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The Commanding Man as Fiction’s Generic Hero

By Walter Donway

March 31, 2022

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For me, the most exciting character in fiction is the man in command of situations that appear to be crushing avalanches of fatal developments. In these works, the genius is getting the protagonist in imaginatively awful trouble, repeatedly, and showing his mastery prevail.

The most exciting character in fiction is the man in command of situations that appear to be crushing avalanches of fatal developments.

I do not say, “hero,” because outstanding characters in this tradition included the likes of Hannibal Lecter. After seeing Silence of the Lambs, I read every other novel about Lecter and never felt let down. Lecter, created by Thomas Harris, is a serial killer, and, for good measure, eats a choice morsel of people he kills. The novels put him in circumstances impossible, like solitary confinement times two. Special portable cages and a mask when he must travel.

Lecter’s pulse never increases. He always knows what to do. No circumstance—and some are ingeniously contrived—can baffle his genius.

Human intelligence is undefeatable and unstoppable. Its brutish enemies are laughable in their reliance on violence, the power of wealth, the power of position.

Another improbable protagonist who almost defies what we thought possible in this genre is Lisbeth Salander in the series beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Swedish novelist Steig Larsson. My feeling, as I read these novels (several times), was that human intelligence is undefeatable and unstoppable. Its brutish enemies are laughable in their reliance on violence, the power of wealth, the power of position.

A movie premiering this month in the United States, The Outfit, bids to become lead dog in this pack. The script writer is directing his film and it seems to me a tour de force.

The setting is classic—mob-dominated Chicago in the 1950s—and the character improbable—a “cutter” (please don’t say “tailor”) who trained on Seville Row in London but now has a modest Chicago shop to create exquisite suits from measurement to final stitch. To all appearances he is absorbed in his work and nothing else. He is deferential to clients. Fatherly to his pretty receptionist who dreams of “getting out of here” to Paris, Rome, Barcelona, London….

Fatefully, his first patron in Chicago was the “godfather” of an ambitious gang, and among his clients are mobsters. They tease him, provoke him, but he pretends to know nothing of what is going on. Their drop box in his office is filled daily with envelopes of cash. He measures, cuts, fits, sews, tamps the fabric…. His gentle expressions are mild. Like the best in this tradition, he watches bloody violence, outrageous threats, horrifying dilemmas, and at most his eyes widen. His tone never changes much. In the moments of unbearable tension, he opens his hand-crafted cigarette case and shares a smoke with the proximate killers.

The gang that uses the drop box in his shop suddenly is at war and staggering into his shop with gut wounds. Gun to his head, he uses needle and thread to sew up the belly wound of the godfather’s son. Things fly out of control; he is caught between guns pointed at his head (or at his receptionist, Mable’s).

A dozen and more times, the situation seems one second away from disaster. It only gradually emerges that what appears chaotic to the gangsters is per plan. When the unplanned seems ready to crush him, Leonard extemporizes.

It is not all cerebral plot twists. Leonard (played by Mark Rylance) occasionally mesmerizes us with a quiet recital of his past. There was his apprenticeship on Seville Row, his permission at last to open a shop, the war, the post-war poverty that drove English gentlemen out of hand-tailored suits into blue jeans. His flight from London. He uses these revelations almost as hypnosis. The man with the gun, or the switchblade, freezes, despite himself, to hear the secrets of this silent man.

Whatever happens, we see Leonard’s intelligence, and his confidence in it, as the ultimate weapon against the man with the gun. Clever, ruthless men, who point a gun at his head to enforce their demands, go down. Time and again, they appear to have the upper hand. In the end, they go down.

After I wrote this review, I checked out the review in The New Yorker. It never once raises the theme of intelligence clashing with brute force. There is no mention of Leonard’s defining mastery through intelligence. The review comments that this is a pretty good thriller, but we must not confuse “keeping us guessing” with thrills. The thrill of watching intelligence foil thuggery at every turn—the legend of hard-bitten “Chicago” defeated not by Eliot Ness but the lover of “gentlemen”—gets no notice.

Nor have I seen, as yet, any comment on a defining theme of characterization in Romanticism: the dramatic power of opposites. Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Ayn Rand’s chapter in Atlas Shrugged, “The Top and the Bottom.” Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. What contrast could be more poignant than the proper British cutter from Seville Row and the Chicago gangsters?  But…no mention of that theme in The New Yorker review.

Why am I so inspired by “intelligence,” per se, without rationality or virtue?

My initial response to Hannibal Lecter, Lisbeth Sanders, and Leonard is to ask: Why am I so inspired by “intelligence,” per se, without rationality or virtue? But the creators of these characters are as aware of this issue as we are. Lisbeth is the ultimate victim of child abuse who becomes a terror to anyone who would imagine they could continue that abuse. Hannibal Lecter is a tough case! How do you redeem the serial killer who is a cannibal? Can it be done? Well, Harris did it for me, anyway. Part of the answer is the backstory of horrors that forged Hannibal’s personality; part is the victims he chooses (arrogant and bullying bureaucrats, for example). You will have to see for yourself. To me, in the end, Hannibal is consistently satisfying within the world of the novels, but most of us cannot and should not live our lives by the code of “poetic justice.” Save that for poetry.

In “the last battle,” to borrow a title from the Chronicles of Narnia series, the symbol that dominates The Outfit, Leonard’s shears, the only thing he brought from London—the only thing he needs to practice his craft anywhere—leap out of the story of his past. The final, unexpected, horrifying threat to his life—just as he appears to have achieved a perfect end to a perfectly planned story—is solved by the shears.

He has said, at the very end, seemingly faced with death, that he wanted only to be “a good man,” a respectable man in a gentleman’s suit, and we come to understand what drove him to realize that only his mind—with ruthless and unemotional intelligence—could answer the gun as the final argument of the thug.

If, like Hannibal, Leonard has a pulse and blood pressure, and smile and tone, that never register what he is witnessing, perhaps it is because he has seen it all. What the youngish Chicago hoods view as the ultimate showdown, the pulsing moment of guns held straight out, Leonard has seen. He says, “Gentlemen, it does not have to come to this….”

The hoods assume he is pleading for the decorum of his little’s shop’s world of gentlemanly commerce; but we learn that Leonard indeed has seen it all. And has learned, at cost, that it does not have to come to this. That nothing is gained, but the losses may be irreparable. No wonder he has learned that the mind can play on the gangster’s own terms—or appear to do so—and win.

We cannot but wonder out of what crucible the gentle cutter has come, so sedately at peace in his craft, so that with the guns of the Chicago mobsters at his head, he is the one who does not die.

Mark Rylance, as Leonard, is a Shakespearean actor, first artistic director of the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London, award-winning actor in Shakespeare’s plays, but also a repeatedly awarded actor in American films (The Imitation) and on Broadway.

Thanks to Leonard’s character, the dialogue in this movie carries the tension and irony as well as does the action. But it also provides a gentle irony and humor. The gang chieftain asks Leonard why he left London.

“Well, the city was being invaded.”

“You mean the war?”

“No, I mean by blue jeans.”

The Outfit, which refers to a Chicago follow-on of Al Capone’s gang, for which Chicago’s gangs are competing, is presented to Leonard as all-powerful, the gun as “the tool” of ultimate control—the great “decider.” Yet, that is as dimwitted as the celebrated line in The Godfather: “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Leonard nods, gingerly examines the gang leader’s gun, as though he never had held one.

But, at the end, as he faces the final brutal threat, we hear Leonard’s real story.

If you exalt in intelligence’s command over the brute and boasting gang, then The Outfit is the pleasure you have awaited.

If you exalt in intelligence’s command over the brute and boasting gang, then The Outfit is the pleasure you have awaited. When Leonard walks out into the Chicago winter night with his shop and two inconvenient corpses behind him, ablaze, with only his precious shears in his bag, you can believe that, in principle—accidents aside—the brute meets his nemesis in human intelligence.

The pretty girl gets her sack of money to travel the world that her spirit longs to explore. Can’t she take Leonard with her? With his quiet, controlled smile, he says, “You will not spend your best years watching out for me in my final years.”

His happiness will be his shears and exacting craft.

To turn to “craft” for a moment, many viewers will not register that this entire film, with gang wars, roots in London, the Chicago underworld, takes place entirely in Leonard’s little tailor shop. The “unity of place” is complete. In this sense, it is a “stage,” with its entrances and exits. The power of the fiction—it really is a drama—is that confinement to the “stage” comes across as utterly natural. Leonard is the only one who in his monologues brings the rest of the world onto that stage. And what he invokes is not noticeably less real than what we see.

Director of The Outfit is Graham Moore; this is his directorial debut with a screenplay he wrote with Jonathan McClain. The cast includes Mark Rylance, Zoey Deutch (the receptionist), and Johnny Flynn and Dylan O’Brien, the two convincing gangsters. The film had its world premiere at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival just last month and was released in the United States on March 18 by Focus Features.
 
 

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