Marc Estrin

ADOLESCENT CONFESSION

It wasn’t Texas, but New York City; it wasn’t from small town to big city, but from the Bronx to Manhattan. I have to confess that I snagged this scene directly from my own experience with my first girlfriend. To this day, I still consider The Seventh Seal to be one of the great films of all times.

THE SEVENTH SEAL

Billie Jo was Arnold’s gateway and guide to the world of Art, twenty minutes north. Dallas, for Arnold, had hitherto meant one thing: the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Day. Now it came to mean the symphony at Meyerson Hall, the Theater Center, the Shakespeare Festival at Grand Park, and the theatrical experiments at SMU. And she paid. Or rather, he was the frequent replacement for missing members of the family subscriptions. But his favorite venue was, coincidentally, the place they went to sans famille, an art movie house, happily located at Inwood Road and Lovers Lane, across from the SMU campus. 

And lovers they were, though technically virgins, lovers of each other, and of the amazing tour they had booked together: from concert to film to play to film to reading to film to museum to film, a rondo in which film was the fundamental; never were two people better served by the Inwood. Arnold saw his first foreign film in February of 1966. It was an eye-opener of such force and brilliance as to divide his life -- before and after The Seventh Seal. Until that time, his movie fare had consisted of Saturday matinees at the Farr Best Theater on Broad St., with noisy white kids downstairs, and noisy black kids up in the balcony. He had been two or three times at night with his parents: the noise level was lower, but the films were the same: mostly westerns and grade B unmemorables with the occasional Marty or Ben Hur. 

But The Seventh Seal was something else entirely. It unveiled a whole new way of seizing the world, the way of images which spoke more than they said. The knight, Antonius Block, lay on a grey beach at the edge of a grey sea. But somehow -- magically -- within five seconds -- it was clear that this beach was not just a beach, the beach at Joe Pool Lake, a Beach Boys beach, a Debbie Reynolds beach, but something vast and mysterious and threatening. At least for some. For some, not: for the knight’s squire snores away at the edge of the forest among the wind-gnarled trees. Some must watch, while some must sleep. Arnold was among the watchers -- like the knight’s horse, who lifts his head and whinnies -- for behind him is a man, a pallid man in black. “Who are you?” asks the knight. “I am Death,” says the man.

“I am Death.” In the hundreds of movies he had seen, in the thousands of cartoons, and news broadcasts and TV shows, Arnold had never heard anyone say “I am Death.” Where had he been all his life? What kind of superficial world did he inhabit that such a statement had never, in seventeen years, come his way? How was it that a man could make a movie, and have the audacity and courage to instruct a white-faced actor to say, simply “I am Death”? Six words, “Who are you?” “I am Death”, and the so-called real world was forever after dissolved to background for the big questions. The old saga rose up in Arnold’s world of Texas in the sixties, an ancient structure of wood and flesh and iron and stone, of wind and wave and light and shadow, to speak of our true condition, ominous and loveless, no matter that his hand was in her lap, and warm. This was it. This was film. This was art. Art! This was Art -- about him. 

And as this certainty shivered through his soul, the knight Antonius Block said “You play chess, don’t you?” and a gleam of interest kindled in Death’s eye. Chess! How did Ingmar Bergman know? How did he know Arnold Hitler, unknown master, would be here at the Inwood, watching this story? Who in the audience but he could -- would -- say that to Death? How many would stand a chance at beating Him?

“Yes, in fact I’m quite a good chess player,” says the man in black.

“But you can’t be better than I am.”

The knight rummages in the black bag beside him, takes out a board and pieces, and sets up a game in the chiaroscuro light. Death is curious.

“Why do you want to play chess with me?”

“I have my reasons.”

“That is your privilege.

“The condition is that I may live as long as I hold out against you. If I win, you will release me. Is it agreed?”

The knight holds out his two fists to Death, who smiles at him suddenly. Death points to one of the knights’ hands; it contains a black pawn.

“You drew black.”

“Very appropriate. Don’t you think so?”

The knight and Death bend over the chessboard. After a moment of hesitation, Antonius Block opens with his king’s pawn. Death moves, also using his king’s pawn.

Arnold’s mind raced through strategies, while the film moved on.

But it was not the opening of Seventh Seal that most moved him, though it was those initial moments that set him up to be hyper-present throughout. It was not the gorgeous and frightening end, the silhouetted dance of death of people he had grown to love. It was the burning of the witch that stayed most painfully with him, lodged in his throat and chest for years, the gamin on the pyre, her wide eyes filled with smoke, seeing -- what?

“What does she see?” demands the squire of Antonius Block. “Can you tell me?”

“Look at her eyes, my lord. Her poor brain has just made a discovery. Emptiness under the moon.”

“No.”

“We stand powerless, our arms hanging at our sides, because we see what she sees, and our terror and hers are the same. That poor little child. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it...”

For Arnold there was no riding away from this horrifying scene. In her own pain, Billie Jo squeezed his hand, but she found it limp, as powerless to help as those of squire or knight. Was it because he, too, sensed the emptiness, like the squire? Or was he transfixed in hope like Antonius Block, the Knight? All this he did not know. He knew only that he loved the witch more than he loved Billie Jo, more even than he loved Mia, the juggler’s wife, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen on the screen, the first woman with whom he had been unfaithful -- only forty minutes before.