The Magnificent Seven (Old School) and Shadow Divers - How heroes are made really does matter

Shadow Divers is a book that has been rattling around in my brain, but I haven’t known how to post on it until watching The Magnificent Seven last night with the reluctant wife.  The new Magnificent Seven has received lukewarm reviews, she wasn’t up for watching Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (the original film) and neither of us had seen John Sturges’ 1960 remake of it as a western.  Coincidentally a friend is considering trying to interest his son in classic westerns after having seen the new version, and I was curious about how well that genre and this version have stood up.

The Magnificent Seven is a story written by men for men about being a man’s man.  The men in this movie are bad men.  They are gunmen who have done bad things to people.  When they have their first scene, Yul Brynner as Chris and Steve McQueen as Vin stand up for the Indian who has been killed on the streets of a shabby border time by driving his hearse through gunfire to boot hill where he will be buried next to the white people who want to lie in eternity only with their own.  Chris and Vin’s motives are unclear – perhaps it is the adventure, or perhaps it is the chance to stick it to the racist snobs who are the civilizing force that has run them as gunmen out of business all over the west.  But the Mexican villagers who have come to the border town seeking help see them as a combination of Robin Hood and Knights in Shining Armor and put up all of their money to hire them and a five friends (at a pittance compared to what they usually command) to protect them from Calvera (played by Eli Wallach) and his forty men who regularly take the peasants’ hard won grain just because he has guns and can do that.

Shadow Divers (published in 2004) is a non-fiction book with three central characters – two scuba divers and the author – a sort of shadow diver of a different variety.  The scuba divers both dive wrecks off the Jersey shore – a sort of quasi-legal pillaging and pirating of stuff – plates and silverware and the captain’s bell from a variety of ships – the big prize of which is the Andrea Doria – an ocean liner buried in 200 feet of water that is extremely dangerous to enter and navigate inside of.  But there is a huge difference between them.  John Chatterton appears to be the principled diver – one who always goes through proper protocol and is held up as a diver’s diver – and Ritchie Kohler – a diver who goes along with bawdy and ribald divers on alcohol infused party dives whose goal is to accumulate the most loot possible.  They become part of a group that discovers a here-to-fore unknown wreck – a wreck of a U-boat – that is in very deep water – at the limits of what they can reach – with a mystery – which U-boat is it?  Robert Kurson – the author of the book – tells a gripping story of the dives and research done to determine the identity of the boat – but he also dives into the lives of these two men and tells a man’s story written to appeal (I think) to men about what it means to be a man.

Now, reluctant or not, I am a psychoanalyst, and I want some depth to stories that I read and to movies that I see.  I want to know the back stories and the internal experience of the protagonists.  I want to resonate with the characters as portrayed.  Both of these stories pretend to offer that – but I think that both of them do so in a highly coded fashion.  And I think the code is one that is intended to hide rather than reveal what it is that men experience.  I don’t mean this maliciously.  I think it is what men – at least men in our culture do – or believe they need to do – not just to survive, though I think both of these are cast as survival tales and I think we are drawn to them because of that, but to thrive – to create a story that turns their tawdriness and loneliness and isolation into something grander – something enviable and worthy of emulation.

The Magnificent Seven is almost self-conscious and transparent about laying out what I have outlined in the last paragraph.  There is a piece of dialogue, when the assembled group is contemplating why they are doing what they are doing and they are engaged in a conversation with the last member, Chico (Horst Bucholz), who is a wannabe gunslinger – not the real thing like the rest of them.  It goes like this:

Chico: Villages like this they make up a song about every big thing that happens. Sing them for years.

Chris Adams: You think it's worth it?

Chico: Don't you?

Chris Adams: It's only a matter of knowing how to shoot a gun. Nothing big about that.

Chico: Hey. How can you talk like this? Your gun has got you everything you have. Isn't that true? Hmm? Well, isn't that true?

Vin: Yeah, sure. Everything. After a while you can call bartenders and faro dealers by their first name - maybe two hundred of 'em! Rented rooms you live in - five hundred! Meals you eat in hash houses - a thousand! Home - none! Wife - none! Kids... none! Prospects - zero. Suppose I left anything out?

Chris Adams: Yeah. Places you're tied down to - none. People with a hold on you - none.  Men you step aside for - none.

Lee: Insults swallowed - none. Enemies - none.

Chris Adams: No enemies?

Lee: Alive.

Chico: Well. This is the kind of arithmetic I like.

Chris Adams: Yeah. So did I - at your age.

The real gunslingers have been at this for a while.  They have a talent.  It is using a particular machine with particular skill.  They are at the height of their powers, but they are no longer wanted.  They have drifted south because there is no longer real work for them and the law is civilizing the west.  This job – one that they would have been well paid in the past – is one that they are receiving twenty dollars for six weeks work – and they are working for principle – for what is right.  They live by the code: “Men you step aside for – none,” and they are helping other men not step aside – teaching them how to fight, not just fighting on their behalf. 

Some of the gunslingers are haunted by demons – and they all acknowledge, in one way or another, the fear that they have before a fight – that this life – despite their really cool guns and really cool leather holsters and their really cool demeanors – is a dangerous one.  More than that, the glamour that comes from the danger is artificial.  In fact, they find themselves envious of the peasants they have come to protect.  These people have a life that will fight to defend – not because they are paid to do it, but because they love their family and community and the community and their families love them.

Shadow Divers is much less self-aware – I think that Robert Kurson, the author, is too caught up in his own hero worship – or in convincing us that we should worship the heroes that he creates – to notice the cracks and crevices in the marble sculptures he creates.  

John Chatterton, the first hero Kurson serves up, is the son of an alcoholic Yale graduate who runs out on his family before inventing the Bar-O-Matic, the ubiquitous dispenser of a variety of sodas through a single hose.  Unsupported by his father, Chatterton serves a one year tour of duty in Vietnam as a medic and his actions are heroic.  He is a thoughtful diver – one who works through the details of how to get to a particular point within a boat over the course of many dives and scholarship about the architecture of it.  He is meticulous with his materials and is cautious in his approach – while also confronting tremendous danger.  He, like the gunslingers, knows his tools and how to use them.  He also thinks through the implications of the U-boat dive as one that is necessarily one that involves a gravesite and he makes a plan ahead of time for respecting the bodies of those he finds.

Ritchie Kohler, the second hero, also has an interesting history with his father; the difference is that he has a real relationship with him, in fact he idolized him.  His father taught him about boats, fishing, and to value his German heritage – to be proud of it.  He also told Ritchie about the many wrecks that they fished that were caused by German U-boats.  Their later relationship proved much more difficult as Ritchie failed to live up to the harsh and critical expectations of his father when they worked together in the father’s business and Ritchie ultimately left the business with considerable hard feelings.  Kohler is also the one who is taken by surprise by the bodies that he discovers in the boat – and has to wrestle – in the deep with his mind reeling from the toxic mix of nitrogen in the bloodstream with what to do about the people’s remains he confronts.

The issue I have with Kurson, the author of Shadow Divers, is that, despite protestations to the contrary, he takes the formative narratives at face value.  Told almost as succinctly as I have outlined them above, they are tied into the heroes later lives as explanatory of them as heroes, while their obvious shortcomings – Chatterton marries and parts from a woman who is caught up in her own obsessions while Kohler has a series of failed relationships – are glossed over and the ways in which they may have turned to dangerous and glory filled avocations may grow not just out of Chatterton’s self-written guides to life and Kohler’s learning about boats and the sea at an early age, but out of a need to accomplish something in their own eyes that they weren’t able to in others.  In fact, they may have turned, as the gunmen may have turned, to mastering materials rather than people because they found that they could rely on materials to be worked in ways that would benefit them.

Now, to be fair, neither the book (nor the movie for that matter) is intended to be about the characters of the heroes – but about their exploits.  And I think we read it to learn about the exploits.  As short and undigested as the biographical information is, the material about diving and the experience of diving is long and we learn about particular dives in minute detail (and the fight scenes in The Magnificent Seven are rendered in magnificent detail).  We are being encouraged to listen to the song the villagers sing about the heroes who found the wreck, and not to look at the arithmetic of loneliness that leads them to be poking around in the ocean trying to discover something interesting about the past.

That said, the characters of the two men will out.  At the end of the book, it is Kohler who connects with the families of the crew members – who takes, at their request, trinkets from the ship to them so that they can have something concrete to remember their family members by.  Even more, he seems to truly enjoy hearing the stories and finding out about the individuals aboard the boat – though that is also a tribute to Kurson, who humanizes people who might have been villainized for being part of a corrupt war machine that engaged in atrocities. 

The magnificent seven, as much as they argue against their path – so much so that Chico, the wannabe who likes the math in the middle, ends up choosing to stay in the village and become the farmer he truly is – and to marry the woman he has become sweet on – or she on him – also exude the aura of “be like me.”  The hero encourages us to identify with his or her accomplishments – to become the person that they are.  And we strongly desire doing that.  And their drive to be heroes leaves us with much that we would not otherwise have.  Kohler touches the lives of Germans who had long given up knowing what became of loved ones – and Chatterton goes on, with Kohler sometimes in tow, to explore great wrecks all over the world – including the Titanic.

Vin and Chris ride off into the sunset after ridding the town of the feared Calvera.  They have righted a small wrong.  Kohler and Chatterton set something straight about history – the U-boat they discovered was not sunk off Gibraltar as the record of the war maintained, but off New Jersey.  It was not involved in a great naval battle and may not have caused any of the wrecks that Ritchie’s father told him about – we do not know.  Yet the actual settling of the west was (ironically) dependent on little known or documented moments when civilizing forces like these gunslingers engaged in – and the second world war was not just a war of great military pushes – the battle of the bulge – but of frantic moments for thousands – maybe millions of men and women – many of those moments ending in death.

Both of these are stories of men who risked their lives to set something right – to fix something in the world that was amiss.  The Magnificent Seven acknowledges that this was at least as much about putting something to rights within the individual psyches of the misfits who banded together to save the town, while Kurson, at best, hints at that.  I think that a tale told without acknowledging the costs of heroism – the ways in which it is not just based on noble motives, but also on base or human or complicated ones that get twisted into acts that are noble – sometimes despite their motives – are more difficult to craft and more difficult to listen to.  My family has recoiled from my attempts to engage them in watching Das Boot, a German film with subtitles about what it is like to live beneath the sea, stating that my tastes in movies are too esoteric and difficult.  What about a good story well told?

OK.  I liked the Magnificent Seven.  It was a tale well told.  OK.  I had a hard time putting Shadow Divers down.  But I want something more from them – especially the second; I want to know that the cracks I see are part of what the heroes are working to plaster over – and I want a narrator who helps us see that and who trusts us to love a flawed hero – in fact, to find a hero’s flaws a compelling part of the narrative. 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...