The Beginnings of Wisdom: "The Leopard"
Like many people, I’ve found myself in a moment of not feeling particularly hopeful about America and its future.
The reasons for this are as obvious as they are disturbing. Our national politics might charitably be described as a shit-show put on by the clueless for the benefit of the moronic. And if there's one thing that can be said to instill less confidence than our politics it's our political commentary, in which self-righteous indignation is the order of the day and calls for the lifesaving necessity of stomping on the other guy's throat ring from every corner. (For profit, of course, all for profit, for which of the media personalities or YouTubers or podcasters out there isn't working to turn a buck with their jeremiads?)
The populace is uneasy. Tempers are running hot. Chest-puffed and mostly silly talk of civil war is in the air…and to be honest, in the moments when the dark dog is nipping at my heels, I've urged disunion myself. I live in California, which would do fine were the nation to splinter; if some set of benighted souls want to declare Kansas or Tennessee some kind of Christian caliphate where no one pays taxes and gun ownership and church attendance are the law of the land, by all means, have a go. Who am I to tell you what to do?
When my choleric tendencies are in better balance, though, what it all mostly seems to be is sad.
A country beset by anxiety and fury, unable to rediscover its democratic spirit, incapable of making the economy work for the majority of the population, powerless to address climate change, filled with an ennui that people try to address by rushing around bashing each other on the heads with whatever cause has most recently been used to whip them into a fury. A malaise has descended on us all, and it's difficult to see a way forward.
None of these are original observations. And if you're looking for overarching remedies or easy to follow guides for "making the future a better place," then you've clicked on the wrong link. I would not have said at the top that I was not hopeful if I actually were; this into is not a devious way to sucker you into a piece about how if we all just do what I say everything will be okay.
What I have to offer is an observation; it leads (perhaps predictably) to the same suggestion that I always offer, perhaps the only one I have. For god's sake, bring more art into your life.
Not the euthanasia of entertainment, but the challenge of art. Find the best of it, the stuff that interests you the most, and take in as much of it as you can. Why? Because art is about human connection; it's the greatest archive there is of the human experience; it's the place in which it becomes the most difficult to hate, or ignore, or defile other people in the ways that feed what's wrong with our culture–
Ah, but I've jumped ahead. That's the end of the piece, in which I urge you to watch more movies. We're still at the beginning, in which I offer my observation about contemporary American culture.
So here it is: I believe one of our greatest difficulties is that we possess no true sense of failure, of being surpassed, of tragedy. And because of this, we find it almost impossible to come to terms with what's ailing us.
The Leopard, made by the Italian director Luchino Visconti and released in 1963, is a monumental film – running just over three hours – and to my mind one of the great triumphs of 20th Century filmmaking. It's fantastically rich in its emotional registers, astounding in its visual design, and yet simple in terms of its plot.
Burt Lancaster plays Don Fabrizio Corbera, who's the prince of Salina, in Sicily. The year is 1860, and revolutionaries are battling to turn all of Italy into a republic. Corbera's favorite nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) joins the revolutionaries, and is surprised when his uncle does not try to stop him: although a successful revolution will mean the diminution of his stature and power, Prince Corbera understands that change is inevitable.
The revolutionaries come to power and begin organizing a new national Italian assembly. In the town of Donnafugata, where Corbera has a summer palace, this process is overseen by a wealthy local landowner named Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa). Don Calogero is both gauche and pragmatically corrupt – he rigs the district vote to approve the new national assembly so that it comes in at 512 - 0 – and he also has a beautiful daughter named Angelica (Claudia Cardinale).
Tancredi and Angelica fall in love, and after Prince Corbera turns down an offer to represent the new Italy in the Senate, Tancredi accepts. He will be wealthy and a politician, a perfect representative of the new Italian man. The film ends with a ball which all the main characters attend. The sequence extends for a full 50 minutes. During its course we watch as Corbera struggles to accept what he has known for some time: that his old Sicily is gone, that he has been rendered irrelevant, and that the world is rolling inevitably forward into modernity.
I believe in treading carefully when writing about foreign films. A good deal of the way I understand cinema is as something bound up inextricably with the culture that produces it, and I cannot speak with any real depth about any culture other than that of my own. Someone from Sicily, with a true knowledge of the history of the place and its relationship to the rest of Italy, will obviously understand many elements of the film inaccessible to me. As will someone with a deeper grasp of European history and the revolutions that followed in the wake of 1848, or someone more intimate with mid-century Italian filmmaking, etc.
At the same time, though, it cannot be the case that movies are inaccessible to viewers with a less than comprehensive cultural knowledge, or that thinking about film is simply a matter of learning a bunch of facts about culture or history or filmmaking. Movies rely on something common to all of us. They at once emerge from specific cultures and specific minds, and speak to all cultures, all human minds; this is one of the deepest secrets of their magic. Which means that care is required in talking about them, not trepidation.
So let me start this way. There is an annoying reading of The Leopard available. I have never seen anyone forward a reading along these lines (although I suspect someone has); I bring it up as a kind of counterweight to my own thoughts.
This annoying reading is as follows: The Leopard is a stupid film because it shows an old powerful ruler being sad about the advent of democracy and the modern world, and we all know these are amazing things. Corbera is a prince, and the rural destitution of his land stands not just in contrast to the opulence of his life, but is a result of it. The peasants are poor because he is rich, and his noblesse oblige is thus simply a back-door justification of ignoble power relations. In asking us to see some kind of tragedy in his life, therefore, the film is implicitly asking us to agree with the idea that wealthy people living fabulous lives and the rest of us being poor is actually an okay thing. The romance of a story like this one is ultimately no more than a way of perpetuating injustice.
The reason I object to a reading of The Leopard that would proceed along these lines is not because of the politics inherent in it – a kind of (parody of) steel-toed leftism – but because it mistakes (intentionally ignores) what is serious and beautiful in the film.
So what is serious and beautiful here? More than it is possible to count. But for today, how about this: a profoundly human sense of loss and irrelevance.
Corbera is neither a romantic nor naïve. He believes that the transition to a new form of government will not bring about much change in the lives of the people. Instead, it will simply substitute one set of powerful rulers for another, as he himself is replaced by the likes of the wealthy Don Calogero and the ambitious Tancredi.
Nor is Corbera self-sacrificing or a martyr, giving up his own position with all its privileges for the good of the people. He is dismayed at the grasping nature and lack of dignity of the nouveau-riche who are replacing him, but at the same time he's a man devoted to the pomp and luxuries of his position. He likes his title, but the loss of it is not what eats at him. Despite the world-historical setting (or perhaps exactly because of it), that is, what the film centers on is a personal, almost existential confrontation.
This confrontation is symbolized (a dangerous word) at the end of the film, when Corbera is walking home from the ball. He's in a poor part of town, dirt streets and old brick buildings. A priest passes, headed for a lighted doorway, perhaps at this hour of the night on his way to attend a sick or dying parishioner. Or perhaps to attend a birth. Corbera kneels to acknowledge the priest. And then, instead of rising again, he stays on his knees and looks up at the night sky. "O faithful star," he says, "when will you decide to give me a less fleeting appointment, far from everything, in your realm of perennial certainty?"
He is calling out to fate itself. He must himself pass from this world, in which he has only fleetingly resided. He understands this, and yet it fills him with despair, as does the fact that this plane of existence is such a difficult and uncertain one.
The star does not answer. It cannot. The certainty and lack of transience Corbera yearns for is not on offer. And this is exactly what we have watched him struggled to come to terms with in the film, and in particular the final act. Everything in this world has been revealed to the Prince as being impermanent. Everything fades, everything falls.
It is a story, in other words, about a certain kind of human wisdom. This is not a wisdom of resignation. Corbera does not give in or give up; he maintains, above all else, his integrity. He sees his own passing and holds fast to his belief in what he values in the face of that passing. But nor is it a wisdom based on a subterranean hope: it is not reliant on the promise of a better world. Corbera is not sacrificing so that Italy can go on to greatness. He does not hold to the Christian guarantee that the torment and struggle of living is bearable because it leads to a great prize.
It is, instead, a wisdom of sadness, of lifting one's face to the inevitable. Like Corbera, we will all sooner or later face this night star. As will we all, the Prince learns of his own irrelevance. He is outmoded by history, can do nothing to stop the march of time. And yet one of the great qualities of the film is that it does not present this sadness as dour, or nihilistic; instead, it suggests that confronted with the inevitability of loss, what we have to offer is our most basic and generous qualities: compassion, dignity, integrity, human connection.
From the American point of view, The Leopard is a deeply un-American movie. The American mindset is based almost entirely on righteousness, on a vision of a continual and inevitable march towards victory, on an unstated feeling that defeat cannot be countenanced.
One side of this cultural habit is the famous American optimism. There is no problem that cannot be overcome. Forward motion, solution-oriented thought, innovation, the embrace of the new: all of these are ingrained in us. The ills of the past are to be learned from; whatever is to come will be better than what was. The archetypal American does not fall to their knees and strive to confront their inevitable passing from this world; they refuse that passing and set about trying to change that world, to make it better, to extend their influence in it by leaving their mark for future generations.
Yes, there is great strength here. Great vitality. But this optimism also imbues a certain weakness. It creates a culture beset by a brittle inability to face certain realities, a childlike turning away from anything that does not promise victory.
Lurking beneath the great American optimism is an almost apocalyptic terror of defeat. The sense of impending disunion that I wrote of at the beginning of this piece has its deepest roots, I think, in a feeling that if something is lost – a political battle, a cultural battle, having to be governed by someone different than you – all will be lost.
We are a nation that has never contemplated its own transience, and because of that any notion of transience, of failure, of loss is terrifying. There is no well to draw from, no sense that because death is inevitable one had better find what it is in the human that is to be valued, and value that.
This lack of a sense of the tragic, in other words, is intimately tied to a feeling of vulnerability, of incapacity. The fear of losing is so strong that it cannot be faced, and so the answer must always be to win, to create more, to drive forward and over obstacles, to never stop sprinting because of that thing that will catch us if we slow even a half step.
It is a powerful nation, and a vibrant one. But it is not a particularly wise one. And perhaps no nation is.
But you know who trades in wisdom? You know who forces us to confront our basic similarities? You know who invites us to think through – and feel through – the inevitability of change, and of failure, who suggests that stomping your boot on the other guy's throat may not accomplish all the glorious things you hope it will, that you yourself are not the be-all, end-all of the world?
That's right. The artists.
Consider what The Leopard forces the viewer to do. It connects us to Prince Corbera and thus allows us to experience what he experiences: the inevitability of loss, the reality of transience. And then, such is the miracle of narrative, it releases us back into our own world. We experience tragedy…and then we are made to confront existence after tragedy. The Prince's life is over, but ours continues…and yet ours will one day be over, just as his was. We are defeated with him, and we must then ponder what it is that lies beyond defeat.
By this process, we are pushed not only into a contemplation of meaning, but also into the kind of emotional experiencing of meaning – the feeling of what it means to lose, to value something, and possess dignity and integrity – that is one of the core elements of the beginning of wisdom.
So, to return to my initial thoughts on our national discord, how do we proceed? (Being an American, after all, I feel compelled to offer something that gestures in that direction, however minutely.) Should we put the artists in charge?
No. Artists make terrible leaders. But perhaps we should be paying attention to them when we’re searching for meaning and when it comes time to decide how to interact with one another, instead of some boob on YouTube who's trying to make a buck by telling us that we're right about everything we think and will triumph in the end if we just push forward, relentlessly and maniacally and forever.
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