Breaking good, eventually
by David Benjamin
“I
was sure I was going to get that scholarship. My dad of course was sure
I wasn't. When I didn’t, he was real understanding, you know. He loves
to do that. He loves to be understanding when I fail.”
— Cyril, in Breaking Away
MADISON, Wis.— Movie scenes haunt me.
The
other day, America’s current confluence of cultural warfare, social
strife and political paralysis brought to mind a scene from the 1979
film, Breaking Away.
The movie’s set in a Rust Belt
outpost — Bloomington, Indiana. One character, Moocher, played by the
splendid Jackie Earle Haley, is undersized, scrawny and almost
operatically scruffy. He lives alone in a crumbling clapboard house. His
father — an aging stonecutter left jobless by the collapse of
Bloomington’s limestone industry — has fled to Chicago, to scrounge for
work. Desperate for a little money to help out, Moocher takes a job at a
car wash.
In this scene, Moocher’s sidekicks, Dave (Dennis
Christopher), Mike (Dennis Quaid) and Cyril (Daniel Stern), drop him off
reluctantly at the car wash, urging him not to surrender his freedom
and actually report to work. But Moocher is determined — right up ’til
his new boss hands him a time card, calls him “Shorty” and orders him to
“punch in.”
Moocher takes the cue, walks over to the time-clock,
rears back and delivers a haymaker that leaves it in smithereens. His
comrades cheer, Moocher kisses his crummy job goodbye and climbs back
into the car. Mike burns rubber as Moocher’s erstwhile employer stands
seething.
This prescient clip — 38 years old now — foreshadowed
the anger and frustration that became a national upheaval in 2016.
Moocher, Dave, Mike and Cyril are the forsaken white males of flyover
country. Their childhood in Bloomington has witnessed the demise of a
proud local — stonecutting — trade that afforded their blue-collar
forebears a comfortable middle-class life. They’ve graduated from high
school, but they’re stuck on the outside, looking resentfully in, at a
great university — in their hometown — where they don’t seem to belong.
The
frat boys of Indiana U. — creased, cool and confident — are a living,
constant counterpoint to the dead-end prospects of local kids,
dismissively referred to as “cutters.” The students drive better cars,
wear nicer clothes, sport bigger muscles and date sorority chicks. They
have a future in an educated, corporate world beyond Bloomington that
seems a million miles away from the four bewildered cutters.
As
Mike, in one of the film’s many poignantly ironic exchanges, says,
“They're gonna keep callin’ us ‘cutters.’ To them, it’s just a dirty
word. To me, it’s just somethin’ else I never got a chance to be.”
Another
turning point in Breaking Away is Dave’s moment of hard truth. Until
then, his wry defense against reality is an alter ego. To his father’s
dismay, Dave poses as an Italian bicyclist, speaking pidgin Italian,
memorizing arias, convincing an IU coed that he’s an Italian student and
even fooling himself. Dave doggedly sustains this romance until the
Cinzano team arrives in Indiana. During an exhibition road rally, Dave
keeps pace with the Italian pros and tries to make conversation. The
grizzled pros greet his hero-worship by scuttling his bike. They laugh
and curse as Dave lies bleeding in a ditch.
These two scenes —
Moocher’s defiance and Dave’s heartbreak — punctuate the movie, but
don’t end it. It’s a comedy, after all. Director Peter Yates has gotten
us to like these boys and we want to pull for them. So, given a chance
to redeem themselves in IU’s “Little 500” bicycle race, the Cutters
regroup.
Moocher, Dave, Mike and Cyril, at the worst moment in
their lives, turn their rage and confusion into resolve. During the
race, Dave — who was supposed to solo the entire Little 500 — crashes.
Clumsily and comically, his three friends become emergency cyclists.
Driven by necessity and love, they lift one another and engage with a
world that they saw before as baffling, forbidding and impenetrable.
The race’s outcome offers viewers a handy climax, but it’s ultimately beside the point. Breaking Away, as the title suggests, is about cracking our shells and escaping our fears.
In
1979, moviegoers readily accepted a film about working-class kids
swallowing their anger, overcoming economic hardships and battling
impossible odds. We bought the premise because we’d seen the story all
our lives among friends and family. We’d seen it play out on a grand
scale when Americans joined to lift ourselves from the Great Depression,
when we formed a global alliance to win World War II and spent our
treasure to succor the war’s survivors, and when we defined our nation
as the “golden door” through which anyone in trouble could enter and
find, here in America, freedom, opportunity, sympathy and hope.
Today, I fear, we’d need to script a new ending. In the 2016 Breaking Away
remake, the Cutters wouldn’t get a chance to prove themselves.
Fictional liberals on the IU faculty would hate them for being white and
ban them from the race. Instead of taking the SAT and starting college,
Dave and Cyril would break bad, sinking into a cycle of part-time jobs
in the daytime and nightly drinking at a local dive. Instead of marrying
his girlfriend and starting fresh in Chicago, Moocher would beat her
’til she abandons him. After that, he’d nurse a hydrocodone habit and
spend his waking hours surfing alt-right websites for assurance that
none of his misery is his own fault. And Mike, instead of hugging his
policeman brother at the end of the movie, would instead get arrested by
said brother. In prison, Mike would join the Aryan Brotherhood.
At
the end, the Cutters would reunite at a Trump rally. The final shots
would show them chanting “Lock her up!” and gang-molesting a girl
reporter from CNN.
I know. Sounds like a rotten movie.
It is. Nobody would make it. Not only would it be more depressing than Easy Rider,
it wouldn’t ring true. It would defy the basic principle that Americans
— when we’re true to ourselves — help. No matter how low we’ve sunk,
how much we’ve bickered, backstabbed and wracked one another’s feelings,
no matter how sorry we feel for our poor, poor, pitiful selves, we
remember our better angels, bind our wounds, and find a way back.
Always, we go that way together.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
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2 comments:
This is very moving. I have been reading "Hillbilly Elegy" by JD Vance. He isn't as good a writer as you but he is grappling with the same reality that you write about. He describes the desperation of people living in small towns where there are no jobs, and how the disappointments of one generation are passed on to the next. Everyone deserves to feel a sense of hope for the future. It is taken for granted by the "privileged" but is so elusive for many...
Amen (and women too) to that. BUT, Breaking Away to a New World Order beyond all Parochial Petty Politics is what I think we really need. National Politics and Irrational Economic Systems are killing us and destroying our planet. (Earth can't afford nations anymore.)
Earth's Ecosystem requires sane rational reasonable leadership that trumps all other issues. It isn't a question of what we CAN afford...it's a question of what we CAN'T afford "not" to do. (Life on earth can't afford being about money anymore.)
Breaking away from bad assumptions and bad habits is never easy... BUT, "when required," it isn't all that hard either for most. (Ask any real grown up how hard a good life can be.)
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