They Shoot Horses Don't They?
At first I was amused and superior about it—and glad it hadn't been a long movie, it wouldn't have been worth the time. It told me nothing I didn't already know, and didn't tell as much as I did know. And it was a little trite, the “They Shoot Horses, Don't They?” bit. It looked like a statement of the problem, but no answer—just—well they shoot horses, don't they?
But it made me think what were my real reactions to the movie as I saw it? —and I began to see a logical whole and symbolism to the movie—rather effective on me, at that. The movie had a vital symbol—the outside world of the sea. The sea and the sky and the cycle of sun.
As she held the gun at herself, caught on the threshold between one death and another—he stood there, calmly, at the same threshold. And seated in the audience, we were there too.
“The sea!” I cried out loud within myself. “Look! The sea!”
He was supposed to say that—that the answer was the sea. So that something would click in her, something would turn over, and she would suddenly see the sea and realize the threshold between the two deaths was a false threshold—that it had a solution. He ought to have realized himself that the sea symbolized the solution.
For after all he had come from the vantage point of the sea—he had seen it—before allowing himself to be swept into the dance circus. And even then, once, he had looked out and seen the sun setting over the sea, white, and the sea white. The circus man thought it absolutely silly that anyone would want to look at the sun setting white over any white sea—perhaps in an idle time, but not during something as important as the marathon, not during the serious business of life!
Brilliant! The all-important, all-consuming world of man symbolized by a marathon dance.
But he let the audience down, and to his share betrayed the girl—because he failed to access the things he had seen—he failed to draw up inside himself the perspective provided by the contrast between the busy tent world and the unbusy world of the sea. The circus was a tight little world created by the busy minds of men, and unleashed like insanity on the very men who created it. For the marathon was simply insane when seen from the view of the sea, just as the sea seemed insane from the view of the tent. Neither made sense in the context of the other: they were foreign to each other. The sea was outside the world of men, physically and mentally outside it, just as it was physically and mentally outside the littler kaleidoscope of the dance.
But tragically, he didn't realize this, didn't recognize it, as he stood looking out to the sea. And so his mind was caught in the mental “false position” of “death or death”—not realizing it was all an insane mental game that, like monopoly, one could choose to quit. Quit the mental life created by men, yet not the physical life that the sea was god to. How tragic—that he was too numbed by it all, too numbed to save the girl—to shout “Look! The sea! Look at the sea!” But his senses were chaosed and worn nub by whirl of the tent world—and this is why in the brief courtroom scene (so brilliantly interjected into the movie) he could simply only stand before the judge, unable to know what to say, unable to know how to act.
In reality, he stood before the girl, unable to know what to say, unable to know how to act—morally bankrupt in a sense—in a dead position. He was helping her to commit suicide, the suicide of life—in going along with her, her partner in the dance—an accomplice—and yet never protesting—never taking a stand on behalf of the sea for her. And so his holding the gun and pulling the trigger at the end was symbolic of what he'd done the entire movie to her—helped her kill herself. And so to an extent, helped all the others.
And how apt, too, that he shot her through the head—through the mind. For that was the scene of her conflict with the mental death of the tent world created by men. It was insanity and contact with it that killed the vital life of her mind—until she was in a perpetual checkmate. There was no solution to the insane death-life of the mental tent world—since she could not recognize the outside and physical-consciousness of the sea world.
So that it was a threshold between the mental death-in-life of the world, and the unknown, other-worldly unknown, of physical death. But in the known she was in checkmate, and so had no choice.
Only, if she had seen the sea, she could have toppled over the board, pieces and all.
He ought to have shown her the sea, they ought to have walked down to it until the noise of the tent was distant, down to the sea, for the sea was outside, and a larger, new world for bandaging the mind and healing it; and though they may have been poor, maybe hungry, maybe through the hate of men have starved to death, still they would have undergone it from outside, not a part of the din and marathon of insanity.
The movie, it seems to me, had a flaw in the phrase and title “They Shoot Horses, Don't They?” The comparison fails to ring true. They shoot horses when the horse in in physical pain by injury—when it is going to otherwise die a slow painful physical death. But the death people undergo exemplified in the movie is primarily and firstly mental—and any physical misery is consequence of mental post-mortem twitches. She shoots herself because she has been mentally checkmated; the other girl throws herself into the cold shower because she, too, is mentally checkmated; the old sailor runs himself to death because he likewise has suffered mental checkmate; and the boy allows all to happen about himself because he himself is in mental check, and in a mental frozen panic.
He comes out of the tent, looks on the sea, and hates it because he now sees it from the mental framework of man busy in his jitterbug marathons.
But a mental death, mental checkmate, is not a physical death. It is not the same situation the horse is in. The horse is going to die, nothing by meadow, sea, or sun will help. But the people have an escape—if they can recognize that the dilemma is false—that they can step outside, can allow the gentle healing of their minds, and worship the god in life outside, in the sea and the sun so white setting day after day to the restful sea.
