The Dream of the Good Life and The Death of the Decent Hedonist:

(A Reflection on the Pursuit of the Ideal in the Recurring Pattern of William Holden’s Death in Film).

I can’t stand to see William Holden die. I never could. I always hated it. I think it was because he was as far away from Sartre as you could get. The World as given made wonderful, effortless sense to him. He loved it and so he hated dying. It was not a philosophical belief in life, it was a natural reflex response to it. He was that kind of naive, tragic romantic whose search for the ideal resided in the actual rather than the imagined.

He was not a scientist nor a philosopher. Meaning did not lay in the very large or the very small. It was not at the distant edge of the universe or in the microscope’s atom, but rather in the territory of experience and awareness where they intersect, the wonderful, impossible, unavoidable landscape of emotion. His allegiance was to the hedonist’s braille of the senses. His was a politics of the eyes and ears, of taste and touch, a primitive’s awareness of safety and danger, pleasure and pain, but with man’s distinct preference for the joy of living, the marginal optimist’s continual search for possibility.

He was on the other end of the spectrum from the Buddhists. He respected them but he felt they courted a certain lack of respect for the drama, the concreteness of the illusion, the hard cement of the dream. The thought of meditating often left a small sorrow inside him. What’s the point in a show if no one is looking, if no one is paying serious attention after so much trouble had gone into making it so bright and warm and desirable.

The noblest part of William Holden was his fear of death which he always carried with him. In “Bridge on The River Kwai” Holden is reluctantly returning to a Japanese prison camp he had all too recently escaped from, with a group of British commandos led by Col. Shears (Jack Hawkins). They are going to blow up the bridge that the British P.O.W.’s are being forced to build across the Kwai river. He is angrily hacking his way through the Burmese jungle with a machete when Col. Shears, who has a leg wound, orders Holden to go on without him. Holden throws his machete down at the Col’s feet in a sudden disgust. “You make me sick with your heroics, there’s a stench of death about you. You carry it in your pack like the plague. This war is just a game to you. You’re crazy with courage. For what? How to die like an officer and a gentleman, how to die by the rules, when the only important thing is how to live like a human being.”

And so his credo is spoken, the thread is laid in the loom, the recurrent pattern of pursuit begins, not for distant Oz, but for the sense’s imminent banquet, the mind’s conscious delight, and always with it the threat of the camouflaged mine, the hidden snare, the gray cold uniform waiting at the gate demanding identification and so you knew that apprehension was always there, fear was always within reach behind the crows feet eyes. It was a human fear, a generic fear of consequence, the consequence of every startling act and his veneer of bravado did not push it away but embroidered it. He just used the bravado to lift the log fallen across the path.

His voice was like the sound of your feet on the gravel of a country dirt road in May.
Its rich resonance seemed to carry the earth in it. It was deep strong masculine one yet at the same time warm and comforting.

No one died like Holden. Not Stewart, not Cagney, not Bogart, and certainly not Wayne. Holden died with that ‘NO’ on his face that you carry with you your entire life. He died after blowing up the bridges at Toko-Ri in Korea and then rose from the ashes to come back and blow up the bridges and die on the Kwai river, but in his best form - against his will. He knew living was the main event. All that mattered was life and it was always within reach. The only true ideal was the real, the soft peach at the end of the tree limb, the slender hair circling above her left ear and he always reached for it and he always went to it until the world’s simple stupid folly intervened.

William Holden’s passion was a generic passion, it was the tension between his love of life and its continual companions, loss and death, that played in his face and eyes and jaw. It was not a passion for the loftiness of ideal love but it’s root, need; it wasn’t the voltage of sex but it’s river, desire- and their tributaries -grief, pain, joy, profound hope. It was a passion rising out of the whole coiled spring of existence.

And so he worried. He was always worried, like the time he was trapped behind German Lines in “The Counterfeit Traitor” and approached the barmaid in the tavern,
“A friend of mine said if I ever found myself alone in Hamburg you’d help me.” And I wanted her to help him but I tried to hold myself back from desperately wanting her to because I knew that Holden was often doomed and it could be behind any door.

When he worried he did it with his eyes, but also with the assistance of his forehead and brow and jaw. The jaw became offset just a little as his teeth closed down tight and the brow pressing down on the eyes that looked ahead fiercely, fixing the mind at a spot on the floor or ceiling. It was an intense religious kind of worry, not over the soul’s plight, but the body’s imminent predicament, the threat to the mind’s freedom. His eyes never looked far ahead. They did not see the distant future, the eventual decay and dissolution, but instead to the field of wildflowers you could clutch in your hand just yards away, the ache for the one who is waiting under the bridge, the face in the harsh crowd that is everything. And so he was never far away from angry resentment at the intersection’s red light that stopped his pursuit of the cab carrying away the woman he needed or at a Major telling him he had to go back and blow up the bridge on the river Kwai.

He walked a certain kind of emotional edge that deprived him of those larger abstract consolations of religious conviction, political ideologies and philosophies that come with their ready-made faiths. He didn’t have a raincoat of belief to wear through all the bad weather, or the dime store idea of choice in that doll’s house of an orderly universe. Yet he was closer to a deeper kind of richness, the sense’s shower of happiness, the felt edge of experience, as though feeling itself was a buoyant joy lifting him beyond grief’s gravitational pull, informing him of some available magic in life and so he reserved his anger for that which interfered with it, a flat tire or a husband or a war. It was just that he had an instinct for life. It was not a search he had begun or a question asked but rather an answer he simply acknowledged, a direction taken naturally like the pigeon returning home.

He was made for the pungent aroma of rich tobacco or the strong pull of a woman’s pollen and that kind of talk that feels easy but is tied to the real. With women it wasn’t just the sex. I mean you could tell he liked the sex, kind of like a child likes his tennis shoes, but you could tell he liked the woman more, the way you love the earth more when you have the tennis shoes. Sex was just something that was woven through the spiritual, like a blackberry vine.

He was not without values or a capacity for reverence, it was just that pleasure stuck to the roof of God’s mouth like peanut butter. His feast was mostly the ordinary, the commonplace, like shaving, dressing, eating his breakfast or having a nice car and then someplace to drive it to and something to do when you got there, sell a house, break in a horse, or drill for oil and then a late lunch where you could eat at a table outside in the sun and laugh during the conversation, mostly an ordinary laugh but an occasional strong real one and a drink afterwards with ice in it and then after relaxing for a while maybe a short activity, not aggressive but slightly strenuous like a walk on the beach or a light game of tennis, something hinting at enjoyment and leisure but without strain. Like pigeons he seemed to be always busy and idle at the same time. Pleasure was his soul’s recess, the place where his patience resided. It was his genius, his cosmology, his lyrical logic.

He first discover it in ‘Picnic’ where he’s in a small mid-western town during a labor day picnic. He’s a drifter, but a young drifter, at the beginning end of life’s table of desire. He has nothing and wants it all, a restless horse looking for a way into the race with a confused impatience he doesn’t know how to direct. Then he sees Madge (Kim Novak), the queen of the Fair, floating down the river on a boat of roses after her late evening coronation toward the waiting reception on the dock. His face suddenly knows something deeper than understanding, beyond explanation. She descends down to the floating platform where a few people are dancing. They move toward each other slowly, wordlessly, without choice like planets following a path of unalterable laws. Their bodies come together in the slow rhythmic movement of a timeless dance, and his face becomes finally calm. They leave together and drive down to some railroad tracks near the river. In his struggle to express his feelings for her he stumbles uncertainly into the word “important,” but his face is still searching, “No, it’s not that,” then his eyes light up with recognition, “It’s patience.” He is surprised at his own astonishment, “Yes,you make me feel patient.”

The first time I saw him die I was seventeen. It was the first real death I’d ever seen. He died alone in a muddy ditch in Korea after blowing up the bridges at Toko-Ri. He had been afraid of the bridges. He’d lain in bed the night before the mission with his right arm around Grace Kelly and a cigarette in the left hand, bathed in the quiet blue light of the open window’s soft moon.

“I have to know about the bridges,” she said. There was a pause. “There are seven of them” he answered quietly, “and they’re shooting at you constantly from both sides of the mountains.” “Are you afraid” she asked. His eyes stared fiercely at a spot on the ceiling. “Yes,” he said. You could see how the worry was making its way into fear, pushing out the pleasure. Something very wrong was happening inside him. He should have said “No! I won’t go,” but it was l951, not l968, and that’s how it always seemed to be for him. He never wanted to be the hero but he was always lured by clumsy circumstance into the heroic against his deeper, smarter self. He hated ideals, he knew they were damn traps. He was just the victim of the simple bad luck that dogs the most innocent decision. The fault was not in him, it was in the stars.

They got through the first pass okay, the one he was worried about, but they missed one bridge and the team leader said they had to go back. It was then I felt my stomach tighten. They got the bridge the second time and were heading for home when Holden saw the white stream trailing out from under his plane’s tail. “I think I took a hit,” he said. He leaned into his radio mask, then trying to reassure himself added “I think I can make it over the mountains ahead and then coast to the sea.” “Right,” said the team leader, “I’ll radio your position and they can pick you up.” “Roger,” said Holden. He reaches up with his right hand and unsnaps the radio mask and lets it hang down beside his face which is filled, not with the fear of death, but with the longing for the other side of the mountain, for Grace Kelly, the bed, the open window. He pulls up on the throttle and then gazes down at the fuel gauge. His face stiffens and he raises the radio mask up to his mouth, “Brubaker to team leader, fuel tank is empty, I’ve had it. Can’t make the mountain.” He looks below out the window, sharp fear darting through his eyes, “there’s a flat area ahead, looks like a deep irrigation ditch running through it, good cover. I’m going to put her down.” “Okay, I copy you,” says the team leader. I’ll give you cover as long as I can.”

Holden heads the plane down with one movement of his right hand, his face hating the whole thing. He skids to a halt fifty yards from the ditch then releases the canopy and jumps to the ground and crouches beside the plane. His face is suddenly stunned with the disoriented panic of a trapped animal, momentarily paralyzed with indecision, and then he runs toward the ditch in a swift zig zag pattern and jumps in and quickly forces his back up against the bank clutching his rifle. His face shows fear and then anger and then a mixture of both. He swivels his body around and peers up over the embankment and sees a dozen moving figures silently advancing out of the near trees toward him. A new wave of terror crosses his face. He fires several bursts and three of them fall down and then three more emerge out of the distant trees toward the ravine and then four more behind them. Desperate anxiety floods his face and he throws his jacket off into the mud and moves in a fast darting pace down the ravine and then abruptly stops as he sees four more figures jump down into the ditch fifty yards ahead of him. He jerks a grenade from his belt, hastily throws it at them and then turns around to retreat and sees several more figures advancing toward him. He empties his rifle at them in an unthinking panic, dropping one and wounding another as they are replaced by two more. He starts to run wildly and then he grabs at a sharp sting in his left leg and falls against the bank and then leans forward quickly to check the wound and is hit in the side and thrown back again. His face is now pure fear and he grabs the hand gun from his holster and tries to wiggle back and away and then he takes three more rapid shots in the chest and his body twitches and convulses and the fear suddenly vanishes from his face and for a brief second there is stunned surprise and then the eyes close and his body is motionless in the mud. I left the theater sickened and empty.

And this was years before he had to die on the river Kwai and that was only because the damn river went down during the night and a crazy British officer gave him away. In “Bridge On The River Kwai” Holden is recuperating at a military British hospital after his harrowing escape from the Japanese prison camp on the Kwai river. Colonel Shears (Jack Hawkins) finds him sunbathing on the beach with a beautiful Nurse Lieutenant and a drink and annoyingly asks him if he could spare a few minutes for “a matter of considerable importance.” Holden grudgingly accompanies him up the hill to his quarters where the colonel requests his advice on the best approach to take for going in and blowing up the bridge on the Kwai. While Holden is tactfully trying to display his disinterest on the matter the Colonel casually asks him if he might like to go with them explaining enthusiastically that “your experience in the area would be invaluable.” Holden’s eyes register shock. He stares in stunned silence then drops formality as his voice suddenly rises sharply and says incredulously, “You mean to tell me that’s why you brought me here! You want me to go back?” His eyes show pained disbelief. “Colonel, I just got out of there- my escape was a miracle. I nearly died and now you want me to go back! Don’t be ridiculous.” His voice is pleading, panicky.

The colonel continued patronizingly, “I know how you feel, but try to see our point, you have a first-hand knowledge of the whole show which no one else possesses and besides......” Holden interrupts suddenly, his face almost frantic, the voice laced with anger, “Let’s stop kidding
around, it’s insane.

I can’t go back there.” He pauses as a saving thought surfaces, “Besides I belong to the American Navy...” he pauses again, “also, you might as well know..., I’m not really an officer. You see, when the ‘Houston’ sank I made it ashore with a real commander and when a Jap patrol got him I took his uniform in order to get better treatment as an officer. He breathes a sigh of relief. “So there, you see. I’m in big trouble with my outfit, I wouldn’t be of any use to you.”

“Well actually we knew all about that,” colonel Shears replies, “and so we made an arrangement with your American navy. You see you’re a bit of a problem to them, on the one hand you’re a bloody hero for escaping from Kwai but they can’t very well pin a medal on you for impersonating an officer so our need for you rather serves them well. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

Holden is trapped by circumstance and he knows it and so he returns to the Kwai river with a small band of four demolition experts led by colonel Shears to blow up the bridge which has been religiously constructed by the misguided Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness) who is the captive commanding British officer of the P.O.W’s. In a twisted application of military logic Col. Nicholson develops an attachment to the bridge as an example and symbol of British superiority and discipline and fiercely, protectively supervises the bridges construction. Meanwhile Holden is cutting his way toward it through the Burmese jungle with his companions and two Asian women porters. When they stop to rest one of the women begins to massage his back tenderly speaking to him in her language which he can’t understand. Col. Shears begins to translate for him but Holden deliberately stops him with his satisfied eyes, “No,” he says knowingly, “talk always spoils it”.

They arrive at the bridge and swim the river by moonlight to attach the explosives and then settle back to await the morning’s arrival of the Japanese transport train when they plan to detonate it. But during the night the river goes down and Holden awakes to the universe’s indifferent extenuation of circumstance. Col. Nicholson sees the now-exposed demolition wires and attempts to cut them and save his bridge to Holden’s disbelief and then, in an involuntary rage Holden runs across the river to kill the Col. and is cut down by a shower of bullets and killed just feet away from the Col who is also shot and inadvertently collapses across the detonator destroying the bridge. A lone British medical officer surveys the scene from a distance muttering to himself like a Greek oracle, “Madness, madness, madness!” So Holden dies because the river went down and he didn’t want to go back there in the first place. All he wanted was to stay on the beach with the beautiful nurse lieutenant and his drink at the British hospital, he was just caught in the middle like in the “Counterfeit Traitor.”

You see in “The Counterfeit Traitor” he was just trying to make his way through the damn world at war again. It begins with his straight foreward, honest statement. “There was no secret about it, I’d been trading with the axis and the allies for years. My business was oil and Sweden was neutral and I was a Swedish citizen.” Holden’s compass was built for moral ambiguity, he always knew that grace and goodness had essentially, nothing to do with social, political, moral or religious issues, but that they were buried someplace smaller, nearer, within each instance of each human predicament and that you were just as often led there by bewilderment, fear, and desire as by other nobler routes, so that to say ‘He was a priest, or that she was a prostitute, or that the boy helped the old woman carry her groceries’ was to say nearly nothing. It’s not that he didn’t have a conscience, it’s just that his standards were higher and lower than most people’s. He was not giving aid and comfort to the Axis or the Allies, he was simply ready to give it to anyone he felt needed it, even himself.

Unfortunately his name had appeared on the blacklist in the American papers and he wanted to explain his side to his relatives in the States so he meets with a friend of his brothers who happens to be in Stockholm. Of course this man turns out to be a counter-intelligence agent from England who explains how they managed to place him on the blacklist so they could seduce him into getting off it by forcing him to monitor German oil shipments for them. To do that he would be violating Sweden’s neutrality act and he could be arrested by them or if discovered by the Germans, simply shot.

They ask him to become more vocal as a pro-nazi sympathizer in order to gain the German’s trust and access to their secrets. He refuses because that would destroy his closest friend, Max who is Jewish. Then they reveal that they have been taping their meeting and threaten to expose him to as a traitor to both the Germans and the Swedish if he doesn’t cooperate. So there he is again, just like in the ‘River Kwai,’ a trapped pawn under faulty stars.

He arranges a dinner with Max and starts dropping anti British remarks which upsets his friend and then continues the painful charade with his business associates. He is ordered to Berlin to hopefully draw his oil contacts there over the the side of the Allies.

While at a German party he meets his undercover contact, Lilli Palmer, who is to assist him. She is beautiful and mature and intelligent and she throws him off balance in a way that is irresistible and that he loves. His performance is convincing to the Nazis and he is allowed to probe deeper into the German military operations.

He is shortly given further instructions by British intelligence to meet a contact at a spot on the river. When he arrives there he doesn’t see anyone so he lights a cigarette and then he sees Lilli Palmer coming toward him. She rushes up to him and throws her arms around his neck and gives him a short but convincing kiss for the benefit of onlookers and then begins a quick whispered explanation but he interrupts. “I think I’m being followed, in fact I think it’s the entire German Gestapo,” and he grabs her and kisses her the way he’s been aching to, his whole body against hers.

She takes him to an apartment she’s rented for their cover where she explains that she has some important information that has to get out of Germany. The irrepressible Holden says with a glow in his smiling eyes, “How about a drink before we start?” She responds with “How about after,” dampening the preferable anticipation in his face.

It’s on one of his tours through a munitions factory where he witnesses a worker who is hanged in public by the Gestapo as an example to the other assembled workers who were threatening to go on strike. His face stiffens with rage, “You can read about a thousand atrocities but you only have to see one. Suddenly it is your brother there.” A deeper, nobler part of him becomes engaged. He is no longer coerced into cooperating with the British, now he is doing it willingly.

Shortly after that Holden and Lilli are in the apartment. She has just learned that an English bomb accidentally hit a German school killing one hundred and twenty children. She feels the information she gave was somehow responsible and wants to quit. They are arguing over it when a truck of German soldiers pull up, break in the downstairs door and head up the stairs toward their apartment. Instant panic and fear flood their face. She dashes about looking for a way out. He grabs her with a sinking tender look, “It’s no use,” he says, then pulls her close and they cling to each other in their terror like caught animals. The loud boots rush up to their door and past it, up to the next floor where another trapped animal is removed screaming and taken away instead of them. They stand still long moments in silence. Release and relief and guilt flood through them, then they see each other for the first time. A love and swift desire swells up and seizes them and they reach and grab and hold in the fierce clarity and strangeness of passion.

The Gestapo return to search the other apartments and find a suspicious scrap of paper in Lilli’s bathroom that something cryptic had been written on. They find her in a church and arrest her and then pick up Holden and place him in a basement cell. The next morning he is awakened by a sound outside the window. He looks up through the bars into a square cement yard and sees Lilly being escorted by soldiers with rifles and placed against a wall. In a panicked horror he yells her name. Her shocked face searches for its source in a crazed recognition of confused delight. The bullets tear through her and she slumps onto the stone. Holder’s face is twisted in an enormous grief and agony without dimension or boundary, a pain beyond name or release.

It is shortly after that while attempting to escape from Germany with the help of the Resistance that he is caught by another Gestapo agent. He manages to disarm him and throws him to the ground then kills him by pounding his head against a cement wall, his teeth clenched in a fierce rage, in the will of the universe.

'Sunset Boulevard’ opens with the good life already dead. Holder is floating face down in the swimming pool of Norm Despond, a faded, passed over star from the ‘silent’ era. His voice begins the narrative with cynical irony, “This morning the body of a young man was found floating in the pool of a Hollywood mansion, two shots in the back and one in the stomach. Nobody important really, just a movie writer with a couple of B pictures to his credit. The poor dope always wanted a swimming pool and in the end he got it.” He begins telling the story as the camera moves up from the bottom of the pool into the expression of stunned surprise on his dead face and then fades out to six months earlier when the story begins with him sitting at his table writing in a small drab apartment.

He was a down on his luck screenwriter trying to keep a low profile from the bill collectors who were after his convertible which he kept hidden behind Rudy’s shoe shine shop. “Rudy was the kind of guy who never asked questions, he’d just look at the heels of your shoes and know the score.” His fate begins its familiar form when he is out trying to distract himself from his problems on a nice Sunday drive through the wealthy section of the Hollywood hills. He is spotted by two men from the collection agency who begin a speedy pursuit after him. Just as he thinks he’s lost them he gets a flat tire and quickly pulls into the open driveway of a large residence. He gets out and begins to look around, moving up some large ornate marble steps toward the house. “It was a great big, white elephant of a place. A neglected house gets an unhappy look.” His vital instinct for happiness lets him mourn its absence even in a house. He is sharply summoned by a mysterious woman’s voice from behind the curtains of a high window. ‘Hey you, what took you so long. Come up here.” Max, a butler, appears and ushers Holden into the house and upstairs to a large room where he meets Norma Desmond - sunglasses, cigarette holder, and a perfumed air of tarnished glory, one foot in this world and one in another, still waving proudly to a parade that had long since passed her by.

She discovers he’s a writer and offers him a job tightening up a screenplay for her “return to the screen.” He hesitates, listening to his ambivalence, looking for an alternative. “well, do you want the job or not?,” she demands. Having no money and no other prospects he decides to give it a try and uncomfortably settles in, his bruised sense of pride somewhat healed by the abundance of champagne and caviar.

He occupies a room over the garage and tries to ignore the nagging voice of his souls discomfort with the place, the sad sense everywhere of a creeping paralysis that permeates the air and the grounds and the occupants. In the middle of unpacking he looks out his window down onto an old abandoned tennis court as desolate as the life of Scott Fitzgerald, “out of beat with the rest of the world, crumbling apart in slow motion, from the faded markers to the sagging tennis nets.

Living in the constant melodrama of her continual presence a slow fondness begins to develop for her somewhere below his awareness. After a couple of weeks it gradually becomes clear to him that her need for him extends beyond his professional capacity and he continually maneuvers out of being saddled. Then she throws a formal Ball with no other guests, just the two of them and dances around the ballroom clinging to him and declares her love for him. “I had to get away from there,” he says desperately. “I had to hear somebody laugh again, somebody my own age.” he puts his coat on and leaves in the rain and hitches his way to the party of some of his old friends. Finally surrounded by gaiety and the pulsing flow of blood in joyful veins his clarity of vision is renewed and he calls Max at the mansion to get his belonging returned and is told, “Madam is with the Dr. She slashed her wrists after you left.” He lays the phone down and stares at the floor with the furrowed brow, tightened forehead and pained eyes and then looks around at the party. Everything is changed inside him. The freedom and gaiety now seems to mock the tragedy that has invaded his happiness.

It was the same look he’d had when he had to go back and blow up the bridges on the River Kwai and make that second return run at the bridges over ToKo Ri, of the universe showing him the right direction and then forcing him in the other. He gets his coat and dashes out into the rain back to the mansion.

Norma Desmond is lying in bed with her bandaged wrists. He walks slowly over to her and gently removes her dancing shoes. “What’s kind of fool stunt was that,” he says awkwardly. His whole manner has changed toward her from cavalier to caring. He sits on the bed. “Happy New Year, darling,” he says as the soft strands of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ filter up to the bedroom.

He resigns himself to helping her but fate brings him another chance of happiness when one of his old friend’s fiancees, Betty Schaffer, falls in love with him. He tells himself he’ll find a way out somehow and leave with her but Norma finds out and intervenes, exposing the dependence of his ‘other life’ to Betty and Holden’s damaged pride and guilty feelings sends her back to his old friend who she was engaged to. Then, in a final effort to save his remaining integrity, he packs his clothes in his suitcase and heads out of the mansion, past the pool where Norma Desmond screams at him and then fires three shots from a revolver at his back. Holden tries to turn around and then stumbles foreword, face down into the pool.

The camera looks down on Holden’s body from the air as he his voice gives a post mortem. “What would they do to poor Norma now,” he says as they carry him away on the stretcher. “Here’s something those heartless bastards can have some real fun with. The headlines will kill her, ‘yesterday’s glamour queen falls from grace’. She had more heart and courage than all of them together. She was only terrible toward the end, and who isn’t, when you’re looking right at it. The camera fades with Holden’s last voice, ‘It’s funny how gentle they are with you after your dead.”

It was really always about sympathy with him, a kind of radical sympathy, and he was suspicious of anything that would weaken it. He was incapable of being unattached to the pathos of her drama just as he was to the screenplay that had been written for his own life. The dreams she’d clung to had desperately enfolded her like Holden’s dream of the good life had always enfolded him, even here, again, in its lovely ashes.