An Essay about a Movie that Came Out in 1993
A lengthy condemnation of Sam Neil in The Piano, the world's all time most bullshit husband.
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I guess it’s bad husband week here at Caterpillar Steps, because for the first half of today’s entry, we’re going to spend a little time with a big fucking moron who just didn’t have what it took to make a LITTLE EFFORT to please his brand new wife, who came all the way from SCOTLAND to get married to him.
That’s right, folks: a brave writer is finally going after Sam Neil in Jane Campion’s 1993 Academy-Award winning masterwork, “The Piano,” the single biggest dipshit in the history of movies. If you haven’t seen The Piano, you can watch it here on Netflix’s crummy video architecture. I will wait while you take it all in.
Take a second to really look at this British oaf. Sam Neil is a colonizing scumboy in New Zealand, who spends all his time doing shit like buying land and paying the local Maori to do stuff for him. He has relatives who all wear British clothes and drink tea and gossip about stuff. Because they are unbearable, he sends off to Britain for a wife. Some guy agrees to marry off his daughter, Ada McGragth (Holly Hunter), who is pretty cool. She has a daughter and is selectively mute (She stopped talking when she was six, for reasons that even she does not understand.).
When she and her daughter get to New Zealand, there’s no one there’s no one on the beach to greet her and she has to camp under a hoop skirt. This is the first in a series of actions that could CHARITABLY be labeled “Inconsiderate.”
He then IMMEDIATELY whines about the quantity of stuff she brought. It’s like the first thing he says when he sees her! Kiss the top of her hand or something! You dipshit, you absolutely clown!
Then he says “Fuck, you’re small. Like a little pocket lady. You’re small like a mouse when I thought you would be big like a bear. I sent off for a Bearwife and although I am willing to compromise, please know that this face will color all of my feelings henceforth. I love the Queen, and crumpets, and disgusting sacks of fried potatoes drowned in vinegar. Did you bring a disgusting bag of oily acid potatoes from the homeland? It will make up for the fact that you are a silent mouse woman with a mouthy daughter.”
One of the boxes has a big-ass piano, which is the titular Piano. She says, through her daughter, translating sign language, hey, make sure to bring my piano, and then he says: no. Too hard. She says hey can we come back for it? He doesn’t reply, thinking that the rhetorical sleight of hand will make her forget that he has more or less said nah, I don’t wanna get the piano. It’s too heavy. So they leave it on the beach, where, hopefully, it will stop being a problem for Sam Neil sooner or later. Smooth move my man. No way this will come back on you at all.
They get home without the piano. Then, after getting back from a surveying expedition he went on immediately after bringing her home-- really good effort on making Ada feel comfortable, you dingus-- Sam Neil sees Ada and her daughter “Playing” one of the tables in the house like a piano.
Instead of thinking “Damn, she must really miss that piano I left on the fucking beach, I should make an extra effort to retrieve it,” Sam Neil talks to one of his maid-aunts and says:
Well, considering the context, I would probably feel that she missed the piano I left on the fucking beach. But the conclusion he comes to is:
Yeah man. She’s crazy. She hasn’t gone out of her fucking way to communicate what she wants. Oh my GOD the first part of this movie is so FRUSTRATING! I’m getting annoyed all over again! Sam Neil, you fucking idiot!
Ada and her daughter go to the house of George Baines, an illiterate Scottish guy who lives on the beach and works as a middleman between the local Maori and the various colonial shitheads who are looking to strip the land of its natural essence and eventually turn the whole island into an English shithole. She says hey take me to the piano, he says nah, she says c’mon, he says alright why not. They go visit the piano together. Then Baines talks to Sam Neil and says hey, I own some land, I’ll give you the land for the piano. I want to learn to play it. Sam Neil, who, as a British guy, loves owning land more than anything says hell yeah let’s do this. When he tells Ada, she is fucking pissed.
“Good point, Ada. I will not buy the land with your piano, which is literally the one thing you’ve asked me for, and also I will hire some guys to bring the piano here.”
Just kidding. He loses his shit and says not only will George get the piano, you will teach him how to play it. From here, I suspect you can figure what happens: Ada and George hang out, George leverages his possession of the piano to forge a physical relationship between the two of them, you briefly see Harvey Keitel’s average but thematically resonant hog, Harvey reneges on the arrangement, gives her the piano AND has it taken to the house where she lives with Sam Neil, something Sam Neil could have done a while ago, and then she misses him and goes to his house, where they fuck while Sam Neil watches through a little hole in George’s Shack.
Sam Neil is CLEARLY into getting cuckholded (Look at that boner vein in his temple) but because he is British he can’t just accept that about himself and build a complicated triad arrangement where his wife and the local Keitel keep fucking while he watches from more and more precarious places while beating off like a well adjusted person would. Instead he chops one of Ada’s fingers off and feels bad about it (Very Drake move on his part: “Girl I’m so sad/I chopped your finger off/for messing around on me” sounds very elegant in autotune.) and then sends them both away, where they do perfectly fine without him in a New Zealand city somewhere.
The entire time this is happening, all I can think is Jesus Christ dude, none of this would have happened if you just listened to your wife and got the fucking piano! Of course, this is the point of the movie. Ada's muteness is a metaphor for the condition of being a woman trying to communicate her needs to a man (Or all men, manifesting in our patriarchal formation) who ignores her reasonable requests and opts to, instead, scrounge together all the evidence he can to regard her insane.
There’s another cuckolded man that came to mind while watching this movie: Sam Shepard in Days of Heaven. This poor guy tripped into a pit of snakes and got bit. That movie is a tragedy in the Greek sense, whereby the gods arranged a perfect triad of suffering. Sometimes, love is the path to our terrible doom. Sam Neil, on the other hand, makes his fucking bed like every dumbshit man who tries to extract love from a woman, because he doesn’t take like one second to listen and just assumes he’s being gaslit or subjected to some wild test he can never understand. The gap is fake, Sam Neil and also every man including myself: just read the angry note and get the fucking piano! Metaphorically. (Unless you are literally not getting a piano in the same way Sam Neil is not getting a piano, in which case, literally get the fucking piano.)
ADDENDUM: This week I also watched Bright Star, Campion’s dramatization of the romance between Fanny Brawne and all-time-king-English poet John Keats. I don’t know if people have seen this movie, but I thought it was fucking amazing. The way Campion tells a fairly familiar story through different assemblages of images is masterful, and the last 40 or so minutes are just fucking heartbreaking. You too will find yourself yelling ‘C’MON FANNY GO TO ITALY! JUST DO IT! LOVE IS MORE POWERFUL THAN MONEY!” Some guy on Rotten Tomatoes called the movie “melodramatic,” to this clown I say, yeah, damn right, it’s called EXPRESSING A FEELING ON SCREEN. You random pig man, you disgust me. Go neglect your mute wife somewhere buddy!