Reflections on the Spirit of Resistance

A few days ago on Substack, I Noted that I will devote the remaining time leading to Election Day to writing for American Samizdat. All going well, with a Kamala Harris victory in the election over Trump (who warrants, long past, only the one-word, last name identifier historically common to tyrants) — that is to say, a victory of liberal democracy over the forces of corrupt, authoritarian decline —American Samizdat will soon end and Homo Vitruvius return as the sole home of my Substack writing. Even in democratic victory, Trumpian-GOP attempts to thwart the election results might delay the transition. The tragedy of an actual Trump victory will, I Noted, transition American Samizdat into a resistance phase.

“Resistance” is a word that has come over the course of history, and especially now, to carry a lot of cheapened cachet. It is, in some human and political circles, a romanticized and glorified term. Resistance to tyranny rises in the imagination as hallowed ground. “Resistance” is both the more general mode of any rebel and has been fashioned in the political vocabulary as also the specific manner in which the rebel acts: to resist, as part of the resistance. In his profound and eloquent analysis of the resistant spirit of rebellion, The Rebel, Albert Camus posited for it a metaphysical level.

The Rebel: an Essay on Man in Revolt: the edition I own.

When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical.

As I mention in the essay below, republished from last year, Camus had earlier exemplified human resistance and, through it, freedom in The Myth of Sisyphus, in which his Absurd Hero, Sisyphus, has been condemned by the gods eternally to pushing a boulder up a hill and watching it roll down. Our absurd existence in a single symbolic act of futility. But Camus has Sisyphus “crown” his “victory” over this fate in his contempt for it. “There is no fate,” I wrote on Homo Vitruvius, quoting Camus, “that cannot be overcome by scorn.”

There Is No Fate

Writes Camus in the The Rebel, seeming to expound on Sisyphus’s exemplary act, “Become so very free that your whole existence is an act of rebellion.”

The French Algerian Camus himself wrote during the Second World War for the French Resistance, among the most famous and honored resistance campaigns in history. I wrote about this connection in “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death,” my consideration of that greatest of all films about the French resistance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows. Adapted from Joseph Kessel’s 1943 novel in 1969, it was not released in the U.S. until 2006.

It is a film about human beings in existential extremity. It is a film about resistance to oppression, not in the modern, political sense, but in a fundamental human sense. It is a film about the struggle to be human in a fundamental existential sense.

Camus, however, both reading and living history, warned against the extremities of thought and action to which the spirit of resistance can take us.

Freedom . . . is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.

I pursued these ideas further in my Melville essay, as relevant today as when I wrote them 18 years ago.

We live in an age when political and moral values are often sophistically reduced to their principled forms, from which have been ideologically subtracted the substance of those forms, which confers upon them in the first place their worth — the elevation, for instance, of resistance in itself as a virtue, in casuistic disregard of those ideas and values of which the resistance is in support.

It isn’t simply that we resist; it is for what we resist.

It is almost exactly a year ago, that I offered these following Reflections on the Spirit of Resistance. They are doubly, perhaps triply relevant now.

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Paul Newman’s 1967 film Cool Hand Luke resides at the apex of journeyman director Stuart Rosenberg’s career, the fullest flowering of his skills, representing on the screen a fundamental story. The film assumed only some of the cultural cachet of that same year’s Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn, or Mike Nichol’s The Graduate (or 1970’s MASH, by Robert Altman) all of which delivered greater cinematic inventiveness or subversive comic brio to speak to the 1960’s counter-cultural uprising. But Cool Hand Luke has nonetheless lived on as an iconic expression of the essential spirit of the time – resistance to oppression – though by virtue of its essential nature, it addressed itself specifically to none of the issues of the day, neither cultural conformity, nor state power, nor racial subjugation.

Under Rosenberg’s experienced hand, a host of pre-stardom actors joined Newman in giving on-the-mark performances as varied chain-gang characters and in deliverance of what would become equally iconic lines. Strother Martin’s famous pronouncement, “What we’ve got here is — failure to communicate,” memorably resonates not just because of the message, delivered after Martin’s prison “Captain” has just beat the irremediably resistant Luke to the ground, but because of Martin’s choked-anger vocalization of the words. Another famous line, from which the film’s title is derived, in one of many famous scenes, is Newman’s delivery of Luke’s defining existential statement of how he plays it in life: “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”

Maybe the most famous scene in the film is that of the boxing match between George Kennedy‘s alpha prisoner “Dragline” (the role that won Kennedy an Oscar and made him famous) and Newman’s smaller, slighter Luke. As expected, Dragline whups Luke good. But Luke will not stay down. Woozily staggering with every blow, beat to the ground by head shots, against cries from his fellow prisoners and advice from even Dragline himself, finally, to stay down and end his beating, each time the unconquerably resistant Luke rises up for more, punching, near the end, even from his knees. Finally, Dragline has to walk away, defeated in victory, and Luke has earned the oddly silent, awed worship of his fellow prisoners (as if at the revelation of some strange scrawny god) and the fearsome, concentrated recognition by the prison guards looking on of the physically unimposing monster they see they’ll one day have to kill.

In a nation with pandering pride in its mythos of individualism, Cool Hand Luke exalts the spirit of resistance against crushing, inhuman authority – in the film itself, against the sadistic chain gang guardians, and, for the cultural moment that received the film, against long presiding forces that would crush individual autonomy and personality beneath the wheel of disciplined conformity.

The valorization of resistance as heroic, noble human attribute is longstanding. From the slave rebellion of Spartacus and the last holdouts atop Masada to democracy-creating revolutions and the Warsaw uprisings, the human spirit is stirred and encouraged to persist, and dream to prevail, by the spirit of resistance. Albert Camus, a resistor himself during the Second World War, in the end offers the Sisyphus of his myth also as resistant hero. What “crowns” Sisyphus’s victory, Camus tell us, is his refusal to accept the meaninglessness of the futility to which the gods condemned him.

“There is no fate,” Camus writes, “that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

In the contemporary world, we are habituated to see inspiration not just in the acts of lone individuals but also in a whole people’s uprising against oppression. In the United States, for instance, we celebrate our founding in revolution. Even before the founding, though, and beyond it, we celebrate a story of resistance on Thanksgiving. That isn’t how most people think of the day, but that’s what it also is. We mythologize a congenial meal between surviving Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony and the Native Wampanoag led by Massasoit. But celebrations of survival are also testaments to resistance – resistance to the forces of nature and circumstance and all the challenges of life in this world that align against us. We resist our crushing defeat in many ways.

Of course, Native America has a very different perspective on Thanksgiving. The son of Massasoit, his successor as chief, Metacomet, waged his own campaign of resistance once he recognized the never-ending expansion to which the colonists were determined. He further resisted attempts to convert the Wampanoag to Christianity. The Wampanoag failed in their resistance. They were overcome, and Massasoit ended with his head atop a pike at the Plymouth colony and his wife and child sold into slavery. Resistance does not prevail just because it is just.

Resistance is not just because it prevails. It is not righteous because it is weak. It will not fail just because it is wrong.

For all we exalt the spirit of resistance, its spirit alone does not make righteous any instance of it or ennoble the goal in the service of which it stands its ground and refuses to bend.

Newman’s Luke is an easy charmer, aided by the immeasurable, non-hipster cool of the actor who played him and “that Luke smile.” The film’s ending mythologizes that vision of him. But near that end, Luke calls himself a “hard case,” and he has earlier confessed to his mother (an emotionally translucent Jo Van Fleet) that he could never find “any elbow room” in the world.

The prisons of this world, in fact, have filled their cells — besides the many political prisoners and the hard luck victims and the wrongly convicted and the framed — also with hard cases: the meanest, fiercest, most murderous resisters you dream never to meet in the dark alone. Hardened by this cruel world in their first or second decade, committed to disobey, not to go or get along, they will match your fiercest dream of resistance with a furious carelessness of their own lives as great as their hate-filled disregard for yours and fight you until the stake is in their heart.

The Underground Man, of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, begins:

I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.

He is not resistant. He is recalcitrant: obstinately defiant of authority or restraint; difficult to manage or operate; not responsive to treatment. From the Latin recalcitrare, which means literally "to kick back." Like a mule or horse.

In the United States, organized crime has resisted American law enforcement for over a century. In Mexico, drug cartels resist even the government’s militarized effort to stamp them out. During the Iraq War, to match the American presence, there arose an anti-democratic, theocratic, and criminal insurgency, cause itself of tens of thousands of targeted Iraqi civilian deaths — a resistance movement, so called — and those among promoters of social justice who supported it and cheered the necessity of alliance with it.

In the name of what — what ideas, what values, what dream of human relationship and organization — do we resist? What do we resist?

An anecdote:

Some years ago, I was present at an exhibit opening and party at my partner, Julia’s still young photography school in Venice, California, just steps from the Venice Pier and beach, before – after that night – we both understood that security would always now be necessary. Midway through the evening, friends had alerted me to a man no one knew who had behaved obnoxiously toward several women. None of the women had complained or made a scene, however, and there seemed no basis on which to take any action. We all just kept an eye out.

At the end of the evening, while saying goodbye near the front door to some last departing visitors, I was told that back in Julia’s office, where a few close friends were now privately gathered, this man was present and refusing to leave. I went back to speak to him. He was seated in a chair next to Julia, in her chair. I politely, regretfully, advised him that the party was over, it was time to close up, and that we needed visitors to leave now. The man, about my size but fifteen or twenty years younger than I, ignored me. Though I stood just in front of him, he didn’t look at me but instead asked Julia a personal question and touched her arm. Julia uncomfortably declined to respond, and I told him at the point that if he didn’t leave, I would have to call the police.

“How fast can you get to the phone?” he replied, springing up out of his chair and lunging with his hand at my throat.

Taken by surprise, I was pushed back against the wall, where the two of us began to grapple. Two male friends quickly jumped in to help and the four of us in short order tumbled to the floor in a heap of struggling bodies and torn clothing.

We have probably all seen videos of men apparently high on drugs, or off their meds, who display extraordinary strength and require multiple police officers, after very great effort, to restrain them. This was such an instance. Though all four of us were of roughly equal size, it took all the effort that three of us could muster to control this one man and restrain him on the floor, where he never ceased his resistance and continued to try to throw us off and lash out. He was wild and could not be reasoned with. If we let up at all, he would attempt to throw us off. Any one of us would have been beaten by him. Even two of us would have been unable to control him.

A female friend called the police. For the twenty minutes it took them to arrive, there was no reprieve from the fight to retain control. We told him multiple times that if he calmed down, we would ease up. He only fought back harder. When his face was positioned to do it, he spat at us, until we had to fight still more for greater control: we held his face pressed sideways to the ground so the spit couldn’t reach us.

More violent people than we, of whom there are many, wouldn’t have been satisfied to control the conflict: they would have brutally ended it with their own violent beating. In truth, were there no police to come to the rescue, we’d have had no alternative to that violent beating, and there would have been real damage all around. Had I been without two friends to leap to my aid, who knows the damage to me?

The last fight I’d had before that one, by the way, was thirteen or fourteen years still earlier. I was then night managing a lower Manhattan warehouse, a trucking transshipment hub, while attending graduate school. Informed that one of the interstate truckers had the night before made antisemitic comments about me, I confronted him about it, to which he responded by calling me a kike and kicking me in the balls. My fusillade of punches in return, in the shadow of the World Trade Center, escalated out into the street. The ensuing brawl, broken up by a handy ex-footballer twice both our size, resumed inside the warehouse, where Football put a stop to it once again.

In the later instance, having just passed my fiftieth birthday, I later informed Julia that I was now officially too old to fight, and hence was hired, to man all future events, the burly security professional with the black belt.

When the police finally arrived on the scene, they found four bodies sprawled across the floor so entwined that in taking control of the situation they had actually to touch arms and legs and ask to whom each one belonged. Certainly, the entangled circumstance into which they walked told no obvious story, though it would have been easy to conclude that three men had ganged up on a fourth.

Everyone present confirmed the same account, however, and our troubled guest, inflamed with the spirit of resistance, was handcuffed and escorted to a cell.

That’s my account anyway, the only one you have. You have to believe me, and if you think you have reason to mistrust me — perhaps some ideological enmity — you may think I’ve slanted the story, withheld or misrepresented facts in the case. I think I’m a fairly swell guy, but would you believe there are people, based on things I’ve written, ideas I’ve espoused, decisions I made as a “boss,” (grades I’ve given) who have had some not very nice things to say about me? They’ve even called me a kike. More than once.

Of course, there are events and histories in this world with considerably greater historic and evidentiary records than my wrestling match on a gallery office floor just off the boardwalk at Venice Beach, California. There are today, totally verified facts about the world we live in. Oddly, for some people, in either instance, that doesn’t make a difference.

People resist the truth, too.

AJA

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com