams – although his wildest dreams are not necessarily wreathed with joy and good fortune, and, by this unwilling association, neither are hers.

The vision that Stevenson imposes on his odd Hawaiian cast has much to do with his own Presbyterian upbringing and the cataclysmic consequences of greed and diabolical pacts. The main value of The Bottle Imp, apart from its remarkable concinnity of style, is the wholly unexpected dénouement to Keowe's crisis of conscience. We will not remark here that Stevenson's decision was influenced by his growing antipathy to European mores and his concomitant sympathy with the South Sea islanders among whom he died, although there is great plausibility in such an assertion. More likely, as in so often the case in art, there obtained a happy combination of his long-held tenets on the fate of the human soul and the setting which inspired him to re-imagine an old trope. There is one paragraph in this regard which is particularly magnificent:

Kokua concealed the bottle under her holoku, said farewell to the old man, and walked off along the avenue, she cared not whither. For all roads were now the same to her, and led equally to hell. Sometimes she walked, and sometimes ran; sometimes she screamed out loud in the night, and sometimes lay by the wayside in the dust and wept. All that she had heard of hell came back to her; she saw the flames blaze, and she smelt the smoke, and her flesh withered on the coals.

"All that she had heard of hell came back to her" might be the finest short description ever furnished on the subject. And the funny thing is, all of us know exactly what she means.