“The Incident” and Dictatorship.

I watched The Incident, a 1967 film written by Nicholas E. Baehr and directed by Larry Peerce.

The film opens with two thugs playing pool, drinking on the street, and harassing a couple, before deciding to hide in an alley to mug a passerby.

The audience is introduced to the other players, mostly couples of various sorts, heading home via the subway after a late night.

Inevitably the two troublemakers make their own way to the subway, in the same car with the other players, and begin to harass the others and make themselves into monsters. Their menace moves from couple to couple, pair to pair, while others try to ignore them or tell them to stop.

The fundamental setup is the idea that most people don’t want to risk the confrontation, when presented with obvious hostility of unknown scope. Sometimes it’s for their own sake, while others out of fear of what will happen to their companions. Despite having the numbers on their side, the passengers do not join together to put down their common threat, but instead they each try to ignore it and avoid it as much as possible.

And that tends to be the model of how dictatorships start. Their first victims on the train are a gay man and a sleeping vagrant man, the less sympathetic members of the train, following the pattern expressed by Martin Niemöller’s poem, “First They Came” (1946).

Even when they get to the pair of soldiers, they pick on the one who’s not from New York and who has a broken arm. They repeatedly back the individuals down from the courage of their convictions, partly by the threat, but partly by singling them out so the current victims feel responsibility or worry for the other riders’ emotional disruption. They often attack one of a pair to make their companion feel impotent.

As an allegorical film, it does not portray what the riders should have done, or could have done, from the start. That’s left up to the viewer to consider.

Expressing solidarity and not letting scoundrels make it out that they can, as wild beasts, simply prey on the weaker members, seems like the best strategy. The attackers have limited focus, and so depriving them of easy and lasting targets is key.

They could have pointed to universal human rights, to the fact they all pay their fares to ride, that all have a right to go where they are going. Not to elicit agreement of the assailants, but to find agreement with the majority of the riders.

In such cases, due to the dynamics, those seeking to establish solidarity should do so directly with intended allies. Speech-making would only tend toward general agreement without commitment, where appealing to specific passengers in sequence would allow them to assert their own rights and participate in the assertion without becoming the sole focus of attention of the bullies.

More effective yet, would be if the passengers “pass the ball” in their assertions of mutual support, so that attention is continued along a chain, making it all the harder for the goons to zero-in on any one individual.

In any case, the film serves as a useful reminder that we should support our brothers and sisters, and that we shouldn’t be afraid to say we do so. Although our lots differ, the suffering being noisy, ultimately we are all in the same car, so we must face the fiends together.