Harvey Keitel. Marshall Fine

persona can be traced to that exercise: the edgy young (or middle-aged) man, whose way of dealing with the world is to lash out at it in spasms of violence – or worse. The good man confronted with his own attraction to what is forbidden – or coping with guilt at his inability to resist temptation.

      When Lt, the character he plays in Bad Lieutenant, stares into an abyss of drugs, sex and numerous forms of spiritual corruption and faces his own pitiable disintegration, he is looking through Harvey Keitel’s eyes. And those eyes say, ‘I know these thoughts. I understand this way of thinking.’

      The comprehension dawned on that dark night in North Carolina when the young Keitel, barely seventeen and newly sprung from basic training, showed up for night-combat training. It was an inky night and Keitel was nervous and skittish. He had played the tough guy for years, learning it early on the streets of Brooklyn. But this was the Marines – and he was hardly the only tough guy who wanted to prove just how tough he was by joining the Marines.

      He had the kind of approachable hard-boiled quality of a young John Garfield. Mixing for the first time with people from all parts of the country, he’d found other Brooklynites and hung out with them, if anything emphasizing his own Brooklyn origins.

      But this was different: even though it was peacetime, even though he was armed and wearing combat gear, even though it was only an exercise and not actual combat conditions, standing out here in the dark was creepy. He was a Brooklynite through and through, used to corners with streetlamps and traffic and people. This was darkness one can only find far from city lights, darkness like he’d never experienced except, perhaps, while hiding in a closet as a child: ‘It was pitch-black out. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. We were sitting in the darkness, me and hundreds of other Marines, huddled together, about to go through this course in night combat. And I was scared. And I didn’t want to tell any of my fellow Marines that I was scared. But I was scared.’

      Then, out of the darkness came a voice: calm, reasonable, all-knowing. It was the voice of the instructor, an aged veteran of, perhaps, twenty-five or twenty-six who seemed like a mystic ancient to this still-raw batch of shaven-headed seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. ‘You’re all afraid of the dark,’ he said, without judgment, ‘because you’re all afraid of what you don’t know. I’m going to teach you to know the darkness, so that you’re no longer afraid of it. So that you learn how to live in it.’

      ‘My introduction to mythology and philosophy,’ Keitel called it. ‘In the years that came, that is one of the essences of all the mythology and philosophy I have read. He could tell us those words because he had experienced the darkness. He had experienced that terror in a war. But that was the first time I had heard words like that.’

      That notion – of dealing with fear by confronting it and learning about it – struck a chord that resonated with the seemingly easy-going Keitel. It remained with him and became a credo of sorts: to explore the darkness in order to better understand the light, to examine wrong in order to better know what is right. It became the source of Keitel’s journey as an actor – the inner journey to explore his own darkest, least-acceptable feelings and ideas, then using that self-knowledge while creating his film and stage characters – to plumb his own pain for his characters’ reality:

      That is probably the most important philosophical question to ask oneself. What is the darkness? How do I learn to live with it? I heard that when I was seventeen years old and I never forgot it. It appealed to me. I wanted to learn to live with the darkness. What the Marine was teaching – it’s not that you are not scared in the night time. It’s that you learn about your fear and the darkness. That fear becomes different and you can work with it.

      At that time I didn’t know what the extension of that idea was. I know now. It took me years to understand it, but I sensed it.

      Eventually, Keitel would find the same thought echoed in the Gospel of Thomas, as he researched the role of Judas in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’

      ‘There,’ Keitel said, ‘is the whole foundation of self-analysis.’

4

      Keitel was more excited and curious than scared when America decided to intervene in Lebanon in 1957, to provide a peacekeeping presence while American and Soviet diplomats conferred and tried to resolve the dispute between Lebanon and the Soviet-backed forces in the region. ‘Jews weren’t normally allowed to be sent to the Middle East then,’ he said, ‘but it was an emergency situation – the threat that some Arab states were going to invade Lebanon – so they didn’t separate me from my unit.’

      Once they got to Lebanon, they carried rifles in the name of their country when they were on duty and, when off duty, explored Beirut, where they were stationed, as much as the politics of the moment would allow. Keitel was fascinated by Beirut’s blend of the modern and the biblical, but appalled by the poverty that he saw. American Marines always drew a crowd of children; Keitel found himself moved by the squalid conditions in which they existed. Though it was against regulations, he and his friends began filching rations in order to give them to the children they encountered.

      As he patrolled Beirut, Keitel – who only a couple of years earlier was spitting on the mezuzah at every opportunity – began wearing a Star of David on a chain around his neck, in plain view, as a note of defiance aimed at the people he was there to protect, people he knew would wipe out him and all the Jews in Israel, given the opportunity.

      Inevitably, it led one day to an encounter with a Lebanese civilian, who dropped a remark in passing – along the lines of ‘Jewish dog’ – that Keitel wouldn’t let pass. Springing suddenly into action, the nineteen-year-old Marine, eager for combat, grabbed the transgressor by the throat and applied a choke-hold long enough to make it clear that he disapproved of the remark. Keitel walked away, satisfied that the young man would keep future opinions about Jewish jewelry to himself.

      It wasn’t Keitel’s first run-in with anti-Semitism in the Marines. Still, the prejudice he’d found in the Marine Corps had a somewhat less emotionally charged context: ‘I was called a kike once by a sergeant when we were alone. I called him a guinea. He said, “Don’t call me that.” I said, “Don’t call me a kike.” He never said it again and we were OK.’

      His three years in the Marines remain a touchstone of his life, from his lifelong devotion to working out to the sense of self-esteem it instilled:

      That was the first time I had a real sense of pride about myself, a sense of belonging to a group that’s special. To this day, I’m proud of being a Marine.

      There was a spirit. We were on a journey, albeit the creativity was directed to a place none of us wanted to go to – war. But you understand, if you are in the middle of that, why the group is unstoppable. There is a spirit at work there, a support system, where you know you will never get left behind. I’m talking about being there for someone. Semper fidelis. That says it all. Always faithful. It means you’ll never let the other guy down. It means if he needs you, you will be there. Every experience I have affects my choices in life and the Marines was one of those experiences. Certainly the elevation of spirit that I encountered in the Marine Corps influenced me.

      Yet what he came away with – that pride in being a Marine – was hardly what he had gone looking for:

      I volunteered because I was looking for a war. And in retrospect, I see that it was all because of my inability to suffer, to be sad, to be lonely. I ended up being a Marine for three years and I know now that it’s easier to go to war than it is to face your own inner violence.

      I think I was probably looking to be tough, to be part of something where I could say, ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’ To hide the fear. But now I know where that’s at. The only way to protect yourself is to know fear and to accept it.

      It was on the return boat from Beirut