A witness to the world
Healy, T.R.
leaders and theologians about the possibility of setting up an understand each other. Perhaps for both Jews and Christians a international commission to deal with the Carmelite founda- ...
...Writer and director Peter Wang, who season's kiddie films will probably provide combined...
...It lacked credible foundation...
...Months later, had been hanging with him from my ankles wondering if I, after large segments of South Africa's blacks had met increas- too, might fall to my death...
...In fact, it was not a political protest comprehend any purpose in an act so dangerous and unnecesat all, but a theatrical spectacle, an artistic "public hanging" sary...
...But I FIX steadily works on one's nerves to engender creepy misgivbegan to reconsider my misgivings about public protests...
...And if they regarded them at all, surely, it was as Inside the Whale misguided zealots or inveterate revolutionaries who were absolutely opposed to the continuation of their authority in South 0 vER A YEAR and a half ago, Americans began to assemble Africa...
...the whale...
...What he does with the figure of this likable rogue (close in African embassy...
...The image of the ghostly man that careened in theirs, I speculated, there might be substantially less turmoil through my thoughts compelled me to reconsider my opposiin the world...
...The wall is not just star attraction but central metaphor, an expresROBERT MANDEL'S FIX is not a summer release but a sion of the divide between a native Chinese and a Chinesesleeper hit left over from the spring...
...This introduced an doubts about my position, I would recall the observation of element of doubt with respect to my convictions on the protest Pascal that the unhappiness in people arises from the fact they issue, dislodging a large cornerstone from the wall of certitude are unable to stay quietly in their own rooms...
...tamount to permitting any act of lawlessness, irrespective of Throughout most of that first year of the protest, I resided in the harm or damage it causes others, provided that the transWashington, D.C...
...I was convinced that such a protest, despite its notoriThere you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly ety and duration, would have slight impact on the policies of fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and the government in South Africa...
...Both they and the public hanging in Pioneer Square had created an impression that was unerasable...
...Slowly, to upheld, and any attempt to violate it is to be resisted...
...But it was unshakable, the ghostly man appearing to fall Despite the brutality of apartheid, I resolutely declined to forever through a deep tunnel of darkness...
...They were almost naked, their bodies A third, if less substantial, objection concerned the protest- shaven and coated white with rice flour so that they appeared ers' fashionableness...
...I heard the same voices making all the same dismissed the protest outside the South African embassy in demands...
...I recog- man intermittently drifted through my thoughts like a pale nized the smugness in their eyes...
...As ning the very illusions that contribute to the danger and confu- his actress girlfriend (Diane Venora) comments, "Nobody sion of the world...
...To be sure, the protestplacards with photographs of the victims of apartheid...
...But the performed by the five-man Sankai Juku dance company of more I remembered the man falling through the air, the more I Japan...
...confrontation, without detriment to Christian relations with One can only wish that it may be so...
...penalties...
...There one has some control over what happens...
...The tragic death of the Japanese per- special effects...
...and returned to the different edifice...
...I was trying to do what I believed was right, I told tion to the protests at the South African embassy...
...Yet, curiously, the image of the careening cency of those who have been here time and again...
...But in time, I began to fissiparous society, I remained adamant in my refusal to sup- wonder if it might have something to do with my opposition to port the American protest...
...In a formed one of its celebrated hangings before hundreds of democratic society, especially, the law must be respected and lunchtime spectators gathered in Pioneer Square...
...apart from the sanctions established against its violation, and, might extend the privilege of lawbreaking to those affluent T.R...
...There one is at home...
...I realized I had never really forgotten those protests...
...At times, when I began to have the protests at the South African embassy...
...Suddenly, come all too familiar in American politics...
...But at violation...
...To take a stand Brooklyn, played guard for Columbia, and served in the anywhere is an act of personal definition...
...dismissed the protesters outside the South African embassy...
...But good intentions who have already suffered too much...
...Fortunately, the film provides more than a scenic tour...
...But the law is an intricate web, designed to hold 20 June 1986: 371 together disparate and conflicting people and convictions...
...Sometimes they would light candles or hold disobedience in a democratic society...
...School...
...The gleaming lights the rope holding one of the men snapped...
...Day after day test was futile...
...It thus has the Screen advantage of a magnificent, inexpensive set design, and some faces and scenes photographed far more beautifully and sensitively than by visiting journalists filming documentaries...
...The first half-hour is nerve-racking...
...Perhaps then we alone are not enough - certainly not between Jews and Chris- Christians may dare to ask the trust of Jews and become tians in our post-Auschwitz world...
...voices of commentators benignly explained all the ramifica- I watched the event on television later that evening...
...Though tions, political celebrities hurriedly arrived to be numbered in I was as shocked as anyone by the tragic accident, I assumed I the protest for an afternoon, followed by other celebrities for would not think anything more about it, believing I could other afternoons...
...cated, in every act of knowledge we are creating ourselves...
...move in a circle of people before a closed gate with my head raised, slowly breathing again fresh air...
...But this did not excuse their violation of arrested, ordered to pay fines, or sentenced to short periods of American law...
...And I turned away, knowing feather...
...Marines in Vietnam, was born to play characters like McCarI was wrong not to join the protesters outside the South thy...
...who protested outside their embassy in Washington every George Orwell weekday...
...The They could march day after day but, they alone could not screenplay abounds in wit aimed at the absurdities of senmodify the policies in Pretoria...
...A GREAT WALL is the first American-made film to be shot almost entirely in the People's Republic of China, including a scene on the great wall north of Beijing...
...It could never they came to protest...
...They would not go away...
...I saw the same faces, ingrained with the compla- Washington, D.C...
...I seemed his capjoin the protesters...
...But still they would not go away, eventually violate American law so long as they were prepared to suffer forming one of the longest continuous political demonstrations the penalties for their transgressions...
...No one questions the the Jewish people, without further offense or anguish to those good intentions of the Carmelite nuns...
...Sometimes they would pace back and forth chanting their A further objection concerned my skepticism regarding civil grievances...
...HEALY is a graduate of George Washington University Law members of society who are most able to afford to suffer the...
...Now I conclusions, etc...
...To think otherwise was preposterous, fan- Succubus, Return of the Vermin, and ! Dismember Mama...
...When eyes makes for a large part of the campy fear and fun that FIX others are already out in the street, tyrannically imposing their is contrived to produce...
...No doubt the leaders in reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest Pretoria were, initially, oblivious to the cluster of Americans indifference, no matter what happens...
...Such a commission would include Jewish response to Abraham Joshua Heschel's question: "How can members...
...I had not been back long, more puerile and superfluous than the protests outside the however, when I learned about a different sort of public South African embassy, I regarded the tragic accident of the demonstration in a downtown square in Seattle...
...If the leaders in I had erected over the past year, and threatened to collapse the Pretoria remained in their rooms, and the, American protesters entire structure...
...I was not sure why his image ing repression and violence protesting the conditions in their remained so vivid in my thoughts...
...The business of the Sankai Juku company, according to Ushio Amagatsu, its founder and director, is to project "unerasable impressions...
...The prosystem of apartheid...
...We You might think Dennehy, who grew up Irish Catholic in are defined by our actions, not our silences...
...together, we can bring this whole affair might never have erupted...
...I could not protest against apartheid...
...an Amen to this conviction expressed by Sister Katherine Had such sensitivity been present from the first, the "furor" MacDonald...
...seriously influence decisions made in Pretoria...
...I began to consider the value of such The second half of the film is sustained by Brian Dennehy, public ceremonies to the individual protesters themselves one of the best supporting actors in film today...
...Eventually it myself, not what was fashionable...
...apartheid, justifying my participation in the protest, as well as The way that Dennehy uses his girth and his alert, shrewd discovering something I had not known about myself...
...I agreed with Orwell that one must get inside range for a mock assassination of one of its Mafia informers...
...Pacific Northwest, I had nearly repressed the South Afri- At first, convinced the public hanging exhibition was even can protest from my thoughts...
...To be sure, I remained sympathetic to the view that the world would be less troublesome if fewer people left the quiet Commonweal: 372 of their rooms...
...By the ers had the right to denounce the ignominious policies of the end of the first year, over three thousand protesters had been South African regime...
...As he is invited, then hired and instructed in how to do the job, There it is secure and soothing...
...In a matter of days, the small protest was as pale as ghosts, and each one was curled into a fetus, slowly transformed into the kind of theatrical spectacle that has be- twisting in a primordial dance of birth and death...
...in Pretoria who, like all authoritarians, are concerned only to demand that the Pretoria government dismantle its with the actual military strength of their opposition...
...loose...
...Leo McCarthy of the NYPD, Brown's unexthat such acts define their participants...
...We must learn to know and credible witness to expiation, prayer, and reconciliation..' MISGIVINGS, FASHION, & PROTEST A witness to the world First of all, I regarded it as meaningless, an exercise in T. R. HEALY futility...
...Instead, I had remained inside the whale, between the police bureaucrats and Dennehy, several false registering my protest in silence, as passive as Jonah...
...This was not a Japanese performer as foolish, absurd, an outrage...
...FIX yields more American family that has taken advantage of detente to revisit action, adventure, thrills, and suspense than all the new its mainland relatives...
...And This proposal, like Cardinal Macharski's letter, is evidence certainly every serious Christian can find within her or himself of a new and welcome sensitivity on the part of church leaders...
...I may not have accomplished anything for kind to his roles in Never Cry Wolf, Foul Play, and the the oppressed people of South Africa, but I might have helped soon-to-be-released Legal Eagles), is to individualize it, to to project an unerasable impression of the wickedness of animate the cliche with some personal, playful mischief...
...all they care about is So I believed once...
...Early one afternoon last summer the company per- seemed to become involved in his curious performance, gradually being transformed from a mere observer into a participant...
...I decided the maverick Lt...
...This apparent involvement prompted me to recognize a certain connection between the public, hanging and the apartheid protests...
...Specifically, I democratic society, denies the authority of the law in itself, had three objections to their protest...
...Sometimes they would stand in silence...
...Anxiously, I would shake my head to rattle the image I did not wish to be part of the spectacle...
...To believe this is tanin American history...
...To the horror of the of television cameras quickly shone on the protest, the droning crowd, he plunged to his instantaneous death...
...Augustine indi- pected ally in untangling the mess the FBI agents have created...
...He is at work on a collection of autobiographical essays...
...These protests from abroad did not disturb the leaders outside the South African embassy in Washington, D.C...
...South African embassy...
...A veteran of the New York Shakespeare former made me appreciate the significance that certain ac- Festival (indeed, once its female Hamlet), Venora put so much tions may have apart from their stated objectives...
...around their ankles...
...Perhaps it can yet be laid to rest, if before God, praying that a solution may be found without Jews are listened to and involved in future discussions...
...One sequence depicts Chinese musical storytelling, a centuries-old BLOODY MAYHEM art whose antique grace has outlasted dynasties, civil wars, 'F/X,' 'GREAT WALL,' & 'TOP GUN' Red Guards, and now even Pepsi...
...cares about making movies about people...
...The film is also stylishly written, acted, and directed...
...Here he plays rather than the achievement of a particular purpose...
...And it was uses Venora's scenes to provide suspenseful alternation bethe pursuit of this vision, not his death, that made it difficult for tween a quiet, almost pastoral mood and the bloody mayhem me to sustain the objections I had to the protests outside the when the fake assassination goes askew...
...All of a sudden, the protest seemed to have a dismiss it from my thoughts as easily as I seemed to have life of its own...
...Even if the accompaniment of recorded songs of humpbacked whales, the lawbreaker is willing to accept the penalty meted out for an four members of the company descended upside down from infraction, this does not remove her or his obligation to uphold the top of a six-story office building with thick ropes fastened the law...
...Perhaps for both Jews and Christians a international commission to deal with the Carmelite founda- beginning would be to bring forth from their inmost spirits a tion at Auschwitz...
...Gradually, I recognized that this was also the business of the protests outside the South African embassy...
...The protesters maintained they had the right to confinement...
...The also stars as the American father, enriches his screenplay with strange title is movie argot for "special effects," and the plot notes on different definitions of privacy (there's no word for it concerns one master of the trade (played by Bryan Brown) who in Chinese), attitudes to grief (displayed in the best scene in the is contacted by the FBI's Witness Protection Program to ar- film, a visit to his father's grave), and attitudes toward adolesCommonweal: 374...
...I had ings...
...Civil disobedience, condoned on this basis in a the time I believed the protesters were wrong...
...FIX provides an entertaining, inventive am resolved to move outside that belly of the whale, if only to revision of the mystery genre...
...made me admit I had been in error, requiring me to sift through the rubble of my previous convictions to gather stones for a BY THE TIME I left Washington, D.C...
...I never tried to persuade others to adopt my tive, unable to get his image out of my mind, as if somehow I position...
...He, for one, energy into her performance - especially in one humorous, had not done something that was merely fashionable and sensual exit from Brown's bed for an audition - that you convenient, but had risked his life to convey a personal vision know she is a marked woman...
...But I was convinced I was correct...
...Despite some obscurities, improbwill, one should, if possible, enter those same streets to dem- abilities, and predictable elements (chase scenes, blow-ups onstrate opposition...
...I never joined the protesters outside the gressor is willing to accept the consequences of his or her South African embassy, and I realize now I was wrong...
...Similarly, four men hanging sationalist moviemaking: Brownwas sought by the FBI beoutside a building could not seriously refine the consciousness cause of his success in such (supposed) hits as Song of the of their audience...
...Mandel's directing expertly of the condition of the world that was unerasable...
...As St...
...I was puzzled, angry, and sought an explanation...
...you say you love me if you don't know what hurts me...
Vol. 113 • June 1986 • No. 12
