MovieChat Forums > Out of Africa (1985) Discussion > Did Denys deliberately crash his plane?

Did Denys deliberately crash his plane?

posted 14 years ago by sily-rabbit
17 replies | jump to latest

Did Denys deliberately crash his plane? I'm wondering if he did because he told Karen she had ruined his life, he could no longer go back to being a free spirit. What do you think?

[–] MsAnthropy 14 years ago

No, it was an accident. When he tells Karen she's ruined it for him, he means it in a kind way -- i.e., she's ruined being alone because now he wants to be with her all the time.

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[–] nyc88 14 years ago

That's a great thought. I guess there's no way to know for sure.

[–] shaguniitb 14 years ago

You can see she knew already that he was dead before she was given the news. but again, it can just be because he was late and she couldn't fathom any other reason, or she could read it all on her ex-husband's face!

[–] eawkw 14 years ago

From reading about Karen Blixen's life, I believe Denys was having romance with Beryl Markham (an aviatrix who penned - or had a ghost-writer pen - "West with the Night") following his breakup with Karen. In the movie, it appears that the character, Felicity, represents Beryl Markham.

[–] urbanspaceman 13 years ago

In The Lives Of Beryl Markham, the author Errol Trzebinski makes it clear that West With The Night was ghost-written by Raoul Schumacher.

[–] Kroyall1962 11 years ago

I read the same thing. Apparently he was a bit of a cad. He forced them both to have abortions for example. He was even more self-absorbed in real life than the film portrays. He was an aristocrat to the core as well. The film would have you believe he sort of turned against nobility and was all about leaving the natives alone. Not so from what I have read. His Kikuyu servant died with him in the plane crash.

[–] evergreen-6 11 years ago

Well, he was very complicated character, the real Denys I mean.
But, making film look like romance, they shifted events and not wanted bits left behind. But then, they're always doing this, we can't help.

More, taking American boy Redford as Denys Mr Pollack first thing had to throw away all about Denys being English aristocrat. Maybe Redford is no less charming than Denys have been, still, it makes quite a different story. In fact about oh so tipical American cowboy who have to earn his money the way he can and all that.

"When did you learn to fly?' and the answer was, "Yesterday." A self-taught aviator is bound to make mistakes and eventually one of them will prove fatal.

Come, it's movie! Not yesterday really. Real Denys could fly.
When his plane was high enough in the air probably the engine failed. It happen quite near from the place it took off, and friends who waved him wishing good luck saw what happened. Hardly there might be some Denys's mistake.

[–] Kroyall1962 11 years ago

Yes they wanted a romance but in retrospect you could make the case the African people would have been better off if the "white folk" had stayed home. Redford, through his character in the film, seems to be putting that message across even though it is no way historically accurate.

[–] evergreen-6 11 years ago

Looks like. But sadly the retrospect not finished yet. Who knows what happen in some remote future? Not Denys from the movie. To be realistic, everywhere native people are no less able to destroy their own country and nature, to be sure.

So all that is kind of the brave charming boy's message adding desirable aspect to the movie, no more.

[–] Kroyall1962 11 years ago

Yeah many of those countries have been destroyed by their native populations. It is one of those "you break it, you buy it" sort of things. Once a foreign power colonizes, occupies or invades another country they get blamed for everything that goes wrong after that. Then it becomes a matter of wasting millions or billions to "save" the place. The west has "invested" trillions in Africa over the decades and they are not really better off.

[–] myndchanger 8 years ago

Redford is a boy? Was Redford ever a boy?

[–] finnegansword 14 years ago

Karen Blixen asks the question, "When did you learn to fly?' and the answer was, "Yesterday." A self-taught aviator is bound to make mistakes and eventually one of them will prove fatal. The air is a very unforgiving medium.

[–] larpine 10 years ago

Boy this this go off the beaten path. No, it was an accident and Denys for had a native boy assistance who was extreme scared of flying who also perished in the crash.

True, the character of Felicity was based loosely on Beryl Markham.

Denys never required Blixen to have an abortion. Karen did become very ill and it was speculated that she conceived a child by Denys and had a miscarriage
, for she was by then in her forties and while her syphilis was put into remission, it was never cured.

[–] gorye 10 years ago

Denys never required Karen to have an abortion, maybe because he didn't believe she was really pregnant. He had no desire to be a dad or marry anyone, Karen not excluded. She was extraordinarily exalted a person, and in many ways "too extreme". Such women are prone to lead themselves in false pregnancies, if they want it badly, to develop symptoms of maladies which they dread badly, and so on.
As it was with her syphilis. Surely she was cured. But she never wanted to believe she was. And continued to take the mercury nearly daily, in spite doctor's recommendation to stop poisoning herself. She became a kind of mercury addict. Well, nearly every stuff can be turned by one's organism into drugs. She got extremely thin and eventually died when unable to eat.

As for her "pregnancies" more likely those were the means of manipulations, and in fact Denys suggested writing from England that she'd better do something to it (if she was...) Actually, she was very secretive and determined. She made people to believe what she wanted they'd believe. Making stories convincing is an essential quality for a writer, right?

[–] larpine 10 years ago

That's sounds like a crock of extraordinarily misogynistic crust to me.

[–] feodoric 10 years ago

Just for the record, Karen Blixen used mercurials to treat her syphilis only around 1914, i.e. at the time the disease was first suspected. Due to poisoning using the mercury compounds, she was not prescribed mercurials anymore. Later on, when it became the fashionable "salva" in high society to treat the disease, she took arsenic and bismuth compounds. This is also mentioned in the movie's narration ("I developed arsenic addiction"), as this information is found in Blixen's book. She used arsenials nearly until her death, and it is now believed that heavy metal poisoning (and especially arsenic and bismuth) and/or neurosyphilis were the main causes of the writer's lifelong health issues, and ultimately led to her death from anorexia nervosa (cf. Sex Transm Dis. 1995 May-Jun;22(3):137-44. for a serious article on her condition from a medical journal).

As for pregnancies or lack thereof, I would restrain from taking a subjective, psychoanalytical view. We are walking on soft ground, here, and nobody can eliminate an organic source for her disease and complications. I find the last comment rather derogatory (as the use of quotation marks when writing about her pregnancies, and the implication that Blixen was a manipulator, hence nothing was to be believed from her.

It's not a matter of truth here: that we don't know nor have we the means to be certain of it (or lack thereof). It's rather a question of how one should consider "truths" the act of adding subjective meaning to facts and interpreting someone's actions without proper evidence.

[–] thesnowleopard 9 years ago

As for pregnancies or lack thereof, I would restrain from taking a subjective, psychoanalytical view. We are walking on soft ground, here, and nobody can eliminate an organic source for her disease and complications. I find the last comment rather derogatory (as the use of quotation marks when writing about her pregnancies, and the implication that Blixen was a manipulator, hence nothing was to be believed from her.

It's not a matter of truth here: that we don't know nor have we the means to be certain of it (or lack thereof). It's rather a question of how one should consider "truths" the act of adding subjective meaning to facts and interpreting someone's actions without proper evidence.

Yes, this. And also what larpine said.

First of all, the real Karen Blixen was a desperately sick woman most of her life. The syphilis didn't drive her mad the way it did her father, but it sure didn't do any favors to her health. Second of all, it's on record that she just as desperately wanted a child. Not to ensnare Denys but because she wanted to be a mother. So, there's no reason to believe that her pregnancies, hysterically induced or actual miscarriages, were fabrications on her part. The person who had the most reason to believe they were occurring at the time was her.

Second, I've seen a lot of nasty comparisons between her and the women who were also connected to the men in her life. I've always found them a bit ridiculous. I also don't think it's a coincidence that all of the women she's compared to were nobility and/or extremely rich, sharing a general carelessness and self-centeredness with the men that you can only have when you are an aristocratic snob from old money.

Personally, I think there was a lot to like about Denys, and even Bror, but when the going got rough on that farm, they were the ones who flaked off on safari and Karen (and her hard-working neighbors, who were not nobility) was the one left holding the coffee bag.

Karen Blixen, who came from a middle class bourgeois family, really wanted to be a member of the nobility and her relationship to all these people was not unlike that of Jay Gatsby to Daisy and her "set" in "The Great Gatsby." A lot of the attitudes toward Blixen had very little to do with her personality (there were many eccentrics among the whites in the early days of the Kenyan colony) and lots to do with snobbery about her "lower" origins, as well as a condescending view of strong women. It probably galled them that she became so famous after she returned to Denmark for writing about them, that they never would have been remembered save in connection to her. And unlike Beryl Markham, there's no question Blixen wrote *her* stories.

There's much talk about how good-natured Bror's second wife, Cockie, was compared to Karen about the "Baroness" title and Bror's rather aimless nature. Well, Cockie could afford not to care about that title since she was English nobility herself (and the title for Karen was her one foothold in Kenyan high society). As for her tolerance of Bror's eccentric ways, that ended when she came back from England one day to find he'd taken up with his third wife, Eva, in her absence. Ooops.

And that's not even getting into the fact that Bror gave Karen (plus who knows what other of his lovers at the time) syphilis and never appeared to be terribly broken up about it.

As for Beryl Markham, she was undoubtedly physically brave and had many adventures. But she was also, by many accounts, a total bitch who had no regard for the feelings of others. She had a son she barely knew (by choice) and she was friends with Karen before taking up with Denys. Which you'd think might have stopped her sleeping with her friend's soon-to-be(but-not-quite)-ex, but it didn't stop Beryl. She even later talked about sleeping with Bror on safari!

In addition, she herself admitted (in a story from "West with the Night") that she was not good with sickness, so it's very doubtful she'd have demonstrated a tenth of the fortitude it took Karen to survive syphilis so long *and* have a great writing career.

Mind you, I'm not saying Karen Blixen was perfect. She had a hot temper, could be histrionic and vindictive, and (as I said above) was an unapologetic social climber. But as someone who's lived at the village level in Africa for two years, I can tell you that running a coffee farm in Africa for 17 years in the early 20th century couldn't have been any picnic, even with her family being willing to bail her out financially and come to help from time to time. That, too, took a lot of fortitude and her accomplishments shouldn't be downplayed just because some want to swallow whole the class snobbery of an older time.

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