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theillstills:

Marathon Man (1976, John Schlesinger; Cinematographer: Conrad L. Hall)

 

SPOILERS

 

“Do you think anyone cared about Victor Frankl or admired his humanity until he gave them Man’s Search for Meaning?” - David Foster Wallace (Brief Interviews With Hideous Men)

 

And so he runs.  One man flees for his life, ensnared in a convoluted power-play of fascism, fascism that changes faces and geography but never its simple but efficient binary that turns human beings into non-entities, shells for labor, commerce, and information.  In 1976, when John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man hit theaters, New York City was feeling the shift.  Overwhelmed with crime, the police came harder than ever, singling out problem areas, then problem groups.  Race was a factor, as it always is.  Films like Death Wish and Taxi Driver confronted the power of the pistol with bloody spectacle - could violence stop violence?  Has it ever?

That a pistol is the prominent motif in Marathon Man, a movie similarly controversial for its stark look at violence, suggests an ingrained fear of the weapon as agency, and as an inescapable link to the crimes of the past.  Babe, played by Dustin Hoffman, keeps the pistol his father used to commit suicide, a death spurred by accusations of communist sympathies during the McCarthy era, in his dresser drawer, while he works tirelessly on a scathing thesis about tyranny.  His teacher is quick to illustrate the revenge fantasy implicit in Babe’s words, and this cannot be denied, the paper on Babe’s desk is just the eloquent representation of the firearm inside of it.

The thesis and the weapon trade places halfway through the film, the former forgotten as the stakes rise and Babe tries desperately to avoid using the symbol for fascism that killed his father, and overshadowed Babe’s own life since he was a child, on his oppressors.  And so he runs, hoping that like his hero, marathoner Abebe Bikila, he will eventually push through to some sort of tangible catharsis, a ribbon stretched across the road, signaling his victory, and his freedom.

But who is Babe? Is he his father’s son?  Babe’s teacher explains without malice that he will never fill those footsteps, that he can only create his own, individual mark.  When Babe’s brother, Doc, is murdered, Babe becomes his sibling’s facsimile, running from Doc’s pursuers, failing to answer questions and relay information that only Doc could understand.  Perhaps Babe belongs to the collective Jewish diaspora.  A memorable scene in which Babe is tortured at length by a former Nazi doctor links his personal crises, and continued flight, to that of the Holocaust and the Jewish exodus, but despite the repeated implications of Jewishness, never in the film does he describe himself as such.  Suffocating under the weight of multitudinous identities, Babe becomes not an amalgam of his influences, but a complete rejection of them – a nothing. 

Victor Frankl, a neurologist who, in Man’s Search for Meaning, documented his three years in a concentration camp, understood that there is no such thing as inherent humanity, that one must claim it.  As David Foster Wallace suggested, Frankl was not, could not be, an entity until he wrote that he was one.  He had gone through and seen things under the Nazi regime that should have destroyed him, but he survived with a tenacity of will that he constructed to combat the very forces that would have him deny that will’s existence.  In the climax of Marathon Man, unable to outrun himself, Babe claims his own humanity.  The gun goes into a reservoir, and he finally purges the object that took away both his father’s life and his own, but not before using it against his enemies, and understanding the convoluted autonomy of force - that those pulling the trigger and those running from it become equally oppressed, mirrors at the crux of tyranny.