July 11: Enemy, Friend
On July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr fatally wounds Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Tonight's film: Enemy Mine (1985).
I read the news, and it is the same picture again: two sides that cannot agree, and each one ready to risk everything to be proven right. It does not take a war. Two people are enough, one insult, and the bitter conviction that the only way to keep your dignity is to make the other one bleed.
On July 11, 1804, at dawn, on a rocky ledge in Weehawken, New Jersey, exactly that happened. Two men stood facing each other with Wogdon and Barton pistols in their hands. One was Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president of the United States. The other was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury. The spot was a popular dueling ground: at least eighteen duels were fought there between 1700 and 1884. The two seconds, William Van Ness and Nathaniel Pendleton, gave the signal.
Hamilton fired first. His ball struck a tree branch, well above Burr’s head. Historians have argued for two centuries over whether he threw the shot on purpose or his hand simply slipped. Burr did not hesitate. His ball buried itself in Hamilton’s abdomen. They carried him across the Hudson River, and the next day, July 12, about thirty-six hours after the duel, Hamilton died.
That is the whole story. One mean remark at a dinner, passed along, inflated, and two statesmen working themselves up until they ended up on that riverbank. Thirty-six hours stood between that and a handshake. It did not end there.
That is exactly why tonight I am putting on Enemy Mine, Wolfgang Petersen’s 1985 film. It is not about the Weehawken duel, but it asks the same question with a far better outcome: what happens when you lock two enemies together, and they have no choice left but to stay together?
The film opens in 2092. A human fighter pilot, Willis Davidge, and a Drac alien, Jeriba, shoot each other down in space, and both crash on the same miserable volcanic planet, Fyrine IV. At first they hunt each other through the rocks. Then they realize that alone, each of them dies. Over three years the enemy becomes a friend, and Davidge makes a promise: when the Drac dies in childbirth (Dracs reproduce by self-fertilization, a surprise to both), he will carry the child to the Drac homeworld and recite the family line before the council.
The film is based on Barry B. Longyear’s 1979 novella, which won the Hugo Award for best novella in 1980. The shoot was a nightmare. Richard Loncraine was set to direct in Budapest, but production shut down after a week because the alien costume and the location looked like a cheap 1950s horror picture. Petersen took over, moved to Munich, and the original $17 million budget climbed to $29 million, then past $40 million with marketing. At the box office it brought in only $12.3 million worldwide. A financial flop, no question.
But honestly, a flop and quality are not the same thing. Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars out of four and accused it of sparing no expense on effects while compromising everything else. I would say it does exactly what good science fiction should. It looks out onto another world and hands back one simple human truth: two beings taught to hate each other, who still carry the strength to step out of that. The Burr and Hamilton duel is the exact reverse. There, nobody stopped to think, nobody was forced to stay together.
There is one small detail I cannot pass over. Enemy Mine was the first Western science fiction film shown in Soviet theaters. In the world where I grew up, where pirated VHS copies were the technological escape, that lines up with what I think the genre is for. Two enemies who learn to live together. Not a bad message for an evening like this either.
Do not let today’s news drag you down. Tonight, press play.
What else could have been tonight
When Big Ben sounded for the first time (1859)
On July 11, 1859, in London, inside the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, the Great Bell finally rang out for the first time. That bell, Big Ben, weighs 13.7 tons, and sixteen horses had hauled it up into the belfry back in 1858, while the clock itself had been ticking since May 31. The success was short-lived: in September the bell cracked and stood silent for four years. The crack is still there, and it is what gives Big Ben that strange, recognizable tone.
That silent, tower-bound timekeeper pairs perfectly with the closing scene of Back to the Future (1985). The Hill Valley clock tower, a precisely timed lightning bolt on November 12, 1955, at 10:04 p.m., and a DeLorean drawing 1.21 gigawatts from the sky to send Marty McFly back to his own time. Where Big Ben measured shared time for a nation, Doc Brown gambled with time itself to bring one man home.
When Skylab fell back to Earth (1979)
On July 11, 1979, the first American space station, the 77.5-ton Skylab, came back through the atmosphere after its 34,981st orbit. NASA had aimed it at the Indian Ocean, but part of the debris came down in Western Australia, near the small town of Esperance. Esperance fined the American space agency $400 for littering, a small-town joke that went unpaid for decades.
For this one I reach for Space Cowboys (2000). Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner play four retired test pilots who are called back to repair a 1950s-era Russian satellite, IKON. The satellite threatens to crash, and the modern control systems cannot handle it, because the technology is so old that only the obsolete know-how of the aging pilots is worth anything against it. It is basically the Skylab story, only with a happy ending and Eastwood in the cabin.
Sources
Main event, the Burr and Hamilton duel:
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/hamilton-burr-duel.htm (Weehawken site, seconds William Van Ness and Nathaniel Pendleton)
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/burr-vs-hamilton-behind-the-ultimate-political-feud (Hamilton died about 36 hours after the duel)
https://www.visithudson.org/things-to-do/attractions/weehawken-dueling-grounds/ (at least 18 duels at the Weehawken site between 1700 and 1884)
Film, Enemy Mine (1985):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Mine_(film) (Barry B. Longyear 1979 novella, 1980 Hugo Award; Roger Ebert 2.5/4 stars)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089092/ (Enemy Mine, 1985)
Side events:
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/big-ben/building-clock-tower/constructing-the-most-accurate-clock-in-the-world/ (Big Ben first rang July 11, 1859, cracked in September, silent for four years)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763 (Back to the Future, 1985)
https://www.nasa.gov/history/45-years-ago-skylab-reenters-earths-atmosphere/ (Skylab reentered on its 34,981st orbit, debris over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0186566/ (Space Cowboys, 2000)