Getting Mad and Getting Even

One of my favorite films is the 1983 comedy-drama written and directed by Bill Forsythe called Local Hero. It's about a a young oil company executive sent to a village on the coast of Scotland, to buy up all the property in town to make way for a massive refinery. The exec, "Mac" MacIntyre (played by Peter Riegert) starts out the movie as a typical American to much of the world: he has an MBA, he drives a Porche, he's a capitalist city-slicker and so on, your typical "yuppie" in the parlance of the day. As such, Mac is not a little put off by having to travel to a remote part of the British Isles when he could easily close the deal over the phone from his office in Houston. Little does he realize before he sets off, that the only telephone in town is inside a phone booth (phone box in local speak) on the beach.

Once there he slowly falls in love with the place, the fictional village of Ferness, for its charms, its breathtaking scenery, its slower pace of life, and its people, especially the woman who happens to be the wife of his chief contact in town. 

Soon enough, MacIntyre becomes conflicted about his mission to enable the destruction of the lovely Ferness and the countryside surrounding it.  

It turns out the villagers are two steps ahead of him. The moment they learn the plans of the oil company to buy them out, they start planning how best to spend their new found fortune. The devotion for the place they present to MacIntyre is only an act to drive up the price of their property. Even the local pastor is in on the act as his church serves as the meeting place for townsfolk to gather and discuss their plans to best cash in.

The only snag is Ben Knox, whose surname is the same as the oil company's. Ben lives in a dilapidated shack on the beach and, thanks to his family's century's old accord with the Crown, happens to own the entire beach, lock, stock and barrel. He does not intend to sell what turns out to be the most significant parcel of the site. 

So, Mac's boss, Knox Oil's president Felix Happer (played by Burt Lancaster), flies in from Houston to personally negotiate with Ben.

Funny thing, but in a case of life imitating art, another film made a generation later and its sequel documenting real-life events, have several parallels with the fictional Local Hero.

For starters, the documentaries are also set in the Scottish Highlands not far from the city of Aberdeen. An American company sets its sights on developing its own large-scale project on the coast. Many of the locals sell off their land to the developers, but a handful, one in particular whose story the film is centered around, flat out refuse.

The boss of the company in the documentary bears only a slight physical resemblance to Lancaster's Felix Happer, but there are a few parallels between the two. Both are oddball characters, their eccentricities at times defying credibility.  Narcissism also plays a role in both men's characters.

That is where their similarities end.

Happer's narcissism is garden variety, even charming at times.  His true passion is astronomy, and his greatest ambition it seems is to discover a celestial object and have it named after himself. * 

The other's narcissism is off-the-charts and toxic.

The similarities between the stories were not lost on the creator of the documentary, Anthony Baxter, who with the permission of the owner of its rights and the blessing of Bill Forsythe, incorporated scenes from Local Hero into his own films.

Local Hero isn't really about the construction of the plant, nor the planned destruction of the town. It's about history, nature, myths and legends, beauty, wonder, magic, transformation, the bonds that tie all human beings together, and other things that make life worth living. But mostly it's a love poem to Scotland. As such, it could be considered an allegorical fantasy. Here is a link to the original trailer which nicely captures the spirit of the film without giving too much away. 

The two documentaries sadly, are all too real. They are about hubris, deceit, pettiness, greed, the wanton destruction of nature, and people who do everything in their power to stand in the way of all that. 

In that last sense, one theme both films share is the indefatigable human spirit.

The Ben Knox of the original documentary is Michael Forbes, a quarry worker, farmer and part time salmon fisherman who refuses to sell his land and home of over forty years to the Americans who want to build a golf course and resort over it. Forbes is the star of Part I of the documentary as much of the film centers around his life, struggle, and his neighbors' and family's ordeal. The seeds of Part II are planted at the end of Part I, and the role of star switches over to Michael's mother, Molly Forbes. Her beauty, strength, dignity, pride, sense of humor, and love of her home, steal the show. The best line of both films comes at the beginning of Part II when after being informed that the American businessman claimed she reminds him of his mother, Molly responds with both a sneer and a gleam in her eye: "Well he hadn't been very good to her then."

If you haven't guessed by now, the Felix Happer of the documentaries is Donald Trump.

The name of the original documentary is You've Been Trumped, released in 2011, and its sequel, You've been Trumped Too, released in 2016. **

I won't go into all the sordid details other than to say that Part I begins before ground is broken on the project, and over the course of its runtime, we see ancient dunes, at one time protected by the Scottish government as a unique ecosystem, home to numerous endangered species of flora and fauna, lost piece by piece as earth movers build the golf course. Adding insult to injury, the developers created giant berms to block the views of the homes Trump couldn't get his rapacious little hands on. He called the homes he couldn't destroy "eyesores".

Trump reserved his harshest words for Michael Forbes whose property he referred to as a "pigsty", and to Michael himself as a person whom "every Scot should be ashamed of."

That comment no doubt had great influence on the Scottish people because soon after the release of You've been Trumped, Michael Forbes won the "Top Scot" award, an annual popular public vote sponsored by the makers of Glenfiddich Scotch as a part of their Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards campaign. In response, Trump threw one of his trademark hissy fits condemning Glenfiddich, pledging never to serve the hooch in any of his properties ever again. I guess that sure showed 'em. 

The conflict between Forbes and Trump received world-wide coverage and some of the most poignant scenes in both films show the tremendous support Michael and his family have received from complete strangers all over the world.

Part I ends with a particularly troubling event. The Forbes family discovers their water supply has dried up after construction workers were seen digging in the vicinity of the natural spring, the source of their water, well as they were building a road. Despite the Forbes's rightful demand to restore their water, nothing happened except broken promises and the Trump Organization calling the police to arrest the filmmakers for having the nerve to ask why the group would not take care of their legal responsibility and repair the damages they made to the Forbes's water supply.

Much of Part II is devoted to Molly, by this time in her nineties, who spends much of her time hauling buckets in a wheelbarrow back and forth to obtain water from a nearby stream so she could flush her toilet. The only potable water available to her and the rest of her family was bottled water. Rather than the one-week fix Team Trump kept promising the Forbes family, the situation lasted for five years until Michael, in defiance of Trump and the local police he had in his pocket, took it upon himself to dig a trench in the access road for the golf course and fix the broken pipes himself. 

During the filming of Part II, before the water situation was resolved, Trump was running for President of the United States and Baxter had the inspired idea to fly Michael Forbes and his wife Sheila to Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. While there they struck up conversations with Trump supporters, some of whom were genuinely moved by their situation while others could not be swayed. One of them in justifying Trump's actions remarked that his man doesn't get mad, he gets even. 

Now where have I heard that before? 

Oh that's right, I heard it a couple weeks ago from Trump himself after winning the New Hampshire primary while he was trashing his opponent, Nikki Haley.

"I don't get mad, I get even" sounds kind of cool and defiant in a Clint Eastwood sort of way.

But what does it really mean?

On the surface, the phrase implies that getting mad and getting even are mutually exclusive things. Getting mad implies loosing one's cool, acting irrationally and uncontrollably, while getting even in this comparison anyway, implies a cool, measured response to an offense. As the saying goes: "revenge is a dish best served cold."

There is a certain logic to getting even, after all, doing unto others as they have done unto us is basic human nature, in stark contrast to the so called "Golden Rule" which suggests quite the opposite.

The Golden Rule in one wording or other, exists as the basis of the justice system of every culture I can think of, the primary tool to help human beings get along with one another by helping settle conflicts if not avoiding them altogether.

Yet doing unto others as we would have done unto us is not a one-size-fits-all rule for successful human relationships as it does not go nearly far enough. It hardly works in truly close relationships such as marriage for example where a more appropriate rule would be do unto her/him as she/he would have done to herself/himself. 

In other words, we're all different and have different expectations of one another, so treating our partner precisely as we would like to be treated ourselves is a recipe for disaster. I consider myself something of an expert on the issue. 

 

In the same vein, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to resolving conflicts because conflicts come in all shapes and sizes from petty to tragic. With the exception of the tragic, we all differ as to what conflict constitutes a true offense.  

For people used to always getting their way like Donald Trump, every conflict is a true offense, a personal affront worthy of getting even. Contrary to what Trump says about not getting mad, as borne out by Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony under oath before Congress, he does indeed get mad, a lot. It was she you might remember who had to clean the ketchup off the walls of the White House dining room after he threw his plate of lunch against it like a two-year-old, when he received some news that displeased him.

In reality, getting mad and getting even are joined at the hip. Getting even is just one of many responses to anger. If a conflict does not make us angry, we feel no need to get even. While it may be useful at times, especially to make the aggrieved party feel better, getting even, especially if it means eye-for-eye style justice, is rarely a useful tool to resolving conflicts, which you must admit is kind of a useful skill for someone who wants to be president.

Let's use Trump as an example. He got mad at Michael Forbes and got even by calling him names and making his ninety-year-old mother haul buckets of water from a stream in a wheelbarrow so she could flush her toilet. 

Yet Michael and Sheila Forbes continue to live in their home as Trump's disgruntled neighbors, no doubt still pissing him off to no end. (Molly unfortunately passed away in 2021 at the age of 96).

He got mad at a whiskey company because they published the results of a public poll he didn't like, so he got even by banning their whiskey at his establishments.

Seems to me Glenfiddich is still the first name most people come up with when they think of single malt scotch. Heck, I can even buy it at my local grocery store. 

And he got mad at the United States for not re-electing him president in 2020. So he got back at us by waging a riot in and around the Capitol in the hopes of overturning two cornerstones of our democracy, a free election and the peaceful transfer of power. 

Four indictments and 92 criminal counts against him later, he's running for president again for the sole purpose of keeping himself out of jail for the rest of his life.  

Seems to me like an awful lot of trouble just to get even with somebody.

CODA

On the flip side, there is no way that Michael and Sheila Forbes or their neighbors could ever get even at Trump for all the grief he put them through.

Yet there's always laughter which is the next best thing. This from 2017:

* The fictional Felix Happer's wish was granted in real life when in 1992, an asteroid was discovered and named by its discoverer (no doubt a fan of the film), 7345Happer.

** You've been Trumped is available on most streaming platforms. You can watch You've been Trumped Too for free on YouTube by clicking here. I don't feel it's necessary to watch them in the order in which they were made. In fact, as the sequel prominently features Molly, if you're like me you'll instantly fall in love with her and her story, so watching them in reverse order may even be preferable.