Angry Men

Written on 22 March 2010

When I was eight my father brought home a movie. My sister and I flattened ourselves against the nearest wall as he came through the house carrying a stack of metals cans, four or five cans shaped like dinner plates but larger, a feast for giants. Then he wrestled a heavy projector through the halls. Hidden inside the machine, through a side door, were a chess-playing troll and his captive, a giant moth trapped against a hot light. If you beat the troll at chess you came to the moth, but the moth struggled furiously when you turned on the hot light, flapping and buzzing against the light and throwing splinters of movie onto the far wall. My father hung a reel of film on a high arm and fed the machine through a winding pathway of spools, spools with teeth. Hit the lights, he would call to me across the room, and we would try again to sooth the moth.

Some movies go deeper than memory in you, and you don’t remember them when talk turns to movies, though you catch glimpses of them again years later, like the glint of a fish that breaks from the ocean on a bright lazy day. How many such days do you get in a lifetime, bright lazy days on the ocean, when you can see across decades?

I remember seeing Hamlet kneeling at prayer in the early years of television, with his mother watching him from the doorway. What’s he doing, I asked my father. My mother wouldn’t know. His father was murdered, answered my father. His father came back as a ghost and told Hamlet. He told Hamlet to kill the murderer. Stop! my mother would cry. Hamlet can’t tell if he should trust this ghost, continued my father. Enough! my mother would cry. More people are watching Hamlet tonight, my father added, than in Shakespeare’s lifetime, or the three and a half centuries since.

The movie he brought home that night filled the largest room in our house, a room added at the far end of the house, with a wall of glass doors that opened onto the pool, far from the family room where the breadbox of a television snoozed on the furniture like a pet.

I have often wondered if I give movies too much time, in place of time with the people around me. But how much do you know of yourself or the people around you, until you have looked into far-off lives, and looked back at your life from theirs? I was forty before I first saw Brooklyn, but I knew the place like home. I had seen it all my life in movies. I saw it that night, at the far end of our house in Southern California. A jury room in New York, at the far corner of the country, with Twelve Angry Men.

My father has been that man in white in my life, the dissenting juror played by Henry Fonda, calmly insisting that things are not what they seem, they are more. People are worth more than our hasty first glance. Worth looking into with care. Infinite care. Particularly where angry men differ, and show their worst.

I think that’s where my adventures in aversion began, the subtitle of this blog. From my father, who in those same years taught me Prisoner’s Dilemma, from John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a book I still have in a box somewhere.

Sales people have always known Prisoner’s Dilemma, though not by name, and though we have despised them as tricksters for taking the form of the people around them, for putting themselves where strangers and rivals and enemies sit, and looking back at themselves from there, looking back at themselves across another man’s desk.

In Twelve Angry Men, the man in the white suit puts himself inside the mind of the Puerto Rican kid with the switchblade, and then, across the hours, inside the mind of each of the other eleven jurors. One by one, the other eleven come over to him.

If he were selling timeshares in Costa Rica we would despise the man in the white suit, but he is selling justice, justice for every last man.

Just this week I saw a Russian remake of Twelve Angry Men, with a Chechan boy on trial for his life in a courthouse in Moscow. It just might be better than the original. It just might be the hope of the world.