{"id":121349,"date":"2018-02-08T13:00:58","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T18:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121349"},"modified":"2018-02-08T14:18:24","modified_gmt":"2018-02-08T19:18:24","slug":"the-moment-of-the-tiles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/08\/the-moment-of-the-tiles\/","title":{"rendered":"The Moment of the Tiles"},"content":{"rendered":"

On watching <\/i>Ben-Hur in Bombay, remakes, and the wide-ranging repercussions of a loose tile.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from Ben-Hur <\/em> (1959).<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I think I began watching MGM-style historical epics at the New Empire. There was a cluster of three cinemas in the bit of Bombay near my school\u2014Sterling, the New Empire, and the New Excelsior. I have a memory of shamefacedly submitting to The Ten Commandments<\/em>. These films were shown as reruns in the midseventies, of course, but the crowds were large and easily impressed. I say \u201cshamefacedly\u201d because, even then, I think I was allergic to the genre: the costumes, the sets, the battles, the panoply. To in some way abet such a spectacle seemed beneath one\u2019s dignity at thirteen. When it came to history, my generation was drawn insatiably to the downfall of the Nazis. Biblical stories, given we went to schools with Christian affiliations, weren\u2019t taken seriously. Nevertheless, Dinyar, a boy of superior culture, said gravely (in retrospect, I see his tastes were quite camp), \u201cHave you seen The Ten Commandments<\/em>? You\u2019re missing something if you haven\u2019t.\u201d So I went to the New Empire and was moved to reluctant tears by the parting of the Red Sea. The cinema and the life I knew had been bereft of miracles, and here was an example of what Dinyar said I\u2019d been \u201cmissing,\u201d of what technology and divine intervention could achieve if they chose to. Here, too, I encountered the sculpted, orange-skinned Charlton Heston, who appeared like a plausible link between the vengeful expanse of antiquity and a lithe Californian freedom. Whether I knew him already from Ben-Hur<\/em>, I can\u2019t say, but I did see Ben-Hur<\/em>, too, at the New Empire.<\/p>\n

In a couple of years, I had forgotten these films. I saw them as inextricable from the comic exuberance, hard-nosed commercial agendas, and faux devotionalism of a particular period and consigned them to a category called DeMille movies. Then I saw Ben-Hur<\/em> again, probably a decade ago. It might have been shown on TV during Christmas or Easter\u2014it is, after all, as the subtitle of the novel it was based on states, tangentially \u201ca story of the Christ.\u201d I rewatched Ben-Hur<\/em> as you would pick up a storybook you\u2019d read as a child: to check if its pages amused you in some way. I was also curious, I suppose, about what the chariot race at the end, in which the eponymous hero\u2019s survival skills are displayed at their keenest, would look like on an adult review. My prejudice against the genre had grown more ingrained since I was thirteen, and I was also in fundamental agreement with Roland Barthes that these Hollywood epics comprise a weaving of codes (\u201cThe frontal lock [of Romans in Hollywood films] overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt he is in ancient Rome.\u201d). Yet I discovered, at the end of the four hours, that I was again inexplicably moved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The story is simple. Judah Ben-Hur, played by Heston, belongs to Jerusalem\u2019s moneyed Jewish aristocracy. He lives in an opulent mansion with his mother, sister, his slaves, and their families. His childhood friend is a Roman called Messala, who is a tribune when the film opens but who then departs Jerusalem to return as a commander of a Roman garrison with his ambitions more fiercely bound than ever before to the empire. Naturally, Messala wants\u00a0Ben-Hur\u00a0on his side as he plans to impose a more repressive regime of imperial rule on Jerusalem.\u00a0Ben-Hur is resistant to becoming, as he puts it, \u201can informant\u201d; there is friction between the friends. \u201cYou\u2019re either for me or against me,\u201d says Messala, to which Ben-Hur replies, \u201cIf that is the choice, then I am against you.\u201d A few days later, Messala\u00a0organizes a parade to\u00a0honor the new\u00a0governor\u00a0of Judea\u2014and no doubt to display Rome\u2019s pomp to Jerusalem. The Romans make their way through the streets and pass Ben-Hur\u2019s mansion. Ben-Hur and his sister watch the procession anxiously from the rooftop; Messala glances upward. As the sister leans forward, we hear a tile on the ledge move slightly. She then follows the procession to the right; Ben-Hur, arms outstretched, looks on the Romans below. Tiles come loose and fall on the governor, frightening his horse and causing it to rear. The governor is dislodged from his horse and is injured. The Roman soldiers enter Ben-Hur\u2019s house to round up its occupants. Messala makes his entry and, despite Ben-Hur\u2019s appeal (\u201cIt was an accident!\u201d), orders the men to take him and his mother and sister away. Ben-Hur becomes a slave in a ship\u2019s galley.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from Ben-Hur <\/em> (1959).<\/p><\/div>\n

Nothing that happens subsequently\u2014the stripping away from Ben-Hur of various layers of his existence, the brutality visited on him, his heroism, the leprosy he will later discover his mother and his sister have contracted\u2014compares with the unsettlement, physically and existentially, of the loose tile. It gives to the film\u2019s portrayal of life a deep strangeness. In the 2016 remake, which I saw a week ago by chance in a hotel room, there is no tile. It has been replaced by a young rebel whom Ben-Hur has been sheltering. As the family watches the Roman procession from a rooftop, the young man takes aim with a bow and arrow at Pontius Pilate, who has taken the place of the governor in the 1959 film, but fails to kill him. Turbulence follows, but the unsettlement\u2014of which Charlton Heston\u2019s repeated protest, \u201cIt was an accident!\u201d, is an expression\u2014has gone.<\/p>\n

Contemporary films seal out fate. They protect the viewer from life\u2019s randomness. Huge levels of violence in cinema don\u2019t disturb us as long as our moral order and interpretative apparatus aren\u2019t endangered. We know that good people can suffer. We know that power can uproot and destroy and that the locus of power changes. (My wife pointed out to me that, in today\u2019s Jerusalem, it would be a Palestinian who would be taken away if he or she dislodged a brick on an Israeli soldier by mistake.) We live in a time defined by the unspeakable migration of refugees. And yet we stand on relatively stable ground whenever we turn away from the randomness that interferes with, and shapes, existence.<\/p>\n

The loose tile represents how we encounter fate. Secular synonyms for fate include chance, accident, and coincidence. In pre-Christian or non-Christian terminology, fate is a chance or accidental occurrence that changes the course of our lives, an occurrence that must be\u2014precisely because it is inexplicable\u2014preordained. We have been singled out. Ben-Hur doesn\u2019t suffer because he\u2019s brave and good and Messala a vindictive man. His destiny is connected to the fact that he is no one else, though we can\u2019t be certain what constitutes his singularity. But he is extraordinary because<\/em> he has been singled out, rather than being singled out for being extraordinary. This is what makes even Kafka\u2019s near-nameless Josef K, a drab office worker in The Trial<\/em>, peerless: the dawning upon him of the fact, just before he dies, that his fate was reserved for him,<\/em>\u00a0that the doorkeeper who keeps making him wait at the court\u00a0is not a general doorkeeper who\u00a0keeps everyone out but appointed to impede him alone: \u201cHere no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I\u2019m going now to close it.\u201d<\/p>\n

To embrace fate (Nietzsche\u2019s term) is to abandon linear progression for a ramification of meaning in every direction. So Nietzsche: \u201cDid you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together \u2026 \u201d Once the tiles have fallen, you feel the events in Ben-Hur<\/em> are a rippling outward rather than a sequential shifting from victory to misfortune back to victory once more. Ben-Hur may look like a hero who\u2019s determined to overcome his adversaries, but he\u2019s really a man who\u2019s consented to what fate has set in motion. His life is not so much a heroic narrative as a series of metamorphoses.<\/p>\n

In creative work, chance and accident are generally eschewed for craft and mastery. This is true even for those who court extremities of language and seek fragmentation and disjunction. Craft reigns over experiment. There are exceptions\u2014John Cage, who decided to expose his art to chance after encountering Buddhism; surrealists like Louis Aragon; Raymond Roussel, one of the surrealists\u2019 more eccentric fellow travelers. The moment of the accident in writing is like the moment of fate in our lives: it exceeds our mastery and control. Its outcomes are hard to gauge. For Ben-Hur, you might even say that one of the outcomes of his fate is his contact with the miraculous, which is on the periphery of his world\u2014thirsty and captive, he is given water by an unknown man, who is Christ. Toward the end of the film, he sees Christ on his way to his crucifixion, recognizes him, returns the favor. This the not the climax of the narrative, of this \u201ctale of the Christ\u201d; these are random points of contact in a ramifying movement engendered by the slip of a tile.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is the\u00a0second\u00a0installment\u00a0of Amit Chaudhuri\u2019s column,\u00a0The Moment<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. His seventh novel, <\/em>Friend of My Youth, will be published in the U.S. by\u00a0New York Review Books in early 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On watching Ben-Hur in Bombay, remakes, and the wide-ranging repercussions of a loose tile.\u00a0   I think I began watching MGM-style historical epics at the New Empire. There was a cluster of three cinemas in the bit of Bombay near my school\u2014Sterling, the New Empire, and the New Excelsior. I have a memory of shamefacedly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1370,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32655],"tags":[4600,12158,16915,8117,11389,32869,16965,15242],"class_list":["post-121349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-moment","tag-ben-hur","tag-bombay","tag-charlton-heston","tag-john-cage","tag-kafka","tag-nietsche","tag-raymond-roussel","tag-the-ten-commandments"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Moment of the Tiles<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On watching \u2018Ben-Hur\u2019 in Bombay, remakes, and the wide-ranging repercussions of a loose tile.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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