A Failure To Communicate
I'd just as soon not know what makes a human bomb tick
by George Jonas
National Post
January 13, 2010
"What we've got here is failure to communicate," said actor Strother Martin as the prison camp warden in the 1967 Paul Newman movie, Cool Hand Luke. The ironic line, reprised by Newman himself in the last reel, became almost as famous as Clark Gable's 1939 rejoinder to Vivian Leigh: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Like Gone With The Wind, or the inimitable (if non-existent) "Play it again, Sam" attributed to the 1942 classic Casablanca, "failure to communicate" became a defining line of the period.
In the 1960s the breakdown wasn't merely between totalitarianism and democracy. Failure to communicate loomed large between the generations. It characterized the clean-cut and the hirsute; the love-makers and the war-makers. Suburbanites who cut their grass had little to say to inner city dwellers who smoked theirs. Citizens who were for banning the bomb had no language in common with those who wanted more bang for the buck.
A gay producer friend had his Japanese production manager demonstrate a different type of failure to communicate during a Tokyo shoot. Apparently the production manager was a genius with numbers, but less at home with words. Normally a picture of calm, having to speak English made him especially excitable.
"You nice to film," he greeted my friend on one memorable occasion, "but terrible accident. The fish make trouble when eat interpreter Morikasan. Is okay. Go for lonesome lunch with inferior minister."
The producer had a choice. He could infer from this that he was photogenic, and although as a consequence of a mishap his interpreter was feeding the fishes, if he was feeling lonely, he might find lunchtime solace in the arms of a lesser man of the cloth ("inferior minister.") But tempted as he was to come to this conclusion, he didn't.
"I accurately deduced," he explained, "that I needed a permit from the Interior Ministry to film whatever I wanted to film, and although Morika, our interpreter, who was to go with me, became ill with food poisoning, it was all right for me to go alone."
If the reason for "a failure to communicate" is linguistic, the breakdown is likely to occur at the level of idiom. That's where a foreign speaker may come to grief, especially if he tackles a highly idiomatic language, such as English. The novelist Guy Gavriel Kay has a telling example to illustrate the dangers of courting a woman in a second language.
"You want to tell her," Kay says, "that looking at her makes time stand still. Unfortunately, what you say is: 'Your face would stop a clock.'"
I know what Kay is talking about. Never mind a woman, I court my entire readership in a second language, to say nothing of my Muse. It can be very disconcerting when one's Muse keeps interrupting one's entreaties with "Pardon me?" and "What was that last bit again?" You can't help wondering how Shakespeare's great work would have ended if, in the balcony scene, following his:
O blessed, blessed night! I am afeard. Being in night, all this is but a dream, Too flattering-sweet to be substantial.
she, instead of:
Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed...
would have replied: Speak up, dear Romeo, and do not mumble,
"Too flattering sweet to..." what was the rest?
Can't Montagues learn to enunciate? Getting back to Cool Hand Luke, in 1967, when it was released, the problem wasn't the language. The communication gap was between Americans who fought the war in Vietnam and Americans who protested it. Both spoke English, but a conscript taking the bus to report for duty spoke a language different from the draft-dodger's across the aisle. As for a refugee from Communism like myself, the proposition that the world would look better after a hundred years of Marxism than a hundred years after a thermonuclear war didn't seem self-evident to me.
Back then a failure to communicate was a matter for regret, but the world has moved on since. A fellow traveller who has explosives sewn into his underwear isn't like a flower child across the aisle. A suicide bomber is a ghoul. It's a good thing the gulf between his world and ours is large enough to allow no intercourse. We should be grateful we cannot communicate with him or his apologists. I'd just as soon not know what makes a human bomb tick, as it were.
Sorry to disappoint readers who expect a lament for dialogue. What I offer here is a paean to failure to communicate. Communicating isn't what's cracked up to be. To dialogue with the devil we must learn his language. Time enough to do that in hell. It wouldn't worry me if I never became fluent in diabolical dialects. Minimally, I hope to always speak them with a heavy foreign accent.