In the Flesh: The Aviator

Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) pushes the field of aviation forward through brute stubbornness and creativity unfettered by knowledge or economic restraint. He pushes and pulls and demands and demands again, throwing himself against reality, and because the industry is both hidebound and still very young, reality has quite a bit of give in it. But when it comes to its more granular elements, to bodies, to emotions, to his own reactions to stimuli, to sound and light and skin, reality isn’t so accommodating. You can’t hear every conversation. You can’t suck every breath out of a lover’s mouth. You can’t banish a globe-spanning industry with a word, or undo gravity’s pull. You can’t reach back through time and undo the damage a parent did to your psyche when it was still wet and moldable, like clay. That opening shot lingers like a bad smell clinging to fabric. Howard’s mother Allene (Amy Sloan) washes her nine-year-old son while drilling him as to the meaning of “quarantine.” The implication of sexual violence clings to the scene, but it’s the psychological conditioning, the root of Hughes’ obsessive-compulsive disorder, that colors it with such profound sadness.

Thirty years later, huddled in his car after suffering a nervous fit, Hughes recalls the word. “Quarantine,” Howard breathes like he’s remembering a prayer from his boyhood, something he once said on his knees with his hands folded atop his bed. And of course, to Howard, it is a prayer, a folding inward of his own tremendous willpower in defiance of sickness, filth, and even mortality itself. The body can never diminish if it’s never touched, if its excretions are kept close, if by the miracle of obsession it can be unstuck from time and placed in the continuous flow of an eternal past and present. Perhaps, Scorsese seems to say, this same mania is what drove Hughes to make films, to conjure celluloid worlds where the rules were his rules, the people his people, the flow of events and causality subject to his whim. At the nadir of his post-crash physical and mental decline, Hughes acts along childishly with his own films, then later sobs on the ground with the projector turned on him, bathing in light and sound, superimposing the orderly and idealized reality he created over the scarred and broken wreckage of his body.

Eventually, these same obsessions become a lever by which Hughes’ enemies can control him. Watch senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) carefully impress a thumbprint on a glass of water from which he knows Hughes will drink, or observe his self-satisfied smile as he sees Hughes react to the eye and glistening flesh of the brook trout served for their lunch. The eccentric tycoon’s inability to process these triggering minutiae leaves him gravely weakened and susceptible to manipulation. Quarantine comes with him wherever he goes, whispering in his ear that cholera is close, that nothing is clean, that death and disease dog his footsteps. Even after his Hercules flying boat successfully takes to the sky, even after he thrashes senator Brewster during the senator’s own hearings, that specter is never far away. It comes to him one final time as he paces a dank restroom after that triumphant flight, his childhood self reciting a litany of dreams and ambitions only for his mother to answer, “You’re not safe.”