Max von Sydow, who died earlier this month, was a hunk with a mind. He was one of those rare actors who lived large in Hollywood movies and art house flics. (He starred in The Seventh Seal and Flash Gordon, The Emigrants and The Exorcist.) Von Sydow’s passing sent me back to Hamsun–a movie in which he gave one of his most mindful performances.
Von Sydow plays a character who’s losing his hearing, though he’s not missing it all that much, which brought to mind one of Marlon Brando’s rules of social discourse. Per Brando, if you’re talking with an actor, and you’re not talking about him, he ain’t listening. Brando’s hard angle on his profession seemed on point after I watched von Sydow in Hamsun dip into a bottomless well of narcissism that links Mr. Vain matinee idols with still-struggling method men. But Hamsun’s anti-hero isn’t a ham. Directed by Jan Troell (who also helmed The Emigrants), von Sydow recast an ambitious actor’s I-me-mine mentality, melding it with the self-absorption of a serious writer–a slightly different kettle of ink. The litterateur von Sydow plays in the movie is more at home off to the side than at the center of any scene. He’s at once a self-made culture hero, sure he should be a national resource, and a near-deaf recluse. Von Sydow is one of very few avatars of the screen who could go big while doing detail-work required to evoke a world-class asshole/aesthete from within.
Hamsun is the true story of the last deplorable years in the life of Norwegian Nobelist Knut Hamsun. Von Sydow presents him as a patriarchal role-player who’s also a sort of pantheist anchorite, given to musing on Gods and Woods. The movie begins in 1936 when Hamsun has done the work that made him an important figure in the history of modernism (and a writer beloved and disdained by Scandinavians to this day). He’s in his seventies, suffering from writer’s block, on the verge of a divorce from the mother of his four children. His Nobel, which he got in 1920, seems less of a reward than a reminder of his lack of potency/currency. He’s waiting around to die. But then comes a cause that gives him half a life and sparks a partial reconciliation with his wife. That cause is Hitlerism. His wife becomes a full-bore Nazi. Hamsun, hater of British Imperialism and “mongrel” Americanism, is also stuck on Hitler whom he puts a Nietzschean spin on, though he doesn’t go all in for his superman’s anti-Semitism. (Hamsun avoids reading Mein Kampf.) After Germany invades Norway, he collaborates with his country’s new rulers. At first, Nazis can’t get enough Hamsun—his blood-and-soil mysticism made him a best-selling author in Germany long before his Nobel prize. His wife—formerly an actress—goes on tours, giving readings from German translations of Hamsun’s work. (Hamsun himself can’t speak German.) But Norway’s Nazi administrator gets sick of Hamsun since the writer keeps trying to intervene on behalf of Norwegian resistors. Hamsun rarely manages to save anyone from firing squads but, despite facts in the ground, he pretends to himself Norway might retain a measure of sovereignty inside Hitler’s “New Europe.”
His long comeuppance begins when he visits Hitler in the Black Forest. In a dreamlike scene based on a real event, Hitler, a huge Hamsun fan (if you catch an echo of Trumpery, you’re meant to) behaves like a Paris Review interviewer, asking the great author of Growth of the Soil if he writes in the morning or night. Hamsun, though, skips craft talk and rushes to register complaints about the German civilian administrator in Norway. There’s a pause while Hitler gets avuncular with a stray child (whose presence gently foreshadows the horror of homey Nazi eliminationism, which Hamsun hasn’t yet fully grasped). When Hamsun presses on, an enraged Hitler kicks him out. (Per Wikipedia, a Nazi witness who described the actual meeting in his memoirs noted it was…
the only time that another person was able to get a word in edgeways with Hitler. He attributes the cause to Hamsun’s deafness. Regardless…it took Hitler three days to get over his anger.
You can watch the imagined encounter between Hitler and Hamsun below…
But Hamsun’s humiliation is light stuff compared to the moment–years on, after the Allies have won the war–when he’s finally faced with the reality of the Holocaust. In the run-up to that scene, the movie depicts how Hamsun dared to own his choices, refusing the Ezra Pound option of an insanity defense. His wife, who is jailed for being a traitor to Norway, meets with government psychologists and exposes secrets of her marriage. Director Troell cuts from scenes of her small perfidies, which bring home ditched familial loyalties, to a revelation of an infinitely larger betrayal. As Hamsun’s wife frets over an imperfect marriage and domestic life, Hamsun’s minders have him watch film of Jewish families in Nazi concentration camps. His eyes open mad-wide and his face caves in. He raises his arms as if to stop the truth-attacks which make him feel like his brain is being battered. Confronted with undeniable images–“Children?”–von Sydow’s Hamsun gets real guilty.
Unlike a certain monster of self-regard who’s in our face every day now. (Talk about someone who ain’t listening if you’re not talking about him.)
xxx
It occurs to me viewers of Hamsun might be tempted to take away a false sense of possibility from von Sydow’s conjuration of a moral awakening. After all, when you watch Trump’s press briefings—those spectacles of fecklessness, lies and meanness—it’s easy to fantasize some of his supporters might be waking up. But von Sydow’s genius act of remorse isn’t a good template for imagining how Trump might lose his hold on his base. (Nor are myths derived from “woke” culture.) Don’t get me wrong, I’m hoping Trump will be washed away in a wave of popular revulsion. But his partisans will fight against time and tide to hold on to their faith in him.
I got a sense of how that resistance is faring last Friday night when I found myself having my first ever political chat with a woman in my building whom I’ve been exchanging pleasantries with for more than 30 years. I still don’t know much about her private life other than that she’s a lesbian who’s been in a same sex partnership for decades. I was clueless about her politics until Friday. It turns out she’s a Trumpist with mild reservations. We ended up talking about her president for about half an hour, which she allowed was rare for her since she avoids discussing politics in New York City where her right-wing views make her an outlier. Every 5 minutes or so, she’d say “I’ve gotta go now…” as our disagreements about this or that Trump policy or behavior came to a head. But she hadn’t finished her recycling and she kept sticking around. She seemed intrigued to find out things she probably wouldn’t hear on Fox News (such as the fact that “America First” was originally the slogan of Lindberg’s neo-fascist movement in America). “I’m enjoying this” she mused more than once (as she put something else in the trash barrel). Yet there was another side of her that seemed in distress. (George Bernard Shaw once said that when people learn something profound that affects long-held beliefs, their first reaction is not elation but, on the contrary, a sense of loss. They lament the passing of their long-held belief.) Not that my neighbor was close to being over Trump. She kept coming up with excuses for him. She explained away Trump’s rant at NBC journalist Peter Alexander by averring the President was short-tempered because he’d been up all night working to keep America safe. I didn’t ask if she was aware how much of Trump’s daily schedule over the past three years had been given over to “executive time” (or golf). She also asserted Trump was an anti-racist with a history of promoting black women, though she did seem to take in that the only black woman with a prominent position in Trump’s administration was long-gone Omarosa. (Not to worry, yours truly wasn’t talking up the sort of bean-counting that put ex-neurosurgeon Ben Carson in charge of affordable housing.) Our conversation ranged from Crimea to the betrayal of the Kurds (which had bothered my neighbor, though she seemed to think every American president had betrayed Kurds. Uh, nah.) She nodded to Trump’s womanizing, but I think she brought that up chiefly because it enabled her to segue into Clinton-bashing. Along with over-the-top personal animus—Hillary is “stupid” as well as venal—she linked Clintons with elites whereas Trump, somehow, was on the side of the working class that had been forsaken by the Democratic Establishment…
My neighbor’s notion Trump is on the side of workers is a reminder the imperial middle’s refusal to take class matters seriously leaves openings for the president and his echo chamber in the right-wing media. The New York Post shouldn’t be the only paper reporting on rage at selfish rich folks looking for luxe solutions to conrona virus quandaries. This Post piece on the class conflict between Hamptons’ year-round residents and used-to-be summer people who have escaped to Long Island from New York offers a gritty dis of aristo insularity. Yet there’s something slightly off about its angle on our national crisis. Absent any reference to Trump’s failure to look out for every American, it leaves the impression all the anger from below in the Hamptons is directed at high-and-mighty city people. Nobody’s pissed at Trump? Maybe that’s the case, but even if there’s a lot of blue collar Republicans on Long Island, I’m guessing the Post is cultivating a kind of populist anger that serves to deflect blame from the Don.
Clarity about class in America is always hard to come by. Yet it shouldn’t be used strategically to trash the possibility of broadscale, cross-class communal solidarity during a plague. All that’s left to us then is ressentiment. That’s Trump’s thing. (Think “Chinese Virus.”) If we’re going to get rid of our shameless sociopath in November, we have to prove there’s such a thing as society—a structure of feeling and institutions that can’t be reduced to self-interest or class imperatives. Given social distancing, how you act in one-on-one encounters with your neighbors in the coming weeks may be the key to preserving government of the people, by the people, for the people. The political is personal?
Which brings us back to Hamsun. That movie provides a crisp compaction of Norway’s history before, during and after World War II, but it never loses its private thru-line. The moment when von Sydow makes us see the Holocaust through Hamsun’s eyes is the movie’s climax, yet Hamsun’s life (and that of his family) goes on until it doesn’t. The film finishes with Hamsun’s death. And that natural ending doesn’t diminish the movie’s social consciousness or political engagement. But it does remind us politics is always necessary but never sufficient for comprehending human lives and death. I’m afraid we’ll be learning that over and over in the coming weeks.