The Lying Liar who Lies

Tales of adultery and polyamory have never been my favorite way to while away the time; there is just a mental disjoint that occurs in me when I am confronted by this kind of plot line, an inability to understand this morality which is totally out of keeping with my usual pathologically strong ability to empathize. I should have approached Ida Lupino's straightforwardly titled film,"The Bigamist," with a thicker skin, perhaps, fully prepared for the sympathy it was going to demand for a protagonist who, gosh darn it, just loves two different women so much he has to marry them both. I suppose I was just so excited to see a film by a pioneering female director that I forgot my prejudicial sensitivities for a moment.

And my sympathies were aroused for the man's plight, I will admit (my skin crawling as I do so). As a lawyer asks late in the film, is it really so much worse to marry the woman you are carrying on with outside your marriage than to just keep her as your mistress? Perhaps not, but were these really the only two options? Kudos to Lupino for taking the complexities of her subject's situation seriously, avoiding the trap of making him into a lust-driven, mustache-twisting villain. But the film is still little more than a double-stuffed Oreo of a romantic melodrama (twice the wife).

I was drastically misguided if I was looking for Ida Lupino's film to present some kind of feminist rethinking of Hollywood conventions. Both wives are, in fact, types not often found in the other films I have watched from this period. Joan Fontaine plays a career woman ahead of her time, who revolutionizes her husband's business when she is brought on as a secretary. Ida Lupino (Wife #2) is insistent that our "hero" not marry her simply because she is pregnant - she can take care of herself (in fact, I was surprised at how honestly the film treated the subject of unwed pregnancy). Of course, these characteristics quickly prove to be flaws rather than strengths. Harry is driven to cheat on Wife #1 because she is so business-minded that she forgets what is really important: loving him. Wife #2's independence ends up being something of a lie: he is attracted to her because she DOES need him, and she is tormented by the idea that she has trapped him into marriage. Bah. BAH, I say.

"The Bigamist" (1953)
Dir. Ida Lupino
**1/2

"Killing Pablo"

"Since nobody expected the Search Bloc to be looking for Zapata and, indeed, no one in the police department cared a great deal about catching him just then, Hugo and his two-man team spent days cruising alone in their white Mercedes van, far more exposed than they would have normally dared to be. [...] At one point, Hugo stayed for too long in one spot listening to one of Zapata's calls. A child on skates rolled up to the car and handed him a piece of paper. 'We know what you're doing,' it read. 'We know you are looking for Pablo. Either you leave or we're going to kill you.'" (Bowden 227)

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Last night I finished "Killing Pablo," an account of the pursuit of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar written by Mark Bowden of "Black Hawk Down" fame. It is a gripping story: people are pushed to the limits of human endurance and a government is brought to its knees by corrupting terror. For Pablo's great talent was combining corruption with terror: first he would offer a bribe to those whose help he requested. If they accepted, he owned them forever. If they refused, he would retaliate with violence, kidnapping and torturing family members, planting bombs outside public buildings, sending assassins all over the world to track those who had fled, until they were dead or acquiesced.

I will never, I think, get used to the convention of popular history that allows the author to jump inside the consciousness of his historical subjects, narrating events through them. On the one hand, this device calls out "fiction" to me, and surely shouldn't be necessary to invoke a sense of immediacy or tension in a story as gripping as this. Do we all have to be video game first person shooters in a narrative to feel sympathy for those we are reading about?

On the other hand, the convention blurs the line between the sort of factuality, the sort of incontrovertible truth, that we associate with video or film proof, "what we see with our own eyes." When Bowden recounts the narratives of his protagonists (told to him in interviews) through their own eyes, it obscures the possibility that his interlocutors might be lying to him or blurring the truth. Bowden gives us a good idea of how murky and unstable Colombia was in this period, when both the American government and idealists throughout Colombia were willing to join forces with sub-legal death squads and rival cartels to find and kill Pablo Escobar. But sometimes he is too willing to trust those who were kind enough to give him interviews and look over the manuscript. Suddenly those whom he talked to emerge as beacons of virtue in a sea of corruption. And the book as a whole leaves us devastatingly certain (with a horror based on self-examination) that humanity is rarely that strong.

"Killing Pablo" (2001)
Mark Bowden
***