Old Yeller gets shot. Nothing. Shane rides off wounded while a kid hollers after him to come back. Eyes dry as a saltine. Bambi’s mother, the patron saint of childhood trauma? I was mostly wondering where the father had been.
I’m not made of stone. I just see the wires. A boy, a dog, a rifle, and a string section sawing away at you like a lumberjack. Those scenes aren’t moving, they’re mugging. Somebody in a studio office decided I’d cry at minute eighty-seven, and I resent the appointment.
Hand me something hard and gritty instead and I’ll sit through it like a customs agent. Body counts, betrayals, bleak endings. Fine. That’s just the news with better lighting.
And yet. There’s a short list of scenes that get me every single time. The waterworks, the whole embarrassing production. On paper they have nothing in common, which is why they’re worth lining up.
The ones that work
Children of Men. Eighteen years without a baby born anywhere on Earth, and the movie spends most of its running time proving we had it coming. Then, in a shot-up building in the middle of a firefight, a newborn cries. The shooting stops. Soldiers who were killing people ten seconds earlier lower their rifles and step aside. A few of them cross themselves. A woman carries her daughter down the stairs and out through the middle of a war. Then the shooting starts again, because everyone remembers what they came for.
Maybe a minute of people being better than they are. Which, if you’ve met people, is about fifty-nine seconds over the record.
Now cut to a sheepdog trial. Babe. A pig has just herded sheep in front of a crowd that showed up to laugh at him. Farmer Hoggett, a man who treats words like they cost money, looks down and says, “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” No speech. No hug. Five words, and I’m a puddle. Hollywood has spent a century and several billion dollars on swelling orchestras, and it got beat by a farmer complimenting livestock.
Back to the apocalypse. The Walking Dead, and yes, it’s television. My list. Hershel is on his knees with a sword at his neck while Rick makes the speech of his life, the one about how nobody is too far gone. And Hershel smiles. Not because he thinks it’ll work. Because the man he’s been coaching finally believes it. It’s a proud father’s smile, and it’s about the last thing he gets to do. The man holding the sword whispers “Liar” and swings. There’s always one.
The pig again. Babe: Pig in the City is a children’s film directed by the Mad Max guy, and it shows. It’s rated G, which tells you everything you need to know about ratings. Flealick is a little terrier with his back legs strapped into a cart. He goes after the truck hauling his friends away, gets thrown into the street, and lies there, done. For a few seconds the movie cuts to a green field, sunlight, butterflies, and that dog running on four good legs. Then he’s nudged awake, back on the pavement, back in the cart. He gets up and goes back to work. I have never forgiven George Miller, and I never will.
On the Beach, 1959. The bombs fell somewhere else, the fallout is on its way, and Melbourne spends the movie waiting politely to die. The last shot is an empty square. No bodies, no rubble, nobody. Just a Salvation Army banner still hanging where the crowds used to gather: “There is still time .. Brother.” For them it was a lie. It was never aimed at them. Sixty-some years on, we’re still treating it as a suggestion.
Blade Runner 2049. Ana Stelline builds memories for a living, sealed in a glass room, manufacturing childhoods for people who never had one. A replicant brings her a memory and asks if it’s real. She looks, and she starts to cry, and all she can tell him is that someone lived this. He thinks she means him. She doesn’t. A woman who fakes the past for a paycheck just got ambushed by her own. Nearly three hours of gorgeous orange fog, and the part that gets me is a woman behind glass looking at a toy horse.
The last one
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. You know the scene. The glass, the hand, “I have been, and always shall be, your friend.” It gets me. Of course it gets me.
But the older I get, the more it’s the funeral. Kirk, a man who has talked his way out of everything his whole life, stands over a torpedo casket trying to get through a few sentences. He nearly makes it. Then he reaches the last word, that his friend’s soul was the most “human,” and his voice just goes. William Shatner, a man who has never knowingly underplayed a line, underplays that one.
A cynic expects the worst and is rarely disappointed. Dogs die, bombs fall, the sword comes down. I had all of it in the pool. What gets me is being wrong.
Briefly. Then Scotty starts in on the bagpipes, and I have to leave the room.
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