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Friday
On our plane ride back from the United Kingdom, I watched Sam Mendes’s Oscar-nominated Empire of Light, which looks back to a time when cinema screens seemed to stretch forever and when films like Chariots of Fire were public events. I write about the film here because it is filled with poetry, which infuses the film with a special magic.
An article in Awards Daily by one Sasha Stone picks up some of the poetic references I missed. For instance, the film is set in the beach resort sound of Margate Sands, where T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land, and a crossword puzzle that one of the characters is filling out asks, “What is the cruelest month.” (I know I don’t have to answer that one for you.) After that, we encounter poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson, W. H. Auden, and Philip Larkin.
The story reminds me somewhat of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film Ali: Fears Eats the Soul in the way a middle-aged woman, beaten down by life, is rejuvenated by her relationship with a young immigrant of color. In this case, he is from the West Indies and he works alongside her in a movie theatre. The year is 1981, which is when Thatcherism and skinhead riots were creating havoc in the U.K., and at one point rioters smash through the cinema’s windows and beat up young Stephen. Hilary, meanwhile, doesn’t have the self-belief to stand up to her boss, who uses her sexually. They are indeed living in a desolate wasteland.
Their relationship brings poetry into their lives, sometimes literally as Hilary shares various poems with Stephen. The first poem I recall is Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” the first stanza of which Hilary recites for Stephen as they greet the new year. At the time, they are standing on the roof of the theatre awaiting the fireworks:
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Moved by the poem and the moment, Stephen kisses Hilary, at which point, frightened by her growing attraction for him, she runs away. Eliot’s Waste Land explains why. April is the cruelest month when we have shut down our feelings (“Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow”), which Hilary has, and now here are, like
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain…
As the relationship blooms, we learn that Hilary has been raped in the past and also been hospitalized for mental problems. As the two face pressure from both sides, Stephen wonders whether they should break off the relationship, which sends Hilary into a tailspin. Yet she gathers her strength and, during the announcements of a grand showing of Chariots of Fire that all the local luminaries are attending, crashes the podium. In her remarks she pleads for interracial harmony and then reads to the bewildered crowd the final stanza of Auden’s “Death’s Echo”:
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy,
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
“Death’s Echo” is a dark poem, as indicated by such lines as
The greater the love, the more false to its object,
Not to be born is the best for man;
After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle,
Break the embraces, dance while you can.
If we can dance—or if we can love—the Waste Land won’t have the last word. Hilary proclaims this vision to herself, to Stephen, and to the world.
Her relationship with Stephen cannot last, however. If he is is to step into his powers, he must leave his job at the theatre and go to college. He must also find someone his own age. Hilary realizes this and, in the end, though heartbroken, she uses a Larkin poem to let him know it’s okay to leave her. Opening the book of Larkin poems that she has presented him upon his boarding the bus, he find the following one marked:
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
“Dance, dance, dance,” Auden has written and now Larkin follows it up with his own thrice repeated command. “Trees” also reads as a response to Eliot’s vision of a world
where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
The Larkin poem applies more to Hilary than to Stephen and could be her way of reassuring him that all will be well with her. While separations and deaths inevitably occur in our lives, greenness returns. “Last year is dead,” Larkin writes, just as Tennyson writes, “The year is dying in the night.” And while Tennyson follows this up with, “Ring out, wild bells, and let him die,” Larkin writes, “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” At movie’s end, we see Hilary indeed beginning afresh as she returns to her friends in the theatre and to the world of the movies.
One last note: I believe the movie ends with Hilary seeing, for the first time, one of the films her theatre is showing. In watching Peter Sellers, as Chauncey Gardener, walk across a pond in the finale of Being There, we are seeing the power of cinema, that empire of light, to create transcendent moments. Hilary herself has achieved a new level of being—she has begun afresh—and the movie confirms what she has achieved.