All the rage
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- December
- 7
What is the true nature of evil? I mean, the real nature of evil?
When I was a child, the nuns used to tell us that all evil had its roots in selfishness, which I suppose is a good general way of looking at it. But I think in modern times, evil specifically is the disproportionate rage at rejection.
Read between the lines of TV’s recent sad coverage of the shooters at the Omaha mall and Virginia Tech, then go back and look at the biographies of everyone from Adolf Hitler to Lee Harvey Oswald  who haunts a Jan. 14 exploration of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on PBS’ “American Experience” â€â€to Osama bin Laden even, and you’ll see a pattern emerge. These men experienced some kind of rebuff in life  failure to get into a chosen profession, dismissal by a girlfriend, coldness on the part of the father or a daddy figure  and instead of chalking that up to life experience, they chose to visit a world of hurt on others, turning disappointment into devastation.
This has always been a great theme in the arts, and I’m sure someday some clever college professor is going to create a whole course on “the literature of rejection,” including Achilles in Homer’s “The Iliad”; Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello”; Lucifer in Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the pathetic monster in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” to name a few.
To these we can add Det. Charlie Crews on NBC’s “Life,” who on the last first-run episode of the year (the series returns in January) came dangerously close to going over the edge in his quest to right the brutal wrong that was done to him. Indeed, part of what kept you transfixed for the hour  I could barely breathe, let alone move  was watching star Damian Lewis and the writers (ah, writers!) dance on that ledge. When Charlie went after Kyle Hollis  the man who actually committed the murders for which he was sent to prison  you feared that Charlie might exact his pound of flesh by burying him alive. The level of ice-cold threat in Lewis’ performance was so riveting at the point that it was like watching in horror as someone you loved revealed a monstrous side you had never seen before. In that moment, I almost found Charlie hateful.
Of course, it all turned out to be a ruse on Charlie’s part to extract a confession from Hollis  a confession that in reality would be inadmissible in court since it was coerced. (Therefore, the other cops clapping for Charlie as the worked-over Hollis was brought into the police station seemed more than a little unrealistic.)
As fascinating as the whole episode was, with some great images  Charlie throwing the Zen tape out the window before his single-minded pursuit of Hollis; the snake with the gun inside it; Charlie cradling the long-lost Rachel (you knew it was her!) “Pietà”-style; Charlie in the car, upside-down after the accident, taking a cool-eyed shot at some bad guys  the single most important scene was the one in which Charlie met with his ex-wife and asked for her forgiveness.
In a way, it was an odd moment: She abandoned him, not vice versa. She loved him but not enough.
But forgiveness is not about the person who’s being forgiven. It’s about the person extending the forgiveness. At that moment, with Hollis in the trunk of his car, Charlie thought he might do something that would send him back to the slammer and so, decided to get right with the ex at least.
It turned out to be a step in the right direction. Another was retrieving the Zen tape from the highway. Charlie has a long road ahead. But when I think of him, I think of those lines from William Wordsworth’s “Imitations of Immortality”:
“Shades of the prison-house begin to close
“Upon the growing Boy,
“But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
“He sees it in his joy.”
This entry was posted
on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 3:01 pm by Georgette Gouveia.
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Category: American Experience, Damian Lewis, Life, PBS
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Thank you for this thoughtful view of the episode, and for so consistently supporting the show. Charlie’s earnest request for forgiveness was one of my favorite moments of the whole series so far all the more so because it was one of the rare moments of calm in a hyperventilatingly paced storm. Can’t wait for the return of the series in the new year.