Highlander

Even in its longer, so-called International Cut, Russell Mulachy's Highlander is a fragmented experience. Characters - and their subplots - come and go, briefly touched upon but always just out of our reach. This structural collapse isn't a failure of plotting though, it's a mode of communication explicitly tied to the film's lead character: an immortal swordsman named Connor MacLeod. We meet MacLeod during a wrestling match in Madison Square Garden. The camera's viewpoint becomes untangled from the ground-level brawling, lifting into the air then surging upwards towards the balcony seats, before crashing into Christopher Lambert's lulled observer. While the in-ring action works an ugly Southern pride angle, MacLeod disassociates, dreaming of a youth spent fighting for a 16th century Scottish clan. 

Connor MacLeod has over four hundred years of memories behind him. Desperate battles on muddy fields mingle with a long, blissful, relationship with a woman who adored him. There's even a brief interlude in occupied Europe of the 1940s that sees MacLeod rescue a child then machinegun a Nazi officer to death. It makes sense that this immortal is untethered from this pantomime present and therefore a firm narrative procession. MacLeod's daydreaming overwhelms, not just him, but the film itself. Flashbacks are not only geared to dole out the exposition required to make sense of an apocalyptic battle of multinational immortals, they also put us in the headspace of someone grappling with their own massively extended lifespan - the friends and lovers that they have buried, the thwarted human connections that he hopelessly clings to. This sadness underlines Lambert's blurry-eyed performance. As the cosmic competition that he finds himself a part of begins to wrap up, what does he actually have left? 

MacLeod and the film's other undying swordsmen battle for a vague power known as The Prize. When one man fells another by decapitation the winner is consumed by light and fire; an ejaculatory possession that mingles the strain of crucifixion with an almighty, building-shaking, orgasm. Sean Connery's Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramirez, whose primary function in Highlander is that of a knowledgeable mentor, is a Christian despite the fact that his birth comfortably pre-dates that of the faith's founders. Run through and close to death, following a castle-toppling fight with Clancy Brown's unstoppable Kurgan, Ramirez drops to his knees and raises his hands in prayer. A supplication seemingly rooted in the only rule that all of the game's participants, good or irredeemably evil, will not break: battle cannot be joined on holy ground. 

These notes lend Highlander a strange, semi-religious aspect. MacLeod's declaration upon vanquishing his final enemy - that he not only knows and feels everything but that he actually is everything - positions the character as a kind of bloodied Messiah. This supernatural survival of the fittest has facilitated the rise of an all-knowing leader for mankind, one who has built himself out of centuries of toil and torment. It makes you wonder about what sort of Creator inhabits this universe? Certainly not a merciful one. The Prize was anyone's to claim. MacLeod's eventual victory was hard-fought rather than pre-ordained. Indeed at the moment of his ascension, MacLeod is lifted up and consumed not by heavenly apparitions but by smoking phantoms and regurgitating beasts; visions of rot that try to take hold of his body before they are, themselves, absorbed. This incredible power is portrayed as violent and ugly, a crashing wave to be tamed by someone worthy. In the film's epilogue MacLeod chats merrily with the spirits of his departed friends about his Godhood. He sits with his new love, Roxanne Hart's Brenda, on a Scottish hillside, finally at peace. This unshakable connection with the land that birthed him is deployed in the reassuring, picturesque, terms of a romantic picnic but it also underlines something human and imperfect about MacLeod: his greatest dream was to live in his memories.