Vivre la Resisitance !

I cry in movies. It has been an embarrassment at times. It happened in movie theatres or on the TV screen in the days before room-size flat-screens. It happens today. There was a time, when my son's were 10 and 7. I rented John Wayne's, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon at Blockbuster. Remember Blockbuster Video Rentals? John Wayne and I have a complicated relationship, but this was one of my favorite movies of his, with director John Ford.There's a scene: captain Brittles, the stolid cavalry soldier who rose through the ranks, is retiring. One last campaign. As he rides out to his troops prior to leading them out the gate of the fort, someone from the ranks, Harry Carey Jr., apologizes, and presents captain Brittles a gold pocket watch. "There's a sentiment sir", says another, maybe Ward Bond, and Captain Brittles opens the case and reads it. I cracked up, tears welling in my eyes and Quinn, my eldest, laughed at me, then hugged me. That scene represents one of many great movie scenes that allow me to lose myself in the moment.

Mostly I am drawn into a world in which I am unfamiliar. All of them have been unfamiliar, until recently. I could never be Capt Brittles riding into battle against the people who lived here first. I could never be Spartacus. I could not even be Han Solo. I'm more like Ishmael with a spleen full of disappointment at humanity, or Billy Budd searching for justice in the king's navy, or Mel Brooks laughing about all of it.

I could not tell you how many movies are in my 'top however-many", but near the tippy-top would be that great Humphry Bogart-Ingrid Bergman masterpiece, Casablanca. A movie made while WWII was being fought, about people fleeing fascist Germany. With a cast of extras, many of whom had seen the inside of a concentration camp. None of these experiences are familiar to me. Not until now. I'm pretty sure I now know what creeping fascism is because it has stopped creeping. I now relate to the entire cast of Casablanca, knowing I have not yet seen what they were reliving as cast-members of that movie. I feel it to my toes, which aren't as sensitive as they used to be. 

The most iconic scene of that iconic movie is when the German troops at Colonel Strasser's table, stood and surrounded the piano. They began a vigorous if not very elegant rendition of a German Drinking song, The Watch on the Rhein. Victor Lazlo, escaped from a German concentration and on his way to the free world with his re-united wife, with whom Rick had shared some intimate moments in Paris in the hours before German occupation, walks over to the band, picks up a conductors wand and order's, "Le Marsaillise!" The band leader looks to Rick, Rick nods and soon the entire bar is united in the resistance the Germans  had tried to keep at bay in this Moroccan pocket of the "free French".

And it is here where the gestalt of the film is a tragic gestalt of the life we are living. I see where Karl, the aging Jewish husband fleeing with his wife to freedom, is me, the aging white n'er-do-well. And I know that there is a place for me in this resistance. Even more to the point, I have joined the revolution, not as a combatant, not with a secret password, but like the people in Rick's Cafe Americaine, we resist in the ways that make sense for us.  They will have to conquer all of us. Small people, confronting an authoritarian government lusting for over-weening power. We do what we must because if we don't, we get told what we must do. So we do what they don't want us to do. We confront, we cajole, we laugh at the stupidity on display. There are examples of resistance through-out history and authoritarians are not equipped to fight an unseen enemy who knows the landscape. That fight has walked into our bar and tried to intimidate us. We will resist.