I'm Shiva the God of Death

Michael Clayton and the Poison We Make

In the first act of Michael Clayton, in a jail cell in Wisconsin on a snowy night, litigator Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) argues with his firm’s fixer, Michael Clayton (George Clooney). Edens is in the midst of what appears to be a manic episode, having gone off his meds and subsequently stripped naked in a deposition hearing on behalf of one of his biggest clients, an agribusiness firm accused of poisoning farmers. Clayton tries to talk some sense into Edens, who in more stable moments is a megalodon-level shark:

Arthur: I have blood on my hands.

Michael: You are a Senior Litigating Partner at one of the largest, most respected law firms in the world. You are a legend.

Arthur: I’m an accomplice.

Michael: You’re a manic depressive.

Arthur: I’m Shiva the god of death.

Michael: Let’s get out of Milwaukee and we’ll talk about it.

I love many things about this exchange, which is carried off beautifully by both Wilkinson and Clooney. When I looked up the script just now, one thing stood out for me above all else: Michael and Arthur aren’t really arguing.

Nothing that one says negates what the other says. Both Arthur and Michael could be completely correct at the same time. Arthur can have blood on his hands and be a senior litigating partner at a huge law firm. He can be an accomplice and a manic-depressive. In a strictly metaphysical sense, it might be difficult for a doughy middle-aged lawyer to be Shiva The Destroyer, a Hindu deity, but even the wild-eyed Arthur seems to mean this to be a metaphor. Whether he does or not, Michael doesn’t even challenge him. He just says, OK, let’s get out of here before we do any cosmology.

Perhaps the most suggestively spiritual scene in Michael Clayton comes early and is revisited later on: The Horse Scene. Having endured days of draining pursuit of Arthur Edens, who’s eventually found dead, and having secured the money he needs to pay off a mob loan he took out for a failed bar venture with his alcoholic brother, Michael is sent to Westchester late at night on an unglamorous mission. After doing his best to help yet another feckless rich guy get away with shit, Michael takes a restless drive through the countryside as dawn breaks. When he happens upon some horses in a field, he walks toward them in a daze.

Then his car blows up.

There are a number of ways to interpret this bucolic scene. Is Michael losing his grip on reality, as Arthur perhaps has? Or is subsuming ourselves in nature our only escape from this wicked glass-and-steel world? Do the bad guys always come roaring back just when you’re about to pet the horse?

As a buddy of mine pointed out yesterday on Twitter, our first critical move these days tends to be towards politics. That’s a move that’s both easy and tricky to make with this movie. Michael Clayton came out in 2007, an interesting year in retrospect for an ambitious corporate thriller, poised as it was on the precipice of the 2008 financial crisis. The Great Recession marked the end of a certain golden age of blitheness in the elite Manhattan corporate offices that are the province of Michael Clayton. Not that there’s been any less money after the disaster—there’s been more, more, more. It’s just that the advertisements on TV were still for goods and services, rather than constant glitzily calibrated apologies and promises to Do Better. The politics of capital remain what they’ve always been, but now there’s ever more dissembling about morality.

In Michael Clayton, politics as such are subsidiary to a hard-edged moral schema: Sharks eat fish, relentlessly and ruthlessly. This is bad but it is the way of things and you’re a sucker if you look away from the blood. Except sometimes the line between sharks and fish blurs a bit, and sometimes sharks eat one of their own, and sometimes a tough fish gets to bite back. Call Michael Clayton a barracuda.

Michael does get to bite back, ultimately taking down the big bads at cartoonishly evil agribusiness giant U-North. It’s satisfying, but also haunting in a way that can be hard to describe. The catharsis is direct enough. Michael even gets to give a triumphal speech to general counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) after she thought she had successfully had him blown up in a car bombing. So why does it leave us feeling both breathless and spooked?

In trying to answer this question, I found myself thinking back to the first and last scenes of Michael Clayton. We open with shots of mostly abandoned corporate offices in a Manhattan skyscraper. Shadows play over desks and conference rooms as sparse cleaning crews do their work. The voice we will learn belongs to Arthur rants into a voice mail about having an out-of-body experience in the middle of Sixth Avenue, in which he felt that he was covered in “some sort of film”:

I realized, Michael, that I had emerged not through the doors of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the poison, the amyl, the defoliant necessary for other larger more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity and that I had been coated in this patina of shit for the best part of my life. The scent of it and the stain of it, will in all likelihood take the rest of my life to undo

Nonsense, the ravings of a person in the grips of mental pathology, but also clearly part of the poison motif that will trickle through the movie. The law firm really is helping to poison people. Arthur is both insane and correct, like a holy fool in Dostoevsky.

As Arthur’s rant goes on, the camera eventually begins to follow the wheels of a cart carrying stacks of documents through the dark hallways of the deserted building. We discover the building is not in fact empty as we arrive at a bustling conference room, full of lawyers burning the midnight oil. Then the plot begins.

At the very end of the movie, we’re in another office building. This one belongs to U-North, the evil agribusiness client. Michael gives his gotcha speech to Crowder and the police swoop in. Michael then leaves alone, tracked by an overhead shot of him quietly going down an escalator.

In Michael Clayton, our built environments are where the evil happens, and they are best left behind. What we have made is literally poison, especially when it meets the Wisconsin dairy farms so many of these characters have decided to revere but never so much as visit. Get away from the toxins if you can. But our toxic shrines are also always there, slumbering even when we’re out in a field communing with horses. We’ll have to go back up the escalator and into the conference room.

I love Michael Clayton for its refusal to resolve this tension. The final scene, after the escalator, shows Michael giving a cabby fifty bucks and telling him to just drive. We don’t know where he ends up, and his face remains restless and harried even as he’s won the day. Maybe he’ll go back to the horses, but they don’t belong to him and he wouldn’t know what to do with them. There’s a good chance he’ll eventually go back up the escalator.

Arthur’s line about being the god of death echoes one of history’s most famous quotes, itself an adaptation. When J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the first nuclear blast, which he had helped create, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” These are the words of a man who feels the gravity of what he’s done, but who also feels the thrill of it. The blast is destructive, but he made it, and now it will be there no matter what he does.

I was considering writing more, but the wildfire smoke is making it hard to keep looking at a glowing screen.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

A lot can happen when you’re gone all morning:

I promise I won’t always analyze Calvin and Hobbes through the lens of political philosophy. But since this arc has been all about Calvin’s conception of liberty, I have to note how delicious it is that his climactic distress is all about private poverty. If (small-l) liberalism has a central neurosis, it would have to be the notion that the most important fact about everything is which individual or entity could be said to own it.

So Calvin, having declared his independence and seceded from his household, now fears that someone else might own his things. It makes perfect sense for a six-year-old. It also got me thinking about all the people who have tried to move to Montana, where I live, since the start of the pandemic. Some will stay here, but some will get cold and realize they never actually wanted to leave where they were before. Some of them will regret selling their houses elsewhere.

Right now, we probably all have some envy Calvin’s ability to run back to his mother. She’ll always take him in, which is the kind of thing you can’t buy with cash or a mortgage.

A poem

Some Yeats, always a good counter to the poison