As Deep as It Gets

Movies and Metaphysics

Randall E. Auxier

• Publisher: Open Universe
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781637700099
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Essays

A lot of thought goes into making Hollywood films and television series. The best artists of the twentieth century chose this medium over the arts they would have practiced in previous centuries --the painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, actors, and most of all the director, the master auteur, packed up their gear and went west. As time has gone on, television and movie-making converged into one huge canvas for all that creative thinking. Let's think about some of the best things that got thunk in the last hundred years, see if we can uncover the deeper layers of that thinking and sling a little philosophy at the screen.

Part IRated G: General Audiences

1I Know Something You Don’t Know

THE PRINCESS BRIDE

The Spaniard apologizes and says that Westley is too good; he is obliged to fight with his dominant hand. The scene pushes on for another minute or two and, sure enough, the Spaniard is going to win unless Westley makes a similar admission: “I’m not left handed either.”

I have spoken with my friends who fence. I have spoken with a couple of thirty-something men who learned fencing because of this scene. (Is that pathetic? I don’t know.) They all assure me that the difference between fencing with the left hand, and against the left hand, is as great a difference as one is likely to find in any sport—whether it descends from forms of combat or not. Aaron Rodgers throwing passes with his left hand would be about as easy as switching hands in fencing. Clayton Kershaw launching fastballs with his right hand would be about as easy as switch-fencing.

And yet, as all fans know, Mandy Patinkin and Cary Elwes actually performed every frame of the film and it is good enough to make real fencers go “Wow!” The actors were trained by Bob Anderson, the legendary British Olympic fencer and fight choreographer, who has many grand fight scenes to his credit, but probably nothing to equal the scene in The Princess Bride.

An analogy for those who better understand other sports: Kevin Costner in Bull Durham vs. Robert Redford in The Natural. I’ll come back to this later in this book. I’m sorry folks, but Costner is an actual ballplayer and Redford, well, as a baseball player, he’s a good movie director. Yet, Patinkin and Elwes knew nothing, I repeat, nothing, about fencing going into the production of The Princess Bride. I’m told that you can’t really teach what they did with those swords to most people, with one hand, let alone both. I assume that Patinkin and Elwes harbored natural talent that they probably knew nothing about.

It was difficult not to smile as I recently re-watched Elwes flash the saber at Battery Wagner as the executive officer of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the 1989 film Glory—he was rather more convincing with that piece of hardware than was Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller, in charge of a whole regiment? I would like to talk to that casting director). I confess that I envy these actors their latent talent. If someone out there should contradict my fencing friends, I will have to challenge them to a duel—a test of wits, since I am clearly not anyone’s physical match. But that brings me to a point.

In the classic three challenges that Westley must overcome to gain possession of his princess (anyone ever heard of Eros and Psyche? Theseus and Ariadne?), this particular tale places a strange, even uncanny, emphasis upon fair play. But the case is not simple.

Let me remind you:

1. The Spaniard announces in advance (before Westley made it up the Cliffs of Insanity) that he would fight lefthanded to make things interesting.
2. The Spaniard then helps Westley up to the level ground and allows him to rest before engaging in the fight.
3. Westley, having gained the advantage, decides he could sooner break a stained-glass window than kill such an able swordsman (and this is on top of the significant exchanges of genuine admiration that punctuate the sword battle).
4. When Fezzik throws his first boulder at Westley, he misses on purpose and declares himself to have done so in order to make the encounter a sporting encounter.
5. When Fezzick and Westley are differentially armed and able, they decide upon the oldest form of struggle (hand-to-hand wrestling).
6. When Vizzini is confronted with the clear physical superiority of our hero, he assumes that the hero will accept an (honorable?) exchange of wits, albeit to the death, in exchange for a physical contest that would be unequal.

The three tasks completed, only he who has, by his inordinate pride, secured his own death is in fact dead. On the other hand (and that would be the left hand), there was nothing fair in this contest of wits between Westley and Vizzini, since both cups were poisoned and our hero had immunity. Should he have been trusted? That was the act of a fool? Well, … let’s return to this question later. Perhaps Vizzini was foully murdered, perhaps not. Let’s make that our test case in this … shall we call it a test of wits? All’s Fair … in love and war. You’ve heard that saying. Who said that? You’re thinking “hmmm, maybe Shakespeare.” You are wrong! (in my best Vizzini voice). It was Francis Smedley. “Inconceivable,” you say. Yes, the Immortal Smedley said that. I hope I didn’t ruin your day. What you need to know is whether I’m the kind of person who poisons the cup in front of himself or the one in front of you. Or both. But here are a few thoughts you might not have considered.

First, consider that both The Spaniard and Fezzick would have killed Our Hero if they had won their fights. Of course, then there would be no story, so at one level it’s impossible, but at another, there’s every reason to believe that both were intent upon killing Our Hero, which was, after all, their job, and no reason not to believe it. Had either succeeded, they would have been murderers, and there is at least some evidence to believe that both had killed before. They are, at best ne’er-do-wells, and at worst, simply terrible people.

Second, Our Hero has been, for some years, The Dread Pirate Roberts, who leaves no one alive. Surely he has been doing some pirating in these years, at the beginning as the First Mate of the former Dread Pirate Roberts, then as Dread Pirate Roberts with the former Dread Pirate Roberts as his First Mate, then alone. Not leaving anyone alive involves murder. Piracy is stealing, and this is not Men in Tights, so there’s no suggestion of giving the booty to the poor. Our Hero is, therefore, an exceedingly dangerous and wicked individual.

Third, while it’s true that the Prince, Vizzini, and the Six-Fingered Man are wicked, are they really any worse than Our Hero and Montoya and Fizzick? I’m not trying to get all literal and factual about a fairytale. I understand how fairytales work (although I want to say something about that in a minute). All I want to do is “level the playing field,” morally speaking, to give the bad guys a sporting chance in what follows.

So just remember, everyone is a wanton murderer in this comparison, and while we know very little about how many people they have killed, the evidence points to the clear, likelihood that Westley is the worst of the lot.

An Odd Little Man

Here’s a fairytale for you. There was an odd little boy born in California not far from Sutter’s Mill during the last days of the California Gold Rush. His parents had crossed the prairies and the mountains in 1849, real forty-niners, not the kind who play football. As I said, the boy was odd. He looked a bit like an insect (according to his own wife, in a later comment), with an enormous head and flaming red hair. He was a solitary, bookish boy, with a vivid imagination. His cat ran away when he was eight and he wrote an entire book (Pussycat Blackie’s Travels) imagining the cat’s adventures, though that book wasn’t published until much later.

The boy’s name was Josie, which was short for Josiah. Josie’s family was very poor and he was often hungry as he grew up. They had to move to a big city when he was eleven, where his father could look for work, but he still went to bed hungry and with nothing but straw to sleep on for years. But he was smart and good at school, and even though the other boys picked on him, because he was funny-looking and quiet, he never caved in to their jeers and name-calling. He stood up for himself and that led to frequent fights, in which he was always whipped but never humbled.

In time, Josie grew up and got married to a very smart and beautiful and wealthy woman (who didn’t mind that he looked like an insect) and they had three sons. He became one of the most famous and creative philosophers in the world, teaching at Harvard University and lecturing all over the world. From rags to riches—well, not riches in gold, but in fame and achievement—he went. He was an odd little man, but he was very widely loved and universally admired.

I wish I could say the story had a happy ending, but he died relatively young and suffered many tragedies in his life. One son was mentally ill and died at twenty-seven. He lost his closest friend at the same time. But he kept writing beautiful and profound books. When a Great War broke out in 1914, it broke his heart and his spirit because he had loved Germany, where he had learned so much and had so many friends. By the end he was very sad. Some people said that the War really killed him from sadness.

But Josiah Royce helped a lot of people with his creative ideas, and there were many, many such ideas, things no one had ever thought of before. One was the idea that we could understand the meaning of life, and its purpose, by cultivating our loyalties in just the right way. And that’s the idea I want to bring back to our story about fighting left-handed.

Philosophers have always talked about the meaning of life, and about what is the best life for a human being. Since they are philosophers, they never agree—Bertrand Russell once said that the only thing two philosophers can ever agree upon is the incompetence of a third. But Royce’s idea about loyalty was a new suggestion about the best life. Here is what he thought:

Our lives get meaning from the service we give to causes that are bigger than ourselves. When we willingly pledge our devotion and make daily sacrifices and deeds of service to a cause we have freely chosen, the result is that a “self,” an “individual,” gradually comes into existence—the person who has done all these deeds and whose life is dedicated to the furthering of this freely chosen cause. We come to be part of a community through this service, we come to have friends, camaraderie, belonging, and most importantly a life plan that provides a purpose for our lives.

The best life for a human being, then, is a life of loyal service, with others who share the cause and whose purpose is the same. Through service we overcome our selfishness, our egocentricity, our isolation from others.

Sounds like something Peter Falk might have said.

A lot of people didn’t like what Royce was saying because they were worried that people can serve evil causes and might still become, well, relatively fulfilled in their lives while doing very wicked things—there could be honor among thieves, and pirates, for example, but that doesn’t mean that the best life is one of thievery, or piracy, right? It may be pretty clear by now why I want to talk about the ideas of that odd little man, since he has some interesting answers to the complaints about honor among thieves.

Honor among Thieves

The argument about whether there really can be honor among people who are doing bad things together, or separately, is at least as old as the Common Era. Cicero talked about it in 45 B.C., and he had ample reason to worry about it. It wasn’t clear whether the new dictator of Rome, Gaius Julius Caesar, was or wasn’t a rogue. The world still hasn’t decided that question, but it ultimately cost Cicero his life. It’s a fair thing to wonder about. Can people just keep doing bad things (although they may believe them to be permissible or even good) indefinitely, without the wickedness or wrongness of the deeds eventually catching up to the evil-doers? Is there no justice in the universe?

Here we really have to make a space for fairytale logic and hold it apart from the way life really is. Not many philosophers talk about fairytales, but Susanne Langer (1895–1985), a very accomplished American philosopher, did. She says: The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, “as a dream doth flatter.” Its heroes and heroines, though of delightfully high station, wealth, beauty, etc., are simply individuals; “a certain prince,” “a lovely princess.”

The end of the story is always satisfying, though by no means always moral; the hero’s heroism may be by slyness or luck quite as readily as integrity or valor. The theme is generally the triumph of an unfortunate one—an enchanted maiden, a youngest son, a poor Cinderella, an alleged fool—over his or her superiors, whether these be kings, bad fairies, strong animals … stepmothers, or elder brothers. (Philosophy in a New Key, p. 175)

This all sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it, right down to the Rodents of Unusual Size? We all know the logic of fairytales, but sometimes we forget that morality has little to do with it. Moral of the story my ass. More like the immoral of the story. We just ignore ...