Sight and Solitude in Le Samouraï (1967) by Jean-Pierre Melville (Part 2)

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 noir thriller “Le Samouraï,” and the surprising power of love to capture its fugitives, even if it means finding them in the most shadowy of underworlds. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Le Samouraï. Say it in your Frenchy voice. Is it different? 0:40 Erin: No, the samurai. That's it. 0:45 Wes: Okay. 0:45 Erin: You could say it really obnoxiously like the samurai. 0:49 Wes: Well, there you go. That's what I'm going for. I. Yeah, I'm just terrified of trying to do it. Yes. So we were just done talking about. About what might have been the midpoint of the film. I'm not sure, but the scene in which Jane's apartment is invaded by the police and she holds up under pressure. 1:09 Erin: You like a three act structure. I'd say that's probably right at the end of act two. 1:13 Wes: Okay. I marked the end of act two. So I mocked. But this may be wrong because I wasn't actually paying attention. But I marked him confronting the assassin guy in his apartment as the end. But that, that may be wrong. Either one of them, I guess, could make sense as leading into act three, but whatever. 1:30 Erin: Sure. 1:31 Wes: All right. So we had also been talking about the love relationship of whatever sort between him and the Pianist and the way that set him on the path to getting him out of his life of crime in a very indirect way. Very direct in the end. I mean, the end is the directest way you can get out of a life of any kind. 1:50 Erin: But he opens the airlock on the spaceship and gets sucked out. He presses the eject button on the life of crime. 1:59 Wes: It is the best way to take one's leave of life. Go out with a bang or three or four. Yeah, right. One of the other things I wanted to talk about was the question of competence. So here's the reason I asked that. So in contemporary films like action or films about mobsters, whether it's an action film or film about a mobster, I think often what's highlighted is the extreme competence. So you get a scene of a hit where someone comes up on someone and then shoots them with their silencer on and then walks away and casually tosses away the gun. Or if it's an action film, they're just badass fighters who can defeat 50 people or various sorts of extreme competence that might play a role. And then the same thing with technology. Technology generally serves that same purpose. You know, more. Maybe more in action films, cool guns and maybe other gadgets. If it's a spy film. In this film, though, the way he's breaking into a car, he doesn't hotwire the car. He has to go through a ring of keys by trial and error. And it's the same thing with the police later on getting into his apartment. And these are very extended scenes, which adds the charm of the film, Right? There's no attempt to rush through this. And you're gonna sit there and watch him try a few keys. Maybe it's the third key that he gets in. But it feels like, you know, you're waiting a while for him to find the right key to the ignition of a car that he's stealing. And then the same thing with the scene with surveillance. They break into his apartment, put up an enormous transmitter behind the curtain. 3:37 Erin: That's so good. 3:38 Wes: You know, today it would be this invisible thing, right? But. Well, I guess it's not that it is small, but it's still a little. 3:45 Erin: No, no, they use. They use a huge one first. Then they realize this is first. 3:49 Wes: And then they. Yeah. 3:49 Erin: Comically large. This is the wrong genre of film. Let me switch it out. Slightly smaller one. 3:56 Wes: You know, it strikes me that this film kind of downplays the sense of competence among both criminals and police. It's not. People don't seem like such experts at what they're doing. And even with the, you know, in the case of, say, Jeff confronting the blonde guy, the guy is supposed to give him money on the bridge. It's just a quick fight, right? There's no badass kung fu fight or any. Anything like that. It's just a quick scuffle, which is more. Much more realistic, of course. Quick scuffle. Jeff gets shot, the guy runs away. So I don't know if you made anything of that. You know, you could call It. Yes, there's a kind of realism to that, but I. Seems like there's almost a commentary on that here. 4:38 Erin: Yeah. I'm not sure what to make of the key thing. I mean, I do think that we're meant to think of Jeff as a master of his profession. You know, like we're meant to think of him as being very good at this, unfortunately, because he's destabilized by the piano player. So early in the film, we see him just start to screw up. Almost as soon as we're introduced to him, he makes another crucial error. Maybe not a crucial error. I don't know. It's an odd moment when he takes that wadded up ball of bloody gauze and he just throws it. 5:08 Wes: Exactly. 5:09 Erin: On the sidewalk or on the, you know, presumably in the gutter, but there's no gutter nearby. So. 5:13 Wes: Yeah, it's really odd. 5:14 Erin: It is an odd moment. 5:15 Wes: And then is he trying to, you know, is he trying to let them know that he's get tailed at that point? I mean, maybe. Maybe from the point he sees her, when he first sees her onward, he's playing out this thing that he knows. He's. He knows the way it's going to end. 5:29 Erin: Right. 5:29 Wes: I don't know. 5:30 Erin: I think I mentioned in part one of our conversation that the pianist not calling him when she said she will was the first of two things that I really didn't understand. The second is when the blonde guy lets him get away. That seems to be what's happening in that. I mean, Jeff is shot, he's down, he's. I think the blonde guy was there to take him out. 5:52 Wes: Gets the gun away from him. 5:53 Erin: Or is that what happens? 5:55 Wes: Jeff has the gun? Yeah, I think. 5:57 Erin: Well, because at some point the blonde guy lies. So when he goes to the mob boss and gives his report of what happens, he says that Jeff got away from him. In fact, he ran away from Jeff. Right. So there's something. I mean, maybe he wants to save face with that. He doesn't. If Jeff, in fact, got the gun from him, and I suppose that would make sense because he's gotten rid of the gun with which he shot Marty. Right. He's thrown that into the, the. Into the river. So maybe he doesn't have a gun at that point. Doesn't he have his own gun or, I don't know, a backup? 6:29 Wes: I don't think so. And I think he leaves, he wrestles the gun. I mean, I may be imagining this, but I. He leaves that scene with a gun, which I Assume was the blonde guy's gun. 6:39 Erin: But I guess I. I just wouldn't think that he would show up to an encounter like that unarmed. 6:44 Wes: But we don't see him arm himself. And he's gotten rid of that other guns, right? I don't know. 6:48 Erin: Right, yeah. 6:50 Wes: And also he just think he's gonna. He thinks he's being paid, but sure, yeah. 6:54 Erin: So maybe that's the case and maybe the blonde guy is just saving face. But I do think that to a lesser extent than the identification between Jeff and the pianist, but still, to a certain extent, there is an identification between Jeff and this blonde guy. They're essentially in the same position. They're both ancillary contract hires, perhaps by the spirit by this mob boss. They have that encounter in Jeff's apartment in which they sort of trade places, and then the blonde guy ends up sort of comically tied up in the corner with almost like a noose around his neck, practically. There's a moment I made note of in the mob boss's apartment. When the blonde guy is there, when the mob boss is going on about how he's wounded, he'll leave a trace. Now we have to get rid of him in quick. Since the police won't find the killer, they won't let him off the hook. He's still there, main witness, by which I mean their main suspect, which is interesting, will keep on his trail as well. And he walks over to the. To the blonde guy and he says, make sure he doesn't give you the slip again. And I noted that the blonde guy is. And this is the moment that I interpreted that the blonde guy must have lied because Jeff, in fact, didn't give him the slip. It was, you know, the blonde guy who ran away from him. But the blonde guy is holding his arm in this strange way, almost as if he's wounded in the arm in the same place that Jeff is wounded. 8:13 Wes: He might have been. 8:13 Erin: Yeah. I just made note of that body language. It could be because of the scuffle that he got in with Jeff. But it's interesting that it's the same part of his arm that he's kind of holding his, you know, he's kind of bracing one arm, holding it by the elbow. 8:26 Wes: Yeah. They could have been wounded by the same bullet in that scuffle. 8:29 Erin: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. 8:30 Wes: In the same place. 8:32 Erin: Yeah. It just increases the sense of identification between them and, you know, reminds one of the fact that they're in kind of interchangeable positions in terms of the jobs that they've been hired to do, you know. Now he's the sort of the hitman for the hitman. He's like the Woody Harrelson character in No Country for Old Men, a movie that I thought of. I also. I love how you brought up Collateral in the part one, because it's obviously a movie that must have been influenced by this one and several others I could think of that bear traces of this, probably in their DNA. 9:00 Wes: So the blonde guy does something that Jeff says he would never have done, which is he gives up his. Puts his gun away, right? So Jeff convinces a blond guy at the scene later on where the blond guy shows up at his apartment. So Jeff says, I never talked to a man holding a gun. Blond guy says, is that a rule? He says, it's a habit. Blonde guy puts the gun away. Jeff punches, takes a gun, pistol, whips him, holds a gun on him. And then he says, I'll answer you the question. Who sent you? I'm not free to tell you. You were free to kill me on the overpass. I won't ask you a third time. And then he finally gives it away. It's Olivier Rey, right? Gives up the address. And then Jeff says, that's how you ended up out of work. He makes some quip. I guess it's not in my notes, about the lack of professionalism. Anyway. I forget the specific remark, but Jeff makes a note of the lack of professionalism. The guy for putting away the gun and getting himself caught, you know, getting himself overcome. What I'm trying to point to, I guess, is that, yeah, I think that there's that identification. But blonde guy is the less professional of the two, or the blond guy maybe is more of a person. Is, you know, it's not. Is not as cold as Jeff, not as unrelated and as him. So Jeff couldn't have been persuaded to trust someone, in other words, with a blonde guy can, Right? 10:18 Erin: Yeah, that's a good. That's a good point. 10:20 Wes: But you know, the other thing here you were talking again about that scene where the employer and other mobsters are plotting. And that's something which I thought, okay, this is another thing which is. Doesn't quite make sense because they hired him because he makes these airtight alibis. And the whole point of that is that he can stand up under police interrogation. That's supposed to be his. One of his key features as a hitman, but now they're going to kill him for that. They're going to kill him for using this wonderful alibi thing, skill that he has. And then they bring up. So let's get some of the flavor of the scene. So they're plotting. Can't leave them out there on the loose. He was picked up and held for several hours. He might still be a suspect. And then another guy, another mobster says, I doubt it. He has a terrific alibi, which is, it's almost comic in a way. And then I think it's the employer who says, well what if it doesn't hold up? And then the other guy says it's impossible, it's a two part alibi and they don't connect. And then the employer says, I admit they don't come any smarter. That's why we hired him. I think another person says he's a lone. I think the other part of why they hired him is because he's a lone wolf, but now he's a wounded wolf. So they're making use not just of his, his alibi talent but his. The fact that he's isolated again. But two things which I thought were kind of intention. But he's a lone wolf. Airtight alibis. But the alibi thing turns out not to be so important. And the lone wolf idea, it almost seems to make him less trustworthy because he's a wounded wolf and he might do anything. So he's not bound by mob omerta or whatever it is, you know, there's no loyalty in other words. And that, that seems to be an asset. But now it's something that's creating some paranoia on part of the employer. 12:02 Erin: Well, I like the fact too that this aligns with the too airtight quality of the alibi, actually making him more of a suspect to the police captain. When you think about it, it really isn't that airtight at all. I mean it's, it hinges on the wor. This one girlfriend who of course is going to lie for him if she's 12:25 Wes: in love with him, who has another boyfriend visiting the same evening. 12:28 Erin: Has another boyfriend visiting the same evening. Yeah. And then. Yeah. And I suppose Wiener's, you know, that element is another part of this. So there is a third party. Because otherwise the two halves that connect up are the girlfriend who sort of inherently can't be trusted for reasons involving her personal relationship with him and the group of guys playing cards, all of whom have got to be criminals. Right. And they all seem to be part of this. Yeah. So you know, really Vinair, seeing him in the hallway is the only time that he is deliberately seen in passing that he's made you Know, made the choice that he's going to be seen. He's not able to construct an alibi because it would be impossible of him, you know, walking around in a big crowd of people and creating an abundance of witnesses to make his alibi super airtight. Or the nature of the alibi is itself actually a bit flimsy. For all the discussion of it being so wonderful, all it really hinges on is was he with his girlfriend the whole night or not? And they have to take just her word for it. And that's it. There's not much of an alibi. I was home with my wife all evening, you know, and like, it's your wife, it's your girlfriend, it's your, you know, it's not really an objective standard by which to measure the greatness of an alibi. So. 13:47 Wes: And it, yeah, it all rests on her talents, not his. How good is she under? 13:53 Erin: Right, right. 13:54 Wes: And. 13:54 Erin: And she doesn't fold, though. Though they know that the police captain says he knows that she's lying. And he, and he, he makes some, some pretty ridiculous comment after that, saying, the truth is what I say it is or something like that, you know, he too, I guess, is a. A great professional. What marks, you know, greatness in a police captain, I suppose it's having a great nose for what the truth is, being able to size up the situation. The girlfriend accuses him of not being a very good psychologist. In fact, he's wonderful one. He puts his finger right on the nature of their relationship, the nature of her relationship with Wiener, the, you know, the, the nature of the relationship, as we already discussed in the previous episode with the pianist, you know, so he's slimy and unpalatable for sure. But he's good at what he does, though. The sting operation to trail doesn't go very well. 14:42 Wes: Yeah. And this, I was just, you know, I was reading this trailing operation that they do with people following him around. And that's a point in the film, at the very end of the film where there's a lot of cutting between these different scenes of. Between the police and him. Police in the field and then the police at the station central headquarters monitoring everything that's going on where the pace is really picked up and there's a more frenetic quality, I think, to the film. But this is one of his other virtues I was thinking about. Okay, so what is it that makes him good as a hitman? He's got the alibis, he's great looking. He's a fast draw. Right. He Basically gets in three gunfights, I think, where he has to draw quickly. Or is it three? So he draws on. I don't understand the wisdom of going up to Marty and saying, I'm here to kill you. And then he has to. 15:33 Erin: It's stylish, Wes. 15:34 Wes: They draw on each other. 15:36 Erin: It's epic. 15:36 Wes: And then it's very similar with the employer. Is that it? Are those the two, or is there another? I mean, he gets in the scuffle in any case. Yeah. So he's quick draw, but then he's got this subway system talent. He's got the Paris Metro down by heart, and he knows how to move around in a way where he's going to be able to evade anyone. So I thought. I was thinking. Well, actually, the most important talent that he has in the film is his talent for evasion. Physically and psychologically. He can shake people, he can shake a tail. And at a psychological level, I think what he's doing is for someone who's sort of cut off socially and is so stoic and without much affection in his life, there's a form of evasion in that the one person he doesn't evade, obviously, is the pianist, as we've said. She catches him, so to speak, and there's nothing he can do about that. 16:33 Erin: I like this because it's. Evasion also suggests a certain passivity, and that seems to be a fundamental feature of the way that he operates. This exposes maybe a little bit of the paradox of the actor. You know, the actor is actually a passive figure. I mean, this is something that, like, lots of people used to talk about in interviews about actors, how, you know, the actor turned director. You know, oftentimes these male figures are sort of taking revenge on the passivity of the situation that acting has put them in. You know, they want to be more proactive and less reactive or something. That seems inherent to this, you know, parallel that I'm trying to draw between, you know, Jeff the contract hitman and Jeff the virtuoso performer. It involves being activated. You know, when you're an actor, you're given. You're given a script, you're told where to stand, you're directed, you're photographed by people. Then there's always a conflict. I think, for some people who are more sensitive about the passivity inherent in this, especially if they're really good looking, because you feel you're an object. Right. And Delon himself is sort of like this ultimate super handsome, almost pretty boy figure who perfectly fits this mold. So where Am I getting at with this? Well, you know, I'm thinking about. 17:47 Wes: Are you thinking of Paul Newman here? 17:49 Erin: I'm thinking of Paul Newman quite a bit. There are lots of people who've been bothered by it. Redford, Anne Bancroft, in an interview with Charlie Rose talked about how Sean Penn basically felt like the acting profession is fundamentally unmanly. And I've heard this expression that it's, you know, it's somehow unmanly in some, some way because they're, you're, you're being told what to do by a bunch of people. And that speaks of a certain level of insecurity to me on the one 18:14 Wes: hand, and on the other hand, ranch wrangling some cows. 18:17 Erin: Right, right, exactly, exactly. I'm, I'm, I'm just the reporter here, but, but I do, you know, I do think there can be a conflict for people with more desire to actually be active. Like this is the interesting paradox in the word, right. They're actors, but they're not. They're fundamentally sort of reacting in this 18:40 Wes: world of make believe, this world of fantasy where nothing is happening in there. 18:44 Erin: Right, right. I want to connect this up to actually the role of technology in the film, you know, the key ring. Okay, so, so what does he have to do when he steals a car? Well, we see him the first time he goes out to steal a car. He steals them twice in the film. Right. He has to wait on the street for someone to walk away from a car because then he knows that it's unlocked. So he goes into the unlocked car. He doesn't have to break it open. He doesn't have to. Right. And then he tries the key, you know, the keys in succession. There's something a little bit, what's the term? Low, low tech. I don't know, whatever the opposite of high tech is. Right. It's certainly low tech way of. And it's a little bit old fashionedy, you know, and it's also, he has, he just has to sit there until he gets it right. And then he takes the car and he goes into the garage. And sure, it's cool the way he does the turn and gets right into that garage. Right. But then he just has to sit there while somebody else changes the plates and hands him the gun. Again, it's passive. You know, the moments when, you know, when he's being trailed on the subway. I'm thinking about the receivers that they have to switch on and off when they, they catch sight of him. Their receiver is hooked up to this kind of comical map. With light up lights that the police captain is following. And what does he have to do? He has to be able to tell if a plainclothes officer is actually a police officer, if a person who looks like a normal person is actually a plainclothes police officer. And it turns out to be pretty obvious. Right. But they're sitting there following him around and he's like the rat in the Skinner box. And they're flicking this thing on and off. And the bug as well in his apartment. They've infiltrated his space, they've put the bug on the wall and then he has to sort of find the bug. He has to react to the situation that the technology and the infiltration of the. Of the police has imposed upon him, that he then has to sort of reckon with, deal with. We've totally also glossed over the fact that it's hilarious that they bug the apartment of a man who lives alone and who is, you know, says three words in the whole movie. 20:44 Wes: Then they just get to hear the, the bird chirping. 20:46 Erin: Right, right. And he finds it immediately, first looking in all the more logical hiding places and then can just go to some phone booth and make the phone call from there, which if he had made it in the apartment, she wouldn't have picked up anyway. He never had to say anything at all. 21:01 Wes: And what would they, you know, and how much detail would there have been and. 21:05 Erin: Right, right. 21:06 Wes: But he's so stoic and impassive and apparently he's looking for something from her. Right, so she would have been the one doing the talking. 21:12 Erin: Exactly, exactly. You know, I want to connect those two things. This seems to be the operative going rogue, turns this dynamic on its head. The passive one goes rogue and becomes the more active one. But then of course, in the end, it's a sort of further. I mean, suicide by cop is yet another kind of passive act. You know, I'm wanting to connect this with the intrusive and the sort of more assertive use of technology on the. The part of the police and occasionally the mobsters, which then is repeatedly undercut by the very passivity that it's trying to thwart. You know, I don't know what we could say about that. 21:54 Wes: Yeah, well, you're making me think of a lot of different things and hopefully this will come out as something coherent. Mix it up in a pot and see what happens. Here's a little thought, gumbo. I was thinking about surveillance versus evasion. Right. So that's the kind of thing that we're getting at here. Where his skill for evasion is up against someone else's skill for surveillance, which is often technological. This had me thinking about the fact that something you see in paranoid schizophrenics frequently is this idea that they're being surveilled, often with technological devices. So there have been some famous papers written about this, but they will. You know, I once had someone in my capacity and working in mental health who thought that he was constantly being surveilled and that everyone on the street was an actor and this was all designed just for him. And that there were. There was a powerful person who controlled radio antennas everywhere, who's putting thoughts into his mind, things like that. Technology often plays this role because. Or reading his mind as well. So it's putting things into your mind and also reading your mind. Technology plays a role because it makes more plausible the idea that this sort of thing could be happening. It's not just magic. It's not just there's a shaman out there reading your mind, but technology makes it possible, makes these paranoid ideas much more plausible. So when Freud wrote about this in a famous paper called On Narcissism, his Some Preliminary Thoughts on Schizophrenia, which is, like, in Freud's theoretical framework, like the most extreme form of narcissism one can have. But his idea is that when people hear voices, so this is another aspect of schizophrenia. It's as if they're the voice of conscience, which we all have. We know, in a way, it's our own voice. It isn't. It isn't right. It's society's voice. It's the voice of norms, abstract norms that have kind of been implanted in us, the things with our values. But it feels like us. And to a schizophrenic who's hearing voices, it literally becomes a voice of another that they can hear still berating them for the things they do wrong or telling them what to do. So it serves a very similar function to conscience. And the same thing with paranoia, where you feel like you're being monitored. Someone's monitoring me. That's what conscience does. It monitors you. So surveillance, in other words, is an externalization of the concept of conscience, which is something as a hitman. To the extent that he's sociopathic, he lacks that. So you could say this is another one of his things that he's talented at. He can evade. He can evade physical capture. He can evade at a social level, but he can also evade his own conscience and the symbolic representation of conscience. So I was going to try and Connect that to your idea that going rogue makes him more active. So. 24:50 Erin: Well, in theory, it would. 24:52 Wes: Here's another idea, right? So he's supposed to be a samurai. So he does have a system of values. So maybe to say he doesn't have a conscience is too strong because he has a code that he lives by. And the code apparently, is to. I don't know what is for samurai, literally, to obey the emperor, to obey their lord, do the bidding of their lord. They're obviously not hitmen. The ronin are the hitmen, the people who live outside of the code of the hitmen. So it's a weird. It's a weird idea that. That he's a samurai with a code, but he seems to be living according to some sort of code that involves solitude and all the rest of it. And he's messed up. He messed up by getting seen by that woman. To the extent that he's involved with her, interested in her, he's messed up. He's no longer living by his code of isolation. He's going to mess up by killing the employer. I don't know if that stands inside or outside the code, but you conceivably could think of it not being part of the code. So what I'm trying to say is you can think of. Just because he's killing people doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't have a conscience, because he does have a system of values, and he seems invested in living up to that system of values. But he doesn't, which is one of the reasons you would think he has to commit suicide at the end. For samurai, right? It would be a loss of honor, and then you commit seppuku. I think there might be something like that going on with him. But again, the one thing he can't evade is love here. So love is the thing that actually captures her love. Not the police, not the mobsters, but her love is the thing that he can't evade. 26:22 Erin: Yeah, No, I like this a lot. I mean, I'm sure you've read this opening quote about the, you know, the samurai, that Melville just made that up 26:29 Wes: from a fake book. 26:31 Erin: Right. I love that. The one thing I read on this, as far as, you know, any kind of secondary literature goes, is just the Roger Ebert review, which I had in his. My collection of his movies reviews. Yeah, yeah. And he mentions this conflict, and I like the fact that you seem to be kind of resolving it more. You seem to be making more connections between the film and the. And the actual, you know, the samurai structure. Maybe we should call it rather than an honor code, it's more of just living your life with a kind of structure of values that Jeff seems to live by. Whereas Ebert has said, you know, this doesn't really line up. He's not really killing somebody according to traditional samurai values of honor and et cetera. I like the idea that the lone wolf quality, the loneliness, the solitude is itself a kind of code and that sparing this woman out of this kind of identification slash love at first sight, or, you know, whatever we want to call it, the decision to spare her actually is what violates his own sort of backwards set of standards. Like, we would see this as being a good thing, that he spares somebody's life, you know, even though it would have saved him to kill her. And we find in the end that he's going to spare her a second time and kill himself rather than. Rather than kill her. So, yeah, I like all that. And I think you're explaining for me more that, you know, I hadn't connected. This is so stupid. I'm loathe to admit it, but I hadn't connected the suicide at the end with seppuku. But of course, that's like a hallmark of the samurai that does in fact happen at the end. 28:02 Wes: What's the point of being a samurai if you can't commit seppuku? 28:04 Erin: Right, right, right. Yeah, I hadn't. I hadn't even thought of that. Of course, in the end, he's a true samurai. 28:11 Wes: Yes, I stole this idea. I'm not sure if I had the idea about. If I. If it occurred to me before reading the Ebert review that this conflict between, you know, the fact that samurai aren't hitmen, basically. 28:24 Erin: Right. 28:26 Wes: I think it. I mean, that seems pretty obvious. But yeah, Ebert highlights this and then he says. So I'll just read a bit from the review because I think there's another point here to be made. But as Stanley Kauffmann points out in his review, a samurai did not accept commissions to kill merely for money. Honor and ethics were involved. Perhaps he should have taken his text from a real book. He Melville, the Code of the samurai from 16th century Japan. It begins with the words Melville might have quoted. One who's a samurai must, before all things, keep constantly in mind, by day and by night, the fact that he has to die. This is his chief business. So the samurai must live. And I'm just reading elsewhere, reading some things about samurai. They have to live as if they've already died. They're basically preparing themselves to die honorably. So that would be Another form of mastery for him. Right. His mastery of alibis and evasion. Anything else we want to say about him? Is that something that he's done? Well, he lived his life keeping in mind that he. That he. Or in other words, he set things up so he could die honorably. I don't know there's a better way to put that, but go ahead. 29:32 Erin: I love this, because at the beginning, it really is like he's dead. You know, you barely even in that opening shot. It takes a while for you to even realize there's somebody in that room. Right. I think light slowly maybe filters through a little bit, and that's what gives us the sense that there's someone in there and we start to see the curl of smoke. 29:50 Wes: Right. 29:51 Erin: But he might as well be dead. And in a way, it's the. It's the identification with the. With the pianist that sort of makes him flicker to life or something. I was reminded, too, of. I don't know why I was. I was reminded a little bit of Blade Runner, but maybe in that there's this idea of the. Oh, what's the. What's the term? That. For the people who aren't really people, but they're. 30:09 Wes: Well, they're androids, essentially. 30:10 Erin: Android. 30:11 Wes: I forget what they're called. 30:12 Erin: Oh, it's such a famous word, too. 30:15 Wes: It's on the tip of my tongue. 30:16 Erin: I'll just look it up. 30:17 Wes: Why don't I look it up on Google and pretend. Replicant. 30:19 Erin: Replicant. Yeah. 30:20 Wes: But I was just going to pretend 30:21 Erin: that I. Yeah, good. Pretend. 30:24 Wes: Yeah. So would he pass that test? Would he pass the Blade Runner replicant test? I don't know. 30:29 Erin: Right. But. Yeah, but there's something like. Yeah, or there's a Pinocchio quality maybe, you know, he becomes a real boy when he. When he sees her in the hallway. 30:38 Wes: He's. He's autistic or they would say schizoid in my business. Or there's a psychological impoverishment that has to do with his lack of connectedness to people. A dead inner world. 30:51 Erin: Yeah. And that's what makes him so effective. The lone wolf, as the boss says. Right. But now he's a wounded wolf. It's as if the wound is not the one that they're thinking of. It's as if he's been wounded into reality, into real engagement with the world via. You know, I mean, the scene we keep pointing to in the hallway is so short and it's so. You know, I hesitate to put as much weight on it as we're putting. Because there's no indication in his face or, you know, he's a mask the whole time. There's no indication that he really falls in love with her. And yet he looks stunned. He's stunned by her. He's stunned by her presence. Why is she there? It could just be stunned because he didn't expect anybody to be there. Right. And yet we're putting so much weight on this. But I think It's. 31:35 Wes: What's that C.S. lewis book? Is it called Surprised by Joy? 31:38 Erin: Yes. Yeah. Because his wife. 31:40 Wes: Isn't that about meeting his wife? 31:41 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 31:42 Wes: Surprised by Joy. 31:44 Erin: Yeah. 31:44 Wes: In a better world, it could have been him settling down and leaving a life of the hitman. I mean, it's not as if he has no social life. You know, he has a social engagement here or there. It's just that the person ends up dead, usually right after. 31:59 Erin: He could have been her. Her agent. She becomes a recording star and he sets the terms of her contract and makes sure that she's getting the best deal when she goes into the recording studio. Yeah. 32:11 Wes: And he would. 32:11 Erin: He checks everything out. Yeah. All right, well, let's talk about this. 32:15 Wes: Jeff Costello, inventor of the airtight contract. 32:19 Erin: Exactly. 32:20 Wes: Perfect on the musician side of things. Yeah. 32:23 Erin: Everybody in the recording studio turns around like, oh, he's been there the whole time watching us, making sure we do it. 32:28 Wes: That's right. 32:29 Erin: Okay, so let's take a close look then at this final scene. So the blonde guy is tied up in his. In his apartment and he does his. 32:37 Wes: Yeah, I was worried about the blonde guy for the rest of the movie. Right? 32:40 Erin: Yeah. Nobody ever found out. I'm more concerned about the bird. That poor bird is not going to get fed. It's already living such a sad little existence. He throws the blonde guy's gun on the bed, out of reach before he puts on his hat and does his little stylish ritual and takes his keys and does look at the bird, I think before he leaves. It's his goodbye. 33:01 Wes: Yeah. Gives it this pensive goodbye look. 33:03 Erin: Yeah, yeah. They communicate telepathically. 33:06 Wes: Obviously they kiss for, of course, they also kiss right before he leaves. 33:11 Erin: Right, right. 33:12 Wes: Don't leave that part out. 33:14 Erin: It's just a peck. 33:15 Wes: A passionate. Oh, okay, I was gonna say passionate. 33:19 Erin: I knew where you were going with that. I had to cut you off at the peck. 33:21 Wes: It's peck on the cheek. No, peck on the cheek is a much better way. 33:24 Erin: Make a bird joke. Yeah. Okay, so he does the key trick with the car. He goes to Jane's apartment. He says, don't worry, it'll all work out, or whatever. Puts on the white gloves in an elevator, and he kicks the door open and we see it's the same. He's now inside the pianist's apartment, which is also the boss's apartment. We see the hallway with the paintings. And then there's this really awkward moment where he runs down the hallway at the boss and pushes him. It's awkward, I think the mob boss asks him if he accepts the new contract, and Jeff says yes. And then the boss says, you shouldn't have come. And he says, I'm leaving. He pulls his hands out of his pockets. We see that they're empty. The guy turns around with a gun, and Jeff still beats him to it. So that's it. 34:10 Wes: Yep. 34:10 Erin: Really quick draw. 34:11 Wes: He always wins. Yeah. 34:13 Erin: Okay. So then he. From there. So he's just killed the mob boss. He goes, drives up to the Club Idols in his car outside, he looks ahead, sort of straight ahead in this blank, kind of haunted way I thought. And then he pulls out his gun, and he looks at the bullets in the chamber. And luckily it's a revolver, so he could look at the bullets in the chamber. And he sees that the chamber is full. 34:33 Wes: So we see it's full. Yeah. 34:35 Erin: But then it quickly cuts. It cuts to people exiting the club. 34:38 Wes: As he enters, we get tricked. 34:40 Erin: Get tricked? Yeah. And he looks. I think he looks very pale. I think actually that he's very good at looking really wounded after he gets shot. And he. He does seem to deteriorate over the course of the film. He becomes a sort of diminished version of himself. And at this point, I think he's looking very pale. I like the shot we get. Just every single shot in this whole movie is just so amazing. I love Melville. We see him stop opposite the hat check girl, but we see her in the mirror in that shot. And he walks up to her. He gives her his hat. So he checks his hat, she gives him the ticket, and he just leaves it on the counter. So it's like, okay, that's weird, right? 35:15 Wes: So he's saying goodbye to his hat, which is almost as painful as saying goodbye to his bird. 35:22 Erin: These are his two best friends. 35:24 Wes: Farewell hat. 35:25 Erin: Yeah. 35:26 Wes: I'll see you in the afterlife. 35:29 Erin: So he walks over to the bar. The bartender, who we know is on the hitman's payroll, walks over. And we do see in the background, this is how I noted it, we do see a different piano player up on stage with a combo. The music stops and Then a beat later, the pianist makes her grand entrance to applause. And we see very clearly something which we got glimpses of before, but this time it's really clear, like the horizontal sort of white bars around the black backed stage. So she walks sort of behind these bars to sit at the piano. There's so many bars in this film. Like, I don't know if you notice the bars on the glass inside the police station, the various rooms. There's this sort of striated bars that block the view. And they're the columns inside Marty's office. Like there's so many clever things. There are two. This is apropos of nothing, I'm sorry, but the room is divided by this set of columns, divides Jeff from Marty sitting at his desk. And Jeff stands right at the sort of threshold of these columns and right where he stops. There are two paintings of each of a woman on the walls. And the women are. Their faces are turned so that they both seem to be looking at Jeff as he stands there between them. And one woman has her hand on a. Like kind of rested on a book with her index finger sort of extended on the top of. It's either a book or a block, something. But it just. It gives the effect that she's actually pointing at Jeff as he's standing there. 36:55 Wes: Interesting. 36:56 Erin: Sort of like the two women in his life, you know, like maybe one of them kind of looks like the pianist and one looks like the girlfriend. I don't know. Have to go back and check. But anyway, okay, so she comes out. Jeff walks over to the piano and rests his arm on it as the piano player turns and sees him. And the smile kind of fades from her face and he looks at her very strangely and she smiles at him in this kind of benevolent way and says, don't stay here. 37:20 Wes: Yeah. 37:20 Erin: She continues playing through this. He pulls his gun out and cocks it, points it at her and she just still playing through this and says, why Jeff? 37:30 Wes: She has a. She has a sad look on her face. 37:32 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I thought it was sort of like resigned to her face. Like she's. Again, she's another kind of valley woman. 37:38 Wes: She looks disappointed in him. I thought. Reminds me of on the Waterfront where the Brando character, his brother, pulls a gun on him and he just has this disappointed look on his face. It's much more pronounced with Brando. But anyway, maybe I'm reading into it, but she looks sad or disappointed and says, why Jeff? And he says, I was paid to. 37:57 Erin: Yeah. She looks sort of surprised and then he's suddenly shot by three policemen who have been waiting in the wings who he hasn't seen. They've managed to be as invisible in that club as he was at the beginning of the film. But he knows this is going to happen, of course, because then the police captain comes out, looks at the gun, you know, the policemen are telling her that she had a close call and if it wasn't for them, she'd be dead. And the police captain says, wrong. And he opens up the gun to show that there are no longer any bullets in the chamber. So he's emptied the gun. So presumably the reason why he has done this, he's cleaned up the plot threads that he's opened up. So he's neatly tidied everything up by the end of the film by getting killed. But also this public encounter, this public confrontation with her has allowed him to warn her that she was the mark. So he's been able to tell her that she's next so that she could. Presumably so that she could extricate herself from this relationship with the mob boss and get out in time. So he tries to. He's. In other words, he's trying to save her in the end by warning her. Is that correct? It's hard to say. 39:00 Wes: Yeah. I don't know why he has to die to do that, but I think it also serves as a warning to her, definitely. So let's take the idea that, yeah, she represented the presence of love in his life and in that sense was a mentor, but is also an antagonist because it's too much for him. You know, it's gonna. Inevitably it kills him. Not just because he's engaging in a necessary self sacrifice to save her life. Right. It didn't. Doesn't seem to be necessary to do that, but because love is too much for him. So he was isolated for a reason and now he's been turned on to, I guess, the possibility of connection with someone in a way that is psychologically overwhelming. You know, if we have to come up with a psychological theory, I think this might be it. And also, you know, if he does have a code of. And the code, the code of the samurai involves isolation, he's been compromised by any feeling of love and so suicide would be indicated. I think in real life, samurai had wives, right? They were allowed. I don't know if were they. Or were they monks? I don't know. 40:04 Erin: I don't know. 40:04 Wes: But yeah, in this case, it's be lonely or it's loneliness or bust. Isolation or bust. So I think you have to infer that in some way he's been compromised. That's the. You could call it ethical compromise, psychological compromise, something that necessitates suicide. Is that right, or am I. 40:25 Erin: No, I think that's great. I hadn't thought of that at all. I thought he realizes the fatal mistake by not killing her at the beginning means he's going to be running for the rest of his life. 40:36 Wes: Oh, okay. 40:36 Erin: So he figures. 40:37 Wes: So that's a more reasonable explanation, actually. 40:40 Erin: Well, so he figures his last act, even though it's a passive one, he's going to take control. He's going to star in a scene that for once he's directed. 40:48 Wes: Yeah, I like this idea a lot, too. And. And I didn't think of this in preparation for this recording, but once you talked about the idea of the police inspector as a director and them being on stage in the lineup, it occurred to me that in this final scene, it kind of breaks the fourth wall because you see them taking down the. At the end, you see them, like, the last thing to happen is the band starts taking its stuff off stage. They start packing up as if you're watching the film crew pack up at the end. So. 41:18 Erin: Exactly. 41:19 Wes: Yeah, yeah. 41:21 Erin: The bass player takes his bass off the stage and the drum player walks off with his drumsticks. But before he does. He even does a little. A little riff, a little bit umps. Not quite that obvious, but almost that obvious before he takes his drumsticks and walks off and it's. Yeah, it's like the end of a set. 41:38 Wes: Yeah. So highlighting the fact that we've just seen the end of a performance and the performance comes to an end. I like this idea a lot that, you know, your idea a lot about. It's his action that produces the end of the performance. So he's not just following the script or the director. It's an act. It's a free act of his own at the very end that terminates the performance. And so obviously, we could draw analogy to our own lives and the extent to which it feels like we are following a script. Whether it's the rules or our own habits of character and the desire to break free of that, to do something that's truly free. I don't think it requires suicide. I think you can do it without committing suicide, although you can't. You know, suicide is the only way to escape character. It is the only way to escape. There are lots of ways in which, of course, we are confined by a script. There are therapeutic methods for trying to free that Up a little bit, but we don't transcend it except by dying. 42:36 Erin: I don't know if this is going to be a funny connection or a useful one or if it's just totally crazy, but I can't help but think. Thinking, but watching this. Think of the old adage in the music world, you know, don't shoot the piano player. He's doing his best. This is an old expression which. Then Truffaut, in 1960, made a film called Shoot the Piano Player. So when I see him not shoot the piano player, in other words, follow the. Follow the adage. Like here he moves as if to shoot the piano player, and instead he has shot himself. 43:08 Wes: And. 43:08 Erin: And it's a gesture towards. I don't know, allowing the performer to do his thing. You know, he spares the piano player, as one is directed to do by this expression. To me, it seems there's almost a joke in that, that he's about to shoot the piano player and then he is shot. It's like a gag from a silent film. 43:25 Wes: Well, in this sense, I mean, you could see her as the representative of life in a way. Not just of love, but life. And we are living as long as the musical performance is ongoing. So she. In a way, you know, she could be fate as well. Life or fate. But I like that to shoot her and to arrange it, that he will be shot or to commit suicide are the same thing. 43:45 Erin: You know, just to talk a little bit about Melville at the end, I think you'd really enjoy army of Shadows. That's my favorite film of his, and I love him as a director. He's fabulous. But, you know, this is a film about the French Resistance that shows, you know, it's very similar to this in that it's about process and it's about how various things. Things are carried out. But you never see any of the Resistance fighters do anything heroic. It's basically like they're all just. It's just how they deal with each other and how they deal with. With defectors or traitors. You know, they're all kind of like moving themselves around a chessboard, you know. But you don't actually see them take out any Germans or do anything that's actually like the work of the Resistance that you assume they would be doing. So it's this very demoralized, bleak, similarly sort of grayscale look to this film. And, you know, motivation is sort of taken out. I mean, it's a very Pro de Gaulle film, which. Which caused a lot of controversy when it first came out, it didn't get a release in the United States until 2007, very famously so what happened was, you know, it was made in 69 and caused a lot of controversy in France, then wasn't released in the US until, at which point it was. That was its official American release. So all these American critics were putting it on their, you know, top 10 films of the year list for 2007. It was a kind of a funny, you know, out of, out of time. Also, it's a World War II movie made in 69, so it's sort of a double displacement. But Melville himself was in the Resistance and was quite a hero, as far as I know. And he had also a brother and sister who served in the Resistance as well. And this famous story about his brother was that his brother was taking money for de Gaulle over the Pyrenees into Spain. And his guide, who was supposed to be helping him obviously, find his way through the Pyrenees, shot him and took his money. And Melville didn't find out that he was dead until after the war was over. There's just this very bleak betrayal. People being a traitor to you. Ultimately, it all kind of amounting to nothing. Like how this film doesn't really. It doesn't matter what the mob boss is up to. It doesn't matter that, you know who the good guy or the bad guy is. Right. That sort of moral complexity is. It's almost sort of elided or just pushed to the side in favor of just watching people at work do what they do. And he almost reminds me of Hawks in that way. Howard Hawks being just obsessed with, like, people who do their work well, no matter what that job is or how. How morally suspect the job may be. And I'm just. I'm fascinated by him as a. As a figure and the films that come out of these experiences that he had. 46:22 Wes: Yeah, this was the first time I. I've seen this. I haven't and I haven't seen any other films by him. 46:27 Erin: He's just the best. This is just the most stylish film. 46:30 Wes: Yeah, it occurred to me because it was playing at the Brattle, I think this indie. Well, you know, it. This indie film place here in Cambridge. 46:39 Erin: Did you see it on the big screen? 46:41 Wes: I didn't. Oh, a lot of gray opportunity. But then I suggested it to you, but. 46:46 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 46:47 Wes: So, yeah, I agree. I think, yeah, this is great. Thank you. 46:50 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook @subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.