The Lady From Shanghai

 Alert:  Spoilers

The last scene from Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai takes place in the crazy house.  That is, in the house of mirrors set in the amusement park that was once known as Playland at the Beach in San Francisco.  We'll examine exchanges of dialogue in the final part of the film between Elsa and Michael.  Elsa Bannister, the femme fatal, is played by Rita Hayworth.  For this part, Hayworth's well-known luxuriant auburn tresses are trimmed short and dyed platinum blonde.  Michael O'Hara, Elsa's lover and would-be knight errant, is played by Orson Welles.  Welles is also the director of the film.

Michael, until this final part of the film, has been duped by Elsa into playing the fool for her.  In each exchange of dialogue here, the talk is indicative of some kind of a struggle.  This is a struggle to which Michael has just awakened, understanding that Elsa meant to kill him in the end.  There is a signature “motto” she’s expressed earlier in the movie, which presumably comes from her childhood in Shanghai:

       “One who follows his nature keeps his original nature in the end.”    

The film’s ending is the outcome of the nihilism of what Elsa calls her nature, a corrupt understanding of a corrupt world, in which one has no choice but to be corrupt also.  By this time, she and her husband have shot one another in this house of distorted mirrors, and Michael has now realized she planned to kill him also.   Michael quotes the motto about "original nature," and now asks her in this newly-aware state, 

"But haven´t you heard ever of something better to follow?"

He’s indicating that there’s a better measuring stick, a better model to follow than whatever we call our nature that has been shaped in a corrupt world.  We know what he’s getting at, something that takes us beyond corruption and gives us hope for something better.  In the language of the letters of St. Paul, this is called “redemption” (Romans 8:21-23).  That is, the "better" thing that takes us out of the nature we know.

As she's dying, Michael says to her:

"You said the world´s bad, we can´t run away from the badness. And you´re right there. But you said we can´t fight it. We must deal with the badness, make terms. And didn’t the badness deal with you?  And make its own terms in the end, surely."

Elsa:  "You can fight, but what good is it? Goodbye."

Michael:  "You mean we can´t win?"

Elsa: "No, we can´t win. Give my love to the sunrise."

Michael realizes that whatever she’s followed, thinking she’ll get the better of that world (money, a dead husband, no witnesses left), has led her to her death.  Her fatalistic and ultimately nihilistic perspective is that since we can’t run away from the badness, we might as well make terms, join it.  But he correctly assesses that this is a stacked deck, and the house wins if you cooperate and settle with it.  Elsa doesn’t feel it’s worth the fight to struggle against the badness.  She’s dying, and tells him, "Give my love to the sunrise."  This is a reference to the fantasy she’s played for him throughout the film, saying that they could "go off into the sunrise."

But Michael reflects and finds his own conclusion that differs from hers:  

Michael:  "Well, we can´t lose, either.  Only if we quit."

Elsa:  "And you´re not going to?"

Michael:  "Not again."

In other words, he knew better but fell for her siren’s song, and now he’s back to the struggle.  He’s not going to quit again.  He won’t give up what St. Paul calls the "good warfare" or "good fight" (1 Timothy 1:18; 2 Timothy 4:7).  For that’s really what he’s talking about here, that need to struggle against the badness. His final lines in the film, as he walks away from the crazy house, tell us this.

"Well, everybody is somebody´s fool.  The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess l´ll concentrate on that.  Maybe l´ll live so long that . . . l´ll forget her.  Maybe l´ll die . . . trying."

The Lady From Shanghai was made during 1946, the year after the end of World War II.  We know what happened in the war, with ambitious powers following what they thought were their “natures.”   The three Axis powers each had a particular take on the notion of the greatness of their own national “natures,” and following that to its supreme end.  Of course there was the notion of the Ubermensch which fueled the Nazi theories and policies.  In Japan this was symbolized in the emperor and the imperial system.  Italy had Mussolini.  But left only to a corrupt nature, the real nature of the corrupt – of the devil – is nihilism.  It is an old, old story that to make terms with the badness is to fall victim to it, so that it has its way with you in the end.  In the story of the Gadarene demoniac (Luke 8:26-39) we see this exemplified.  For, even occupied by a legion of demons, the man’s desire to live and to be saved is great enough so that we can contrast his life, miserable as it was, with the fate of the swine into whom Jesus allowed the demons to go.  That exposes the true destructive nature of the badness, while the true nature of human beings is known through the redemption of Christ, and the saved former demoniac.

The lesson:  Surely there must be "something better to follow."  And of course there is, and Michael finally asks Elsa if she’s never heard of this "something better."  "No," she replies, in her sad ignorance, the victim of her own upbringing and blighted environment missing this something better.

Early on, close to the time he first meets her, she says that her parents were Russian.  There was a large Russian settlement in China, and particularly in Shanghai, of "white Russians" like Elsa’s parents, who had fled the Russian Revolution.  There were many other minorities as well.   For these foreigners from Allied nations, the Japanese Occupation was brutal (as it was for the Chinese), and meant prison camps.  The places Elsa names were also places of vice, especially gambling and also prostitution.  It sounds like she was left to fend for herself, a beautiful young girl, especially in Shanghai.  She’s worked in Macao as a gambler (which early in the film Michael called the “wickedest city in the world”), and also in Shanghai, but she doesn’t quite say what she did there at the gambling tables.  She tells him soberly, 

"You need more than luck in Shanghai."

We don’t have to dig too far to pick apart this tale into an old story of seduction and glamor.  Michael says of the coast at Acapulco, "It´s a bright, guilty world."  And Elsa  is bright with her electric platinum hair.  For some, like film noir historian (and host on TCM) Eddie Muller, that platinum blonde hair suggests the nuclear bomb which had so recently been used for the first time.  The first atomic bomb, exploded in a test at Bikini Atoll, was marked with Rita Hayworth's photo, the pin-up from the movie Gilda, which had been popular with the GIs during the war.  (This infuriated the actress.)

Michael’s is the voice of the one who’s learned a lesson through that struggle and all the vice and destruction he and the world have seen.  In the "bright guilty world" the struggle is as necessary now as it’s ever been – perhaps more necessary because the stakes grow higher.  But his experience has taught him that the struggle is worth it, and to make terms with the badness is a death knell.   And this is what we should all take from our experiences.  St. Paul would encourage us to continue the struggle, to fight the good fight of faith in the something better that offers an alternative, and redemption.  For in the end, it’s only that struggle that is better than complacency to the corruption of the world.  Even if we die trying.

It's important that as we open on this final part of the film, Michael’s character tells us, 

"Well, I came to in the crazy house.  And for a while there I thought it was me that was crazy.  After what l´d been through, anything crazy at all seemed natural."

We might be tempted to call it the fun house, but Welles names the right term. It’s the crazy house, and when the world is upside down and crazy, when we start to wake up from the acceptance of an upside down world full of badness, we too will at first think we’re the ones who are crazy – because the crazy has been sanctioned as natural.  Many of Welles’ films carry within them the same seeds of these themes.  The Third Man (in which Welles starred, but did not direct) is a notable film depicting a once-beloved friend who’s adapted in a crazy and corrupt world, and the sad state of those who love him.  The Stranger tells a story of one who comes from the corrupt and crazy and hides in plain sight within a different society.  Touch of Evil speaks clearly through its title, about a man meant to fight the badness, but who “makes terms” and eventually is swallowed up by the badness.

 

 

Indeed the hour is coming, yes, has now come, that you will be scattered, each to his own, and will leave Me alone. And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me

 So often in film noir one finds themes of the lone man (or lone individual) who faces a very dirty, tricky, dark world and makes his way through that world to discover the truth about something.  Often that truth is a hidden act such as a crime, often involving murder.  The protagonist (or detective) goes through all the tricks of the evil person or persons in the story, is sabotaged or fooled, faces many deceptions and dangers. Often this involves self-sacrificial behavior on the part of the hard-boiled detective.  He has a code, after all, even if he's the only one left in the world who follows that code.  

Jesus tells His disciples, "Indeed the hour is coming, yes, has now come, that you will be scattered, each to his own, and will leave Me alone. And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me" (John 16:32).  He'll be the one to walk the straight path, the true path, the one of duty and courage, even when the rest are scattered.  He will pay the price.  He'll be deserted by friends and disciples, but not by His code nor His Father in heaven, the One whom He serves.  He's loyal to the end, and has the courage and integrity to be that person even if he has to do it alone, on His own.  Even when friends desert Him.  This is the startling light in the darkness, the existential reality of the divine who has come into the world as one of us, and faces the grim "facts" of this world on our behalf, to transfigure what looks true but is just an illusion, to expose the lies of death and evil.

Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it

"Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it" (Matthew 7:13; Sermon on the Mount).

In film noir, the way of destruction is always broad, it is everywhere.  It is often literally on whatever Broadway there is in a city, big or small.  There are pitfalls everywhere, especially for the unwise and uninitiated, those who sleepwalk through life without awareness.  When Christ comes into the world, He is wise beyond the world, and He is especially wise to the ways of the evil one, the accuser, the devil.  He knows how the demonic oppresses human beings, and tempts with its distorted values -- and especially with its full emphasis only on the material, the life of mammon and the temptations therein to declare that one is perfectly satisfied, all desires fulfilled.  Christ is wise to the ways of destruction, and the tricks meant to seduce us into it, precisely because He comes from outside the world. He's the opposite of naive; He's the One who can see what's what, when we are all too often so used to the mud in which we live, the darkness with which we're surrounded, we can't tell the difference.  Or we're too blind to see it because we don't know anything else.

And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it

 Many people attempt to write about the Gospels, and about the story of Christ.  But to see things as they are, one must understand both darkness and light -- and especially in the terms of Christ's language of illumination and darkness.  

To enter into the Gospels is to encounter the light shining in the darkness; the darkness that is the world that doesn't know the light, and the light that is Christ coming into the world.  The date of the celebration of the birth of Christ reflects that light coming into the world; it coincides with the solstice, when the light begins to grow and the days lengthen.

Christ taught that one must take very careful measure of the light that we allow to illumine our "eye" -- meaning our mind, that through which we apprehend life and the world.  "The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:22-23; in the Sermon on the Mount).  If we choose to "see" by the darkness, our whole lives, our way of life, our apprehension about how to walk in the world is dark indeed.