Watching Steve

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 January

You know the scene. Steve McQueen. On his looted motor-bike. The border. Barbed-wire fence on high trestles.*

I forget what he went through to get there, who is in pursuit, whether this (accurate or not to the realities of war) is meant to be the border into Switzerland, and what he must have thought the plan was.

Maybe, heading for the border, he did not think that wire-cutters would be needed (and so did not procure them), and let’s assume that they were somehow not easily-made standard issue for what are normally called - although it makes no sense - escapees**. If so, then we have our given:

Steve’s bike isn’t really going to be as much help getting over the barbed wire as snipping the top couple of strands would be and a quick hop over. In fact, for all that he is 20 yards from the border, he might as well be 20 miles away, but that is all part of the so close, and yet so far motif of his part of the story, of seeing what he cannot, any more than Tantalus, reach***.

Is he then, as Camus might have said, heroic, but heroic in the way that Sisyphus, and so, looked at coldly, attempting the absurd in thinking that he can get the angle and terrain right to cross the barbed wire on the bike ? Does he represent someone who is so far from being able to achieve what is necessary to complete the escape for which he has struggled that he might as well not be there, when he is there without the means to mitigate the problem, and his predicament does not even resemble having no hammer, but only a milk-bottle, to put up a picture-hook, where thinking might find a solution ?

All this may always have been obvious in the lead-up to the scene, it may all be desperation, but what is the reason for it symbolizing heroism, unless we don’t – or don’t choose – to think those other thoughts ?


End-notes

* In The Great Escape (1963).

** They are clearly escapers (those who escape), and those whom they escape are escapees.

*** The film-makers, of course, put him in this impossible position, of not being able to cross to where he can see.


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here