14. Nothing Else Matters &...

Lyrics

So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
and nothing else matters

Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don't just say
and nothing else matters

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
and nothing else matters

never cared for what they do
never cared for what they know
but I know

So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
and nothing else matters

never cared for what they do
never cared for what they know
but I know

Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don't just say

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us, something new
Open mind for a different view
and nothing else matters

never cared for what they say
never cared for games they play
never cared for what they do
never cared for what they know
and I know

So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
No, nothing else matters


This is a great song by a band I don't really like. I am not really a fan of hard rock/metal.
Metal music is very often associated with horror. So the movie I chose to link this song with is a straightforward drama by a director usually associated with twisted horror(-like) movies.

The Movie: The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999)

The Straight Story is a movie about 73-year old Alvin Straight who goes on a 377 mile journey from Laurens, Iowa to Mount Zion, Wisconsin, to visit his brother who recently had a stroke. His mode of transportation during this trip is a lawnmower. I may be a bit too much of pragmatic, but one of the reasons I didn't really like this movie was Alvin's completely irrational insistence to travel by lawnmower. It's stupid and unnecessary. He is not a poor man. He buys the lawnmower for 325 dollars and when it breaks down pays another 180 dollars to repair it. And he still seems to have lots of money left. He is also not very healthy. He needs two canes to walk properly and has all kinds of other problems. As you can see there is no reason to not take a bus. And at one point he is actually offered a free ride to Mt. Zion which he refuses. The movie presents Alvin's journey as a heroic one by a man who always stays true to himself. And of course being yourself is the most important virtue, right? Well, not if you are in a hurry to see your brother who might die soon and who you haven't seen in 10 years because of a falling out. The movie cannot both claim that Alvin wants to see his brother very much and that his traveling there by lawnmower is a good, heroic thing. When he is offered a ride he is already a month on his way without having a clue whether his brother still lives or not.

There is more wrong with the movie. On his journey Alvin meets all kinds of people who he teaches all kinds of 'valuable' life lessons. His life lessons though are the kinds of cliches you can hear uttered by television doctors who want to be the next Dr. Phil. The movie pretends that these are some kind of profound statements he makes. 'The worst thing about being old is remembering that you were young' Alvin says and the young man hearing it, gives him a contemplative look. That statement forever changed his life. And in one, for some reason very darkly lit night scene, so we can hardly see anything, Alvin meets a girl who ran away from home 5 months earlier. Alvin tells her the following story: "I'd give each one of 'em a stick and, one for each one of 'em, then I'd say, 'You break that.' Course they could real easy. Then I'd say, 'Tie them sticks in a bundle and try to break that.' Course they couldn't. Then I'd say, "That bundle... that's family." This story is hundreds, if not thousands years old. The very next morning the girl has gone, leaving Alvin with bundled sticks. Oh, please.

I am curious what exactly attracted David Lynch to direct this movie. He is a director of absurd, twisted, dreamlike movies that often go into the realm of horror. Besides this one I have also seen his Blue Velvet en Mulholland Dr and I think Blue Velvet is a really great movie. I was too young when I saw Mulholland Dr. and did not like it. Watching this movie I sometimes thought that Lynch was aware of how absurd and stupid this movie actually is. Is this some sort of elaborate joke by Lynch? The movie's beginning scenes are actually very similar to the beginning scenes of Blue Velvet. We see a montage of an ordinary American town and its ordinary citizens. It's fun to think, but most probably not true, that Lynch might have intended this movie as a parody of itself. That he read the screenplay and thought to kid around a bit with the audience. He would make the audience believe that he made a conventional straightforward drama. And he would be lauded for this, because he stepped outside his comfort zone. But secretly this conventional straightforward drama would often be just as absurd and insane as many as his other movies, like Blue Velvet. And nobody would notice this. In any case, if in 1999 you wouldn't know anything about the movie and be familiar with Lynch and heard that he made a movie called The Straight Story, chances are you'd think the title was some kind of joke. Unfortunately as I said, this is most probably not true and this is just a bad movie. If there is anything positive about it it is that David Lynch is a great visual director. There are some really wonderful shots and if there was no dialogue at all the movie could have worked as a love letter to the landscapes and people of the American Midwest. The scene below is actually quite beautiful.

13. Brothers in Arms &...

Lyrics

These mist covered mountains
Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands
And always will be
Some day you'll return to
Your valleys and your farms
And you'll no longer burn
To be brothers in arms

Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I've witnessed your suffering
As the battles raged higher
And though they hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms

There's so many different words
So many different songs
We have just one world
But we live in different ones

Now the sun's gone to hill
And the moon's riding high
Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die
But it's written in the starlight
And every line on your palm
We're fools to make war
On our brothers in arms


The Dire Straits are awesome. This isn't my favorite Dire Straits song, but it still is a powerful anti-war song. It was written as a response to the pointless Falkland War between UK and Argentina in the 1980's. Unfortunately, unlike America and the Vietnam War, the British have hardly made any movies made about this war. The Argentinians have made one major movie about it, Blessed by Fire. Unfortunately I could not find it subtitled. So I had to choose a movie about another war. I chose World War I. That is not a very random choice. Lyrically this song is reminiscent of poems written during World War I by British poets. I don't know much about poetry, but in high school during English classes we once discussed British poetry during World War I. I unfortunately haven't remembered much of it, but I do remember that these poets focused a lot on the fact that the British were going to fight in places far away from home. And the horrid war-torn landscapes of these places were described very vividly in these poems. One of the most famous of these poems is probably Rupert Brooke's The Soldier. Especially the first lines of it: 'If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.' I think that especially the first part of Brothers in Arms is very reminiscent of these poems. Besides this the phrase brothers in arms is often very much associated with the World War I. Due to the horrible life in the trenches many soldiers saw each other as brothers in arms. And as the war progressed, the cause of it seemed more and more pointless and many soldiers began to see their enemy soldiers as brothers in arms too. They only fought and killed them, because their superiors told them to and because otherwise they would be killed themselves.

The Movie: Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)

As you may have guessed from the former paragraph, one of my favorite subjects during my History classes was World War I. I still do know a lot about it. This may be why I found Paths of Glory to be the most disappointing Kubrick film I've seen. It's by no means a bad film, but it's not really great either. Kubrick is not much interested in creating an interesting story or making us care about the characters. He uses the plot and the characters only to make a point about (the) war. I don't think this is wrong. In fact I actually think that using your characters and plot to say something about something, as opposed to simply tell a story about the lives of these characters that will make us care about them, is the most interesting way to use them. I would argue that this is exactly what Tarantino does in Inglourious Basterds, which may be my favorite film. The problem is that what Kubrick has to say about the war here doesn't really go much further then what we've learned in high school. More importantly, he doesn't say it in a really interesting way. Before I started to watch I was surprised that the movie was only 88 minutes long. After I watched it I thought it could have been way shorter.

IMDB gives the following plot summary of the movie: 'When soldiers in WW1 refuse to continue with an impossible attack, their superiors decide to make an example of them.' This simple sentence is actually the perfect summary of what happens in the movie. Though it's important to note that there is one superior who does defend the soldiers. This is the hero of the movie, Colonel Dax, played by Kirk Douglas. Kubrick uses the plot to say two major things about the war. First of all, Kubrick claims that everything about the war was justified by invoking (often false) feelings of patriotism and nationalism. When for example the soldiers are tried in a 'court' for cowardice their superiors claim that they have to be found guilty, because they are a shame to France. They neglected to fight for their country and thus let their nation and their people down. This is how every country that fought in the war justified its fighting in it. They had to participate in it, because they had to show that they were a great and prideful nation, that was better and greater than other nations. Thus if you refused to fight for your nation, you undermined it and were a disgrace to it. In the final and best scene of the movie Kubrick shows how stupid this line of thinking was (and still is). A bunch of French soldiers have come together to rest a bit in a tavern, when a captured German female singer is brought to entertain them. First she is made fun off and called all kinds of derisive things. But when she starts singing some German song she moves the soldiers to tears and they start humming along to it. The scene shows that the differences between nations are so marginal and unimportant that they can easily be transcended. This of course makes the war incredibly futile and meaningless. And not only do we realize this, so do the soldiers in the tavern, which makes the scene even more sad.

Secondly Kubrick makes the claim that there was a huge dissonance between the soldiers and their superiors. While the soldiers were send on all kinds of dangerous and irresponsible missions, the arrogant superiors hardly experienced the dangers of the war. They could live with losing 55% of their soldiers if the mission succeeded. And while the superiors sold the idea of fighting for France's pride, they themselves hardly cared about France. The main reason for their desire to win a battle was that their status would increase if they won it. Kubrick also makes this dissonance clear with his depiction of the living and 'working' conditions of the soldiers and their superiors. We see the generals and colonels in beautiful, lavish palaces, eating fine foods and attending gallant dances. On the other hand there are the soldiers who live miserably in the trenches. In a long take we follow a general walking through the trenches, inspecting his troops (the only time we actually see a general there) and see all the misery and destruction there.

Lastly some minor notes. While I didn't find the movie that special, it certainly had an impact when it came out. Because of its depiction of the French army, it was forbidden in France until 1975. Germany and Spain also forbade it for some time. The first one because it didn't want to strain its relationship with France. The second one because Franco objected to the anti-militarism in it.
It is astonishing how much Kirk Douglas looks like his son Michael. Before you say d'oh, I understand that fathers and sons are supposed to look like one another, but if you were to make an exact remake of this film with only Michael Douglas, instead of his father, it would be hard to notice.
I once read an interesting observation that it is really hard to make a satisfying movie with a happy ending about World War I. After all most of the characters would be screwed again 20 years later during World War 2. If not earlier. The interbellum was not a very happy period either.