A man walks into Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1919, and the first thing he reads is a list of the dead. The names of the men who did not come back from France are fresh on the chapel wall, and the porters wear their grief like the gowns wear their dust. Harold Abrahams (1899-1978) carries two suitcases and a name his father changed once already. Isaac Abrahams came out of Lithuania, made money in the City, and sent his sons to be made into Englishmen. The dons at the high table watch the boy with the dark hair and the quick eyes, and their welcome has a temperature, and the temperature is cool. Abrahams reads the room before he unpacks. He has been reading rooms his whole life.
Eight hundred miles north, a different man runs along a beach with the cold coming off the Firth of Forth. Eric Liddell (1902-1945) was born in Tianjin to missionary parents, schooled in England, and trained at the University of Edinburgh, and he runs with his head thrown back and his mouth open as if he were drowning in air. His sister Jennie wants him in China. The mission needs him. The running is a delay, a vanity, a road that leads away from the work. He tells her he will go. First he has something to settle with his legs. God made him fast, he says, and when he runs he feels His pleasure.
Two men, one race, the hundred meters. The stopwatch gives the same reading to both. Ernest Becker (1924-1974), in The Denial of Death, would say the stopwatch lies. The clock measures seconds. It cannot measure what a man thinks he is buying with those seconds, and the two runners are buying opposite goods in the same shop.
Becker’s argument runs like this. A man knows he will die, and the knowledge is unbearable, so every culture hands him a script that lets him feel he will not altogether die. The script tells him what counts as heroism, what earns a place in the order of things that outlasts the body. Becker calls the script a hero system, and he calls the prize symbolic immortality, and he says the whole apparatus is a lie a man cannot live without. The systems compete. They never agree on the prize, on the price, or on the meaning of the words they share. Two men can chase the same trophy and want two different gods.
Watch Abrahams chase. He tells his friend Aubrey Montague that he runs as a weapon, that he has the burden of proof on his back every time the gun goes off. The famous line gives the game away. He has ten lonely seconds, he says, to justify his existence. Hold that word. Justify. He means it as the courts mean it, as the ledger means it. He stands accused of being a Jew at Cambridge in a country that smiles and does not quite let him in, and the verdict is provisional, and the only evidence the court will accept is a finish line crossed first. He runs to acquit himself. The acquittal lasts until the next gun.
Watch Liddell run. He does not run to acquit himself, because in his account the verdict came in before the race, before his birth, before the world. He belongs to a tradition that holds a man right with God by grace and not by works, and so the running cannot earn him anything, and that is the secret of his ease. He runs the way a man sings in a language he was raised in. The speed is a gift returned to the giver. When he loses, and he does lose, he is not diminished, because he was never running to be justified in the first place. He was running because the gift wanted using and the giver was watching and the watching felt like joy.
So the word justify splits clean down the middle. For Abrahams it points to works, to the ledger, to a self on trial. For Liddell it points to grace, to a self already received, to a debt already paid. Here the picture turns over. The Jew lives by a righteousness of works. The Calvinist lives by grace. Abrahams, schooled in a country built on the Protestant idea that a man proves his election by his striving, out-Protestants the Protestants. He carries the iron logic of works-righteousness without the gospel that was supposed to relieve it. Liddell, the son of evangelists, lets the gospel relieve him. The man you expect to rest in grace grinds himself against the clock. The man you expect to grind rests. The two hero systems trade costumes, and most viewers never notice, because the costumes are the only thing they came to see.
There is a third system in the film, and it wears the best clothes. Hugh Hudson (1936-2023) and his writer Colin Welland (1934-2015) stage a scene in which the Master of Trinity and the Master of Caius summon Abrahams and inform him, with the gentlest possible knives, that he has hired a professional coach, and that this is not done. Sam Mussabini (1867-1927), half Italian and half Arab by descent, a tradesman of the stopwatch and the starting block, teaches Abrahams to drive his arms and shorten his stride and treat the body as a problem to be solved. The masters find the whole thing vulgar. Their hero system prizes the gifted amateur, the man whose excellence appears to cost him nothing, the gentleman who wins between lunch and tea and never sweats where anyone can see. To want a thing as badly as Abrahams wants it, to train for it, to pay a man to engineer it, this offends them more than losing ever could. Effort is the obscenity. Lord Andrew Lindsay, the film’s invention drawn loosely from the real hurdler David Burghley (1905-1981), runs his practice hurdles with full champagne glasses balanced on each, and spills not a drop, and laughs. For Lindsay the running is play. For the masters it is breeding. For Abrahams it is a trial. For Liddell it is worship. One track. Four cosmologies. The shared word this time is sport, and it means a different sacred thing to each man who says it.
The hinge of the picture comes on a Sunday. The schedule puts the heat of the hundred meters on the Lord’s day, and Liddell will not run. The British Olympic committee leans on him. A prince of the realm leans on him, the man who will briefly be Edward VIII, and the room fills with the soft pressure of country and crown and duty, and Liddell does not move. His sacred order ranks God above king, and the ranking is not negotiable, and a medal is a small thing to set against the Sabbath. Lindsay, the aristocrat for whom none of it cuts so deep, gives up his own place in the four hundred meters so Liddell can run a day that is not Sunday. Liddell takes the longer race, the wrong race, the race he is not built for, and wins it, and sets a world mark at 47.6 seconds, and the win reads to him not as proof of anything but as one more place where the gift met the day and the giver was pleased. He had already taken bronze at two hundred meters. The four hundred was the gift surprising even the man who carried it.
Abrahams wins his hundred meters. The gun, the ten seconds, the tape. And then the strangest beat in the film, the one that gives the whole thing away. The victory does not land. He sits alone, and the thing he spent his life proving turns out not to stay proved, and the court he ran to satisfy has already gone home. Mussabini, who built the win, weeps by himself in a hotel room and cannot bring himself to come down. Becker has a name for this flatness. The immortality project, when a man finally completes it, exposes the size of the hole it was meant to fill. The medal is real gold and the death it was supposed to answer is still coming. A man cannot buy his way out of mortality with a footrace, and some part of Abrahams, crossing the line first, learns this in his body before his mind admits it. The acquittal expires the moment it is handed down.
The two systems part ways on a single test, and the test is failure. Abrahams’s system cannot survive a loss and barely survives a win, because it stakes the whole self on the result every time. Liddell’s system survives both, because it staked the self before the race began and asked the race for nothing it could withhold. That is why the missionary looks free and the champion looks haunted, though both stand on the same podium in the same summer.
The film ends its story of Liddell with a card and a death. He went to China as his father had. The Japanese came. He sent his pregnant wife and his daughters to safety in Canada and stayed with the mission, and the Japanese interned him at Weihsien with two thousand others, and he taught the camp children mathematics and ran races for them and led them in prayer, and they called him Uncle Eric. By accounts that circulated after the war, though his most careful biographer doubts them, Churchill arranged his release in a prisoner exchange and Liddell gave his place to a pregnant woman and stayed. He died in the camp on February 21, 1945, of a brain tumor, malnutrition and overwork pressing on him, five months before the gates opened. He gave a fellow runner his worn shoes. The hero system consumes here, not on the track. A man who runs for the glory of God and not for himself ends by spending himself on others and counting the cost as gain, because his ledger was never the one Abrahams kept. Liddell dies the death his system was always pointed at, and inside that system the death is not defeat. It is the gift returned in full.
Now widen the lens, because Becker insists the two systems in the film are two among a crowd, and the crowd never stops arguing about the words. Take the value Abrahams stakes everything on, the justified self, the excellence of the body proving the worth of the man, and carry it across the world’s hero systems, and watch it refuse to hold still.
A Trappist in a Cistercian abbey rises at three to chant the psalms, and his vow is silence and stability and a grave inside the cloister wall he will never leave. Ask him to justify his existence and he will not understand the verb. He has emptied the self that would need justifying. The excellence he seeks is the disappearance of striving, the day when the will stops wanting to win anything at all. To him Abrahams looks like a man drowning who keeps explaining how well he swims.
A quantitative trader on a London desk justifies his existence in basis points before the market closes, and the verdict comes in every afternoon, numeric and merciless, and resets to zero overnight. His hero system shares Abrahams’s clock and Abrahams’s loneliness and Abrahams’s terror that yesterday’s proof buys nothing today. He understands the runner in his bones. He would have hired Mussabini too.
A laamb wrestler in Dakar carries the hopes of a neighborhood and a marabout’s charms sewn into his shorts, and his victory is not his alone but his quarter’s, his lineage’s, the spirits’ who fought beside him in the sand. The body’s excellence belongs to the ancestors who lent it. Abrahams’s loneliness on the line would strike him as a kind of orphanhood, a man fighting with no one behind him.
A Korean student preparing through the long night for the suneung, the exam that will sort his whole life in a single December day, knows Abrahams’s ten lonely seconds stretched across eighteen years. His parents wait outside the gate and pray to several gods at once. The justified self here is filial before it is personal. He runs to vindicate not himself but his mother’s sacrifices, and the burden is heavier than a medal and softer, because the love that loads it also shares it.
A Pashtun man in the mountains lives by Pashtunwali, where a man’s worth hangs on honor, hospitality, and the obligation of revenge, and where to be justified is to have answered every insult and sheltered every guest. Speed earns him nothing. A footrace settles no account that his world keeps. He would watch the Olympic final and ask what was avenged.
A bullfighter in Seville seeks justification in the way he stands inside the horns and does not flinch, in beauty bought with the nearness of death, and the crowd grants or withholds it in real time with handkerchiefs and silence. He stakes the self against the bull the way Abrahams stakes it against the clock, but the bull can kill him, and so his proof tastes of something the runner’s never will.
Same word, justification. Eight systems, eight meanings, and not one of them translates without loss into the others. The Trappist’s emptying and the trader’s basis points and the wrestler’s lineage and the student’s filial debt and the Pashtun’s honor and the bullfighter’s grace under the horns and Liddell’s pleasure of God and Abrahams’s lonely acquittal all use the human equipment for one purpose, to make a mortal man feel he amounts to something the grave cannot cancel, and each calls that purpose by the same handful of borrowed words, and each means a thing the others would not recognize.
Becker’s hard claim is that all of them are lies, necessary lies, the fictions a death-knowing animal tells himself to get out of bed. The film does not go that far, and a viewer need not either. What the film shows, and what the frame lets us name, is the gentler and stranger thing. Two men ran the same race in the same Paris summer toward two different immortalities. One built his on a verdict he had to win again every morning, and the winning hollowed him, and he lived a long anxious life and died in his bed in 1978 having proved the point and found the point would not stay proved. The other built his on a verdict already entered in his favor, and the certainty freed him to lose, to give, and to die in a prison camp at forty-three with his shoes already handed to the next runner. The clocks recorded their times to a tenth of a second. The clocks had no column for what the running was for.
