Watched a 2001 film tonight on Netflix that I’d never heard of until it popped-up. Starring Jack Nicholson and an “ensemble” cast of Hollywood’s great and good – Harry Dean Stanton, Helen Mirren, Micky Rourke, Vanessa Redgrave. Sean Penn as producer and director with music by Hans Zimmer. What’s not to like?
But I didn’t know any of that, other than the Jack Nicholson lead role, until I selected it. The reason it caught my eye as I scrolled over available recommendations was that I noticed The Pledge (the film) was based-on a book by Swiss-German author Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
Dürrenmatt is an exception to my pre-2001 experience of barely ever reading anything other than technical, popular science or news material, before I became a born-again devourer of fiction, classical and philosophical. Dürrenmatt’s “Die Physiker” (The Physicists) was a set text drama when I did Germanic Studies as a minority subject along with my Aeronautical Engineering degree major way back in 1974-77. The play was mixed in with other German language, culture and history syllabus, but it (and the tutor, now I think of her) made an impression that obviously stuck with me. Shortly after I embarked on this Psybertron research and writing project in 2001 (9/11) I picked-up and re-read Die Physiker in early 2002. it was relevant to my agenda for the obvious science vs morals content. And I’ve probably reviewed and mentioned it again another 10 times on my travels. It didn’t occur to me that Dürrenmatt had written anything more that had made it into English translation, and I’d never looked.
Die Physiker is a fictional drama based on patients known as Newton, Einstein and Möbius in a private mental institution / sanitorium, the first two because they are presumably schizophrenic patients with imagined identities. The third is presumed feigning his madness in order to lock himself away with the maddening guilt of physics having enabled the atomic bomb, with the realised ambiguity that he is in fact being locked in a secure institution by society for the same reason. (The sanitorium being called Les Cerisiers always put me in mind of Chekhov. Some big names played the main roles in an RSC 1963 production of the 1962 translation of the 1961 original.)
The Pledge (the book) is a quite different earlier work originally published in 1958 and first translated in 1959. The 2001 film screenplay is an adaptation, transposed from Switzerland to northern Nevada (rural small-towns around Reno NV). Very Scandi-noir watching it in 2025 and very evocative of Fargo ND given the harsh winters and the Scandinavian character names. As the Wikipedia notes suggest the detective – Jack Nicholson a “three-time loser with women” – does in effect solve the crime he has pledged justice for the victim’s family, despite the crime happening on the day of his retirement party. But his eventual failure to actually achieve the denouement, identify and bring the serial criminal to justice, is really just a series of bad choices and accidental events both relevant and incidental. Eventually after suffering ongoing accusations of madness in his obsession with keeping his promise, he really is driven mad by his failure. A requiem (in 1958) for the detective stories that are so common place today that involve elaborately constructed ambiguity and mis-direction of multiple suspects, etc. Gruesome the crimes and creepy the detective’s association with the actual and potential victims, relatives and witnesses, despite never doubting his sincere intentions – you must know you look madly obsessive and appear creepy even though we know you’re not – but a very well done psychological drama. Recommended.
I must seek out more Dürrenmatt works
(and add to the endless reading list).
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