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Zeik, Jd
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Spring 2025
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2025
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9802_Stephen_Holden.pdf
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1863 & 2016: Two generations of Martin Crane, 150 years apart, struggle with guilt and truth-telling.
The Calf and the Cave is a narrative told across two timelines. The first tells the story of Martin Crane during and shortly after his experience in the Civil War. The second tells the story of Marty Crane in the aftermath of the turbulent 2016 election. Both Martin and Marty are riddled with guilt over their actions in these two distinct moments in American history, but both of them grapple with their guilt in completely different ways. Martin is unable to express his guilt and tell the truth about his actions, and suffers as a result. Marty eventually overcomes his hesitance to own up to his actions, and in doing so, better understands the value of the truth and the way that stories contextualize his life, even if those stories are purely speculative.
The 1863 arc also offers a characterization of the Leatherman, based on a figure of local lore in the Hudson Valley and Western Connecticut. This character's identity is left largely ambiguous. It is clear that the Leatherman does not subscribe to societal conventions, and exists at somewhat of a remove from Martin and his visiting friend from college, Joshua Kirby. Joshua, an ethnologist, seeks to crack the mystery that the Leatherman represents. Joshua fails, and the Leatherman's identity remains an enigma to all but the Leatherman himself. While this subplot might seem opaque thematically, the Leatherman's existence outside conventional spectrums of class, race, and power exemplifies the theory of the Subaltern. As a Subaltern figure, the Leatherman's identity, his story, is his most valuable asset.
This screenplay was initially intended to be a localized, trans-generational anthology. Evidence of this hyper-local origin is still apparent; many character names are taken from street names in and around White Plains. No longer anthological, the final result presents two separate narratives that are thematically and symbolically (although rarely explicitly) linked. Inspiration for this project came from novels like Rushdie's "Midnight's Children," Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and Garcia-Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude."
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