Candide and Meek's Cutoff

I do like a thin book.  I like succinctness and I like to finish a story in one reading before I forget what happened at the beginning and who the people are and what the whole thing is supposed to be about.  Which led me to highly favour a re-reading of Voltaire’s Candide.  (Surely I MUST have read it before.)  Also, the Penguin Classic of Candide has a fab cover, apparently a detail from a bigger painting called Lever de Voltaire, showing a scrawny old person in a nightshirt and bizarre nightcap with a ribbon, executing an unlikely acrobatic pose to step into a pair of pants, with a small spaniel looking on.  It begs the question: What could be happening in the rest of the painting?  Which is a bit like the book.  Even though there’s so much going on in the vicinity of our main character Candide, starting with wholesale slaughter and rape, disembowelment and hanging of his loved one and old tutor respectively, tempest, shipwreck and earthquake, the reader is thinking: This is ghastly, the whole world is a barbaric bloodbath, no-one is safe; who would want to live there?  Even though Voltaire’s fable is a philosophical joke (hoax) meant to debunk a callous optimism about the suffering of others – God is in his heaven and all’s right with the world – and it’s written to be ridiculously funny, so that graphically butchered characters spring back to life cartoonishly to continue living in a world of hellish violence, as a reader I was on a tightrope of being thoroughly entertained by grotesque  misery (- why the old woman has only got one buttock!) and feeling appalled about horrors inflicted on humanity, past, present and future.  It’s a big call, Voltaire, but I think you pulled it off.  It certainly had me ruminating on how dreadful life is for many people other than lucky Australian me.  But to my mind, the big philosophical question is this:  After travelling the world and finding it mean and ugly everywhere, why doesn’t our hero stay in Eldorado, the mythical land of plenty where everyone is innocent and happy, and free to worship God and Science without dire Inquisitorial interest?  The excuse Candide gives us for wanting to leave is that he could never be truly happy without his lady love; and with his next breath the truth comes out: ‘If we stay here, we shall be no different from anybody else.’  Exactly.  Candide, like everyone, is besotted with advantage, which is to say - being rich enough to be powerful.  So the second half of the book tells how stupid Candide spends his money stupidly until all that’s left to him is a motley retinue of friends, an ugly old wife, and a modest block of land to work so they can all eat.  Which is just about all the average person can expect of life, to be fair.  Which sounds like Australia.

And then, me being free to do so, I went to the movies.  For some reason that I can’t remember now, I wanted to see Meek’s Cutoff, an Indie movie showing at the Nova only.  I’d read some encouraging reviews, it’s been shown at festivals, Michelle Williams is in it and was gracious enough not to complain about the shooting conditions in the desert, I’d also read somewhere.  I probably would have seen a different movie, if there’d been a vaguely alluring different movie on at the time.  No, I’m making it up; I wanted to see Meek’s Cutoff, whatever the title means, which I still don’t know.  For what it’s worth, Meek is the name of the tough, scruffy, bearded, middle-aged loner type who leads a pitiful wagon train of three couples and a kid into a desert, the idea being of course to get to a mythical promised land, an Eldorado perhaps of innocence and happiness and freedom to worship God and Science without dire inquisitorial interest.  Except that they’re lost from the start, and we watch the characters walk through a terrifically boring terrain, and we squint at them in the dark because the (lack of) lighting is meant to be realistic, and then there’s no water and then there’s an Indian: yes, only one, and he actually sings when one of the characters is sick, and he’s very stoic and doesn’t speak English, and he has a dead rat for a hair tie on his ponytail.  Apart from the rat, which seemed to deteriorate with time, (yes, the details were drainingly and gratuitously realistic – who needs this?  We all have lives!)  it was mildly exciting when we hoped Michelle Williams would shoot Meek (but she didn’t) and when one of the wagons expectedly broke up while it was being lowered by rope (tediously, tediously)down a not-very-steep incline.  And I’m sure nobody in the audience cared, by then, about the poor suffering couple left without a wagon.  (Actually, we would have preferred everyone’s wagons to have broken.)  Didn’t they, after all, still have their oxen, a sturdy brace with massive curly horns and lustrous brown eyes?  Not grey Brahmin bulls, or water buffalo, or even bison, but brown bullocks.  (And why weren’t these enormous overworked beasts dying from lack of water? – THAT would have been realistic.)  You see how I was distracted by the minutiae, in my desperation to find some succour (!) in the piece, destitute as I found it of sense or meaning or interest.  Other things I liked were Michelle Williams’ lovely round cheeks, the interesting bonnets, closely inspecting the continuity of the women and their clothes getting dirtier and dirtier, and wondering how fresh young Michelle Williams, after the fashion of a French movie, had ended up hitched to an old man.  If you haven’t seen Meek’s Cutoff yet, and are attracted to do so by my review, I will spoil the ending for you now if you haven’t already guessed it.  That’s right: nothing happens.  They are still lost, only instead of Meek (his Cutoff?) they are following the Indian –who knows why? since our Noble Host Savage hasn’t led them to water or civilization and we’re not meant to think he will.  Or are we?  Will the Indian, plodding off into the undulating sameness of his own environment, lead us all to Salvation?  About a minute from the end, one of the characters says something hokily deterministic, I think it’s Meek, rough philosopher that he is.  We have all been lead, inexorably, fatalistically, to this: following the Noble Natural Man who is the only one apparently not scared and apparently on course.  The End.

If I wanted to, I could make a case for the endings of Candide and Meek’s Cutoff amounting to the same thing, philosophically speaking, but not actually speaking, since Michelle and her friends are going to die if they don’t find food and water soon.  In terms of survival, which seems to be what counts for most people on the planet, philosophy isn’t so nutritious.  In a sequel to Meek’s Cutoff, our new friends could eat the oxen; that should take two hours, what with making jerky and tanning the skins and doing other pioneer things.  And Candide and his friends could be set upon by vagabonds or whatever again.  It’s never The End.