Commander Shears, living like a human being
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William Holden as Shears at the beginning of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Last weekend I rewatched The Bridge on the River Kwai for the first time in several years, and introduced it to my older kids, too—a wonderful experience. As with Lawrence of Arabia, which we watched together earlier this year, they were immediately and totally involved in it even though they only understood some of what was going on.
As for me, I thrilled, as always, to the escalating conflict between Col Nicholson and Col Saito, the struggle to build the bridge, and the commando mission to destroy it. The final unavoidable intersection of all the major storylines, converging on the bridge itself, gives The Bridge on the River Kwai one of the most suspenseful and weighty endings I’ve ever seen. I first watched it in middle school and it still floors me. Like any good story it continues to unfold and reveal itself and, per Flannery O’Connor, the more I see in it the more it escapes me.
What I’ve seen more of in the film as I’ve gotten older is the conflict of worldviews at its heart. Each major character lives according to an ethic that butts up against one of the others’ with little room for negotiation or coexistence. Col Nicholson and Col Saito, both men of honor, discipline, and protocol, are more alike than they are different, though Nicholson stands more for an order born of law and Saito for order born of feudal force. Saito explicitly invokes bushido. Major Clipton, the surgeon, argues for compromise with both Nicholson and Saito along utilitarian, consequentialist lines, an ethic suited for triage but which doesn’t satisfactorily scale to civilizational war—something Clipton, the most self-conscious character in the film, seems to realize. Maj Warden, the adventurer, with his scientific background, thoughtlessness about the consequences of his mission, and his willingness to kill his own teammates in pursuit of an objective, seems firmly entrenched in an optimistic materialist pragmatism. This also proves inadequate, as the reactions of his Siamese bearers to his actions during the climax make clear.
But the character who really struck me this time around William Holden’s Shears. One of only two survivors of the original batch of prisoners who built the camp in the film, Shears is wounded while escaping, nursed back to health by locals, and miraculously reaches British territory, where upon recovering from his ordeal he is recruited by Warden to go back to the bridge and blow it up. During this return, in one of the film’s only moments of speechifying, Shears berates Warden:
You make me sick with your heroics! There's a stench of death about you. You carry it in your pack like the plague. Explosives and [cyanide]-pills—they go well together, don't they? And with you it's just one thing or the other: destroy a bridge or destroy yourself. This is just a game, this war! You and Colonel Nicholson, you're two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being!
It’s a commonplace that The Bridge on the River Kwai is an antiwar film, and, if this is true—and I’m not convinced it is—where Clipton’s closing “Madness! Madness!” might serve as the film’s argument against war, Shears’s speech may serve as the film’s proposed alternative vision. If not honor, discipline, law, and civilization, then what? Living “like a human being,” a phrase that should resonate with our postmodern liberal humanist world.
“You and Colonel Nicholson, you’re two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being!”
Very well—let’s take Shears at his word. What, to him, does it mean “to live like a human being?”
Shears is cowardly, deceitful, venal, obsequious to the Japanese and snide to his fellow prisoners, and willing to submit to any degradation and commit any underhanded act necessary to survive. He claims to be an officer but performs the manual labor required of him by his captors and, when questioned on this by Nicholson, cheerfully admits his contentment as “just a slave—a living slave.” We learn later that he stole a dead man’s rank in order to get preferential treatment.
And what does “living like a human being” look like when, having escaped the camp, Shears is finally free of the coercion of the enemy and the deprivations of the jungle? Stolen liquor and sex, apparently. And his relationship with one of his British nurses doesn’t stop him from starting something with one of the women on the commando mission, either.
Shears has become one of CS Lewis’s “men without chests.” Abandoning honor and law as antiquated absurdities or irrelevant superstitions and substituting something as nebulous as “humanity” leaves one with nothing but base animal appetites. And deprived of carnal gratification, one is left with only resentment and rage. Note that the greatest passion Shears exhibits in the entire film comes in the climax, when he urges one of the other commandos not to blow up the bridge ahead of schedule—Warden’s pragmatic solution—but to kill Nicholson. When the other commando fails, Shears’s last act is to try to kill Nicholson himself.
I think the filmmakers are sympathetic to Shears and, like the rest of the cast, Holden plays his character wonderfully, as a real man rather than the avatar of a philosophical system. But I also think the film stops well short of endorsing his vague, selfish humanism, especially since Nicholson and even Saito are presented with unironic sympathy. (I could, and probably should, write a post just on Saito.) They, and even the doubting Clipton, have a consistent vision of right action and the good life. Shears talks big about humanity but embraces dissipation. A familiar type.
The Bridge on the River Kwai is too great a work of art and too good a story to offer a pat solution to a problem like war, so don’t be deceived by Shears’s plausible, self-flattering, and self-justifying words.
