Who Are Those Guys?

Tragedy has come to mean pretty much any event that involves great suffering or distress, but the original meaning from the Greek plays involves the downfall of the protagonist due to a defect in his character.

Usually, it's the protag's own fault.

So when HMS Titanic sinks, it's tragic because the builder and captain were arrogantly certain the ship was unsinkable. Oops ...

At first glance, it seems that Oedipus gets the crappy end of the stick when he fulfills the prophecy of killing his father and then sleeping with his mother. He doesn't know who they are and since they knew the prophesy that he was gonna do it, they tried to get rid of him, but delegated the job because they didn't want to do it, which was a fatal mistake.

However, it is Oedipus's pride that causes him to off his old man -- in what is the first recorded case of road rage -- and his defeat of the Sphinx because he is all-too-clever that gets him into his mother's bed. And it's not just the gimp who comes to a tragic end, self-blinded and exiled, so do his father and mother. If they had all been better people, they would have avoided the dire consequences. Pretty much their own damn fault.

My favorite tragedy is the movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, brilliantly written by William Goldman, and brought to life by Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katherine Ross, directed by George Roy Hill. There are several lines from the movie I have used over the years, ranging from "Rules? In a knife fight?!" to "I'm better when I move." Goldman has a way with words, the man does. That one picture would endear him to me for life, but he wrote a bunch of others, ranging from All the President's Men, to Marathon Man, to, of course, The Princess Bride ...

Butch and Sundance are anachronisms, men who have outlived their time. Civilization has caught up with them, they have run out of places that allow their kind of bad guys, and there is only one way the movie can possibly end. You can see that going in, from the very first scene, and it's sad, but predestined. They can't change -- if they could have, they would have already done so, and by the time we get to the final shootout in South America, there's no hope. Etta has gone home, because the only thing she wouldn't do, she told Sundance, was watch him die, and everybody knows it is coming.

How many men? the commandant asks the soldier seeking help. Cuantos hombres?

Dos.

Dos?!

Banditos Yankees ...

Ah ...

The last scene in the movie is a freeze-frame, in that instant between Butch and the Kid charging from cover, wounded, but still game, and the fusillade of gunfire erupting from the Bolivian army. That was pure genius, that shot, because it offered the tiniest bit of hope. Maybe they survived.

We all knew they didn't -- though there is a story that Sundance did, managed to get home, and live to a ripe old age, not dying until the mid-1930's, and we were, as Flatnose Curry said to Butch after the knife fight, rootin' for him ...

Tragic figures, Butch and Sundance. Likable, but it was their own damn fault ...