We have been being brave.
Have you noticed?
I almost haven't; or, I notice, and then I forget again.
I. Here Comes History
I was reminded that we've been being brave while I was watching The Dig last night. It's a Netflix movie about an amateur archaeologist discovering the Anglo Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo (at the British Museum) in 1939, on the eve of World War II.
It's beautiful and atmospheric and very noble on the subject of art & history. I liked it a lot.
The archaeologists in The Dig work under pressure to complete their excavation before war breaks out. Near the end, they listen to Neville Chamberlain on the radio:
"This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany."
Every character's face registers, We're in for it now.
I thought, that's us––a lot of us––this past year.
This past year, normalcy has been flayed.
The global pandemic; the police murder of George Floyd; the outgoing U.S. president coordinating an assault on the US Senate, these all peeled back the skin...
Meanwhile the ever-present Everything Else keeps going on too.
I have to take my infected tooth to the dentist? Don't I get a pass?
No.
The characters in The Dig dig in and prepare themselves--for what they couldn't know would be six years of war.
I was just talking––laughing–– with a work pal about how last March (2020), we thought the governor's executive Stay at Home orders would last four weeks. Now there's a vaccine--along with new strains of the virus.
So, we've been brave.
Which isn't to say we've accomplished great things.
There's a nice exchange in The Dig about how we fail all the time because life, history is bigger than us, and we can't fix things.
When you face that, you are brave.
Or, you don't face it--you sign on for a delusion that you can storm reality, give it a different skin, like a video game character.
(Some of that's helpful, if you know it's a game.)
There's a lot that calls for bravery going on.
I think it's helpful to remind myself (and one another) of that.
And there's nothing wrong (I say to myself) if it's all a bit too much sometimes.
____________________
II. History Repeats Itself
The Dig is like the cousin-that-takes-itself-very-seriously of one of my favorite TV series, Detectorists, a gentle comedy about amateur historians with metal detectors.
The two main detectorists walk among people from the past in this illustration by Tom Knight:
The Dig also feels and looks something like A Canterbury Tale * (1944, Powell & Pressburger). When fighter planes from a nearby RAF field fly over The Dig's archaeologists, it's like the scene in ACT when hunting falcon in the medieval sky turns into a fighter plane in World War II:
A loving piece about A Canterbury Tale in the "My Favorite Film" feature in the Guardian:
"I still hesitate to shove it to the fore, because it's a thing of such fragile, broken glory, like some tubercular saint, that I hate the thought of people laughing at it.
"It was shot in 1943, in Powell's home county, during the dog days of the second world war and charts the fortunes of three modern-day pilgrims (land girl, British soldier, US sergeant) en-route to Canterbury but waylaid for a few days in the neighbouring village of Chillingbourne.
"None of them want to be there; they would rather be at home, except they are so tired, lonely and saddle-sore that they scarcely know where home is anymore.
...A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made.
It's a picture that's steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away."