The Aviator

Continuing the aperture of my untimely reminiscence, I recently came upon The Aviator on TV. As I watched it (I had been meaning to do so for years), I tried to imagine it reverse engineered as a book, all the intricacies of Howard Hughes and his obsessive compulsion explained in detail. But I think that The Aviator is perfect as a movie in that it thrives on the lack of information. Consider the opening of the film. Though the viewer realizes that he is much more of a blinding visionary than a wasteful and unorganized fool, the film certainly attempts to blur the lines because he never once explains himself to anybody. There is only an intensity to Howard Hughes, and though nothing is said about the quality of his work or his emotional state, Hughes is presented as a man who will do anything in the fulfillment of his vision and only gets away with it because he is so good at it. As the audience finishes the first screening of Hell's Angels and roars in acceptance, it sets up a common theme: how close triumph skates with disaster.

Within the context of the film his behavior is also never given an awareness of its own. He washes his hands with a cathartic zeal and during movie premieres has to hold himself together through the light of ionized gas and speeding electrons like he holds his plane through the sparks and heat of a bad landing. This is a man who struggles with a darkness that to others seems eccentric unexplained and mentally disturbed when it is known. The movie says a lot about what he does, not why, and I think that these are things that cannot be understood because they are a product of his mind. Sometimes the mind can't be known. What is important is what we understand from watching him, how he designs his planes, and what he does to get what he wants. The subject material governs this. It allows the film to focus on the story of his life while the seedy underbelly beneath it goes unexplained. The brilliance cannot come without the madness, and at some point this simply becomes a movie about a man's life. I also enjoy movies about how the best of us (intellectually, creatively, financially) cope with darkness.

The thing that stays with me the most is that out of one last triumph the movie ends on the eve of his biggest disaster. It remains consistent with the rest of the film and never moves his issues to the forefront, but it also foreshadows his declination with words that are strangely prescient. Howard Hughes continuously banks everything on the future, only to gamble on it again, and yet this is a man who is quickly hurtling into the sun.