In the movie Jack
Reacher Tom Cruise plays an updated version of an old fashioned American
hero who comes across the path of an elderly villain who had survived for
decades in a Soviet gulag. The villain (played by Werner Herzog!!) has
become a reptilian boss of an American-Russian gang that uses a construction
company as a front to feed its endless hunger. The Russian, known as Zec, which
simply means “prisoner” since the man no longer remembers his original name, is
missing almost all of his fingers. The reason why is that he chewed off some of the fingers to keep from getting gangrene from frostbite in Siberia and thus
dying. The others he chewed off to keep from having to work in the sulphur
mines (sounds vaguely similar to the movie Barabbas) where he also would
have most likely died
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| Zec |
This willingness to
self-amputate shows the drive of Zec to live. His urge to survive has made his
criminality become his essential nature, and he confesses at one point to
continue engaging in criminal activity long after he has obtained anything he
really needs because it has become his nature to simply gobble up more and more
of life. His survival instinct has metastasized into a kind of pure evil that
commits crime now for the sake of committing crime. He doesn’t want women, or
wealth, or fancy cars. Crime no longer has a goal for him, just as his
surviving the Gulag had no real purpose other than pure survival itself.
No doubt such people
exist. No doubt labor and death camps all over the world contain emotionally,
mentally, and spiritually stripped human beings who have essentially turned
into automatons that are zeroed in on living for as long as possible. But these
are not the only sort of humanity that exists in death camps. The Soviet
Gulag, as one example, might have regurgitated Zec, but it also formed
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
is unfortunately not as well known as he used to be. His existence, though,
demonstrates how the Christian vision supports a humane life in the most
inhumane of circumstances. Solzhenitsyn survived the Soviet Gulag and learned
how to be Christian (and a novelist) as a result. In the early short novel A
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alyosha the Baptist survives with joy,
not with animal determination. The main character, Shukov, is not a Christian,
but he recognizes in Alyosha a miraculous ability to love and forgive and endure
that goes beyond any of the other prisoners, some of whom seem to be early
versions of Zec. In his non-fiction Gulag Archipelago,
Solzhenitsyn recounts his own experiences and his growth of faith, showing that
Alyosha was not merely the byproduct of a novelist’s imagination.
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During one scene in Jack
Reacher, Cruise/Reacher is in the office of Helen Rodin, the defense
attorney for an Army sniper framed by Zec. Reacher makes her look out a window
into nearby offices where people are working late in cubicles. He then gives a
little monologue that includes the following: “So many people talk
about freedom and security, safety and success. But what is freedom?”
Reacher claims that what many Americans consider to be freedom is
in fact a kind of low grade serfdom. The poor saps working late have
bills to pay, and bosses to placate, and ladders to climb. Reacher ponders if
this is the “freedom” he has spent his life fighting for overseas; has all his
efforts really been worth the fight? Provisionally for him it is because
his American existence allows him to live in such a way that he can get up and
move any time he wants, living off grid.
He says: “It's why I
refuse to work for someone else … my freedom is defined by my vision of being
safe, secure but able to get up and go.”
Reacher’s freedom in
this context obviously contrasts with Zec, who knew what the ultimate cubicle
was in the Gulag. But Zec is still trapped, enslaved, by his subhuman
programming that drives him to commit crimes even though he doesn’t need to. So
what is going on here? On the one hand, the ultimate American fantasy of
freedom: the skilled male who can do just about anything and get away with it in style,
a man with a kind of old fashioned martial nobility and self-control, who rides
into town, rights wrongs, and rides out again, helping the weak, even on the
bus that leaves the big city. On the other hand, the criminal who stops hurting
others only when the good guy kills him.
In some ways, this is a satisfying fantasy. But . . . what about Solzhenitsyn? He is not just a tertium quid, a third option on a spectrum between Reacher and Zec. He is the question mark put to all man-made constructions of freedom (and justice). Reacher can never stop moving, can never have a family, can never grow old with grandkids. He is free but only in a limited fantasy sense that men sometimes entertain (sort of like Huck Finn perpetually lighting out for the territory). Zec is just dead. But Solzhenitsyn finds happiness wherever he is, in the Gulag prison, in the woods of Vermont, in post-Soviet Moscow.
"It is for freedom tha Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened by a yoke of slavery."