Revenants

Yesterday I went to see The Revenant at a local movie house. It has received a dozen Oscar nominations and is getting a lot of buzz. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the story of a trapper in the 1820s West who is mauled to within an inch of his life by a bear, is left for dead by a scoundrel who also kills the trapper’s son, but survives and drags himself 200 miles across the snow—fueled by revenge and empowered by his survival skills—to exact his revenge.

It’s a ripping yarn that’s based on a true story—albeit one that’s in many respects unverifiable and in others clearly is embellished by artistic license. As impressed as I was by the film’s cinematography, attention to detail and acting, I was distracted by the number of times I found myself asking, “Why is this guy STILL not dead?!” (Each time, Leonardo DiCaprio, in his lead role as 19th-century fur trader and bear-mauling survivor Hugh Glass, answered my disbelieving query with a wheeze and a grunt, and took another emphatic bite of something disgusting—like bison liver or the flapping fish he’d just yanked out the river.)

I was thinking about The Revenant this morning as I ran through my Bethesda neighborhood in low-teen wind chills. I’d layered myself to the nines, so I actually was quite comfortable as the few drivers who passed me at that early-morning hour on a federal holiday looked out their windows and no doubt thought, “What a moron!” But afterward, back in the house, I had to concede that completing an hour-long run on a chilly-for-DC morning is pretty much the extent of my survival skills. Were a movie to be made of my epic revenge saga against the elements, starvation, and hostile whites and Native Americans, its title would be The Corpse.

Which brings up the subject of the film’s title. When I got home from the movies yesterday, Lynn asked me what a “revenant” is. I told her I frankly had no idea, but that I’d been meaning to look it up. So, I immediately did. The first definition I found on the Internet was, “A person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.” Which makes abundant sense in view of the mini-synopsis I just gave you. DiCaprio’s Glass even says at one point that he “ain’t afraid to die” because “I done it already.” The guy who wrote the book on which the movie is based picked an apt word for the story he was telling, all right.

Lynn then asked why such a simple but highly descriptive word is so obscure that the likes of us—non-geniuses, for sure, but reasonably intelligent and articulate people—had never even heard of it until it became a movie’s name. The answer to that is, who knows? I’m not a lexicographer. Maybe “revenant” sounds too much like other English words that get much more use, and society didn’t want to gum up the works with one that might become conversationally entangled with “reverend,” “reverent” and “remnant.” Perhaps “revenant” was poised for the primetime as handy linguistic shorthand for the longer “reanimation” when the Zombie Craze of the early 21st century hit and the Z Word became everyone’s go-to description for returning from the dead. It’s a mystery. The English language is littered with perfectly serviceable and even cool words that languish largely unused (take “languish”), while arguably inferior and imprecise words and phrases (such as “just sit there” in place of “languish”) thrive.

So. This word, “revenant,” and its meaning got me to thinking about the new year and the presidential race. Well, not directly, but those are things about which I also want to write today, and I’ve been looking for a way to tie all this together. What I’ve come up with is this: The story of the Republican presidential field also could, in a sense, be titled The Revenant. I mean, the campaigns of all the frontrunners, at least, are built on returning certain ideas, philosophies and approaches from the dead. Or, if not the dead, at least the largely dormant..

I’m always struck by Donald Trump’s campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again." Again? What're we going back to, then? As The Donald sees it—and as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and all the others echo in their remarks and beliefs—back to a time when the United States was strong, respected, “moral” by their definition, and not enslaved by “political correctness.” As I see it, however, “Make America Great Again” means taking the country back to a time when might made right. When white meant right. When America didn’t have to accommodate or cede power to anything we, as a nation, didn’t like or couldn’t understand.

In truth, belief in things like American exceptionalism, the business of America being (unfettered) business and Big Government being the root of all ills (as opposed to the mitigator of many) never were dead—which is why the “revenant” analogy isn’t entirely apt. But maybe that’s where that “supposedly” in the word’s definition comes in.

You might suppose that such resounding successes of optimism, such triumphs of our better nature, as trust-busting, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the civil rights movement might have killed off the kinds of dark, victimized, conspiracy-laden, bigoted nonsense now being trumpeted (pun inadvertent) by the Republican presidential aspirants. But no, sadly. Those malignancies may have been left for dead, and hoped dead, by progressive thinkers, but they limped along for decades, often in the shadows, finally to be given new and pulsating life by a group of rage-filled politicians who gaze out upon a complicated and unfriendly world, and a multicultural and needy country, and don’t at all like what they see.

This new revenant has something else very much in common with the cinematic one: lust for revenge. This new revenant says, “This is not the America we want—the one that conforms to our inaccurate but self-serving vision of what America was and should be—and somebody has to pay for it. Actually, a lot of people must pay for it. Without nuance and without mercy. We will carpet-bomb Syria—civilians and ISIS foes stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time be damned. We’ll close our borders, arm our citizenry and impose our vision of what a righteous God Would Do on the liberals, the illegals and even the insufficiently compliant women who’ve continually thwarted us from getting our due! Which is to say, everything we want.”

The thing that the political revenant has stirred that perplexes me is the dimension of the societal revenant it has exposed. That so many of my fellow Americans find the fury, vitriol and incivility of Trump and his ilk energizing, empowering and expressive of their deepest thoughts is frankly startling, alarming and confusing to me. It tells me that I’m out of sync and out of touch with a force that’s big enough to be a movement, and perhaps even to win the White House.

I’ll concede that I’m economically in a better and more secure place than are many of the most ardent Trump supporters, who counterintuitively trust a transparently megalomaniacal billionaire to champion their interests over those of (his fellow) rich and powerful. I’ll grant that I’m not religious like Ted Cruz’s evangelical followers, and thus don’t feel threatened by alleged evidences of the insidious spread of “secular” society.  I’ll admit that, while I admire much about my country, its history and its people, I can’t and won’t edit out the flaws. I’m not in every instance proud to be an American, so the jingoistic appeals of seemingly the entire GOP slate go nowhere with me. Likewise, I didn’t grow up with guns, though I’d like to think that even if I had, and therefore liked to target-shoot or hunt, I wouldn’t equate reasonable steps to curb gun violence with a government plot to confiscate them.

Recently President Obama gave his final State of the Union address. Like every incumbent chief executive regardless of political party, he pronounced the state of the union to be strong. Which, by many economic and social indicators it is, whatever Obama’s detractors might claim. But the words I’d use to describe the state of the union I see before me at the beginning of 2016 are “angry,” “paranoid,” “bitter” and, yes, “vengeful.”

Admittedly, many months—too many, I think both Left and Right can agree—remain in this election cycle. Presumably, moderate voices will yet be heard among the many millions of Americans who have no proverbial dog in this internecine fight among highly partisan Republicans. It’s far from a foregone conclusion that Trump or Cruz or Rubio or one of the other frightening entrees on the GOP plate will prevail in the general election, although I’d feel better if the Democratic candidate wasn’t destined to be either a woman many people irrationally hate or a guy who proudly calls himself a socialist. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that word—speaking of words—except for the fact that a lot of Americans deem “socialist” less a shorter way to say “adherent of European-style democratic socialism” and more a synonym for “communist.”)

So, will the American revenant succeed? Will the forces of rage prevail in wreaking their revenge upon those they despise? It’s too early to tell, but this revenant’s strength and seeming momentum are deeply unsettling.

Interestingly, there’s another way in which the story of Hugh Glass nearly two centuries ago and that of a slice of the 2016 electorate diverge—besides the whole resurrection-from-death thing and the differing justifications for vengeance.

After I looked up the meaning of “revenant,” I sought out the details of Glass’s real-life story. Again, much is unknown and unverifiable, beyond the facts that he indeed was mauled by a bear, was left for dead and was understandably aggrieved by that. Historical accounts seem to agree on one key point, however, that was understandably ignored by the yarn-aggrandizing novelist and filmmakers, but that, one wishes, the modern-day revenants would consider:

The revenant Hugh Glass, in the end, forgave his adversary.