"Who Knows Where the Wind Comes From?"

We begin with legend, men, boys, who see their lives as legends, epics of hedonism. Our heroes descend the steps and mount the waves. But time is our subject here. Time and change, like any film that attempts to confront life itself, full on. Waves as passing time, as tired a metaphor as any, yet leave it to cinema to render it anew, vibrant and living it its potent literalism. This is cinema as Gesamtkunstwerk, or at least John Milius' grand attempt. And what an attempt...

It's a story of growing, of friends, man and nature, everything we seem to talk about with epics. And this is an epic. Truly. Three friends that gradually become one man, as others drift apart, some wed, some die. John Ford and Vincente Minnelli have been cited by others as influences or echoes, incredibly apt comparisons. A Ford community, Ford brawls, Ford subtlety of movement. Minnelli camera, Minnelli emphasis on aloneness. How appropriate both names are here. 

The simple beauty of friends, in our genesis. The film begins on a plateau of community and incidence (and even Ford favorite Hank Worden makes an appearance). This is deeply felt cinema, gathering moments of emotion and motion together, primarily gestural but also moored to grand movements (ie the surfing, the party, etc). Indeed, we get cinema's most Fordian brawl outside of Donovan's Reef:

Wanton, carefree destruction, relationships defined by physical allegiance. But this is a film of couplets and relations. Physical violence as youthful and inconsequential cruelly, wisely, contrasts off violence as a real threat, mortal danger found in the Mexico sequence. The gang's quest for thrills brings them into contact with actual fear and threat, but this is only their first encounter. Gradually, Big Wednesday strips down the engagements of youth as our heroes progress into adulthood. The key, however, is the refusal to abandon youth's promise of excitement and spiritual fulfillment. Rather, Milius tries, with full force, to find that line, that transition, between the two. 

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The character Bear is our only truly tangible connection to "adulthood" and "experience", and is, as such, the most mournful, knowing character in the film. It is he, who in the party sequence, is left alone, and it is he alone who can see the impermanence. What we get is a Fordian note of loneliness and solitude. This is a significant moment, our first moment outside the opera of our young heroes lives. Soon they themselves will be dragged out of it, until youth itself becomes a literal wall of water. 

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A last coda for youth, for a carefree existence. Surfing itself, as a spiritual and physical activity, is now in flux. 

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Enter Minnelli. The camera smoothly, effortlessly, enters a club, a place of garish color and movement straight out of Two Weeks in Another Town, and just as significant in its sin and danger. Here is our first encounter with a world outside, the Olympus of the beach diminishing. A shock, cold water to the face, to shake us from the dream. The first brawl was the act of mythic legends; the second brawl is an ugly confrontation. Milius is concerned with our own perception of the myths of ourselves. Here he shatters them.

And while we may leave unscarred, we leave behind others scarred. 

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And so the film becomes an epic of loneliness. We are left with a last gasp of physical comedy, our heroes trying to dodge the draft with broad performances. But what is slipping away will be gone forever. Bear must leave the pier, our heroes must begin to grapple with "responsible" lives. Many a film has tangled with the idea of aging and time passing, but Milius succeeds because he has the intelligence to bridge the gap between the grand and the real, knowing that life is lived in neither realm fully. 

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Death now becomes personal, no longer the fate of strangers. A minor character, but an essential piece of the community fabric, dies, elliptically, his death entering as feeling and idea. The three friends grapple drunkenly with this reality, Vietnam raising its head in the story. Milius thinks very literally, but is one of the great directors of thinking literally. His linear lines of meaning always end at the desired effect. 

When the characters stop seeing their lives as myths, when they begin to feel and accept time, their myths diffuse into the community. Bear, a philosopher-cum-bum, watches Matt walk away, heroic in frame as a being preserved in elegiac blue light. Matt himself, our ostensible protagonist, must battle one last time with youth, as an idea, and eternity himself. He comes away injured, but he is able to depart from the story's Olympus. 

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The surf sequences themselves are key. You cannot conduct such a self-knowingly grand film on life without movements on which to attach your meanings, realized as physical and visual expressions. The surfing is Wagnerian and intimate, fixed cameras and helicopter shots meshing to become symphonic, the cornball score retreating from the grandeur of the waves themselves. Men and time, men and the sea, ancient, overdone, familiar, but who has so thoroughly embodied this division as Milius? He attempted that foolish idea, that film about "LIFE", and rather than obliquely tiptoeing around it with caution and, uh, "restraint", he rushed forward, drunkenly and brazenly, and tackled it. Success in such an attempt is measured with emotion, not gestural profundity. 

The surf sequences are the wellspring...

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"Who knows where the wind comes from? Is it the breath of God? Who knows what really makes the clouds? Where do the great swells come from? And for what? Only that now it was time. And we had waited so long..."