If there is one scene in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus that is sure to provoke derisive laughter from cynical viewers, it is that which occurs just before the film’s long climactic sequence detailing the events of the 1995 Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand. In this scene, President Mandela (Morgan Freeman) touches down in a helicopter on the Springboks’ training field, while they are going through their final drills the evening before the big match. As the President makes his descent, a simpering American pop ballad (by some band with the imbecilic name of Overtone) spells out the film’s themes of racial reconciliation and the unifying power of sport in thuddingly unsubtle terms: “It’s not just a game, you can’t throw me away / I’ve put all I had on the line… I’m colourblind.” Eastwood here once again shows his total unconcern for any possible accusations of hokiness, much as he did on last year’s Gran Torino when he chose to play his own half-sung, half-croaked rendition of the title song over the closing credits.
But the cynic’s scoffs at this moment may prevent him from hearing the crucial sound that persists throughout the rest of the scene, after Overtone’s dreadful song has melted away: this sound is the whirring of the propeller of Mandela’s helicopter, as it gradually slows down after landing. This loud, irritating whirring forces Mandela and his main interlocutor, the Springboks captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to speak loudly, and we ourselves find we have to strain a little to catch every word. These two elements of the sound design of this scene – the hokey, casual insertion of this stupidly obvious but at the same time bizarrely incongruous song, and the emphatic rendering of the propeller’s whirring – are, in their close entanglement, emblematic of the film’s central dichotomy: between bombastic release and the close detailing of the particular elements that contribute to this release, this bombast.
The use of the helicopter is a paradigmatic example of this detailing of elements, through whose functioning the entire narrative of Invictus is constituted. It’s common enough for helicopters to appear in movies, and for the characters to have to speak loudly to be heard over them. But when this happens, it is invariably imbued with a sense of urgency – usually, the hero is about to take off so as to escape, or catch up to, something or someone. In the scene from Invictus, Mandela has just touched down, and there is no urgency about him; the whirring of the propeller does not signify any such hurried need for heroic exploits. Rather, it is there as a reminder of the enormous network of staff that Mandela has behind him – his helicopter pilot, his bodyguards, his ministerial and domestic staff.
The whirring propeller is metonymic of this entire network of people, technology and energy that make the presidential office function – and it is such networks that one is never shown in mainstream films, where attention is always diverted from the mechanics of how people get from one place to another, how much money things cost (when Pienaar’s maid learns he will be meeting the President, she immediately tells him he must ask Mandela to make the buses in her area cheaper and more efficient), how much time it takes for a single event to reach its completion (for a helicopter propeller to wind down after landing, or for the ball to fall out of a rugby scrum), and how these repeated actions and social gestures inflect individual and group identity. Eastwood has given us a mainstream film that is alive to all these questions, a film whose sentimentality is offset but also joyously enhanced by its elemental detailing. It is an imperfect film, but a film of true, startling beauty and conviction. The cynics may be too busy rolling their eyes to see it – but, as Slavoj Zizek says, the cynics are wrong.
