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. 

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Florence Foster Jenkins: How do we live with limitations?

Is there something about which you are passionate – something that you deeply appreciate? And is this object of passion something that you can participate in - something that you can do with some but not great proficiency?  For me, that passionate object would be basketball.  I started playing basketball consistently in graduate school in Saturday pick-up games that a friend invited me to.  I had played in a city league in college, though I was mostly kind of a mascot.  I am tall – and look like I should be able to play, so I would tip the ball at the beginning of the game and then ride the bench the rest of the time.  But in practices, one of the students who had played in high school taught us the rudiments of the game including how to work together and move as a team and I found the idea of basketball fascinating.

In fact, I was hooked.  Basketball was like dancing – something else that I like to do but have no formal training or great skill at doing- but with a purpose and a way to keep score.  In graduate school, while I was learning very esoteric things about the human condition and how to study it, basketball was a place where I could concretely see myself learning and improving from week to week.  My shot improved, my dribbling improved – I made fewer turnovers and by the time our Saturday group entered the intramural league, I was one of the better players. 

Basketball, then, became the stuff of dreams.  I would think about plays that I had made as I drifted off to sleep.  I watched college and professional basketball games to learn skills that I would then try out on the court.  Because my college had no intercollegiate athletics, I still had academic eligibility and toyed (in the very private recesses of my mind) with trying out for the University’s team.  I would even joke about it, but that joke betrayed a wish – a secret desire that I made ever so slightly public – to get out there on the big stage and show the world my stuff: to play with the big boys.

Florence Foster Jenkins, a society girl born in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania in 1868, had enough musical aptitude to play the piano in a recital at the White House when she was a young girl.  She was passionate enough about pursuing a musical career that she eloped with a man who supported her career – and gave her syphilis, an incurable disease at that time, and the mercury treatments used to keep her symptoms at bay had terrible side effects – she lost her hair – and did not prevent the disease from progressing – which, at that time, it did until people became demented.  Until penicillin was discovered, 50% of patients in mental hospitals were there because of tertiary symptoms of syphilis.  Foster Jenkins defied her wealthy father’s wishes to pursue a vocation that he did not understand, so he disinherited her.  She left her husband after discovering her syphilis and reconciled enough with her father that he returned to supporting her and, as the only living child, leaving her his considerable estate when he died.

Lady Florence, as she came to call herself, took up with a modestly talented Shakespearean Actor from England named St. Clair Bayfield and they had an apparently chaste relationship – at least in part so that he would not contract syphilis.  She shifted from piano to singing in part because the syphilis weakened one of her arms.  If she had aptitude for the piano, she had little or none for singing.  I don’t know, and the biopic starring Meryl Streep as Foster Jenkins and Hugh Grant as St. Clair (who had a separate abode and a mistress on the side) does not much help with understanding the various motives that led St. Clair to care for her, but in the movie it is apparent that he does – deeply.  Whether he was initially drawn by the money – or recognizing a kindred spirit – someone with just a bit of talent but a great deal of passion – or by her joi de vive, we don’t know. 

We do get to see the blossoming of affection that occurs when she hires a pianist to accompany her, Cosmé McMoon (Yup, that was his stage name – he changed it from McMunn when he moved from San Antonio to New York, though Cosmé was his given name) (played in the film by Simon Helberg, Howard on the Big Bang) who, while worried about the effect  accompanying her singing would have on his legitimate musical career, grew from ridiculing her to having a weird sort of connection and even concern for her (and considerable appreciation for her monetary largesse).   I wish that I had felt the blossoming of such a sense of empathy as we get to know her character, but mostly I felt pity, especially as the depth of difficulty she had from the syphilis became apparent.  It is possible that some of her behavior – and her difficulties singing – can be traced to later stage syphilis problems.  In any case, I had trouble gaining access to sympathizing with her as a character.

It is clear, however, that St. Clair does.  He is a special kind of lover – one who helps Lady Florence fall asleep by reciting a bit of Shakespeare (I think) that talks about true love not wanting to change the lover, but loving the beloved for who it is that the beloved actually is.  And he enacts the poem in his love for her, though it clearly takes great effort, over the course of decades – shepherding and protecting Lady Florence as she starts various musical guilds that she presides over – groups of little old ladies who get together largely to watch tableaux – staged pictures of heroic moments – with Lady Florence frequently playing the final Grand Dame.  And he also helped her with recitals – some of them intimate – in the living room of the hotel suite where she lived and one, annually, more public - in the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton.  The audience was always hand-picked – tickets were only given to people who would admire the singing and the critics from the main papers were not invited, though specialty papers ran politely supportive reviews probably written by friends or, as suggested in the film, by paid off reviewers.

I’m not sure who’s at fault for my failure to resonate with Lady Florence.  As in another Streep film, August Osage County, I think the medium is partly at fault.  The visual impact of an elderly woman (Lady Florence was 76 during the period of the film) dressed in costumes that seem more out of the 1890s or maybe 1920s than the 1940s was off-putting.  So, frankly, were some of the tenderest images – those where St. Clair is tending to Lady Florence’s physical difficulties.  But I think there is more to it.  The care that Sr. Clair and McMoon and others took to shield her from knowing how bad she was – her own tone deafness not just to her singing but also to the ways that people laughed at her when she sang – made her less heroic than lost, out of touch, and hidden – something that was emphasized when she drops in on St. Clair’s lair and can’t recognize, despite a great deal of evidence, that he is living a double life.  She prefers to remain in her bubble.

Historically, it is clear that many people resonated with Lady Florence.  She financially supported the musical world in New York City – Toscanini was a friend and she was his patron.  And there were bona fide musicians who came to her performances and enjoyed them – despite her limited tonal abilities.  Cole Porter had to work not to laugh, but he came to see her annually – something brought him there.  Florence Foster Jenkins also recorded and my Mother, brought up in Chicago, remembers listening to her recordings.  In fact, the movie stated that her recordings were the best sellers her record label – melotone – ever had.  And her concert at Carnegie hall, a performance that was not carefully regulated in the ways that the others were – was a sellout with many turned away at the door (and, according to the movie – many tickets given away to military men who hooted and hollered).

I wonder if the appeal was a bit like that of the early rounds of American Idol where they highlight earnest but incompetent singers – people who really want to be good singers – put their hearts into it – but ultimately just don’t have the chops to support their ambitions.  Streep’s performance, though, felt ungainly – and I think that the sycophants – the under director of the Metropolitan Opera who was her singing coach and fed her with Bromides like “You’ve never sounded better,” left me feeling that this woman was living in a delusional cocoon – she had no Simon Cowell to give it to her straight - which feels lonely and isolating.  Rather than singing her heart out despite whatever people might think – something that I find noble, she comes off as lost.  Despite her statement, “some say that I can’t sing, but they can’t say that I didn’t sing,” the movie doesn’t give the sense that she knows how bad her singing actually is.

That said, I was stung this week when one of the truly good basketball players in our game, in talking with me about a play where I was trapped, commented that one of the newbies didn’t yet know not to send the ball to me in that situation because I didn’t have the skills to manage it.  Now, I have seen players choose not to pass that ball to me in similar situations for decades – and I am relieved when they don’t – but I also delude myself into thinking – if they had sent it, I would have done something spectacular this time.  And the odd thing is, every once in a while I do something – if not spectacular – serviceable, even if in a difficult situation – and this helps sustain the delusion.  So it stung to hear the truth – that I have limited basketball skills, especially one-on-one in the open court moving toward the basket.  I didn’t want to hear it, even though I know it to be the case.

I think that I had trouble connecting with Foster Jenkins’ character because she was frequently singing opera arias – which are unforgiving and which I don’t know well enough to know what it is she attempting.  Sometimes my own basketball ineptitude is so bad that it is undeniable – but usually my skills are passable and I can imagine from the inside what we see in the movie when we hear Streep singing what Jenkins must be hearing – Streep’s wonderful and actual singing voice.

My basketball playing skills, despite their meteoric improvement early on – leveled off well below where I would have liked them to have gone.  The varsity players never actually had the least thing in the world to fear from me.  Now that I am seeing age related declines in my already limited skills, I am regularly embarrassed by mishandling a ball that even I would have handled with some competence at an earlier time.  Yet I still play – and contribute – after a fashion – to the games that are increasingly being decided by much younger men, though, frankly, they have always been determined by other men – at least when I have been in the A game.  I still play a contributing if diminishing role even when the best players are there.

Foster Jenkins, if she hadn’t lived in New York City and if she hadn’t been quite so wealthy, might well have presided over the local ladies music club just as she did in New York and it might never have gone on from there.  Because she had money and connections, something greater happened.  She recorded a few songs – they were played on the radio and she sang one glorious sold out night at Carnegie Hall – a night where the audience was not hand-picked and laughed out loud.  She struck a chord, not just with St. Clair Bayfield and Cosmé McMoon, but with people who took her semi- seriously – who heard in what she sang something familiar – maybe something they wished they had the guts to do – a performance driven by desire more than skill – the enactment of a fantasy – only, instead of pretending to be the Michael Jordan of Opera – she was more like George Plimpton as the Paper Lion -  a passionate sports writer playing an NFL down despite not being competent to do that.  And don’t we all, in our heart of hearts, want to be not Michael Jordan doing what Michael Jordan does, but to be ourselves doing what he can do.  And don’t we derive direct and vicarious pleasure - from the effort to emulate his ability to fly?

Having said all of that, I am aware that it is also the case that we laugh at Foster Jenkins.  She can’t sing, we say.  Maybe part of my inability to empathize is my wish to keep her as someone I can deride.  If I don’t feel myself to be like her, I can simply laugh at the silliness of thinking that she could try out for the varsity team and not recognize that it’s me who will never in a thousand years be able to do that.  And the laugher of those, like Cole Porter, who can do what only the gods can do – they use the experience of hearing Foster Jenkins sing or seeing me play basketball to truly appreciate the gift that they have – to realize that it just isn’t given to everyone.  And maybe we all need to appreciate just how rare and special real talent is – and not having a talent – or hearing or seeing someone who doesn’t have that talent – makes us all the more appreciative of those who do.


Addendum: This post was more difficult than most to write - it simply didn't flow.  I had to do more editing than I usually do.  I think this is because it illustrates something that I have long struggled with and actually only now have words to describe:  We need feedback - information - about how we are failing and falling short in order to improve.  Regardless of whether we have a great deal of talent or not, those of us who are able to take in feedback improve and those who cannot don't.  Many of us who are extremely talented can't handle criticism - because talent of whatever sort is in a different box from being able to hear criticism and to know that we are still OK - in fact to welcome it even though it stings because it helps us improve.  Michael Jordan spent a considerable amount of time working on his left hand - even brushing his teeth left handed - because he knew that to be an area that needed improvement.  Others of us, even if we welcome the feedback, simply aren't going to get that much better - no amount of left handed tooth brushing is going to help my left handed layup enough to get me to the show.

I think what is bothering me about this film is that it is unclear whether Foster Jenkins could have used more critical feedback.  What good would it have done her?  Would she have folded up her musical tent and gone home?  She wanted, based on an early scene, to hold Carnegie Hall in the palm of her hand the way that a talented soprano that she and St. Clair went to see together was able to.  She was never going to be able to do that.  I talked with a musician about the movie, and he said that when he was at Julliard the faculty would play her records and laugh at her.  The irony is that protecting her from knowing how poorly she sang ended up leading her to expose herself to an unprecedented level of ridicule - a level that no one should have to endure.  I think it also allowed her to live out a dream.  I'm not sure that I wouldn't trade a little ridicule to run up and down Madison Square Garden's court, even if in a humiliating defeat.  At least I would have played.

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