I’m taking a break from my ‘Secret City’ series because the following happened to me a few weeks ago, with rumblings into this month, and it all captured my imagination.
Towards the end
of February, I watched a movie on Hoopla, called The Pledge (2001). I
chose the movie because it starred Jack Nicholson, who I consider a great actor,
but the movie also had cameos by Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave, and Sam Shephard,
giants in their profession also. To top it off, the movie was directed by Sean
Penn. How could I go wrong? Well, I didn’t.
In summary,
without spoiling things for those who might want to watch the movie (which is
not your typical Hollywood production and didn’t do all that well at the box
office, but I liked it very much) an aging detective on the cusp of retirement joins
another detective at the scene of a child murder. The almost retired detective
goes to inform the parents and promises them he will find the murderer. Things
get more and more complicated for our aging detective as he refuses to believe
in the first suspect, discovers other clues, goes fishing, meets new people, senses
the real murderer is near, and becomes so obsessed that he crosses moral lines.
We were still
in the midst of Covid, the attack on Ukraine was ongoing, the weather here was
frightful, I couldn’t travel and didn’t go out much or see friends. A recipe
for depression perhaps, and envy of those who were flying to warmer parts.
The movie
interested me so much, however, that I embarked on what I call an adventure of
the mind. I often do this to a greater or lesser degree when a book I read, a
story I hear about, or an incident in the news sends me off on further
exploration.
I looked up the
background of the film: it is based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novella The
Pledge: Requiem for a Detective. This is available online for free as a PDF
if you’re interested in reading it. It’s somewhat differently structured from
the 2001 film, some of the characters are different as are details, but it
keeps a lot of the main parts.
Dürrenmatt
believed that fictional detective novels should show the absurdity of real life
rather than being like a mathematical or other puzzle with a satisfactory
solution. He once said, “You set up
your stories logically, like a chess game: all the detective needs to know is
the rules, he replays the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is
caught and justice has triumphed. This fantasy drives me crazy.”
The
Pledge was
originally written as a screenplay Es geschah
am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Broad Daylight) and when the
producers made Dürrenmatt write
a neat conclusion, he wrote the subsequent novella so he could do as he liked.
I also read various biographies of Dürrenmatt online. He was
Swiss, born in 1921 and died in 1990. He wrote avant-garde dramas, other crime
novels and macabre satire. I haven’t read any of his other work, though I wish
I could see the original movie, Es
geschah am hellichten Tag, because
I remember my mother speaking of the actor Heinrich Rühmann, who acted in it,
though my mother didn’t see that film.
One thing leads to another, adventures of the mind can take
you anywhere, absorb and entertain no matter what else is happening in the
world or your life, cost little and last as long or be as short as you wish.
I planned to
write this blog a while ago and was putting it off, but I was sure that I’d
made a few notes about it. Today I looked for those notes in my journal, the
obvious place. Nothing. I searched several times, looked in a couple of other
notebooks and in all the files on my computer, not only my blog folder. Nothing,
except one listing in my journal for February noting The Pledge and its
author.
I guess you can
get lost even in adventures of the mind, especially when age creeps up and the
memory wanders.
