Fire and Rain

A few weeks ago, my father sent me a copy of a book called Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY and the Lost Story of 1970. I didn’t have to ask why. We have always connected on music... not necessarily on our taste in music, but on our enthusiasm for music and its formative influence. My dad doesn’t talk much about his past, so I was intrigued when he pitched this book to me by saying that 1970 was a “watershed” year for him - the year he got his driver’s license, the year his parents divorced and he moved to a new town, a year when music played a significant role in his life.

He once told that he briefly played guitar in a garage band as a teenager. (Years later, when I was about twelve years old, he taught me how to play the opening of “Secret Agent Man.” That’s as far as my own musical training goes.) On another occasion, he told me that his mother forgot his birthday and, in her haste to pick out a last-minute present at the local department store, bought him a copy of a Steppenwolf album that she normally wouldn’t have approved of. (It’s almost impossible for me to imagine my grandmother allowing anyone to listen to Steppenwolf around her. When I was a kid, she wouldn’t even let me bring Garbage Pail Kids stickers into her house.) He was clearly impressed with that particular birthday gift, even if it did arrive late. One of the only other details I’ve heard about my father’s teenage years is that he once pinned a giant American flag on the wall of his bedroom - which suggests to me that a song like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” might have spoken to him about the ways the country was changing in 1970.

1970 was also an important year for David Browne, the author of Fire and Rain. In the introduction, Browne explains how he got the idea to write the book: “My wife suggested I write about the music I loved in my childhood, meaning not just Simon & Garfunkel but Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Beatles, James Taylor, and so on. As she rightly pointed out, I was still giving cursory listens to those musicians’ new releases, attending their reunion concerts, even interviewing them for one outlet or another. When we wondered aloud whether they had anything in common, one thing came to my mind: 1970. Here was the year in which two of those groups fell apart, one achieve critical cultural mass and also collapsed, and another broke through to a new level of mass acceptance. Further researching those twelve months, I was reminded what a turbulent year 1970 truly was. I’d remembered Kent State and Charles Manson’s trial, but I’d nearly forgotten about the Southern Strategy or the brownstone that exploded in New York’s Greenwich Village, right down the street from an NYU dorm where I would later live. It was a year - a strangely overlooked on, in some regards - of upheaval and collapse, tension and release, endings and beginnings.”

Browne does an admirable job of organizing and providing cultural context for four albums: the Beatles’ Let It Be, CSNY’s Deja Vu, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bookends and James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. I was intrigued by many of the details he unearthed about the artists -- Simon & Garfunkel’s first incarnation as a bubblegum pop duo called Tom & Jerry, McCartney’s legal separation from the Beatles, Taylor’s rehab, and the creation of David Crosby’s first solo album (a haunting psychedelic journey with Jerry Garcia) -- but I was also left with a desire for a different book... one that focused on different albums.

Let It Be is the least relevant album of the Beatles’ mature years. Browne uses it to illustrate that the musicians, and American culture in general, were in transition. If the Beatles represented the past, the author proposes, CSNY (who were then being hailed as “the American Beatles”) represented one possible continuation. Of course, that continuation was not to be. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young quickly split up and pursued solo careers. As Browne explains, the very notion of rock super-groups was becoming outdated, the “come together” mindset of the late 60s giving way to the “me decade.” Simon & Garfunkel also parted ways in 1970, as younger listeners turned to harder rock. As a solo artist, Simon retained the older (early 30s) audience. So did James Taylor, who always had a softer, “adult contemporary” sound.

If Browne shared some of his own personal experiences of this music, and justified his album choices in an emotional way (beyond the book’s introduction), I think the narrative might resonate more strongly. Because he adopts a more staid journalistic approach, I couldn’t help feeling that the focus on these four particular musicians was somewhat arbitrary, and the book itself a bit too blandly nostalgic. Why not also write about the harder rock that was already replacing the music of these four bands? I was left wanting to hear about how The Doors made the transition from the sixties with their laid-back, blues-heavy 1970 album Morrison Hotel. Or the way Led Zeppelin followed their balls-to-the-wall Brown Bomber album (an early taste of heavy metal) with the somber mysticism of Led Zeppelin III. The story of guitarist Nick Drake, somewhat similar to Taylor’s tale of drug abuse and mental breakdown, might have made for more compelling reading. And Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew surely would have inspired a more challenging look at the progressive mutations of rock and roll.

Of course, my reaction is based mostly on my own musical preferences. I suppose all I’m really saying is that when someone writes about music, they should be 100% emotionally engaged, not just intellectually engaged. The hell with journalistic objectivity... I want to hear more of the enthusiasm that’s in Browne’s introduction. I believe that music, more than any other art form, conveys pure emotion. Writing about music should mean tapping into that pure emotion, and trying to convey it via another medium. A good writer should be able to get the reader just as engaged. Could I find the right words to share my initial emotional reactions to Morrison Hotel, Led Zeppelin III, Bryter Layter and Bitches Brew? I don’t know... If so, it would be a hell of a book.

Of course, David Browne has a distinct advantage over me here. He experienced those four albums at the time of their release, and within the cultural context that inspired and influenced them. I could not write about them in that context with the same kind of honesty that he can. I’d have to pick another year, one that corresponds with my own personal formative experiences of music... Where to begin?

In his book This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Daniel J. Levitin writes: “Researchers point to the teen years as the turning point for musical preferences. It is around the age of ten or eleven that most children take on music as a real interest, even those children who didn’t express such an interest in music earlier. As adults, the music we tend to be nostalgic for, the music that feels like it is ‘our’ music, corresponds to the music we heard during these years. One of the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease (a disease characterized by changes in nerve cells and neurotransmitter levels, as well as destruction of synapses) in older adults is memory loss. As the disease progresses, memory loss becomes more profound. Yet many of these old-timers can still remember how to sing the songs they heard when they were fourteen. Why fourteen? Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self-discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged; in general, we tend to remember things that have an emotional component because our amygdale and neurotransmitters act in concert to ‘tag’ the memories as something important. Part of the reason also has to do with neural maturation and pruning: it is around fourteen that the wiring of our musical brains is approaching adultlike levels of completion.

“There doesn’t seem to be a cutoff point for acquiring new tastes in music, but most people have formed their tastes by the age of eighteen or twenty. Why this is so is not clear, but several studies have found it to be the case. Part of the reason may be that in general, people tend to become less open to new experiences as they age. During our teenage years, we begin to discover that there exists a world of different ideas, different cultures, different people. We experiment with the idea that we don’t have to limit our life’s course, our personalities, or our decisions to what we were taught by our parents, or to the way we were brought up. We also seek out different kinds of music….”

When I was twelve, I made a mix tape using my father’s music: CSNY, James Taylor, The Eagles, The Band, Three Dog Night, The Doobie Brothers, Elton John, etc. By the time I was fourteen, I was paying more attention to “new” music. (New to me, at least.) Part of me would love to write a book about 1994, featuring an album for each new season of emotion. 1994 was the year I got hooked on Pink Floyd (via their album The Division Bell) and Led Zeppelin (prompted by the release of Page & Plant’s live album No Quarter), and newer bands as diverse as The Cranberries (No Need to Argue) and Nine Inch Nails (The Downward Spiral). It was also the year that hometown boy Dave Matthews released Under the Table and Dreaming. I was never a huge DMB fan, but if you lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, at that time... there was no avoiding that album, and no dodging the enthusiasm it created on the local music scene.

Another writer might be more inclined to recall 1994 through the music of Oasis, Green Day, Beck, Smashing Pumpkins, Portishead, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, L7, Luscious Jackson or even (god help us) Hootie and the Blowfish. Whatever the year and whatever the musical selections... if a writer can explain their choices with emotional honesty, I’ll always listen.

MOVIES MADE ME #40: STEPHEN KING'S GRAVEYARD SHIFT

One of the things I realized while re-reading Stephen King’s Night Shift collection is that the author seems to write short stories as a way of capturing new, and potentially fleeting, ideas. Several of the short stories in Night Shift proved to be the seeds of his more famous novels. “Jerusalem’s Lot,” written in 1967 as a college term paper, eventually became Salem’s Lot. “Night Surf,” first published in 1974, reads like a prologue to The Stand. “The Boogeyman,” first published in 1973, is the forerunner of It. In comparison, several of the other stories in this collection evolved (or devolved) into films. For the most part, those adaptations have been out of King’s hands. The author once joked that having one of your stories adapted to the screen feels like sending your daughter off to college. Sometimes she gets her degree, and sometimes she gets date-raped by frat boys.

At this point, many of the Night Shift stories have been faithfully adapted into independent short films. The trend started in the early 80s, when “The Boogeyman” (an effectively moody adaptation by director Jeff Schiro) and “The Woman in the Room” (an early effort by Frank Darabont, who would become one of King’s most successful collaborators) were paired together in a video release called STEPHEN KING’S NIGHT SHIFT COLLECTION (1989). “The Ledge” and “Quitters, Inc.” were combined with a third story for Lewis Teague’s anthology film CAT’S EYE (1985). “Battleground” became the basis for the first (and some say best) episode of the 2006 TNT miniseries NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES.

Feature film adaptations have not fared quite as well, illustrating that it’s no easy task to expand on King’s storytelling. CHILDREN OF THE CORN (1984) was one of the worst adaptations of the early 1980s, but it’s a masterpiece compared to its seven direct-to-video sequels and 2009 remake. A short film adaptation of the original story, titled DISCIPLES OF THE CROW, and packaged in a cheeky 1987 video release called A STORY FROM STEPHEN KING’S NIGHT SHIFT COLLECTION, isn’t much better. Even more embarrassing is the 1992 cyber-thriller THE LAWNMOWER MAN, which has nothing to do with King’s short story of the same name. The author sued to have his name taken off of the film, but suckers like me had already paid to see it in the theater.

It’s not hard to understand why the author would want to try his own hand at directing a film based on one of his works, but his only attempt, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE (based on the short story “Trucks”), is generally regarded as a travesty. For me, it’s a guilty pleasure. Yes, the movie is silly as hell -- that’s obvious from the opening credit sequence, in which King pelts Marla Maples with a truck full of watermelons while blasting AC/DC -- but that’s the kind of movie that I will always stop to watch if I’m flipping through TV channels on a Sunday afternoon. SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK is a more dignified release from the Dino DeLaurentiis camp. I interviewed director Tom McLoughlin at length about this picture, and came away with an even greater appreciation for it.

This brings me to GRAVEYARD SHIFT (1990) and THE MANGLER (1995), both of which I regard more highly than the usual horror fan. I have already written about THE MANGLER, and made my case for Tobe Hooper’s oppressive storytelling... which was, unfortunately for Hooper, NOT a popular mode for horror movies in the mid-1990s. I think THE MANGLER plays a little better today, but no one will ever regard it as an unqualified success. GRAVEYARD SHIFT has a similar tone, which is to say that it’s surprisingly bleak and gruesome for a monster movie made in 1990. All in all, it has quite a few things going for it.

First there’s Brad Dourif, who sets the scene as a crude exterminator who works nights at the world’s dingiest cotton mill. An entire book could (and should) be written about Dourif’s work as a character actor, from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST to THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. When he made GRAVEYARD SHIFT, he was best known to horror fans as the voice of Chucky in CHILD’S PLAY (1988), and he had more than enough confidence to chew the scenery. Dourif is the kind of actor who can always do something with next to nothing, but here the writer has given him at least one particularly juicy scene, where he tells the film’s nominal hero (David Andrews, doing his best imitation of Rowdy Roddy Piper in THEY LIVE) about an encounter with bloodthirsty rats in ‘Nam. His monologue reminds me of Quint’s suspense-building war story in JAWS, and it works just as well. (Okay, maybe the GRAVEYARD SHIFT example is more “gross-out horror” than suspense-building, but that’s true to the spirit of King’s short story.) Dourif caps of his gruesome anecdote by warning the listener not to mistake him for the kind of crazy vet that Bruce Dern plays in the movies. In this movie, he’s no crazier than anyone else.

Well, maybe that’s not quite true... Stephen Macht gives Dourif a pretty good run for his money in the scenery-chewing department. You could argue that Macht's performance as mill manager Warwick is over the top. I wouldn’t argue with you, but I'd add that his exaggerated performance only adds to the sense of menace in the film. Warwick is a sadistic tyrant, and Macht is gleeful in his portrayal. He’s just plain fun to watch... A guy you love to hate.

And that accent? I grew up in the South, so I have no idea if his rural Maine accent is accurate. All I can say is that he’s doing the same accent that Fred Gwynne did in PET SEMATARY, and I’ve come to think of that as an accurate “Stephen King’s rural Maine” accent. The author loves to emphasize local accents in his writing and, whenever he drops the word “ayuh,” I can practically hear Ed Gwynne and Stephen Macht. And frankly, I like listening to them talk (which is more than I can say for thick Southern accents). The voice and the performance make Macht's character compelling instead of just abrasive, and that allows me to regard Warwick not simply as a stock villain, but as a desperate and determined man fighting in vain against the spirit-crushing atmosphere in a part of America that mostly resembles a third-world country.

Unlike most Stephen King movies, this one was actually shot in Maine. King’s short story is set in the fictional town of Grave’s Falls, but (like “The Mangler”) it is inspired by the author’s personal experiences while working in a sweatshop in his hometown of Durham, Maine. (On a random sidenote, the Worumbo Mill plays itself in King's latest novel, 11/22/63.) I visited Durham a few years ago, and took some photos of the now-abandoned factory on the banks of the Androscoggin River.

It doesn’t look quite as intimidating as the “Bachman Mill” in GRAVEYARD SHIFT... at least, not on the outside... but it's not hard for me to imagine that the place must look like a death-trap on the inside. In the short story, King describes it like this:

“The bulbs couldn’t banish the twelve-year darkness; it could only push it back a little and cast a sickly yellow glow over the whole mess. The place looked like a shattered nave of a desecrated church, with its high ceiling and mammoth discarded machinery that they would never be able to move, its wet walls overgrown with patches of yellow moss, and the atonal choir that was the water from the hoses, running into the half-clogging sewer network that eventually emptied into the river below the falls.”

GRAVEYARD SHIFT captures that sense of a cavernous ruin, like the rotting corpse of some giant mythic creature, permeated by water and pale artificial light. Much of the credit, I suppose, should go to production designer Garry Wissner, who would later oversee the gloomy aesthetics of SEVEN (1995) and the pilot for the TV series MILLENNIUM. Cinematographer Peter Stein, who achieved a similar urban gothic aesthetic in the previous year’s PET SEMATARY, should also get a nod for the off-kilter camera angles that make the mill look so imposing from the outside and so vast from the inside. Bachman Mill is the kind of place that I had nightmares about as a kid. It’s a place that you enter willingly, just to prove that you can, only to find that you can’t get out the same way you came in. Desperately, you wander deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast, and soon come to realize that the place simply goes on forever. In the film, the characters descend into a “sub-basement” (the term alone makes me nervous) that might as well be the pits of Hell.

What they find down there in the third act of the film is, in my mind, the missing link between ALIEN (1979) and THE DESCENT (2005). In fact, until I re-watched GRAVEYARD SHIFT last night, I didn't remember how much the mutant rat-bat creature resembles Giger’s alien (minus its protective shell), or realize that I had scenes and shots from THE DESCENT mixed in my memory with scenes from this earlier film. Now, I can’t imagine that Neil Marshall didn’t take some inspiration from GRAVEYARD SHIFT. And I’m a little bit bummed that the writer and director of this film haven’t gone on to bigger and better horror flicks.

I assume that director Ralph S. Singleton got the GRAVEYARD SHIFT gig based on his work as a producer on PET SEMETARY. Since 1990, he’s had a very respectable career as a producer and production manager, but he hasn’t directed another feature. Writer John Esposito recently did a MASTERS OF HORROR episode (RIGHT TO DIE, for director Rob Schmidt), a segment of the horror anthology film THE THEATRE BIZARRE, and an entire season of THE WALKING DEAD webisodes (co-written with the great Greg Nicotero), so maybe his star is on the rise. Certainly, as a horror fan, I’d welcome more experiments like GRAVEYARD SHIFT -- films where tone, setting and characterization prevail. There's no question that the rat-bat creature in this film plays second fiddle to the mill itself. And maybe that’s the secret to adapting Stephen King... No filmmaker (especially in this CGI-dependent era) can hope to build a monster as terrifying as the one in the reader’s imagination. What they can do is build the perfect environment for it.

MOVIES MADE ME #39: DRIVE

The hell with the Oscars. DRIVE was the best movie I saw this year. In fact, it’s the best new American movie I’ve seen since NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Why? It showcases all the strengths of filmmaking as a medium. Through artful and ruthlessly efficient decisions about characterization, sights and sounds, all old things are made new again.

(Advance notice: Spoilers ahead. If you haven't already seen the movie, do yourself a favor...)

DRIVE, like NO COUNTRY, is essentially a genre film - a horror-tinged elegiac western disguised as a romantic crime drama. As a story, it’s nothing new. The first scene establishes Ryan Gosling’s Man with No Name as a dangerous hero with a professional code. Anyone raised on genre movies knows that, if he sticks to his professional code, he’ll be okay. We also know (because we’ve seen a few Michael Mann movies, and the opening credit sequence practically screams at us to remember movies like THIEF and HEAT) that he won’t stick to his code. The self-centered minimalist (a clear case of arrested development) falls in love, and suddenly his world becomes richer and more complicated. Because I’ve been immersed in westerns lately, I saw similarities to the classic 1953 western SHANE.

“Even I could read the endurance in the lines of that dark figure and the quiet power in his effortless, unthinking adjustment to every movement of the tired horse.”

In SHANE, we are introduced to the main character through the eyes of a young boy -- named Bob in Jack Schaefer’s novel, Joey in the 1952 movie adaptation with Alan Ladd. “He rode easily,” Bob remembers, “relaxed in the saddle, leaning his weight lazily into the stirrups. Yet even in his easiness was a suggestion of tension. It was the easiness of a coiled spring, of a trap set.” The pre-credit sequence in DRIVE introduces us to the same type of character. Schaefer could just as easily be describing Driver: “all his movements were deft and sure,” he wore “a frown of fixed and habitual alertness,” with “eyes that were endlessly searching.” In short, he’s a professional so in tune with his job and his environment that he seems to operate completely on instinct and intuition. What Schaefer conveys through words, filmmaker Nicholas Winding Refn conveys largely through sound design. (This New York Times article explains the techniques better than I can.)

On the surface, the filmmaking and the character are each as efficient as a Swiss watch. The brilliance of the filmmaking is that it’s constantly hinting at what lies beneath the surface. As the story progresses, the storyteller subtly peels away more and more layers. There’s a quick scene at the end of the credit sequence in which Driver returns home to a dark, mostly empty apartment. This tells us everything we need to know about his lifestyle. (Again, I’m reminded of HEAT... Do all career criminals prefer minimalist decor?) A few minutes later, he’s in an elevator with his attractive neighbor Irene. A quick glance is all it takes to convey his loneliness... and his resolve to keep life simple by remaining lonely. No dialogue necessary.

He breaks down, of course, or there would be no movie. There is another quick scene that encapsulates his budding relationship with Irene’s son Benicio. In the elevator, the boy stares up at him. Driver stares back. It seems at first like an awkward moment. Then the boy blinks and smiles, and we realize that they were having a staring contest. Again, no dialogue necessary. We understand that Driver has already entered Benicio’s world, and belongs there. Why? Bob/Joey explains: “His eyes were still and steady and you knew the man’s whole attention was concentrated on you even in the casual glance.” What more does a kid want from a father? “He was a man like father in whom a boy could believe in the simple knowing that what was beyond comprehension was still clean and solid and right.”

Only a few words are exchanged between Driver and Irene in the subsequent kitchen scene. They have two conversations. One real. One implied. It’s the same thing between Shane and Bob/Joey’s mother Marian (played by Jean Arthur in the film) in SHANE. Bob tells us that Shane “always regarded her with a tenderness in his eyes he had for no one else.” A short montage illustrates the same thing in DRIVE: With Irene and Benicio, Driver is 100% present. That’s a simple thing to say, but it’s rare in real life. How many of us are so intensely focused? How many of us listen without waiting to talk? How often do we stop to really observe? In another other movie, the silence in the kitchen scene would segueway directly into a hot and heavy sex scene. Not here. Expectant breathing is sexy enough. Bob observes that he and his mother are “more vibrant, more alive” around Shane, because Shane is always there, always in the moment. As the song goes, “A real human being...” And yet.

Marian says of Shane, “I like him... He’s so nice and polite and sort of gentle. Not like most men I’ve met out here. But there’s something about him. Something underneath the gentleness. Something dangerous.”

“You could fairly feel the fierce energy suddenly burning in him, pouring through him in the single coordinated drive.”

DRIVE keeps things simple. It gives us very little information about Driver’s past. (Bob observes, “His past was fenced as tightly as our pasture.”) We know he moves around a lot. We know he’s new to his apartment building. We know he’s only been at his current job for four or five years. Like Shane, he’s a drifter with very little to lose. That partially explains his willingness to risk all, but a man doesn’t risk his life on a regular basis without some deeper psychological reason.

I’ve been reading a biography about Audie Murphy, American’s most decorated WWII veteran. Murphy says: “People don’t realize that after you’ve come out of a war nothing much gives you a thrill.” Murphy was constantly getting into fights, and remained addicted to high-stakes gambling for most of his life. Actor Lance Henriksen says it another way: “I was in a bar once with this guy who was provoking everyone around him, including me. He pushed people to the point where they were ready to fight. Then he would get happy - because when everybody around him was operating at a certain adrenaline level, he felt normal... When he’s surrounded by chaos, he’s in his element.” That’s the backstory on Shane and Driver. It’s all we need to know.

In SHANE, the hero allies himself not only with Marian and Bob/Joey, but with their husband and father. There’s never any doubt that Marian is attracted to him, just as there’s never any doubt that Irene is attracted to Driver... her breathing pattern alone conveys her anticipation. But Shane’s personal code dictates that he won’t act on it. In DRIVE, Irene announces that her husband Standard is coming home from prison and Driver takes a step back to preserve the family. He doesn’t have to say a word about it. His actions show that he respects the sanctity of those familial bonds, and he resolves to protect them as a unit.

Standard is trying to do right by his family, just like Joe Starrett in SHANE. “I have a lot of making up to do,” he says upon his return home. He has to make up for lost time, and re-establish himself as a husband and father. The first thing he does is tell Driver (without saying a word) that Irene and Benicio are spoken for. In any other film, the exchange between these two men would escalate into violence, or at least the threat of violence. Here, it’s all subtext.

Shane and Joe Starrett have a similar exchange when they first meet, with Bob standing between them like a helpless referee. Bob remembers, “I stared in wonder as father and the stranger looked at each other a long moment, measuring each other in an unspoken fraternity of adult knowledge beyond my reach.” Boundaries are established. Intentions are conveyed. Then they can move forward. A few scenes later, Driver is sitting at the dinner table - the fourth member of a family of three. Standard refers to him as “my new friend.”

Standard never admires Driver the way that Joe Starrett comes to admire Shane. That admiration comes instead from the character of Shannon, Driver’s employer and his only friend, played by BREAKING BAD’s Bryan Cranston. Shannon is willing to gamble everything he has on Driver, because he's the closest thing Shannon has to a son. “You put this kid behind the wheel,” he tells a loan shark, “there’s nothing he can’t do.” Up to a point, Driver follows the lead of this slightly weasely father-figure. Perhaps that’s why everything goes wrong.

The pivotal scene in the film, and the note on which the story diverges from SHANE, involves a short conversation between Driver and Irene. Driver contemplates telling Irene that Standard is planning to pull off a jewelry store heist in order to repay a debt and protect her and Benicio. He decides, instead, to secretly help Standard. His motives are noble: He wants to protect Irene and Benicio, without destroying the bonds of their family. He wants to deliver for them the way he delivers for Shannon. For that, he’s willing to break his professional code -- the source of whatever inner peace he has in his life.

“Some men just plain have dynamite in them, and he’s one of them.”

The heist goes wrong, and soon Driver is holed up in a hotel room with a million dollars of stolen mob money. What happens next is as brutal, and as psychologically staggering, as the hotel scene in SCARFACE. Driver is transformed. (Or maybe, as in the case of SHANE, simply regressed?) The next scene, where he goes after the guy who set up the heist, is even more brutal. Up to a point, Driver’s actions seem cold and calculated. By the end of the scene, however, he is trembling. There are a few ways the viewer could interpret this. I’m inclined to remember the observations of Mr. Grafton in SHANE, just before the gunslinger erupts into uncontrollable violence. Grafton says of Shane, “He was afraid of himself.” The same is true of Driver, and we have to wonder if he has already gone past the point of no return. Can we, after seeing all of this, accept him as the loving husband and father? Is he still an ideal protector or is he just a ticking time bomb?

Joe Starrett says of Shane, “He’s a special brand we sometimes get out here in the grass country. I’ve come across a few. A bad one’s poison. A good one’s straight grain clear through.” Shane holds back from killing the henchman who threatened his new family - partly because Shane believes that, although the guy is working for an asshole, he “has the makings of a good man.” There’s no particular reason to assume that Cook (the henchman who helped orchestrate Standard’s murder) has the makings of a good man, but Driver holds back anyway... for the sake of self-preservation. He barely manages to keep himself from going over the edge. The next scene - the infamous “elevator stomp” scene - gives him another big push. Because Irene is there, in harm’s way, he can’t hold back this time. Over the edge he goes.

What makes it all the more tragic is that Driver knows the significance of this event before he acts. He kisses Irene because he realizes it's going to be his last chance. He’s about to become a different person, at least in her eyes. Less than sixty seconds later, everything has changed.

“He breathed deeply and his chest filled and he held it, held it long and achingly, and released it slowly and sighing. Suddenly you were impressed by the fact that he was quiet, that he was still. You saw how battered and bloody he was. In the moments before you saw only the splendor of movement, the flowing brute beauty of line and power in action. The man, you felt, was tireless and indestructible. Now that he was still and the fire in him had banked and subsided, you saw, and in the seeing remembered, that he had taken bitter punishment.” - Jack Schaefer, SHANE

The third act of the film is the true test of character. Shannon frames Driver’s moral dilemma simply: “What are you gonna do?” Fight or run? We can safely assume that Driver has always run in the past. That’s his nature. (“I drive.”) That’s his code. Solitude. Self-preservation. Joe Starrett says of Shane, “He’s fiddle-footed.” Bob/Joey disagrees, saying, “Shane wouldn’t run.”

Driver doesn’t run. He unmasks, becoming a killer as terrifying as Michael Myers or Anton Chigurh (in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN). The difference is that Driver’s whirlwind of violence has a noble purpose. He’s protecting his family... and not just from the goons who killed Standard, but from himself. That’s what makes Driver a tragic western hero, like Shane or Audie Murphy. He knows his story can end only one way. He tells Irene, before he goes to war, that he won't be able to come back.

Shane: “A man is what he is, Bob, and there’s no breaking the mold. I tried that and I’ve lost. But I reckon it was in the cards from the moment I saw a freckled kid on a rail up the road there and a real man behind him, the kind that could back him for the chance another kid never had... There’s no going back from a killing, Bob. Right or wrong, the brand sticks and there’s no going back. It’s up to you now. Go home to your mother and father. Grow strong and straight and take care of them.”

Bob: “This was not our Shane. And yet it was. I remembered Ed Howells’ saying that this was the most dangerous man he had ever seen. I remembered in the same rush that father had said he was the safest man we ever had in our house. I realized that both were right and that this, this at last, was Shane.”

Marian: “He’s not gone. He’s here, in this place, in this place he gave us. He’s all around us and in us, and he always will be.”