“Major Payne” (1995)
A rude, crude, rather low-brow movie…that I love. I’m a sucker for stories about men helping boys become men. And despite being a Damon Wayans vehicle, with all that implies, there are scenes of genuine emotional impact for me. And talking to other fans, it seems I’m not alone, that it hits a lot of guys who grew up without male mentors…and in some cases, men who have been Marines.
The set-up is simple: hard-core killing machine, Major Benson Payne (Wayans) finds himself at the end of his career, because his kind of gung-ho destruction derby approach simply isn’t needed in the modern world. Going through terrible withdrawals from his lack of action, he takes the only job he can find: heading up an ROTC program full of misfits at a swanky prep school. Lo-Jinks ensue.
But along the way he fathers a fatherless boy, and becomes a role model to another with an abusive stepfather. And charms the lovely school counselor (Karyn Parsons) despite being…well, frankly, a neanderthal. No offense to neanderthals.
The trick here is that there is just enough truth to see how this scenario could have been played totally straight (and more or less was, in Charlton Heston’s THE PRIVATE WAR OF MAJOR BENSON), with a combat vet forced to find a way to relate to kids without the slightest interest in what he’s offering. The key isn’t that the kids need him. The key is that he needs the kids. Needs the door back into humanity, after wandering in the fringes for too long.
Yep, they made a wacky comedy out of the adjustments often needed by those who choose a warrior path, who open their hearts and souls to the role of protector and thereby encounter their own survival drives on the deepest, rawest, most primal level imaginable, crossing many lines that society puts in place to protect itself (“thou shalt not kill” and “respect life” and “love thy neighbor” can create serious conflicts with the realities of combat.) It is easy to see the men [and traditionally it has been men] who went off to various foreign actions as a breed apart from the rest of us.
But no, they are not. They have experienced an aspect of the human experience, one society does all it can to protect us from, no matter how much we might see that animal peeking out in our love of violent movies and combat sports. On some level we know that thing is in there, is part of us. But we distance ourselves like happy families eating Happy Meals at McDonalds are distanced from the bloody butcher. We love the cheeseburgers, but are ignorant enough to look down on the very people who make those burgers possible.
Traditional societies understand this, and have ceremonies in place to welcome back the warriors and hunters who have risked their souls to protect the innocents of the tribe. We could use more of that. And there is scene in Major Payne, late in the film, that while a goof struck me as touching on reality.
So…Payne has broken through to the boys, given them some of his spirit while simultaneously he is opening his heart to the orphan ‘Tiger” (Orlando Brown, adorable) and counselor Parsons. We can see that he is uneasy with this new vulnerability, and when his former commander offers him a chance back into the Marine on an emergency mission to Beirut, he jumps at the chance, abandoning his boys and snapping at Parsons, attempting to crush the very real feelings between them with harsh words.
But waiting at the train station, he sees a happy family playing in the yard across the tracks. And has a fantasy that that could be HIS family. He could be married to Emily, and adopt Tiger. Barbecue in the front yard, with all the domestic pleasures. Then…a Viet Cong appears, threatening them. Payne sees himself disarm and disable the attacker, while his family beams and laughs. And while cartoonish, what we have here is a very real question I’ve seen asked countless times by people in protective contexts, who have faced the real dangers of the world, often by fighting fire with fire.
Can I be who I am, and also have the things other people have? Can I keep my steel, and find my softness? Is there anyone who can see what I really am, and love me, or would they be repulsed if they saw my truth?
In so many ways, we can all feel that the “real us” would repulse the people we need to love us. And although played broadly for laughs, there is enough truth here to carry me into the predictable climax of the film with a goofy smile on my face, and…dammit, is someone cutting onions?
Find that spark of truth, that belief in the nature of humanity, some glimmer of an observation, and build upon it. Even if it’s a wacky comedy, or a horror film, or anything else. That spark can light a blaze. And if you can have just one viewer feel there was truth there, that someone understood something they couldn’t quite put into words…you have done a very good thing indeed.
Namaste
Steven Barnes