Jenna Ricker
The American Side

I started reading Leonardo Sciascia when I was sixteen, seventeen years old. Since then I have never stopped, considering him - rightly - the greatest writer and essayist in the history of our country. Periodically, I travel to Racalmuto (which he recounted as 'Regalpetra' in one of his works), state road 640 from Agrigento towards Caltanissetta and then turn left, provincial road 13 to the central square, where there is the cathedral and a few steps away, on Corso Garibaldi, you can still meet Leonardo Sciascia. He stands there, with his left hand in his pants pocket and strolls through the town mingling with his fellow townsmen. I swear that the first time I was there, I hadn't seen him, I mean, I had seen him: but I hadn't realized he was a statue and I thought he was actually him, alive and well, coming towards me with that curious and investigative look that always distinguished him.

I started reading Leonardo Sciascia when I was sixteen, seventeen years old. The G8, the Twin Towers and the war in Afghanistan, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the war (again). In October 2002 at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, forty Chechen militants took over eight hundred civilians hostage. The Russian Special Forces Specnaz intervened after two days, introducing nerve gas into the theater. They killed all the Chechen fighters and over one hundred thirty civilians. My father took a book from the shelf and gave it to me, saying, 'Here, read.' The 'booklet' was 'The Disappearance of Majorana', the essay that Sciascia wrote recounting and arguing, gathering fragmentary news on the fact and reconstructing the historical setting of events which was the news story on the presumed death of theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana, who, boarded a ferry from Naples to Palermo on the evening of March 25, 1938, wrote two letters foreshadowing his own 'disappearance.' A disappearance that actually happened later, enveloping the figure of Ettore Majorana in mystery and consigning him to history and chronicles in a different manner than otherwise...

Ettore Majorana, born in Catania in 1906, was a theoretical physicist and worked within that fantastic group of physicists known as 'the Via Panisperna boys' (among these, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, Bruno Pontecorvo, Oscar D'Agostino, especially Enrico Fermi). Probably the most brilliant mind of the group, and somehow an antithetical figure to that of Enrico Fermi, his studies on nuclear physics and relativistic quantum mechanics were evidently among the most brilliant and advanced of the period. He spent six months in Germany at the beginning of 1933, where he worked closely with Wener Heisenberg, one of his most interested admirers, and convinced him to publish two works, 'Über die Kerntheorie' and 'Zeltschrfit fur Physik'. In Denmark, he met Niels Bohr.

During his stay in Germany, he wrote to his mother about the Nazi revolution. His words and tones are serious. Without openly indulging in any criticism of the regime, it is clear from the reading of those letters, also addressed to his colleagues, what must have been a state of unease. When he returned to Rome, his attitude changed radically. He had always been shy and reserved, but he stopped attending the institute and isolated himself completely, leading a secluded life until his move to Naples in 1937, where he took on the post of professor of theoretical physics, which he held until that famous March 25, 1938.

Why did Ettore Majorana decide to disappear? Assuming it was his choice. Because it cannot be ruled out that he was killed or perhaps kidnapped, a hypothesis for which there is no evidence but which, however, cannot be entirely excluded. Even though the general opinion is that Majorana himself decided to disappear. Some speculate suicide, that he may have thrown himself into the sea during his return trip from Palermo to Naples. Leonardo Sciascia hypothesizes that Majorana retired to a convent, renouncing his role as a scientist following an intuition about the possible development of the atomic bomb and the disastrous consequences that could ensue.

'The American Side', a film directed by Jenna Ricker and written by her in collaboration with Greg Stuhr, who also takes the main acting role in the film, does not deal with Ettore Majorana, but is configured as a mystery thriller centered on the figure of another scientist, the electrical engineer, inventor, and Serbian-born American physicist Nikola Tesla. We are talking about someone who was and still is one of the most famous scientists and inventors, also in popular culture, for his eccentric personality (to the point of being considered a kind of mad scientist). His work in the field of electromagnetism was and still is the foundation of alternating current electrical systems. Considered superior to Thomas Edison, he contested with Galileo Ferraris for the discovery of the rotating magnetic field and with Guglielmo Marconi for the fatherhood of wireless information transmission via radio waves. Affected by obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tesla was a brilliant mind, and his discoveries somehow anticipated the very passing of time. Like Leonardo before him, he also formulated several revolutionary hypotheses: electromagnetic forces that could distort and modify time and space; light walls capable of altering space, gravity, and matter; thus teleportation and time travel, anti-gravity propulsion.

Nikola Tesla died of a heart attack in the New Yorker Hotel in January 1943. He was 86 years old. At the time of his death, he was working on 'teleforce,' a project he had proposed to the US War Department, and renamed 'death ray'. J. Edgar Hoover declared the case 'most secret', given the nature of Tesla's inventions and his patents, which over the years have raised various voices and hypotheses, making the Serbian scientist the most popular figure among conspiracy theorists.

Niagara Falls Park, New York State, year 2016. Charlie Paczynski (Greg Stuhr) is a private investigator who prefers Mike Hammer to Philip Marlowe and makes his living taking the usual photographs of unfaithful husbands and wives. Among his 'collaborators' is Kat, a friend of his who works as a stripper and let's say, plays a double game with her lovers to facilitate Paczynski's work.

One evening Kat accompanies a man, Tom Soberin, who we will later discover to be a physicist, and she is killed under mysterious circumstances which Charlie begins to investigate, convinced from the very first moment that the person responsible for his friend's death is Soberin himself. From this moment on, he will inevitably be involved in a mysterious case where, as in the tradition of the best spy-stories, more parties interested in the same thing participate in the game, and as in the tradition of hard-boiled genre literature, Charlie Paczynski is what we can define as an anti-hero. A private investigator who smokes cigarettes, enjoys gambling and drinking alcohol, walks around without a gun, and as the genre dictates, has a controversial relationship with the police and institutions and lives alone in a small run-down apartment. Charlie Paczynski is not a hero, but he is nevertheless determined to get to the bottom of the affair and discover who killed Kat and why. Deep down, he somehow feels responsible for what happened. He meets Tom Soberin at Niagara Falls; there are men following him, the two separate, shortly afterward, Tom Soberin is found dead because he threw himself into the waterfall. Paczynski returns home and finds his apartment completely devastated and occupied by three men who apparently operate in the Serbian secret services and claim to be interested in something they are convinced he possesses.

Paczynski realizes he is in something bigger than himself. The story becomes increasingly complicated as he continues to dig deeper, and various characters become part of the story. A young and brilliant physicist named Nikki Meeker, considered a kind of genius who worked for Tom Soberin, meets him at night in secret, in an alley, before running away frightened by the arrival of unidentified figures. The rich and powerful Borden brothers and Emily Chase, who also operate in the field of physics. FBI Agent Barry. All these characters, including the Serbian secret services (Nikki Meeker tells Charlie that for the Serbs, a single page of Tesla's notes is considered a sort of Holy Grail), are searching for the same thing: a fragment, a single page of what is believed to be Nikola Tesla's notes and which somehow escaped the concealment by the US government. Not only that. It turns out that Nikola Tesla himself, in the years leading up to his death, was concerned with preventing the dissemination of the contents of some of his discoveries, which he considered dangerous, and had then widely hidden the contents separately and in such a way that reconstructing each one would constitute a difficult and challenging task, ideally confiding in a better future where these would be used only for positive purposes.

I will not reveal further the contents of the plot. Besides, I know many would consider such a thing an outright violation, considering it pointless to watch a movie they already know the ending to (that's not my case). I prefer to focus on what are the central contents of the film. 'The American Side' boasts a pretty impressive cast (among others, there's Matthew Broderick and Robert Forster, as well as the beautiful Alicja Bachleda and Camilla Belle) and, in my opinion, it rekindles the hard-boiled genre without grand ambitions. A mystery thriller set in noir environments and enriched with particular contents, more than strictly scientific, of ethical and moral nature, ultimately renewing those same themes at the base of Ettore Majorana's disappearance.

Like the Italian physicist renounced himself and all those studies of a lifetime and the incredible discoveries made in science that could have made him the 'number one', that could have somehow delivered him to history like and more than Enrico Fermi and all the other 'Via Panisperna boys', in the same way, according to the (probably fanciful and unfounded, instrumental for making the film) hypotheses proposed by the plot of 'The American Side', Nikola Tesla himself, scared by the potential of his discoveries, decided to defer this to an unspecified future time, trusting in what should have been an evolution in human thought in a more enlightened way than that of the first half of the last century. An evolution that, evidently, not only for the development of events within the film, has not occurred, and perhaps in this 'ideal' sense will never be or is still very distant in future time to materialize. The question remains whether renouncing science (one's own or someone else's) for the maintenance of what are considered more or less positive balances or because stopped by fear of what could be negative consequences, is something right or not. Assuming you can, in this case, speak of 'right' in the very sense of 'justice.' If I think of Ettore Majorana, who like Leonardo Sciascia, through that reading became a reference figure for me (even though I am absolutely ignorant regarding physics, and apologize in this sense for any inaccuracies in this page), I feel a strong empathy, as if in his painful individual choice we were all somehow involved as other human beings (and I myself, I mean, even those who would come after). Who knows, if writing this film, Jenna Ricker and Greg Stuhr considered the same thing about Nikola Tesla and all science in general, using his figure in an instrumental and representative way of all those human discoveries. The film does not answer this great question directly. What I think, however, is that this great potential that would be 'science' and which is then made by humans for humans, you cannot stop and maybe not even hide, you should not hide, and indeed you must for reasons of ethical and moral nature, place it before everyone's eyes and at this point perhaps even discuss it. After all, how can you hide 'science,' it's matter for few from time to time, but is never 'one' and unique in time and space.