If You Want a Life

The Marathon Man

Thomas Elsaesser (from: European Cinema - Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam UP, 2005)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

In , a film appeared that left a permanent impression and may have changed my life. I saw Tony Richardsons The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in a cinema in Brighton, shortly after moving to Britain in . The lean and bony features of Tom Courtneys face instilled in me an intense yearning of wanting to belong to the English working class, one of the true aristocracies of the human race, as it seemed to me: noble in spirit, brave in adversity, resolute in action. The feeling is long gone, but its memory returned when I saw a young Tim Roth in Mike Leighs Meantime many, many years later. What made Tom Courtney special, though, was that he was a runner. As one reviewer put it: You can almost smell the wet leaves of the forests and hills, and feel the cold of the morning air as you follow Courtney on his daily jog. England, with its crummy weather, declining manufacturing economy, post-imperial history and hugely varied terrain, is particularly well-suited to the sport. Distance running is primarily a solitary activity, designed for bona-fide introverts, obsessive individuals who do not mind pain, and in some cases, may actually enjoy it. Courtney plays Colin, a Nottingham boy in his late teens, who is sent to borstal for robbing a bakery. In the reformatory school he is spotted as a natural by the upper-class governor with a mission. He gives Colin special privileges because he wants to groom him as a runner to lead the prison team in a muchanticipated long-distance race against a local public school. The ensuing conflict of whether Colin can be bribed into betraying his class, or would a victory be his alone, had a lot of resonance in the early s, when in the wake of the writings of Richard Hoggart and the education policies of the new Labour Government under Harold Wilson working-class boys began entering British universities and the professions in significant numbers. To join the establishment or to jinx it? could have been the motto of Britains Swinging Sixties. In the film, Courtney decides on the latter, and when far out ahead of his public school opponent (James Fox in one of his first roles as the archetypal upper-

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class cad) he simply coasts to a stop within view of the finish line, casually dashing the ambitions of the governor as well as his own. Is the moral of the tale that one is reminded that, in truth, theres no real losing, only degrees of winning, or do we witness that essentially English state of mind, where it is better to fail than to succeed as long as you have chosen to fail? True enough, for a first-year undergraduate reading Sartre and dreaming of Juliette Greco, the images of Courtney running through the open Nottinghamshire countryside were like long riffs by Django Reinhardt in one of cellar clubs of St. Germaindes-Prs: the confusion was no doubt helped by the films beautiful jazz score, complete with trumpet solo by John Addison.

The Marathon Man

A little more than ten years later, another memorable runner made it into the movies and into my life. This time, a Hollywood production, set in New York, but it, too, directed by an Englishman. Instead of Angry Young Man Tony Richardson, it was the turn of Angry Young Man John Schlesinger to direct The Marathon Man ( ). And instead of (Sir) Michael Redgrave as the governor, we have (Sir) Laurence Olivier as the older man, opposite the hero, played by Dustin Hoffman. His Babe in Marathon Man is not altogether different from Courtneys Colin. As David Thomson describes Hoffman: his screen character is reticent but stubborn. He is small and often timid, but a nucleus of hard identity never wavers .... A wary liberalism lurks in his anticipation of suffering at the worlds rough hands. In Marathon Man the rough hands are those of Olivier as Dr. Szell, a former Nazi SS dentist, once known as The White Angel of Auschwitz, who after hiding for decades in South America, has come to New York to retrieve a cache of ill-gotten diamonds, once he learns that his brother, who kept the (other) keys to the safe, has been killed, but not before telling someone compromising secrets about Szell. In this convoluted tale of Nazi villains, CIA agents and New York Jews, better not ask how Babe, who is a graduate student at Columbia University, gets into the act. Rather, what matters to the viewer is how he gets in (and out of!) Dr. Szells dentists chair, in a scene that nobody, absolutely nobody, who has seen the film will ever forget. Say to someone: so, tell me ... is it safe? Is it safe?! and chances are, theyll twist their jaw in a grimace of agonized pain. Whether Marathon Man despite SS war criminals, Auschwitz, Jewish survivors and teeth qualifies as a Holocaust movie is questionable, but it has one of the most stunning running sequences on film, as Hoffman puts to good use

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his stamina, gained through long hours of training for the New York Marathon, and weaves through the traffic on the interstate freeway, successfully outwitting his pursuers. No jazz score this time, but a Manhattan cityscape every bit as gritty as that of Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver, and almost as jazzy as Piet Mondrians Broadway Boogie Woogie.

Chariots of Fire
The s, too, can boast of a runners movie. Mention its title, and most people will grimace, trying to hum its theme tune. The three or four chords that make up Vangelis (Papathanassion)s score have stayed in peoples ears longer than they cared for, and now are probably as (in)famous as Beethovens ta-ta-tataa. This film is, again, set in Britain, even based on historical characters, and it involves class, race and ethnicity in politically correct proportions. Chariots of Fire tells the story of two British track athletes, competing in the Paris Summer Olympics. One, Eric Lidell, is a devout Scottish missionary who runs for God, the other, Harold Abrahams, is a Jewish student at Cambridges Caius College, who runs mainly to prove himself in front of the college snobs, and to escape anti-Semitic prejudice. The plot runs their two stories in parallel, until they compete against each other, and the stakes for each of them are shown to be similar. Both are inspired by higher principles that underscore their dissidence, while giving them the outsiders position in their respective peer groups. The Presbyterian Scot Lidell has to explain to his sister who wants him to quit: I believe God made me for a purpose. But he also made me fast, and when I run I feel His pleasure. To win is to honour Him. Chariots of Fire The orthodox Jew Abrahams has a showdown of his own with two Cambridge dons who question his esprit de corps. He defends himself by saying: I want victory as much as you do. But you want it achieved with the apparent effortlessness of Gods. I believe in the relentless pursuit of excellence. For after losing to Lidell in the qualifying heats, he had accepted the offer of a coach, Sam Mussambini: a decision that the Establishment considers un-gentlemanly, and a choice Mussambini is not English that further hardens racially biased resentment against him. Abrahams is the moral center of the film, as one viewer

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clearly noted: The film is anchored in the character study of the introspective, brooding, and complex persona of Harold Abrahams, wonderfully portrayed by Ben Cross. Here is a man with all of the outward trappings of success: academic achievement, unparalleled athletic ability, wildly popular with his peers, yet tortured by an inbred inferiority complex and driven to lash out at the world in response. In the end, he conquers his inner demons through hard work, sacrifice, understanding of his fellow man, and the love of a good woman, to whom he opens his heart. Chariots of Fire was a huge success in , ensuring for its producer, David Puttnam, a significant, if brief Hollywood career as studio boss, a prominence not given to a Brit since Alexander Korda in the s, though Korda, a naturalized Briton, was in fact a Jew and a Hungarian from Puzstaturpaszto! It is not hard to see that running in Chariots of Fire once again serves as a metaphor for changes in British society, as it had done twenty years earlier in Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner. Abrahams already represents the new meritocracy of the Thatcher Years, where city gents, bank managers as well as politicians learnt to their cost that they could no longer rely just on the old school tie and the amateurism of the landed gentry, but needed to surround themselves with experts, think tanks and (if necessary, foreign) advisers. Slyly identifying this new professional (business) ethos with Jews Margaret Thatcher famously had promoted several British Jews to cabinet rank Chariots of Fire is prepared to attack amateurism as a now obsolete instrument of class warfare, no matter how disinterested it may present itself in the arena of sports, which thanks to television is, of course, now one of the least amateurish branches of global media entertainment business. The fact that the only other prominent sportsmen in the film are Americans delivers this message loud and clear and the Oscars the film garnered show that it was well-received. There are some exquisitely staged running sequences, not least the opening one by the seashore, choreographed and cut like a Pina Bausch ensemble piece. Yet although the film makes distinctions, and even establishes something like a morphology of runners Lidell is called a gut runner, digging deep my sense is that Chariots of Fire (or maybe just Vangelis on the Walkman in Central Park) did finally more for jogging than for running.

Run Forrest Run

If only things had remained so simple. Clear ethical choices, running as a metaphor for social change, underpinned by the affirmative trajectory of self-transcendence, with winning standing for an act of rehabilitation or the removal of

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a stigma in the arena of social acceptance. But in the s, a film appeared now once more coming from Hollywood that also features running at a pivotal point in the heros life, in circumstances so much more enigmatic. Robert Zemeckis Forrest Gump, starring Tom Hanks, is more of a puzzle than its commercial success would indicate, or the contempt of its enemies would be prepared to admit. A Vietnam veteran, decorated for rescuing the commander of his platoon, tells the story of his life to anyone who cares to listen, sitting on a bus-stop bench somewhere in the Deep South. It turns out that Forrest played a key role in practically all of the events of the Sixties and Seventies: The invention of rocknroll, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, the Kent State shootings, the anti-Vietnam protests at the Washington Monument, the Watergate break-ins. Forrest was always there, as we can see from the newsreel pictures cut into his flashback narrative. There is only one problem: Forrest does not seem to have a clue about the significance of these events. His sweet personality and home-spun wisdom turns everything that has happened to him or that he was instrumental in bringing about, into an illustration of his Mothers motto: life is a like a box of chocolates you never know what you find inside. For those who loved the film, here finally was a conciliatory version of Americas most Forrest gump troubled two decades in modern history. For those who felt offended, and there were many, the problem was not only that Forrest Gump wiped the historical slate clean of all the struggles, sacrifices and the fight against injustices, to which a whole generation had given its activism and dedicated its idealism. Forrest Gump also used the latest technologies of digital re-mastering to fake the historical record, by inserting Tom Hanks into authentic television footage of Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and the Black Panthers. How aware is the film of what it is doing? There is a period in Forrests life when he becomes something of a Messiah, following his decision to run across America, several times, all by himself. At first, people start lining the route where he passes, but then more and more imitate him, because of the mysterious saintliness that seems to radiate from his determined, unstoppable run from coast to coast, from Alaska to Baja California and from Maine to New Mexico. Perhaps in contrast to the pathetic jogging that US Presidents ritually perform in front of news cameras the film pointedly shows Forrest passing a television shop, just as the now famous footage of Jimmy Carters morning jog

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can be seen, when suffering from heat exhaustion, he collapses in the arms of one of his aids Forrest Gump is like the original Marathon Man. He bears a message for his people, though it remains unclear whether of victory or defeat. After three years of perpetual running, and finding himself in the middle of Monument Valley, trailed by a group of devotees, whom he has never addressed, Forrest suddenly decides to stop running, and returns home, much to the consternation and then contempt of his followers. No explanation for his decision is given. It could be that he remembered the scene from his youth, when, still a boy with leg-braces and severely handicapped, he is pursued by a group of bully boys on bicycles. At this point, his childhood sweetheart Jenny herself abused by her father comes out of the door and shouts to him run, Forrest, run. Miraculously, he picks up speed, the braces fly off, and Forrest is now free running, running, running. Perhaps he realizes that this was in fact the true motto of his life, but that he had never figured out the direction of his running: was he running away or running towards something? This indeterminacy, this radical openness of his running, without origin or goal may have been his saving grace, the secret of his saintliness. Now was the time to return to Jane, the evident mother-substitute, and found his own family, which he does, except that it is too late. Jane, having just given birth to a boy, is dying from a mysterious virus. And so, Forrest is once more in a loop, a time warp, for which the bus-stop is as useful a metaphor as was the leafless tree in Waiting for Godot. With Forrest Gump, the passion for running had left the world of linear-chronological narratives, of teleological life-plans or self-improvement. The fact that he stopped in the middle of Monument Valley, that archetypal Western landscape, seemed to signal the end of the grand rcit of Americas frontier myths, even in mainstream movies. But what was the film hinting at?

Run Lola Run

Just as in Forrest Gump, the coordinates of historical chronology begin to bend, as the heros spectral body is present in every historical event, while his soul has time out, running across America or waiting on the bus-stop bench, so the runners film for the new century though dating from opens up the time-loop across the metaphor of running. I am referring to Tom Tykwers Run Lola Run. This time, it is a young Berlin woman, who gets a phone call from her boyfriend, Manni, somewhere in the city, and is told to run, Lola, run. He is in deep trouble with a drug dealer, and needs to replace the , DM he carelessly lost in the Berlin S-Bahn, and to do so within the next minutes,

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otherwise hes dead. Three times we see her start on her race to the rescue, each time one slightly different micro-incident radically changes the course of events. The first time she arrives too late and Manni is killed by the police, the second time, she is killed trying to shield him, and the third time, she arrives in time, and Manni himself has found the money he had lost to a tramp. It is like winning the jackpot in a computer game that re-sets itself after each bout, but here balanced by the agonized pillow-talk between Lola and Manni separating the segments: Why do you love me? Why me? Lola asks, to which Manni can only reply why not you? Running becomes a modality of being-in-the-world, to counter such epistemological skepticism as besets Lola about never being able to know what goes on in other minds, however familiar their bodies may be. The technosound of her pounding heartbeat ensures lift-off to another realm of possibility, shifting gears between the unique event and the what if of the rippling consequences Run Lola Run of chance: Tykwer illustrates how the smallest change in what a person does can alter the rest of their life (not to mention the lives of others, including complete strangers she passes on the street). Lending her athletic body to the sense that every act forecloses an alternative reality, and by that very possibility, makes it both preciously special and potentially meaningless, Lolas running bends times arrow, to render obsolete that distinction between being last and being first in life, once one is aware of all the forking paths and all the roads not taken. I wish I were a beating heart that never comes to rest. Compared to Lola running, powered by an urgency due not just to Mannis predicament, the usual city jogger to my mind resembles nothing more than a donkey on the water wheel with the eternal return of the same. Running, too, as we have seen, may be without where-from and where-to, but its intensity to the point of in-direction, and its acceleration to the point of movement in multiple dimensions makes for that repetition and reversibility which ensures that the last can be the first, and the first will (not) be the last: the further the runner runs, the closer he or she is to the point we all have to start from, up against ourselves. For the runner, distance and proximity fold inwards, suspending and even sublimating the very idea of first and last in an altogether different topography of being

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and becoming. The Marathon Man is a Moebius man and as long as he is on the move, the actual and the virtual, the inner and the outer are the perfectly joined recto and verso of a figure, whose singularity is also a token of its infinity. Or as Emil Zatopek, the Czech Olympic champion of Helsinki in , and perhaps the worlds greatest marathon man ever, was fond of saying: If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon. ( )

Notes
. . Taken from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, User Comments, The Internet Movie Database, accessed June . David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Knopf, ), p. .