I’ve always been fascinated by the particular variation on “offering up one’s life for another” that is developed, or at least touched on, in the Dutch novel Het Gouden Ei by Tim Krabbé, made into a terrifying, somber, beautiful film in Holland in 1988 by George Sluizer and then – in one of the most laughable and shameful sell-outs in cinema history – into a tacky, gutless, commercial film (“The Vanishing”) in the USA in 1993 by the same director.
The novel and the 1988 film tell the story of a couple who are seemingly deeply in love with one another but are troubled – or at least the woman in the relationship is troubled – by doubts that their love would not stand up to any really arduous test of fidelity and commitment. In the course of a quarrel over an apparently trivial matter, the woman relates to the man a dream she has had. She dreamed she was enclosed entirely inside a golden egg, unable to see or hear, but somehow aware that her isolation extended even deeper than the isolation of imprisonment in the egg, that the egg, with her in it, was flying at some incredible velocity through the cold, trackless wastes of interstellar space. For a moment, she felt total panic and despair engulf her, so that she seemed to be on the brink of being destroyed completely by these feelings. And then, in the same strange extra-sensory manner in which she had sensed that the egg was flying through space, she somehow knew with absolute certainty that her lover was flying parallel to her through these same cold and trackless interstellar wastes, imprisoned in the same type of egg, unable to touch her or see her or speak to her, but “with” her, in the shared horror of their situations, in perhaps a fuller and realer sense than any other human being had ever been with another.
The rest of the action of the novel and the 1988 film consists only in the logical unfolding of the idea expressed in this dream. The woman is kidnapped by a maniac, buried alive, and dies in the most terrible way imaginable. The man searches obsessively for her for several years, eventually locates her killer, but seems fixated not on taking revenge or on bringing the killer to justice but rather on learning every detail of how his former lover had actually died. The killer says that the only way he can ever know that is by dying exactly as she had, and the man willingly consents to being buried alive also.
Part of the horror of the original story’s final moments inheres, indeed, in the thought that perhaps he did not knowingly consent to this fate – he consents, in fact, only to giving himself over, drugged, into the hands of the killer – but it seems to me that the story has a deeper, more beautiful and mystical logic that requires that, in some part of himself, the hero should have known precisely what he was doing. That deeper logic is something along the following lines:
There can be no question, in the novel and the 1988 film, of the hero’s “saving” his girlfriend. She has been missing – and in fact dead – for several years at the time of his decisive action. And yet the action that he performs IS a kind of “salvation”, perhaps the highest kind. The bliss and the grace of the “saving help” that came to her as her oxygen ran out in the grave and she found that she was able to cling to the thought – the real correlate of her dream – that her lover was somehow there beside her, invisible and intangible but present, must have been a bliss and a grace commensurate with the horror of her situation: a divine, an inconceivable bliss and grace; a true “salvation”, even if, like the salvation granted by Christ, it was powerless to alter any part or detail of her real situation. Like the true Christian, she had to have faith in order to be saved – and she WAS saved, something of her sanity and her soul were saved, even in this most terrible of deaths, by “faith alone”.
The burden weighing through all those years on her lover, however, was the burden of having, sooner or later, to remove from this saving faith the shadow of the suspicion that it could have been a lie. The bliss of blind belief that had prevented his girlfriend’s soul from being asphyxiated and destroyed in the same terrible moment as her body was – that allowed her to remain the human being she was right up until the moment she ceased to be a living being at all – reached out over the intervening years and commanded irrefusably: “this MUST NOT have been a false, a self-deluding bliss”. It drew him slowly – it took several years – into a living grave that was close beside hers even though it was many years and many miles removed from the grave in which her body had in fact long since rotted away. (So the original and the Dutch cinematic adaptation; in the American film version, the several intervening years are telescoped into a couple of days, so that the hero can punch his way out of his grave, dig out his still-gasping girlfriend, and give the fleeing serial killer the beating he deserves).
I’m fascinated, as I say, by the possibility of one human being’s accepted death “illuminating” the life – or, in this case, the death – of another human being in just this way. This way has nothing in it of the hidden spite, the hidden urge for vengeance, that, arguably, lurks in the acts of suicidal self-sacrifice described in the post above. And yet the most fascinating and mysterious thing about it is that its action upon the life – or death – of the other person is indeed an action of mere “illumination”. It changes nothing in the horror of life, the horror of death. (The calamitous failure of the US version is precisely that it does not dare to try to get by without “action” in a sense more tangible than mere “illumination”, without an intervention that actually changes something). In its pure "Dutch" form, the action saves without saving, or saves each person only as the person and the thing that they are, as the abject or as the terrified or as the ugly or as the miserably dying thing that they are (“And he which is filthy, let him be filthy still” – Revelations 22: 11, or Johnny Cash, your choice).
The close relevance to Cracky is too obvious, of course, to need pointing out.
