March 01, 2006
My philosophy professor passed on to me The Man On The Train, Walker Percy's essay on alienation; I had enquired about it after reading thje following short synopsis in Lewis A. Lawson's The Cinema As Cave:
Since the present is the locus of alienation, then one anticipates a radically better future or attempts to identify that point in the past at which one became alienated (Lewis 85).
That sounded so similar to the thematic content of Patrice Leconte's wonderful film of almost the same name, L'homme du train (2002), that I wondered if Percy's essay might have been the basis for a sort of idealogical adaptation. Reading the essay itself didn't really dispel this, but it also suggested the possibility that these similarities may be a coincidence rooted in a developing iconography. Which is a fancy way of saying: the very idea of the Man On A Train is a cliche. It is an archetype not of character but of context, and one that both filmmaker and author might turn to as a means of succinct and immediate expression of a certain concept.
Thus, a man on a train is conceptual shorthand for existential alienation vis a vis transience; the sight of a woman standing alone on a train platform will telegraph stoic heartbreak; put a man and a woman together in a train car, and - well, you get Hitchcock.
Matt Zoller Seitz's feature film Home opens in NYC this week at the Pioneer Theater. I can, rather shamefully, only vouch for the first two thirds of it; it was the one film I didn't finish watching at the Dallas Video Festival last summer. Physical health be damned, I wish I'd stayed; that first hour has stuck with me since then, and I'm envious of all you New Yorkers who have the chance to see it - in its entirety - this week.
Posted by David Lowery at March 1, 2006 01:29 AM