#88: Ivan The Terrible, Parts I & II

(originally published Oct. 4, 2011)

Part I

In 1996, while I was at Johns Hopkins University, a student I knew committed murder. He shot another student—once in the head, then once in the chest—before surrendering himself. This happened on campus. At the time, I worked as an editor for the school paper, the News-Letter. Someone rushed into the office—it was the middle of Wednesday evening, and we were laying out the paper—and announced the news, and our editor-in-chief started shouting, “What happened?  What’s going on?”

Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part I seeks to explain, perhaps, how a person becomes ruthless. Ivan, at first, doesn’t seem so terrible. Ivan is horrified when the Tartars shoot down the captives Ivan has strung up on the battlements than surrender them to “the uncircumsized ones.”

Eisenstein suggests three things that may have prompted the change:

Ivan is beset on all sides by sinister profiles, all German Expressionistic shadows and angles. When Ivan, nearly dead from illness, asks the boyars to pledge allegiance to his son, they turn away, one by one, and this betrayal is almost too much to bear. The illness itself may have affected his brain. Or perhaps it was the death of love—his wife, Anastasia, poisoned by politicking boyars, though, historically, her actual cause of death is unknown.

We may never know what drives someone over the edge.

Part II

In the months after the shooting at Hopkins, psychologists diagnosed the killer with numerous personality disorders. In going through the emails of the two young men, the police found an odd, quasi-Victorian formality to them: “We once again revealed and expressed ourselves to deeper levels and found profound joy in our bond.” It was strongly hinted, but never proven, that the two had had some sort of sexual contact. Months before the murder, the killer sent a message to his victim: “I’ve cried out for your assistance, presence and help…. You know I’m a private person, very much an introvert, and when finally I wish to talk, to be silenced by one’s friend really hurts.” And, on the day of the killing, he wrote in his journal, “This was a violation of me, my rights, and my dignity. But I was embarrassed and kind of humiliated and afraid, and I didn’t want to destroy a good friendship over some act [in] which he overstepped his bounds.”

Ivan the Terrible, Part II sees Ivan succumbing to loneliness. His movements are arch; he extends and cranes his neck like a bird, pecking at crumbs. He draws his oprichniks close—his iron band—but they only aid his spiral into paranoia, isolation, summary executions. Stalin, upon screening the film, summoned Eisenstein. “Ivan the Terrible was very cruel,” Stalin told him. “You can depict him as a cruel man, but you have to show why he had to be cruel.”

Eisenstein died of a heart attack before he could complete the trilogy.

I wonder if the answers are in that third film: how a man becomes cruel, how he becomes a killer.

Part III

#87: Alexander Nevsky

(originally published Sept. 21, 2011)

Today marks the end of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. I remember when Bill Clinton issued the directive. I had just started college and attending meetings of the gay student organization. DADT, at the time, was a terribly disappointing compromise, though, in retrospect, necessary. Clinton’s promise to repeal the ban altogether would never have passed, given the hostile climate in Congress and from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I came to know two gay ROTC members: a short, curly-haired lesbian from Georgia, Noel, and Patrick, a good-looking blonde. They took pride in their service but knew the possibly consequences if they were ever discovered. I imagine them marching in uniform the way I’ve seen ROTC students practice their formations on campus nowadays. I never knew what become of Noel—she transferred to another school—and Patrick hinted that his military career would continue after graduation. In The Best American Short Stories 2006, Tobias Wolff’s story, “Awaiting Orders,” deals with DADT. In it, an army sergeant hesitates calling his boyfriend a ‘partner.’ His fears of discovery and blackmail overcome his desire to reach out to the sister of a deployed soldier. I wonder if this is what life was like for Noel and Patrick. The need to hide.

The end of the policy came with little fanfare, which was what the military had wanted. Just another day in the war machine. In the media, however, there’s been a small flurry of stories: a Navy lieutenant who wed his partner at the stroke of midnight in Vermont to mark the end of the ban; soldiers coming out to their comrades, superiors and families; remembrances of soldiers who could not.

The damage has already been done, though.

Late in Alexander Nevsky, the scene that follows the kinetic battle on the iced-over Lake Chudskoye slows the film to plaintive pace. Prokofiev’s score takes an operatic note. Eisenstein scholar David Bordwell calls the music a “threnody.” Wounded and dying soldiers, German and Russian alike, lie heaped upon the ice, and Eisenstein tracks across them diagonally. One lifts his head momentarily before crumpling face-down. On the ice, torches appear, carried by women who peer into the faces of the fallen. One man rises long enough to say, “Maria.” As the women move from body to body, another soldier says, “Izaslavna.” Another:  “Anastasia.” “Sister.” Wives, family members, all of their beloved: their last breaths. On the field of battle, a mother collapses on a body lying in the snow.

All the years the ban was in effect—how many gay soldiers weren’t able to speak the name of their beloved, even at death? Who carried torches for them? Who was allowed to mourn them? This was the real tragedy of the policy: silence. Even in grief.

Sgt. Leonard Matlovich, the first gay servicemember to fight the ban, had this inscribed on his tombstone: “When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”