PRESS: Peacetime

...And in a roundabout away, the initial visit we see to the doctor is the beginning of Jonathan's decline and fall...

...From moments like these the film builds up a correspondence between Jonathan's disease and his criminality...

...So long as it survives it is an admirable antidote to the sexual gluttony of our age...

...The sales instinct, it would seem, is prepared to abuse nearly anything, and just as television news is pleased to stretch the boundaries of taste and judgment in the name of the people's right to know, so comedy ,will saturate us for the cause of the people's fight to snicker...

...In other circumstances their appeal might have brought a broader response...

...Indeed our mood is so uncombative that we all but ignore the shooting war in Ethiopia, where the Russians and Cubans are heavily engaged in a manner which would have invited our pellmell intervention only a few years ago...

...Or was it the return of American troops and POWs early in 19737 Or the end of the bombing in Cambodia in August, 19737 Or the fall of Saigon in April, 19757 Or the Mayaguez incident in May, 1975...

...It has been curiously like the beginning of the war, which arrived by stages...

...At the very latest the war began when several hundred Americans died during a single week in the Ia Drang Valley in November, 1965...

...On the 16th the terrorists murdered one of the plane's pilots, On the 18th a German commando group stormed the plane and killed three of the terrorists outright, seriously wounding the fourth...

...The similarity between the painting of a train which we see Ripley with in the opening scene and the picture of a train on a lampshade in Jonathan's apartment suggests even before these two men have met that their lives are somehow linked...

...From such a gesture we see how casually this gentle man has saturated his life with the senseless violence of gangsters...

...You might say the war began with the first American air raids on North Vietnam in August, 1964, after the Tonkin Gulf incident...

...An establishing shot is by definition a normative view of reality, but this one has served as the lead-in to a scene in which nothing is normative anymore...

...These pictures seem to foreshadow the unlikely turn his life takes, and therefore to imply that that turn was unavoidable...

...and it has no great natural resources, but neither did Vietnam...

...A compelling bit of evidence, if evidence is needed, is the very fact that no one much remarks the fact...

...Or so it seemed to me...

...But in our present mood of peace this seems hard to believe...

...Ripley's self-portraits are a gesture of introspection more in keeping Commonweal: 725...

...No doubt social concern played its role in the gang's infancy, when its members were anonymous molecules in a much broader and cooler mass student movement...

...Or with the onset of independent U.S...

...War is a matter of mood more than of violence...

...In peacetime we understand the consequences only too well...

...The reasons have something to do with the relation of moral passion, blocked aspiration and anger, but I cannot guess much more than that...

...All of these groups, if not all of their members, have come to varyingly bad ends, but even in that dismal company the Baader-Meinhof gang sets something of a record...

...Peace is implicit on the front pages of the newspapers every morning...

...After awhile our mood will change...

...Even gentler champions get nowhere...

...These details seem prescient...

...This scarcely represents a breakthrough, either for television or society...

...That their actions do not :make sense, does not make them insane...

...But this is peacetime and we are in no mood for rallying cries...

...The Bert Lance affair, which dominated reports from Washington for so many months, never quite captured my attention...

...There is still plenty of violence in the world, of course...

...The craziest thing about the Baader-Meinhof gang, in fact, is that they directed their appeal to an audience so unlikely to respond...

...Yet it is a bizarre, almost disturbing location too--a succession of escalators, in fact, that seem to go down endlessly in this peculiar building where the doctor's office is located...

...It results from the first overture that the gangsters make to Jonathan, a fake telegram in which an associate of Ripley's plays on Jonathan's fears about his disease...

...Indeed, in ways that make it harder and harder for us to decide who is hero and who villain in this film, Jonathan and Ripley exchange personalities...

...We are in no mood for war and struggle...

...The Baader-Meinhof gang is only frightening and sad...

...What is annoying about Soap is not so much that it is salacious, as I imagine some would conclude that it is, but that it is dirty-minded, which is something quite different...

...A great deal is going to be made of the pistols which two of the suicides used--how did they get into the prison...

...The Russians are gaining a foothold...

...This is the first appearance o] what will be a regular column...

...people's hearts weren't in it...

...if agreements elude us this year, perhaps we will reach them next...

...Did the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 mark the end of the war...

...Perhaps more telling, however, is the correspondenee which also develops, often from the same moments in the film, between Jonathan and Ripley...

...But all the same they hoped to shatter our placidity and bring us into their world, to make us partners in their desperation, to narrow our minds to their singleness, to draw all the bits I1 November 1977:724 and pieces of society together in a conflict with only two sides, to make their war a general war, and to end the peace...

...Three leaders of the gang, including its co-founder Andreas Baader, committed suicide in Stuttgart only a few hours after the hijacked plane had been stormed in Somalia...

...Or with the first of the big troop commitments in July, 1965...

...We are content to let the Russians have a taste of unruly allies and pointless struggle...

...However, like any saturation of the flesh it soon loses its spark and becomes tired, silly, and embarrassing...

...Carter's troubles with tax reform, the energy bill, the SALT talks, welfare reform, and a Jewish community much alarmed by the prospect of Palestinians at Geneva are intractable no doubt, but they lack the venom of really bruising political battles...

...All grew out of middleclass student groups, were morally horrified by the materialism and even the prosperity of their societies, rejected the conservatism of the Russian-dominated Communist Party, and turned toward violence from a kind of desperate integrity, not because they thought it would work, but because they felt that defiance--even suicidal defiance--was the only permissible response to a corrupt world...

...Up to a point the Baader-Meinhoff gang's history was much like that of other leftist terrorist groups in France, Italy, Japan, Latin America and even the United States during the last decade...

...The strategic thinkers in the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and the ante-rooms of academia all have their arguments ready, but no one seems to want to listen...

...Access to the Red Sea is at stake, they might say...

...The scene at the doctor's and the scene of the murder blend, at least symbolically, in a way that begins to make it hard for us to differentiate one aspect of Jonathan's life from another...

...He becomes Jonathan's demon-a doppelgiinger, a twin brother, an alter-ego, an antiself...

...A nation at peace is a nation in bits and pieces, which jostle each other in passing...

...For the reporters covering the story, and certainly for Carter, Jody Powell, Senators Percy and Ribicoff, and Lance himself, it was no doubt real enough, but to me the story had a certain hollow quality, as if no one quite believed in it...

...But these concessions are entirely perfunctory on my part...

...military operations in June, 1965...

...Consider the strangeness of the Baader-Meinhof gang...

...Trouble, expense and a bad name...

...It would be a mistake to dismiss them too quickly as crazy...

...The series of escalators Jonathan runs down on the way to visit his doctor in Hamburg, and another escalator he rides up in the airport in Paris, both return to mind when he shoots his first victim on an escalator later...

...But then the really extraordinary thing happened...

...Even now a lot of people have failed to notice the change...

...In the second scene, which occurs the night after the murder, Ripley lies on a pool table at his house in the same posture Jonathan assumed in bed and shoots himself in the face with a Polaroid camera, one latent self-image after another falling onto the table around him...

...Mussolini had Ethiopia once, after all, and what did it get him...

...The difference is one of mood...

...The players take a kind of giggly delight in their naughtiness and elbow-in-the-ribs remarks...

...It is remarkable to see people on television swapping homosexual lore and unzipping their trousers with abandon...

...The person that fingers Jonathan for a life of crime is a purveyor of art forgeries named Ripley (Dennis Hopper), who is more the hero of the film than Jonathan in a sense...

...We have our private concerns but no appetite for general undertakings...

...You would think a state of war would be as easy to establish as the date, but it's not...

...we are in a mood to conciliate...

...postmortems of this sort to trot out a list of the ills of society--War, Injustice, Racism, Poverty--as if muddled but honest concern were sufficient to explain desperate acts...

...They render the moral universe in which Jonathan lives murky and indefinite...

...Like small children, they have gotten hold of something forbidden and, in their perversity, refuse to let go...

...While Jonathan, the framemaker and art restorer who always dealt with life as mere images, has now become a murderer, it seems that the criminal Ripley has become an image-studier...

...In two brief scenes that bracket the second murder Jonathan commits, we see how this is happening...

...PHILIP TERZIAN (Philip Terzian is Assistant Editor o/ The New Republic...

...A dozen or more gang members killed four people when they kidnapped the German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer on September 5. After holding Schleyer for six weeks they murdered him by cutting his throat...

...we are very far from feeling trapped in a corner...

...Vietnam and Watergate involved everybody all the time, but now it is peacetime and we go our separate ways...

...The United States is at peace...

...We are at peace...

...Yet at the same time such details make everything seem unclear too...

...Parallels Wenders creates in Jonathan's life before and after he meets Ripley make it hard for us to see just where Jonathan went wrong...

...Consider those escalators, for instance...

...It is customary in...

...but as Wenders's treatment of the relationship between them indicates, Ripley also becomes more than that...

...The partisans of the environment, social justice, peace, tax and welfare reform, energy and arms control send out their appeals, but receive only half an ear...

...They obscure ordinary distinctions between right and wrong, innocence and guilt, on which most of us rely...

...The end, whenever it came, was in stages, a kind of military detumescence, its passage clouded by Watergate...

...nor that the efforts of various oflieials to for: get the whole business weren't . . . troubling...

...A related group of three men and a wonian hijacked a Lufthansa plane with 82 passengers on October 13th...

...Similarly, some routine settings and incidentals of the plot, little visual asides early in the film, turn ominous in retrospect...

...We are content with dull newspapers and private lives...

...Similar arguments persuaded Ford and Kissinger to slip more than a toe if not so much as a whole leg into Angola, but things are different now...

...Its history of violence is quite extraordinary...

...I felt they were making it up...

...Or with the beginning of systematic bombing in February, 1965...

...Or with the landing of a Marine battalion near Da Nang in March, 1965...

...e t c . - - but there cannot be much question the suicides were genuine...

...We can't help feeling as if Jonathan is descending into the abyss when we see him here...

...They make us feel as if in some eerie way it has been clear all along that Jonathan would commit these crimes...

...THOMAS POWERS DARK THOUGHTS O 0 0 0 O O 0 0 0 0 0000 In Wim Wenders's The American Friend, as I was saying last time, the atmospheric detail makes the fate of one of the characters seem inevitable...

...I think religious objections to it are ill-founded...

...When Jonathan kills his first victim on an escalator, and then turns to run back down it to escape, what was an establishing shot earlier becomes a climactic shot now...

...Suicide from despair is bad enough, but a mass suicide as a gesture of pure rejection and defiance speaks in a tone of compelling horror...

...This is very much a subjective thing, but the news I read strikes me as faint and uncompelling, as if we were only going through the motions of struggle and conflict...

...The Bert Lance affair w a s n ' t really an affair at all...

...I don't mean they are unimportant, nor that the combatants are only half in earnest, but that the conflicts are parochial, arousing fitful general interest at best...

...In the first, the night before the murder, Jonathan lies on his back in bed and points a pistol he's been given at his own face, as if he might, in an idle moment, commit suicide...

...Insofar as politics is a cousin of war pursued by gentler means, we are even politically Commonweal: 723 at peace...

...it was something of a charade...

...All were following the example of the gang's other co-founder, Urlike Meinhoff, who hung herself in May, 1976...

...Of course the Horn of Africa is a long way off, but so was Vietnam...

...It is too much to hope that the networks would treat our unbuttoned age with subtlety or discreti0n--that is not why they are there...

...This is the mood of a nation at peace, its fires banked...

...One of the three hung herself, and a fourth gang member attempted to stab herself to death with a bread knife, but survived...

...But in peacetime such things have a muted, puzzling quality...

...The first one serves only as an establishing shot to tell us whenever Jonathan, who has leukemia, is going to see his doctor...

...Soap may very well be the extreme that will carry television to the mean...

...did the authorities murder them...

...I do not know how to explain the Baader-Meinhof gang...

...I don't mean that Lance's overdrafts w e r e n ' t . . , disturbing...

...Before Jonathan (Bruno Ganz) has been lured into becoming a hit man for gangsters, certain pictures of trains that figure in the story anticipate the real trains where he will commit his murders...

...If the first half of the Seventies was the last act of the Sixties, what defines the present decade's last half...

...terrorism is often in the morning papers...

...People remember the campaigns and battles, but they quickly forget the mood...

...The Pentagon started to count the dead back in 1961, but we did not really feel ourselves at war until three or four years after the first American casualties...

...It has crept up on us quietly, without announcing itself...

...But when did the war end...

...The Persian Gulf and Indian Oceans are next door...

...One reason is that, besides giving an air of inevitability to Jonathan's life, these details suggest similarities between the normal and criminal aspects of that life...

...The suicides may have had a practical goal of some sort, but they were also an expression of what the gang members felt for each other, and thought of us...

...But there are all sorts of ways to help people without resort to guns and bombs, and a revolutionary effort so obviously doomed to failure from the start requires an additional attempt at explanation...

...The papers are ~ filled with stories aspiring to five-column headlines--er.ergy, the environment, the cities, the Middle East, Rhodesia and South Africa, terrorism--but they elbow each other inconclusively for space...

...As the film's title indicates, Ripley becomes Jonathan's friend...

...It is like the difference between a mob, and a lunchtime crowd at a busy street corner...

...No matter how much observers protested in print that this was indeed serious, we ought to be paying attention, important principles are at stake, down this road Nixon lies, etc., etc., I never altogether believed them...

...nor that Powell's brief exercise of the art of the political knife wasn't even . . . perhaps . . . alarming...

...Two distinguishing characteristics of peacetime, in fact, are the difficulty people find in remembering what war feels like, and their inability to imagine the circumstances which might lead to another...