The Best Screen Villain: Wes Studi's MAGUA in THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

Watch him: he's like a monstrous dark image of hate, from his raptor's beak of a nose to the Huron war plumes bristling on his shaven naked head. Everything counts: that pulse throbbing in his temple precedes his devoutly-schemed-for homicides by seconds. His very acne scars have a vile eloquence.

He's subtle. See the fascinating night scene of his parlay with the French general Montcalm. These two brilliant insincere minds understand each other so well, and with so few words. Montcalm smoothly explains that the English prisoners are allowed by law to leave safely. LEAVE safely--he doesn't say, REACH THEIR DESTINATION safely. Magua knows he has been given permission to kill them down to the last man and woman.

Which is exactly what he almost does. As a scout, he leads the relieved and complacent party of English prisoners frolicking along to their doom as though to a picnic. Then suddenly he's the god pulling the strings, delivering the first blow in an ecstatic seizure of revenge as the English are ambushed by his warriors, and bloodily hacked apart with gore flooding their red coats.

Even in this scene of carnage, Magua's focus is unearthly: what he wants is the scalp and beating heart of the Englishman Munro, his great enemy. Driving straight through the chaos like a spear to its target, he finds Munro and cripples him--you will never see eyes more remote and murderous than Magua's in this scene--then, not content with simply killing the man, tells Munro with a terrifying icy triumph that he will leave behind him no issue on the earth: his children will be murdered. Thus Magua breaks Munro's heart before he cuts it out and holds it high.

Wes Studi underplays throughout, except for brief moments in the magnificent action scenes when his intensity explodes. He's capable of great nuance just by slight movements of his eyes. Even in the climactic fight with Uncas (Eric Schweig)--the noble and (it has to be said) staggeringly beautiful Mohican warrior who's attempting to rescue Munro's daughter Alice--Magua has a totemic focus. He leaps, parries, stabs, slashes, and throws Uncas down the cliff face--with the efficiency of a violent dance. Even when he cuts Uncas's throat, and the boy is dead, Magua's expression reveals a powerful distaste, as though he feels disgust for the carrion corpse beneath his hand. That look of Studi's seems like an odd choice--until we think about it and realize that it's exactly what Magua would have felt.

Studi's performance keeps hitting us on the back of the head with a shovel. We can't rest for a moment, because he never can while he lives. And as though everything he's done weren't enough, it turns out he had his reasons. His wife and children were murdered by whites. That is what set him on this frenzy.

In a final turn of the blade, Magua's most perfect revenge, we don't get to just hate him. We have to understand him.

Men and Women Talk About The Ex, With Heartbreak and Humor

"She wanted to take the dogs. But the dogs liked me better."
Mickey Rourke, actor

"I was totally committed to Janet Leigh, she was the star of my heart throughout our marriage, although I did cheat on her constantly from day one."
Tony Curtis, actor. He explains in his autobiography that he was so beautiful as a young man, the girls hunted him down like a dog and he couldn't fight them off.

"He's an asshole, he really is."
Lorrie Moore, writer. Moore was married to a divorce lawyer.

"There's a Spanish saying for a certain type of cold, sadistic, punitive husband: 'He makes her eat ice.' I decided that forty years of eating ice was enough."
J.Z., a friend

"She said to me, 'I'm just not that into you romantically.' And I said to her, 'Then what is it we've been doing?'"
Laura R., about the woman she'd thought of as her lover, D.

"Live by the sword, die by the sword."
Ernest Hemingway, writer, said this about his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. Hemingway had never forgiven Pfeiffer for being (as he saw it) a home-wrecker who pursued him when he was an innocent lad, and lured him away from his first marriage to sweet Hadley Richardson. He now gloated over the "prairie justice" aspects of allowing himself to be lured away from Pfeiffer by a much younger woman. Martha Gellhorn would become his third wife. However, Hemingway only fully learned about real prairie justice when Gellhorn left him for younger men and for her journalism career.

"I realized why she divorced me in the first place. I was in love with her, but she was not in love with me. For her, I was not the most beautiful thing on the planet."
Terrence Howard, actor

"He's a psychologist. He's also cunning. And what he did was stop talking to me. He withdrew, leaving me to stumble and tremble, to wonder what was happening. And when he did talk, it was to ridicule and threaten. He seemed to enjoy his immense capacity to frighten me...soon after our new baby's birth, there were moments when I confronted my husband, telling him I was lonely and frightened. 'Why are you so cruel?' I'd ask him. 'Why don't you hold your daughter? Why don't you hold the baby? Why don't you love us?'"
Marlena de Blasi, writer. She found a kind and loving second husband, thank God, and describes their courtship in her memoir, A THOUSAND DAYS IN VENICE.

"It was as if he'd been attracted to me for my exuberance, and then did everything he could to tone it down. Dutifully, I chucked my red shoes into the back of the closet and wore a lot of grey."
Laura Fraser, writer.

"I would never desert her, or let her feel that she was abandoned."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, writer. Fitzgerald never divorced his mentally ill wife Zelda, although friends urged him to do so.

And finally, this serious but somehow encouraging passage from writer Edmund Wilson's journal about a meeting with Mary Blair when they were in the middle of getting a divorce:

"When I finally left her in her apartment, after dinner, she gave me a human intelligent look, as she said good night, which made me feel her friendliness and her strength: a look of understanding between us on a level above our wrangling. I could count on her, she could count on me."

A Father Has Taken His Very Young Family To Devil's Lake, a poem, by Margaret Benbow

For Theodore Savides, April 6, 1915- September 14, 2001
(Happy Father's Day, Dear Dad)



A father has taken his very young family
to Devil's Lake. Dinosaur-sided slabs of
rocks the age of stars stare down
from their dizzying tumble
at these lilies of a day.

Little sisters horse around in melted topaz water
noting too late the thrillingly ominous
absence of the father
who can swim underwater for incredible distances
and now in our midst a dazzling sea monster
explodes roaring from the depths laughing
shucking kids like sheaves
on towering gouts of waves
mighty arms gleaming-scaled with shining lake-beads
and we yell with one throat until we see the monster is
Torpedo Dad
our starry but trustworthy giant
and we become giddy
leap around him like tipsy fish
hang from his ears like fond pygmies
use the launching pad of his kind shoulders
for our brave and blazing back-flips.

On Deep Survival: "One who is good at preserving his life..."

(I've posted this quote from the Tao Te Ching once before, in 2009. However, because it becomes wiser and more valuable the longer you think about it, it's worth saying twice.)

One who is good at preserving his life
does not avoid tigers and rhinoceroses
when he walks in the hills;
nor does he put on armor and take up weapons
when he enters battle.
In this man
the rhinoceros has no place to jab its horn.
The tiger has no place to fasten its claws.
Weapons have no place to admit their blades.
Now,
what is the reason for this?
Because on him there are no mortal spots.

(quote from the Tao Te Ching)

And writer Peter Leschak explains the mystery of survival
this way:
"You must be so alive you simply cannot die."

Part 2: Cee-Cee Says How To Tell The One Bad Cop Among A Hundred Good Ones, continued

I was getting pretty weary of Cee-Cee's remarks about "shit-fer-brains civilians," but decided she was on a roll and I shouldn't slow her down. I said, "Why do you blame just Leroy? There must have been other officers involved too."

She said, "But it was on his say-so. He developed the case in the first place. He made a stupid mistake. He trusted bad informants, believed bad information. He WANTED to believe it. It's as though he was working on a math problem and decided that 2 and 2 equals 5 because he liked it better that way. And all of us who came after him and tried to solve the problem were stuck with it, and nothing worked out right because 2 and 2 does not equal 5. Never has, never will. Nothing can work right when the information's wrong.

"So now I see you got your frowny face on," she mocked me. "You're thinking, Why didn't one of the other cops stand up and say, 'What the f--k! We don't have jack squat on this case and Leroy has been feeding us horse s--t!'

"I know this will stun you, but cops are busy. We have battles to fight every day. We're not lounging around the police station saying, 'Well, s--t, I don't have a single thing to do all month so I guess I'll second-guess Leroy's cases for the last five years.' We don't do that. We trust each other. We have to, or we'd never get anything done."

She continued, "I'm not mad because he made the mistake in the first place. Every one of us makes mistakes. Everyone is a fool sometimes. I'm mad because he was an ONGOING fool. Out of vanity he never admitted his mistake. He was thinking like a goddamn civilian instead of a cop."

I bristled, but she paid me no mind,

"A cop has to believe what the evidence tells him. HAS to, or he's no use. A civilian gets to believe whatever the hell he wants. This is also the way crazy people think."

Cee-Cee also said she was involved in the case. "I did what undercover cops do to keep suspects shaken up, it's not in the rulebook. I don't want to talk about everything we did. But we tried to entrap them about twenty million times, there was never a response. We investigated the living crap out of them, and nothing but good things came up. I began to get a real bad feeling. I began to be afraid that these were good folks.

"I was working with my friend Mark, smartest cop I ever knew. He said out loud what I'd been thinking. He said, 'Those people are clean.' And that's what they turned out to be. There was no case.

"It was really about a private feud, some kind of bad feeling between neighbors going back fifteen or twenty years. You wouldn't believe how nasty these can get.
One side got all obsessed and decided to use the police as their personal goon squad to make their enemies suffer. We hate that, but it happens. We fell for it.

"This whole bogus case, every dollar, every minute, every airplane flight, every meal or mile, was on the taxpayer's dime. Every chocolate croissant in a fancy B&B. But this is what bothers me the most: personally I'm O.K. with acting like an asshole on the job, if it's for a good cause. But in this case I'd been acting like an asshole to nice folks. I'd been hurting people I should have been protecting, and protecting people I should have been hurting. I'll never forgive Leroy for that."

I said, "I still don't understand why you believed him in the first place."

She sighed. After a minute she said, "I wish I had a better reason, but he was kind of our star. He LOOKED right. He looked like he belonged on a recruitment poster. Still does. A big strapping guy, real confident, a leader. Bright eyes, great big smile. Mark said, 'Those eyes are TOO bright.' But he liked him too. Everybody did."

She set her wine glass down. We sat quietly for a few minutes. Then I paid the bill, and we wove our way out of the restaurant.

TO BE CONTINUED

Cee-Cee Says: How To Tell The One Bad Cop Among The Hundred Good Ones

(Before reading this entry, you might want to take another look at my post of August 16, 2009. It describes how Cee-Cee, a retired policewoman, introduced herself to me over the phone and proceeded to flog me like a racehorse for what she considered an incredibly stupid letter-to-the-editor I'd written. By the end of the call we'd stopped screaming at each other, more or less, and I'd said we should meet some time over a glass of good red.)

Cee-Cee and I did meet at a Middle Eastern restaurant which had beautiful rugs on the walls and belly-dancing music, and we did have that glass of red wine. And it was so good we had a few more. It was on her fourth glass that she told me a surefire way she'd discovered, during her career, of spotting the rare bad cop, complete with an example.

"Cops like to be right. Not one of us enjoys admitting to a mistake, especially if it was a big, fat, stupid one. But a good cop will admit it, at least to himself. He'll feel shame and regret. He'll do what he can to make it right, and move on.

"A bad cop will never admit to a mistake unless he's driven to it, kicking and screaming." Here Cee-Cee gave the example of an officer she called Leroy, "because it's not his real name." She spoke for half an hour about a case he'd been involved in. His surveillance included shadowing his suspects on flights and several stays in pleasant domestic cities, at countless meals in good restaurants, the theater, on one occasion the opera, as well as wire-taps and invaded email accounts. After all of this, an unthinkable disaster occurred: the suspects turned out to be innocent. And not only were they innocent, they were as clean as Ivory soap. They had never committed a crime.

"So here we've got Leroy, who should have figured this out after a few months at most. We began to realize he may have falsified information. He liked that cushy investigation. He cost us tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of manhours, he made fools of other officers who trusted him, and by far the worst of it, he caused suffering to the innocent. That's the exact opposite of what we're supposed to be doing. And to this day, Leroy has never admitted he made a mistake.

"Yes, suspects are usually guilty, but once a cop starts assuming that they ALWAYS are, he's in trouble. Every once in awhile, the sonsabitches are innocent. Tormenting an innocent person is the worst thing a cop can do, and the good ones know it. But a bad cop like Leroy will be mad at the innocent. He thinks they did it on purpose to make him look bad. He'll make them suffer, if he can. He'll even put them in danger, if he can. Because if he's arrogant AND druggy, like Leroy, there's no boundaries for him."

I asked, "What happened to him?"

"Oh, we got rid of him. We let him retire young." She swirled wine in her glass, looked at it thoughtfully. "I know I talk a lot of trash about civilians, complain that we have to protect them like babies, but after all, it is all about the goddamn civilians. What else is our job about, except to help all you dumb shit-fer-brains civilians out there live your lives, pursue your happiness, you know?" Then she smiled at me, and drank down the last of her wine.
TO BE CONTINUED

Coming from the Ends of the Earth to Share Dessert, and A Sweet Life...

The beauty of Marlena de Blasi's memoir A THOUSAND DAYS IN VENICE is that it's true. In 1992 she was a chef and travel writer, saddened by a ghastly divorce, who reluctantly visited Venice to write articles about the food. He, Fernando, was a middle-aged, somewhat depressed Venetian banker who concealed a blazingly passionate heart beneath his pinstriped vests. He saw her across the Piazza San Marco and fell in love at first sight--or rather, half-sight, for as he told her later, he saw only her profile, her wild and unmanageable mass of pinned-up black hair, and a beautiful woolly white coat that covered her to the ankles. He had been agonizingly shy his whole life, and he was afraid to speak to her. She did not notice him at all.

A year later Marlena returned to Venice. The day came when Fernando saw her again, in a cafe, and this time he spoke. She rebuffed the blue-eyed stranger, but he had found his courage and refused to disappear. He spoke no English, she spoke almost no Italian. There were false starts, and a Venetian storm kept them apart, and she fled back to America. This man who had been so shy, self-doubting, and cautious his whole life, pursued her across the ocean with the confidence of an arrow that will absolutely not be deflected from its target. He had found his mate, and that was that.

It took Marlena a little more time to share his feelings. However, in the meantime she cooked him a marvelous meal. It is wonderfully described in her book. The meal ends this way:

"He seems content with silence. I've made a dessert, one I haven't made in years, a funny-looking cake made from bread dough, purple plums, and brown sugar. The thick black juices of the fruit, mingled with the caramelized sugar, give up a fine treacly steam, and we put the cake between us, eating it from the battered old pan I baked it in. He spoons up the last of the plummy syrup, and we drink the heel of the red wine. He gets up and comes over to my side of the table. He sits next to me, looks at me full face, then gently turns my face a bit to the right, holding my chin in his hand. "Si, questa e la mia faccia," he tells me in a whisper. "Yes, this is my face."

(quote from A Thousand Days In Venice, by Marlena De Blasi)