While reeling back medleys of old memories, I often think about how intertwined many of them are mixed between real life and the Pictures.
I remember watching that two-hour serving of grandiose derring-do and romance that is the historical matinee, The Last of the Mohicans, for the first time. I was thirteen, clueless about deep love, and had no idea my little pubescent heart was about to get spin-cycled and steamrolled by the images unfurling before me.
It was near the end of the movie. Young Alice Munro stands at the edge of a rocky precipice, neck deep in Huron territory, ready to jump to her earnest and dear-heartbroken death. She's fallen in love with Uncas, the second-to-the-last of the Mohicans. The problem for Alice by this point is that Uncas, in an effort to save her life, now lays dead at the bottom of that cliff, having been sliced open and pushed over moments before in a failed attempt at mortal combat.
Maguai, Uncas' killer, beckons Alice to step from the edge, and for a moment she holds that idea in her troubled head.
She looks over the edge. She turns back to Maguai. She repeats.
But tear-rimmed eyes betray her next move. The music subdues to an aching bass line threaded with ghosts of a violin (if you play the soundtrack backwards, you can hear pieces of my heart harmlessly mending back together).
Then, she leans back… back… and plummets into oblivion, slo-mo style, the cold mountain winds trumpeting her demise.
Why does this scene scar my memory so deeply? In the story, their love affair is minor — an afterthought of a subplot. Yet somehow, the images resonate.
I resolved that, aside from Alice's grace (Jodhi May, you are special) in that ethereal moment, the resonance springs from experiencing kindred spirits united by a connection which transcends time and space, even reason. Acknowledging this can mark us, make us act inconceivably. What does it matter that they barely know each other, especially when love's on the line?
And then, as I got older, I wondered if Alice was simply ingenuous and foolish. To her limited experience, what she shared with Uncas probably felt deep, but so are many love stories of the young, impulsive and romantic. Maybe she regrets her choice halfway down the fall. Maybe she jumps for other reasons. Her father's just had his heart literally ripped out of his chest and eaten (that damn Maguai!), and her sister, not long before, has brushed-off a chance to marry into English nobility for a fleeting romp in the hay with a bastard vagabond (say goodbye to those summers in Cornwall).
In that moment, Alice's life isn't exactly awash in a sea of gilded prospects, so why not end it all? There's no nearby musket barrel to swallow, so maybe some rocky high ground and a little gravity might do the trick. Maybe she's hoping to get all 50 Shades with Uncas in an over-sexed afterlife.
I thought about the nature of love and relationships. I thought more about why she kills herself, my opinions shifting ever still. Then I compared Uncas and Alice's connection with my own. Over the years lots of lovers came and went, and for most, on whatever terms we may have parted, I put them in the rear-view, cried two tears in a bucket. Then f*ck it.
Eventually, I realized I'd been using that scene as a touchstone for determining how serious all my relationships were. If the situation presented itself — if shit went down, and hard decisions had to be made — could I do what Alice does? Would I fight for her to the bloody end like Uncas?
I asked my wife to marry me because I knew for the first time that, for her, I would do either — maybe not happily, but with a certain zest, a strength of will.
I asked my wife to marry me because I knew for the first time that, for her, I would do either, maybe not happily, but with a certain zest, a strength of will — and belt out For Your Precious Love like Linda Jones while Maguai hacks away at me like I were a smirking piñata that just dissed his mother — and I knew after our first date. Or maybe it was the second one.
Like Alice, it was something from her eyes to mine. Currents connecting at high voltage… with enough juice to power a thousand sunsets more.
But without that memory from the multiplex so long ago, I'm not sure I would have drawn the same conclusion. Or?
I do know the arrival of disarming questions like these make certain films a blessing. They allow haunting stories, images and sounds to linger in the mind like wisps of smoke from the smoldering pages of tragic, tortured love songs.
And as for disarming questions, don't even get me started on the last shot from A Clockwork Orange.
