Postman, The

The Postman by Kevin Costner was made about 25 years too late. This is
the kind of thing that would have seemed “deep,” or possibly “heavy” to the
drugged-out hippies of the Vietnam era, but is just laughable now. Even the
audience of film critics I saw it with laughed out loud at several of the parts
which were meant to be most deeply affecting. You’d think Costner would have
learned his lesson after Waterworld. No more futuristic romances about
lonely men (naturally played by Costner himself) who come out of nowhere to save
the world from anarchy and militarism! But he’s at it again in Postman,
which makes Waterworld look like Citizen Kane.

The evil militarists who inhabit the post-apocalyptic Pacific Northwest in 2013 are called the Holnists and are led by the warlord General Bethlehem (Will Patton). Costner’s character (who is never named) is captured by them, tortured and beaten. They want to turn him into one of their soldiers. But he escapes. On the run, he finds a post office Jeep with the skeleton of the postman still in it.
Somehow, the dead man has had time to decay to the bare bones, but his uniform is still in good shape and his lighter still works. Also, Costner finds a sack
of undelivered mail. This he takes with him as a dodge to get into a town and
get a meal. He tells people that the United States is “restored” and that he is
a postman sent by the new goverment of President Richard Starkey (Ringo?), who governs from the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis, to start delivering the mail again.

Already it is clear what kind of dichotomy the film is setting up: the
brutal, thuggish, racist (recruits have to be of the “right ethnic foundation”
and even a mule is condemned to death for being the bastard offspring of a horse
and a donkey) and, above all, the all-male society presided over by General
Bethlehem faces off against the gentle flower children of the little towns of
Oregon where the Postman tries to find a place to stay. These townspeople are
into folk singing and folk dancing—and wife-swapping, since the gorgeous
Abby (Olivia Williams) offers herself to the Postman because he has “good seed”
and her own husband is sterile on account of the “bad mumps.” At one point the
rock musician, Tom Petty, appears as the leader of a sort of hippie commune with
an impressive alternative technology and helps the now legendary Postman at a
crucial moment.

One of the film’s most revealing moments comes shortly after the future
Postman has a Shakespeare-quoting contest with his captor for the moment,
General Bethlehem. The tags that both men remember are only the most familiar
and the larger point of their counterpointing each other was lost on me. But
later, Costner’s character (who had before his capture scraped a living as a
strolling player) explains to one of his fellow recruits a line that he claims
is in Macbeth: “At least we’ll die with harness off our back.”
What does that mean?” asks the other. Costner tells him that he thinks it means
Live Free or Die. Is it possible that Costner himself does not know that the
quotation is in fact “At least we’ll die with harness on our backs”?

For Macbeth, that is, the honor of going down fighting is its own reward,
whereas Costner wants to make him instead into a champion of his hippie
“freedom.” In another mangled quotation, Henry V’s speech before the walls of
Harfleur comes out as having exhorted his soldiers to “close the wall up with
our dead,” omitting what would seem to have been to Shakespeare the essential
word “English” before “dead.” Such forays of clumsy deconstruction are typical
of the film’s hippie-like spirit of whimsy. If don’t like the world as it is (or
Shakespeare as he is), you can always smoke something and pretend it’s something
else.

Such silliness reaches a culmination in the climactic scene where Costner’s
co-ed army of rag-tag long hairs finally faces off with General Bethlehem’s
absurdly macho updating of the Pentagon’s Masters of War. In fulfilment of
another hippie dream, Costner says to his rival: “Wouldn’t it be great if wars
could be fought just by the a******* who start them?” And, lo, so it comes to
pass. For Costner has the “8” brand, and so by the Holnists’ rules is entitled
to challenge General B for leadership. Then, when he defeats him, he still
doesn’t want to finish him off: “It doesn’t have to be this way,” he says to
Bethlehem when he has him at his mercy. (Audience laughter). When his sidekick
(Larenz Tate) offers to kill him instead, Costner says: “He isn’t worth it.” Of
course, the general takes advantage of their mercy to grab a gun, but his own
sidekick—a man who had once challenged him for the leadership and, having
lost, suffered a humiliating double mutilation—kills him before he can
shoot.

At this point a cheer goes up from both armies. For in the hippie dream it is
only murderous psychotics like Bethlehem who start wars. Even the macho types in
his army would rather put flowers in their hair. Thus as his first act as
supreme dictator, Costner emends the Holnist laws: “Law one: there is to be no
more killing; there’s going to be peace.”

“Yeah!” shouts the crowd.

“Law eight, live and let live,” he continues.

“Yeah!” shouts the crowd.

I predict that that will be the only cheering associated with this foolish
fanatasy.