CONDUCT UNBECOMING

My Netflix film this week was “Conduct Unbecoming” which I ordered mostly on the basis of the excellent cast (Christopher Plummer and Stacy Keach are long-standing favorites) but also on the mistaken assumption that it would follow along my India/Africa/Australia thread.

Even before the titles, there are smashingly gorgeous horse drills-- supposedly in India but obviously in Pakistan. Hmmm. Okay, I can forgive that. LOVE the horses! Then a train sequence: two young men, one indolent and beautiful and the other earnest and vulnerable. Suddenly we’re on a stage set -- an OBVIOUS stage set with actor’s in greasepaint -- and the dialogue is clearly stage dialogue. Okay, so now maybe this is going to be a kind of Oscar Wilde play. But it’s clearly not on the level of “The Jewel in the Crown” which won’t come along for another decade. Even “Flames Trees of Thika” is 1981. (Elspeth Huxley’s “father” is serving in India in “Conduct Unbecoming” -- he looks so much like everyone’s idea of cavalry.)

“Conduct Unbecoming” gets to the screen in 1975 but began as a stage play some years earlier. It is the second movie adapted from a Barry England work, the first being a book called “Figures in a Landscape” in which two men flee from a black helicopter for unknown reason. Talk about archetypes. Everyone liked the first one better than the second, but you’d never know it from the voice-overs on this DVD, which explains nothing and simply goes on and on about the famous actors and how great they are in these “difficult” scenes.

The plot is thin: the careless narcissist young man is accused of rape (though no one actually says there WAS a rape, just an “attack”) and his idealistic friend is forced to defend him. Crushing authority is brought to bear, lots of talk about honor, and in the end the mystery cheats: it all but pulls a rubber face off the villain to show he is someone else. This is not “Breaker Morant.” Neither plot nor performances come anywhere close, let alone landscape.

The crucial and supposedly riveting bit of symbolism is that the company traditionally gets drunk and chases a “stuffed” pig on wheels around while the men pursue it with sabers. Not only does a buzzer ring when they stick their sabers into the boar’s anus, but when they pierce him all over his rump, feathers fly out as though we were a pillow. The attacker of women has done the same thing to their rearends, though evidently they are not equipped with buzzers and feathers. The testifying victim, Susannah York, was wearing a pale yellow dress with pink silk roses in strategic spots, including her bottom, where the pale silk admirably showed up a heart-shaped blood stain. In the just previous scene she was in widow’s black, which would not have shown the stain which looks rather, well, menstrual.

I’m not a big fan of deconstruction, but this one is so easy that it’s almost irresistible. This is not about India or cavalry or even honor. It’s a young boy’s story about English boarding school with all the fascination with bottoms and horror over women’s bleeding. I’m surprised there were no spankings. It’s big boys preying on little boys and hazing newbies, all in the name of the honor of the school, of course. The victims of anal attack in these schools are simply pretty boys -- along the same lines as the fascination with prison rape Americans have. Therefore, the heroics of someone like the York character who will defend the innocent is enormously appealing. There’s no real sex scene because little boys don’t really know about such things. Likewise, the women are puppets. No wonder the critics were nervous and the actors and director must insist on how brilliant the performances. “Look over there!” Distraction. Susannah York, now wearing lilac silk, on her hands and knees, crawling towards the camera and sneering “pig, pig!”

So often things are not about what they seem to be about. It’s like dreams, where one person represents another or an animal represents a concept. Snakes, bears, cats, and so on. In our more recent times we are more willing to peel off the disguises, go a little deeper, try to see what’s at bottom (sorry). But we can still be distracted.

The news tonight is about Senator Craig of Idaho. (And you thought this was going to be a movie review!) Bless Barney Frank (Barney Frank for President!) who is willing to look at reality and who survived his own de-closeting to be elected as his real authentic self. Talk about honor. He had some very interesting things to say about Craig’s “conduct unbecoming”. He pointed out that in the first place the offense was indeed NOT being gay. The protestations have been many and vigorous, especially from Craig himself, who is so phobic on the subject that one cartoon had him claiming he didn’t even use Bengay.

But as Barney Frank points out, the offense was “DISORDERLY conduct.” It was not that the poor man craved sex with someone of his own gender, but that he was doing it in an inappropriate place and way. No one wants to go to secluded facilities only to be confronted with someone else’s intimate behavior. As kids yell at heavy neckers, “If you’re in love, go rent a room.” But, of course, it had nothing to do with love.

Why would a senator engage in such silliness as toe-tapping and sole-nudging in an airport bathroom? I’d guess along these lines -- and, of course, they’re only guesses. (And, of course, those signals are now rendered useless, laughable. The comedians must be overjoyed to have such material.)

First of all, flying and being in airports are identity-destroying. One is so anonymous, so aware of possible danger and at the same time in such a suspended banal state, that parts of oneself that are normally controlled might come out. It’s a sort of hypnogogy, that floating state just before sleep. An anonymity, even a liminality. Smart people make sure they have work to do, even if it’s nothing but needlepoint.

Second, to be a public servant like a senator, one is constantly controlled, always presenting a front, always being critiqued by party coaches or staff. Sooner or later, one’s subconscious is going to want OUT, to demand some assertion of personhood, some small defiance. And yet a senator lives in such a bubble that they aren’t even aware of what any high school kid knows: public bathrooms are natural stakeouts for cops.

Third, this kind of behavior is addictive because, like shop-lifting, the possibility of getting caught provides a kick of adrenaline, a true -- if self-generated -- drug. People who like politics love adrenaline.

Barney Frank got caught paying for an “escort” and many other government figures have been fingered as using “het” paid companions. As Frank is correct to point out, such commercial intimate arrangements are usually addressed with snickers and forgiveness so long as they are cross-gender. Even J. Edgar Hoover... the cross-dresser. The reason that heterosexual people don’t get caught playing lavatory footsie in bathrooms is because the bathrooms are separate.

What gagged many about Craig was his hypocrisy in attacking gays. He was masked, he was two people, and there was not even a ghastly incident of seeing a close friend de-sexed to split his personality with post-trauma, as there was in this movie, “Conduct Unbecoming.” In the movie the offender is expected to commit suicide, a little boy’s solution for a semi-sexual crime that resulted in no deaths and should have been addressed with compassion and therapy. It was not so much conduct unbecoming as it was conduct disillusioning in both the movie and real life. The women in the movie WERE pigs, if unusually pretty. And they were hurt, but not fatally. The police action in the bathroom WAS very close to entrapment. The reaction to the incident has been far too dramatic and excessive. But there have been so many of these incidents that no amount of distraction is going to save the Religious Right from reality.

Possibly Craig wanted out of his political role and his subconscious gave him a way. A resignation is a kind of small suicide. Of course, in a movie the events end when the movie ends. It’s an intimate event that we pay for and then it’s over. Political resignation leaves everyone alive, but the real consequence, one would hope, would be a better reality that persists a long time.