The Value of the Negative: "Sorcerer"
Every historical moment has its optimists and its pessimists, its preachers of positivity and adherents to the doctrine of negativity. At some junctures, the believers take the upper hand; at others it's the cynics who are more pervasive.
Our moment is dominated, I think, by the creatures of the light. Positivity is the order of the day.
This may at first seem counterintuitive. But today positivity is not a matter of sunny dispositions: there is too much anger around us for that to be the case. Nor is it a matter of a lack of bad news: I don't think anyone who's lived through the past few years can reasonably argue that the ratio of good things to bad things happening has not been weighed toward the latter.
Nor is it even a matter of feeling that the world tilts in our favor: one of the signal feelings of our time, shared by people high and low, far and wide, is that the world is dead set against them.
For us, rather, positivity is about moral certainty and a belief in our own overmastering abilities. Believers in Big Tech believe that through their devices lies the salvation of humanity. Believers in Big Science believe that through their observational truths the ultimate truth will be known. Believers in Big Religion believe the moment is at hand. Believers in Big Morality and Big Sociology believe that through their interventions our culture will be made virtuous.
There is dismay on all sides about the conditions we find ourselves in, along with a certain cynicism about the motives of "the other side." But these things are countermanded by a pure, crystalline certainty about our own righteousness. We live in a moment as optimistic in its conviction as it is reductionist in its morality.
If this doesn’t strike you as right, I'd ask you to think about the tenor of our cinema, particularly compared to the tenor of the cinema of the late 1960s and early 1970s, or the '50s, or the '30s. Our contemporary films, many of which I love, are far more about moral conviction, a clearly delineated "good" and "evil," and celebrations of the power of virtue than are films from those times. Our movies are, put shortly, extremely hopeful. They evince a certainty that victory is, if not at hand, then just over the horizon.
And there is great value in this: it helps us survive. But I would also like to argue that there is great value in the negative, the cynical, the attempt to look nihilism in the face and understand what it really entails. There is value in the idea that victory may not be possible, that we may lose in the end, and lose badly.
Sorcerer, made in 1977 by William Friedkin, has something of a reputation as a lost classic. People are fond of noting it was released several months after Star Wars and obliterated by that film's monumental success, relegating it to the dustbin of film failures despite its inarguable cinematic accomplishments. There is certainly some truth to this. But one also wonders if Sorcerer ever would have been a hit in the theaters, regardless of the box-office events of that summer: even for the 1970s, it is bitter medicine.
A remake of Henri-Georges Clouzo's 1953 masterpiece The Wages of Fear (both films were based on a French novel from 1950) the film opens with four vignettes. The first shows a hitman named Nilo (Francisco Rabal) killing someone in Mexico and then fleeing the scene. The second tells the story of a Palestinian named Kassem (Hamidou Benmessaoud), who’s part of a cell that sets off a bomb at a bus stop in Jerusalem. Israeli authorities immediately track them down and kill or arrest all but Kassem, who escapes.
The third vignette is about a wealthy French businessman named Victor (Bruno Cremer) who is about to be arrested for embezzling money from his father-in-law's firm. Rather than face the scandal and go to prison, Victor abandons his wife at a luncheon and flees the country. The fourth centers on a low-level gangster named Jackie (Roy Scheider) who robs the payroll operation of a New Jersey mafia family. When Jackie crashes the getaway car, the other members of his gang are killed and he ends up with a contract on his head.
These men all end up in a small town in a desperately impoverished South American country. The local authorities are deeply corrupt, and the only work to be had is for an American oil company that dominates the region and arranges its wage scale to ensure that its workers will never be able to make quite enough money to leave.
The precipitating action of the movie comes when one of the company’s oil wells catches fire, killing a number of indigenous workers. Faced with the disruption of its profits and the prospect of civil unrest against its de facto rule, the company needs to extinguish the still-burning well. A big enough explosion will do the trick, and there is nitroglycerine available 200 miles away, but the explosive is so old as to be immensely dangerous: at the slightest bump it will detonate. So the company announces it will be hiring men for the virtual suicide mission of driving the nitro through the jungle.
The four men from the film's initial vignettes are the volunteers chosen for this mission. They set off in a pair of huge trucks, driving slowly and carefully, the cases of nitro packed into sand which serves as a cushion.
The obstacles confronting them are monumental. Terrible roads that continually jar the trucks; a storm-swollen river that can only be crossed by a rotting, swaying suspension bridge; an enormous, immovable tree blocking their path; heavily armed bandits. Only Jackie survives, half-mad, carrying the last case of nitro by hand over the final two miles after his truck gives out. The film closes with him preparing to leave the country...and then a small plane lands and mafia hitmen get out. They've found him at last. He will be killed.
Sorcerer is often acknowledged as a masterpiece of sustained tension and extraordinary set-pieces. A feeling of imminent disaster reigns. The action sequences are almost perfectly realized, from the Jerusalem bombing, through the villager's riot in response to the explosion at the oil well (clearly influenced, as was so much of The French Connection, by Friedkin's early work as a documentarian), to the famous scene of the truck crossing the rope bridge in the storm.
But to rhapsodize about these without acknowledging the framework into which they are set is to miss half the point. The film is relentlessly negative, cynical, pessimistic, choose your adjective. And this tone carries great value.
The characters are morally unredeemed. They are a hitman, a cowardly embezzler, a terrorist who kills civilians, and a thief. There are no moments, and no attempts at moments, in which they come to understand the error of their ways. The film does not trade in a kind of false cynicism, as so many lesser films do, celebrating or aggrandizing immoral characters to give the audience a thrill. Instead, it presents them as struggling residents, sometimes pathetic and often ignoble, of a world in which no kind of morality holds sway.
A great deal of this effect lies in the small details. The bodies of Jews in the street after Kassem's bomb goes off. The fact that the mafia operation Jackie robs is located in the back of a Catholic church, in the front of which a wedding is taking place featuring a young bride with a conspicuous black eye. Victor's abandonment to his own cowardice as he runs down the street after leaving his wife at lunch. There is an emotional register here – a kind of fury at the universe in which we've found ourselves – but there is no righteousness, no judgment, only an assertion that this tragic sordidness is the thing of which our lives consist.
The setting enhances this feeling. The country in which they find themselves is ruled by corruption and disease. The people are poor. The local cops are sadistic. The American oil company whose suzerainty this is values profit over human life.
Finally, the action of the film – the quest these four heroes undertake – offers no move toward hopefulness. We never believe they will escape their predicaments. We understand from the beginning that the journey through the jungle will most likely kill them. And we are not given to hope that even if they do complete the journey they will end up rich and happy on a beach somewhere, like Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman at the end of The Shawshank Redemption.
So then...why?
What is the purpose of watching this film, if there is one other than the simple response it engenders in us for its running time? What is its worth? What is it trying to communicate? What, in short, is the value of all this negativity?
The easiest way into this question is to ask why the men take on this quest.
At some level, the answer is desperation. They are poor and living in squalor; the company offers them a payday. But whatever else their flaws, these men are not naïve. Victor does not imagine he will ever be able to go back to his wife and wealth; Nilo recognizes that he has no life available other than killing; Kassem understands the Israelis will never stop looking for him; and Jackie knows the mafia will catch up with him sooner or later.
In the end, they act not to escape or triumph or profit, but because they have no other choice. There is that in them which will not submit.
And here lies the deep value of negativity. It poses a clarifying question, one that strips us down, exposes us to the core. Confronted with absolute zero, what do we do?
Dostoevsky, in Notes From Underground, posed an answer a long time ago. Our world, the narrator of that book argues, assaults us with irrationality, with destruction, with the feeling that we are but a function, no more than a key on a piano being played by some larger force, call it fate or chaos or God.
But faced with this assault, humans resist.
And the reason is not the assurance of the crowd, or faith in our own virtue, or belief that the arc of history bends towards justice.
It is instead a kind of irrational inability to submit. As Dostoevsky's narrator puts it, we will cling to our "fantastic dreams" and our "vulgar follies" simply to prove that, if nothing else, we are in charge of ourselves, "that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar."
And if it's clear that we are not in charge of ourselves? If it's clear that we are controlled by fate or biology or history or the market or the corporation? If it's clear that we are faced with losing, inevitably, and terribly, and irrevocably?
"Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key," exclaims the narrator in fury, "even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then man would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point."
Even when confronted by the inescapable truth of our situation, we will refuse to believe it. We cannot be made to believe it. We do not need hope or certainty or moral righteousness, because we are constituted (for better or worse) of some strange material that is beyond all of those things.
The men in Sorcerer do what they do out of a perverse inability not to do it. It is to this human quality that the terror, the heroism, the accomplishments of their fatal journey testify. And it is thus, through their inescapable defiance, that they make true the fact that they, and we, are not piano keys.
In this assertion lies the value of the negative.
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