Manchester By the Sea: On the Lip of an Abyss

There is a central scene in Manchester By the Sea, when Randi (Michelle Williams) seeks to console her ex-husband Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), assuring him he is not to blame for the personal holocaust that lay behind them, and hoping to make amends for the accusations she has hurled at him. It is an all but impossible task for both of them. Neither is quite able to look each other in the eye, but it took an astute young future filmmaker of my acquaintance to point out that one of the great feats of direction here is Lee’s inability to take his eyes off the infant in the carriage, a child of Randi’s remarriage.

Only infants and children are not guilty or accusing. No one else—none of the adults—in the story seems able to look anyone in the eye for long. Characters talk at each other, over each other, missing each other’s points. Incessantly, so that there is (at least for this aging viewer) an oppressive sense of perpetual conflict, of disjointedness verging on violence. These are redeemed—I mean that in the religious sense—by scenes of incandescent beauty: crystalline skies; a charming New England town encrusted in winter; seagulls pinwheeling in a grey mist over the water; crooked gravestones in snow; boats bobbing in the pier, heaving gently as if in slumber, or meditation; and always the sea. These are backed by a soundtrack of choral and string music—forgiving and benedictory.

Manchester By the Sea is a masterpiece of storytelling, a profound meditation on suffering, death and beauty. The horrific tragedy at the heart of this story (no spoilers here, go see the movie), singes everyone in this drama—with the exception, perhaps, of 16-year old Patrick, whose fate following his father’s death from congestive heart failure forms the plot of the film. But it has entirely consumed Lee, Patrick’s uncle. It has devoured him. He is a shattered soul, a walking ruin. Death, unadorned and unromanticized, is everywhere in this film. Lee is already walking dead, and his brother’s passage is only an occasion for dutifully tying up loose ends. “What’s he look like,” Patrick asks when Lee comes to his school to inform him of the death. “He looks dead,” Lee says. “Not bad. Just….dead.” Patrick’s father cannot be buried until spring so he rests in a frozen vault at the morgue.  “I don’t like him being in a freezer,” Patrick protests. “I don’t either,” Lee says. “But we can’t do anything about it. It’s the way it is.”

Lee’s brother has left behind a will making him Patrick’s guardian, but it’s a responsibility Lee—given the ruin he has become—cannot think about shouldering. Patrick (Lucas Hedges), handsome, impish and gentle, is the only one in the film free of the somber curse that hangs over the story. He is buoyantly alive, the source of the film’s best humor. As he boasts to his uncle who wants him to move to Boston, he has a life to live in Manchester: he’s on the hockey team, he has two girlfriends (one he has sex with and one with whom he is mainly doing “basement business,” as he explains to his uncle. “What’s that mean?” Lee asks. “It means I’m working on it”), and he plays in a rock band (an atrociously bad one). Scolding his uncle for being unable to make casual small talk with the mother of one of those girlfriends (the one he’s working on), Patrick has no problem at all speaking directly. “You can’t make boring adult conversation for a few minutes? Like `Hey, how ‘bout those fucking interest rates?’”

The resolution of this conflict (sorry, you won’t get that here, either) will not be the one we might find sentimentally satisfying; but it will be the one that works, in a human way.

In just that way does Manchester render its blessing on this story of human woe. They are trying, these characters, to work it out under a gunmetal sky, hemmed in by the sea, in the teeth of death. The guilt that consumes them, that renders them unable to look each other in the eye, may be the awareness that they haven’t deserved the beauty that surrounds them. Yet one of those redemptive scenes is a human one: gathering in the church for Patrick’s father’s funeral, family and friends and folks from the town do not hesitate to greet each other honestly—smiling, consoling, comforting, embracing. The art and craft of life is learning how to live on the lip of an abyss; mostly it’s a mess or a comedy show, and some of us fall off. But sometimes, in the right light, its beautiful.

A Letter to the Religious Right

Nearly forty years ago Jerry Falwell Sr. emerged on the national stage, a happy warrior and leader of a movement that would become the Moral Majority. It was a movement that seemed at once to stand outside, over and above, what it considered to be a degenerating culture, demanding that it reform itself. At the same time, it was engaged, with its feet planted firmly on the ground and determined to win over not just the hearts and minds of the public, but seats in the House and the Senate.
   Even for those of us who couldn’t quite get on board with their agenda, Falwell’s movement was difficult to criticize. Here were Christians who took their faith seriously enough to take it, as it were, to the streets. I was 20 in 1980. I had been raised in a Methodist church and religious faith has always been important to me, something I have never quite relinquished even during slack periods when doubt and indifference overtake me. I was a “deacon” of the ecumenical church at my small liberal arts school. I thought briefly of going into the ministry (a bad idea Im very glad I never acted on) and thought more seriously about studying academic theology (something I wish to this day I had done).
   As a Methodist I absorbed the ethic of doing good works (“Do all the good that you can, wherever you can, whenever you can.”) As a college student I thrilled to my undergraduate dose of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Christianity I was attracted to was concerned with social justice. The historical Jesus I knew was the Jesus whose concern was always the poor, outcasts, the marginalized, including women (especially widows who had it very bad in his day). It continues to be baffling, in fact, how anyone can read the gospels and come away with any other portrait. It was a faith that claimed for Christ the whole of human experience, the repair of the world so that the community of man would mirror the Kingdom of God, nothing less. The faith of Falwell and the religious right, in contrast, seemed to takes its stand on a narrow beachhead of personal salvation and private behavior, still more narrowly circumscribed to the area of sexuality. It seemed, and seems to me now, an enormous retreat.
   But Falwell and his movement made its mark and it clearly resonated with millions who felt that the values that had built America were being shuffled off.  It captured the attention of Ronald Reagan, and was a vital component of the conservative Republican revival. In any social history of late 20^th century America, the “religious right” had earned a chapter all to themselves.
   In time, there would be slips in the façade that seemed to confirm what some of us thought of the movement—as when Falwell suggested that the 9/11 attacks were America’s retribution for a culture of abortion and homosexuality. Now, in the aftermath of the ugliest political campaign in our history, a humiliation of international proportions in which you the public leaders of the “religious right” fell (with some notable exceptions) one by one into line with Donald Trump—today I and people like me, of every shade of faith and skepticism, wonder, quite literally, how you look yourselves in the mirror.
   Where does one begin? It ought to be entirely sufficient to mention simply that the candidate you backed has exhibited—not just during his campaign, but throughout his adult life and career in the public eye—every sort of behavior that decent parents admonish their children to avoid. A loudmouth, a braggart, a bully, a crybaby who is insulted easily, yet easily and breezily insults, a compulsive liar. And you know the laundry list of recent revelations—the jilting of contractors and employees, the claims against Trump University, the bankruptcies, the failed casinos and businesses—you know the list and you ignored it all. Of course, there is the famous Access Hollywood tape that captured your candidate’s distinctive style with women; that’s the one that caused Paul Ryan and other Republicans to be (briefly) shocked, shocked, and prompted Ralph “Family Values” Reed to pronounce Trump—using that conscienceless, value-free label so emblematic of baby-boomer moral neutrality—“inappropriate.”
   But honest to God, who is so sweetly naïve as to have been honestly surprised to learn that this man is a coarse, crude, vulgar reptilian? Boys will be boys—right?—and now the episode barely registers (a measure, itself, of political degeneracy). But some things do stand out and retain their capacity to take the breath away (at least for those of us capable of shock and shame). Trump’s mockery of a disabled reporter is one—perhaps because it was captured on video and replays itself in the mind like a traumatic memory. Maybe you take your lead from Ann (“Godless: The Church of Liberalism”) Coulter who rationalized that Trump was merely mimicking a “generic retard.”
   Is that how you explain this to your children?
   Or take Trump’s astonishingly, brazenly dishonest description of an altercation that took place, late in the campaign, during a rally at which President Obama was speaking. A veteran stood up and began heckling the president; predictably, some people in the crowd booed, attempting to silence him. But Obama lightly scolded the crowd and insisted the man, who served the country, had a right to have his say. The exchange was, of course, videotaped and can be viewed online.
   Later at his own rally—also, of course, videotaped and easily accessible--Trump described the exchange saying the President was “screaming” at the veteran, and called Obama’s behavior a “disgrace.” 
   Spend even just a minute or two to meditate on this: Trump made a patently false, publicly defamatory pronouncement about the President’s behavior during a rally that he knew (as all of us know now about virtually everything that doesn’t happen in the deepest warrens of our own homes) would be videotaped and widely available on the web. He made this statement (at a rally he also knew was being recorded) either not knowing what the President actually said or did; or he made it knowing exactly what the President said and did, and lied anyways. In either case--and this is really the important thing--he didn't care.   

   Do you care? Evidently not. Are you ashamed of not caring? I guess not. Does it matter to you what this behavior, when it is endorsed or overlooked by moralists such as you, does to the entire understanding of public truth? Evidently not.

   Spare me, spare all of us, your prevarications about Hillary Clinton. Drop it. There are countless ways you might have approached this travesty of a campaign without endorsing Mrs. Clinton and salvaged your integrity.

“We the public leaders of the contemporary Christian conservative political movement (the so-called `religious right’) urge Americans of faith to vote their conscience. However, we feel obligated to state that this entire campaign, and these candidates—both of them—are the rotten fruit of a political culture that is shot to pieces. This ruin has been a long-time in the making, with blame to go around on all sides (however much we as conservatives may feel that the great bulk of blame lay on the other side) and is ultimately rooted in a larger, broader culture degeneration which the founders of our political movement first began to point to nearly 40 years ago. Whatever the outcome of this election, Christians of all shades of belief must come together afterward to work to repair our democratic Republic.”

But no. Listen to William “Book of Virtues” Bennet on Fox News who said that Republicans who opposed Trump “suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.” How else to translate this except as follows: manners, civility, the norms of civilized discourse, are all an elitist affectation, unrelated to the substance of our politics, and irrelevant in judging the fitness of any candidate.

   On that note, by the way, would any of you dare to look anyone in the eye and say that your candidate would have been as gracious in defeat as Hillary Clinton was, and as Barack Obama, who endured eight years of nihilistic obstruction, continues to be? Right…Don’t even bother. Just move on and let that one go.  
   Mr. “Death of Outrage” Bennet was clearly cashing in on the current stock, lately risen so high, around the notion that “elitism”—which evidently includes commonplace and traditionally understood instincts toward civility and truth-saying—is what afflicts our politics. Yet nowhere among the conservative media outlets have I read anything remotely as sympathetic to Trump’s supporters as Larissa Macfarquhar’s article, “In Trump Country,” in The New Yorker—that citadel of the Manhattan literary and intellectual elite.  Read it--there is not a trace of that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension that sometimes characterizes liberal-left attitudes toward the underclass; it is an authentically sympathetic, even admiring, portrait of Trump supporters in rural West Virginia.
   By the way, I believe that your candidate should—as Mrs. Clinton suggested—be given a chance, despite my foreboding. He’s big on infrastructure (name a candidate who isn't) and everyone will smile if gets some bridges repaired. And, let us acknowledge: the man likes to build things. The nation needs a grand project (the interstate highway system, the Apollo space mission) to inspire it again.  So maybe your candidate will incite some clever entrepreneurs and engineers to throw a great string of gondolas across the West Virginia mountains, creating a monumental statewide park that will attract millions of tourists, hikers and campers to that beautiful state, employing tens of thousands of state residents and helping to rekindle a national awareness of Appalachian history and culture. And maybe he will couple this great national project with a massive infusion of public dollars for mental health and substance abuse treatment to battle the off-the-charts opioid epidemic there. 
   (I just made that up sitting at the laptop. You tell us what the New York City real estate mogul with the trophy wives intends to do for those people in Larissa Macfarquhar’s portrait.)
   Maybe he will be successful, or less disastrous than some of us fear. Perhaps inertia and the stuck forces everywhere (inertia plus stuck forces = “reality”) will rein in the man’s crazier impulses. Perhaps he won’t launch a nuclear war on a whim when he has a bad hair day and can’t find his I-phone. Perhaps someone sane will urge him to give the heave-ho to the unsanitary figures around him (Roger Stone, Steve Bannon). Maybe he will surprise us all, and all of the drama on Facebook and Broadway theaters will be shown to be so much foolishness.  Perhaps, who knows, your man will end up someday engraved on the side of Mt. Rushmore, his trousers down, seated on the crapper and studying his I-phone, his brow furrowed in mid-tweet—a final, enduring, case-closing rebuke to elites everywhere: This is who we are, get over it.
   Or not. Where will you hide your shame when it becomes clear that those tiny bones he tossed to the working class during the campaign will be all they will ever get, as your man stocks his cabinet with billionaire businessmen? Shamelessness. That’s the key to getting by for the next four years with your candidate who was forced to shell out millions to striving regular folks defrauded in his “University,” and as the revelations about his many conflicted interests emerge. Reach for the most shameless excuses as his curious crush on Vladimir Putin evolves, with ominous consequences for the NATO alliance and the Baltic states you would otherwise be howling at Democrats for having “lost.” Shamelessness is what will enable you to hold your head up when the peculiar childishness of this man’s temperament begins to unnerve the closed circle around him, and he careens from one drama to the next, punctuating the reality show with angry, semi-literate tweets composed at 3 am and aimed at whoever has not—in the Trump parlance strikingly reminiscent of a first-grader coming home from school in tears—been “nice” to him.
   Shamelessness, no need to hide anything. After all, you hold all the cards. The executive branch, both houses of Congress, a majority of governorships and state legislatures—all this along with your gerrymandered congressional districts, your multi-million-dollar megaphone at Fox News, the Koch Brothers, and legions of one-percenters determined keep employed those legislators in Congress whom Garrison Keillor called “Christian pirates with their hands on the tax levers.”
   Many of us—whose patriotism you would readily impugn if it was advantageous to do so—do indeed feel profoundly afraid for our country. Resentment toward our fellow citizens who voted for Donald Trump is not the way out, but for you, the leaders of a movement that has claimed for 40 years to champion the cause of character, integrity and values in our politics, there will be no forgetting and no forgiveness.
   There is a tremendous liberation that comes with finally seeing things as they are, at finally seeing you and your “movement” in all its naked shamelessness for what it is. Moreover, some of us will hold on to an assurance that, in fact, you are not the future. Now when the attendant of the man of God had risen early and gone out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was circling the city. And his servant said to him, "Alas, my master! What shall we do?" He answered, “Fear not, for there are more of us than there are of them.”
   There are more of us than there are of you. Here is the nub of what I have to say: you will never, ever again lecture Americans about the need for character and integrity in our leaders without being met by the rolling thunder of derisive laughter followed by the silence of contemptuous disregard. You have won another battle, congratulations. You have lost your war.