Leslie Howard's Sacrificial Graft

once, as I went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two hundred million years later," -- Italo Calvino, A SIGN IN SPACE

49th Parallel, in a nearly exact correlation to Lars and the Real Girl, a film roughly seventy years older, more fluid, less schematic, and even a different genre, is not an intrinsically Canadian film. Canadian films for and about Canadians may exist, and Canadian literary writers love to assume, through the chic ferocity of Margaret Atwood, that a distinctive Canadian identity exists, embodied in the graphic hero of Wolverine, perhaps, but much like X-Men is an overblown extended metaphor about difference and restraint, Canada never truly evolved as a nation, and it had the luxury of not doing so thanks to the fact that Britain Germany and France hate each other. 49th Parallel is actually a dialectical argument about neo-imperialism of two types: romantic absolutism (German Nazism, which for our purposes, for the time being, shall remain disparate from Italy's half-assed delusions of grandeur) and the UK's torturous evolution of virtuous monarchy, itself a national psychosis which is in no way unique to British sensibilities, although every empire has a unique and singular application.

Britain's unique mindset falls under this rubric:We defeated Spain and at least drew a stalemate with France at the end of the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, were therefore the truest heirs of Rome, and we get to tell the rest of the world how to live, play nice, and respect each other's autonomy, according to our rules and laws, because we killed enough indigenous natives, including Frenchmen, to have earned that right.

The Germans came along a little late and said not so fast, and the frightening thing is, the Germans almost won, despite their significant disadvantages, despite Leslie Howard's moral outrage, despite Powell's and Pressburger's near religious fidelity to the justice of liberal democracy, and Olivier's canonization by Pope Pius in the opening scene after the crash. How was the German vision different, setting aside their mechanized methods of sanitizing human civilization? The difficulty lies in the fact that Hitler as Fuhrer obscures why the German establishment rallied to eugenics, and that one ethnicity which had set itself apart for millennia became the handmaiden of the mother of all genocides -- one from which the disabled were not excluded-- but even Nazi's knew when to back off, and in the early days of Hitler's consolidation of power, German families rose up to protect their disabled loved ones, and officers stopped rounding up disabled German citizens to inter them-- setting these issues apart, what did the National Socialists want, or desire to achieve, and was it even possible to alter evolutionary science in such a radical fashion? It isn't an easy question to pose, but in essence, the Fascists, too, had such a radical notion of egalitarian purity that it might have wiped itself out in a mono-biological disaster of a human efficiency model, one which threatens to return with the merger, at least, between human and machine, perhaps in a few hundred years. Life is messy. Hitler's Fascists, unlike Britons, were invested in superior efficiency models as a notion of great civilization.

It was humanity's greatest quarrel to date. The United Kingdom won at such a great price that the lines of the equally messy Islamic insurgency can be traced through it, though this seems to have hit its watermark, whatever else these soldiers for Allah have up their sleeve.

In the same vein, Lars isn't a Canadian film either, but a North Hollywood softball a nod to US selfish shallowness about what community adaptation actually means, with Patricia Clarkson as the lynchpin for accommodating a necessary delusional mechanism, with a conclusion that sails in like a beatitude on a featherbed, but that's a luxury which North Hollywood can concoct only because the British bayonet and Yankee military success at consolidating territory created it.

In these troubled times, the sense of jeremiad in the US is overblown, even if Trump pulls an upset and has a bad term in office, but it is also true that US hegemony will never again quite be what it was, and without it, the Canadian comfort zone, and its presumed benevolence, will cease to exist. Man eating lions are a succinct minority doomed to extinction, but even the dowager has her pet causes.

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"In recent years the star, suffering from Alzheimer's, revealed he was lonely."--Sara Malm

Policy analysts should respect foreign film releases as predicates, and The Horsemen is one of those which might have served as a bolt pistol extension to the brain of the 43rd president, not that our 44th is on much more hallowed ground.

One can understand Omar's vast plateau of superstardom as not contradictory to his loneliness. Who might have ameliorated that loneliness? Would primarily Caucasian westerners have braved the latter day Nubian people in their sciatic dissipation to comfort him? One of his earlier roles, little discussed, perhaps because the film was badly made, not willing to address its own implications, was as the Spanish priest in Behold A Pale Horse, about the residue of Franco's victory. Everything is over by this time-- the time of the film-- though Vietnam was still brewing in the kettle while this black and white docu-drama was assembled, and Omar's character escapes with his life. Peck's Republican partisan doesn't kill him, and the fascist forces are reluctant to antagonize the Catholic Church, giving Sharif a certain ambidextrous fluidity.

Someone in Bush'es cabinet, and why not Dr. Rice, should have consulted a humanist after the shock of 9/11 and played The Horsemen for The Decider. The .02 percent of his literate hemisphere might have listened to Omar's role as the obstinate rider. You do not invade Afghanistan if you pay attention to the coda herein, whether Russian or American. Tight lipped. 

No obituary post the evening his death made the wire. He was already an acculturated mummy entombed, despite his last major role. Unlike Bacall, Sharif was finished as a bankable name after thrillers like Juggernaut came and went. It is the thickened beat in your arteries, the Arabic everyman who never got to be himself until he was far past the age where it might have mattered.