"Getting Out:" True Freedom in The Great Escape (1963)

Hello, my dears! Happy spring, and happy Easter! I didn't mean to give up blogging for Lent; but March was busy, and Easter break was full, and, well, here we are. 

I keep saying "soon my schedule will change and then I will be free to do all the things (like blogging)--SOON I will be FREE of the constraints under which I currently live."

That's the feeling at this time of year for a lot of people, I suppose. The school year is drawing to a close. Warm weather keeps coming around to tease us. Green grass and blue skies and running water all whisper, "Soon, soon, soon, you'll be out here with us for days at a time." Schoolchildren and college students and teachers hear the promise and pant for freedom.

It's an exciting time of year, but it can also be frustrating; and also, it can be easy to fall into the trap of living in the future instead of the present. Right now with two months left in the schoolyear, I'm kind of in survival mode, existing rather than living to the full. It's so tempting to think, "It's ok to just exist right now, because soon--SOON, I will no longer have these constraints on my life; soon, I will be FREE. And then I'll be able to live."

But spoiler alert: life will always have constraints.

Which can be kinda depressing to think about.

I'm not trying to quash anybody's hope or anything. Quite the contrary: I think the virtue of hope is less about envisioning a perfect future and more about embracing invisible realities in the present. Realities like free will, and human dignity, and courage and humor and creativity and perseverance and sacrificial love.

I want to stop living with the kind of hope that depends on tomorrow, and start living with the kind of hope that the characters have in The Great Escape. 

Which is what I really wanna talk about here. 

I hope you have seen The Great Escape. If you haven't, be forewarned that I am going to spoil it with abandon. Tell you who lives and who dies and everything. So maybe take three hours and watch it before you read this. If you wanna be surprised.

Then again, a lot of the surprises are distressing surprises? So maybe spoilers would be doing you a favor? It depends on your point of view.

From a purely physical perspective, The Great Escape is a massive tragedy. The escape plan doesn't entirely fail, true, but the numbers are depressing. Out of the 250 men who are supposed to get out of the Nazi POW camp, only 76 actually make it through the tunnel. Of those 76, 50 are shot and killed.That leaves 26; and of these 26, 11 are returned to camp before the credits roll. Of the remaining 15, the audience only has the satisfaction of watching three walk out of Nazi territory alive. And those three aren't the movie's main characters, either--Sedgwick, in particular, gets hardly any screen-time until the escape. The characters the audience really forms an emotional connection with are mostly dead or broken in the end. Roger "Big X" Bartlett, the courageous head of the escape; Colin Blythe, the overcivilized birdwatcher; MacDonald, the smiling Scotsman; Ashley-Pitt, the ingenious hider of tunnel dirt--they're all dead. Those who aren’t dead have to deal with the fallout of the failed escape. Virgil Hilts is in the cooler for the umpteenth time in his military career. And the audience can't help but ask, along with the once-genial hotshot pilot Hendley, "was it worth it?" Certainly the Great Escape seems like more of a great escape attempt, if not an utter failure.

And yet--"it depends on your point of view, Hendley." Ramsey, the commanding officer who speaks this line, doesn't say what his point of view is. And Hendley doesn't seem mightily encouraged by it. But if we look at the last words of the men who die, we get a glimpse of hope in their point of view.

Simplest and perhaps sweetest, there's Blythe, who dies in Hendley's arms saying, "Thank you for getting me out."

Then there's Mac, who tells Roger not to beat himself up for the way the escape ended: "I think you did a damn good job. I think we all did."

And then there's Roger himself, who says, with a real smile (a smile as real as Mac's, and much rarer), that orchestrating the escape "kept me alive" and that "I've never been happier."

The machine gun cuts him off before he can finish his monologue; but the one or two sentences he speaks are enough. It was the business of being Big X that "kept him alive" in the POW camp; and when he says it kept him alive, I doubt very much that he only means physically alive. (Especially since it ends up getting him killed.) Orchestrating the escape kept Roger and the other men alive spiritually. That is, it gave them hope. It reminded them that they were human. It reminded them that, in a very real way that no Nazi oppression could ever kill, they were already free.

Christian thought distinguishes between "freedom from" and "freedom to." "Freedom from" means mere license--freedom from constraints, outside pressures affecting your ability to do this or that thing. The prisoners of war in the movie don't have the luxury of "freedom from." They are physically trapped in countless ways--by the barbed wire, by the guns, by the guards, by the watchtowers, by the warning fence, by the commandant, by the SS, by the Gestapo, by the mere physical facts of dirt and weight and gravity. If we think we are limited by our class load or work schedule, all we have to do to put things in perspective is watch ten minutes of The Great Escape. 

And yet, as limited as they are in their "freedom from," the characters in the film still find ways to exercise their "freedom to"--that is, the liberty of the human will to choose the right thing. They have no freedom from the camp, but they do have freedom to be human in the midst of oppression. As one of my sisters put it, freedom is about more than where you are.

Circumstances do not take away from your human dignity, the freedom you have to do the things that really matter. No matter what external pressures are at play in your life, you still have the power to choose. You have the power to think--to create--to be resourceful, to be courageous, to make sacrifices. And, as the pinnacle of all this human freedom, you have the power to love.

This essential human freedom--the internal kind, freedom to--is on display from beginning to end of The Great Escape. Every heroic character proves his agency, the sovereignty he bears over his own human heart. And more often than not this agency is a responsible agency--not "I will because I CAN," but "I will because I SHOULD." In the words of Ramsey to the commandant: "Do you expect officers to forget their duty?"

“No,” the commandant answers. And it is precisely this which makes the Nazis' job so difficult, their worldview ultimately impossible--at least, impossible in a world filled with brave and good men fired by the courage of their convictions.

Time and again the heroes of The Great Escape prove that they are such men. In the absence of freedom from oppression, they assert their freedom to do the right thing.

Hilts might get caught every time he tries to escape. He's the "Cooler King" for a reason. But he doesn't let the confines of the camp put a stop to his perseverance. He looks for weak spots in security. He talks smart to the commandant. He encourages his friends to be as daring and imaginative and optimistic as he is. And when at the end of the movie he's thrown in the cooler again--he makes the most of it with his perpetual baseball. He has no freedom from the camp. But he has freedom to be cocky anyway.

Hendley asserts his freedom with the particular creativity of the "scrounger." It's his job to get supplies for the escape organization. His resources are limited, but his resourcefulness is unlimited. He'll get what he needs if it means blackmailing the poor fear-stricken prison guard all the way to Doomsday. (The contrast between Hendley's cavalier confidence and Werner's cringing cowardice is a golden illustration of internal vs. external freedom--Hendley the POW has far more true freedom than Werner, his guard.) But more than this creativity, Hendley proves his freedom to be human when he throws all his own chances of escape in with Colin Blythe's: "Colin's not a blind man as long as he's with me--and he's going with me."

Colin Blythe is somewhat imprisoned by his own limitations as well as by the Nazis--Hendley is surprised to find him involved in the escape at all, so attached is he to his British comforts and quiet hobbies. But Colin keeps his freedom to love birds (not hunting--watching, and drawing), to prefer milk in his tea and to use the same tea leaves 20 times. Also, he knows and proves that who he is--mild-mannered, near-sighted birdwatcher--is an asset to the organization. "I'm the forger." And he makes the choice to take a risk for freedom even if he doesn't stand a chance. 

Danny asserts his freedom by digging tunnels--even if he is afraid of small dark places.

Willie asserts his freedom by begging Danny not to give up. 

Ashley-Pitt asserts his freedom by finding creative new ways to hide black dirt--also by sacrificing his safety for Roger's.

Mac asserts his freedom with a smile.

Griff, the tailor, is a minor character; but he has one of my favorite lines in the film. When Roger remarks on how horrible it would be if the Nazis found the escape outfits, Griff shrugs off the concern with the words, "That's Sorren's department"--showing that even in the confines of the POW camp, he has the freedom to trust his fellow men.

Cavendish asserts his freedom by leading a choir to cover up the sounds of tunnel construction.

It countless moments, big and small, the characters prove that they are human--and, in the words of an old song, "No, no, they can't take that away from me."

But here's the tricky part: even though you always do have true internal human freedom, it's possible to forget you have human freedom. The real danger of the Nazi regime is not so much the camp as the lie the camp is there to tell: the lie that you are not human, that you are not free, that your life does not have value. It is only by convincing people of this lie that the Nazis have any real control. And while the focus of The Great Escape is on the heroes who fight the lie, it does also show what it looks like for people to buy the lie: subtly, in the commandant, who feels trapped by "the higher authority" that eventually sends him to the Russian Front; comically, in the guard Werner, who is at Hendley's beck and call for fear of his commanding officer; and, most pathetically, in Archibald Ives, the prisoner who allows the constraints of the prison camp to break his spirit. 

As long as Ives has a hope of getting out of the camp, he is able to soldier on; but his hope is not an embracing of invisible realities so much as it is a counting on a less-constrained future. His hope is not in his own present (and eternal) dignity but in the potential day he might again go into town and "buy off the birds." Poor Ives. As soon as the Nazis find the tunnel, he gives up hope. He lets them take away his freedom.

Not to come down too hard on Ives. It's easy to buy a lie when you've been beaten down with it every day for the past three years.

My sisters came up with a splendid observation that Ives is symbolic of all the other characters and, indeed, of the whole world outside the camp: if the escape fails--if the men give up on freedom--the whole world will despair and die on the barbed wire of Nazism.

"They are the common enemy of all who believe in freedom!"

To fight for freedom, you must believe in freedom--really believe in it, know that it's there inside you no matter what outside forces say about your ability to choose. When the men in the camp see Ives give up and die, they know the stakes very clearly: they can't despair, because if they do the Nazis have already won. They have to keep fighting.

And keep fighting they do.

Their fight, like the whole film, is a dramatic mixture of spunk and sorrow. 

Spunk, because in the course of courage they do stumble across bits of fun. The Fourth of July celebration is thematically appropriate, and the soundtrack is as mischievous as Hendley's smile (or Hilts') for a reason. 

Sorrow, because the path to freedom involves blood, sweat, and tears. (Hendley's blood. Danny's sweat. The audience's tears.)

But also also also--freedom is not just a distant goal.

Freedom is inside the men, inside the camp. A line from A Hidden Life, a much more recent WWII movie, comes to mind: when the Nazis tell the hero he simply has to sign a paper to be free, he answers, calmly, "But I already am."

And in that "freedom to" lies happiness. Virtue may not be its own reward, but its effect in the soul is so immediate that it may as well be.

Roger, about to die: "I've never been happier."

And Blythe, already dying: "Thank you for getting me out."

He isn't just talking about the last few hours of his life outside the confines of the prison camp. He's talking about the whole liberating endeavor of working against the Nazis. Tricking Werner, scrounging tea and milk and coffee, taking wood from the beds to brace the tunnel, having birdwatchers' meetings to cover up forgeries--all of this kind of thing has kept the men alive in soul as well as in body. 

Most of the men who come through the tunnel die, yes. But little matter. It was never really about the tunnel. 

The moment Big X called a meeting on the first day they came to camp, they had already claimed their internal, indomitable freedom.

They had already made their great escape.