Equus

A child is born into a world of phenomena, all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs, it sucks, it strokes its eyes over the whole, uncountable range. Suddenly, one strikes. Then another. Then another. Why? Moments snap together, like magnets forging a chain of shackles. Why?” -- Equus (1977) United Artists

Equus is art that manages to be about violence without adding to the culture of violence.  Neither the Peter Shaffer play nor the 1977 film adaptation by Sidney Lumet are likely to provoke copycats to act out the violence that is the subject of their art.  Alan Strang, the boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike, doesn't inspire admiration or contempt, only pity.  His cruel attack on demigods of his own creation is a desperate act, performed in the midst of despair and excruciating mental pain.

Alan Strang's fictional parents -- like Jared Loughner's real world parents -- are unable to explain their son's madness.  Unlike the Loughner parents who, reportedly, blame themselves for the way Loughner turned out, Strang's parents are not willing to shoulder any responsibility for Strang.  And, while Shaffer hints at the roles Strang's mother's religiosity and repressed sexuality and his father's hypocrisy may have played in Alan's descent into a secret world, ruled by improbable gods, ultimately, Shaffer lets the parents and society off the hook.  The connections are just too complex.

Self-flagellation.  Equus (1977)  United Artists  Peter Firth as Alan Strang

One of the reasons Equus works is that it grounds itself in antiquity and refers to fundamentally important things like the struggle between reason and emotion, the Appollonian versus the Dyonesian in culture. The role of psychiatry in Shaffer's Equus is to civilize the child, to bend the individual's will, even his grasp of reality, to the demands of society, even if the unique and creative individual is destroyed in the process.

Equus distances us from the violence it portrays by beginning and ending with: "Why?"

As a play, Equus naturally involves the viewer as spectator more than participant.  And, being a British play by a British playwright, it lacks the cultural references to the Westward Expansion that are so readily available to American artists. But even the film version by American director Sidney Lumet, though it occasionally adopts a subjective point of view and graphically depicts the blinding of the horses, manages balance.  It doesn't just dramatize the struggle between nature and civilization  -- between what Levi-Strauss called the raw and the cooked -- it honestly wrestles with the dilemma and achieves, if not a solution, at least a resolution to the conflict between freedom and conformity.  It wraps the action of the film up in literate and reasonable discourse about a difficult subject.  For better or for worse, it is a cerebral film.  And it's an honest one, because the author doesn't pretend to answer the unanswerable.  He -- and we -- must settle for stasis -- as painful as that may be.

Richard Burton as Martin Dysart  Equus (1977)  United Artists

Ultimately, of course, it is not Alan Strang but Martin Dysart, the child psychiatrist appointed by a British court to ease Alan's pain -- and the one person in the film who has a moral dilemma -- who ends up in chains.

Account for me, Equus demands.

Dysart can no more account for Equus than I can rule out the possibility that some word of mine, some thought, floating loose in the blogosphere where everything is connected to everything else, will forge the last link in some lethal chain.

I wonder if there are any American institutions left that are capable of reconciling freedom of speech with the responsibility to speak reasonably, to limit self-expression to less hurtful forms than we've experienced in the last couple of decades. At one time, I believed the American criminal justice system, grounded in the Constitution, was such an institution. Now, I'm not sure. The courts seem to be politicized. Even the Constitution itself is the subject of sophomoric chalk talks, foisted off on television viewers as political analysis, while other commentators -- just as opinionated -- decorate their rants with lines better men spoke in better times.  Is it any wonder that by now we view other opinions as, essentially, unreconcilable with our own?

The truth is unlikely to come to us from polemicists on the right or on the left.  It will come -- if it comes at all-- tentatively, in the form of a dialogue, a collaboration.  The best collaborations take place inside the same skull, inner dialogues, examinations of conscience, that proceed haltingly, full of doubt.  By their very nature, they must lack conviction, and lack of conviction is popular culture's unforgivable sin.

That such a dialogue can occur any longer in the context of American pop culture is doubtful to say the least.