WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2026
...and soothe the wounds they found there:" The gruesome news from Cornell has had us thinking about one of our favorite movies.
Rather, it's had us thinking about one part of that high profile film. The film in question is The Horse Whisperer. Here's the start of the overview from the leading authority:
The Horse Whisperer
The Horse Whisperer is a 1998 American neo-western drama film directed by and starring Robert Redford, based on the 1995 novel The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans. Redford plays the title role, a talented trainer with a remarkable gift for understanding horses, who is hired to help an injured teenager (played by Scarlett Johansson) and her horse back to health following a tragic accident.
The film was produced by Touchstone Pictures and released on May 15, 1998 by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. It received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed nearly $187 million worldwide.
Johansson was 13 when the firm was made. Continuing directly from above, here's the start of the plot:
Plot
In Lake Luzerne, New York, teenagers Grace MacLean and her best friend Judith go out early one winter's morning to ride their horses, Pilgrim and Gulliver. As they ride up an icy slope, Gulliver slips and hits Pilgrim. Both horses fall, dragging the girls onto a road, where they are hit by a tractor-trailer. Judith and Gulliver are killed, while Grace and Pilgrim are severely injured.
Grace, left with a partially amputated right leg, is bitter and withdrawn after the accident. Meanwhile, Pilgrim is traumatized and uncontrollable to the extent that it is suggested he be put down. Grace's mother Annie, a strong-minded, workaholic magazine editor, refuses to allow it, sensing that Grace's recovery is linked with Pilgrim's.
Desperate for a way to heal Grace and Pilgrim, Annie tracks down a "horse whisperer," Tom Booker, in the remote Montana mountains...
And so on from there.
That's how the authority sees it. We refer to the part of the film where the Redford character saves the emotional life of the girl, rather than the part of the film in which he falls in love with her mother.
Focusing on that part of the film, we're not sure we've ever seen a film which was more deeply humane. We've thought of the Redford character's concern for the girl as we've followed the disgraceful news from the Ivy League this past week.
Intriguing point: In its broad outlines, The Horse Whisperer is a virtual remake of Redford's first film as a director, Ordinary People (1980).
In that earlier film, a tortured teenager (Timothy Hutton) is struggling with the death of his older brother in a terrible boating accident. In The Horse Whisperer, Grace—she seems to be as young as 13—is struggling with the death of her best friend, and with terrible injuries to herself and to her horse
In the more literal earlier film, the Hutton character is saved by the intercession of a caring psychiatrist. In The Horse Whisperer, the tortured teenage girl is fortunate enough to encounter the Redford character "in the remote Montana mountains," which turns out to be a very good place to be.
Early on, we see Grace's mother searching for someone who might be able to save the traumatized horse. She stumbles upon this bit of text describing an ancient separation between two branches of creation:
A million years before man, they grazed the vast and empty plains, living by voices only they could hear. They first came to know man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he used horses for his labors, he killed them for meat.
The alliance with man would forever be fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.
Since that Neolithic moment when a horse was first haltered, there were those among men who understood this. They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. For secrets uttered softly into troubled ears, these men were known as "the whisperers."
Early in the film, the girl's mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) comes upon that text in a book, along with a profile of Booker. To see that evocative moment from the film, you can click right here.
The whisperers were able to see into a troubled creature's soul. When the mother and girl arrive in Montana, hoping that the Redford character would be able to cure the traumatized horse, the Redford character was able to see that it was really the suffering child who was most in need of help.
He's so humane that he sets out to provide that help, even though she was the girl.
Traumatized by her friend's death and by the injuries to herself and to her horse, the tormented child in this second film (Grace) is disappearing inside herself. Eventually, she confesses to the Redford character (Booker) that she feels responsible for her friend's death in the fatal accident, in which her horse reared up against an incoming truck.
Afte her confession, the Redford character tells her a story about a local Montana kid who was paralyzed in a terrible swimming accident, then seemed to disappear inside himself.
"I know where he goes," the girl says. Along the way, the Redford character is decent enough and humane enough to tell her this:
BOOKER: I won't tell you it'll stop feeling this bad. But I will tell you, you didn't do anything wrong. The same thing would have happened to me—or to Frank, or to Joey. And it doesn't make any sense to try to figure out why these things happen.
[...]
BOOKER: It's like the boy I knew just went away somewhere.
GRACE: I know where he goes.
BOOKER: I know you do. Don't you disappear. You do whatever you have to do to hold on.
I'll tell you one more thing. When Pilgrim reared up to face that truck, you know what I think? I think that damn horse loved you so much, he was trying to protect you. That's what I think.
In our view, you have to go a good long way to find a more humane presentation than that.
We admired Redford for making Ordinary People—for caring about the suffering of a suffering teenage boy, despite the fact that he was a giant big Hollywood star. We triply admired him for making a version of the same film, in which a deeply humane character—a whisperer, in this case to humans—was even willing and able to look into the soul of "the girl."
We've thought of that deeply humane character as we've followed the inexcusable news from Cornell. Also, we've thought about the terrible people running those elite universities, and we've thought about the squalor of the garbage can that gets rolled out every night on the Fox News Channel.
From there, it's on to the broadcasting Hall of Fame! Our rumination continues tomorrow.
Tomorrow: It's hard to find the words
University of Oregon, too.
ReplyDeletehttps://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/10/02/its-not-just-cornell/
The Cornell incident are just accusations in a civil suit. Nothing has been proven or even tried. All we have is the court filings of a profit and publicity seeking attorney.
DeleteLack of a trial doesn't make the crime disappear. Before hiring an attorney, the woman in this case sought medical attention, went to the campus police and filed a complaint with Cornell, which was not properly referred to police for investigation and prosecution. That is the heart of the civil case.
DeleteSaying that this is just a profit-seeking civil suit does not show an open mind but someone who has already decided the claims are not valid.
It's not a crime yet. It's an accusation of a crime.
DeleteRe. The lawyer, you be the judge:
Deletehttps://www.rheingoldlaw.com/attorneys/thomas-p-giuffra/
The crime occurred. The culpability of the accused is yet to be determined.
DeleteThere will be criminal charges, the governor has appointed a special prosecutor because they are intending to prosecute.
DeleteBut whom will they prosecute?
DeleteDon't forget that it is a civil case and Cornell is named.
DeleteThere is a current civil case, as well as an upcoming criminal case.
DeleteThe defendants will be the rapists.
The ones that exclaimed "free pussy" (a callback to Trump's grab em by the pussy) and then later were asked "Shop still open?" and responded "Yeah"; the ones that horribly assaulted the victim.
When a serial sexual predator like Trump can be elected president, there's less inhibition for this kind of demented behavior.
It’s unfair to put the horse down but not the human.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think suicide is about?
DeleteIt's about putting oneself down.
DeleteTrolling a suicide hotline is pretty low.
DeleteWhat an asshole.
ReplyDeleteAn asshole should be put down.
DeleteThen life would be just perfect.
DeleteRapists should be put down.
DeleteYou seem obsessed with putting people down. There are hotlines for that.
DeleteThe hotline hung up on me.
DeleteTDH, understandably, is chagrined by the current state of affairs in the US and everywhere else. Certainly, things are bitter between the reds and blues in this country and trump has escalated the divisiveness. No doubt Trump is awful, and to me vile. Some of the critics here (how many are there really? - can't tell as the posts are "anon") cannot abide TDH's position that the "blue" side bears some level of blame for the situation, and he is called an "asshole." TDH for a considerable time has repeated his thoughts over and over. He cites various movies as he does here;) and books where there is a message that we should be kind. to each other, should be modest, try to understand the other side's views, etc. The books and novels he quotes are fiction, or in general don't relate very closely to the unfortunate status of things at present. TDH doesn't seem to have any specific idea how to make human interactions better. He is guilty of presentism - hasn't it always been this way.? things will have to take their course, no one knows how things will pan out. In my opinion though, nothing in what TDH says here or in his other posts makes him an "asshole" a rather vile epithet. the anon critics fail to acknowledge how demented their comments are. No one is forced to read TDH's posts.
DeleteWhy do you always say this dumb shit, AC/MA? No one is forced to read comments who challenge TDH and debunk his fallacious theories.
DeleteI acknowledge that I am demented.
DeleteI acknowledge that I am demented TDH shitposter.
DeleteIf it makes you feel better ac/ma, it is not just Somerby, you too are seen as an asshole.
Delete"We refer to the part of the film where the Redford character saves the emotional life of the girl, rather than the part of the film in which he falls in love with her mother. "
ReplyDeleteWith a bit more empathy, Somerby might see that the horse whisperer is not only saving the emotional life of the girl AND her horse, but also of the mother, who is also traumatized by the accident to her child, who she cannot reach. Somerby seems to be dismissing the romantic aspect without seeing the mother's trauma. Without seeing that, it is no wonder Somerby does not understand why the mother and horse whisperer bond or appreciate that their relationship is not just a romance.
The theme of healing from trauma and of relationship between mothers and grieving children is similar to Ordinary People, for which Redford won an Oscar in his directorial debut. It is one of the best films made about the mechanics of how therapists help patients.
ReplyDeleteYou're so deep, Bob. So deeep. Such a deep thinking wanker.
...yawn.
Deep of you to say so. Not.
DeleteBob has always been a poor thinker.
DeleteAgree. I am surprised by the perception of him held by the author of that CJR article.
Delete"We've thought of the Redford character's concern for the girl as we've followed the disgraceful news from the Ivy League this past week."
ReplyDeleteUnsurprising that Somerby would be so focused on the concern for the girl, who is of the age that he "admires" and not the mother.
It does seem a bit unfair to generalize from Cornell's failures to the entire Ivy League, as if this were something routine to blueblood spawn and not a failure to redress mistreatment of a specific woman (she is college age and thus older than 18). Why does Somerby persist in calling women "the girl" instead of according them the dignity of adulthood? Is that an extension of a belief that age doesn't matter when it comes to sex or is he just trying to encourage readers to lump all female humans into a single category when it comes to sexual activity?
The girl in this film was not a woman. She was still a child. Comparing her to an adult woman in an entirely different situation at Cornell is wrong of Somerby to do. They are not alike.
Somerby admires the horse whisperer for the kind of humane response that is normal among humans. It is when that empathy is missing that people are considered deviant. That empathy is the glue that holds us together as families, communities, as a nation. Somerby says he admires Redford for making Ordinary People. So did the academy and the overwhelmingly positive audience response. He not only won Best Director for the film, but the movie won Best Film. Everyone loved it, who had a heart to care about others. I admire Mary Tyler Moore for playing the role of Timothy Hutton's unlikeable, cold, also grieving mother. Note Somerby's lack of empathy for her. She was nominated for an oscar but did not win. She had no horse whisperer to help her heal from the same loss that her son was suffering.
ReplyDeleteIt is good that Somerby is not rushing to defend those Cornell frat rapists, but perhaps he is going to chide us for not empathizing with their plight, later on. The traumas depicted in Redford's two films are accidents of fate, not the deliberate rape experienced at Cornell. Evil is violence against humans done on purpose, for the pleasure of sadistic others, not a horse protecting its rider or a boy in a boat who drowns during a squall while his brother survives.
It is wrong to equate evil with accident because it excuses the wrongdoing of humans who commit deliberate crimes and trivializes the pain of their victims.
"VALUES: "They could see into the creature's soul..."
ReplyDeleteWho is Somerby talking about here? It cannot be the horse because he uses the word "they" and Redford was one person. It cannot be the woman at Cornell, because we do not refer to human beings as creatures, especially not abused women.
What does empathy have to do with values?
Values definition: "Values are the fundamental beliefs, ideals, and guiding principles that determine what is important to you and how you choose to live your life."
Empathy definition: "Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person."
Empathy is contrasted with sympathy, which is an intellectual understanding of another person's feelings or plight, without the emotional reexperiencing that characterizes empathy.
Empathy emerges around age 1-2. If one toddler cries, another will too, without any understanding of why that other child is crying. Child early on watch the faces of adults around them to determine how to react to an event. It is considered an inborn aspect of emotional response that binds people to each other in relationships of all kinds.
Some people are born without empathy -- sociopaths and psychopaths, but even those without the capacity to interpret facial expressions (such as some autistic people) feel empathy. Lacking empathy is a deficit. People who hate others lack empathy for those they hate. Too much stress and burnout can result in lack of empathy due to compassion fatigue and exhaustion of internal resources. People who have experienced severe childhood neglect, abuse, or emotional coldness may fail to learn basic empathy skills or may build emotional walls to protect themselves.
People who lack empathy may have interpersonal problems throughout life, but conflating that with values makes no sense. No one lacks empathy because they lack values. People with empathy do not automatically have values either, as when Somerby empathizes with Trump without recognizing the wrongness of Trump's actions. But these are independent of each other and do not depend on the same cognitive abilities, life experiences, or innate humanity.
This is why it is a tragedy that Somerby did not ever study psychology at Harvard and has apparently read next to nothing on the subject. He has a blog and a readership but he doesn't know how to talk about what it means to be a human being, and that impairs his political analysis but also his reactions to other situations he wants to talk about, such as what he mistakenly calls "sexual politics" and his responses to women in a variety of contexts.
Psychopaths tend to torture their parents and small animals before graduating to torturing people. They may have been short-changed by nature but they can learn not to hurt others, if taught at a young age. Failing that, they need to be confined so that they cannot hurt others. That was society's mistake with Trump.
DeleteThey need to be put down.
DeleteSometimes they are, folks like Ted Bundy.
DeleteBob uses “they” in reference to the horse because he doesn’t know if they’re a mare or a stallion.
DeleteNo, he clearly uses the phrase “the whisperers” (plural) :
Delete‘They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. For secrets uttered softly into troubled ears, these men were known as "the whisperers."‘
Horses originated in North America but went extinct about 10k years ago.
DeleteThe horses here now were bought by the Spanish colonizers.
Generally, to ride or utilize a horse, it has to be broken; it is typically an abusive process.
It is very similar to how children are indoctrinated, particularly with religious indoctrination.
Ironically, it was about 10k years ago that we started seeing children as laborers and otherwise materially beneficial and stopped raising them properly.
To clarify, horses went extinct in North America, but they had already crossed a land bridge into Asia and Europe.
DeleteThey were brought back by the Spaniards and were thriving both wild and as a domesticated species in the Great Plains by the time American settlers moved West to threaten the Indians. There are still wild horses in the plains.
DeleteThere's also the famous Chincoteague ponies.
DeleteIt is bizarre that Somerby plainly thinks he is demonstrating his own humane capacities when he applauds the humane qualities of a movie character who is so obviously being portrayed as humane that only Trump would miss it.
ReplyDeleteAgree, Somerby acting surprised at the most normal and basic and common human behavior that does not involve people being at each other's throat is just a way for him to push an agenda, a way to move the Overton window to the right.
DeleteTiedrich discusses Trump's lack of empathy today:
ReplyDelete"Folks, one of the more stunning things about our profoundly damaged, broken-inside Sociopath-in-Chief is that he just can’t ever have a normal human response to anything. You’d love nothing more than to add ‘no matter how hard he tries’ to that observation, but let’s face it. Preznit Fuckwit doesn’t try at all — and it shows.
Reporter: “Your meeting with the Gold Star families today, how did it go?”
Donny: “It was great … these are the most incredible people, so I invited them to check out the— check out the new helipad, check out the new ballroom, and check out the new helicopter.”
Holy shit.
Yesterday, Donny’s babysitters had arranged for him to meet with the Gold Star families — the families of service members who died while serving their country. It would have been the perfect opportunity to for Donny to show off his human side, and erase the stain of having just invited Iran to nuke Los Angeles and San Diego. All he had to do was mumble a few words about honor and sacrifice.
It was a softball, gently lobbed right down the middle of the plate, and Dear Leader should have smacked it a country mile.
But Donny doesn’t have a human side, so he fucking whiffed it. He made it all about himself. ‘Oh, did your kid die or something? Come see my new toys. Helicopter! Ballroom!’
Seriously, Donny — the media won’t say it, but I will. What the actual fuck is wrong with you?"
Compare contrast with Biden's compassion for fallen soldiers. Trump is a filthy pig.
DeleteIt is behavior like that, that has made Trump the least popular president in history.
Delete"We triply admired him for making a version of the same film..."
ReplyDeleteIt isn't the same film. For one thing, the character played by Redford is taciturn. That makes his speech to the girl more effective. He communicates with the horse through touch. Part of healing for the girl is her caring for the horse. In Ordinary People, Judd Hirsch plays a therapist who communicates with the boy using lots and lots of words. He uses well-portrayed talking therapy to help him express and examine his survivor guilt and his ambivalent feelings toward his mother, who seems to have hated him since he survive an accident that killed his brother. His feelings are way too complex to be healed by having a taciturn man tell him to hang in there. The complexity of his relationship with his mother, and her difficulties grieving, make this a completely different movie, only superficially the same because in both cases a teen is grieving a loss. In all other respects, it is very different. And there is no romance at all in Ordinary People.
I get tired of Somerby's grasping at superficial similarities in his comparisons. There is no similarity at all between these two films and the Cornell rape case. Being raped is not the same kind of trauma as the films depict. It is almost as if Somerby has brought up these films to prove he can feel compassion, but the lack of similarity undercuts that goal.
The best film about gang rape is The Accused, starring Jody Foster. If Somerby felt the slightest shred of empathy for Jane Doe at Cornell, he would have mentioned that film instead of this stupid Horse Whisperer analogy. But I doubt he has even seen it. If he had empathy, it would be hard for him to watch, as it is for many women. But it is true, unlike these comparisons with entirely different situations, one involving a HORSE, as if it is the soul that matters most when it comes to healing.
He uses touch to communicate with the horse because they can’t parse speech.
DeleteThe Accused is a very good film, particularly in the way the prosecution goes after the enablers, the men that incited and encouraged the rape are shown to be culpable.
DeleteIt is based on a real event.
The director also made some other top notch movies: Over the Edge (one of the best films about youth in the late 70s) and Project X are two good ones.
The Horse Whisperer is pop pablum imho.
DeleteOrdinary People is an extraordinary film that explores painful family dynamics in a sophisticated manner.
Ordinary People is a bore.
DeletePoint taken, Ordinary People is unlikely to resonant with the warped minds of Republicans.
DeleteSomewhere in the back of the reader’s mind is Somerby’s framing of the Cornell incident from yesterday:
ReplyDelete“ the challenge Cornell may pose to the way we Blue Americans sometimes pursue our professed values.”
But we take a detour to “The Horse Whisperer.”
What Somerby is implying is that men who rape are like wild horses, but really all they want is to protect females, so we need a rapist-whisperer.
ReplyDeleteSick.
ReplyDeleteWhat an ass Somerby is!
I sniff my finger, and I post a long word-salad. I sniff my finger, and I post another. And another. And...
I am Corby.
You’re a troll. I ignore you.
DeleteThe Whispers were an R&B band that formed in the 60s, but their best song is from 1983 Keep On Lovin' Me.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/d6aRvVTSC0I?si=83z9nsHRdd8NWura
The song is upbeat and catchy but also has this bass (fretless?) undercurrent that has a serious and almost threatening tone, the interplay is interesting.
The video is a hoot. Shot in LA it shows the band walking around cool LA buildings mostly in downtown. The band maintains their style which is fading and becoming out of style but they proudly stand by it, it is soooo early 80s.
It is almost like Somerby has given up on whining about how Gutfeld is bad for Republican branding.
ReplyDeleteWith the polls solidifying, the effort is too obviously futile.