Musings on an Independent Muse

Brando is dead, although he still made some news the other day, as questions over who first broke the story of his death swirled about the Net. Our fascination with him will eventually fade into a background leitmotif…because in so many ways, and roles, he was the quintessential all-American rebel, itself a primal leitmotif of our culture. “What are you rebelling against?” he was asked in “The Wild One.” “What have you got?” he answered.

Now, of course, he was just acting. But he wasn’t, either. He made the choices he made to play the roles he played and that is as much a part of him as any particular acting skills or looks or poses.

There was something so…Brandoesque…that he died right on Independence Day. He might have been pathological or philosophical about his acting, depending on your point of view. But he was independent. Tormented, maybe, but free, too. And that’s what made him so American about it, so warts and all.

And Americans loved him for it. For the proudness of his freedom to do as he liked. For both the good and the bad of Independence: the strength and the loneliness, the anger he faced and faced up to when he acted different than the norm.

He was the rebel and the wild one. Just going. In a tradition of the mountain men, or of the paratroopers who couldn’t stand a return to post war suburbia and started the Hell’s Angels. That whiff of the violence and the freedom that even the men in their gray flannel suits could taste, just a bit, when they’d loosen their narrow ties and knock back martinis after work. And so they could relate to him, admire him, go sit in the dark to see his movies and think to themselves, when asked where they were going in their lives, “we just go.”

That was Brando young. The rebel on the bike. And America young, too. Strong and virile, basking in the unreflective glory of atom-bomb dropping triumph. No regrets, no looking back, no moral complexity there.

Then the second act. Apocalypse Now. Bloated, lord of the Empire, in the stinking, all-too-reflective jungles, mad as Kurtz. The man who had gone too far. As if War itself was not already too far for the civilized sensibilities of those who have never been in one. The beast in the Jungle who gets to the very heart of the matter, scrawling in his journal, "drop the bomb--exterminate them all."

America’s second act, too. The one where we could only bask in the glow of napalm and millions dead and in the uneasy uncertainty about the outcome. Did we stop the Chinese from expanding throughout Southeast Asia? Some say yes, some no. Even today we can not know for sure. We can never know for sure. But if you want to start a real barroom brawl, just try bringing it up again, Vietnam, and see how clearly there is no clear analysis still. But there was Brando again, a mirror of independence, showing the only rational solution to waging a civilianized war, the unsavory practice of genocide. The philosophical breakthrough of realizing that you can do whatever you want to! Small wonder he sent a Native American to the Oscars, when you think of it in that light.

And the Don. He will always be known for the Don. Who is not more independent than a mob chieftain who lives by a rigorous code outside the law? Who dies peacefully at home, all the while having set in motion events that will leave havoc, vengeance and bloody devastation to all whom he loved. The Karma of killing, the wheel of vengeance that turns back onto you.

What he showed us, naked and painful to see, are the three stages of freedom: the unrestrained liberty of youth with its promise of personal joy and free love chaffing at the restrictions of the greater society; the absolute power of the “superman” no longer drawn by love into any commune with his fellows and so free of any moral and ethical restraints; and finally the relentless demands of this freedom, turned into a strict outlaw code whose inevitable consequence is isolation, loneliness and death and devastation.

The horror of power, so difficult to leave go of once you’ve got it. But Brando was always letting go of his power. Letting go of being the Brando we expected him to be. That was great, really great. For that alone he deserves a prize.

Always ignoring sage advice, Brando took chances and experienced his freedom. How else to explain his wacky behavior and his overindulgence. And then, just to highlight the crazy astral convergence of it all, Takeryu, “The Tsunami” Kibayashi, 26, broke his own hot-dog eating record that very weekend, stuffing 53 down his gullet…

Brando, I am sure, would have approved, even though his overeating so clearly cut his life short…at age 80. ¶ 3:12 PM