When was the last time you saw a movie involving a train? Really. There hasn't been a serious train movie in a long time. There are airplane movies and car movies, and 'Speed' was certainly a bus movie. No trains. This dearth of train movies tells us something about our culture. To see this you need to go back and watch some train movies. But let me be clear what I mean by a train movie. I am not sure 'Strangers on a Train', the famous Hitchcock movie, counts. Sure, the real action takes place on a train, but the train travel does little but structure the time in which the narrative takes place. I think the same can be said for the every wonderful 'Some Like it Hot'. In these movies if the train itself plays any role it is affording a place where two (or more) people who would otherwise not have met can meet. In this regard any other sort of public transport, could fill in...buses or planes, perhaps even boats (in the era of the reborn cruise ship). Train movies, movies that MUST involve trains, are about something else all together. They are, at their core, about human freedom, or the lack of it.
This new fixation on train movies began when I rented 'The Train', directed by John Frankenheimer (and since the guy at the video store asked, its one of his good ones, clearly the same director as 'The Manchurian Candidate' (the original), and starring Burt Lancaster as a French railwayman in Nazi occupied France. The movie begins in Paris days before the Allied re-taking of the city. The problem is that no one in town knows how many days until the Allied forces come into town. While the paintings at the Jeu de Paume (a sublime modernist collection, including Renoir, Picasso, Braque, et al) have been saved by bombing they have not been saved from the clutches of a sublimely calculating Nazi colonel who has decided to box them up and put them on a train to Germany. He argues that their value can be traded for arms, but one suspects he wants them for his very own and takes them because he can. The French curator of the museum argues to the resistance that these paintings represent the very soul of France. If they leave the country so does national pride. Lancaster, who manages the railyard at Orsay, has a hard time signing on to any mission to retake the paintings. (It is an interesting historical fact that in fact the paintings at the Jeu de Paume were moved to the new Musee d'Orsay built in that old train station.) After a series of events, he changes his mind. None of this plot needs to involve trains. What does is the struggle to take the art work back. Here the workings of the railroad itself represent the chess match between Lancaster and the Nazi Colonel. Lancaster knows the way trains work, the way the railroad works, he knows the way the Nazi mind works. The Nazi Colonel is no idiot. He knows the system too -- the way trains work, the way the railroad works, the way Lancaster's mind works. The train and the railroad represent the rules that structure our lives. These rules are put to use oppressing the French. The question is whether the French can use those same rules to effect their liberation. The thrill of the movie is the thrill of a chess match: all the possible moves are pre-determined. What is not clear is how the moves will be played out, and whether they will work -- that is, whether the opponent will see the move when it comes.
This is what is special about train movies. Trains run on tracks, tracks that are laid out on a particular path, with switches that determine when the train can be diverted from one path to another. Trains thus lay bare the ways in which human beings are constrained in their actions. We might be able to make choices, but the sorts of choices we have available are limited. Sometimes our interests run up against those of others and we have to really think through how we are to act. Trains also pose for us the question of how determined we are to act as we do. Take 'La Bete Humaine', the movie version of Zola's novel that tells for us the story of a recidivist alcoholic. We cannot help but think that the central character can choose to act differently, but the movie tests us again and again, making us wonder whether human beings might, just as is an animal, be determined to act as it does by the desires and appetites it finds itself experiencing. The idea that human beings do not have a free will but are just as determined in our actions as any other part of the natural world is represented on screen by the trainyard in which our hero works. There is shot after shot of train tracks extending off into the distance, determining just where the trains will go and how they will get there. A human being is no different from these trains on their tracks, the movie suggests.
There is a third movie to consider in this vein -- Runaway Train. The movie stars Jon Voight in a tremendous performance as a convict kept chained in his cell with no human contact for three years. He wins a constitutional suit, gets moved back into the prison population, and proceeds immediately to escape into the winter wasteland of Alaska. He manages to make it to a trainyard, where he hops a train whose driver proceeds to die of a heartattack. The train is a runaway. Just when Voight thinks he has gained his freedom he finds he is trapped on a train careening down the tracks. The train is destined to go to oblivion. There is a sense in which Voight is meant to represent the human condition. We have an illusion of freedom even though our course is determined. But what is interesting here are the small ways in which Voight acts and creates ephemeral moments where he makes this course his own. He takes what he is given, and how he is propelled forward, and where is bound to end up and still manages to move in his own way, and so to taste the every elusive freedom.
What does it say about our culture today that there haven't been any train movies in such a long time? Is it that we don't think about what it is to choose anymore? Is it that the problem of how to choose wisely isn't with us? Is it that we are resigned to determinism? Or content with an illusion of freedom? What think you?
