Lessons from Stan and Ollie: Betrayal Forgiveness, Friendship and Love

It’s funny the things that you grow up with and love, the things that you remember. It’s always the heartwarming things or the distressingly painful ones, that stay with you. For some reason a couple of cultural ones from my mum and former step dad have been floating around in my consciousness. The first is a Drifters Album of my mum’s “Saturday Night at the Movies”. I have over the last year spent many Friday nights at the movies and just like the Drifters sang

“Saturday night at the movies

Who cares what picture you see

When you're hugging with your baby

Last row in the balcony?”

I have enjoyed some wonderful films and some less so, and shared some heart filling experiences.

We have seen quite a variety of films and recently went to see something that takes both of us back to our childhoods, as well as our parents and grandparents childhoods. By the way it also links to my nieces and nephews as I know my brother's children share in this love, a love for “Laurel and Hardy”. Sue and I recently went to see “Stan and Ollie”. It was truly wonderful. Now I do have a tenuous family link to Stan Laurel. A lady known as auntie Nancy, she was actually my mum’s husband’s Godmother,  her mother was Stan Laurel’s cousin. She helped with the research on the book “Laurel before Hardy” about Stan’s early life, some of which was spent in my home town of Batley. and I know that my mum helped Stan’s daughter Lois do some family research a few years ago, she helped her solve a family mystery. My mum is a family history detective, an expert genealogist.

The film got me in all the places one would hope it could. It was funny and beautifully moving and enabled me to connect heart to heart with so many people I have known and loved, it brought back some beautiful memories. It was a true love story, a very human story too and funny with it. It is a love story in so many ways, a story about philia love. The ancient Greeks saw this kind of love, that between friends, as one of the highest, certainly higher than Eros.

Now the film is not your classic biopic. It focuses on a tour they both made to Britain when they had fallen on hard times and were both not in the best of health. Ollie was seriously ill with a heart condition. It was an attempt to relaunch their film careers, which never happened. It beautifully portrayed their loving partnership and how they struggled on. There is obviously a deep love between them, the wives are brilliant too. There is an interesting aspect to film that caught my attention. It looked at betrayal. Stan felt betrayed by Ollie as he had made a film “Zenobia” with another actor in 1939, this was due to them having separate contacts and Stan being out of contract at the time. Stan believed that this was what put them in the predicament they were in during the 1950's, struggling playing small venues in Britain. During the tour resentment rises to the surface: “I loved us,” Stan claims. “But you never loved me,” replies Ollie. Stan, the brains and the workaholic, loved the double act, but for Ollie life is more about real people and real relationships.

There is a scene later in the film where they have an almighty public fall out, although those present thought that they were acting. A few days later Ollie has a heart attack and is told he can no longer perform. Despite this being the end of their working dreams the two men make up as the love they have for each other is stronger than the resentment they feel. Stan is about to go on stage with another character but finds he cannot do so and then Ollie decides he can’t break up the partnership and they go together to Ireland to a heroes welcome. They both return to America and Ollie dies within three years, Stan lives a few years longer continuing to write material for Laurel and Hardy until the day he died.

It is a beautiful and moving story about friendship, about love. The love for one another and the power of that love to touch hearts when things work together. It’s also a story about betrayal and forgiveness too. How love is the most important and powerful emotion there is.

I loved the film, it touched my heart deeply and connected me to so many deep memories. It helped me to re-feel so much love for the people I have loved and still love in my life, many no longer here. Many who at some point I have let down and even betrayed and who have done the same to me and those I love too. It is a beautiful human story about the power of love, family and community, past, present and future. I laughed and I cried and felt so alive.

I think the key component for long term relationships, of any kind, is love and the capacity to forgive. For the truth is that if you spend enough time with anybody, no matter how deep the love they will at some point or another let you down, even betray you in some way or another, as you will them. They may not mean to, but they will all the same. I have heard it said that when you meet someone, if you want to develop a deep bond its best to get the disappointment out of the way quickly and move on, because it is going to come sooner or later.

The forgiveness and the healing that comes is about the power of the relationship, it is never an individual act. It is about something greater than merely ourselves. For Stan and Ollie is was about their partnership and what it gave to them and so many other people, this was greater than their individual resentments and disappointments. There is so much more power in reconciliation than resentment. It builds bridges, it builds community, it certainly beats walls and separation.

This brings to mind a wonderful story in Jack Kornfield’s “The Art of Forgiveness, Loving kindness, and Peace”. He writes:

"In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed in the center of the village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and every man, woman and child in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused individual. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, each recalling the good things the person in the center of the circle has done in his lifetime. Every incident, every experience that can be recalled with any detail and accuracy, is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths, and kindnesses are recited carefully and at length. This tribal ceremony often lasts for several days. At the end, the tribal circle is broken, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe."

For the Babemba it seems that healing and reconciliation is far more important than individual wrong doing.

Wow can you imagine what things could be like if we all lived this way. Sadly though, too often, we live with resentment and seek revenge. Too often folk want pay back. An eye for an eye, which as Gandhi pointed out, leaves everyone blind. Now interestingly even an eye for an eye doesn’t mean exactly what we might think. When Hammarubi came up with this code is was actually an attempt to limit punishment and revenge. He wasn’t so much recommending that we take and eye for an eye, instead he was suggesting take that much, but no more. Then came a more radical idea. If you are injured do not seek revenge, instead offer forgiveness. Just think of the prayer that Jesus taught “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” A radical idea even now, but an acknowledgement of our shared humanity, because in the end we all let someone down at some point and forgiveness is about connection, it’s about building bridges, not those walls of separation. It’s about seeing the other as ourselves and not as someone separate and or different.

No one person is truly a single separate human being, we are who we are in community, we are part of one family, the human one. This brings to mind Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu’s thoughts on the African term “Ubuntu”. He said:

" 'We say a person is a person through other persons. We don't come fully formed into the world. We learn how to think, how to walk, how to speak, how to behave, indeed how to be human from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. We are made for togetherness, we are made for family, for fellowship, to exist in a tender network of interdependence.”

Tutu devoted his life to reconciliation, having grown up under the horrors of Apartheid, a system that saw some people as being less than others, due to the colour of their skin.

This speaks powerfully of Jesus teachings on love, perfectly exemplified in forgiveness. Put simply in the Golden Rule of Compassion, the basic teaching of virtually every religious tradition that has ever existed. He said 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength . . . (and) you shall love your neighbor as yourself' (Mk. 12:30-31).

Sounds simple hey, well yes but it aint easy. I know that. The truth is though it is vital. Our world so desperately needs more love, needs more bridges and reconciliation and less walls of separation.

There is a love that can come to life in this world; a love that is in all of us; a love that so desperately needs our bodily experience to live and breath through. It comes to life when we begin to see that we are not so different; that we are all made form the same stuff; that we all need, community and companionship. A simple love that is so wonderfully exemplified in the charming humour of Stan and Ollie, two every men, two seeming losers, but ones that had an ability to tap into something simple and beautiful in each and every one of us. A love that lives on long after they have gone and a love that connects so many generations. When I think of Stan and Ollie I think of both of my grandfather’s and I also think of my niece Scarlett and so many other people I love and have loved deeply, people who I have let down and who have let me down too. As I think of them I laugh and I cry, I live and one day I know we will all die. That said I also know that when we die, the love that we shared will live on,beyond our bodily mortality.