Let's begin this tango of subtlety with care, can we not? This movie consists of the greatest speech ever made in cinema. We will talk about that later in this post.
So, when Mr. Colonel Frank asked Ms. Donna to do the tango with him, that was the moment Mr. Charlie smiled—truthful smiles. That smile was not of happiness, but of revelation, like Zarathustra's laughter echoing in the mountains. To dance, for a blind man, is to see with the body what the eyes can no longer bear. The body becomes the philosopher, and motion becomes metaphysics. I fall every time when I watch this movie, inside it gives me a razor-awareness of being alive in this world.
When I first watched this movie, during my Le Grey Bastion period (it just lasted for two years from 2008–2010)—yes, in that tango scene—I realized that life is a flickering candle, and one must grab that brief flame before it fades. I followed it. I tried. I must affirm I tried to do my best to carry every memory with me but Nietzsche would call it the affirmation of the instant—amor fati, the love of fate, the joy of burning completely. But I utterly failed at every moment. I should have stood on my own legs and danced the tango, but my legs were too busy burrowing into the darkness I had never known before. Artaud once said, "The body must be broken open to find its spirit."
I, too, was trying to break open—but all I found was silence. I always remember and give homage in such time to Mr. Nijinsky, who danced well in his life, tired of standing up just like me. Those moments I used to dance alone.
What common ground do I share with Mr. Colonel? We are both blind; he tangoes, and I do not. But blindness is not darkness, it is an initiation. The Katha Upanishad says: "The Self is not known by sight, but by that which sees sight." And I take it by heart, though, Colonel Slade saw through his blindness—he smelt, remembered, felt. He was the Upanishadic witness trapped in an Artaudian theatre. Yes, one day you will rely on memory, just as Mr. Colonel did on that plane trip. He described how memory can hold men steady on their lane.
In the scent, the touch, the brief glance—there resides what the Upanishads call Rasa, the essence. Which I am trying to feel every moment of life. When I peek through my blinded-eyes I see the fear—that fear belongs not to mine but Other (this concept of fear, I am working on my next book). And, yes, in that moment Nietzsche's eternal recurrence hides in that scent—every fragrance a returning world. How could not human being understand this?
Yes, I have always chased music over cover. What a mistake!? But isn't that the Dionysian spirit—to chase chaos and call it rhythm? To dance on the ruins and call it meaning? Colonel's tango was not a dance—it was a metaphysical protest against paralysis. I am trying to wake up and stand against those paralysis-ridden-legs.
Colonel used to shout on my ear on my youthful days. That line—I could have written—God is dead, conscience is dead, I am dead, but man still smells the woman—still desires beauty amidst decay. That scent is the resurrection of sensation. When he drives that Ferrari, blind, through the streets—it is not recklessness. It is Prana, the breath of life, roaring through dead nerves. I even tried that too, to drive recklessly but I did not drive to see life, but to avoid the darkness.
What greater fear could there be than this—the tiredness of life and the death of conscience? And that tiredness—no one can understand it. It is the cosmic weariness that the Chandogya Upanishad hinted at when it said: "From exhaustion, Being desired rest."
We are all fragments of that fatigue. "I am fragmented Colonel. I just broken and shards of memory are all vanished, what a misery, Colonel" I used to murmur when I see him driving that red-fine-piece-of-machine.
And in that fatigue, I saw the seed of compassion, the beginning of rebirth. When I later started reading Heidegger I understood this tiredness more clearly. In Being and Time, he discusses moods as a fundamental way we are "disclosed" to the world. Profound weariness or even boredom is not just a psychological state; it's an existential experience that reveals the "nothingness" at the core of being. And Colonel Frank's tiredness and mine reflects fatigue not from exertion or exterior but it renders from the existential angst or meaningless existence of human inferiority.
"Yes, Colonel, I too am rotten." I was speaking with him all along too. But perhaps, as Artaud would whisper, "Rot is the beginning of new flesh." From decay, a new fragrance; from blindness, a new seeing. Is this true? Even somedays I doubted my own essence. That is what Scent of a Woman taught me: to dance even when the eyes are closed, to feel even when the soul is tired, to live even when the gods are gone.
This line I remember every day, a profane, defiant call to action: Colonel said this to his cat as he embarked on his journey to New York—a whispered philosophy to a silent companion.
If Colonel Slade's ultimate act of Amor Fati is not the tango (the private, aesthetic defiance) but his defense of Charlie in the school hearing (the public, ethical commitment), how does this shift—from the physical affirmation of his body to the moral affirmation of his conscience—change the meaning of his "resurrection of sensation" through the woman's scent? It changes the whole perspective of the movie at the end.