Brian’sPoems

The Bridge on the River Kwai

Do you know the film:
The Bridge on the River Kwai?
It stars Alec Guinness
as Lt. Colonel Nicholson.
Yeah, you know him.
He played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.
In this film he’s an English officer
in charge of a captured brigade
held somewhere in occupied Burma.
He’s banal and quite stiff.
Just picture a proud character
with too little awareness
of his status as a prisoner of war.

As the story goes,
the British prisoners are put to work
building a bridge for their Japanese captors.
Nicholson chooses to oversee every detail,
making certain the construction
will be worthy of the royal seal.
When the marvelous bridge is complete,
it is Nicholson who is bursting with pride
and in astonishing denial
defying all comprehension.
Even the audience begins to doubt
their own discomfort and confusion
in a sympathetic Stockholm Syndrome.

At last a spark goes off,
wherein Nicholson realizes
he’s aided and abetted his enemy,
helping them to link supply lines.
Then in a bizarre series of events
he manages to detonate the bridge.
...

So what do you think the metaphor is here?
Are we all engineers of our own delusion,
and therefore the only ones
who can blow it up?