On Stakes, Franchises, and War Films: "The Train"
These days one hears a lot about "stakes" in movies. This is a particularly hot topic in those corners of the internet concerned with blockbuster franchises, where fierce debates burn over whether the extended nature of these franchises – particularly the ones involving superheroes – means that they don't have real stakes.
Frequently, these debates revolve around the idea that these heroes don't really face death in the way characters from other films do. So, the argument goes, when these stories put The Black Panther or Harley Quinn into danger, and the audience already knows that there's another Black Panther or Harley Quinn movie set to be released in six months, the stakes are immediately reduced to nil because we know nothing too bad is going to happen to the character.
Even worse, when (as happened a few years back) when one of these films actually kills a bunch of characters who already have sequels in the works, the stakes have become so low as to be almost risible, as the audience knows the deaths are not real and the characters will return.
This line of thought has always struck me as being not quite right. First, these franchises are often based on comic books, in which virtually everything is fair game, from simply starting the story over again when a new artist comes on board to inventing strange dimensions into which our heroes can travel to rescue each other from death. So is the possibility of death really the right way to conceive of stakes in the first place?
Second, the complaints ignore the fact that these movie franchises are not one-off enterprises by artists struggling to express their vision, but rather exist for the purpose of generating profit for the companies that own them. Which is to say that, precisely as there’s frequently an inherent tension in corporate America between acting ethically and maximizing shareholder profits, there’s a tension in movie franchises between telling narratively coherent stories and convincing the viewer to pony up for the sequels.
These complaints of mine seem at least cogent. But the more I've thought about it, the more they've also come to seem like only surface grumblings, potshots from the Statler and Waldorf section of the theater. Much as I love sitting in that balcony and lobbing down pithy observations, pointing out that the point of comic books isn't narrative consistency and that Hollywood is a commercial enterprise doesn't seem entirely sufficient.
More importantly for my purposes today, the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that I've never really even been able to articulate what bothers me about this talk of stakes. The whole question has lodged itchily under the skin of my mind, and I've never quite known why.
But then last week I watched The Train again. Things became at least more clear, if not perfectly so. I think that what bothers me is that the notion of stakes, in the way this notion is framed in the franchise movie debate, has more to do with the emotional experience of the viewer than it does with anything actually happening on screen. And that’s precisely where the problems begin.
Made in 1964 by John Frankenheimer, and starring Burt Lancaster, The Train is set in France in the closing days of the Second World War. Lancaster plays Paul Labiche, a French railroad engineer who has been forced by the Nazis to maintain and run the railway system while they're in control of his country. He's also a member of the Resistance who has put his life in jeopardy again and again to hinder the Nazi war effort.
The action of the film is driven by the fact that the Allies are closing in on France, driving the Nazis back into Germany. Among the spoils of war that the Nazis want to take with them in this retreat is a cache of masterpieces of French painting – by Cezanne and Manet, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec and the rest – they've looted. These are under the care of the Nazi Colonel Franz von Waldheim (Paul Schofield), who considers himself a lover the kind of high culture the paintings represent.
Waldheim loads his precious cargo onto several boxcars to take back to Germany. Labiche is initially resistant to sacrificing his resistance fighters and himself over a load of paintings, but eventually submits to the argument that the art represents something greater, an almost spiritual accomplishment of French culture that the Nazis are threatening to steal. So he decides to prevent Waldhem from getting away. Over the course of the film, the contest also begins to represent something of a personal struggle between the men.
Labiche at first uses deception to try to stop the train. He has resistance fighters change the name placards of the station the train passes, in order to convince Waldheim and the other Nazis on board that they're journeying to Germany, when in reality they're chugging in a circle in France, heading right back to where they started.
This buys some time, but not enough, as the Allies have not shown up yet; and one by one Labiche's comrades in the Resistance are killed as the Nazis realize what's happening.
In the end, only Labiche is left alive, desperately sabotaging the tracks by himself as the Nazis – who have now loaded the engine with hostages to prevent him from blowing it up – chug slowly toward Germany. Through sheer force of will, Labiche finally triumphs, managing to derail the train. With Allied artillery sounding in the distance, the Nazis kill all the hostages and decamp, except for Waldheim. He confronts Labiche and claims that he is the higher human being, because he can appreciate the precious cargo of the train, while Labiche is merely a violent thug. In return, Labiche machine-guns him.
The film closes by counterpointing shots of the crates of precious art with the bodies of the murdered French hostages, solidifying if not answering its primary questions about the value of art and human life and why, particularly in war, that value is placed where it is.
One of the central elements of any war film is that many (and sometimes all) of the characters will die. They are, after all, engaged in an activity in which the very point is to kill the enemy or be killed by them. Indeed, the genre itself frequently operates (as does The Train) in such a way that the death of the characters is one of its main narrative drivers: by introducing us to a set of them and then killing them off one after another, until only the principals are left alive. At which point, maybe the principals die heroically (Saving Private Ryan) or maybe they survive (The Dirty Dozen).
What occurred to me after watching The Train was that this constituent presence of death in the war film presents an interesting spin on the idea of "stakes," by turning a possibility into a presumption. In the movies I was talking about above – our contemporary franchises, and superhero films writ large – death is a kind of potentiality. The characters are in danger, and there is a threat that they might die, but we know in our hearts that they will most likely survive.
Which is to say that in these films, when fans argue that the stakes are low because the characters can't really die, what they're articulating is the lack of what we might call an emotional frisson on the part of the audience about the (very slim) possibility that the hero might die. Even if we know in our hearts that The Hulk or John McClane isn’t going to get exterminated by some sniveling villain, that potentiality, that tiny sliver of knowledge in our minds that they could be killed, allows us to invest ourselves in the action.
So what our knowledge of a sequel does is to prevent us from fully investing ourselves in the story. If we know that the next Hulk or Die Hard film has already been green-lit, then what's happening on the screen doesn’t seem to have the same thrill of danger, the same import, because we already know that the character is going to triumph and go on to fight another baddie in the next movie. So the talk about stakes in this context is about our stakes, our ability to invest ourselves in the action.
One idea this might suggest is that a movie in the war genre automatically has higher stakes in this regard. An easy way to make this point is to note that there are, almost by definition, no war films which provide us with sequels. (Perhaps the Rambo or Jack Ryan franchises? But are those really about "war" in the way we're discussing here?) Going in, we know that the war film we're seeing will be a stand-alone, which means that it will finish whatever story it begins, maybe allowing the hero to survive, or maybe killing them. Because of this, we can be fully emotionally invested in it.
Death, in other words, is a presumption. In a war film, it's the ground the character treads, the livewire they step continually back and forth over, and because we know it's a stand-alone that offers narrative conclusiveness, we fear for them. Thus, its automatically higher stakes.
This is all well and good, but it doesn't really address the issue of stakes in big franchises for a couple of reasons. One is that we're talking about different genres. It's usually not super-helpful when someone's complaining about one genre to point to another genre and say, "Look how they do it over there! It's better!" Because we're not talking about that genre, we're talking about this one.
Another reason is that we often do know whether the hero in a war film is going to survive, just as we do the hero of a franchise. One could think here of the John Wayne war films of the middle of the last century. When The Duke is the main character, there's little chance he's actually going to perish; when he's the stern secondary character teaching life lessons to the protagonist, then look out: his last lesson may actually involve him giving his life for the cause. The audience for these movies, I would argue, had a strong sense of this set-up going in, much as they do with major and minor characters in superhero films these days.
More interestingly, one could point to war films in which the ending is given to us in advance. In Apocalypse Now, for example, Martin Sheen's central character offers the kind of narration that virtually assures his survival: unless we're talking about the famous from-the-grave narration of Sunset Boulevard, a direct address to the audience is a great way to indicate that the protagonist will last longer than the story. Conversely, the sequencing of Saving Private Ryan tells us from the beginning that Tom Hanks' protagonist is going to die: it's his grave site that we visit in the opening.
This poses an interesting question, and brings us to The Train. If, in a film like Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan, we have a good idea of the ending before we really even get into the action, then where are the stakes? If it's not our lack of knowledge about whether the hero will live or die that pulls us into the film and creates suspense or emotional investment, then what is it?
One answer, certainly, is that we're engaged by the protagonist's emotional journey. We watch Martin Sheen come to terms with his own moral corruption; we watch Tom Hanks sacrifice himself for the greater good. But this answer only skims the surface, I think. Because in a war film, the personal stakes of the character are always tied to larger questions of right and wrong, the morality of killing, the place of humans in the face of the grindstone of history, and the like. Which is to say that it's on these same things that our own investment hinges as well.
And it's this – the way our investment is tied to both the characters' investment and the larger issues implied by the action – that The Train frames so beautifully.
The film begins in the building in which the Nazis have collected their horde of paintings. These are treated reverently by the camera, and our initial characters – a French caretaker of the paintings and the German Colonel Waldheim – look at them and discuss them with awe. This is, the film insists, a real treasure. It’s one of the highest accomplishments of human endeavor, and certainly possessing more dignity, meaning, and value than the squalid war that surrounds it. No matter what happens with the bombs and bullets, this thing – art – will survive.
This feeling is emphasized by a sequence in which the Nazi soldiers box up the paintings so they can be shipped on the train back to Germany. We get close shots of the paintings being packed into crates, and then the famous names are stenciled onto the boxes: Monet. Picasso. Braque. Van Gogh. The names are incantatory, and set their bearers – those famous artists – apart from the nameless soldiers doing the work. These artists and their masterpieces, the film insists at the beginning, are what we should be concerned about, not the rather inconsequential humans engaged in the squalid pursuit of military victory.
Our hero, Labiche, is initially suspicious of this equation. Can it really be the case that a bunch of paint on stretched canvas is worth not only the lives of the people under his command, but also a diversion of resources from the more direct war effort? But one after another of the characters around him insist that this legacy of French culture is, indeed, deserving of sacrifice. And eventually, as one after another they give their lives for the cause of this treasure, he too becomes convinced…or at least becomes willing to join in the effort.
In all of this, what The Train does so well, to begin to return to our initial discussion of stakes, is tie the personal predicaments of the characters to a larger set of questions. What are the reasons we give our lives for something larger? What is the actual purpose of nation-level killing? And what is the relative value of art? (The sly meta-reference the film sneaks in is of course that it itself is a piece of art; there's a side of it that opens to question its own attempt in the face of the horrors it's depicting.)
The stakes here are not simply whether the characters will survive. Instead, the stakes revolve around the connections between their living or dying and larger ethical and historical issues. And these issues are presented as both morally serious, and exactly as complicated as is human life itself.
The force of the closing sequence of the film – in which Labiche machine-guns Waldheim, and we are then given shots of dead humans intercut with shots of the crates of art with their stenciled and heroic names – is that it calls into question for the final time whether art is worth human life or not…and finds only indeterminacy.
The early parts of the film, and the characters' insistence about the monumental worth of French culture, have pushed us in the direction of feeling as though any sacrifice on behalf of this treasure is worthwhile. But is it? In forcing us to look at the bodies – the actual effect of war – the director cracks open the question again.
Here are the dead humans, and here are the crates of paintings, which are, the closing shots seem to insist, no more in the end than objects.
Is life worth an object? Labiche, we suspect because of his final action, has never quite believed that it is. There is a cynicism – or is it a humanism? – in his final gunning-down of his Nazi antagonist which suggests this. For him it has perhaps been a human endeavor all along: the Nazis, embodied by Waldheim, are an evil that needs to be defeated, regardless of what paintings they steal or of what happens to those paintings. It is stopping them, not saving the glories of French culture, that is important.
These, then, are the stakes that The Train forces us to engage with.
What this suggests, I think, is that if a film attempts to center its notion of stakes – or if fans do so – wholly on the emotional experience of the viewer, then those stakes will never be terribly high. It takes actual moral intelligence, or narrative complexity on the level of ethics, to create true stakes. If the experience of the characters is not tied into some sort of larger human issues, which themselves have enough serious, adult complications to maintain our interest, then the most that can be created is excitement.
Excitement is fine. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Terminator II and the Fast and Furious and James Bond franchises and any number of other films subsist on creating an emotional investment on the part of the viewer based on excitement. We like the characters and are thrilled by them; we get the frisson caused by them being in peril and having to defeat the bad guys. But we know they're going to win in the end. And we're happy about it! The stakes, that is, exist inside us, in our investment, in our happy willingness to buckle into our seat on the roller coaster and be taken along.
But what they don't have, speaking broadly, are stakes regarding the implications of the experience the characters go through, or the way these experiences tie into larger, seriously-considered questions. It’s all simple and obvious. Good is good, and evil is evil. At the most, we might get some faint Hollywood posturing about "the evils of technology" or the "threat of government overreach" or "what society is doing to us."
But these are not, in any serious sense, stakes. They do not have real tension. They are not real questions, because the film has answered them for us, in the very act of posing them in such simple, reductive, easy ways.
Put differently, the problem with stakes in franchises is not that we know ahead of time that the characters will survive the adventure. It's that the primary attempt of these franchises is to draw us into an interior emotional investment with them, to make us feel good and important about watching them. It is in the creation of this investment, rather than in the fabric of the story itself, that the energy is expended.
There is value in this, and it can be a hell of a lot of fun. But if you're looking for real stakes in it, then you may be looking in the wrong place.
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