TWICE AS HOT: DUPLICITY AND THE SECOND PERSON IN THE BRIBE
After a weeklong break, the fifth episode of Detours is now available on Vimeo:
The synopsis:
Situation wanted with someone, but who? The question is sung to a crowd of tourists and locals in the fictional Carlotta, an exotic island off the coast of Peru. Government agent Rigby is sent to the island by his superiors to break up a graft ring; in the process, he is compromised. Much of The Bribe is accounted in medias res, with Rigby admonishing himself in the second person for having allowed himself to be coerced. In this video essay, Stephen Broomer addresses The Bribe in terms of Rigby's role as self-loathing narrator in search of redemption, and the film's concomitant representation of pathetic, clumsy evil.
Like many, I first encountered The Bribe as a quotation: the most striking material in Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, the fireworks sequence in the film’s final act. It’s a seldom-remembered film, notable for its astonishing cast and occasionally powerful cinematography. The reason for any oversight becomes clear in watching it: Robert Taylor’s Rigby is repellent in ways that the film conveniently glosses over (prideful to the point of arrogance, Taylor’s stoic best is overwhelmed by the smugness of his smirk). But this is perhaps a strength of the film: as I argue in the above video, he’s oily from the start, and this makes his corruption inevitable (although, not to split hairs, but the film’s equivocating bribery and coercion is a bit slippery). Further to this, the tropical island that has been contrived as a setting is under-utilized. Where it is used most effectively is in moonlit sequences damp with sweat, and in the climax, as powerful as any in American cinema.
Fascinated by the excerpt featured in Reiner’s film, I tracked down The Bribe in my late teens. Disappointed at first, over time I’ve come back to it for its contradictions. And I’ve always found it to be plainly what it is: a stranger-in-a-strange-land tale where archetypes mislead our expectations in interesting ways, but where the form itself is never coherent enough to maintain a sense of its oppressive tropical venue. What I have become most interested in is the character of Rigby, trapped in this spell of unrequited torch-song love (like many murderous anti-heroes before him…), one foot in a fantasy more hardboiled than the egg on his face, more white than his suit. In other words, he’s one of cinema’s ugly American tourists, and if the film were to dig into the despairing tone of other American films of the era, he could be an iconic anti-hero. In planning a video essay about The Bribe, it seemed to me that the most interesting aspect of his character is the narration he offers in medias res, telling you how you came to be here.
If on a winter’s night, a film noir. It’s not so modern or subversive or self-aware as that. But it led me to reflect on what this means in terms of perspective in a film, much like the literal subjective in Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, or the first person voice in Hammett’s Continental Op stories. Situation wanted with anyone but him, with anyone but you, with anyone but me, and so we reach the point of it all: self-loathing. It broadcasts Rigby’s self-loathing better than anything else could, to have him telling himself (you) how (you) came to be here. The second person makes that self-loathing palpable, and suddenly we’re chain-smoking in the tropical heat, and soon enough, we’ll be the ones slamming our fingers in doorjams to slap out the fogs in our heads. In The Bribe, the second person is a miraculous command to empathy.
The casual stupidity of evil is a related theme. After all, if he/you/we are the hero, what could the other be made from but incomprehensible witlessness? In The Bribe, that witlessness has two faces: the sloppy Beeler and the diabolical Carwood, motivated solely by greed and desperation, motivations that Rigby/you/we comes to know well through his dark night, writhing under the influence.
Despite this, he emerges from the story unchanged.
The Bribe is a film I meet with some apprehension, only because it produces very little that stays in the memory, and even the murkiness of its moral sensibilities never stray far enough to become compelling, as if it’s courting a sense of pessimism that it will, in the end, reject. My appreciation for it is largely formal, as in the rich metaphor of a battlefield that is cast over the final sequence; or the hallucinatory fog, primed to illustrate a torch song; or a shootout in a dark room, lit only faintly by distant bursts of fireworks.
When I first started making video essays, I revisited some of Tag Gallagher’s pieces on John Ford, made primarily for The Criterion Collection. Their deeply thoughtful analysis shows tremendous understanding of the poetic properties of cinema. As I’m preparing to show my students his piece on Stagecoach, I Dream of Jeannie (made available here thanks to Kevin B. Lee), I decided to try to track down more of them, and found this amazing archive of his video essays and articles compiled by Matthew Sorrento at Film International. Well worth your time! A model to aspire to.
We’ll be back next week with a new episode, this one on Cy Endfield’s Try and Get Me! (1950), one of the most harrowing films of the era (on vigilantism and the responsibilities of the press), presently playing as part of the Criterion Channel’s true crime collection.