Defenestration

Unthinkingly I used a word today that a colleague had never heard of, and that got the two of us talking on the subject of words that are in the language but are rarely used. I said that one of my favorites is “defenestration”, or the act of being thrown out of a window. As an example I gave the scene in the 1995 film “Braveheart”, in which the old king’s response to receiving sound strategic advice from Phillip – his son’s male lover/advisor – is to summarily pick the man up and throw him out the window to his death.

I remember that when I first saw this film, that scene really bothered me; watching it gave me a dreadful, inexplicable sense of deja vu. The murdered man, played by the excellent British actor Stephen Billington, was clearly brilliant, charismatic, fearless, a man who would be an asset in any situation. By killing him, the old king was effectively destroying his own son’s greatest political asset (by the way, none of this is historically accurate – Phillip was in reality killed by rival courtiers after young Edward II had already ascended to the thrown). Although Gibson has publicly said otherwise, you have only to watch the scene to see that the audience is meant to side with the old king. In fact the moment reliably generates a big laugh from audiences.

But I was horrified by the old king’s act. Why would you dispose of the smartest guy in the room, and thereby possibly jeopardize your own kingdom? It’s not like the young prince wasn’t giving his father heirs (in real life, whatever his personal leanings, Edward II fathered at least five children).

It was not until today, during the conversation about defenestration, that I realized the sourc of my deja vu, recalling what other scene it had reminded me of. It was a moment in a film that came out two years earlier – Stephen Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” – when concentration camp prisoners are being put to work assembling barracks. A young Jewish woman engineer – good looking, brilliant, outspoken, rather like Phillip – tells the camp commandant that they are laying the foundations incorrectly, and that the resulting buildings will be unstable. Without a moment’s hesitation the commandant shoots her in the head, killing her instantly, and then nonchalantly orders the guards to follow her advice and rebuild the barracks.

What I realize now is that the two moments are essentially the same. We are presented with a brilliant young person who is clearly exceptional, with a dazzling mind and a superior ability to find solutions. But this young person belongs to the “wrong” group. So the response of the brutal and cynical ruler is to instantly have this person killed, so their continued existence will not offend the order of things. All of the wondrous and original ideas that might have come into the world from such a mind are deemed less important than the need to affirm the status quo.

The difference is that Gibson plays this concept for cheap laughs, whereas Spielberg plays it for heart wrenching tragedy. I wonder now whether I would have seen the essential horror of the defenestration scene in “Braveheart”, had I not already seen “Schindler’s List”. I’d like to think I would have, but there’s no way to know for sure.

In any case, our word of the day seems oddly appropriate. When you begin with mindless prejudice, then the very possibility of seeing others clearly – of appreciating who they truly are and what they might bring to the world – goes out the window.