“It is better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age”
These words can be found in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” which is considered by some to be the best short story in the English language. These thoughts are by a middle-aged man named Gabriel Conroy. He is thinking them while lying in a Dublin hotel next to his wife who is sleeping, as snow falls all over Ireland. He has spent musical night at the home of his aunts Julia and Kate, in the company of elderly friends who gather every Christmas to sing the same songs and tell the same old stories, clucking over the fact that poor Freddy Malins has turned up drunk again. Embarrassing for his mother.
The majority of the story deals with the party who attends, the action that takes place, and the conversations. But Joyce somehow manages to provide a glimpse of unspeaking depth under different feelings that are put on mute in the happy festive atmosphere. The book closes with Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, in a cab moving towards their hotel. There, she opens up to him that one of the songs makes her recall the guy who used to adore her at the age of 17, the ill Michael Fury. When he learned she was heading to Dublin to attend the convent school, he pleaded with her to stay, even standing outside her window in the winter rain. He died a week after that.
Upon listening to the story by Greta, Gabriel understands that there was a huge chunk of his wife’s life which he never knew existed. She goes to bed, and he remains awake beside her in the dark. Joyce writes: “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never achieved a level of emotional attachment that strong towards any woman, but he understood that this feeling was love.” He looks outside and realizes it is snowing, which means it is snowing across all of Ireland, even at the tomb of Michael Furey.
I have explained all the complicated details of the Joyce story as I wish to illustrate the difficult challenge John Huston undertook of filming ‘The Dead’. There is no issue in filming the details of the party, all the commotion, the singing, and the toasting; everything is easy. But all of those scenes are present only for one specific reason, which is to get the audience accustomed to the facade of a mundane and satisfactory life and then get shocked in the last few moments when they see the depths of loneliness and passionate emotions that the people they thought were normal had hidden in their hearts.
Gabriel is the one who has to cry in ‘The Dead’ because that is the only way he can let go of the fact that his wife used to love a man he never met. The key emotional moment does not belong to Gretta, and that is what makes the entire premise of ‘The Dead’ so brilliant. Losing a beloved automatically means a loss in ones life. Humans have the ability to contemplate and dwell upon these losses, and indeed Gretta weeps for a stranger.
There is no way a filmmaker is able to replicate the issues going around in Gabriel’s mind while shooting the final scene of ‘The Dead,’ and this is something Huston presumably understood as well when he made this film. So what was the point of attempting to do it? My opinion is that he did it because there is some Irish blood flowing in him, and he spent a considerable amount of time there. He made it because the movie was going to be directed and produced in Ireland by his son, Tony, and acted by his daughter, Anjelica. And above all, he made it because he was well aware that he was approaching the end of his life, and for him this was going to be the last one.
One final underlying reason remains which I can already glimpse in the words with which I began: “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” Huston was a daring man even in his older years as he attempted to make an impossible film. Look at Huston’s “The Dead” and you will not see a successful film but rather a grand gesture because that is the best film that Huston could possibly have made. He may not have achieved everything people set out fine with, but he sure opened up boundaries people never thought was possible. And now the snow falls upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where John Huston lies buried.
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