Hobson's Choice

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Murmurs of the Heart

August 21, 2004

Some of my readers may have heard of a Louis Malle film entitled A Murmur of the Heart (Le Souffle au Coeur, 1971). In this movie, a boy is diagnosed with a heart murmur and travels to a tiny resort to receive therapy. The year is 1954, and during the course of the movie the lad—in his elite Catholic school in the early spring of that year, through diagnosis and the journey to the resort, and so on—there are references to the French colonial war in Vietnam, which reached its climax at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The lad is fourteen, and wont to toying with nihilism; but the adults around him are affected by the events. They may be disturbed at what their country is doing, but they hope for a "peaceful settlement"; they torn between love of their fellow French, and grim disgust with the folly of the situation. Malle's scenes are lush with oppulence and eye candy, and perhaps the screenwriters didn't expect viewers to share the priest's concern for "our men at Dien Bien Phu"; but of course, looking at a sceen filled with French people, and reminded of their plight, I did indeed feel melancholy. As an adult, I learned to feel this way even when I must root for the other side.

The battle of Dien Bien Phu lasted seven weeks, and was the stupidest idea of modern warfare, not barring Hitler's invasion of the USSR. It was followed by a foolish, if more understandable, political settlement that is mentioned off-screen over the course of the film. All the while, however, Malle and others are not interested in the battle and its political settlement; they use it to illustrate Laurent's nihilism and the insipidness of others, perhaps as a logical defense of his ghastly behavior in the movie. After all, if "France" will not learn by reading Camus, it must suffer defeat in the jungles of Vietnam.*

This is not a review of that movie; the movie is technically brilliant, but thematically sophomoric and aesthetically cloying. At the time I saw it, it had great resonance; it made France look like a delightful country, albeit with four appalling jerks in the midst of 50-odd million mostly-lovable people. But I was interested in the memory of being a boy in periods of great national shame and tension. During the Iran hostage crisis—back when your humble correspondent was all of ten years old—it seemed as if the country was on the brink of some huge confrontation with a great evil. It was confusing and maddening, and I turned into a fiendish news junky. After school I would walk to the deserted Vietnamese bakery to get a news fix from Ken. Then I would read my neighbor's Daily News, and discuss the TV news with my friend Craig. My father was scandalized that I wasn't outplaying baseball and earning merit badges; my opinions on the subject were so abyssmally ill-informed anyway. But he was glued to the radio whenever outside of the house.

Now this same story is unfolding again in Najaf. I think there are a lot more little Laurents running about, but the nihilism they've inhaled is not scorn for the establishment, but a "bring on the apocalypse—we're bored" nihilism. To a sober political analyst, it would appear that nothing could be further apart than Sartre's self-flagellation* from the likes of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and sundry other bellicose ideologues. But I think there is a parallel in the narrative of nihilism. Neither are true ideologues—since neither actually invites their readers to do anything that affects the subject under discussion—but of haplessness and repudiation of basic consideration. While Laurent interprets existentialism to repudiate public morality and have casual sex with his own mother, people like Misha, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler (see Orcinus, 1, 2) actually express delight in the physical destruction of perceived enemies, even when common sense indicates that "perceived enemies" are in fact no harm at all. By this, incidentally, I refer to episodes where Misha urges readers to assault a person with an anti-Bush website after posting his literal address. Yes, that is not vigilence, it's nihilistic self-indulgence.
NOTE: * Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon:

In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang ...it comes back on us, ...we do not realize ...that it’s we that have launched it. The ‘liberals’ are stupefied; they admit that we were not polite enough to the natives, ...and now this barbarous, mad outburst doesn’t spare them any more than the bad settlers. The Left ...is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it. But, all the same, they think to themselves, ...these guerrillas should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous; that would be the best way of showing they are men. Sometimes the Left scolds them ... We won’t support you any more. The natives don’t give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them they might as well stuff it up their backsides. Once their war began, they saw this hard truth: that every single one of us has made his bit, has got something out of them... The rebel’s weapon is the proof his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.

You may agree, you may disagree, but that's self-flagellating and if you take out that heady potion with the moralizing, you are a goner.