Oh, Brother where art thou?

(Tape 2) There’s a movie that’s been at the theater that’s along these lines. The name of the movie is “Brother, Where are you?” or something to that extent. It has already won about four or five awards, or is up for four or five awards, by a couple of prestigious groups. The story is a story set in, I believe, the state of Mississippi during probably the 1930’s, somewhere back in that time. [um] It’s got George Clooney in one of the lead roles, for which I think his acting has won him one of the awards already, on that movie. The story was taken and updated from the book “The Odyssey” by Homer. What was that story about?

[someone else] (unintelligible)

[Heh, heh, heh] Good guess, because it was about the voyages of some warriors that had just basically come off a war. And they were on, or trying to find their way back home, weren’t they, isn’t that what’s going on? And the gods did not look lightly on the victories, of this army in the wars, because they killed some of the good earth beings that were the favorite of these gods. And so the gods declared that in order to get home they would have to sail around for a long period of time going through adventures of one kind or another, kinda like a gamut of tests, before they would be permitted to make it back home again. What’s so much the difference between the basic premise of that story and the prolonged military democracy in which we’re not getting back home to our land and to our loved ones?

In the movie, the war is personified in the fact that our three leading characters were prisoners on the Mississippi chain gang. And they were out every day on the road, breaking up stone and rock to build up the highways and the roadways of the great state of Mississippi. And it turns out that George Clooney and his two buddies on the chain gang decide one day would be a great opportunity to escape, and so they set about the process of escaping. So now theoretically they’re at liberty, they’ve left the war, they’ve got their liberty or freedom back. Which is the condition that most patriots think they’re in, “Ah, we’ve left the democracy. We’re on our way now.” And yet before they get to the point where they’re not molested by the officers of the great democracy they seem to keep bumping into various little dramas and episodes and adventures with people coming from the democracy. And that’s basically what you’re seeing in this movie and this story it is a very, very enjoyable movie. Very entertaining, particularly if you like southern gospel singing. There is an awful lot of that in there from the 1930’s.

Our three heroes [are] can only be described as totally naive, as the people in the Odyssey would have been, not understanding that the gods have placed predicaments on them, making it almost impossible for them to try to achieve what they’re trying to achieve. What is extremely interesting is when they break out of the chain gang obviously it’s not gonna be too many hours before a head count knows they’re missed. And the authorities are gonna be coming after ‘em with the bloodhounds and the dogs. And they’ve been taking through the fields, hiding in the woods, trying to do whatever they can. They’re chained together [uh] to begin with, so they’re very limited on their ability, mobility, and their ability to fit in since their wearing their candy stripped uniforms in the back farm countries.

And in one cute little episode they happen to be just maybe a half mile ahead of the dogs and this railroad train’s goin’ down the tracks and as usual you just know darn well they’re gonna try to jump the freight train. And George Clooney and his other two buddies, Clooney’s out in front, are running and he gets into the boxcar and he’s talking to a bunch of hobos and bums, in the boxcar. And the neat thing about Clooney is, he’s got a vocabulary on him, for the 1930’s, that’s probably pretty close to about thirty years of professional education. He just speaks way above a doctorate degree in everything that he says, including his ideas, and in contrast his other two buddies attached to him are relatively low IQ individuals. That can hardly express even their common needs. But as Clooney gets up into the boxcar, he’s made it, he’s arrived, and he’s discussing possibilities with all the hobos on the boxcar while his two buddies are still running along the train. The second in line finally almost with total exhaustion leaps into the boxcar and he’s there now. And now, through the window you see outside the third guy running along the train still trying to make it in and then pretty soon you see the third guy outside the train trip and fall. And then you see the second guy, the one that was in the boxcar, get drug flat down with his hands and, “Whoop” out the door, he’s gone. And George Clooney still hasn’t got a clue he’s carrying on this high level conversation and all of the sudden, “Boom” he’s out the door and gone. It seems to me like, if you’re bound to some other people, you better help them get on board before you have the luxury of assuming that your position is probably secure.

However, they missed the train, and low and behold they weren’t hanging around for to awfully long and they heard the dogs not far away. They’re trying to figure out what they’re gonna do now because the three of ‘em are fighting, which is a bad thing to be doing when you’re bound to each other and relying on each other. And they hear this funny sound and they look up and behind, well the [uh] railroad trains already about two miles down the track. But they hear this sound, comin’ down the track, and low and behold it’s this guy on a handcar, pumping the handcar, goin’ down the track. And they look at each other and go, “Hey this is something that we can bum a ride on, we can get on this one.” So they got onto it. And the guy that’s pumping the handcar is blind as a bat, absolutely blind. But he has his other sense of knowing what’s going on, detects that he’s got riders on his car and of course when they realize he’s blind they give him all the lies they need to give him so that he doesn’t know who they are. And they really think they’re getting away with something. And the blind man, on the car, gives them sage wisdom and he sets the pattern for the whole story. He tells them that they’re after a treasure and that in order to secure the treasure they will have to go through a series of adventures. And during the times of the adventures, as they go through these, they will find that the treasure that they seek they will not get. But they will get other things along the road and in the end they will have a treasure, not the one that they seek, which will reward them.

Now the only reason that George Clooney got his two buddies to leave the chain gang and run away with him is George Clooney lied to them and told them that he had robbed a bank and had a million dollars in treasure buried. And later on, when they found out that he lied, they were just about ready to kill him. But he said, “Well what could I do, I was chained to you guys and I wasn’t gonna get to my liberty unless you guys went with me. And the only thing that was gonna create [a] an urgency in you guys to go with me is the greed of thinking there was a million dollars we were gonna split.”

So this wise blind man was like the gods, in the Odyssey, that was explaining what was going to happen to the mere mortals, the naive people, that had not a clue what was going on with them. So the movie is but a dream, it’s an illusion. But the wise man that explained everything to them, out front, said, “You guys are on an adventure and you will get a treasure.”

They said to him, “What is your name?”

And he said, “I have no name.”

Then they said, “Well what do you do for a living where do you work?”

“I do not work.”

I mean, are you talking about a man that has no Rez to attach? Going down the railroad track. Helping three escaped prisoners get to liberty. It is one of the neatest little comedies that you’re ever going to see. It’s a cute little movie. And they’re telling you the same story of the Wizard of Oz, riding through the land of fiction and naiveté thinking that you know who you are and what you want and not having a clue.

It is so cute what they get into. I mean, they fall for every trick in the book. They go to one of the relatives of George Clooney’s buddy, that’s gonna help them get outa their chains and escape. They’re at the house overnight. They sleep in his barn. The guy feeds ‘em, befriends ‘em, takes their chains off and the next morning the sheriff and the cops are waiting for ‘em with machine guns because their relative turned ‘em in, for the reward. (um) What part of, “There is a reward for helping point the Rez out to the creditor, don’t you understand?” And that it absolutely [is] is a better incentive than mere blood in the real world, which absolutely doesn’t pay. ‘Cause these people don’t know what the real world is.

They’re going down the road one day in a series of stolen vehicles, that they keep trying to acquire in order to move themselves away from the inevitable law. And one of the lunatics yells, “Stop.” And they stop at the edge of this woods and they walk down to this beautiful river and there’s three gorgeous babes on these rocks by the river. Now if you’ve read the Greek literature about the sirens that are used to distract our hero sailors from their adventures in going home. The three sirens, at the river, get ‘em drunk. And when they finally wake up, George Clooney is passed out dead drunk and he’s laying on the bank of the river over here. And his buddy wakes up first and he’s laying on the bank of the river over here. And his buddy gets up and he’s looking around and the sirens are gone. And he sees Clooney and goes “yea, he’s there.” And then he looks over where the other buddy was and the only thing they see there are his clothes, laid out perfectly on the rocks, as though he was there. But the clothes are like, laying flat against the rock and the body is gone. And this lunatic looks and he goes, “Oh my God they took Pete.” And Clooney’s getting up, Clooney now has like a vocabulary of about thirty years of public education and he goes, “Naw, I don’t think they took Pete he’s gotta be around here someplace.” And they’re yelling and screaming and there’s no Pete. And all of a sudden, within the chest cavity of the shirt, it starts moving up and down. And the other lunatic looks and says, “Oh my God, they left his heart.” And Clooney goes, “I don’t think so, I don’t know.” And it keeps jumpin and movin and pretty soon this toad leaps out and the lunatic goes, “They turned Pete into a toad.” It is absolutely one of the funniest movies you’re ever going to see, as long as you understand what they’re telling you.

At another stage of the game, before the river and the sirens, they stopped at a southern religious revival. And all of the people of the church were going down in the river and being baptized and our three lunatic heroes are just standing there looking at parades of all these people going down into the river being baptized. And the minister said, “Your sins are forgiven.” And all of the sudden, one of the two lunatics’ jumps into the river and swims up to the pastor and the pastor takes him and baptizes him too. And he comes swimming out, he is so happy he says, “You guys gotta get baptized.”

And they’re going, “Well that’s okay, you know, it’s all right.”

And later he keeps saying, “This is incredible.” he said, “All my sins are forgiven.” He says, “Everything, including the robbery I did.”

And his buddies look at him and go, “Robbery? You told us you didn’t do that, you lied.”

He says, “That’s okay, the sin of the lie was forgiven too.”

But Clooney looks at him and says; “You better get your head on straight here. Maybe they forgave you in the spiritual world, but the state of Mississippi is still looking for you.” I’m sure you guys are going to love that film, there is no doubt about it. Hollywood is doing just some really, really incredible things out here. 

As transcribed by: Majic