Last time: My scorecard for the scene we talked about in part 11:
- Atmosphere/Creepy appearance of villain: +4
- Girl actually assists in fight instead of just screaming: +2
- Pointfulness of fight, hero or villain side: -4 (-2 apiece)
- Random helicopter: -2
- I want the Kurgan’s evil laugh as a text-message notifier noise: +1
- Total: 1
That’ll do, Highlander. That’ll do.
12. Maybe I’m an optimist at heart after all.
We go to another sixteenth-century flashback, in which the other MacLeods gossip about Connor—and if I’d only started this series earlier, I could be making a nice Christmas-dinner analogy right about now.
The gist of this particular gossip is Connor’s untimely aliveness (to borrow a phrase from The Tick), and how it’s probably all the work of the devil. This part of the movie always throws me into a mild philosophical confusion: I think of myself as a mildly to moderately superstitious person, and also a bit of a pessimist. Yet I think my response to a relative’s revival would be something like this:
In the event the MacLeods lost the battle: “Well, he seems the same. It’s a little weird, but at least that guy with the helmet didn’t kill everybody. Praise god!”
In the event the MacLeods won the battle: “God shows his favor on us again! We thought we’d lost Connor, but he’s alive through a miracle! Praise god!”
Last resort? Pull a Dracula and splash him with holy water to see what happens, since the clan’s priest has been prominent in every flashback sequence. These people have to be getting their demon lore from somewhere, right? Instead, the priest is just as spooked as everybody else.
I’m willing to believe, after shivering in Inverness in July back in my college days, that people in the highlands of Scotland are probably even more pessimistic/colder than I am. I’m just not used to feeling like Pollyanna.
Connor shows up with no apparent idea about any of this (and he’s smiling! make a note!), which is odd: the other MacLeods, especially Dugal*, do not seem to be masters of hiding their feelings. They certainly don’t hide them in the dialogue that follows, which ends with Connor being conked on the head with a jug.
And you know, I want all this not to be a plot contrivance. I try to imagine what it would be like to be, say, Connor’s girlfriend (wife? betrothed? do we know what that relationship is?): there was a huge wound in him, he was grey, not breathing, and now none of those things are true and it’s creepy. So maybe you would want to burn him as a warlock. But no matter how many times I start out saying “It was a more ignorant time,” I always end up at “The MacLeods have lost their damn minds.**”
Connor is tied to a yoke and taken outside, where the idiots of his village—you guessed it—beat the ever-loving shit out of the Highlander. (They also scatter a few chickens.) The intent is still to burn him, but his cousin Angus, voice of reason and approximate Robin Williamson lookalike, pleads him down to exile—not, however, before he’s punched by Dugal and attacked by Random Headbutt Guy.
I find Random Headbutt Guy fascinating because until now, we’ve never seen him. I can’t find him in the battle scenes, even though he’s clearly a lover of violence. He doesn’t wear a clan tartan. I’m half convinced he just saw an angry mob and joined in because head-butting people is his most cherished hobby.
If you want to see him yourself, he appears from 2:27 to 2:30 in this montage. Head-butting is a lot more common in movies than I thought.
Bloodied and still yoked, Connor leaves his village forever and leans against a rock, the movie cutting back to the present day by having his face fade into a mural on the side of a building. It’s of Mona Lisa with bloodshot eyes, and I am kind of offended on her behalf.
*This is how the character’s name is spelled according to IMDb. This annoys me disproportionately. Did the O freeze off?
** Especially if, as we see in a later flashback, he’s a blacksmith. Enjoy trying to shoe your horses using only collective anger!
Next time: Found-Again Friday goes animated again.
Next time on TCBOM! Doesn’t everybody have a room for treasure and flashbacks?
