February 08, 2004
The Hunter
We slept on the couch all day. Steve McQueen was on TV in The Hunter, his last movie. In one scene he is standing in an elevated subway car as it rumbles through Chicago, and there is another man at the end of the car with a gun and a hostage. Steve, sensing that he has come up against an insurmountable obstacle, wrinkles his brow and backs out the door into the little space between cars. He sits there and waits calmly while the man inside unloads a few shots through the window.
Steve knows he can’t go in the car, but he can't run off and let this guy get away either. So he gets on top of the car. What is so perfect about this maneuver is that there is absolutely no reason for him to get on top of that subway car. There is nothing to be accomplished up there; he can’t stop the train, he can’t flag down help; getting on top of the car is probably the dumbest thing to do in this situation, but he does it anyway because, hey, why the hell not?
Once Steve is on top of the car, the crazed man starts shooting up through the roof at him. If Steve McQueen is bothered by this, he doesn’t let it show.
So the car is rattling down the track and Steve McQueen is up on top trying to hold on. He doesn’t really have a plan -- as far as the viewer can tell, Steve figures he’ll just stay up there for a while and see what happens. It is at this moment that the viewer on the couch realizes that he too, in his own small way, is Steve McQueen.
Then, out of nowhere, the metal latticework on top of the train swings out with Steve on it and dangles him like a fish over the elevated track. It’s as if the latticework existed only for this purpose, as if this strange piece of machinery had to be built this way so Steve could swing out from it - it is the metal things nature.
So now Steve is careening though space while hanging off of the thing and the man is shooting at him through the side of the moving train. You have to understand that none of this had to be. He could have just waited in the space between trains, but instead, and for no good reason, he got on top.
Eventually he swings back onto the roof, the train stops and the robber flees. Steve climbs down to give chase. He doesn’t seem relieved to be back on solid ground, he has simply been transported from one scene to the next. His essential nature -- that which makes him Steve -- remains unchanged. The whole episode on top of the train was a diversion.
When she woke up I told her about the train and she told me that someone made a movie called the Tao of Steve about something like this. I hadn’t seen it, but it was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one who had been struck by the metaphysical significance of Steve McQueen. If someone else had noticed it, it must be true.
Steve McQueen was dying when he filmed The Hunter, and he knew it. He had a cancer of the lungs called mesothelioma, which can be caused by smoking or asbestos exposure. He made the movie anyway.
He spent his last days in a hospital in Mexico, undergoing a painful experimental treatment that included animal-cell injections and doses of a drug made primarily of apricot seeds. The cancer that was killing him was incredibly painful, and the final treatments he recieved were torturous.
I’d like to imagine that at some point during his final days he heard a noise outside his hospital room and stood up and shuffled to the door. There might have been a metal device, a gurney of some kind, something with wheels. He should probably have just stayed in bed ... but why the hell not? Just go out and have a look, you know. Check things out and see where they lead.
