Incense and peppermints (1/3/05)
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National Treasure. [Jon Turteltaub, 2004. Written by Jim Kouf, Cormac Wibberly, and Marianne Wibberly.]
At a critical moment in this protracted treasure-hunt — after deciphering yet another code, and unravelling yet another riddle — the protagonists agree that the meaning of the palimpest under examination is that at a given hour, the shadow of the Liberty Bell tower in Philadelphia will point at the precise brick in an old wall which hides the next in an apparently interminable series of clues — which will lead, they expect, to the location of a fabulous treasure which has been lost for centuries.
The problem seems to be that this hour is now just past — a vital issue here because, in keeping with the long-familiar bipolar conflict structure [perfected, as was everything else, by Hitchcock] which governs their situation, both the cops and the bad guys are at their heels, and opportunity is fleeting. Fortunately Designated Geek Justin Bartha picks this moment to step forward and point out that the message was composed before the advent of Daylight Savings Time — yet another idea, it is immediately noted, which originated with Benjamin Franklin, though it was not adopted until the First World War — and they still have a few minutes to make their appointment with destiny.
Unfortunately, as, for instance, any astronomer for the last several thousand years, say, the designers of Stonehenge, or, for instance, anybody who has ever seen one of the numerous movies in which this has been a plot point, e.g.
Journey to the Center of the Earth, or, well, anybody at all, might have pointed out to the writers, the apparent height of the sun at a given hour at some given place upon the globe, and the corresponding location of a shadow, varies with the season, and the specification of a time of day would, accordingly, be meaningless, without the additional specification of a time of year.
I say this by way of reassurance that my judgment has not entirely lapsed. — Nor am I, incidentally, so sanguine as to suppose that Nicolas Cage could jump off the deck of an aircraft carrier without breaking his neck, Diane Kruger could be a government librarian [presumably Miss Musty Archival Material 2004], or that the Freemasons could dig a hole to the center of the Earth in the middle of New York City, even in the seventeenth century, without somebody noticing all those wheelbarrows coming out of the back door of the church. — A Jerry Bruckheimer production inevitably makes great demands upon the willing suspension of disbelief.
But, such quibbles aside, this is nonetheless an extremely entertaining escapist fantasy, which inevitably begs interpretation as the Bruckheimer reading of Indiana Jones: winningly deranged tombraider-wannabe Cage, a historian and sleuth with an impressive [albeit apparently wholly unmarketable] obsessive mastery of the historical trivia of the American Revolution — and descended, as the prologue explains, from six generations of dedicated conspiracy buffs — has arrived, as the principal action commences and we discover him trekking through the trackless wastes of the Arctic, on the verge of the solution of the grand mystery which has obsessed him since childhood — this, the location of the legendary treasure of the Knights Templar; who are supposed (in song and story) to have taken the opportunity during the Crusades to have looted the Temple of Solomon, thus amassing a fabulous pile of swag [presumably including, e.g., the Maltese Falcon] dating back to the Pharaohs, which they then hid from the Pope’s bagmen, sometime in the fourteenth century — which evidence, he is confident on the basis of a Clue passed on by a dying man [the theatrically-expiring last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence] to his great-to-the-fourth grandfather on the steps of the White House in 1832, is to be found in the wreck of an antique New England whaler buried in the Arctic ice.
Unfortunately, as his disapproving [because frustrated in his own pursuit of the brass ring] father Jon Voight [not quite Sean Connery, but not bad either] has already made clear in the expository prologue, the six generations of conspiracy buffs from whom Cage has inherited this quixotic quest were too busy hunting hypothetical fortunes to acquire any real one, meaning that his expedition to the polar wastes must be funded and equipped by ethically-challenged zillionaire Sean Bean; and when, in the first of several episodes of busting into a sealed dusty environment occupied by dessicated stiffs with lots of murky atmosphere to shape every source of light into a dramatic shaft and by diffusion provide threedimensionality in the mise-en-scene, a carved and curiously articulated meerschaum pipe turns up which points unequivocally to the existence of a treasure map on the back of the original [and, of course, utterly irreplaceable] Declaration of Independence and Bean promptly proposes to steal the founding document of the Republic, Cage is too obvious in his opposition; and, after a brief argument in which stray gunshots set fire to a hold full of barrels of gunpowder, is rewarded for his pangs of conscience by nearly being blown to pieces [remarkably, this is the only explosion in the movie]; setting up what seems like it ought to be the grand central caper of the scenario, Cage’s attempt to thwart Bean’s attempt to steal the Declaration by stealing it himself.
But as it develops this is only the first in a series of puzzles and pursuits, in which Cage and Bean and their respective posses [pursued by the FBI in the person of that embodiment of tenacity Harvey Keitel] race from point to point to point again — suggesting, as fox-who-could-not-get-the-grapes Voight keeps explaining, an infinite regress of clues within clues; and, indeed, the pipe leads only to the treasure map on the back of the Declaration — which leads to a message encoded in the Silence Dogood letters composed by Benjamin Franklin as a teenager — which leads to a pair of triplewhammy 3D bifocal granny glasses [secreted in the brick pointed to by the shadow] — which leads back to the Declaration — which leads to the Trinity Church on Wall Street — which leads into musty catacombs of immeasurable antiquity — Washington to Philadelphia to New York, with assorted other clues hints signs and portents delivered by the American currency [for Masonic symbols are everywhere, and everyone seems to be wearing one of those rings.] — Indeed, the whole suggests that the authors read
Foucault’s Pendulum, and took extensive notes, but somehow didn’t get the joke.
As for the fabulous treasure, well, naturally they find it, and it’s as big as the world: the Citizen-Kane warehouse at the end of
Raiders, containing all the lost treasures of history — not just the Maltese Falcon, not merely [we must presume] the Ark of the Covenant, but the stolen treasures of the Pharaohs, the starspangled jockstraps of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and probably the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs [which will turn out to be diamond, or Kryptonite, or something.] — Because this is the Bruckheimer version of an Indiana Jones movie; not an Indiana Jones movie per se. — In an Indiana Jones movie, one would, of course, have the fabulous legendary treasure, the pursuit punctuated by the solution of a series of puzzles, the opposing conspiracy. But in the end our hero would have to renounce the prize, because it is something larger than he is, indeed something larger than the story itself, something which transcends not only the narrative but the very logic of possession: the Grail, the Lost Ark, the Sacred Stones. What the story rests upon, its fulcrum, as it were, cannot enter into it; for the same reason that Wittgenstein said the meaning of the world must lie outside it. The prize, like the vanishing point in a painting, must always recede before us; it can never be attained.
In Bruckheimer movies on the other hand we expect closure: that Cage will not simply save San Francisco from an attack with biological weapons, but receive as his reward documents that contain all the darkest secrets of modern history; that Cage will steal fifty cars in one night and get to keep the fairest of them all, the fabulous Eleanor; that Cage will crawl out of a spectacular plane crash on the Vegas strip and hand his daughter the stuffed bunny he’s been lugging around for two-and-a-half acts of random gunfire and mindless violence. — No prize can be too great, no challenge too preposterous, no babe too bodacious: nothing can go too far over the top; above all, nothing can be transcendant.
So the resolution looks odd, but you have to suspect that Bruckheimer’s gut is as usual onto something, and has led him where the audience wants to go. Because, after all, the idea of Indiana Jones, a hero who though indelibly American actually
knows something about the history and culture of foreign countries — even speaks their languages — looks, well, liberal, and probably Jewish; an important consideration in a historical moment in which xenophobic nitwits from the Bible Belt munching Freedom Fries are punching all the buttons on the dashboard of the Ship of State. So why not make up this fairytale about a boundless treasure known to the founding fathers of the Republic? monies they might have been able to use to fund their insurrection; thus diverting attention from the embarrassing fact that the American Revolution was well on its way to failure before that ubiquitous universal genius Franklin succeeded in charming financial underwriting out of the perfidious French. — And abandon the usual international travelogue and turn it inward: build the plot around a kind of product placement for the Chambers of Commerce and historical societies of Washington, Philadelphia, and New York [Boston does get a cameo near the end, but it’s at best a bit part: too blue a state to be trusted with the lead], and try to make it seem natural that the wealth of ancient Egypt, the wisdom of the Temple of Solomon, the contents of the Library of Alexandria, and the objectives of the greatest conspiracy in history should have been directed to the creation of the American nation: the darling of destiny, the teleological End of History, the City of God.
Ridiculous, of course. But as Bruckheimer knows better than anyone else, if you throw enough money at a dumb idea, something is bound to stick. After all, it’s all about the Benjamins.
____________Seven letters on politics (11/12/04)
