The Slaughter Rule - Andrew & Alex Smith 2002
The Smith brother's tale of friendship between a down & out coach (David Morse as Gideon Ferguson) and his reluctant protégée quarterback (Ryan Gosling as Roy Chutney) may not be the most subtle of films--first efforts seldom are--but it's the best prove-you’re-a-man story set against the snowy expanses of a Montana homestead in my memory.
Dealing with the spectrum of 'manliness'--from brawn to moral bravery--The Slaughter Rule takes us on a bumpy ride through the terrain of male honor before resolving itself in an unlikely moment of supervenient grace. In effecting resolution through absolution it straddles the divide between bracing subversion and sentimental kitsch. That it comes out on the side of the former, and against the cynicism of the Zeitgeist, is a credit to the sensitivity of its creators.
The Slaughter Rule demonstrates how the courage of compassion overcomes fight-or-flight not by steeling itself against vulnerability, but by exercising the strength of its own weakness. This depressive insight is at odds with the quest for self-substantiation by male adolescents, who readily submit to tests of fortitude and prowess while skirting the most threatening trial of all--that of assuming another's pain as one's own. By way of the crucible of masculine identification, The Slaughter Rule takes us to a
place where nothing else matters but honoring the desperation of someone with no honor left. It is a story of the triumph of compassion over disgust and the redemption of unruly desire through forgiveness, yet for its duration it plays like a demonstration of La Rochefoucauld's aphorism:
It is easier to love someone we hate than someone who loves us more than we want to be loved.
Roy's love-interest Skyla (Clea DuVall), peripheral to the story, functions primarily to vouch for his heterosexual bone fides. Her attraction to him is mainly physical, and when things don't gel to her satisfaction, she grows restless, withdraws, and leaves town. Roy, who just happens to find her waiting at the bus station, casually rebuffs her half-hearted show of remorse. The Slaughter Rule is not about the mating game. It's about Roy's development into a fully fledged human being through his complicated friendship with Ferguson. Skyla represents the negative example of failed loyalty in a relationship based on infatuation. The test of loyalty in such relationships often amounts to a continuous overcoming of the satiety domesticated passion brings. Only a context not qualified by sexual dependence, yet fraught with unwanted desire and enmity, could provide the setting for the test of loyalty to which Roy submits.
The Slaughter Rule belongs on the list of films dealing with the vicissitudes of love, honor, and loyalty between men : Grand Illusion, Tune's of Glory, Billy Budd, Midnight Cowboy, The Best Way to Walk, Beau Travail, and Enduring Love. Centrally or peripherally each takes up the subject of masculine self-definition--amity/emulation v. enmity--in a more or less homosocial environment. Films like My Beautiful Laundrette, Priest, Brokeback Mountain don't fit into this category because each resolves the emulation-emnity conflict sexually, taking the feasibility of erotic fulfillment and reciprocated love for granted, while problematizing the homoerotic bond in the context of a hostile social setting to establish a distinct thematic constellation. In The Slaughter Rule the homoerotic dimension--unwanted desire, its renunciation and forgiveness--obtains as threat to amity and compassion. In this regard it is more tragic than those which cross the divide into reciprocated intimacy, and, arguably, on a higher spiritual plane.
Honor-based identification in a sub-culture of equals who define themselves by their manliness quotient--the self in the heroic mold--confronts the taboo on tenderness that Ian Suttie* posited as the culturally contingent price of masculine individuation.
Elements of the Plot:
Ferguson's buddy in low-life Flloyd--a diabetic who lives in a Studebaker--knows Ferguson as well as anyone. They're bound by need, including, we assume, sexual need. Flloyd resents Ferguson's fixation on Roy, while Ferguson is contemptuous of Flloyd's unselfconscious weirdness. Having strayed into their desperate lives like some innocent fool, Roy, despite rumors and their 'atypical' behavior, manages to maintain his trusting openness, getting into Flloyd's car at one point to help him inject insulin.
Frustrated by his unspendable passion, Ferguson assumes an exacting avuncular attitude. He takes Roy to task for indulging in a few beers, then insists on showing him the large scar running vertically along his torso. Having been "pickled" in utero as a result of maternal alcoholism, he has an enlarged heart. Begrudging Roy his closeness to Skyla, he responds with exaggerated solicitude. Roy's nonchalance angers him. He wants a sign of reciprocal election, not the trust he keeps disingenuously invoking but a guarantee that his investment won't be in vain. His need to impress on Roy the sanctity of his status as star athlete promotes the exclusive preference he would see reciprocated. The quintessential manipulator, Ferguson imagines himself the rescuer of Roy's floundering soul. He exhausts all means forcing Roy to return his love, eventually settling for his pity. That he does so with gratitude makes The Slaughter Rule at once up-lifting and excruciatingly poignant.
By way of innuendo about Ferguson's involvement with a boy who met a mysterious end in a boating accident, and his own increasingly intense encounters, it dawns on Roy that his overzealous mentor's feelings for him cross the line that divides friendship from madness. That Ferguson's desire is not primarily lustful but a longing directed at Roy's person invests him with unconditional power, challenging his ability to withstand the temptation of being made absolutely essential.
Given that he can or will not flee, Roy's challenge is to maintain enough distance to his obstreperous lover to preserve respect--the distance of civility disgust would annul. Just as true forgiveness draws a line under an offense, confining it to the past for the sake of the future, the overcoming of disgust is only genuine when it preserves a bond. The challenge Roy faces is not to end his toxic relationship but to transmute it from within. This is not made any easier by his indispensability.
If I belabor this point it is because it constitutes the crux of the film's spirituality: the point where morality assumes spiritual dignity. "Spiritual" designating those acts of conscience/heart which exercise the power of forgiveness, a capacity human beings have long consider extra-human.
Ferguson's despair is fed by the dim realization that there is no going back from his claim to exclusive preference to the disinterest of friendship, and no hope of consummation through sexual congress. He is condemned to being ravenous but erotically destitute, masquerading his deranged longing as paternal solicitude.
Not until Ferguson lets his mask slip to reveal his turmoil does the central conflict begin to work itself out. From cautious curiosity Roy, never completely comfortable with Ferguson, turns to open, if not final, disgust.
After bandaging Roy's hand and giving him an impassioned pep-talk, Ferguson bullies Roy into pitting his strength against his. They lunge forward and lock shoulders like rutting bison. The prowess display is a pretext for Ferguson to make physical contact with his object of fixation. Panting with exertion, he relaxes to embrace Roy, who puts up with the quasi consoling gesture until Ferguson presses his mouth against his ear as if to inhale his very being. Ferguson's ardor provokes an equally primal repudiation.
The Smiths don't recoil from showing the confusion of this supremely awkward moment. Roy's enraged rejection matches the ferocity of Ferguson's erotic fixation.
When friends cross from equable reciprocity to the appetitive striving of sexual idealization, they up-end amity's disinterested balance. If both parties succumb and love is requited, a new order of justice is put in play--the "fairness" of love & war qua psychological state of exception. But such a truce is not in the offing for Roy and his mentor. Their only options are a complete break, renunciation, or some kind of reconciliation. The film's resolution represents a mixture of all three.
In real life things usually fall apart at this point--the friend who desires is repudiated and the relationship ends. For Roy and his coach there is no final rupture, just a series of increasingly hostile encounters. Roy's sense of loyalty is such that even Ferguson's abuse of the notion of "trust"--of which he demands endless demonstrations--doesn't cause Roy to reject him. Roy's response comes from a place beyond--'above'--the play-book of male honor.
The full extent of Roy's ability to over-come his discomfort with Ferguson only became apparent upon rewatching the film. It's as if the seeds of compassion sown in Roy's encounter with the stricken deer in the opening sequence continued to germinate. Interestingly, he does not attempt to help the animal, but lies down in the snow next to it, physically and emotionally canceling his distance from it by adopting a contemplative-witnessing attitude.
One winter night Flloyd commits suicide by asphyxiation in his Studebaker. From within a tent on a frozen lake Ferguson and Roy sprinkle his ashes through a fishing hole. Roy places a blanket around the shoulders of his shivering couch, who motions for him to join him beneath it. But Roy wants nothing to do with physical contiguity.
The final straw comes after Ferguson calls a game in which one of his players gets injured and Roy wants to continue playing--to "give pain" by hitting back with "renegade pride." In front of the other increasingly perplexed players Ferguson calls him a punk. When Ferguson grabs him by the groin and calls him a "suger-tit" Roy brutally knocks him to the ground with his helmet. "You're a sorry-ass queer," he exclaims, quitting the turf where Ferguson lies pleading.
After his apparently final rejection in full view of his teammates, Ferguson trudges off into the night. Impeded at a train crossing, Roy has an epiphany, recalling the plight of the wounded deer he couldn't bring himself to euthanize. In flashback we see him lying next to it in an attitude of futile compassion.
The unthinkable becomes the unavoidable: he must find Ferguson and do what he can to make amends; to put himself on the line and stay loyal in the context of Ferguson's betrayals. Roy finds Ferguson lying corpse-like in a snow-covered field, preparing to die. He revives him with blows to the chest and tender coaxing, then cradles him like some mother of sorrows.
In the final scene Roy visits a battered Ferguson in hospital and allows his hand to be placed on his scabby forehead. An ambivalent but powerful gesture conveying a kind of absolution, it transposes the sordid tale of lecherous couch and star quarterback into the realm of mytho-poesis.
The Slaughter Rule shows that the issue at the core of masculine identity--a response mating and warfare as the two defining exigences of a man's existence----is
finally less about gender than about what subsumes all polarities: the ideal of 'humanity.' Compassion tests character as much as any test of ‘mettle’ by challenging us where we are weakest, and, through the workings
of fear and disgust--most contracted into our own impotence.
The Smith's parable, in which a simple laying-on of hands suffices to absolve a defeated man of his self-immunizing resignation--disarms our cynical defenses.
Assuming the authority to which Ferguson's solicitude elevates him, Roy comes into his own as an agent of mercy. His gesture is 'subversive' in the way that all acts of mercy are. The question who is 'stronger'--Roy in complying or Ferguson in prompting and accepting reconciliation--depends on who has the most to lose. In the final analysis--the end-time in which parables are at home--the agonistic question of strength is sublated in a moment of perfect reciprocity.
In his moment of divinization, Roy's spiritual beauty (heart-coherence) matches his physical beauty.
* The Origins of Love and Hate, 1933
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