Sue Harvey explains to her would-be fiancé that “We’ve got all the time in the world to settle down.” Al Roberts, however, responds with nothing but silence because his goal of achieving his American dream is crushed by the one he loves. The pressure to “settle down” into the social norm of marriage is made obvious by Al’s reaction to the postponement of his vows with Sue. He ultimately walks into the foggy night, newly uncertain of his course in life. Only later, in the throes of a disturbing, fatal ordeal, does Al come face to face with an alternate to the envisioned perfection of a life with Sue: Al meets Vera, a despotic anti-bride who provides a marriage situation Al could only have nightmares about. Detour explores the desire to follow an average American life and settle down with an average woman, in contrast to the uncertainty of living life alone or with a bride who is anything but “ordinary.”

The scene that best illustrates the disruption of Al’s planned path in life takes place during the walk home from the Break O’ Dawn Club where Al and Sue work as musicians. The time is about 4am, judging by Al’s narration that work usually ends at that time, and so the break of dawn should not be literally far off. However, the backlit club sign is put out as the two lovers begin their walk into the night, foreshadowing a dark turn in tone. The music starts off airy and generally emotionless until Sue snaps “It doesn’t matter what drunk” in response to Al’s question, at which point the music takes a sour turn and becomes progressively bitter as the dialogue in the scene continues. Al, with a rare smile on his face, reminds Sue that they will be married the following week. However, his smile quickly fades as Sue reveals her discontent with their current plan. “Funny way to talk, darling,” Al says with a nervous voice. After an insert shot of a street sign to orientate the viewer of their location, the return to Sue and Al is swamped with fog, making it, at times, difficult to see much more than the outlines of their bodies. Sue proceeds to inform Al of her plan to move to Hollywood as he becomes more and more distraught and angry. “What about me?” he asks. “You’re busting up all our plans … I thought you loved me.” Al takes her change of plan very personally and is clearly upset that his plans have been disrupted. The music here is more sad and somber. After this, he is mostly silent and concise, and he bestows on Sue an emotionless goodnight kiss before walking home dejected.

The visual aspect of this scene is remarkable. The low-key lighting, with no diagetic light sources other than the occasional streetlamp, sets the sullen tone of the scene from the very start. As soon as Al asks “Don’t you want to marry me?” the image responds with an extremely dense fog that has enveloped the characters. For the first few seconds of this shot, Sue and Al are nothing more than shapes in the very-low contrast image, gradually becoming more noticeable as two people simply wandering in a gray abyss. There seems to be nothing to notice in the background besides a few vague figures in the shape of light posts and a policeman standing still. There are also several wipes between shots of Al and Sue walking. Finally, at the scene’s end, Al walks off back into the thick fog by himself.

The night-time fog coincides with the onset of confusion and anxiety in Al’s mind. Previous to this scene, Al thought he was going to marry Sue and get that requirement of his life out of the way, having not to worry about it any longer. However, with Sue’s revelation of aspirations in Hollywood, Al’s path in life becomes a much less clear. If his attitude and upset dialogue was not enough proof of how nervous the situation made him, the fog and obscured image of the scene provides solid backing that he feels pretty lost without Sue and the prospect of marriage in the near future. The basic action of the scene is to walk from the club to Sue’s apartment: to get from point A to point B. The fog presents a challenge in navigating this walk, which is an example of how a setback can throw a wrench into a man’s plans. The fog also foreshadows on a small scale that the trek to the west coast later in the film may not be completed without some unexpected detours. The wipes between the shots, not seen anywhere else in the film, seem to function to wipe something clean from the narrative. After this scene, Sue and the life she represents with Al become distant objects that Al can never hope to reach due to the tragic circumstances he encounters. After this scene and the wipes included in it, Al is on his own. He walks off into the foggy night, lonely as the sole policeman they passed earlier. He also never achieves the same love he shares with Sue in the beginning of the film, although his vision of a perfect marriage eventually surfaces in a more distorted way.

When Al and Vera become uneasy partners in crime, a bond is created between the man and woman duo. They enter into their “relationship” on dark terms. Both Al and Vera have had bad experiences with Charles Haskell Jr., who is now deceased. They meet in his very car, and Al appears shaken from the very first instant that he discovers Vera is the woman Haskell referred to earlier: “[Haskell] was sitting right there in the car laughing like mad while he haunted me!” The means of Vera’s introduction to Al is hardly the way a legitimate couple meets. However, Vera, sneering and abusive as she is, eventually grows used to Al although she never ceases to berate him. She constantly belts out orders at him, and tells him what he can and cannot do. For example, when Al tries to open a window in the room they rent, she immediately marches over, slams the window, and growls “Keep the window shut!” to which Al can only respond with a docile “Okay.” Furthering the nightmare of marriage that is created by their relationship, Vera becomes “Mrs. Charles Haskell,” a fake wife to the imposter Al has become. Their pseudo-married-couple discourse constantly degrades into little more than arguments and threats. Al himself draws the connection to marriage with Vera in his narration:

If this were fiction, I would fall in love with Vera, marry her, and make a respectable woman out of her, or else she’d make some supreme class-A sacrifice for me and die. Sue and I would bawl a little over her grave and make some crack about there’s good in all of us. But Vera, unfortunately, was just as rotten in the morning as she’d been the night before.

Al considered the possibility of marrying Vera if only she wasn’t a vicious femme fatale, an inverse of the way Sue is portrayed. Whereas Sue was generally submissive to Al, Vera constantly asserts her dominance. When Al and Vera take Haskell’s car to the dealership, Al tells her not to say a word. When they get there, she does almost all of the talking, while Al proves useless in dealing with the insurance problem. Vera then proposes the plan to inherit Haskell’s fortune, once again showing that she is in control of the relationship. This is a stark contrast to the male dominance in married couples, especially in the 1940s before feminist philosophies truly came to fruition.

Even when Vera makes subtle advances at Al, he never gives in. In the back of his mind, he is still not over Sue and their lost relationship. It is assumed that Sue said she would marry Al when he got to Hollywood, but Haskell’s death on the trip over erased any chance of an easy marriage to Sue. Al does not want to settle with Vera in any way, because he realizes that his relationship with her is nothing more than a vile, distorted picture of a marriage that he can never live. It came nowhere close to the normality he envisioned with Sue:

I was an ordinary, healthy guy, and she was an ordinary, healthy girl, and when you add those two together you get an ordinary, healthy romance, which is the old story, sure, but somehow the most wonderful thing in the world.

Al’s dream of partaking in this “old story” never manifests; he and Sue never achieve this normal life with a normal marriage. Whereas Sue is a dream wife in Al’s mind, Vera is nothing more than a nightmare: an agent of an evil duplicate reality that he was forced into. The twisted pseudo-marriage that Al was trapped in with Vera was so binding that the only way he could break free was to ultimately kill her, as accidental as it was.

The film is ultimately about a trip from the east coast to the west and the unfortunate detour that upset Al’s journey. But it was not simply Al’s means of literally reuniting with Sue that were dashed; a more figurative detour was imposed on his life and his plans to begin a socially-acceptable marriage between an “ordinary, healthy” guy and gal. Al’s biggest detour was the diversion from the societal norm he faced, which began not with Haskell’s death, but with Sue’s relocation to Hollywood. It just so happened that this detour led to a bumpy alternate route: a perverted and distorted anti-marriage to Vera. Vera was, in several ways, the opposite of Sue and presented Al with the type of marital fears a man could only hope to avoid: nagging, disparagement, and animosity. Al was headed down a road too offset from the societal norm he envisioned, being guilty of identity theft. His journey and mental stress could only be resolved by an inevitable encounter with the police, however arbitrarily it was portrayed.

---

Based on the film Detour, 1945, written by Martin Goldsmith; Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.

Comment! (14) | Recommend! (4) | Categories: film [t], cinema [t]

The only way I could cross country was to thumb rides, for even after hawking everything, I only had enough money to eat. Money. You know what that is. It's the stuff you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington's picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It's the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented. Simply because there's too little of it. At least I had too little of it. So it was me for the thumb.

Ever done any hitchhiking? It's not much fun, believe me. Oh yeah, I know all about how it's an education, how you get to meet a lot of people and all that. But me, from now on I'll take my education in college, or in PS62, or I'll send $1.98 in stamps for ten easy lessons.

Thumbing rides may save you bus fare, but it's dangerous. You never know what's in store for you when you hear the squeal of brakes. If only I had known what I was getting into that day in Arizona.

You know, Emily Post oughta write a book of rules for guys thumbing rides, because as it is now, you never know what's right and what's wrong. We rode along for a little while but neither one of us was saying anything. I was glad of that. I never know what to say to strange people driving cars. And two, you can never know if a guy wants to talk. A lot of rides have been cut short because of a big mouth. So I kept my mouth shut until he started opening up.

---

From the film Detour, 1945, by Martin Goldsmith.

Comment! (5) | Recommend! | Categories: noir [t], hitchhiking [t]

Satan finds the display of love and affection shown by Adam and Eve to God and to each other “hateful” and “tormenting” (l. 505). This comes in the very first line of the monologue in which he will reveal his malicious scheme to persuade Adam and Eve to consume the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and go against God’s rule. How Satan finds their love “hateful” mirrors how he sees good as evil, evil as good. Satan, at least in his own mind, has become the antithesis of God, and everything God views as evil or wrong, Satan will view as good or right.

But he also finds pain in the fact that Adam and Eve can display and share their love so openly and happily. Just as God allows them to be “Imparadised in one another’s arms” (l. 506), God has subjected Satan to utmost punishment in the depths of Hell, the true anti-paradise. Satan now not only envies the powers and might of God, but he also envies the caring relationship God has with Man, which ironically mirrors the relationship God once shared with Lucifer in heaven.

Satan then interrupts his thoughts of pain with the situation at hand: he has learned that Adam and Even have one rule to follow. They are not allowed to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Immediately he questions God’s reasoning behind forbidding knowledge, calling it “suspicious” and “reasonless” (l. 516). Satan, very ironically, accuses God of envy in forbidding his creations knowledge; but here he has a point and seems to genuinely disdain God’s restriction, whereas in the past Satan normally only disagreed to be difficult and evil. He calls this law from God a “fair foundation laid whereon to build / Their ruin” (ll. 521-2). Satan no longer has his beliefs just to spite God, just to be the evil to God’s good; he has finally found an action by God that he opposes and truly believes to be unjust. Of course, Satan fails to see that God made this rule and gave Adam and Eve the means to break it to allow them free will.

It is then that Satan reveals his intent and plan. He is going to persuade Adam and Eve to desire knowledge and reject God’s commands. Satan says of God’s rule that it is “invented with design / To keep them low whom knowledge might exalt / Equal with gods” (ll. 524-6). Here Satan seems to want to help Man see things from his point of view. He wants Adam and Eve to be jealous of God’s rule over them in the same fashion that Satan was jealous of God’s power earlier.

Satan has already developed an angle with which to approach Adam and Eve: with knowledge, they might become equal with God, in a way, rendering the fact that they would be breaking his rule obsolete. Satan uses his silver tongue already in this monologue, accusing God and his commands of being “envious” of Adam and Eve. Surely, he is preparing to mount a persuasion so fierce that his mischievous meddling will not go in vain.

Satan addresses Adam and Eve from a distance: “Live while ye may / Yet happy pair! Enjoy, till I return, / Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed!” (ll. 533-5). Satan uses “succeed” here in two ways: not only does this mean that long woes will “follow” the short pleasures, but Satan is confident that his plans will “work” and he will accomplish his evil deeds. Satan’s pride shines through here with this taunting exclamation, showing that he is becoming wholly encompassed by evil pride and ambition.

---

Based on lines 505-35 in Book IV of Paradise Lost by John Milton.

Comment! (1) | Recommend!

Forgiveness is too sacred a sword of social relations to be unsheathed for the pettiest of offenses. This sword should only wear the trickling blood of what is unforgivable, slay what beast steers to spawn enmity between men. For if the vociferous loon is slain over the murderous bear, what is need of a sword over a knife? “If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable . . . then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear." No, this sword was tempered to vanquish not venial iniquity, but mortal. Its very point in being is to strike down the immortal foes of our immoral deeds.

To neglect the sword of its duty is in turn an offense worthy of the blade. Unforgiveness lends itself to unforgiveness; to harbor a grudge is to handle a shield impenetrable to reason, ever-protecting of hate. While I tend to witness people justify resentment towards those that have wronged them or for those that have been wronged, I believe it is tragic that grudges must be held. Don’t grudges usually seem to be used as a weapon to fill the offender with regret? What purpose can this regret serve if not to shame the offender to seeking the forgiveness of the victim? And when the victim denies the offender forgiveness, thus completing the circle, it appears to me that the victim is all too misled or blinded by his indignation to realize his purposeless, ceaseless brooding.

Mahatma Gandhi was compassionate enough to invent the vaccine for world blindness. Nothing is made equal with revenge. The only way to level the battlefield is to respond to a wrong with a right, forgive offense instead of perpetuating it. If Rwanda refuses to help New Orleans, where will the cycle end?

The quicker the slash, the sooner the sword rests in its sheath, unneeded.

---

Based on "On Forgiveness" by Jacques Derrida.

Comment! (2) | Recommend! (1)

Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

Frost would declare and could himself believe that nature, through human attribution, sustains so vividly an aspect of human affects that he wagers “probably it never would be lost” (l. 12). In “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” he offers that Everyman over the years has heard and can still hear as Adam the human tone of meaning Eve so softly and eloquently imbued in the birds. Along the course of the sonnet, there is ample room for elements of separation from love and nature that could normally cast loving humans into sorrow, but instead are used to display that a more positive yearning exists. Careful language also affects how the poem’s meaning is relayed. By using his mythological backbone of Eve instilling an oversound into birds’ song, Frost manages to précise the history and everlasting effects of love and nature according to Romantic ideals.

Adam, as the first man to exist, was also the first man to love and be inspired by love when Eve was created. Without any precedent, we have to wonder what it is that made Adam connect the voice of his love, Eve, to the song of birds. The first sentence of the sonnet tells us something about Adam’s location and influence from his surroundings:

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound.
(ll. 1-4)

Adam was dwelling in the garden, able to hear the birds around him singing their usual song. He needed something to equate his love for Eve with, and when in a lush garden with many animals a person is likely to hear the beautiful and prevalent song of birds. But Adam went further than just to equate them; he declared that the birds extracted what they also loved from Eve’s voice and imbedded it into their own song in what probably would be the first act, according to Frost’s interpretation of mythological events, of poetic Romanticism.

The “He” in the poem may explicitly refer to Adam, but Adam is implicitly used as a figure for Everyman. Adam was Eve’s companion and the only other human alive to bear witness to what Eve did to the birds’ song. Only Adam could know that “Never again would birds’ song be the same” (l. 13) because he was the only person around before Eve was created to have heard both the unchanged song and the altered song after. Adam, however, can represent anyone that has ever realized or has been inspired to place a human affect on nature. In using the idea of the first man and woman ever to exist, Frost sets a precedent that the entire human race, as Everyman, is able to follow. The temporality of the poem also hints that Adam is intended to represent Everyman. We can only assume when “now” is, but juxtaposed to the modal “would” it appears as though the poem takes place in the past looking forward to the future. The “probably” admits that the future is still uncertain, but up until the present Eve’s voice has probably not been lost. The same applies in saying “Never again would birds’ song be the same” (l. 13); what is also added, though, is the fact that Eve’s effect was a permanent one. The finality of “Never again” resonates through the entire sonnet from the onset because of the title, and when it is repeated as the turn we come to truly understand what it means in the context of the first 12 lines. The reiteration serves as a coda to Frost’s proposition that lasts for all of time and through every human heart.

Despite Frost’s suggestion that this superimposition of human affection and nature is experienced by every passionate human through time, there also exists a tension in the distance between the speaker and Adam. The speaker does not appear to take on any specific identity, so the poem remains presented by an anonymous narration. The fact remains, however, that this sonnet was written in the 20th century: far past the time of Adam and Eve and the simplicity of their garden. This brings attention to what differences the speaker and Adam, referred to only in the third person as “He” (l. 1), might have. Surely Adam in ahistorical times “would declare and could himself believe” (l. 1), but perhaps the speaker serves to point out that this belief in modern times no longer truly exists. With the knowledge thrust upon us at the Fall of Man, nobody could honestly believe it is true that birds would or could consciously imbue their song with Eve’s “tone of meaning” (l. 5), whether it was their intention or what seemed to be evident in Adam’s ears.

Furthermore, with his mythological proposal Frost must confess that in order for humans to tie our emotions to birds in such a disjunct manner we must have viewed ourselves as something separate from nature from our very inception and especially after the Fall from the Garden of Eden suffered by Adam and Eve. Here we see Eve’s voice as separate from the birds’. The birds, “having heard the daylong voice of Eve / Had added to their own an oversound” (ll. 3-4). Birds and Eve each possessed their own distinct voices while in the Garden of Eden despite that humans were still supposed to be connected to nature then. Later in the poem exists even more grinding between the voices than before: “[Eve’s] voice upon [the birds’] voices crossed / Had now persisted in the woods” (ll. 10-11). “Crossed” is presented as a past participle describing voices, which suggests an uneasy friction between the voices of Eve and the birds. In fact, it makes the voices appear to work against one another. There was even less unity between humans and nature: a downward trend that mostly would continue for the rest of time alongside the advancement of human knowledge.

What also seems to separate humans from nature and thus birds is our intelligence and language. One of the greatest distinctions between humans and animals is our spoken word. The greater skills of communication have helped the human race develop lasting cultures and ideas, effectively moving us past the nature from which we came. What makes this clear is that when the birds added the oversound to their song, they added Eve’s “tone of meaning but without the words” (l. 5). Birds, clearly incapable of the same level of communication through speech that humans have developed, have not been able to broaden their intelligence; they remain a unified part of nature whereas humans have become something unique in spite of the unity of nature.

Rather than disheartening humans, however, Frost appears to suggest this brand of separation is yet another aspect of what draws our interest to nature and makes us long for it, as well as long to see ourselves in it. Adam and Everyman “would declare and could himself believe” (l. 1) that the birds were influenced by Eve’s voice: by a human’s voice. A declaration is a proud variety of statement; a man declares things that he feels speak of achievement and success. Adam and Everyman seem to herald the discovery that an aspect of humanity, however small, can be found within nature in the birds’ song. That Adam and Everyman “could himself believe” in this discovery follows the notion that we comfort ourselves by believing our achievements to be true, however improbable they are. As mentioned earlier, thinking that birds use Eve’s “tone of meaning” is tough to believe. But whether birds in reality have the capacity to forge into their own song something they admire in Eve’s voice matters little; the belief is primarily a reassuring prospect that drives the nature-lusting mind. Romantic poets embraced everything natural and emotional and tended to eschew reason, logic, and the scientific trend of the Enlightenment period. What they, like the birds, would embrace is the “tone of meaning,” not the “words.”

Although it is not clearly touched upon in the immediate context of Frost’s sonnet, the fact that this story is used allegorically to expand past the time spent in the Garden of Eden is substance enough to consider the Fall and how the meaning expressed is altered from pre- to postlapsarian times. If Eve “Could . . . have had such an influence on birds” (l. 7) to make them change such an essential part of their natural existence as their song, then we can imagine how strongly she could have influenced Adam to consume the forbidden fruit. Eve, as the first woman, was created as a companion to Adam: someone for him to love. They were even told to reproduce: “Be fruitful and increase in number,” the Lord said. But after the Fall, the need of a woman was doubled because humans would no longer be immortal. Adam and Eve were suddenly burdened with the need to have sex to reproduce in order for the human race to live on. However, with the newfound knowledge they received came shame in nudity and in turn a sort of sinful pleasure in sex and eroticism. This is for the most part exclusive in human nature; for the vast majority of living organisms, sex is only for to reproduce. It is no surprise, then, to realize a sexual factor playing a part in “why [Eve] came” (l. 14). Eve at once provides a literal separation of humans from nature with her eroticism and figuratively fecundates nature with her eloquent human voice. It is almost as if her intent was to tear Everyman away from nature just to make him crave it, and effectively her, more. Once again, by embodying in the first woman, Eve, a type of coyness all too common to female nature, Frost sets a precedent to last through all time.

Ultimately, Frost proves that humans, although tragically cast away from nature, still retain a yearning to remain natural entities: a yearning that is frequently played upon due to our love for other humans. Frost is able to capture the essential ideals of Romantic poetry and tie them to the very first instance of love mythologically known to human kind and, in effect, launch them as a permanent precedent that has lasted throughout all of history. And to do that to poetry was why Frost came.

Comment! (4) | Recommend! (2)

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
  At the sea-down’s edge between wind-ward and lee,
Wall’d round with rocks as on Ishbu Island,
  The ghost of NuTang fronts the sea.
A girdle of lemons and thorn encloses
  The steep, square slope of the server-less bed
Where the sites that grew green from the graves of Dave's roses
        Now lie dead.

The files fall southward, abrupt and broken,
  To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a ping should sound or a comment be spoken,
  Would a ghost not rise at the member’s hand?
So long have the gray, bare blogs lain guestless,
  Through forums and guestbooks if a member make way,
He shall find no life but Dave’s, restless
        Night and day.

The dense, hard connection is blind and stifled
  That crawls by a server none turn to climb
To the strait waste index that the years have rifled
  Of all but Dave, who is touch’d not of Time.
The sites he spares when the server is taken;
  The pages are left when he wastes the plain.
The members that wander, the blogs wind-shaken,
        These remain.

Not a button to be press’d of the finger that falls not;
  As the heart of Hoya, the pages are dry;
From the thicket of thorns whence Papagoya calls not,
  Could he call, there were never a member to reply.
Over the forums that blossom and wither
  Rings but the note of thezebra’s song;
Only Dave and le_battement come hither
        All year long.

The blogs burn sere and the domain dishevels
  One gaunt bleak blossom of textless breath.
Only Dave here hovers and revels
  In a round where NuTang seems barren as death.
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,
  Haply, of users none ever will know,
Who left NuTang two to three sleeping
        Years ago.

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, “Look thither,”
  Did he comment? “Look forth from Ishbu to the sea;
For the profiles endure when the blog entries wither,
  And members that leave may die—but we?”
And the baboons sang and the same waves whiten’d,
  And or ever NuTang’s last files were shed,
In the fingers that had commented, the text highlighten’d,
        NuTang: dead.

Or they lov’d their sites through, and then went whither?
  And were one to the end—but what end who knows?
Activity, sea-deep, as a rose must wither,
  As the red baboon asses that mock the rose.
Shall the gone take thought for the gone to love them?
  What blog was ever as deep as a grave?
They are guestless now as the header above them
        Or the wave.

All are at one now, lemons and lovers,
  Not known of the sites and the pages and sea.
Not a breath of the server that has been hovers
  In the air now soft with a server to be.
Not a shoutbox shall sweeten the index hereafter
  of the site or baboon that laughs now or weeps,
When, as they that are free now of weeping and laughter,
        NuTang sleeps.

Here death may deal not again forever;
  Upgrades may come not till all upgrades end.
From the blogs they have made they shall rise up never,
  Who have left no site active to comment and send.
Lemons and thorns of the wild ground growing,
  While Yenamaboya lives, these shall be;
Till a last server’s breath upon all these blowing
        Roll the sea.

Till the slow server rise and the witty comment crumble,
  Till files and bandwidth a member drinks,
Till the strengths of baboons of PPGY humble
  The files that lessen, the bandwidth that shrinks,
Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
  Stretch’d out on the revenue that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
        Dave lies dead.

---

(Based on "A Forsaken Garden" by Algernon Charles Swinburne)

Comment! (5) | Recommend! (2)