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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Death March: Skin Like a Lion
The first installment of the "Death March" series: Death as the Great Leveler; Death as radically irrelevant.
Tuesday, 2005-01-04 | Classic Gin, Film, Philosophy
| The cat was only an exterior, life had posed as a cat. |
| Yukio Mishima |
The basic idea of the 'death march' is that everyone knows exactly how it's going to end. The 'death march' is a metaphor for life; each person becomes just another nameless contender (cf. the Latin etymology of the previous word) who is doomed to die. We are all, like it or not, prisoners to the same brutal captors and will all, whether we want to or not, be subject to the same fate.
In this way, the 'death march' is an exhortation to solidarity and (perhaps I haven't quite earned this yet, but I aim to) a refutation of contingency--'contingency,' is, of course, the idea that through discerning the causes and effects of a given event or action that one has some how mastered it or rendered it less effective (this argument often concerns itself with mediation; 'all perceptions are mediated by the senses and are therefore either highly suspect or completely meaningless,' you might hear someone fallaciously allege).
But we can't quite know what kind of solidarity the phrase 'death march' is exhorting us to or what kind of contingent arguments it is urging us to deny unless we do a little contrastive work. Towards that end, we're going to play Structuralism for a second. Just as the Structuralist critics of old sought to demonstrate that meaning, value or significance did not inhere in words, objects or actions by proving that each word, object or action existed as a member of a near-infinite number of binary pairs as the unmarked member, so shall we attempt to figure out what 'death march' is and is not.
If we were, for example, going to attempt to describe what my cellular telephone phone is, we would make it the unmarked member of a number of binary pairs in order to do so: my cellular telephone is not an elephant because it is not large, does not breathe and does not have tusks, my cellular telephone is not a television because it does not receive HD or analogue television signals, it is not my computer because, while it runs programs and has an operating system, it is not of equivalent size and possesses only a very small fraction of the processing power of my computer.
Our beloved 'death march' will now be described in such a way. But we shall not choose random things to demonstrate what the credo in question is not; it would be totally fruitless to compile an endless list of wildly dissimilar things. We shall take some similar things and, contrasting them to our credo, attempt to explain how 'death march' is a code-word for a specific and modern brand of fatalism.
The extremely talented actor Tom Cruise recently played two subtly different roles in two very different films. In 2003's 'The Last Samurai,' he played Nathan Algren, a 19th century military officer who, through a series of happy coincidences, discovered and came to be a champion of the warrior fatalism of the Japanese warrior caste. In 2004's 'Collateral,' he played Vincent, a mysterious hit-man whose chilly affectations and angsty nihilism were frequently made to appear shallow and disingenuous by co-star Jamie Foxx's simple-minded pragmatist, Max.
The organizing conceit of 'Samurai' is that Algren's destructive existential crisis occurs because of his poor relationship with mortality (his and that of others); he is suffering existential tedium and uncertainty acutely because of a certain crisis of conscience that drives him to drink excessively, to upbraid and mistreat others and to act erratically; eventually, through the diligent tutoring of a certain Katsumoto (Ken Wantanabe), Algren comes to have a healthier relationship with death and the (apparent) futility and fragility of life.
Contrastively, 'Collateral' is a film about a man whose certainty about the futility and fragility of life is undermined completely but who is finally unable to overcome his crisis of conscience; his austere nihilism gradually gives way to a panic and terror that the character never quite comes to understand as a performative refutation of his feeble pessimism.
In 'Samurai,' Cruise's character grows; he learns that though life may appear cheap and meaningless, one can make of his life something more than the comings and goings of a carbon-based creature. In 'Collateral,' Cruise's character does not grow; he refuses stubbornly to learn that though life may appear cheap and meaningless that one's unique agency can have any consequence. In the former, Cruise's character learns that there are things more important than his skepticism and self-absorption, in the latter Cruise's character does not.
So what of our 'death march?' Where does it fit in to all of this?
On one hand, the 'death march' stubbornly refutes the nihilism of someone like Cruise's 'Vincent' character; Vincent insists that each man is naught but a speck of inconsequential cosmic dust and that death, simply because it is inevitable and contingent upon forces beyond an individual's control, is an event that renders all life meaningless. On the other hand, 'death march' endorses completely the studied fatalism that Cruise's 'Algren' character comes to believe wholeheartedly in.
Furthermore, the endorsement of fatalism and refutation of nihilism are consequences of one another; by insisting on the solidarity implied in the notion that the human race is really a forced march that will end in an execution, the idea that the end makes the journey meaningless is refuted. After all, if everyone is facing the same end (death) then the argument that 'well, we're all going to die anyway' means approximately nothing: 'yes, we're all going to die. So what?'
Likewise, the refutation of this argument that the unavoidable contingency of death makes individual lives meaningless or insignificant leads naturally into the practiced and studied fatalism of Cruise's character in 'Samurai.' Algren's tutor, Katsumoto, gradually manages to convince him that just because everyone dies that death is not meaningless, but rather, that because everyone dies death is of the utmost importance. The 'curse' or tragedy of death is correctly understood as a gift and each of us has every reason to work day and night to ensure that we treat our deaths with the utmost care, feeding and watering them--toiling over them with the resolute exertions of a slave and the delicate fawning of an amateur.
Finally, our phrase, 'death march' concerns death and how death as a narrative trope is a means by which to dramatize the fact that mediation and contingency do nothing to undermine good, old fashioned human solidarity.
