This afternoon, while I was grading, I looked up, hearing in the background the great speech at the end of The Caine Mutiny, addressing the Fred McMurray character. He’s a writer – one of those articulate intellectuals Shannon describes. I wouldn’t argue that Shannon doesn’t have a point, but I think that speech points to what lies beneath the weakness of such men’s arguments. The writer is an observer, a voyeur, in the world of the Navy. He posits theories, in this case condescending toward the Humphrey Bogart character, clearly of a lower class and with limited education, but a man who has been willing to act in the Navy when few did. Applying the fount of so much theory of a half century ago (Freud) to him, McMurray found him inadequate. But the writer wasn’t even willing to take responsibility for those words. On the stand, he hemmed and hawed – and lied. Neither the men who mutinied nor the captain escaped because they made decisions – some wrong-headed. They were accountable. He was not: except in one brief, drunken speech by the defendant’s lawyer, a man who is ashamed to have made the ship’s commander come apart on the stand, but who realizes that is his responsibility to get his client acquitted.
Words were once commitments – our integrity rode on our ability to live up to those words. This is no longer true – that movie of a half century ago followed in the path of those like Prufrock, who see their lives as revised and revised again. We are not committed by our vows, by our loyalties, by our words.
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