Can The Young Really Hear the Old?

 Vous êtes tous une génération perdue

(You are all a lost generation)

--Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway (Epigraph, "The Sun Also Rises")

I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

--Henry David Thoreau, "Walden"

Being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being a decrepit old bag of bones is what's ridiculous.

--Sam the Lion, "The Last Picture Show"

Ignoring Advice from His Elders

Watching two scenes from two of my favorite movies, I asked myself why I like them so much, and ultimately I decided it was because they were both scenes of old men trying to convey something to younger men, and they ultimately, against all odds, succeeded, at least in some measure of success.

Henry David Thoreau

Being old now, and having sons, I know well about the difficulties of speaking to the next generation, who regards, as it ought to, everything and anything my generation may have to say with suspicion, if not outright contempt.

Sam The Lion

The first scene is from "The Last Picture Show" which is lifted directly from the book, with some changes which actually made the imagery more powerful. Sam simply, wistfully describes having ridden naked across the tank with a young woman, "She was just a girl then really."

He prefaces his story with a shocking, casual remark--"This was after my boys had died." This is the first and only time the loss of his sons is mentioned, and it deepens the viewers sense of the man, and the suffering this character, along with that of so many of the characters in this hardscrabble town of Thalia, have endured. The irony of that name--Thalia,  was one of the Greek muses of joy and lightness, as far from the reality of this windblown, dried up Texas town as it can be. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWSvo0eMK7E&t=4s

The other scene is the opening to "Little Big Man," which needs more explanation.

Jack Crabb

Here, a thirty-something reporter arrives at the nursing home where he has been told the sole White survivor of the battle at Little Big Horn (more little than big) is counting down his last days in this world.  He is faced with a 120 year old crabby old man, Jack Crabb, who seems, at first, hardly capable of knowing what he had for breakfast, much less being able to convey anything of interest to the reporter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oaQGw2W8IU

The young man carries the usual attitude of condescension toward the old, but as the old man spins out his story, which is the body of the movie, the astonishing things he has done and seen done stuns the young man into speechlessness, as he knows his own life has been pallid stuff, safe, inconsequential, compared to the history he has just heard.

I suppose, that's the sort of thing many men and women of my age would like to accomplish, the only thing left to us now, as we will not be scaling new mountains or sailing new seas, but, what is left to us is the possibility we might enrich and impart a bit of wisdom to the one or two youngsters who might care to listen, so they will know they have not been the first generation to face life and struggle with their own bafflement.

In "The Last Picture Show," Sonny, 17,  is having an affair with a forty something woman, and he asks Sam what he should do about this, and Sam does not shrink with politically correct horror about the idea of an older woman purloining a boy--imagine this line today when twenty something female high school teachers are jailed for having affairs with 15 year old students--and Sam, knowing how miserable Ruth has been, says, "Don't look at me for advice...I never know exactly what to do about anybody, least of all women. You might stay with her and get some good out of her while you're growing up. Somebody ought to get some good out of Ruth."

And I nodded: At last somebody making sense! In France, older women initiating boys into sex was once thought to be a good thing. Let the boys learn from somebody who would not insist on fairy tales like "love" and "forever." Let them learn about sex, not just stumble into it. And Sam, in conservative, Bible thumping Texas, springs right over all that, and goes to the heart of the matter. The affair hurts nobody and may be good for both the woman and the boy.

Sonny is actually changed and made wiser by Sam, and his knowledge carries Sam's spirit forward, even after he dies. After Sam's funeral, Lois, the hard bitten mother of the girl Sonny desires, gives him a ride home and parks in front of Sam's now deserted pool hall, she weeps behind the wheel, saying Sam was the only man who ever "knew what I was worth." A light flashes behind Sonny's eyes, "You were the girl at the tank!" 

Lois is surprised, and pleased, "Sam told you about that?" 

Lois 

That Sam told the story, of course, meant to Lois that her affair with him, twenty years earlier, still meant something to him, enough that he would tell Sonny about it. It is one of those loose threads being knit together in the movie and it is a powerful, telling and revealing moment. 

Of course, I expected her to say, "What did he say? When did he tell you? Why did he tell you?" But, she does none of that. She lets it go, and you know it was enough for her that story had been passed down to a younger generation, and that no matter what Sam said, it was not the experience she had had, and there is no conveying that experience, only its importance. It is one of the many understated, delicious and devastating moments in a very great movie. 

Likewise, the gradual dawning of knowledge in the young reporter, as Jack Crabb describes the Indians and the cavalry soldiers, including George Armstrong Custer, and the sympathy of the reporter and the audience gradually shifts away from the White American forces and toward the Indians is a wonder to behold. Right from the first sentences, as Crabb tells the reporter he knew Custer, whose very name comes out as a slur and he knew the Indians, who Crabb mentions with a tears welling up, signals we are about to hear a story which departs from the usual Western movie depiction of cowboys and Indians.

George Armstrong Custer

It is not a story which would make it past Ron DeSantis and the public school boards of Florida, as it tends to depict the White people in a less than flattering way. "Dances With Wolves" continued this narrative, but would not have been possible without "Little Big Man."

Sitting Bull

And that is the power of history, of narrative by people who lived it.

You can see all the TV shows about doctors and hospitals, but you cannot get the real story there. 

You can see all the war movies and even documentaries, but that is not the same as the unedited accounts of soldiers who were actually there.

James Juntilla, the father of one of my childhood friends,  was an American Army Air Force pilot shot down over France during World War II, and he was lying on his couch in his living room, reading a book, laughing so loud and continuously, tears were running down his face. I asked him what he was reading and he held up "Catch-22," a book I had seen lying around my own house, but at age 11, I had never opened.

He said, "This is the closest thing to the way it really was of anything I've ever read."

When I read it, I was mightily confused. This was a spoof, a satire, what on earth was Mr. Juntilla talking about? 

I wanted to run right back across the street and demand from him, a detailed account of his war experiences and how they connected to "Catch-22," but I knew him just well enough to know all I would get from him would be a knowing look, and a shake of the head, "You would never believe me."