The Western and Political Thought: A Fistful of Politics 3031272838, 9783031272837

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: “Thus in the Beginning All the World Was America”
Notes
Foundings, Law, Lawlessness, and John Ford
Virtue, Freedom, and Political Rule in David Milch’s Deadwood
The Low and the High in Deadwood
Heroism and Rule
Tragic Heroism, the Sacred, and the Common Good
Virtue, Freedom, and Political Rule
Conclusion
Notes
Print the Legend: Virtue, Violence, and the Social Contract in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Hang ‘Em High
Introduction: Contending for Virtue and Civilization on the Frontier
The Revisionist Western: Contention and Confusion
Print the Legend: The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance
Two Societies Embodied by Two Men
Caught Between Nature and Civilization
Eating, Schooling, Voting, Killing
Hang ‘Em High: Whose Justice?
The Social Contract: Praying for Someone Between Me and God Almighty
Notes
John Ford’s Legendary Western Ambiguity and White Settler Colonialism
White Western Mythology
Forget Owen Thursday
Beware Nathan Brittles
Notes
“This Is Our Town”: Political Community in High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Notes
The Western as Mirror and Teacher
Simmering Madness: Mob Justice and The Ox-Bow Incident
The Ox-Bow Incident (1940)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Notes
The Loner on the “Frontier of Unfilled Hopes and Threats”: Serling’s Old West in Kennedy’s New Frontier
Aftermath of the Bloodletting
Rootless, Restless, Searching Men
A New Chapter and a New Frontier
Notes
No Man’s Land: Film Cycles, Femininity, and Female Empowerment in the Western
Introduction
The Film Cycle
The 1950s Women’s Western Cycle
The 2010 Women’s Western Cycle
The Working Women as Business Owner
The Professions
Conclusion
Notes
Horse Operas Talk Back: History, Memory, and the Black Cowboy Performing
Introduction
Part 1: Porous Time and Power in Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
Part 2: ‘Put My Grief Onstage’ Performance as Archived Embodied Memory
Conclusion
Notes
Aristophanes in Spurs: Blazing Saddles, Attic Comedy, HBO, and the Politics of Democratic Laughter
Attic Comedy (On the Fart as Democratic Discourse)
Comedy and Democracy (Ancient and Modern)
Blazing Parallels
The Western in Black and White
Notes
The Adaptable, International West
Towards Assimilationist Politics on the Filmic Frontier: Mid-Twentieth Century Westerns in Australia
Introduction
Charles Chauvel
Uncivilised
The Assimilationist Myth
Bitter Springs
Conclusion
Notes
Ideological Uses of the Western in Film Depictions of Post-war Polish Borderlands
A Reluctant Hero: The Law and the Fist
Erasure of History: Wolves’ Echoes
Illusions of Sovereignty: Meridian Zero
Conclusion
Notes
Filmography
Magnificent Strangers: Visions, Vibrations, and Violence in a Fistful of Dollars
Opening Shots: Sovereignty and State Violence
Democratic Orientations
Shot for Shot
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

The Western and Political Thought A Fistful of Politics Edited by Damien K. Picariello

The Western and Political Thought “Picariello and his colleagues have prepared a treat for students of political theory and fans of Western movies. Beginning from the premise that Westerns demonstrate the frontier where law, order, justice, equality, freedom, obedience, and violence intertwine, the chapters included analyze a wide range of Westerns building on insights from Plato, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Locke, among others. Readers will find themselves rewatching movies and rereading these essays for years to come.” —Anthony P. Spanakos, Professor of Political Science and Law, Montclair State University, USA “At one time—as several of the essays in this fine volume attest—both the American experience of the ‘West’ and the literary and cinematic reflection on that experience dominated American politics and American popular culture. Over the last fifty years, however, interest in the history and politics of the frontier West and the genre of the ‘Western,’ while still generating some remarkable pieces of film and television, seem nearly have to evaporated from popular and scholarly attention. A Fistful of Politics attempts to remedy the relative decline of the ‘Western’ as a mode of American self-reflection with the thirteen generally superb essays examining the classics of the genre. The essays, firmly rooted in scholarship and fealty to the artistic sources in popular culture, draw upon both the classics of political philosophy and contemporary concerns and sources of theoretical reflection, including gender, race and class. The themes covered stretch from the perennial issues of foundational violence, the tensions inherent in law and justice, various claims to rule and the possibilities and limitations of democratic community to, as mentioned, issues of racial equity, female empowerment and national myth-making.’ Several of the essays also incorporate meditations upon literary types and sources, exploring how both tragic and comic modes reverberate through classical and contemporary examples of the ‘Western’ and how this uniquely American subject has become a global cultural influence. For teachers and students of American politics and cultural studies, political philosophy and theory, American literature and cinema and ‘popular culture,’ the volume (including the very comprehensive introductory essay) constitutes an indispensable resource. It also serves as a valuable ‘re-introduction’ to the

‘Western’ for contemporary students, opening one more vital portal of American self-reflection for the young who desperately need thoughtful re-engagement with America’s past and future.” —Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Converse University, USA

Damien K. Picariello Editor

The Western and Political Thought A Fistful of Politics

Editor Damien K. Picariello Political Science University of South Carolina Sumter Sumter, SC, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-27283-7 ISBN 978-3-031-27284-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Getty Images/E+/kentarcajuan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Introduction: “Thus in the Beginning All the World Was America” Damien K. Picariello

1

Foundings, Law, Lawlessness, and John Ford Virtue, Freedom, and Political Rule in David Milch’s Deadwood Patrick N. Cain

11

Print the Legend: Virtue, Violence, and the Social Contract in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Hang ‘Em High Glenn A. Moots

27

John Ford’s Legendary Western Ambiguity and White Settler Colonialism Steven Johnston

47

“This Is Our Town”: Political Community in High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Damien K. Picariello

65

The Western as Mirror and Teacher Simmering Madness: Mob Justice and The Ox-Bow Incident Jericho Williams

89

v

vi

CONTENTS

The Loner on the “Frontier of Unfilled Hopes and Threats”: Serling’s Old West in Kennedy’s New Frontier Christina M. Knopf

105

No Man’s Land: Film Cycles, Femininity, and Female Empowerment in the Western Farrah Hersh

121

Horse Operas Talk Back: History, Memory, and the Black Cowboy Performing Indigo Recker

137

Aristophanes in Spurs: Blazing Saddles, Attic Comedy, HBO, and the Politics of Democratic Laughter Simon Stow

155

The Adaptable, International West Towards Assimilationist Politics on the Filmic Frontier: Mid-Twentieth Century Westerns in Australia Scott Pearce

175

Ideological Uses of the Western in Film Depictions of Post-war Polish Borderlands Marek Paryz

193

Magnificent Strangers: Visions, Vibrations, and Violence in a Fistful of Dollars Char Roone Miller

211

Index

229

Notes on Contributors

Patrick N. Cain is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lakehead University, where he teaches Political Philosophy, Politics and Literature, and Constitutional Law. He served as Chair of the Department from 2015 to 2022. His research includes essays on the political thought of Homer, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, and Benedict XVI. He is also co-editor of a volume of essays entitled Democracy and the History of Political Thought (2021). Farrah Hersh is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Florida State University with a specialization in Literature, Media, Culture, and emphasis on Screen Studies. Her research interests include Film Genre and Cycle Theory, Film History, and Gender Studies. Her work has been published in Mise-en-Scene: The Journal of Film and Visual Narration and received an honorable mention from the Writers Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition for her script The Main Attraction. Most recently, she presented her work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Pop Culture Conferences. Steven Johnston is Neal A. Maxwell Presidential Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. He is the author, most recently, of Wonder and Cruelty: Ontological War in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (Lexington, Politics, Literature, and Film series, 2019) and Lincoln: The Ambiguous Icon (Rowman & Littlefield, Modernity and Political Thought series, 2018). He believes everyone should have to watch at least

vii

viii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

five John Ford Westerns before graduating from high school, college, or university. He also believes a beer isn’t drinking. Christina M. Knopf is a professor in the Communication and Media Studies Department at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Cortland. She is the author of Politics in the Gutters: American Politicians and Elections in Comic Book Media (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) and The Comic Art of War: A Critical Study of Military Cartoons, 1805–2014 (McFarland, 2015), along with numerous critical essays on pop culture, military culture, and politics. Char Roone Miller is an Associate Professor at George Mason University. His work, including his recent book, Cities on the Plains, focuses on political aesthetics and disciplinary technologies. His research has appeared in Political Theory, Criticism, Theory & Event; PS: Political Science, American Political Thought, and the Journal of American History. He only gets the wrong idea when it suits him, and he never publishes those. He is currently finishing a book project, Paul: Living in the Last Days, which treats Paul of Tarsus as a political theorist who might help us respond to climate change. Glenn A. Moots is a professor of political science and philosophy at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan, and a fellow at the McNair Center there. He is the author of Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology (Missouri) and co-editor of Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American War for Independence (Oklahoma) and numerous essays in academic journals, books, and online outlets. Marek Paryz is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. He serves as the chief editor of the Polish Journal of American Studies and the senior editor for literature and culture of the European Journal of American Studies. He is the author of The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). His current research focuses on the Western across narrative arts and he takes special interest in transnational uses of the genre. He has co-edited The Post-2000 Film Western: Contexts, Transnationality, Hybridity (with John R. Leo, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and The Western in the Global Literary Imagination (with Christopher Conway and David Rio, Brill, 2022). His scholarship has been published in Papers on Language and Literature, Western

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

ix

American Literature, European Journal of American Culture, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, and other journals and collections of essays. Scott Pearce, Ph.D., is the author of two novels, Faded Yellow by the Winter (2019) and The Rider on the Bridge (2022). His academic research has been published in edited collections and academic journals. He writes about the Western film genre, horror, and New Hollywood. He teaches at Alia College in Victoria, Australia. Damien K. Picariello is Associate Professor of Political Science and Williams Brice Edwards Professor of Social Sciences at the University of South Carolina Sumter. He is the editor of The Politics of Horror (2020) and Politics in Gotham: The Batman Universe and Political Thought (2019). He is in the process of printing the legend. Indigo Recker is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Literature at Duquesne University. She writes about the confluence of culture and politics, focusing primarily on the reception of mass-market Western novels and the rise of far-right extremism from the 1970s through the 1990s. She currently teaches composition and writing in the Communication Department at Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls, OR. Simon Stow is the Marshall Professor of Government and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, and Resilience (Cambridge, 2017), Republic of Readers. The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis (SUNY, 2007), and the co-editor of A Political Companion to John Steinbeck (Kentucky, 2013). A political theorist, he works at the intersection of theory, American politics, and culture, paying particular attention to issues of race. Jericho Williams is Professor of English at Spartanburg Methodist College. His research interests include American literature, African American literature, and film. He is the editor of Critical Insights: Frederick Douglass and Critical Insights: The Color Purple, and he has previously published articles in The James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal, The New Centennial Review, Studies in American Naturalism, South Atlantic Review, and Supernatural Studies.

Introduction: “Thus in the Beginning All the World Was America” Damien K. Picariello

What do Westerns have to do with politics and political thought? Here’s the start—just the start—of one answer: In the fifth chapter of his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke tries to account for the origins of property. Since the Earth was originally given to “Mankind in common,” Locke says, “it seems to some a very great difficulty, how any one should ever come to have a Property in any thing.”1 In other words: since originally nothing belonged to anyone— or, what amounts to the same, everything belonged to everyone—how did we get to a place (and how can we justify a place) in which some things, and some parts of the Earth, belong to some people and not to others? Locke’s answer, in brief, is that we attain property by mixing our labor with something that doesn’t belong to anyone. The product of this mixture—the produce of a field we found vacant and sowed, the meat of an animal we found wild and killed—belongs to us. In essence, Locke is doing a thought experiment. Thinking backward from the world as we know it, how can we imagine that it came to be?

D. K. Picariello (B) University of South Carolina Sumter, Sumter, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_1

1

2

D. K. PICARIELLO

And to help us, Locke offers a ready-to-hand example of the world as it once was, available today (or at least, in Locke’s day) for our examination: America. In the “in-land, vacant places of America,” the “wild woods and uncultivated wast of America,” we find a world “left to Nature,” untamed and unenclosed, pregnant with possibility. “Thus in the beginning all the World was America,” says Locke. And in particular, the “in-land Parts of America,” just to the West of where Europeans had settled.2 Of course, Locke’s America is more imagined than real. But his idea of America as a land of beginnings and possibilities, a place where raw nature and human civilization come together and butt heads, has staying power. Americans, even in their nascency, understood themselves as a people at the start of something, a people destined to build, a people—as Alexander Hamilton put it—called upon to use “reflection and choice,” human intellect and will, to establish a new government in a new world.3 “We have it in our power,” says Thomas Paine in his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, “to begin the world over again.”4 Americans seem often to have had a powerful sense of starting from scratch. One way of thinking about this is to say that Americans have often understood themselves as standing astride a frontier: between old and new worlds, between nature and civilization, between law and lawlessness, between—in Hamilton’s words—“reflection and choice,” on the one hand, and “accident and force,” on the other.5 And nowhere more so than in those “in-land Parts” of America that Locke understood as representative of an otherwise-lost era before property and, indeed, civilization itself. As the country aged and its eastern parts lost their sense of newness—in Robert Pippin’s words, as the country became a “historical actuality” rather than a “great, vast potentiality”—Americans found their frontiers further and further west.6 “To go west,” says Stanley Corkin, “was to enter the wilderness, the unknown.”7 It was to cross an evershifting line from the familiar to the strange, the safe to the dangerous, and the predictable to the unstable. “The West,” says Pippin, “became for Americans what America had been for Europeans…”8 It became a place where, in contrast to the calcified East, a reservoir of possibility remained, a vista of newness stretching in all directions. In the West, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine, Americans celebrated “The birth-day of a new world,” one forced and cajoled into being by the calloused, bloody hands of man.9 Or at least, that’s the story.

INTRODUCTION: “THUS IN THE BEGINNING ALL …

3

The Westerns we’ll discuss in this collection both propagate this story and complicate it. These Westerns can be read—as some of our authors choose to read them—as explorations of the problem of how political order is founded and maintained: how law and justice can be established, defended over time, and reconciled with one another; how peace and security can be instituted, especially when violence is required to do so; how—and whether—people accustomed to living by their own guns and wits can be brought to live instead under impersonal institutions and legal authorities.10 These Westerns can also be read—as some of our authors choose to read them—as documents of the American failure to grapple fully with these questions, and as monuments to the blinkered, self-justifying nature of the stories Americans tell themselves about the American past (and the American present). In this sense, it’s fair to say that these Westerns—like most compelling accounts of political life, American and otherwise—are both exceptionally rich and undeniably limited. As interested readers and writers—and, for many of us, as Western fans— we can hold on to both of these things at once. A full exploration of the Western requires that we do so. ∗ ∗ ∗ Our contributors to this volume explore their chosen Westerns in a great many ways: They mine their depths for insights, and they note their limitations, bringing our attention to what these Westerns leave out. Our contributors show us Westerns that reach for what Pippin calls “mythic universality—the attempt to grapple with a set of basic political questions that appear in, but also point beyond, the American experience.11 Our contributors also show us Westerns that illuminate particular areas of American life: Westerns that explore the challenges of a particular time and place or trace a particular arc within American political and social development. Some of our contributors show us Westerns set far from American shores, in which the Western form is used to explore a national experience other than the American. And some of our contributors show us Westerns that might get us thinking differently about contemporary questions, prompting us to reconsider what we thought we believed. What the contributions to this volume have in common is that they’re interested in the Western both for its own sake and for the sake of participating in larger conversations. The Westerns our contributors discuss—movies, television series, books, and music—are interesting on

4

D. K. PICARIELLO

their own, and well worth exploring. They’re also interesting as provocations, as prompts toward engagement with broader concerns, and as fresh windows into stubborn—perhaps permanent—questions. I regularly teach a politics and film class at the University of South Carolina Sumter, and one of the movies we often watch is Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 Western High Noon. At first, many of my students are skeptical of the idea that a black and white movie from 70 years ago could be anything more than a sterile museum piece; the fact that High Noon is a Western only confirms its status as a relic, a fossil from the cinematic and cultural Stone Age. But when we watch the movie and start asking questions about it, we find ourselves drawn in. Initially, we ask about the characters: What kind of person is this one, or that one? What drives them? What do they want, and what do they believe? Then we take a step back and ask larger questions: Do these characters feel real to us? Which of them do we think is right, and which is wrong? Who is sympathetic, and who isn’t, and why? Then we broaden our frame even more: What does the movie have to tell us about human nature, and about our lives together in a political community? And do we find this depiction of human nature and political life convincing, or do we not? All of the chapters in this collection, in their own way, do something similar. They take something from within the Western genre, introduce us to it, and then take some steps back, connecting their Westerns to broader questions of politics and political thought. I think I can speak for all of our contributors when I say that this collection has been fun to write. We hope that it’s just as fun to read! ∗ ∗ ∗ The Western and Political Thought: A Fistful of Politics is organized into three sections. The first of these is called “Foundings, Law, Lawlessness, and John Ford.” In our first chapter, Patrick Cain discusses David Milch’s Deadwood, showing us how the television series explores some of the central questions of political philosophy through a Western lens. Deadwood, in Cain’s reading, provides a stage upon which the puzzles of human character play themselves out, showing us the connections between political rule and the human soul. For Cain, Milch’s series illuminates the particularly problematic character of political founding and the paradoxical interplay of law, violence, and human virtue at the heart of political order.

INTRODUCTION: “THUS IN THE BEGINNING ALL …

5

Our next three chapters take up these same themes—founding, law, violence, and human character—and trace them through some of the films of John Ford. We begin with Glenn Moots, who compares Ford’s classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with the 1968 Clint Eastwood vehicle Hang ‘Em High, showing us how the two films put forward an ambiguous picture of the journey from lawless nature to lawful civilization. In our next chapter, Steven Johnston takes up The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’s famous concealment—in which a great lie is revealed to a member of the press, who elects not to report it—and connects it to an even greater concealment: the concealment of stories other than those of white Americans in Ford’s films. In my own chapter, I compare The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 classic High Noon, contrasting the depictions of human nature and political community offered by each film and arguing, ultimately, for Ford’s film as the more sophisticated account. The next section of our volume is called “The Western as Mirror and Teacher,” and here we explore the ways in which Westerns both reflect their social, cultural, and political contexts and offer lessons for their own moments and ours. We begin with Jericho Williams’s discussion of the novel and film versions of The Ox-Bow Incident, and the insights the film and novel might yield about mob violence, its causes, and its effects. Our next chapter continues this exploration of the human potential for ugliness— and also, at times, moments of beauty—as Christina Knopf puts Rod Serling’s 1965–6 television series The Loner in dialogue with President Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” and explores how Serling’s single-season series might speak to questions about violence, race and racism, collective memory, and more, both then and now. Farrah Hersh’s chapter follows, in which she examines two distinct “female-driven Western cycles”— Western films of the 1950s and 2010s Western-themed television—with an eye for the connections between the depictions of women in these two cycles and social, political, and economic trends offscreen. In our next chapter, Indigo Recker explores narratives of the Black cowboy and provides, in her words, “a story about those stories and a story about their history,” and “also a story about how stories, in their telling, can remember in ways that history forgets.” Finally, Simon Stow concludes this section with his chapter on Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and the politics of laughter.

6

D. K. PICARIELLO

The great director Sam Peckinpah—responsible for, among many other films, the Western The Wild Bunch—famously described the Western as “a universal frame.”12 Our final section, “The Adaptable, International West,” follows on this thought. The three chapters here explore the Western form beyond the American context, showing us how the Western, as a genre, has been both transformed and extended far past the American West. We begin here with Scott Pearce’s chapter on Australian Western films, in which Pearce draws particular attention to the stories these films tell about the development of Australian national identity and the treatment of First Nations groups. Marek Paryz’s chapter follows, in which he discusses several examples of the Polish Western, and shows us how these films bring the conventions of the genre to bear on the political and historical concerns of postwar Poland. In our final chapter, Char Miller explores the troubling violence, and the unique visual-sonic experience, of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars , the film for which our collection is titled. ∗ ∗ ∗ In a New York Times style guide from the 1990s, the late Times editor Allan M. Siegal wrote that “The best of style” employs “the unpretentious language of a letter to an urbane and literate friend.”13 That’s more or less what we’ve tried to do in this volume. We’re writing across academic disciplines to one another, and we’re also writing for interested readers and Western fans outside academia, so we’ve tried to make our chapters both rigorous and accessible. Only you, our reader, can judge whether we’ve been successful. On behalf of all of the contributors to this volume, let me say: Thank you for reading! ∗ ∗ ∗ As editor of this volume, let me offer thanks, first and foremost, to each of our contributors: Thank you for trusting me with your work, and I hope you’re pleased with the result. Late in the editing process, I had the chance to meet two of our contributors—Farrah Hersh and Steven Johnston—at the 2022 meeting of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association in the South, and our conversation there was helpful for the collection as a whole. I’m grateful for financial support from the

INTRODUCTION: “THUS IN THE BEGINNING ALL …

7

University of South Carolina and the University of South Carolina Sumter during the preparation of this volume, including a RISE grant from the University of South Carolina Office of the Vice President for Research, a Summer Scholarship Stipend from the University of South Carolina Sumter, and travel funding from the University of South Carolina Sumter. I’m also very grateful for the Williams–Brice–Edwards endowed professorship, which allowed me time to put toward the completion of this volume. Mike Sonntag, Eric Reisenauer, Hennie Van Bulck, Ray McManus, and Andy Kunka at USC Sumter are due thanks for their support throughout the production of this volume, and special acknowledgment goes to Andy Kunka for suggesting our collection’s title (I hope he wasn’t joking). This collection has benefitted immensely from the time and attention several anonymous reviewers gave to our proposal and chapters. Madison Allums at Palgrave has been exceptionally helpful and responsive at each stage of this volume’s composition. Over the years I’ve had great conversations about Westerns and politics with (in alphabetical order, and apologies to anyone I’ve missed) Gregory Blass, Justin Blass, Josh Houben, Mike Kelly, Arlene Saxonhouse, Andre Sharon, Justin Sharon, Josh Shipper, and so many others; I’m grateful to them, and also to all of the students in my POLI 357 (Film, Politics, and Social Change) classes at USC Sumter over the last seven years. As always, special thanks are due to Alex Picariello and Jil and Lenny Picariello. Also as always, and for always, Erin Baribeau and Leonard David Picariello, my loves.

Notes 1. John Locke, “Second Treatise,” in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Chap. 5, Section 25, p. 286. 2. Locke, 5:36, p. 293; 5:37, p. 294, 5:49, p. 301; 5:48, p. 301. 3. The Federalist, George W. Carey and James McClellan, eds. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), paper 1. 4. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 120. Paine continues: “A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.” 5. The Federalist, paper 1. 6. Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howards Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 22.

8

D. K. PICARIELLO

7. Stanley Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western as U.S. History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 6. 8. Pippin, 22–23. Discussing the film Stagecoach, Pippin Says: “It seems almost as if America needs its own America, its own New World, if it is to continue to be America—obviously a doomed hope” (10). 9. Paine, 120. John Nelson puts it well: “Westerns insistently pursue fresh starts.” In John S. Nelson, Cowboy Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 3. 10. Pippin emphasizes the psychological aspect of these challenges: “The question often raised is that of how legal order (of a particular form, the form of liberal democratic capitalism) is possible, under what conditions it can be formed and command allegiance, how the bourgeois virtues, especially the domestic virtues, can be said to get a psychological grip in an environment where the heroic and martial virtues are so important ” (20). 11. Pippin, 21. 12. Ray Merlock, “Preface,” Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, eds., Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005), XI. 13. Todd S. Purdum, “Allan M. Siegal, Influential Watchdog Inside The Times, Dies at 82,” The New York Times, September 21, 2022.

Foundings, Law, Lawlessness, and John Ford

Virtue, Freedom, and Political Rule in David Milch’s Deadwood Patrick N. Cain

Unlike almost all modern mass media productions, Deadwood has the advantage of having its writing, filming, and editing completed under the full direction of a single person, with its showrunner David Milch ruling over each aspect of the final product.1 This allows Deadwood the possibility of harmonizing its various parts, and it is rightly praised for achieving this outcome at the highest level.2 Rather than seeking to create titillating plot twists or fulfill a committee’s view of what makes a hero or a villain, Deadwood’s dramatic movement flows from the characters and setting. The result is the deep impression of wholly formed and consistent characters, with the plot appearing not as a series of superficial resolutions, but rather as the natural result of fully formed characters’ interactions with one another within the show’s setting. In this consistency, Deadwood would seem to meet Socrates’ famous account of the rule that governs the best writing: namely that of logographic necessity. According to this philosophic standard, every part of what is written serves a function essential to the purpose of the whole, with nothing appearing that is accidental or inconsistent with

P. N. Cain (B) Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_2

11

12

P. N. CAIN

that purpose or with the work’s other pieces. To provide a standard for poetry—whether it be a novel, play, film, or a televised drama—logographic necessity would have to be connected to the question of character. According to the famous, if oversimplified, version of the Aristotelian account of happiness, human beings are best understood in terms of the characteristics of their soul—virtues or vices—and these characteristics are what shape their words and actions. Whereas a coward shrinks from danger, and a rash person foolishly rushes into it, a person of courage likewise always acts according to his or her character, facing death nobly when the appropriate situation calls upon him or her to do so. And because so it is with other virtues and vices, the proper scope of drama would seem to be the revealing of character through its presentation of human action, with its quality dependent on the beauty and inventiveness of the revelation. Just as logographic necessity provides the reason for every part of writing, the virtues and vices of each character would provide the determinate factor for his or her dramatic deeds. But since drama involves more than one character, and springs from the interaction of these characters with one another, the challenge faced by a poet (and especially a showrunner) seems insurmountable, for (even if we set aside the vast complications caused by how the particular settings shape these interactions) how can one fully combine the various characters and their deeds into a unified whole? The poet’s task is therefore not unlike the problems of founding and ruling a political community, whose solutions seem to depend upon attaining a unity among (and therefore within) its citizens that is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. It is therefore fitting that Deadwood’s treatment of political rule contains important reflections on the unity of the soul and its connection to the human community that in turn have implications for the limits and possibilities of the dramatist’s art.3 Despite the impressive and seemingly harmonized vision produced by its presentation of human life, Deadwood resists applying the standard of logographic necessity to the human soul. Instead, its subtle yet robust account of virtue’s relationship to politics explores the dangers the desire for perfection poses to political community, while simultaneously illuminating freedom’s connection to the virtue of prudence—the practical judgment upon which both the preservation and nobility of the community and its rulers depend, and whose attempt to combine the high and the low requires a consideration of the necessary and practical limits of its own power, and therewith of the proper limits to the human desire for individual and political unity.

VIRTUE, FREEDOM, AND POLITICAL RULE IN DAVID …

13

The Low and the High in Deadwood The plot of David Milch’s Deadwood springs from the pursuit of statehood and happiness by the rulers and citizens of Deadwood, a territorial gold mining camp. This setting allows the series to take up questions and themes central both to political philosophy and to the genre of the American Western, especially the role virtues and vices play in the formation and rule of political community, and their connection to human freedom and self-rule. That Deadwood itself means for us to treat its presentation of its themes with the greatest of care, is suggested by the way it engages other great texts and their arguments in the history of political thought, including the Bible, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Shakespeare, Hume, Smith, Tocqueville, and Marx. These references do not take the form of pretentious commentary or philosophic argument but instead are artfully integrated into the action and dialogue. Yet they also do not lack insight, for although many of them initially seem meant only to give us a general impression of a character or scene, a closer examination of their use (and sometimes misuse) inevitably finds that the references add complexity to our understanding of the very issues being explored by the particular episode. In other words, Deadwood treats the fundamental questions of political and social life with a level of care worthy of being watched and read much in the same way that we study other great works of art. My own reading attempts to show this to be the case through an interpretation of Deadwood’s presentation of human virtue and freedom, including the essential contribution their relationship makes to political life. Watching Deadwood is not always easy. The series is famous for its language, which is perhaps the most violent of any serious television series.4 The f-word is employed a total of forty-three times in the first episode alone, and Deadwood’s dialogue is regularly peppered with insults (including racial and sexual epithets) and coarse language of all kinds. The social and political hub of Deadwood, the Gem Saloon, is the show’s center stage, and its owner Al Swearengen is easily the highest practitioner of the show’s low language, with his swearing often achieving a level of expression unmatched in the genre. And because he sometimes delivers monologues and soliloquies in iambic pentameter, it is hard not to appreciate how his coarseness also makes him the lowest practitioner of language’s highest form. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish Deadwood’s ugliness from its beauty.

14

P. N. CAIN

It is not only the camp’s language that is ugly. Despite devoting their lives to the most beautiful metal, Deadwood’s people live constantly in grime. The “hoopleheads” (Deadwood’s miners) spend their daytimes in wet mud seeking gold, and their evenings in dried mud spending that same gold on drink, cards, and the grungy Gem Saloon prostitutes, who they generally treat no better than their daytime mining shafts. But the prostitutes do not always accept their fate, and in Deadwood’s first episode the defiant Trixie shoots one of the hoopleheads for beating her, for which she is in turn beaten by Al. In the meantime, before being fed to the pigs, the dead hooplehead is “prospected in” by Doc Cochran, who wishes to probe why a shot to the forebrain didn’t immediately incapacitate the man’s ability to speak.5 It is not an episode for the faint of heart, but this scene helps set the stage for the show’s interest in understanding what is truly valuable, and what it might cost to achieve it. Just as the Doc’s thirst for knowledge leads him to desecrate bodies, the pursuit of the most beautiful and valued metal shows itself to require an ugly and dirty life involving the destruction of men’s and women’s lives. The relationship between the high and the low is a central theme of Deadwood, for its movement seems designed to uncover how the single-minded pursuit of a beautiful ideal—whether it be gold, justice, nobility, or progress—can make human beings objects to be mined for selfish gain, and so turn human life into an ugly affair.

Heroism and Rule Fittingly, Deadwood begins with vast separations between heroes and villains and between ladies and prostitutes, with these distinctions eventually proving less true than they first appear. At first glance, Seth Bullock is Deadwood’s ostensible hero, for the show opens with him risking his life to stop a lynch mob from hanging a murderer—who in turn Bullock proceeds to gruesomely hang in the mob’s presence while holding them off at gunpoint. The picture of manly courage committed to the lawful execution of justice, Bullock appears to be the stereotypical Western hero, with the complication that he is giving up his position as a Montana lawman to seek a more settled life in Deadwood by opening a supply store with his friend Sol Starr. When Bullock arrives in the mining camp, he struggles to adjust himself to the subservient aspects of commerce, resisting the requirements to (a) advertise his goods (b) serve his customers; and (c) secure a place

VIRTUE, FREEDOM, AND POLITICAL RULE IN DAVID …

15

of business by becoming the tenant of the Gem Saloon’s Al Swearengen (who effectively rules the camp through force). Bullock instead finds that his character still inclines him to the habits of his former life, and in the episodes that follow he proceeds to make friends with the noble but older Wild Bill Hickok, another former lawman, who also claims to be seeking a new life in Deadwood. Bullock soon adds to his heroic credentials by joining with Hickok in rescuing a young girl from nearcertain death, and by outdrawing and killing Al’s road agent who would have murdered her. This pattern continues throughout season one, with Bullock regularly abandoning his commercial interest to exercise heroic virtue, a way of life that culminates in a torrid affair with the beautiful, rich, and newly widowed Alma Garret, who Bullock has defended against Al’s machinations. In opposition to Bullock is Al Swearengen. Just as Bullock at first appears as the incarnation of the Western hero, Al appears to be as villainous as they come—a seemingly Machiavellian character who is ungoverned by any sense of morality in his dealings with others. Whereas Bullock is almost uniquely well-kept and clean in appearance, Al is more at home in the dirt and disease of his patrons and prostitutes. Yet, over the course of the series, a defense of Al’s methods begins to emerge, along with a deep critique of Bullock’s character. For despite his vicious tactics, Al turns out to be a better defender of the Deadwood camp and its people than Bullock, who furiously pursues justice without any regard for the social and political impact of his deeds, often endangering the camp’s aim of obtaining the statehood necessary to the security and happiness of its members. In contrast to Bullock’s self-sacrificial virtue (which is willing to sacrifice everything for its nobility), Al’s pursuit of his own interests tends to benefit Deadwood, because it is subservient to his knowledge that his long-term prospects are tied to the political future of the camp. Al views Bullock as a threat, not because he heroically resists the Gem owner’s criminal enterprises, but because Bullock’s self-righteous actions regularly threaten the political future of the community that Al rules. This distinction first begins to clarify during the aftermath of the murder of the famous Bill Hickok. Jack McCall, who shoots Hickok from behind during a poker game, is acquitted by the town’s makeshift court. This outcome is reached through the intervention of Al, who argues that any attempt by Deadwood to execute justice (or worse, enforce law) will be seen by the adjacent territorial capital of Yankton as a challenge to its

16

P. N. CAIN

governance. Al knows that Yankton’s annexation of Deadwood is imminent and that it will either legitimize or delegitimize the camp’s various property claims and its informal self-governance. Indeed, his concern is so grave that, after the trial, he saves McCall from lynching by threatening him with lynching, thereby prompting the murderer to flee. But Bullock will not allow McCall to escape justice. Anger at injustice is Bullock’s most defining passion, and so much so that he is viewed as a “near maniac” and a “lunatic” by Al and others in the camp.6 As the perceptive showrunner of the camp’s dramatic troupe, Jack Langrishe notes, Bullock is “less possessing his character than possessed by it,” which makes him ill-equipped to act according to anything resembling Al’s prudence.7 Seeing only the injustice of McCall’s acquittal, Bullock pursues him out of camp as a one-man lynch mob, taking the place of the mob he had resisted at the series opening. The episode reveals the tragic division at the heart of Bullock’s soul later identified by Langrishe: insofar as Bullock is entirely ruled by himself—by his passionate desire to defend himself as the purveyor of justice—he is not free to rule himself. As Doc Cochran observes, Bullock is therefore untrustworthy, not because he seeks evil, but because he pursues justice with righteous indignation: “I see as much misery outta them moving to justify their selves as them that set out to do harm.”8 Bullock’s pursuit of justice, which asserts his right to unrestrained rule, makes him unsuitable for rule of any kind.

Tragic Heroism, the Sacred, and the Common Good Bullock’s tracking of McCall traverses a burial ground of the Lakota people, and he is almost killed when one of the Lakota men defends it by engaging him in mortal combat. This is an almost Deus ex Machina turn, for Bullock’s pursuit of McCall is also in part an impious and indignant response to Reverend Smith’s sermon at Hickok’s funeral. In that sermon, Smith defends a kind of equality between the lowest and the highest on the grounds that each part is essential to the whole: Saint Paul tells us, by one spirit, are we all baptized in the one body. Whether we be Jew or Gentile, bond or free. And they’ve all been made to drink into one spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. He tells us: the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee. Nor again, the head to the feet, I have no need of thee. They—much

VIRTUE, FREEDOM, AND POLITICAL RULE IN DAVID …

17

more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble—and those members of the body which we think of as less honorable—all are necessary. He says that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care, one to another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it. I believe in God’s purpose. Not knowing it. I ask him, moving in me, to allow me to see his will. I ask him, moving in others, to allow them to see it.9

Following the funeral, Rev. Smith applies St. Paul’s metaphor of the Church to the camp community, thanking Bullock and Starr for taking him into the body of Deadwood through their friendship, and asking Bullock “what you feel now may be your part?,” adding: “it was given me to ask.” But Bullock rejects the question, angrily demanding that “we finish the goddamned walk in quiet.” And when Smith departs, Bullock calls him a lunatic, describing his sermon as “pure gibberish,” perhaps not realizing that he is objecting to an almost verbatim recitation of 1 Corinthians 12. But as Bullock’s impious anger suggests, the Reverend’s words have cut deep, and Bullock keeps coming back to the sermon, first attacking it by attempting to explain its incoherence, and then telling Starr: “I’m not supposed to do anything! Let’s agree to that. Not one fucking thing that I don’t decide I’m gonna. Alright, Sol?... If I kill the droop eyed sonofabitch, and my part’s gettin’ hanged for it, good luck with the fuckin’ store.”10 Although we may at first cheer Bullock’s pursuit of McCall as right and as what justice demands, his ugly attack on Sol and the Reverend indicates its deeper ignobility and impiety; it supplants the verdict of the community while rejecting God’s word, which sought to remind him that he is part of a community to which he owes his care. Bullock views himself fit to rule his own life free from the considerations of either politics or the sacred, and his spirited decision to kill McCall is an attempt to make himself a kind of god-like being fit to serve as the judge, jury, and executioner over and against the community in which he lives. 11 He thus perfectly reverses the position of the Lakota warrior, who is willing to piously risk death to perform his own community’s sacred burial rites for his friend. Bullock’s devotion to a virtue self-sufficient unto itself, and the problem it poses to attaining a level of self-rule that is not destructive of one’s community or oneself, is pre-figured in the character of Bill Hickok, who is a kind of tragic model for Bullock. Like Bullock, the virtuous

18

P. N. CAIN

Hickok had planned to leave the life of gunslinging to work as a normal citizen. But Hickok is even less able than Bullock to reconcile himself to this change, and instead finds himself perpetually at the poker table. Despairing at this turn, and disgusted with himself, he tells his companion Charlie Utter that, if he cannot live his life fully according to his ideals, then he does not consider his life worth living: Utter: Hickok: Utter: Hickok: Utter: Hickok:

Utter:

You don’t fuckin’ sleep! I don’t know what the fuck is happenin’ to you, Bill. So ya stayed in camp to tuck me in. If ya don’t wanna prospect, I can put ya in charge of that mail route I’m gettin’. I’m doin’ what I wanna do. Bullshit! Some goddamn time, a man’s due to stop arguin’ with himself. Feeling he’s twice the goddamn fool he knows he is, because he can’t be something he tries to be every goddamn day, without once getting to dinner time and not fucking it up. I don’t want to fight it no more. Understand me, Charlie? And I don’t want you pissing in my ear about it. Can you let me go to hell the way I want to? Yeah... I can do that.12

Rejecting Utter’s offer to help him adjust to a more civic and common way of life, Hickok is murdered by McCall that same evening, leaving Charlie Utter and Calamity Jane Cannary—his two long-time companions— to mourn the death of the man they had loved, admired, and served. Jane is especially devastated by the loss, and her life quickly devolves into one of heavy drinking. Not known to Jane (but likely suspected by Charlie) is that Hickok himself chose his specific fate: an excellent judge of character, he not only correctly saw that his taunts and insults would spur McCall’s cowardly attack but he also chose to remain defenseless when his experience and gifts as a gunfighter allowed him to sense McCall’s approach from behind. His fate then, is an especially tragic one, for his extreme devotion to virtue made him unable to tolerate imperfection in himself, and this failure in turn led to his death at the hands of one of the show’s ugliest characters, and thus to the loss of his many virtues. Unable to accept a life that could not be fully lived

VIRTUE, FREEDOM, AND POLITICAL RULE IN DAVID …

19

according to the rule of his own virtue, Hickok rejected friendship and the partial rule it entails, succumbing to vice in a way that damaged the very people to whom he had most devoted his life, and who could have best helped him refashion it anew.13 Although Bullock admires Hickok, and although he shares many of his strengths and weakness, he is often saved from the famous hero’s fate through the intervention of others. Although he barely survives the battle, his near-death encounter with the Lakota reminds him of his mortality, and Charlie’s later insight into the warrior’s purpose leads Bullock to give him a pious burial according to the man’s beliefs and traditions. Thus chastened, the reformed Bullock, with Charlie at his side, arrests McCall, bringing him to Yankton to be tried under the proper legal authority.

Virtue, Freedom, and Political Rule Like Charlie, Al Swearengen provides Bullock (and us) with an alternative model to Hickok’s tragic heroism. When Bullock first meets Al, he identifies him as a murderous criminal and therefore as his enemy. But Al is more complicated than Bullock initially sees. Although Al appears to be ungoverned by any sense of morality, he is also more or less free from the rule of vice; even his ugliest deeds are performed to further the interests of the Gem Saloon and the Deadwood camp, and not because he is simply being ruled by a particular fault in his soul. Because he has chosen to tie his future to the camp’s prospects, Al is the character most willing to act against his character—whether it be viciously or virtuously—for the sake of the common good.14 As the camp’s ruler, this allows him to live according to his own judgment—i.e., according to his own prudence—and is in this way free from the rule of others. Al therefore shares none of Hickok’s desire to “stop arguin with himself,” and instead spends much of his time engaging in those very arguments, working through the complexities of how to improve his rule and the camp’s precarious position against those outside the camp who seek to subjugate it to their rule. He also understands that his way of life requires rejecting Hickok’s tragic concern with living nobly each day—as Al puts it when dealing with the corrupt Yankton legislature: “in life, you have to do a lot of things you don’t fucking want to do. Many times, that’s what the fuck life is, one vile fucking task after another.”15 Al’s acknowledgment of the importance of bowing to the less honorable but more necessary parts of ruling allows him to avoid Hickok’s

20

P. N. CAIN

tragic fate. But it poses a new set of difficulties. If circumstances can require that acting according to the low is required to secure one’s freedom, and the circumstances always (or almost always) demand that one acts according to the low and never the high, the result of being ruled by the circumstances could be the living of a terrible life. Further, if Al always acts according to his political judgment, his life as a ruler would seem to be slavish rather than free, for the perfect rule of his judgment requires him to be the total servant of what is required by his political and social circumstances.16 Moreover, since Al’s judgment is best, it seems that he should always rule. But the absolute ruler of perfect judgment would undercut the securing of the common good (his very justification for ruling), for the more he exercises his judgment, the more the community will worsen, with its members losing the chance to make good judgments and perform virtuous deeds of their own. Perhaps because he recognizes these difficulties and therefore sees that the nobility of rule depends upon the freedom of citizens,17 Al cultivates those under his command in a way that encourages them both to take part in the rule of Deadwood and to exercise greater control over their own lives. Needless to say, when we first meet Al, he seems to rule over the Gem Saloon like a tyrant, beating and murdering employees and enemies alike. We later find out that he has been in Deadwood with Dan Doherty from its very beginning, cutting by hand the very logs from which the Gem is built, and meeting newcomers with a knife at the ready. The absence of any legal authority in the territory made fear and beast-like force a central means of Al’s initial rule of the lawless camp, and he did not shrink from this necessity. Though Al is hard on his people, his rule secures the devotion of an inner circle consisting of a remarkable set of men and women, including Silas Adams, Dan Doherty, and Trixie. Their loyalty stems both from their admiration of Al’s judgement and strength and from their sense that even his rebukes are designed to improve their strengths and curb their weaknesses. Most importantly, despite their low backgrounds, he has recognized and matched their virtues, proving his intelligence to the reasonable Silas Adams,18 his courage and friendship to the spirited Dan, and his secret care of the vulnerable to the loving Trixie.19 Knowing that Al sees and values their strengths, and finding their own virtues in him, they accept his leadership, understanding that their participation in his rule affirms and enhances their ability to freely act according to their

VIRTUE, FREEDOM, AND POLITICAL RULE IN DAVID …

21

strengths. Al’s rule sees the exercising of one’s gifts as the affirmation of one’s freedom. It should therefore not surprise us that Al suggests that his rule is only ambiguously monarchic, replying to the rumor that he comes from British nobility with the democratic quip that he is “descended from all those cocksuckers.”20 Al’s one-liner points to the fact that nearly all aristocracies actually oppose the principle of true aristocracy: they base their right to rule on birth rather than merit, while also hiding the usually less-thanhonorable origins of their family’s wealth and its associated claim to rule. Insofar as these aristocrats can claim superiority to the poor, it is only because they may claim to have received a superior education.21 But their education has been provided to them on the basis of their wealth rather than their merit, and their wealth depends, at least in part, on the work of the poor. In other words, practically speaking, aristocracies are secretly oligarchic, basing their rule on wealth, and using the beautiful things they can buy to conceal their unjust exclusion of the poor. Despite claiming virtue to be the governing principle of their rule, they exclude the virtues of many, and so can ultimately only defend their status on the ground that an even distribution of wealth and leisure would allow nothing noble to flourish in the community. This contradictions within the wealthy’s claims to rule gives weight to the poor’s objection that the oppressive rule of the wealthy is unjust and that a more democratic distribution is demanded by justice. This appeal upends the apparent chasm between how the rich and the poor seem to live—the former according to nobility and the latter according to necessity—for a second look reveals that it is the arguments of the poor that are more grounded in noble claims, while the wealthy are forced to legitimate their position by appealing to the limits of necessity. In accordance with his mocking of the aristocrats’ claims, Al sides with the democrats by affirming the principles of freedom and equality, allowing the poorest and lowest—including hillbillies and prostitutes—to share in his rule, and in the rule of themselves. Yet Al does not defend total equality of persons separate from their involvement in the community. Instead, he defends the participation of all insofar as their participation aims at contributing to the common good. Indicating that true aristocracy is inseparable from the democratic emphasis on freedom and equality, Al insists that each person—according to their strengths, and regardless of their limits—finds some way to make themselves useful to their community. For instance, when Doc Cochran

22

P. N. CAIN

attempts to quietly remove himself from the camp on the belief that he has contracted tuberculous, Al (who has just had his finger chopped off) admonishes him for allowing the indignities of his new sickness to stop him from contributing to the camp, pointing out that however dishonorable one’s weaknesses may be, the true dishonor is to submit to them by abandoning one’s remaining virtues: No one gets out alive, Doc. Jesus Christ! The fucking gimp finds something useful to do in the fucking brace you made her! Do you think you could treat being Johnny—always struggling to fashion a thought?! Every fucking night I, that could cut a throat but sleep the sleep of the just, spend six fucking wakings trying to find a piss pot with my dribble, and wondering when I got to be so old. [Throws the swatches at Cochran] Pick a fucking swatch for a spit rag, use the others for masks, and go about your fucking business!22

While Al would not deny Cochran the liberty to abandon his care of the camp, he makes it clear that such a decision would involve a wholly dishonorable life, not because of Cochran’s sickness, but because of the choice he made. For Al, freedom is defensible because it allows one to rule in accordance with one’s judgment and to choose to contribute to the good of others. Just as virtue is not possible without freedom, freedom is not possible without virtue.23 Insofar as aristocracy is attainable, it must be founded on and within democracy, allowing for the cultivation and participation of each member’s virtues. This relationship provides a defense of Al’s rule, which sees that, though his cultivation of virtue in others makes them more free to rule themselves, it at the same time provides his rule with more dignity.24 We should not therefore be surprised that Al declares himself devoted to establishing republican government in Deadwood.25 Indeed, his attempt to found a political rule that supports the freedom of democracy and the nobility of virtue is the overarching plot of Deadwood, and the success of his accomplishment depends upon getting Bullock to remember his duties and join him in meeting the threat of the outside forces that would deny the camp self-government. After several false starts, Al ultimately resorts to shaming Bullock in the public square, telling him in the most inflammatory way that his affair with Alma Garrett is leading him to shirk his civic duties.26 Although Bullock nearly kills him

VIRTUE, FREEDOM, AND POLITICAL RULE IN DAVID …

23

in the subsequent fight, Al’s willingness to risk his life in service of Deadwood convinces Bullock of the depth and nobility of his commitment to the common good, and Al succeeds in bringing him more fully into the fold. Over the course of the next two seasons, Al continues his attempt to make Bullock’s gifts useful to Deadwood, regularly working to connect his spirited desire for justice and self-rule to the common good.

Conclusion I have mostly limited myself to Deadwood’s treatment of government and self-rule in its first season—to its exploration of the attempt to establish and unify a political community, and how the concern for freedom, virtue, and necessity shapes and limits these ends. Like other great works of art, Deadwood’s consideration of these and related issues is far broader than one essay can contain.27 For instance, those who have watched the show will know that, though I have defended Al as more noble than he first appears, I have only partially explained the connection between his nobility and his commitment to the community he founds, including how it is that Adams can claim that “When he ain’t lying, Al’s the most honorable man you’ll ever meet.”28 Nor have I addressed the remarkable change Trixie undergoes over the course of the show, her essential contribution to camp life, and the dangers her strengths pose to the community; nor how Martha Bullock is at least as responsible as Al for saving Bullock from Hickok’s tragic end, and how it is that Bullock accepts her intervention. In other words, though I have written about the connection of prudence to the common good, a full account of Deadwood’s political teaching would require accounting for the role of love in the story of its community.

Notes 1. See Paul Cantor, “Order Out of the Mud: Deadwood and the State of Nature,” prof.cantor, Accessed March 22, 2023, https://paulcantor.io/ paul-cantor-works/order-out-of-the-mud, note 10. 2. Paul Cantor calls it “the greatest television series of all time,” an assessment I share. See “Milch’s Last Stand: The Deadwood Movie”, Modern Age, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, January 13, 2020, https://isi.org/ modern-age/milchs-last-stand-the-deadwood-movie. 3. Despite the impressiveness of its seemingly harmonized vision produced by its presentation of human life, Deadwood invites contemplation of the

24

P. N. CAIN

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

complications that arise from attempting to meet the standard of logographic necessity, and especially the difficulties it poses to the poetic attempt to provide a true account of the human experience and how we ought to live with one another. In my experience, Deadwood’s violent language—notwithstanding the scene described below—often leaves viewers remembering the show to be more physically violent than it actually is. Milch, David, Deadwood, seasons 1–3, creator, executive producer, HBO, 2004–2006, AppleTV. Subsequent citations are shortened to season and episode numbers. That the metaphor of mining may be applied to the spirit as well as the body is suggested later by E.B. Farnum: “He ascends, Richardson, to be dug at, and sifted, and shoveled till his crucial vein is exposed. Then Hearst will empty him out (Deadwood, 2.12).” Deadwood, 2.8. Deadwood, 3.12. Deadwood, 1.2. Deadwood, 1.5. Deadwood, 1.5. In Reverend Smith’s other sermon, he recites Proverbs 16:5 to warn Bullock against being “proud in heart” (Deadwood, 1.3), which especially refers to those men whose ways are pure in their own eyes (Prov 16:2). Deadwood, 1.4. Jane Cannary offers an alternative view to Hickok’s tragic desire to “stop arguin’ with himself,” and his conclusion that life is not worth living “because he can’t be something he tries to be every goddamn day.” Unlike Hickok, who demands perfection from himself each day, Jane’s approach is less certain—she does not accept that one should stop arguing with oneself, but instead claims that “every day takes figuring out all over again how to fucking live” (Deadwood, 3.1). Al is also able to use the vices of others, finding a way to have even the lowest among him contribute to the common good. For instance, Al aligns himself with Deadwood’s hotelier, the widely despised E.B. Farnum, who can provide him with a useful set of eyes and ears. Farnum’s miserliness, shamelessness, and cowardice seem to make him almost wholly untrustworthy, but Al says that it is precisely these vices that make Farnum his best spy, and that, because Farnum can be depended upon to act according to his vices, his moments of disloyalty are too predictable and too governed by fear to pose a significant danger to Al. Deadwood, 1.9. For a helpful discussion of this problem and related issues, see Stephen A. Block, “Aristotle on Statesmanship, Freedom, and the Spirit of the Democracy” in Democracy and the History of Political Thought, ed. Patrick N. Cain et al. (Lanham: Lexington, 2021), 89–105.

VIRTUE, FREEDOM, AND POLITICAL RULE IN DAVID …

25

17. Aristotle, Politics 1325a28-30. 18. Al in turn implements certain tests to ensure that those who will become members of his inner circle actually desire to be ruled and taught by him rather than simply use him; for instance, Al convinces Adams to switch allegiances from the Yankton politicians to himself in part by insisting that Adams take less money to work for him than is being offered by Yankton. 19. When Al supports the disabled (but aptly named) Jewel’s request to get leg braces, he does so only on the grounds that it will save him the annoyance of having to listen to her drag her leg around the bar. Though he often verbally abuses Jewel, mocking her physical limitations and lack of external beauty, he also allows her the freedom to ridicule him in turn. Trixie later reveals that Al is Jewel’s secret protector and, as the show proceeds, we discover that Jewel has earned a place within his inner circle. 20. Deadwood, 1.1. 21. Because a life without abundance requires one to be more directly ruled by the claims of necessity, it may provide a better education than wealth in a number of virtues, including courage and generosity (see Plato, Republic VIII ). 22. Deadwood, 3.7. 23. Conversely, freedom without virtue can provide neither the principles nor people needed to resist the rule of tyranny. Aristotle, Politics 1279b4. 24. Al’s rule thus partially aims at his own freedom from ruling, even while recognizing that his prudence will always be necessary. Indeed, to deny the necessity of rule would be to deny the very reason for ruling, and therewith the honor of doing so. Because it allows the freedom and rule of its less than perfect parts, political rule cannot create a perfect or unified whole, and because it is not a perfect whole, the exercising of good judgment and virtue is always needed. 25. Deadwood, 1.8. Al himself seeks to be the architect of statehood for the territory and camp, sacrificing both money and his own social life to achieve that goal. Of these, perhaps most important is his refusal of a bribe when signing Deadwood’s founding documents on the grounds that, as a founding father, he would not be known in history as one who took money to establish good government. 26. In the scene previous, in order to combat Bullock’s concern that the affair is distracting him from his duties, Alma suggests that “dereliction of duty is the one sure way to happiness” (Deadwood, 2.2). 27. Perhaps most obvious is a discussion of why Al’s prudential judgment struggles to meet challenge of the ruthless mining baron George Hearst, a subject that would be the natural sequel to this essay. For now, I will limit myself to suggesting that Al fails because he assumes that Hearst’s pursuit of commerce is governed by self-interest, and therefore that he can be managed by Al’s superior prudence. But Hearst, who describes

26

P. N. CAIN

himself as the vessel of modernity, is instead ruled by commerce’s inherent historical and technological progressivism, whose movement requires the destruction of prudential self-government. 28. Deadwood, 3.12.

Print the Legend: Virtue, Violence, and the Social Contract in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Hang ‘Em High Glenn A. Moots

Introduction: Contending for Virtue and Civilization on the Frontier How can humans escape from barbarism and enjoy the benefits of civilization? Political theorists have devoted considerable attention to this problem, and so have the writers and producers of Westerns. In the long history of political theory, civilization and law are preferred to nature’s undesirable lawless condition. Aristotle, for example, placed the highest premium on political life and argued that only a beast or a god could survive outside of it.1 We require an orderly political community if we are to have any hope of meeting our human potential: what Aristotle called “flourishing.” The Western has become an appropriate canvas on which to paint this challenge. Disorder and violence are reflected in an unforgiving landscape, the outlaw, or the savage Other embodied in the American Indian.2 Against these forces stands the pioneer, the beleaguered sheriff or marshal, the posse, or the horse soldier. But why would pioneers strike out for a

G. A. Moots (B) Northwood University, Midland, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_3

27

28

G. A. MOOTS

no-man’s land between order and disorder?3 Lawlessness, however undesirable, also offers potentially limitless possibilities, including the creation of new societies.4 Throughout the history of political theory, the creation of societies is often cast as a contract establishing both freedoms and obligations. Contracts also oblige adherence to certain virtues, including belief in equality under the rule of law. In the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, the Exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land is institutionalized in a covenant at Mt Sinai binding the people, under God, with an extensive civil and moral law.5 In Plato’s Crito, Socrates argues that goods provided by the laws of society oblige him to uphold a contract: he must obey the laws even when they unjustly rule against him.6 Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias and Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic assert (albeit with scorn) that conventional law is a contract to limit natural human appetites.7 In later political theory and evolving constitutionalism leading to what is broadly called liberalism, society is also cast as a contract. Though the idea of this contract began in the Middle Ages and was later advanced by many political theorists including Samuel Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius, Algernon Sidney, and Immanuel Kant, the most well-known articulations are arguably those of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke proposed the idea of a contract to preserve us from inconveniences and terrors of a “State of Nature” that frequently becomes a “State of War.” Hobbes famously describes this state of nature cum warfare as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Such conditions, and the ensuing struggle for survival, encourage lawlessness and discourage virtuous behavior.8 Locke asserted that in the absence of a “common judge” or authority to decide contests between persons (contests that governments typically resolve), those warring have a right of self-preservation enabling them to become judge, jury, and executioner.9 Jean-Jacques Rousseau likewise saw nature as a potentially unequal competition among persons. He likewise proposed a contract enabling true equality.10 The contemporary philosopher John Rawls was similarly concerned with eliminating social or economic inequality, arguing that the point of a social contract was to enable not only universal equality and liberty but also, where inequality existed, greatest benefit for the “least advantaged” or those with typically less economic or social opportunity.11

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

29

However influential these philosophical presentations have become, they omit attention to an essential political question. Just how do people come to adopt a social contract? Will it happen peacefully? Must we presume that everyone will desire to live under the social contract? If not, what degree of violence (even vice) may be necessary to establish it? The social contract theorists are reticent to answer. Rawls dodges the question altogether, asserting that his social contract only sets the terms of justice but does not create a society.12 Hobbes suggests that we are motivated by fear of death.13 Locke is equally vague on the question, suggesting only that we enter society “not without reason.”14 The ambiguity of how violence and vice might cooperate with civilization and virtue is the perfect subject for a revisionist Western, one in which heroes and villains are not so easily identified—especially to escape from the ravages of nature to a social contract.15 In many such Westerns, we learn that barbarism and civilization may—at least for a time—be partners rather than competitors. As a result, the moral superiority of civilization may not be as superior as it seems if it also requires unrestrained violence.

The Revisionist Western: Contention and Confusion The contest between nature and society, and the move toward civilization, is powerfully presented in revisionist Westerns The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Hang ‘Em High (1968). Each is arguably a “revisionist Western” because it blurs traditional lines between “good guys” and “bad guys.” Each favorably presents violence that is repellent, even savage and unjust. However, this violence is presented as necessary to enable the creation or preservation of a social contract. Any presumption that we nobly or rationally escaped from the state of nature therefore becomes morally ambiguous. In Liberty Valance, Ransom Stoddard is bent on delivering the benefits of liberalism to Shinbone, a remote and lawless desert town in an unnamed Western territory. When his liberal or democratic virtues confront savage nature, exemplified by the villain Liberty Valance, Stoddard himself must admit, “When force threatens, talk’s no good anymore.” Shinbone eventually flourishes thanks to the violence of Tom Doniphon rather than the educated ideals of Ranse Stoddard. Similarly, Marshal Ted Cooper and his boss Judge Fenton in Hang ‘Em High must

30

G. A. MOOTS

deploy unmerciful violence to enable a more merciful social contract. Fenton insists that the hanging judge, despite appearances to the contrary, is superior to the hanging lynch mob, telling Cooper, “If you can’t tell the difference take off that star.” To recall the famous line at the end of Liberty Valance about what is legend and what is fact, however, ironies and paradoxes in both films force us to consider what is legend and what is fact in the supposed moral superiority of a democratic social order. Ironies and paradoxes are evident even in the production of these films and also their legacies. Clint Eastwood, fresh from Sergio Leone Westerns, solidified his bona fides as a Western hero in Hang ‘Em High.16 Its financial success launched his Malposa production company and enabled Eastwood to produce a successful franchise also about the integration of violence with social order: his five-film franchise about San Francisco Police Detective Harry Callahan, aka “Dirty Harry.” Callahan, like Marshal Jed Cooper, uses violence outside social norms, but all the while intends to preserve a coherent social contract. As Eastwood’s career wound down, however, Malposa’s more recent films eschew violent solutions (e.g. Gran Torino and Cry Macho) or question violence’s nobility (Flags of our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, American Sniper). The background of Liberty Valance reflects similar ironies. Jimmy Stewart was cast as Stoddard, a character who repudiates violence; his tough guy foil is Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne. In real life, Stewart was a WW2 bomber pilot while Wayne managed to evade wartime service. Behind the camera was John Ford, who served as an officer in the United States Navy, advised the Office of Strategic Services, and was wounded while facilitating valuable wartime footage. Though Ford was arguably responsible for Wayne’s career, he never treated him like the tough guy existing in the minds of so many fans; Ford chided Wayne for not serving.

Print the Legend: The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance Two Societies Embodied by Two Men Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contrasts two societies, each embodied by its two main characters. Tom Doniphon embodies the state of nature while Ransom Stoddard embodies the social contract. Ford brilliantly contrasts their differences and Shinbone’s passage from nature to

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

31

civilization using two different timeframes: first in the “present day” and then in a long flashback constituting most of the film, we see contrasting statuses and fates of the two men and their respective societies. In the present-day scene at the beginning of the film, Stoddard arrives as he will also leave—by train, and with great honor. We surmise that Stoddard is essentially to thank for the railroad, and we are told that it is the reason why Shinbone now has schools, churches, and thriving commerce. In short, Shinbone is civilized thanks to Stoddard. We also discover that Stoddard is currently a senator and potential candidate for vice president, and formerly a governor and ambassador. Stoddard and the goods he enabled, protected by law and order running through his political influence all the way from Washington DC, makes him a literal embodiment of the American social contract. Doniphon, by contrast, makes his debut in this era in a pine coffin. He died a pauper, and the Stoddards are there to pay their respects. Neither the town’s mayor nor the newspaper staff know of Doniphon or his death, however. Why is the most famous man in Shinbone there to mourn the least famous man? Ranse’s wife Hallie staggers when she sees the coffin, implying that she may have once thought Tom immortal. In hopes of recovering some of his expenses, the undertaker Clute has even taken Tom’s boots but Stoddard insists not only that Doniphon be buried with his boots but also that he be buried with his gun belt. This demand draws our attention to the particular role of violence in the story. In addition to the gun belt, another essential symbol is present—a symbol present both in this opening scene and at the end of the film: the desert rose. Cut from the ground in front of Tom’s ruined house and placed on his coffin, the rose symbolizes the secret cooperation between virtue and violence in Shinbone’s success. The cactus rose, like Doniphon, can bloom even in harsh conditions. When Tom presents one to Hallie in the film, however, Stoddard discounts it and asks her if she’s seen a “real rose.” Less hearty than the desert rose, this rose more commonly known and favored than the desert rose can flourish only under a specific set of circumstances. Stoddard makes those circumstances possible thanks to his leadership: the rivers will be dammed and the wilderness will become a garden. The hearty but fickle desert rose will therefore give way to the now-ubiquitous perennial flowering plant. The contrasting of these two roses symbolize how rough but hearty nature (Doniphon) will give way to civilization (Stoddard).

32

G. A. MOOTS

In the flashback that follows this opening scene, however, the older era whose storyline constitutes most of the film, we turn away from the present day to see these statuses of Stoddard and Doniphon completely reversed. Stoddard is a nobody and Doniphon is preeminent. Outside of town, in a lawless state of nature which only a man like Doniphon can reliably survive, Stoddard’s stagecoach is robbed and held at the mercy of Liberty Valance, an outlaw and a hired gun for the ranchers who leverage the absence of civilization.17 Stoddard naively tells Valance that though he has Stoddard “in his guns now,” Stoddard is an attorney who will ensure Valance goes to jail. For this, and for defending a widow also traveling on the stagecoach (a gesture Doniphon flippantly refers to as being a “ladies’ man”), Valance defiantly beats and whips Stoddard. Valance arrogantly flouts any notion of law and order by removing his mask before attacking Stoddard. Valance and his gang also vandalize his lawbooks, an appropriately symbolic act demonstrating their contempt for a social contract. When Valance sees his victim later in the film, he flagrantly laughs at him. He knows that there is no law and order. After the holdup, Doniphon rescues the beaten Stoddard and brings him to the home and restaurant of Hallie’s parents. In this scene, the two men and their respective philosophies are tellingly contrasted along with their status. They don’t hold forth with political theories, of course, but their personal habits and circumstantial prescriptions speak volumes. When Hallie’s mother Nora tries to calm Ranse with liquor in his coffee he refuses it, but Tom will drink it straight from the bottle. Tom will also smoke indoors (though not before asking permission), an action that Stoddard will later prohibit in his classroom. Most importantly, Doniphon will, like Valance, shrug off Stoddard’s endorsement of the law. The gun is their solution: “Out here, a man settles his own problems,” Doniphon tells Stoddard, a prescription Stoddard equates with Valance’s own. The two men, Doniphon and Valance, are surely different in character, but Stoddard is nevertheless correct: both are creatures of the state of nature. A bewildered and beaten Stoddard asks, “What kind of community have I come to?” In his exhaustion, he attempts a spirited defense of the law. But like the law, he literally crumples—held up only by the powerful Doniphon. Shinbone’s absence of the rule of law is also embodied by Marshal Link Appleyard, a congenial but useless and freeloading lawman who sleeps in his own (unused and unlocked) jail cell. Link insists, in the wake of the holdup, that a complaint should be made only to him, but this is an empty

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

33

gesture. Even after Stoddard determines that Appleyard has jurisdiction over the holdup, it becomes clear that Appleyard has no intention of using any legal authority. As Doniphon exits the scene, he emphasizes who is in charge—and it is not the law. Tom calls himself “the toughest man south of the picket wire” (alongside Valance) and playfully but mockingly drops Appleyard’s hat to the ground. Hallie then kicks the hat in disgust. The message to the audience is clear: Shinbone is firmly in the state of nature.18

Caught Between Nature and Civilization Other characters in Shinbone are trapped between these two societies exemplified by Stoddard and Doniphon. The newspaper editor, Mr. Peabody, would appear to be a natural ally for Stoddard. Both are educated men, enticed from the civilized eastern part of America by Horace Greely’s call to “Go West.” They join forces when Mr. Peabody lets Ranse hang his shingle as an “Attorney at Law” outside Peabody’s newspaper office. He works with Ranse to register voters, hoping that they can outvote those north of the picket wire (the cattle barons) who do not want statehood. Peabody also advocates for the virtues of civilization even in small ways. Though he is an alcoholic, this is mostly for comic effect (including a drunken Shakespearean soliloquy). He remains a man of proprieties, insisting that Hallie place the silverware according to etiquette. Hallie, raised in the state of nature, knows nothing about this and confuses propriety with superstition. Furthermore, The Shinbone Star, Peabody’s newspaper, is an essential ingredient for a liberal society. Peabody frequently touts the liberty of the press. He romances his printing press by calling it a “servant of the public weal.” What’s more, the newspaper holds powerful people accountable, enabling freedom and equality. Peabody challenges not only the lawlessness of Valance and the cattle barons but also those who would abuse offices created under the social contract. When he is nominated for political office, he protests by summarizing the newspaper’s role in a free society and why this precludes him from office. The newspaper is a political conscience, watchdog, and father confessor. It builds politicians up and tears them down. But Peabody’s newspaper is even more essential to any future social contract insofar as its back room serves as a makeshift schoolroom. There, Stoddard tells the students that the best newspaper in the world is “an honest newspaper.”

34

G. A. MOOTS

Peabody is one of the most articulate advocates for statehood and its protection of rights for everyone “no matter how humble.” At the statehood convention, he contrasts the buffalo hunter, “savage redskin,” the “law of the bow and arrow,” the cattlemen and their hired guns with the “homesteaders, shopkeepers, builders of cities.” The people need roads, dams, and the railroad. They will only get these under the civilization of the social contract of statehood. But despite Peabody’s affinity for the virtues of the social contract, he makes compromises with the violent state of nature. When Valance trips Stoddard, Peabody mocks him as an impotent “spectacle of law and order rising up out of the gravy and mashed potatoes.” Stoddard, after all, “can’t shoot back with a law book” and Tom has already warned that the law office and the newspaper are at the mercy of Valance. Peabody knows that there is no law and order, only violence. Though he will extol Stoddard as a man who came “not packing a gun but carrying a bag of lawbooks,” Peabody will enable him to pack a gun by giving him one. In giving Ranse a gun, Peabody essentially sides with Tom. He also urges Hallie to stay with Tom over Ranse: Tom is, after all, the only one able to protect her in the state of nature. Peabody is a man trapped between barbarism and the social contract, and it nearly costs him his life. Hallie is similarly trapped between the two societies, and doubly torn between the two suitors who represent them. Though Tom eventually loses her, or rather, nobly gives her up to marry Ranse, life at his small ranch would have provided her with every available advantage in the state of nature. In that state where force matters and strength is a virtue, he is the one man able to protect her. Hallie, like Valance, even questions what kind of man Stoddard is anyway. When Stoddard is helpless before Valance, she asks “What’s reading and writing done for you?” She wonders why he “pops up” from his chair when a lady comes near. She is ignorant of his more democratic egalitarian virtues, useful only under a social contract. However, Hallie is also put off by Tom’s rougher style of masculinity, and why not? He reduces Stoddard’s chivalry as “Protecting the ladies” and shows his affection for Hallie merely by telling her how pretty she is when she gets angry. Her embarrassment at being unable to read and write is palpable, however. And though Tom can read, only Ranse will teach her. When Tom tells her to abandon the school because it isn’t safe, she replies, “You don’t own me, Tom Doniphon.” In the end, she will choose the social contract and its virtues over Tom’s. When Ranse’s

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

35

life is in danger, she will not only require Tom to protect it, she will inadvertently sacrifice her future with Tom—and Tom’s own future—in doing so. Hallie’s parents remain torn between the two men and their respective political societies. Her mother Nora remains impressed with Tom but also seems intent on shifting Hallie’s affections toward the man who can give her greater economic and social opportunity should he succeed. Her father Peter discourages Nora’s suggestion of a relationship between Ranse and Hallie, expressing displeasure at his wife’s meddling. But each is won over by the promise of the egalitarian education that will empower them under the social contract. We see Nora in the schoolroom learning civics, and we can infer that Peter has been there as well. He arrives on Election Day as an American citizen, ready to vote for delegates to the convention for statehood.

Eating, Schooling, Voting, Killing In addition to the plight of these characters, four essential scenes prompt us to think about issues at stake between the state of nature and the social contract, each highlighting how violence and virtue must cooperate. At “Peter’s Place,” Peter’s restaurant, Valance confronts both Stoddard and Doniphon. When Stoddard arrives to serve Doniphon his steak dinner, Valance eagerly trips Stoddard and humiliates him. Tom, ready to draw his gun, rises to confront Valance, telling him to pick up the food. Valance backs down and leaves with his men, but not before feigning his own pistol draw, and drawing Doniphon’s invitation to “Try it, Liberty. Just try it.” Stoddard is outraged at this confrontation, asserting that people in Shinbone are “kill crazy” to draw guns over “one measly steak.” In his frustration, however, Stoddard protests that “Nobody fights my battles.” Stoddard is in this case no doubt thinking about proportionality, a concept relevant not only when determining the legitimacy of self-defense but also in just war theory.19 But this is a concept that exists only in a social contract wherein some authority is able to rule on whether a response to an act is proportional or not. In the state of nature, where there can be no appeal to a higher authority to enforce the law, Doniphon would have a right to use force, even deadly force, to defend property.20 He correctly says, “My right to interfere. My steak.” If there is a judge, however, one would have to answer for a disproportionate response.

36

G. A. MOOTS

Furthermore, Stoddard is also wrong to say that no one fights his battles. Under Stoddard’s desired political authority, the judge will always fight the citizen’s battle after a violation has occurred—as it did in this case. If the judge is not present, and life (but not steaks) are endangered, one still has to fight one’s own battles. If there was the common judge that Ranse desires, he or Tom would have to take their complaint against Valance to the law.21 In short, Stoddard’s statement aspires to autonomy his other arguments reject. He contradicts himself. A second critical scene is in the schoolroom where Ranse teaches literacy and civics and showcases liberal values. Washington and Lincoln hang like icons of democracy on the wall. Pompey recites Jefferson’s statement in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal.” Nora emphasizes the franchise and says that the “big shots in Washington” have to do what the people want. The classroom is filled with those whom John Rawls might call “the least advantaged” —those who should benefit most from the social contract. Appleyard’s biracial children are learning English.22 The uneducated ranch hands Kaintuck and Highpockets are there. Amos Caruthers brings Herbert, an older boy who is obviously unschooled. Whereas Pompey or the ranch hands might have some chance of survival in the state of nature, they would stand little chance against Valance. For many in this schoolroom, Shinbone may present little hope of life beyond what Hobbes called “nasty, poor, brutish, and short.” In Ranse’s desired social contract, however, there is much more equality and liberty for those who are literate and can gain the rights of citizenship. Can he indeed equip them for this new arrangement? Tom, the embodiment of the state of nature, abruptly barges in and ends the class. Thanks to Peabody’s exposé on what the ranchers are doing outside of town, Tom warns that the streets will run with blood; a war has already begun outside the picket wire where there is no pretense of civility. Homesteaders have been killed by the ranchers’ hired guns and Tom has already killed in self-defense. The ranchers are on the move, ready to overwhelm democracy with guns. As the fearful students disperse, Ranse symbolically erases the director John Ford’s ode to democracy on the blackboard which reads “Education is the basis of law and order.” Hallie abandons her efforts to tidy up the classroom and throws the books down. Having given up on the social contract, Ranse has gone out to practice with his gun. Tom makes clear to him, however,

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

37

that he has no chance. In the state of nature, there are no rules and Stoddard is a naive “tenderfoot.” In a third essential scene, Shinbone residents (or those “south of the picket wire”) gather to elect delegates to “Capitol City” for the statehood convention. Tom starts the meeting and provides security while Ranse runs it. Stoddard makes his case for statehood. It will mean “protection for our farms and fences, schools for our children, progress for our future.” Consistent with democratic virtue, Ranse has forbidden alcohol until after the vote. Here we begin to see much greater cooperation between the two men and their two societies. They unite against the threat Valance poses. Valance illegally nominates himself for delegate and in the vote holds his whip, a tool of violence in the state of nature, to contest the budding social contract and intimidate its supporters. He fails, but it is Doniphon’s presence that prevents Valance from violently ending the meeting altogether. The men are not completely united, however. Ranse nominates Tom to be a delegate, but he refuses. Tom’s self-interest (marrying Hallie) will pre-empt any common good gained by statehood. Though Valance will not be sent as a delegate, he says that the vote doesn’t matter. All he has to do is kill Ranse to end any movement toward the social contract. And in this scene, it is apparent that Ranse will have to face him without Tom. Liberty tells Ranse, “You be out on that street alone.” We are left to wonder what will become of Ranse and the social contract. The film’s answer comes in the fourth relevant scene, the penultimate scene in the flashback portion of the film: the shooting of Liberty Valance. Moral ambiguity abounds in this scene, adding not only to the drama of the film but also to its political content. Having refused Doniphon’s offer to have Pompey take him out of town, an armed Ranse heads out into the street to face Valance. Valance had earlier told him to be “out on the street,” but Stoddard does not have to comply. He could have fled with Pompey, but he is filled with bloodlust after Valance attacks Peabody and the newspaper office. Confronting Valance, gun in hand, would never be allowed under the social contract that Stoddard advocates. He is in no imminent danger and could have escaped until he could find Locke’s common judge. But Ranse has rejected the social contract at this point. He confirms this symbolically by tearing down the “Attorney at Law” sign that Valance just shot in half. He is no longer an attorney, an agent for law and order. Stoddard arguably would not be justified in confronting Valance

38

G. A. MOOTS

even in the state of nature, except perhaps as a preemptive strike on an aggressor.23 Alerted to Stoddard’s approach, Valance quickly downs two liquor shots before the asymmetrical confrontation, suggesting that even he is morally uneasy with what is coming. However, Valance isn’t entirely incorrect to suggest that what he is doing is self-defense. Stoddard has gotten his gun, sent the marshal to summon Valance, and is waiting in the street for him. In doing so, he further demonstrates that he has abandoned the social contract. But what results from this action also enables the contract. Valance’s prowess and cunning are demonstrated when he wounds Stoddard and forces him to shoot offhand. This is not a fair fight, but Ranse appears to prevail by an improbable shot. Liberty drops dead in the street. We are tempted to scoff when Liberty’s gang goads the townspeople to lynch Stoddard, but the justice of such an action in the state of nature isn’t all that farfetched. After all, who else will enforce the law of nature against aggressors when there is no common judge? When Ranse is later accused at the statehood convention of being someone who has deliberately taken upon himself the function of judge and executioner— something only allowed in the state of nature but abhorrent to the social contract—Ranse makes no effort to defend himself. He withdraws from the ruckus of the convention and tells Tom “I’m going out east where I belong.” His friends can only offer the defense that Valance was not (as Stoddard’s opponents claim), “an honest citizen.”

Hang ‘Em High: Whose Justice? Whereas Liberty Valance threatens to close with a lynching, Hang ‘Em High opens with one. Jed Cooper’s gentle leading of cattle across a harsh landscape is abruptly ended by a posse looking for a murdering rustler. Cooper produces a bill of sale for the cattle and says that he is an exlawman. When accused of murder, he replies that he did not run from the men as a guilty man would have. The lynch mob under the leadership of “The Captain” isn’t interested in reason or references any more than they are interested in due process, however. Some of the men, including an old man named Jenkins, seem hesitant. Others, like Miller and Reno, see lynching as a chance to plunder Cooper’s wallet and saddle. The gang is a study of moral ambiguity, emphasizing the lack of moral clarity in any state of nature. There is, after all, no opportunity to appeal to a common judge. With only some muted dissent in the group, they hang Cooper.

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

39

Cooper is rescued by Marshal Bliss, but only to join a pathetic delivery of caged undesirables headed to the town of Fort Grant. Along the way, Bliss shoots a man fleeing arrest. As the man attempts to escape, the prisoner’s egg Bliss on. “Scared of cheating the hanging judge?” they cry. We soon learn what they mean as the wagon of men rolls into town: elaborate gallows stand in the center of town. The judge wasn’t the only one cheated by the summary execution. Hangings in Fort Grant draw families come from all around for what can only be described as a macabre celebration. Cooper and the rest of the men are emptied into a crowded and filthy detention cell. Those already in detention offer an unsolicited orientation to the newcomers. They will have to somehow sleep through the sound of 200-pound sacks dropped from ropes made of fresh hemp. This is the preparatory work of the hangman Schmidt, who is a “craftsman.” Within the first twelve minutes of the film, the audience is subjected to hanging after hanging. The brutal lynching is followed by the sound of the dropped sacks heard by the men in detention. Men are hanged the next morning. The hanging sound even accompanies the opening credits, subjecting the audience to more brutality. The ugliness is briefly broken only when the beautiful Rachel Warren comes to look at the new prisoners. She is there daily to identify and enable the hanging of the men who raped her and killed her husband. But she, too, wants another hanging. Cooper’s fate is not to join the parade of men brought to the gallows, however, because Judge Fenton discovers that he is innocent. Because Cooper is an ex-lawman, Fenton invites him to join the overwhelmed marshal force in the Oklahoma Indian Territory. What entices Cooper to take the job? Is it the opportunity to exact revenge on the nine men who unjustly lynched him? We don’t exactly know, and that moral ambiguity adds to the drama. When Cooper picks up the star, those who watch Eastwood’s Cooper backward—through the lens of his Dirty Harry franchise—think they know what comes next, and they are not disappointed.24 When Cooper serendipitously crosses paths with Reno, he guns him down. But in Cooper’s defense, he did first try to take Reno alive. Cooper tries to abide by the law, but he must do it alone. When he enters Red Creek to arrest some of the posse who lynched him, he finds that the state of nature prevails there. Red Creek’s Sheriff Calhoun, like Appleyard, is the state of nature incarnate. He is physically unable to do his job and, even worse than Appleyard in Shinbone, he is friends with

40

G. A. MOOTS

men who earlier lynched Cooper. Calhoun tells Cooper that the posse members are “leading citizens.” Calhoun’s desertion of duty enabled the aforementioned posse under “The Captain,” and it was therefore Calhoun’s incompetence that almost got Cooper killed. Calhoun even collaborates with his friends to entice Cooper to give up his hunt, reimbursing the funds he lost on the cattle. When the remaining lynch mob members conspire to ambush Cooper before they can be captured, Calhoun feigns ignorance and says, “I didn’t hear that.” Calhoun’s failure forces Cooper to lead his own posse, against Cooper’s protests, when a father and brother are murdered and their cattle rustled. In his odyssey that follows, we are confronted with the no-man’s land between nature and civilization. When the perpetrators are found along with the cattle, the posse wants them hanged. They ask Cooper, “You a lawman or aintcha?” On the one hand, Cooper knows that they are going to be hanged anyway. On the other hand, the whole point of the social contract is to establish a common judge to make such decisions. We are prompted to remember Cooper’s own lynching. When Cooper refuses to hang them, the posse abandons him and he must return the murderers on his own. Miller, one of the rustlers and part of the mob who lynched Cooper, attacks him during the arduous journey back to Judge Fenton’s courtt. His collaborators, Billy Joe and his older brother Ben stand by. Cooper now has two reasons to kill Miller, first for his lynching and now for trying to kill him and escape, but he resists the temptation. When Cooper heroically returns with the three, he is intent on leniency for the brothers. Not only have they denied participating in the killing, but they also did not join Miller and finish Cooper off. But Cooper soon discovers that neither the prosecutor nor the judge cares. If the social contract is to be established, they must imitate the lynch mob and exact the most severe and merciless justice, albeit with the cover of law and order before their hanging. When Cooper protests hanging the boys, Fenton tells him, “Justice is my province, Marshal. Mine, and mine alone.” Likewise, Cooper pleads for leniency for one member of the lynch mob, Jenkins, who turned himself in. Jenkins confesses that he never thought Cooper should have been hanged. Fenton insists that he cannot show mercy even if Jenkins seems to deserve it. If men culpable in such things are not hanged, as the lynch mob would have done, no one will see a benefit in statehood. In a state of nature where easily bushwhacked marshals roam wide swaths of territory, a lynch mob has the freedom to exact justice in the state of

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

41

nature. Why give up that freedom to a “common judge” if the judge will be more lenient? Fenton therefore must give the lynching public, at least for now, the confidence that nothing will be lost by joining the social contract. Cooper and Fenton debate whether Fenton is obliged to be as severe as the mob and whether this will enable statehood. Fenton insists that whatever will facilitate statehood, however questionable, will enable a greater good.

The Social Contract: Praying for Someone Between Me and God Almighty Tom Doniphon, Jed Cooper, and Judge Fenton, and to some degree the men whose lives they take, are men sacrificed for the social contract. They are not calm rational persons enticed by philosophy to enter the social contract and enjoy its benefits. They must stand astride the state of nature and the social contract, exhibiting to some degree both the vices of nature and the virtues of the rule of law. Doniphon saving Stoddard from Valance will cost him everything. Knowing he has lost Hallie, he burns his home and loses his horses. It is not hard to imagine his descent into obscure poverty as a result. We learn from Appleyard that Tom eventually even gave up carrying a gun. And though he forsakes Hallie to save Ranse and his social contract, it was Hallie who condemned him to this life by alerting him, through Pompey, to the danger that Ranse faced that night. Perhaps she regrets this decision. The last scene of Liberty Valance shows a melancholy Hallie, asked by Ranse if she placed the cactus rose on Tom’s coffin. Does she have guilt over his death, perhaps even lingering affection? Does she miss the rugged wilds that enable the cactus rose? The audience doesn’t know, but her life with Ranse is owed to Tom Doniphon. Whereas Stoddard rides on the train, with acclaim, in that last scene, Doniphon lies in his coffin barefoot. Cooper will likewise abandon the domestic life afforded by the social contract. He will briefly romance the widow Rachel; Fenton will mock him for wanting to marry her and settle down with cattle and kids, but that is not to be. He will pick up the marshal’s star and ride out to civilize the territory, bringing back more men for the hanging judge. He will do this at great risk, and will likely find his solace with prostitutes again, just as he did when he first came into Fort Grant. He will also not enjoy the benefits of the social contract though he will be sacrificed for it.

42

G. A. MOOTS

Fenton is a man guilt-ridden by his harsh verdicts. Fenton calls his initial death sentence for Jenkins, which Cooper protests, “kindling for my fire of justice.” He admits that he is making many mistakes in law. But for now, he must err on the side of being at least as harsh as the lynch mob. He tells Cooper “You can cuss me ‘til hell freezes over, or you can join me—even fight me. Help me turn this into a state.” Only then, Fenton argues, will one man no longer be the law. Only an appeals court and a governor can stand “between him and God Almighty” and correct his errors or pardon those judged. But until that happens, Fenton is storing up cases for himself on Judgment Day. Locke argues that when persons have no earthly judge to decide contests, they can only “Appeal to heaven,” which is where Fenton stands.25 Though he is an earthly judge of sorts, he has no one else to share the responsibility for his verdicts. As martyrs for the social contract, Doniphon, Cooper, and Fenton have to bear the moral burdens of the state of nature’s expediencies until the social contract may be established; Stoddard’s burden lasts much longer, however, because he knows that Doniphon and others were sacrificed for his benefit. Stoddard knows the truth about the social contract as well as they do. But whereas they probably fade away once it is established, he hypocritically leverages them for glory. It is likely the hope of unburdening himself of such an ignoble burden that led Stoddard to tell the truth to The Shinbone Star, the story that comprises almost the entire narrative of the film, even though that truth might have cost him his career. But the paper will not print it, the editor burning the story while speaking the now-famous line, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Ranse cannot be free of his reputation as “the man who shot Liberty Valance.” He had asked Tom earlier, “Isn’t it enough to kill a man without building a life on it?” Ranse has built a life on being someone that is supposed to end killing, but that reputation comes only by his own (presumed) killing of Valance. Not only must Ranse and Hallie live with the burden of Tom’s descent into oblivion, but they have also ushered in the virtues of the social contract only thanks to the vices of the state of nature. All of us are complicit, however. The editor’s reluctance to print the story reflects the silence of political theory on the inevitable realities of creating and preserving civilization. We, civilization’s beneficiaries must decide whether we will acknowledge such paradoxes—as many Westerns have done—or vainly keep them hidden.

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

43

Notes 1. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. 2. That contrast paints with an admittedly broad brush both Westerns themselves and American Indians. Many films challenged, even inverted that contrast outright, including Run of the Arrow, Dances with Wolves, A Man Called Horse. Avatar inverted this supposedly savage Other theme for an even broader audience. Long before revisionist Westerns, Roger Williams’s Key to the Language of America (1643) assigned some nobility to the Narraganset tribes while John Locke and others took a dimmer view of their civilization as something closer to the state of nature. 3. Some contend that most frontiers were settled only after law and order was established and reject an either–or of the wild frontier or law and order. See, for example, by Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 4. This idea of the Western frontier as a place of limitless possibility is reflected in 1883, for example. This prequel to the enormously popular Yellowstone television series has its character Elsa Dutton celebrate the freedom she feels on the edge of the frontier even while she is also also subjected to incredible brutality. The late political scientist Daniel Elazar who specialized in works concerning covenanting or contracting devoted significant attention to the idea of the frontier, including the perceptive insight that some lament its civilizing. He writes, “This is the tragedy of the frontiersmen, explorers, and pioneers who inevitably destroy what they love through their very successes. The people attracted to the frontier and successful on it normally are those who, as we have already suggested, are frontiersmen or pioneers; that is to say, those who have the qualities necessary for the frontier and who find the frontier experience exhilarating. As they succeed, however, they tame the frontier and remove their raison d’etre, ending up in the end at best as old folks reminiscing about a glorious past and at worst as people broken by their own successes.” Elazar notes that this theme is reflected in some of John Ford’s later Westerns starring John Wayne. See Daniel Elazar, “The Frontier as Chain Reaction,” https://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles2/ frontier.htm. Accessed February 12, 2022. 5. Exodus 19-24. 6. Plato, Crito, 49e-54c. 7. Plato, Gorgias, 489a-492d and Republic, 359a-b; 8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Chapter 13. Hobbes emphasizes how there seems to be no right or wrong in such a condition: “To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have

44

G. A. MOOTS

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his Senses, and Passions. They are Qualities, that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it.” Locke writes, “And if any one in the state of nature may punish another for any evil he has done, every one may do so: for in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.” John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689). See also Sections 7, 8, 19, 87, 181. Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), Book 1, Chapter 9 and Book 3, Chapter 5. John Rawls Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 5–6. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Original Edition) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 16. Hobbes in Chapter 13 writes, “The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them. And Reason suggesteth convenient Articles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement.” Locke, Second Treatise, Sections 104, 123. Elazar argues that Westerns through the first half of the twentieth century were “moralistic, recognizing the cooperation of the two kinds of liberty, natural liberty (in the state of nature) versus federal liberty (liberty under the social contract). He cites Liberty Valance as a Western that shows how some expression of natural liberty is necessary, but “only to bring about federal liberty.” He contrasts Ford’s outlook as the more “American” view with Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns reflecting what he considers Italian politics: private, individualistic, and cynical. Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Constitutionalism: The Great Frontier and the Matrix of Federal Democracy. The Covenant Tradition in Politics, vol. 3 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998). Lee Van Cleef who was one of Liberty Valance’s henchmen, was also in two of these Leone Westerns. It is not unreasonable to infer some irony in the name. There is liberty in the state of nature, and he takes full advantage of it. But in the state of nature, the difference between liberty and license is much more difficult

PRINT THE LEGEND: VIRTUE, VIOLENCE, AND THE SOCIAL …

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

45

to discern. Valance’s last name, the same word used for a short curtain, brings to mind Rawls’s “Veil of Ignorance” behind which justice is defined in the social contract. Rawls argues that behind the veil, we do not know who we will be in society. Hence, we willingly set terms establishing not just equality but also, where there is inequality, benefits of that inequality accruing to the least advantaged. Many of those who are least advantaged in Shinbone are most at the mercy of Valance. Insofar as Appleyard represents the older, failed system, we see the shadow of the train pass over him in the present-day scene. With the ascendancy of the social contract, the impotent Appleyard hasn’t been elected town marshal “in a dog’s age.” Such clever use of shadow in the beginning of the film was just the first of many clever uses of the fading media of black and white by Ford in Liberty Valance. For a discussion of proportionality in self-defense, see entry on “SelfDefense” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/self-defense/#Prop. Accessed February 15, 2022. For an overview of proportionality of proportionality in war, see Gary D. Brown (2003) Proportionality and Just War, Journal of Military Ethics, 2:3, 171–185. Locke, Second Treatise, Sections 18, 25. Ibid., Section 88. Mexicans or “Spanish-American Gentlemen,” as Peabody calls them, are otherwise segregated in the film. Hobbes, Leviathan, 13.4. The mental association with Dirty Harry is easier to make for the viewer insofar as Pat Hingle is cast as Judge Fenton. Hingle played characters alongside Eastwood in Callahan franchise films The Gauntlet and Sudden Impact. Locke, Second Treatise, Sections 241, 242.

John Ford’s Legendary Western Ambiguity and White Settler Colonialism Steven Johnston

I’ve killed more Indians that Custer, Beecher, and Chivington put together. —John Ford

White Western Mythology John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a profound meditation on the paradoxical phenomenon of political founding worthy of Machiavelli.1 In it, Ford tells the story of a democratic political community that comes into being thanks to the heroic intervention of an outsider, Ransom Stoddard, who happens to arrive in it one day, and effectively forces its citizens to be free. Though a lawyer dedicated to the state’s monopoly on violence, he achieves this remarkable feat by turning to the gun—a move he vowed never to make—and killing a famous, ruthless gunslinger who’d sold his talents to powerful forces representing a contending form of life determined to maintain the status quo. The fame

S. Johnston (B) Department of Political Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_4

47

48

S. JOHNSTON

generated by this brave man’s brave act catapulted him into a decadeslong political career that finds him on the verge of acquiring national power. As it turns out, however, the great champion of law and order was not quite so noble. The much-admired gunfight turned out to be a coldblooded murder committed by a third party, which was then covered up in the name of the greater good. When the full story seems on the verge of revelation some thirty years later, civic leaders decide it would-be best to bury it. The West needs its legends, and the community is the better for it. Ford’s film conveys a disconcerting political truth. The stories we tell ourselves to legitimate our foundings and inspire us in their aftermath are, at least in part, exercises in fiction to conceal their uglier aspects and facilitate a better future. Ford’s film conveys another truth, though not even critics, to my knowledge, ever put it this way: Valance is a story of violence by Whites, against Whites, for Whites. And it is precisely the intra-racial dimension that makes it tragic.2 Ironically, it is Dutton Peabody’s celebratory nomination speech for Stoddard on the floor of the territorial convention that inadvertently draws attention to the whiteness of the Western narrative. In nominating Stoddard, Peabody rehearses Ranse’s remarkable odyssey. Following Horace Greeley’s advice to seek fame, fortune, and adventure, he traveled west “carrying a bag of law books” rather than a gun. Peabody notes that Stoddard is a lawyer—and a teacher, the first “west of the Rosy Buttes.” Most important of all, however, Stoddard has recently come to the public’s attention as a “great champion of law and order.” With that short introduction—short because everyone in the territory knows he’s the man who shot Liberty Valance—Peabody places Stoddard’s name in the nomination. Peabody, of course, does not know the truth about Valance—nor does Stoddard at this point in the film, though he is just about to learn it. Nevertheless, it is the beginning of Peabody’s speech, usually overlooked, that is of interest here. In setting the stage for Stoddard, Peabody offers a brief history of the West and its settlement, a history that leads directly to this moment at the convention when the territory’s future will be decided. Initially responding to a rival nominating speech by a representative of the cattle interests, Peabody declaims: Under the spell of his eloquence, I could see once again the vast herd of buffalo and savage redskin roaming our beautiful territory with no law to

JOHN FORD’S LEGENDARY WESTERN AMBIGUITY …

49

trammel them except the law of survival, the law of the tomahawk and the bow and arrow. And then, with the westward march of our nation, came the pioneer and the buffalo hunter, the adventurous and the bold. The boldest of these were the cattlemen, who seized the wide-open range for their own personal domain, and their law was the law of the hired gun. But now, today, have come the railroads and the people. The steady, hardworking citizens, the homesteader, the shopkeeper, the builder of cities. We need roads to join those cities, dams to store up the waters of the Picketwire, and we need statehood to protect the rights of every man and woman, however humble.

Peabody’s history of the American West is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, he acknowledges that Native peoples were there first, though he can only describe them and their way of life in racist, violent terms (savage redskin, law of survival), thereby discounting them. Second, Native peoples were eventually dispossessed and displaced with the “westward march of our nation.” Our nation, not theirs. This is how their land became “our beautiful territory.” Peabody makes this westward march seem natural, inevitable, and even peaceful. Third, this reversal of fortune was executed by a daring collection of men who “seized the wide-open range for their own personal domain,” which means that Peabody’s initial acknowledgment, however tenuous, of a Native presence has been effectively withdrawn. The territory was waiting there for us to take it and make it our own. Fourth, just as the Indians were once removed and replaced, so the cattlemen must now be removed and replaced. They must give way to an inexorable future that is the culmination of a historical trajectory of advancement and civilization. In this new world order, the rights of everyone, not just the rich and powerful, will be secured. But not of Native Peoples, for they do not fall within this teleological dynamic. They represent, at best, a primitive stage of life that it was necessary to overcome to fulfill our manifest destiny. Fifth, while Peabody notes the past and its denizens, he does not lament their passing. There is no cause for regret or remorse. There is no sense of responsibility or indebtedness to those, especially mere savage redskins, who “lost” out and thereby made “our nation” possible. Ransom Stoddard helps provide the finishing touches to this worldhistorical drama of White western expansion and settlement. He is not the agent of Indian removal, but he is an agent of its consolidation. We thus turn to Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon for an illustration of how someone like Ransom Stoddard could find himself in a position to

50

S. JOHNSTON

do so many great things—for his White territory, his White state, and for White America. Stoddard knows a terrible price was paid for the founding he helped deliver. It included a murder, a cover-up, the destruction of a good man (Tom Doniphon, who saved Stoddard’s life by terminating Valance), and the form of life he embodied. The film induces a tragic sense of gratitude to Doniphon, a White man who sacrificed himself for the greater good of statehood, but the price that still haunts Stoddard in old age is negligible compared to the (perpetual) price inflicted on Native Peoples, which Liberty Valance unwittingly references in passing and then quickly erases.3

Forget Owen Thursday Fort Apache opens with the credits superimposed on scenes taken from the main part of the film. Though the celluloid is running, the film hasn’t actually begun. Ford alternates shots of the United States cavalry and Indians. The United States cavalry is shown in the field, on patrol, but also in the fort, dancing in elegant, martial fashion. These exhilarating shots are accompanied by uplifting, inspirational, and even merry music (including a snippet of “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”). Indians are shown on horseback, armed, traversing the same terrain, accompanied by music at once ominous, threatening, and punishing. Two peoples. One land. These juxtaposed shots establish competing moods. Whites are associated with life, liberty, and the good life. Indians are associated with death, fear, and more death. Nothing that subsequently transpires in the film can alter this initial sonic impression and affective frame. Following the opening sequence, Ford introduces Colonel Owen Thursday, the newly appointed commanding officer of Fort Apache, as he rides a stagecoach to his latest assignment. Thursday hates this remote part of the United States and he resents the posting. Having served in the Civil War with distinction, the former General Thursday believes the glory he seeks is being denied him. While the great Indian campaigns unfold elsewhere with the Sioux and Cheyenne, he is stuck with the inferior Apaches. Nevertheless, Thursday ultimately finds a way (or so he thinks) to achieve the renown he so desperately craves. Fort Apache, then, seems to be a film about Owen Thursday’s sojourn in the American southwest. Thursday, whatever his accomplishments in the Civil War, turns out to be a poor fit for this assignment. He thinks he can use his own officers for his own purposes and manipulate the Apache

JOHN FORD’S LEGENDARY WESTERN AMBIGUITY …

51

leader Cochise into returning to American soil and afterward the reservation—by force if necessary. Considering himself a brilliant strategist, he has no doubts his plan will work. His excessive confidence is bolstered by his visceral racism. He’s fighting Indians, not Robert E. Lee. Thursday’s bid for fame and prestige ends in predictable disaster—for himself and the regiment (at least initially, if not posthumously). Underestimating the enemy and ignoring the advice of his more experienced junior officers, he is killed along with the entirety of his attack force. Prior to this shocking sequence, Fort Apache documents the entrenchment of White settler colonialism in the American Southwest. Much of the film revolves around the would-be romance of Thursday’s daughter and a young officer at the fort. This courtship, which signifies the allimportant reproduction of White life in a colonial setting, can develop thanks to a curious military fact about the film: despite the grave threat supposedly posed by Indians, the fort is never attacked, let alone menaced.4 There is thus more than enough time for the predominant activities: decorating soldiers’ row houses and dancing. Fort Apache’s famous closing sequence, with similarities to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, merits close scrutiny given its complicated confirmation of White settler colonialism masquerading as a critique of American militarism (or at least an extreme racist version of it). Following Thursday’s doomed assault on Cochise and the Apaches, now Colonel York has taken command of the regiment. This corrects the mistake made in the film’s opening when Thursday, an officer utterly unqualified for this particular command, was given charge of Fort Apache. Despite Thursday’s suicidal decision, he has become a legendary figure, a hero to schoolboys across the country. A famous painting of his attack hangs in Washington honoring and celebrating it. It seems, then, that Thursday’s new status, cemented by a posthumous promotion to general, rests on a lie and a cover-up. Leland Poague, however, thinks this unlikely. Rewriting history in such a radical fashion would have required the conspiratorial participation of too many witnesses for whom lying would have been uncharacteristic. Moreover, Poague argues, exposing Thursday’s responsibility for the needless slaughter of his men, given the “military fiasco of the Civil War,” would hardly have constituted a scandal. Poague asks: “Isn’t it more likely that York and the others told the truth and it didn’t matter a whit, neither to the press nor to the War Department?”5

52

S. JOHNSTON

Poague’s account of what came to be known as Thursday’s Charge, however, does not fully capture the event. Thursday’s plan seemed to be going well—except for one thing. Cochise anticipated the White man’s treachery and had his forces deployed accordingly.6 Thus, Thursday decided, if reluctantly, to meet with Cochise after all, which York had arranged at his request. Despite agreeing to talk with Cochise, Thursday, who sits on a portable stool for the parley, is rather impatient and wants to get on with things. Cochise speaks first. He proudly informs Thursday that the Apaches are a great nation and have never been conquered. Still, perpetual war is unacceptable, however warranted. Its price is exorbitant. Cochise is committed to peace, but not given the conditions under which they were forced to live and that led them to leave the reservation in the first place. Cochise identifies the sutler Meacham as the reason for their departure. “He is worse than war.” His well-established corruption represents “slow death” for the Apaches. Cochise will talk peace, but not with Meacham or if Meacham (or anyone like him) is involved with Indian affairs. Otherwise, there will be war. Thursday does not balk at this precondition. But Cochise has not finished. He knows that Thursday tried to trick and trap him. The evidence, Thursday’s regiment, is right in front of him. He thus informs Thursday that if there is war, ten White men will die for every one of his people killed. Cochise even takes a step closer to Thursday as he issues this violent promise. This is too much for Thursday to bear (even if Cochise could not possibly make good on his vow). Rising from his folding stool, he demands to know if Cochise is threatening them. Though York advises him not to interrupt Cochise, Thursday insists that he won’t just sit there and be threatened. Through an interpreter, he insults Cochise, telling him that he finds him to be without honor. More importantly, he informs Cochise that he’s not threatening Thursday but the United States government and that government orders him to return to the reservation. If he and his people do not start back by dawn, he, Thursday, will attack. Since Cochise cannot be bullied, the attack is inevitable. Thursday’s indignant response to Cochise’s pronouncement precipitates the famous charge. With its (military) credibility at stake, no sovereign nation, or its representative, is likely to respond well to intimidation. Add the racial dynamic in which Thursday presumes, embodies, and performs White superiority, and war is guaranteed. Thursday might

JOHN FORD’S LEGENDARY WESTERN AMBIGUITY …

53

have been outgunned 4 to 1, but the numbers can only add to his honor and bravery. Besides, Thursday had mocked York for being unduly impressed by numbers and for making it sound like Cochise had studied with Alexander the Great or Napoleon. To Thursday, they are irrelevant. It is inconceivable to him that he could be defeated by an Indian—under any circumstances.7 Thursday merely needs to assert his will to power for it to be enacted. His virulent racism made him blind to the military realities on the ground, but insofar as the larger culture he represents shares in this blindness he won’t be held accountable for it. Rather, he is going to be celebrated for standing up to Cochise, for refusing to allow the United States to be humiliated, especially by Indians, our racial inferior. How different are Thursday and York? In the closing office scene, York dons Thursday’s kepi before heading out the door to initiate what is likely to be a “long campaign” against the Apaches. Still, Poague assumes York won’t mindlessly repeat Thursday’s “blunders,” but will follow his own principles and instincts, perhaps taking a less militaristic approach to induce capitulation and surrender. “But this positive reading of York’s likely actions, far from resolving the film’s tension, only serves to emphasize a quality of grim determination.”8 There is nothing particularly positive about Poague’s reading of York. Thursday is, in many respects, a distraction. His greatest failing was that he interrupted, disrupted, the relatively smooth machinery of White settler colonialism, as did Meacham, if in a different fashion. Thursday is an egregious figure—and not just for his vehement, visceral racism—but it is York who poses the real threat to the Apaches.9 He knows that a war of attrition is called for, an approach that can also accommodate a negotiated settlement—on terms always already dictated by Whites, for Whites. York is precisely the right man for a long war.10 In the closing sequence, several years have elapsed since Thursday’s demise. Mickey O’Rourke and Philadelphia Thursday (General Thursday’s daughter) have married and produced a son, who is several years old. Apparently, York has been waging war against the Apaches all this time. He may not know when the war will come to an end, but he has no doubt about its ultimate outcome. Nor does he have any doubts about its rightness.11 Cochise and the Apaches were treated unjustly on the reservation, and it is perfectly understandable that they left. But they still belong on the reservation. York is fighting a war of containment and control. Wherever White people go, possession of property follows in their wake. Poague writes

54

S. JOHNSTON

that “the cost of regimental life is the regular risk of it in campaigning against the likes of Geronimo.” The “grimness” that results is what supposedly accounts for the “unexpected fervor” with which “Mickey and Philadelphia embrace…as if aware of the dangers he will soon face.”12 It might be more apt to say that the condition of possibility of White life is the regular risk of Indian life, which is perhaps why the embrace in question seems rather tame and lacking in fervor. It seems an expression of fatigue more than anything else. After all, O’Rourke has been doing this for years now, leaving his young family behind.13 But he always returns and this time he is assigned responsibility for looking after the Eastern reporters that will be accompanying the regiment. York would hardly agree to such an embedding if he thought the reporters were likely to get killed. Imagine the embarrassing publicity that might generate. He also wouldn’t endanger young O’Rourke’s life—not after Thursday spared it so he could marry his daughter. York is not about to undo Thursday’s unexpected familial and communal gesture.14 The York character is often subjected to withering criticism for promoting, or at least not debunking, the emergent Thursday legend with the reporters about to accompany him on his next mission.15 To some extent, this is unfair. Admittedly, in York’s office, he has constructed a memorial-cum-monument to Thursday, including a sizeable portrait of Thursday in uniform, the guidon of B Troop that Cochise returned after killing Thursday and all of his men, and a plaque on which his sword is mounted.16 One of the reporters, gazing at the portrait and stroking the saber, says, solemnly, “He must have been a great man…and a great soldier.” York will have none of it. He looks away from the reporter with a somewhat disgusted look and asserts that “no man died more gallantly,” which York can believe insofar as Thursday could have survived the battle but chose, again ignoring York’s counsel, to rejoin the last remnant of his men and die with them. He finishes the sentence by also claiming that no man “won more honor for his regiment,” which he can also believe given the mythmaking that has surrounded his death and the “heroic charge.” York, then, is not lying (exactly), nor is he challenging the Thursday fiction, which has become hard truth for a country apparently in need of heroes. York is no doubt keenly aware that these reporters, Thursday groupies, would have no interest in hearing the truth about him. What’s more, they wouldn’t be able to hear it. When a second reporter gushes in detail about Thursday’s portrait in Washington, which falsifies the attack, York responds that it is “correct in every detail.” He could be referring

JOHN FORD’S LEGENDARY WESTERN AMBIGUITY …

55

to the reporter’s description of the portrait rather than the battle itself. Either way, York has imperial business to conduct. And since Geronimo is now the target, presumably Cochise has been neutralized. Besides, who said the painter had any interest in historical accuracy? Thursday’s Charge sounds were designed to convey the spirit of the operation, which was to defend the honor and dignity of the United States, the spirit that refused to be threatened by (mere) Indians. York no doubt realizes that the creation of the Thursday legend has made it easier to garner resources from Washington to fight the low-intensity war against the Apaches, which is good for the regiment and his men, which are York’s main focus. When the reporter has last seen fondling Thursday’s sword laments the attention Thursday receives at the expense of the others who fought, died, and were forgotten, York insists they haven’t been forgotten. As long as the regiment lives, they live, too, and it is the regiment that matters most because it allows the continuation of the Indian containment policy. The ongoing war against the Apaches thus honors the sacrifice of those who gave their lives for the country and its manifest destiny—and thereby justifies its continuation. York is an agent of that destiny, and he always was—his appreciation for Cochise as a leader of his people and a warrior notwithstanding.17

Beware Nathan Brittles She Wore a Yellow Ribbon takes place in the early summer of 1876, perhaps a handful of years after the events depicted in Fort Apache. “Custer is dead,” an anonymous and grave voice-over announces as the film begins, along with 212 of his men. The Sioux and Cheyenne are on the warpath. The shocking news of the Custer massacre is transmitted by “military telegraph” to the desert frontier where “one hundred settlements and one-thousand farms” find themselves “under threat from an Indian uprising.” This means that the entire colonial enterprise is in doubt: “one more such defeat as Custer’s” and it will be “another hundred years before another wagon train” would “dare” to head west across the plains. We watch as anxious White families receive Eastern papers via stagecoach and Pony Express. From Canada to Texas, ten thousand Indians from all the great tribes, we are told, have joined in a “common war against the United States cavalry.” Enter Captain Nathan Brittles. He is second in command at Fort Starke, located somewhere in the far regions of the southwest. The lack

56

S. JOHNSTON

of menace that characterized Fort Apache also informs life at Fort Starke. This enables Brittles to visit his wife’s plot daily (to water the flowers and tell her about his day) in a suspiciously small cemetery just outside the fort. Brittles lost her and their two daughters over the space of a few days some nine years before the action in the film. There is no indication that the deaths were Indian-related. The size of the cemetery suggests the success of the colonial enterprise comes with minimal cost—to Whites, anyway. The attention the film devotes to Brittles’s cemetery ritual signals the White presumption of land ownership. This is our country. And unlike Whites, Indians are never shown with their dead—not to mourn or bury them (or even retrieve them after a battle). In fact, Indian life is not portrayed at all. There are no scenes of White settlers in either film either, but while the cavalry is supposedly there to maintain a prior negotiated “peace,” those who serve in it are settlers, too. Indian life, however, given its inferiority, its lack of legitimacy, warrants no screen time, especially since they have left, illegally, the reservation. Thus, each film effectively normalizes White settler colonialism by depicting the quotidian doings of White family and home life, the interruption of which by Indian uprisings (never insurrections or rebellions) cannot be tolerated. In response to the existential threat posed by the collective Indian uprising, Major Allshard, Brittles’s commanding officer, orders Brittles to drive the Cheyenne dog soldiers north. Complicating Brittles’s task is a second undertaking. He’s to escort Major Allshard’s wife and niece to the stage depot so they can take a coach back East to safety. Brittles fails in both assignments. In order to protect the women, Brittles can’t engage Indians. In order to avoid the Indians, he can’t get the women to the stage depot in time which, in the interim, is attacked and the couple who ran it are killed. Brittles returns to Fort Starke feeling somewhat disgraced, though he was placed in an impossible position with incompatible assignments. As the film moves toward its conclusion, it looks like Brittles will ride reluctantly into the proverbial sunset, heading west to California and its “new settlements.” Not surprisingly, Brittles concocts two plans, one dependent on the fate of the other, to redeem himself and avert a war. If the first plan fails, he has a backup ready and waiting. Brittles pays a visit to Indian Chief Pony That Walks. The two talk about the need for peace, but Pony That Walks admits the young warriors do not listen to him. He can do nothing to help Brittles. As if expecting such an answer, Brittles leaves quickly. There is another possibility.

JOHN FORD’S LEGENDARY WESTERN AMBIGUITY …

57

With his official retirement just minutes away, Brittles enlists twenty of his men for a late-night raid on an Indian encampment where 900 war-hungry warriors have assembled. They make a wild charge to scatter Indian horses and render an attack impossible. Enjoying the element of surprise, Brittles’s commandos succeed—without a single casualty. Brittles then instructs his men to follow the Indians, at a respectful distance of one mile, back to the reservation. Brittles informs them that Indians don’t like to walk and they won’t like being surveilled as they retreat. Each is a humiliation. But war has been averted.18 Ford’s presentation of Brittles’s daring raid channels the prejudice we saw at work in Fort Apache, where the Indians couldn’t successfully time their attack against a repair wagon and paid a terrible price for it. In this scene, it appears the Indians can’t even take basic security measures to protect their encampment, including their horses, from a possible attack while they sleep. Even with patrols from Fort Starke a routine occurrence, this possibility does not occur to them. What’s more, as Brittles and his men gallop through the encampment, with the stampeding horses just ahead of them, the Indians can’t manage to kill one of them, not even firing at point-blank range. As White soldiers outthink and outperform their Indian counterparts, Brittles’ implausibly successful mission strips Indians of their agency.19 They do not act. The uprising never materializes. They can only react—too late—to its subversion. The ominous warnings issued at the beginning of the film turn out to be overblown and melodramatic. White settler colonialism was never in any danger, for its opponents are powerless—angry but impotent. Captain Brittles deftly implements the containment policy that Colonel Thursday could not. His neat trick is the kind of maneuver that allows Ford, to borrow Sue Matheson’s formulation, to display “the high ethical standards of the military,” featuring “moral individuals who function within an ethical system.”20 Pace Matheson, what Ford ultimately delivers in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, even if the result is largely obscured in Fort Apache because of the aberrant Thursday, is the ascendancy of White settler colonialism with a human face. In Ford’s very late work, Ransom Stoddard’s face. And who was Ransom Stoddard, in the end? He was the beloved founder who felt terrible guilt for taking credit for killing Valance in a gunfight to end the cattle interests’ reign of terror yet was indifferent to the long history of cleansing racial violence that made his storied career as territorial delegate, congressman, governor, United States senator, Ambassador to Great Britain, would-be vice president, in

58

S. JOHNSTON

other words, as founder, possible in the first place. This is a debt he cannot see let alone make good, which is why it must be erased, and he is the stuff of legend. White legend.

Notes 1. The Machiavelli of The Discourses, that is. 2. Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington argue that Stoddard’s confession “allows us to see the historical process…as a tragedy which subsumes both heroes and villains into a vast, inexorable scheme.” What they don’t mention is that the historical process presented to us is an exclusively White tragedy. Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, John Ford (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1975), 188–189. 3. This is not Liberty Valance’s only instance of color-based erasure based. The film is likewise blind to Blacks. Tom Doniphon is dead when the film starts, but his running mate Pompey lives on—impoverished, homeless. This is no way to treat a founder. Pompey was excluded from the community he helped bring into being through his capacity for violence, intervening to help rescue Ranse’s nomination to the territorial convention, which Valance was determined to steal. Despite all the risks he took for statehood, Pompey was not rewarded with citizenship. And for keeping Stoddard’s secret, an act of civic virtue, he, too, did not receive a thank you. But who mourns for Pompey? The vibrant Spanish-American community in Liberty Valance also seems to have disappeared on the pacified streets of contemporary Shinbone. 4. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon also features a romance, which one contemporary critic deemed “incidental” to the film. But this kind of cinematic preoccupation is part of White settler colonialism’s normalization. See Dudley Early, The Austin American-Statesman, November 5, 1949, https://newspaperarchive.com/entertainment-clipping-nov-051949-1819415/. 5. Leland Poague, “‘All I Can See Is the Flags’: ‘Fort Apache’ and the Visibility of History,” Cinema Journal 27(2): 17, Winter 1988. Poague is correct that the Civil War plays a crucial, if understated, role in the film, but it does not involve its problematic, even incompetent conduct by Union forces. Rather, the divisions that led to the war have been overcome and a fraternal spirit of unity is in evidence. Many ex-Confederate officers now serve in the United States cavalry. This is true in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. In the latter, a former Confederate general served as an enlisted man under an assumed name. When he is killed in the line of duty, Captain Nathan Brittles allows him to be buried with a make-shift version of the Confederate battle flag, the symbol of White

JOHN FORD’S LEGENDARY WESTERN AMBIGUITY …

59

supremacy, which the commanding officer’s wife sewed for the occasion. North and South, once the most bitter enemies, find themselves happily (re)united in the face of a common and hated racial enemy. The Civil War is not still being fought in either film. This is why Douglas Pye’s claim that “the trilogy [including Rio Grande) is permeated throughout by a sense of disrupted careers and disturbed lives” skips the larger point of what Richard Slotkin calls regeneration through violence.). Sue Matheson contends that North–South relations revolve around “the warrior ethos of Christian virtue and courtly manners,” but such a reading takes whiteness for granted. Douglas Pye, “Genre and History,” 3; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); Sue Matheson, The Westerns and War Films of John Ford (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 174, 172. 6. Thursday is confident his plan will work since earlier in the film he had tricked a band of Indians into attacking a small repair party working on the telegraph. I mention this episode because Ford’s filming of the sequence is troubling. The Indians watch from a nearby ridge as the soldiers hightail it back to the fort, but rather than cut them off and kill them they let the soldiers pass and then give chase. As a result, they lose several men, the cavalry loses none, and then the rest of the Indians are killed or captured when Thursday arrives as planned. Yet the Indians, skilled fighters, would never have let the soldiers ride right past them. Nor would they have continued the attack when they realized it was a trap. To present this scenario as plausible or believable is to attribute to the Apaches an inferior intelligence, even stupidity, compared to White ingenuity. When The New York Times movie critic Bosley Crowther reviewed the film, he noted “its new comprehension of frontier history,” reflecting a “new and maturing viewpoint.” Thus, “here it is not the ‘heathen Indian’ who is the ‘heavy’ of the piece but a hard-bitten colonel.” Perhaps, but this does not mean racism doesn’t find expression in other forms, as indicated above. Bosley Crowther, “‘Fort Apache,’ RKO Western, With Fonda, Wayne, and Temple, Bill at Capitol,” The New York Times, June 25, 1948, https://www.nytimes.com/1949/11/18/archives/shewore-a-yellow-ribbon-at-capitol-stars-john-wayne-as-a-cavalry.html. Matheson attributes Thursday’s initial success to being “fortunate.” Matheson, The Westerns and War Films of John Ford, 149. 7. Matheson alternately insults and pathologizes Thursday. She attributes the attack to “stupidity” and “idiocy.” She also refers to Thursday as a “madman” suffering from a “psychosis,” which tends to undercut the role that racism plays in Thursday and the blindness it induces. Interestingly, when York tries to dissuade Thursday from the reckless course of action he is

60

S. JOHNSTON

8. 9.

10.

11.

hellbent on taking, Thursday orders him to the ridge in the rear with the supply wagons. York is enraged and challenges Thursday to a duel. York would kill Thursday for his insult, but won’t kill him to stop his charge and save the regiment. Is this because though York disagrees with Thursday’s tactics, he has no issue with the policy underlying it? In other words, York’s problem with Thursday is not that he’s an agent of violent White settler colonialism. It’s that Thursday is an ineffective, even self-defeating, agent of it. But, finally, he won’t kill him for it. Matheson, 147–148, 151–152, 159. Poague, “‘All I Can See Is the Flags’: ‘Fort Apache’ and the Visibility of History,” 19–20. McBride and Wilmington offer an interesting take on Fort Apache’s conclusion, revealing the film’s common-sense racism that often passes undetected: “[York] lies to cover up [Thursday’s] misdeeds…because the greater truth, known only to the men themselves, is their loyalty to each other and their country. It is, as Russell Campbell has commented, ‘the noble lie of Plato’s philosopher-king,’ but it is also, more simply, an expression of camaraderie, a protective action toward an erring family member.” There is nothing noble about this alleged Platonic lie. It is not issued for the good of all, but for White people in a multiracial nation they refuse to share except on imperial terms that confine Indians to openair prisons known as reservations. The “erring member of the family” had needlessly endangered the American colonial project, but it is a project they all shared. The error was in method not aspiration. McBride and Wilmington, John Ford, 98, emphases mine. Poague writes of York: “[He] is perfectly happy to remain at Fort Apache on an extended basis, where Thursday was desperate to leave.” Poague, “‘All I Can See Is the Flags’: ‘Fort Apache’ and the Visibility of History,” 17. This is not to York’s credit: he is an agent of violent White settler colonialism and its normalization. Slotkin argues: “Fort Apache is less an America-in-microcosm than a utopian idealization of America as it ought to have been.” What he does not say is that it would have been a very White utopia, which is what drove the “idealistic war aims.” Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, 340, 343. Robert Pippin damns York for indulging “in a grotesque glorification” of Thursday’s disastrous assault and for assuming “the imperialist and heartless task of defeating the Indians.” Pippin also insists that given Ford’s portrait of Thursday, “Ford means this to be deeply troubling and tragic,” contrary to those who “seem to believe that Ford is insisting that such a lie and such blindness to the human costs of empire are all necessary or even good.” To those who articulate such a perspective, he can only recommend that they “see more Ford movies.” Even if Pippin is right,

JOHN FORD’S LEGENDARY WESTERN AMBIGUITY …

12. 13.

14.

15.

61

Ford’s sense of the tragic seems to take the form of (mere) resignation, which is why the opposition Pippin posits between Ford and his critics disappears upon closer inspection. White settler colonialism and Native American sovereignty represent incommensurable goods, and for all of York’s sympathy for the Indians he privileges the first, which is superior, at the expense of the second. Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 170. Poague, “‘All I Can See Is the Flags’: ‘Fort Apache’ and the Visibility of History,” 20. Perhaps it’s taken years because, as Ford’s spectacular shots of the rugged and imposing mountain terrain indicate, conquering White soldiers in their dark heavy uniforms don’t belong there as such. Unlike those they hunt, they are not part of something larger. Pointing to the film’s conclusion, in which Philadelphia O’Rourke, now married to Michael O’Rourke and holding their young son of several years, watches Colonel York depart for another round of ethnic cleansing, McBride and Wilmington write of “the likelihood of [the] young father’s death—and with the implication that the young child may grow up only to meet the same fate as his forefathers.” This presumably tragic prophecy is White narcissism, rendering the perpetrators of White settler colonialism its (perpetual) victims. Lieutenant O’Rourke has been conducting search, capture, and destroy missions for years without repercussions. This war is not going to last another twenty years. It is coming to an end, thanks to the skills of all the military’s Kirby Yorks. McBride and Wilmington, John Ford, 103. Robin Wood argues that despite York’s mimicry of Thursday and duplicity regarding his record, when it comes to York’s military campaign, “the film seems…solidly behind him…It is extremely difficult to detect any irony in the tone of the last scene, Wayne’s abrupt…capitulation to the kind of fascist policy and outlook the rest of the film seemed to have been criticizing…Certainly, the ending does violence to the previous development of the Wayne character and to the whole drift of the preceding narrative.” Not if you think of Colonel Thursday as a needless and counterproductive interruption to the patient, steady ethnic cleansing York was overseeing with quiet efficiency before Thursday arrived. Likewise, Pye’s claim that for most of the film “York…has stood for values almost opposite to those of Thursday,” misses the mark. Regarding military protocol, this may be true. Regarding the ultimate fate of Indians, it is not. This is why Kirby’s apparent “volte face” at film’s end isn’t really a turnabout. Robin Wood, “Shall We Gather at the River? The Late Films of John Ford,” Film Comment 7(3): 10, Fall 1971; Pye, “Genre and History,” 6, 7.

62

S. JOHNSTON

16. Thursday lost his sword in the initial charge. He confiscated York’s for his last stand, but promptly lost it, too. (He is last scene firing a pistol lent to him by Sergeant O’Rourke.) It might be York’s sword. It might be Captain Collingwood’s sword (he also perished). Or it might be a random replacement sword procured just for the monument. 17. McBride and Wilmington conclude their analysis of Fort Apache thus: its “remarkable achievement…is that it enables us to see…that an insane system may be perpetuated by noble men, and indeed, that it needs noble and dedicated men to perpetuate itself.” The system to which they refer is anything but insane. Rather, it is ruthless and relentless (if not always efficient). And there is nothing noble about the men who perpetuate it. The perpetuation strips them of any nobility. It does need their dedication, however, and this they can provide because they share the closing sentiments of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which expresses the ideology of whiteness as property: “wherever they rode, and whatever they fought for, their place became the United States.” McBride and Wilmington, John Ford, 109. 18. As Dudley Early wrote at the time, “the ending is too convenient, needing some explanation where there is none.” Early, Austin American Statesman. 19. Matheson overlooks the White monopolization of agency. Noting again and again Brittles’s role as “the sword of destiny,” perhaps she takes it for granted. Assertions of Indian agency are problematically linked to the figure of the sutler, which is demonized. Occupying a government position designed in theory to assist the Indians with adjusting to and surviving life on the reservation, the sutlers pursue their own self-interest and exploit the Indians. In Fort Apache, Meacham is the source of alcohol devastating Native Peoples. In both films, the sutlers sell Indians guns, top-of-the-line rifles. This illegal transaction suggests that an armed Indian is by definition illegitimate. They are not supposed to possess (these) guns. Ironically, it is the sutlers, whatever their motives, that enable the Indians to defend themselves and their interests—which are supposedly guaranteed by treaty—against an overwhelming opponent. The provision of rifles does not render them militarily equal to the United States cavalry, but it does seriously enhance their (fire)power. The demonization of Meacham and Rynders (the sutler in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) indicates that Indians are not to be the sovereign equals of Whites, capable of self-determination by whatever means necessary. Matheson callously remarks that “Rynders receives a well-deserved arrow in the chest.” Even Cochise’s destruction of Thursday proceeds from a defensive posture. It is a reaction to Thursday’s initiative, one last victory in a historical trajectory that marginalizes and

JOHN FORD’S LEGENDARY WESTERN AMBIGUITY …

63

erases his people. Matheson, The Westerns and War Films of John Ford, 175. 20. Matheson, The Westerns and War Films of John Ford, 176, 177.

“This Is Our Town”: Political Community in High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Damien K. Picariello

According to Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker, “The Western is intrinsically the most political movie genre, because, like Plato’s ‘Republic,’ it is concerned with the founding of cities…” The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by John Ford and released in 1962, is, according to Brody, “the greatest American political movie.”1 Brody’s assertion is striking because when we think of politically charged Westerns, we are apt to think, not of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, but rather of High Noon, directed by Fred Zinnemann and released in 1952.2 It is High Noon, after all, that John Wayne called “‘the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,’” adding “that he’d ‘never regret having helped run’” Carl Foreman, the film’s writer and an alleged communist, “‘out of the country.’” The famed director Howard Hawks was so disgusted by High Noon that he teamed up with Wayne to make the film Rio Bravo, released in 1959, out of the desire to “make a western with the precisely opposite point of view.”3 With great respect for Hawks’ intention, this paper nonetheless pairs High Noon, not with Rio Bravo, but rather with The Man Who Shot

D. K. Picariello (B) University of South Carolina Sumter, Sumter, SC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_5

65

66

D. K. PICARIELLO

Liberty Valance.4 Both High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance feature communities located at “the archetypal frontier between civilization and barbarism.”5 Ford’s film appears here as an answer to Zinnemann’s, revealing a cinematic conversation about questions central to the American political community. The two films ask: What is the status of justice in a political community based on self-interested individualism? How does justice come to such a community, and how might it be maintained?6 To bring out the answers to these questions offered by our two films, we’ll turn to two accounts of political community drawn from the history of political thought: Those of Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes. I. “I’m No Lawman…I Just Live Here” High Noon begins with a marriage: Will Kane, the Marshal of a town called Hadleyville, weds his much younger fiancé, Amy. Kane, we learn, is turning in his badge because of his wife’s Quaker faith. As soon as the wedding concludes, Kane and Amy plan to ride out of town; Hadleyville, the townspeople are sure, will survive without a marshal for a single night until Kane’s replacement arrives. The town judge performs the ceremony, and the pair celebrates with friends. Kane hangs up his marshal’s star. Then startling news arrives: Frank Miller, a notorious outlaw brought to justice by Kane, has been released from prison and will be arriving at the Hadleyville station on the noon train. His gang is already assembled and waiting for him. It’s clear that when he arrives in Hadleyville, he’ll be coming for Kane. Kane’s friends urge him to leave town immediately, and he does: He’s not the marshal anymore, after all. But before long—and against Amy’s wishes—he turns back. “They’re making me run,” he tells his new wife: “I’ve never run from anybody before.” Amy doesn’t understand, but Kane feels compelled to return, for reasons he can’t fully explain. “I’ve got to,” he says, “that’s the whole thing…” Kane sets out to round up a posse, and Amy—confused, worried, and angry—declares her intent to leave Hadleyville on the noon train, with or without her husband. Will’s nervousness during his wedding makes it clear that he’s not immune to fear, and as the film progresses, his unease grows. Nevertheless, he’s determined to do what he feels he needs to—what he believes to be right—even as the odds against him grow. Hadleyville’s residents, meanwhile, have mixed reactions to the approaching showdown. The barkeep at the local tavern anticipates a “big day” when he

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

67

sees that Miller’s gang has assembled; the town’s barber (and, apparently, coffin-supplier) urges his coffin-maker to “get busy” when he sees Kane returning to town after initially leaving with Amy. These men see opportunity in the violence to come and seem not to scruple over profiting from it. Some of the townspeople are looking forward to the day’s entertainment: The desk clerk at the local hotel says that the gunfight to come will be “quite a sight to see.” The same clerk later informs Amy that at least some of Hadleyville’s residents don’t care for the Marshal’s devotion to the law. “There’s plenty people around here,” he says, “think he’s got a comeuppance coming.” But it’s not them that Kane is counting on. “This is my town,” he tells Amy, “I’ve got friends here.” Kane expects to round up enough men that “maybe there won’t even be any trouble.” Yet over the course of the next hour, Kane encounters disappointment after disappointment. The good people of Hadleyville, and even his closest friends, refuse to come to his aid. Will Kane, it seems, is the only man in town willing to risk his life for law and justice.7 This pessimistic picture of human beings in a situation of stress and danger surely accounts for much of the film’s political charge. But from the perspective of Thomas Hobbes, this kind of behavior is to be expected. Borrowing from Hobbes’ Leviathan, we might say that as the threat of violence from Miller’s gang grows nearer, the residents of Hadleyville move closer to the “Naturall Condition” of human beings— the state of nature—since the power that protects them, which protection removes them from their natural condition, is under threat.8 After all, it was to escape the “continuall feare, and danger of violent death” characteristic of the state of nature that Hadleyville’s residents formed a political community governed by law.9 Death, and particularly violent death, is the “summum malum”—the ultimate evil—the fear of which is “the only absolute standard by reference to which man may coherently order his life.”10 Ordering their lives in such a way as to mitigate this fear, the residents of Hadleyville joined together in a political community, in order “to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men,” and to obtain “such things as are necessary to commodious living.”11 But when this protection is in question, it is not surprising that the people of Hadleyville balk at risking their lives for the sake of either the law or its enforcer. Even Hobbes, who insists on near-absolute obedience of subjects to their ruler, admits: “The Obligation of Subjects to the

68

D. K. PICARIELLO

Soveraign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them.”12 Hobbes is certainly cognizant of this “High Noon problem,” which is perhaps why he takes pains to say: And when the Defence of the Common-wealth, requireth at once the help of all that are able to bear Arms, every one is obliged; because otherwise the Institution of the Common-wealth, which they have not the purpose, or courage to preserve, was in vain.13

But it seems as though Hobbes’ argument here undoes itself. If men must be asked to risk their lives in order to defend the commonwealth, then its institution seems to have been in vain, whether or not they defend it, since it was instituted in order to prevent men from having to risk their lives. This is perhaps why Hobbes also admits that when soldiers flee from the field of battle out of fear, “they are not esteemed to do it unjustly, but dishonourably. For the same reason, to avoid battell, is not Injustice, but Cowardise.”14 After all, “man by nature chooseth the lesser evill,” which is always the evil that places him furthest from death.15 In Hadleyville, we’re presented with a picture of the state of nature and the political community, not as an either-or proposition, but as shades on a continuum. While the security of their community holds steady, the people of Hadleyville behave as good citizens with a healthy regard for law and justice. But as that security comes into question, they slide closer and closer to acting in ways more proper to the state of nature than the political community, seeing to their own individual preservation and advantage rather than the maintenance of communal justice. Rather than committing themselves against all odds to the defense of law and order, each resident of Hadleyville seems to calculate, for himself, where his advantage lies. As the film moves forward, we find ourselves witnessing a Hobbesian moment in which the bonds of political community fray and tear, making a pre-political state of nature visible through the cracks. This is a surprise to Kane, to be sure, but not to others. We learn this early in the film when Kane goes to see Mettrick, the local Justice of the Peace and the friend who’d officiated his marriage just a short time earlier. Mettrick’s “intuition” tells him that Kane won’t be able to round up a posse to stand against Miller. In the face of these conclusions, he’s decided to leave town ahead of Miller’s revenge. “Have you forgotten,”

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

69

Mettrick asks Kane, “that I’m the man who passed sentence on Frank Miller?” Kane is both confused and disappointed. “No time for a lesson in civics,” Mettrick tells him, and then relates the following story: In the fifth century, BC the citizens of Athens, having suffered grievously under a tyrant, managed to depose and banish him. However, when he returned some years later with an army of mercenaries, those same citizens not only opened the gates for him but stood by while he executed members of the legal government. A similar thing happened about eight years ago in a town called Indian Falls. I escaped there only through the intercession of a lady of somewhat dubious reputation, at the cost of a very handsome ring that once belonged to my mother.

As he tells his story, Mettrick removes the American flag from the wall of his office, folds it up, and packs it into his briefcase. He then removes the scales of justice, and places them, too, in his pack. The message and the image are clear: Mettrick expects that the residents of Hadleyville will not put their lives on the line to defend justice against Miller and his gang, just as the Athenians refused to defend their lawful government against tyrannical violence. The judge will therefore leave town, taking law and order with him. “I’ve been a judge many times in many towns,” Mettrick explains, “and I hope to live to be a judge again.” The judge’s authority—indeed, law and justice themselves—are meaningless in the face of violence. To believe otherwise, Mettrick tells Kane, is “stupid.” Kane is disappointed but not discouraged: He believes that the Judge Mettrick is an anomaly, and that the townspeople—and especially his friends—will rally to his defense, as well as to the defense of justice. This belief is reinforced when Kane’s friend Herb Baker shows up and enthusiastically volunteers to help, recalling Kane’s service to Hadleyville. Baker: Kane: Baker:

You cleaned this town up, you made it fit for women and kids to live in. Miller nor nobody else will ever drag it down again. I was hoping people would feel that way. What other way is there?

This is at least one bright spot—for the time being. The rest of Kane’s morning is distinctly less encouraging. When Kane visits his friend Sam Fuller’s house, Fuller, who sees the Marshal coming, has his wife tell Kane

70

D. K. PICARIELLO

that he isn’t home. Mrs. Fuller helps her husband hide from Kane, but she’s conflicted—one version of the film’s script says she’s “in agony” as she speaks with Kane at the front door, and then “torn, miserable, bewildered” as Kane leaves and Sam comes out of hiding.16 Her husband sees this and says: Fuller:

Well, what do you want? You want me to get killed? You want to be a widow? Is that what you want?

This brings to mind Hobbes’ picture of human nature, in which our primary want—indeed, the spring of all of our other desires and actions— is the desire to free ourselves from the fear of death, and particularly violent death. At bottom, people like Fuller and his wife have law and justice and friends like Kane in order to preserve their own lives. To preserve those other things at the risk of their lives would be backwards. Kane next proceeds to the town church, where Mayor Henderson— one of Kane’s friends and wedding guests—and other townspeople are assembled in worship. The Marshal asks for help, and the Mayor presides over an impromptu town meeting, in which many of the congregants have their say. Some believe that they ought to assist Kane: One man notes that the “trouble” to come threatens the whole town, and not just Kane himself. Others argue that issues of law and order are for the Marshal to resolve, and not the responsibility of the town as a whole: “We’ve been paying good money right along for a marshal and deputies,” says one man, “now the first time there’s any trouble, we’re supposed to take care of it ourselves…we’re not peace officers! This ain’t our job!” Once everyone has quieted down, it falls to Mayor Henderson to give fullest voice to the understanding of political community—its origins and its purposes—that undergirds Hadleyville’s failure to assist its marshal. The Mayor starts by nodding at the moral debt that the town owes Kane: “What this town owes Will Kane here it can never pay with money,” he says, recalling Kane’s bravery and exemplary service. And, he says, if Frank Miller does indeed arrive on the noon train, it’s the town’s problem to deal with, not Kane’s alone. This is so, says the Mayor, because “this is our town!” We made it with our own hands out of nothing! And if we want to keep it decent, keep it growing, we’ve got to think mighty clear here today, and

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

71

we’ve got to have the courage to do what we think is right, no matter how hard it is.

But the hard part about what the people of Hadleyville have to do, as becomes clear over the course of the Mayor’s speech, is the overcoming of moral considerations in the face of political and economic calculus. “People up north are thinking about this town,” explains Henderson, “thinking about sending money down here to put up stores and to build factories.” Investment of this kind, Henderson says, “would mean a lot to this town. An awful lot!” But it’s unlikely to come if Hadleyville seems like the kind of place where there’s “shooting and killing in the streets.” Violence of the kind that’s sure to break out between Kane and Miller will make these northern investors far less likely to contribute to Hadleyville’s growth. “In one day,” says Henderson, “this town will be set back five years.” Turning toward Kane, Henderson pronounces what he must know is his friend’s death sentence, now that the noon train is so close at hand. “Will,” he says, “I think you’d better go while there’s still time. It’s better for you, and it’s better for us.” At Kane’s wedding, Mayor Henderson described himself and the other Town Selectmen as the Marshal’s “very good friends.” But, as his church speech makes clear, he envisions the political relation as very different from—even opposed to—the relation that exists between friends. The political community, in his view, is radically different from the community of friendship, such that friendship plays no role in the calculus by which one makes political decisions. In fact, the people of Hadleyville must look past their friendship with Kane in considering the good of the town, “no matter how hard it is.”17 And Henderson’s picture of the good of the town brings to mind Hobbes’ understanding of political community as emerging from—and existing for the sake of—the desire to avoid “violent death” and to obtain “such things as are necessary to commodious living.”18 What’s good for Hadleyville is whatever tends toward the physical safety and economic advantage of most citizens. There is no room here for a shared commitment to justice, even—especially—in the face of physical threat. Law and justice are not ends in themselves but means by which to secure safety and prosperity. For Henderson, helping Kane would run counter to the purpose for which Hadleyville was instituted.19 The noon train eventually arrives, and Kane faces down Miller and his gang without assistance from any of his friends and fellow citizens.

72

D. K. PICARIELLO

In the end, it’s only Amy, Kane’s wife, who comes to his aid, shooting one of Miller’s gang despite the tenets of her faith and her own deepseated horror of violence. It is the bonds of the household, rather than those of the political community, upon which Kane can count.20 This, of course, brings to mind the scene in which Mrs. Fuller hides her husband despite her shame. Here, we can trust family to sacrifice for us; Amy comes through for Will, and even Ben Miller gives his life for his brother, Frank, just as Mrs. Fuller protects her husband. But we cannot trust our fellow citizens—except to see to their own advantage. In this picture, the affection that characterizes the familial relationship might result in self-sacrifice—but the cold calculus that characterizes the political relation never will. ∗ ∗ ∗ When Kane is being hustled out of town just after his wedding, he says: “I think I ought to stay.” Not because he calculates that this course is to his advantage—his half-hearted claims in this regard ring hollow when he puts them to Amy some moments later—but rather because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. He owes it to Hadleyville, and to himself, to stay. He has a different sense of what it means to be a citizen than the other citizens of Hadleyville. Will Kane acts as a citizen not only when he calculates his own advantage, but rather—and, perhaps, primarily— when he sacrifices his own advantage for the sake of the community as a whole. And unlike Mayor Henderson, Kane envisions the good of the community as something different from, and more than, physical safety and economic gain. In this sense, Kane’s understanding of political community departs from that of Hobbes and points us to that of Aristotle. For Hobbes—and for the people of Hadleyville—the political community exists for the sake of that for which it was instituted in the first place: the avoidance of death and violence, and the pursuit of prosperity. For Aristotle, in contrast, the political community comes into being “for the sake of living,” but “it exists for the sake of living well.”21 While human beings may enter into political community in order to pursue safety and prosperity, it is “partnership” in “the just and the unjust”—in other words, a common commitment to a vision of justice—in which the political community

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

73

consists.22 This common commitment is the difference between a defensive alliance—which exists only for the sake of safety and prosperity—and a political community.23 This is perhaps what Helen Ramirez—Kane’s former flame—means when she says: “If Kane dies, this town dies with him.” In this understanding, Hadleyville itself consists in a commitment to a shared notion of justice, of right and wrong. Absent this commitment, Hadleyville itself ceases to exist; the political community envisioned by Henderson is no community at all, but merely an alliance, subject to ever-shifting calculations of advantage, in which justice holds sway only so long as the odds are on its side. II. “What Kind of a Community Have I Come To?” In John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the trajectory of Shinbone, the town in which the film takes place, is the opposite of the trajectory of High Noon’s Hadleyville. If Hadleyville degenerates into something resembling a pre-political state of nature, Shinbone grows and evolves from something like Hobbes’ “Naturall Condition” into a thriving little commonwealth.24 Or perhaps the story of Hadleyville is more complicated than a simple degeneration. It’s not so much that High Noon shows us Hadleyville transforming from a political community into a state of nature; rather, the film shows us that political community in Hadleyville was always a veneer, a mask, covering over the hard truth about human beings, which truth is revealed in a moment of danger and stress. In this, High Noon speaks to another Hobbesian theme: If the state of nature is the “Naturall Condition” of human beings, then political community is unnatural for human beings. Human beings are radically unsuited to live together. Rather than impelling them toward political association, “Nature” serves to “dissociate” men from one another; the “warre of every man against every man” is the “ill condition, which man by meer Nature is actually placed in.”25 This vision of human nature, and of the naturalness—or not—of political community, is at odds with the vision put forth by Aristotle. For Aristotle, “a human being is political and is disposed by nature to live with others.”26 This means that for Aristotle, unlike Hobbes, political community follows from the nature of man. For Hobbes, political community is a product of human art intended to remedy the defects of human

74

D. K. PICARIELLO

nature: the commonwealth is an “Artificiall Man” with an “Artificiall Soul,” produced by “the Art of man” in order to overcome the meanness of “mere nature.”27 For Aristotle, political community is the natural conclusion of human nature. This is why Aristotle can say that “the city is thus prior by nature to the household and to each of us. For the whole must of necessity be prior to the part,” and human nature is such that it can reach its perfection only as part of a political partnership.28 Aristotle therefore famously says that the city “belongs among the things that exist by nature, and…man is by nature a political animal.”29 But the fact that human beings are “disposed by nature” to live with one another in political community does not mean that political community necessarily develops everywhere and always among human beings, no matter the circumstances or conditions. Much like the “happy person” needs both “the goods residing in the body as well as external goods and chance,” the development of a political community out of a pre-political state requires the union of raw material—human beings living together— and chance or fortune.30 This is perhaps why Aristotle mentions “the one who first constituted [a city],” and his responsibility for “the greatest of goods.”31 Although human beings are impelled by nature toward political community, the development of such community in practice requires particular actions by particular people in particular circumstances.32 This is something that Ranse Stoddard, an eastern lawyer intending to seek his fortune out west, learns even before he arrives in Shinbone, when his stagecoach is held up on the road to town by the outlaw Liberty Valance. After Valance knocks him down, Stoddard announces that he’s an attorney, “duly licensed for the territory,” and threatens Valance with justice: “You may have us at your guns now, but I’ll see you in jail for this!” Valance responds by beating Stoddard mercilessly with his trademark “silver-knobbed whip,” introducing him to what he calls “western law.” The message is clear: It isn’t justice that holds sway in Shinbone, but the right of the stronger.33 Stoddard is carried into town by Tom Doniphon, the only man in Shinbone Liberty Valance is scared of, and passes into the care of Hallie, with whom Tom has a nascent romance. When Stoddard mentions his intention to pursue Vallance, Doniphon cautions him: Doniphon:

If that’s what you’re gonna do, you’d better start packin’ a handgun.

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

Stoddard: Doniphon: Stoddard:

75

A gun? I don’t want a gun…I don’t want to kill him. I want to put him in jail. Oh. Well, I know those law books mean a lot to you, but not out here. Out here a man settles his own problems. Do you know what you’re saying to me? You’re saying just exactly what Liberty Valance said. What kind of a community have I come to?

The answer to Stoddard’s question, it seems, is no community at all— or, as John Marini puts it, “not much of one”; rather, Shinbone seems closer to Hobbes’ state of nature, “wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal.”34 Turning from Hobbes to John Locke, we might say that in Shinbone, each man is “Judge for himself, and Executioner; which is, as I have before shew’d it, the perfect state of Nature.”35 The people of Shinbone live together, but, as Doniphon indicates, they do not have a “partnership” in “the just and the unjust”: they treat justice and injustice as individual or, at best, familial matters, rather than as a communal concern.36 This absence of a communal commitment to justice is embodied by Link Appleyard, the comically cowardly town marshal, who insists that he has no jurisdiction—though he can’t quite remember the word—over the territory in which Valance robbed the stagecoach and beat Stoddard. This, it later becomes clear, is simply an excuse: When Valance shows up in town and raises havoc, Appleyard leaves as quickly as he can. As the marshal himself says: “The jail’s only got one cell, and the lock’s broke, and I sleep in it.” In other words, each man in Shinbone sees to justice himself, and is both “Judge for himself, and Executioner.”37 We get a demonstration of this when Liberty Valance comes to town and shows up at the restaurant operated by Hallie and her parents. In order to pay for his room and board, Stoddard is washing dishes and, on occasion, waiting tables. Appleyard sneaks in the back door in order to avoid Valance—and later, when Valance arrives, he sneaks back out. Stoddard recognizes Valance immediately, but he can’t do anything about it, not even when the outlaw mocks him and, eventually, trips him over. It’s only Doniphon who’s able to confront Valance, forcing the latter to back down and ride out of town. But even as he protects Stoddard— perhaps because of his affection for Hallie—Doniphon tells him that if he intends to hang his lawyer’s shingle in town, he’ll “have to defend

76

D. K. PICARIELLO

it with a gun.” Doniphon, like Valance, is comfortable in a condition in which men settle disputes with violence and the strong take what they want, a condition in which “the notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice”—and Ranse Stoddard—have no place.38 But Stoddard stays in Shinbone, and as time passes he begins to work a change in the town. He institutes a school, teaching reading and writing to both children and adults.39 Civics also forms a part of the curriculum, as indicated by the sentence written on the chalkboard behind Ranse as he leads the class: “Education is the basis of law and order.” Portraits of Washington and Lincoln hang alongside American flags on the walls of the classroom. Students, adults and children alike, proudly share their knowledge of the American government, including its republican form, its Declaration of Independence, and its Constitution. Hallie’s mother— one of the students—tells the class at Ranse’s prompting that “the United States is a republic, and a republic is a state in which the people are the boss.” It’s clear how meaningful these words are for her, both as a demonstration of her knowledge and as an assertion of her role, and the roles of the other students, in the nascent political community of Shinbone. The class also discusses issues of local importance, drawn by Stoddard from what he calls “the best textbook in the world: an honest newspaper.” He intends these discussions to impress upon his students the importance of participating in local debates, voting, and acting in general like members of a political community, which community is based on the common principles and ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution. This school is Stoddard’s first step in habituating Shinbone’s residents to the roles and obligations of citizenship by accustoming them to its principles and practices: “for by habituating citizens, lawgivers make them good.”40 In habituating his students to understand themselves, and to act, as members of a political community, Stoddard builds such a community, not from the outside in—that is, by the Hobbesian method of erecting “a common Power to keep them all in awe”—but rather from the inside out, by working a change in the people of Shinbone rather than in its circumstances.41 By accustoming his students to feel an attachment to, and pride in, a republican form of government, he prepares them “by means of habits…to feel delight and hatred in a noble way,” so that by feeling and behaving as citizens, they become citizens.42 Stoddard fosters among his students a “partnership” in “the just and the unjust,” even in the absence of the means to enforce such a partnership against those who do not share in it.43

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

77

But in seeking to build a political community—and in seeking statehood for the unnamed territory in which the film takes place—the citizens of Shinbone face a sharp challenge from a predictable quarter: Liberty Valance has entered the service of those opposed to statehood. The people of Shinbone intend to vote for statehood, but, as Tom Doniphon points out, “votes won’t stand up against guns.” Dispirited, Stoddard puts forth an assertion that echoes High Noon’s grim diagnosis: “When force threatens, talk’s no good anymore.” Stoddard tries to learn to use a gun, but he also continues to pursue his efforts at shaping the residents of Shinbone into citizens. When the town holds elections to send delegates to the territorial convention to decide the statehood question, he leads the meeting, providing a lesson in the kind of ruling and being ruled in turn that Aristotle calls “political rule,” or the “sort of rule in accordance with which one rules those who are similar in stock and free.”44 He also accepts a nomination as delegate— against Liberty Valance. The visible pride that the people of Shinbone take in exercising the franchise shows the effect that Stoddard’s school, and his presence as a whole, have had in the community. As the townspeople debate and vote at the Shinbone town meeting, it’s clear that they have to a great degree become citizens, for “The citizen in an unqualified sense is defined by no other thing so much as by sharing in decision and office.”45 The citizens of Shinbone are now “living together and sharing in a community of speeches and thought—for this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of human beings, and not as with cattle, merely feeding in the same place.”46 “We want statehood,” says Stoddard, at the Shinbone town meeting, “because statehood means the protection of our farms and our fences, and it means schools for our children, and it means progress for the future.” Certainly, Stoddard’s articulation here of the purposes of political community includes physical protection and economic prosperity. But, unlike Mayor Henderson of High Noon’s Hadleyville, Stoddard doesn’t stop there. He mentions “schools for our children,” and we’ve seen his school: It’s focused, first and foremost, on the shared principles of the community, and the vision of justice embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. This is the kind of education that Stoddard understands as “the basis of law and order.” With this in mind, the “progress for the future” that Stoddard envisions is not simply economic; rather, it is also—perhaps primarily—a progress born of the community’s common commitment to justice.

78

D. K. PICARIELLO

∗ ∗ ∗ Stoddard is chosen as delegate to the territorial convention, alongside the town’s newspaper editor, Dutton Peabody. This enrages Liberty Valance, who demands that Stoddard meet him in the street, that evening, alone—“and don’t make us come get you,” Valance warns. Stoddard, though frightened, accepts Valance’s challenge, and the outlaw is killed. Valance’s death emboldens Shinbone’s citizens, particularly the absurd marshal, Link Appleyard, to stand up to the rest of Valance’s gang. On the strength of his courageous deed, Stoddard finds himself a rising star in the territory’s political firmament.47 At the territorial convention, the delegates assemble and trade passionate speeches, fairly bursting with oratorical tricks and flourishes. The scene encapsulates a striking progression from combat with guns to combat with words: It’s these rhetorical displays, and not the easy violence of a Valance or a Doniphon, that will determine the future of Shinbone and the territory in which it is situated. Dutton Peabody nominates Ranse Stoddard to represent the territory in Congress and advocate for statehood, drawing attention to Ranse’s personification of the movement from state of nature to political community: He is a man who came to us, not packing a gun, but carrying instead a bag of law books. He is a lawyer and a teacher…But more important, he is a man who has come to be known throughout this territory in the last few weeks as a great champion of law and order.

But of course, Ranse’s fame as a champion of law and order emerges from a deed that was neither lawful nor orderly. A speaker opposed to statehood brings this fact to the attention of the assembled delegates, and Stoddard—a man of the law, after all—begins to feel tremendous guilt at the idea that he owes his rise to prominence to an extralegal killing. In decrying Stoddard’s deed, the speaker uses language that brings to mind Locke’s description of his state of nature, in which each man is “Judge for himself, and Executioner”: Stoddard, he says, is “a man who usurps the function of both judge and jury, and takes the law into his own hands.”48 Hearing this, Stoddard leaves the convention, intent on withdrawing his name from consideration and leaving the territory. Then Tom Doniphon takes Ranse aside and reveals the truth: Ranse Stoddard didn’t kill Liberty Valance. It was Doniphon, hidden nearby,

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

79

who fired the shot that struck the outlaw. “Cold-blooded murder,” says Doniphon, “but I can live with it.” He convinces Stoddard to return to the convention by acknowledging the change Stoddard has worked in the citizens of Shinbone, including Hallie, who now prefers Stoddard to Doniphon: “You taught her how to read and write,” he says, “now give her something to read and write about.” From this point, Stoddard’s political career takes off. Statehood is achieved, and he becomes first governor, then senator, then ambassador, and then senator again. When Stoddard, as a much older man, returns to Shinbone for Tom Doniphon’s funeral, he reveals the true story of Liberty Valance’s death to a reporter, emphasizing the central irony of the film: In order for Shinbone to become a political community, a deed that has no place in any political community was necessary; in order for Stoddard to spend a career doing good things, he had to build his reputation on a lie. The newspaperman to whom he tells his story rips it up, explaining himself in the film’s most celebrated line: “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” III. “Print the Legend” At the town meeting, in which Ranse Stoddard is eventually chosen as delegate and Liberty Valance is rejected, Valance threatens the citizens of Shinbone in a way that points to the difference between Shinbone and Hadleyville: “You sodbusters are a brave bunch when you’re together,” he says, “but don’t vote any way now that you’ll regret later, when you’re alone.” When Valance makes his threat, the citizens of Shinbone are at a crossroads: In the past, each had been, in a decisive sense, alone, settling his own affairs according to his strength and ability. Now, due to the efforts of Ranse Stoddard, Tom Doniphon, and many others, they are on the cusp of forming, together, a political community, animated by a common commitment to the vision of justice articulated by Stoddard. In High Noon, the people of Hadleyville face their own sort of crossroads, and show, by their words and actions, that they had always been, and will always be, alone. We can say also that in its depiction of Marshal Will Kane, High Noon imagines the kind of person for whom political community itself is superfluous, and therefore perhaps unnatural.49 In Kane, we find Ranse Stoddard’s rectitude and devotion to law, Tom Doniphon’s toughness

80

D. K. PICARIELLO

and grit, and Link Appleyard’s job title. The only help he needs comes from his wife, Amy, and therefore from within his own household. When Kane throws his star in the dirt at the end of the film, he’s severing a connection that, for him, was unnecessary in the first place: everything he needs is in his wagon. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, on the other hand, contemplates a political community made up of human beings who are radically incomplete, and who need one another for the sake of a collectively self-sufficient life. Even Tom Doniphon can’t separate himself from this mutual dependence, since he needs Hallie, and Hallie needs Ranse.50 The flaws and imperfections of Shinbone’s citizens aren’t impediments to political community; rather, they’re why such community is necessary and natural to human beings. It’s perhaps for this reason that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is able to make peace with the tension at the heart of the community it depicts, why it’s willing to “print the legend” while High Noon insists on showing us the ugly truth. Returning to our opening question—How does justice come to a political community based on self-interested individualism?—High Noon’s answer is straightforward: it doesn’t. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance offers a more complicated response: Justice comes to such a community, suggests the film, with a lot of determined political education, a little bit of cold-blooded murder, and a touch of sleight of hand.51 This—in the words of Hallie Stoddard—is how what was once a “wilderness” becomes a “garden”; to ask for more is to risk High Noon-style disillusionment.52 All that’s left—to borrow one last time from Thomas Hobbes—is for each viewer to examine the human beings each film depicts, and to “consider, if he also find not the same in himself. For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.”53

Notes 1. Richard Brody, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” The New Yorker, October 21, 2009. Heffernan says that Ford’s films “constitute an impressive reserve of social and political reflection on the problems of establishing and maintaining a political community” (Jeanne Heffernan, “‘Poised Between Savagery and Civilization’: Forging Political Communities in Ford’s Westerns,” Perspectives on Political Science 28[3]: 147–152, 1999). I’m grateful for the feedback received on this chapter at the 2016 USC Sumter Seminar Series, the 2017 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, and the 2022 meeting of the Popular Culture/

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

81

American Culture Association in the South. I’m also grateful for the time and attention of several anonymous reviewers. Although Zinnemann himself said of High Noon: “This for me was not a political film,” characterizing the film instead as “about self-respect” (Alan Marcus and Fred Zinnemann, “Unconvering an Auteur: Fred Zinnemann,” Film History 12[1]: 52, 2000). J. Hoberman, “It’s Always ‘High Noon’ At the White House,” The New York Times, April 25, 2004. On the other hand, Dwight D. Eisenhower had the film screened at his White House “no less than three times” during his presidency, and Bill Clinton “screened the film he identified as his favorite some 20 times during his White House residency.” Explaining his love for the film, Clinton said “‘It’s a movie about courage in the face of fear and the guy doing what he thought was right in spite of the fact that it could cost him everything…He’s just doing what he thinks is right. It’s a great movie.’” For summaries of some of the politically charged readings of High Noon that have emerged over time, see, J. M. Caparros-Lera and Segio Alegre, “Cinematic Contextual History of High Noon (1952, dire Fred Zinnemann),” Film Historia 6(1): 37–61, 1996. The authors reproduce a letter from Fred Zinnemann, in which he says: “To me the story is about the character and commitment to duty of a man who is under pressure and who triumphs over his own strongest fears”; they also quote Carl Foreman, who says: “High Noon is more a study of community fear than a study of personal fear.” Smith briefly discusses High Noon in contrast with another John Ford film, My Darling Clementine (Anthony Burke Smith, “The Nationalization of the Catholic Imagination: The Westerns of John Ford,” U.S. Catholic Historian 17[3]: 55–57, 1999). Paul A. Cantor, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 26–27. As Mary Nichols notes in her perceptive article on High Noon, “The American West manifests the dilemmas of law and rule in an acute form. The weakness of law in the West makes clearer its advantages; a lawless state is closer at hand” (“Law and the American Western: High Noon,” Legal Studies Forum 22: 593, 1998). We might also borrow from Heffernan and say that Ford’s West is “poised between savagery and civilization.” Cheney Ryan says of High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “At the heart of both films is the contrast between a state of nature and the ‘civilization’ made possible by a centralized legal order” (“Violence and Recognition in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” in Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts, ed. John Denvir [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996], 28). According to Robert Pippin, in Western films “The question often raised is the question of how legal order…is possible, under what conditions it can

82

D. K. PICARIELLO

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

be formed and command allegiance, how the bourgeois virtues, especially the domestic virtues, can be said to get a psychological grip in an environment where the heroic and martial virtues are so important”; what’s at stake is “the question of the possibility of the political itself” (Robert B. Pippin, “What Is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in John Ford’s The Searchers,” Critical Inquiry 35[2]: 225–226, 2009). According to John Marini, “In the West, men seemed to have it in their power to make the world over again, and this made it necessary or possible to think again about the conditions, purposes, and limits of human community” (“Defending the West: John Ford and the Creation of the Epic Western,” in Print the Legend: Politics, Culture, and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford, ed. Sidney A. Pearson, Jr. [Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009], 8). As Nichols observes, “Law is a precarious bond for community because it cannot command the virtues required for its support” (591). Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Books, 1985), Chap. XIII, 183. As Nichols notes, “The threat of the returning outlaw makes manifest the lawless potential of the town itself” (591). Hobbes 1985, XIII, 186. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 16. Hobbes 1985, XVIII, 229; XIII, 188. Hobbes 1985, XXI, 272. Hobbes 1985, XXI, 270. Hobbes makes a similar claim later: “That every man is bound by Nature, as much as in him lieth, to protect in Warre, the Authority, by which he is himself protected in time of Peace. For he that pretendeth a Right of Nature to preserve his owne body, cannot pretend a Right of Nature to destroy him, by whose strength he is preserved” (A Review and Conclusion, 719). But men enter into the commonwealth following Hobbes’ admonition to “seek Peace,” desiring to escape the “warre of every man against every man” that characterizes the state of nature (Chap. XIV, 190; Chap. XIII, 188). And besides, “no man,” says Hobbes, “can transferre, or lay down his Right to save himselfe from Death, Wounds, and Imprisonment”—so the idea that we are “bound” to do what “no man” can be expected to do is puzzling, to say the least (Chap. XIV, 199). Hobbes 1985, XXI, 270. Hobbes 1985, XIV, 199. Zinnemann characterized this scene as depicting the husband’s “Total loss of dignity” (Marcus and Zinnemann 2000, 55). Jeffrey J. Tillman (2007) contrasts what he characterizes as Kane’s Aristotelian sense of the political or civic significance of friendship with what

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

83

he characterizes as Henderson’s Lockean perspective, in which “political and economic obligations trump personal, relational obligations” (“High Noon and the Problems of American Political Obligation,” Perspectives on Political Science 36(1): 42–43, 2007). Hobbes 1985, XIII, 186; 188. Henderson “locates the common good in avoiding bloodshed, so that no reputation for violence will prevent Northerners from sending money to Hadleyville for factories and jobs…the town’s good, not simply Kane’s, demands that he go” (Nichols 1998, 596). Biskind uses this scene and others to cast High Noon as a critique of postwar political centrism in the United States: “The center is ridiculed for its obsession with mean, trivial, business-as-usual affairs, whereas Kane is applauded for his life-and-death confrontation with the Millers” (Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties [New York: Pantheon Books, 1983], 46). Of course, Henderson’s perspective here is open to charges to shortsightedness; Costello, for instance, notes: “Now, the same interests that have benefited from Kane’s provision of law and order turn their backs on him in his hour of need, leaving open the possibility that without the noble marshal to protect their interests, they will lose their progressive prosperity” (Matthew Costello, “Rewriting High Noon: Transformations in American Popular Political Culture During the Cold War,” Film & History 33[1]: 30–40, 2003, 31). See also discussion of the “High Noon problem” in Hobbes above. “Amy, too, is a hero, for at high noon she demonstrates that the virtues of a marshall square with those of a storekeeper” (Nichols 1998, 601). Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), Book 1, Chap. 2, Section 8, 1252b29–30. Aristotle 1985, 1, 2, 11–12, 1253a15–18. “It is evident, therefore, that the city is not a partnership in a location and for the sake of not committing injustice against each other and of transacting business. These things must necessarily be present if there is to be a city, but not even when all of them are present is it yet a city, but [the city is] the partnership in living well both of households and families for the sake of a complete and self-sufficient life…This, we assert, is living happily and finely. The political partnership must be regarded, therefore, as being for the sake of noble actions, not for the sake of living together” (Aristotle 1985, 3, 9, 12–14, 1280b30–1281a3). According to Tillman (2007), “Henderson’s commercial vision of the city is one that Aristotle rejected. The purpose of the state is not the protection or development of property or revenue derived from it but a quality of life that cares about the goodness of other citizens, their safety, and standards of decency” (43).

84

D. K. PICARIELLO

24. Marini (2009) says: “The film shows the coming into being of a civil society out of the chaos of a kind of state of nature” (11). 25. Hobbes 1985, XIII, 186; 188. 26. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), Book 9, Chap. 9, 1169b18–19. 27. Hobbes 1985, Introduction, 81; XIII, 188. 28. Aristotle 1985, 1, 2, 12–13, 1253a19–20. 29. Aristotle 1985, 1, 2, 9, 1253a1–3. 30. Aristotle 2012, 7, 13, 1153b17–18. 31. Aristotle 1985, 1, 2, 15, 1253a30–31. 32. See Sidney A. Pearson, “Why It Is Tough to Be the Second-Toughest Guy in a Tough Town: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” in Print the Legend: Politics, Culture, and Civic Virtue in the Films of John Ford, ed. Sidney A Pearson, Jr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 173. 33. Heffernan (1999) says that Valance’s “Western law” is “the law of force and fraud mediated by the pistol and silver-knobbed whip.” 34. Marini, 11; Hobbes 1985, XIII, 186; see Pearson (2009, 175). 35. John Locke, “The Second Treatise of Government,” in Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chap. VII, Section 87, 324. 36. Aristotle 1985, 1, 2, 11–12, 1253a15–18. 37. Locke 1998, VII, 87, 324. 38. Hobbes 1985, XIII, 188. 39. Marini’s (2009) discussion of this scene (11–13) is valuable, as is Pearson’s (2009, 177–178). 40. Aristotle 2012, 2, 2, 1103b4. 41. Hobbes 1985, XVII, 225. 42. Aristotle 2012, 10, 9, 1179b26–27. J. A. Place comments perceptively on the interplay between “freedom” and “repression” at work in this scene, which I think suggests the combination of empowerment and restraint in the citizen virtue Stoddard is attempting to cultivate (The Western Films of John Ford [Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1973], 220). 43. Aristotle 1985, 1, 2, 11–12, 1253a15–18. 44. Aristotle 1985, 3, 4, 13–14, 1277b7–9. 45. Aristotle 1985, 3, 1, 6, 1275a22–24. 46. Aristotle 2012, 9, 9, 1170b11–14. 47. Heffernan (1999) and others make the point that Stoddard’s fame—and thus his political success—depends at bottom not on his being “a man who knows how to read, write, and interpret the law, but a good shot.” That this is the case demonstrates “reason’s dependence on spritedness in reckoning with the passions,” which is one of the film’s “insights into the problems the passions pose for establishing political order.”

“THIS IS OUR TOWN”: POLITICAL COMMUNITY IN HIGH …

85

48. Locke 1998, VII, 87, 324. See Pearson (2009, 180–181). 49. Tillman (2007) observes that “Kane himself is uncannily like Aristotle’s great-souled man” (40). 50. Pearson (2009) says that “Both Tom Doniphon and Ransom Stoddard are, each in his own way, incomplete men” (176). 51. According to Pippin (2009), “in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance…there is an attempt to come to terms with the fact that the establishment of any legal order…must be illegal, violent, unjust, and brutal, and a society must find a way to represent that fact to itself as a national memory. It usually does this, as in this movie, by lying, by a distorting mythologizing” (226–227). As I’ve tried to express in this conclusion, my sense of the film’s depiction of the relationship between myth and law, and therefore the ultimate “moral of the story,” is less like Michael Böhnke’s (“Myth and Law in the Films of John Ford,” Journal of Law and Society 28[1]: 47–63, 2001)—who says that in the film, “myth is exposed as an element of establishing law that also hides its real sources” (49)—and more like Joshua Foa Dienstag’s (“A Storied Shooting: Liberty Valance and the Paradox of Sovereignty,” Political Theory 40[3]: 290– 318, 2012), who says that the “perspective” of the film “is to carefully deconstruct and reveal (without debunking) the complicated interrelation of law and power in the formation of any state,” leaving the audience “strengthened, if sobered, by the revelation that law is not self-generating or self-sustaining but requires a sacrifice to succeed” (294–295). In other words, I don’t think that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance intends us to celebrate the exposure or undermining of myths and the concomitant revelation of truth; rather, I think that the film intends us to recognize both that myths are myths and therefore not entirely true, and that myths are both necessary and noble. Dienstag makes a similar point in characterizing Stoddard’s political career post-shooting as “both a fraud based on a lie and a duty that must, for the sake of society, be performed” (309). 52. Peter A. French (Cowboy Metaphysics: Ethics and Death in Westerns [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997]) says that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is “something of a morality play in which the good…does something bad in order to do something good. The problem is that what is good and what is bad has gotten twisted and redefined in the process so that there is a genuine ambiguity about what is right and what is wrong and what is left” (136). High Noon relieves us of such burdensome ambiguity about “what is right and what is wrong,” and as a consequence leaves us with nothing but bitter pessimism about “what is left.” As Pearson (2009) says in his exceptionally valuable essay on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “Complete justice is not to be expected in the polis, and wisdom in these matters comes from only expecting so much justice as the nature of man allows” (169). As to whether the “legend”

86

D. K. PICARIELLO

has indeed become “fact,” as the newspaper editor claims: “history is just poetry after all” (182). 53. Hobbes 1985, Introduction, 83.

The Western as Mirror and Teacher

Simmering Madness: Mob Justice and The Ox-Bow Incident Jericho Williams

For Western lovers and those interested in the psychological and political dimensions of mob formation, there is arguably no better-suited book than Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) and its celebrated film adaptation, The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Both feature a complex, harrowing story that centers on the sudden formation of a mob of twenty-seven men and one woman; concludes with the hangings of three innocent men based on hearsay for the crime of murdering a man who turns out to be alive. They call attention to concepts of equal representation, the rule of law, and the right to a fair trial, and invite debates about how to preserve American democracy in the face of hastening economic change, inequality, disempowerment, and pervasive racism. Left unaddressed, these serious problems, the novel and film assert, threaten to undermine the country by inciting repeated cases of mob violence and social unrest. At least partially inspired by Clark’s worries about Nazism and his concern that something similar could gain traction in the United States

J. Williams (B) University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_6

89

90

J. WILLIAMS

given the right circumstances, The Ox-Bow Incident is also a great beginning point in reassessing the Western’s importance in relation to American politics. The story remains especially apt considering the recent mob attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as other instances of mob behavior broadcast more easily and in real time with the evolution of social media-related technologies during the prior decade. In 2020, the Library of America rereleased Clark’s novel as the first of four books collected within an anthology entitled The Western: Four Classic Novels from the 1940s & 1950s, which also includes Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949), Alan Le May’s The Searchers (1954), and Oakley Hall’s Warlock (1958). This recent publication marks an important literary event because unless one counts proto-Western literature by nineteenth-century writers or historians such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Francis Parkman, or Theodore Roosevelt, Elmore Leonard’s Westerns (2017) is the only one of more than three hundred and fifty prior volumes devoted to milestones of American literature that belongs specifically to this hugely influential literary genre. Described as a “serious examination of the nature of justice and springs of character under pressure” with “a political comment which outreaches its time,” Clark’s novel is also, as reviewer Clifton Fadisman noted in a 1940 book review, a lean and precise literary work with a “cabinet-worker precision” that suggests its conception and development “had been calculated shrewdly and patiently, with nothing left to improvisation.”1 With a distinct terse economy, in regards to language and plot development, the novel explores the relinquishment of personal responsibility to a mob that increases in strength and momentum prior to committing a horrendous crime while pursuing its own form of justice. These qualities are also prevalent in the 1943 film adaptation, though they appear in a different way given the separate artistic mediums. Financed by Fox Studios, produced by legendary producer Darryl F. Zanuck, directed by celebrated film director William A. Wellman, and featuring a memorable performance by Henry Fonda, the film adaptation garnered praise from reviewers and critics, and later, an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture in 1943. For reasons at least partially related to the nature of the original story, however, it did not attract a large theatrical audience and became a box office failure. In the subsequent decades, with the Western’s mass popularity following World War II and the expansion of television and home video, the film attracted a legion of enthusiasts and is now considered a classic Western.

SIMMERING MADNESS: MOB JUSTICE AND THE OX-BOW …

91

In this essay, I argue that The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) and The OxBow Incident (1943) shed light on pressing political moments in America, particularly in relation to the psychological and social dynamics of mob formation and action. Whereas cinematic adaptations of classic texts are sometimes pale imitations or outright failures, Wellman’s film complements Clark’s novel and captures mob formation in a few ways the book cannot, largely due to the differences in medium and Wellman’s creativity in making the most of a very limited production budget. That said, this essay focuses more extensively on the novel, which offers a greater focus on psychological interiority and sociology than the film and, in this way, provides some intriguing insight for present-day readers grappling with how socioeconomic conditions, inequality, racism, and relatively new technologies that foster swifter and more efficient means of communication can facilitate mob-based violence and undermine American democratic ideals.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) The Ox-Bow Incident’s basic outline is simple, and the narrative unfolds over the course of five chapters. The setting is rural Nevada in the 1880s, and when the story begins, Art Croft and his companion Gil Carter enter a small town called Bridger’s Wells following a winter stint rounding up cattle together on the range. They seek company, conversation, and food, and Carter hopes to pursue a relationship with a woman named Rose Mapen. However, Mapen is nowhere to be found, having left for San Francisco a few months prior to their arrival, and Bridger’s Wells is desolate. Croft, the narrator of the novel, describes the town this way: “[it] was losing its stage-stop look and beginning to settle into a half-empty village of the kind that hangs on sometimes where all the real work is spread out on the land around it, and most of the places take care of themselves.”2 The two men enter Canby’s Saloon and engage in a conversation with the bartender, and Carter begins gambling in what eventually becomes a head-to-head challenge with another character, Jeff Farnley. He plays aggressively and wins in an unsportsmanlike way, which prompts a brawl with Farnley that becomes the center of attention until a rider rushes into town to inform everyone at the saloon about the murder of another character named Larry Kinkaid. As a result, a crowd of listeners morphs into a vengeful, twenty-eight-person mob. They eventually leave town, track down the three men whom they assume to be Kinkaid’s

92

J. WILLIAMS

murderers, and hang them. On their way back to Bridger’s Wells, the mob learns that Kinkaid is alive and that they acted on faulty information, which causes more tragedy when the mob leader’s son Gerard Tetley and then the mob leader Major Tetley commit suicide. The novel concludes with the narrator and his partner in the safe confines of their rented room in Bridger’s Wells, but anxious to leave town and move on to a better situation. Prior critics often respond to The Ox-Bow Incident in terms of natural law or political history. For example, commenting about the entirety of Clark’s fictional oeuvre, Max Westbrook claims the author’s recurrent theme is that “nature is a living organism, and human beings need to find their place in its ancient and ongoing story.”3 This is a reasonable way of reading the novel, but it necessitates stripping away the story’s politics and situating the mob in terms of a grander nonhuman world bereft of human discussions that comprise much of The Ox-Bow Incident and are central to its development. There are also critics who explore Clark’s political concerns when he wrote The Ox-Bow Incident in the 1930s. Kenneth Hada suggests that the story’s admonishment of rushing to judgment and rejection of mob rule reflects Clark’s fear of Nazism.4 Walter Prescott Webb seconds this notion, citing a letter where Clark, in a discussion about the novel, claims that incidents that could be retroactively described as American Nazism had previously occurred since the country’s founding.5 From natural law and political history viewpoints, these valuable readings bolster understanding of the story’s complexity, but they offer little internal insight about why certain men outweigh others in regards to mob formation, one of the novel’s major accomplishments and a key component of Clark’s artistry. While The Ox-Bow Incident is straightforward and easy to follow, Clark’s use of a first-person narrator to relay the story contributes to its complexity, distinguishing the book from other more formulaic Western novels and meriting its classic status. As the tragedy unfolds, Art Croft shares his thoughts, serves as a recorder of all remarks and actions, and analyzes everyone’s body language. He is always present, from the moment when the mob forms until it disperses, and though he wavers in his allegiance at certain times, Croft continues to participate as a member of the mob. Consequently, there is a strong moral undercurrent related to what he thinks is just and an ominous sense of urgency that manifests when it becomes clearer and clearer that mob deliberation and action are incompatible with justice because of its disregard for the right to a

SIMMERING MADNESS: MOB JUSTICE AND THE OX-BOW …

93

fair trial. As the story continues, Croft’s account comes to resemble a reluctant confession, a flawed attempt at an objective rendering of mob formation and the lengths to which it might go as tension increases and lawlessness emerges as the right answer. Through an uneasy reckoning with Croft’s guilt, Clark places readers in an uncomfortable position of experiencing the unfolding situation through the troubled eyes of the mob’s most observant participant. What the story reveals is disturbing but also insightful. In his account of the mob’s participants and their undermining of the rule of law, Croft communicates three valuable observations about mob formation related to the relationship between sociology and poverty, leadership, and disempowerment due to racism. The Ox-Bow Incident suggests that this instance of mob formation is inseparable from the poor economic conditions associated with Bridger’s Wells. This is the most underexamined aspect in prior discussions of the novel, yet it is vital to understanding how this mob solidifies and acts as it does. As Croft and Carter arrive in town, Croft calls attention to the stark contrast between the lively place they imagined while working in isolation during the preceding months versus the town’s actual shabbiness and emptiness. Subsequent events reveal that only four characters appear wealthy compared to the others. They are Nate Bartlett, who owns a house in Bridger’s Wells and a small ranch outside of town; the ineffectual Judge Tyler, who represents the law in town but maintains distance from it; an ex-Confederate officer named Major Tetley; and Tetley’s son, Gerard. While Bartlett is a key figure who instigates the mob, Tyler and the Tetleys remain distant from the scene until the mob has begun to form. Tyler fails in his effort to shut down the mob, while Major Tetley appears and assumes leadership of it based on his prior Civil War experience; his son reluctantly follows his father’s lead for the majority of the story. Separate from these four characters, there are a few business owners who appear to be barely eking out a living without anywhere more promising to go, plus Reverend Osgood, the town’s preacher. Otherwise, Bridger’s Wells caters to a much larger underclass consisting of those such as Croft and Carter who live outside of town and work in ranching, or else do not work. The town contains buildings such as a saloon, general store, and a church, but an oppressive air of vacancy inhabits and defines it. Canby’s Saloon, the town’s one social center, is the first place that Croft and Carter visit. According to Croft, no one seems to know how Canby arrived there

94

J. WILLIAMS

or came to operate the bar, but the dominant impression Canby imparts is that of someone who has once been more prominent elsewhere and has tumbled down to his current position as a supplier of drinks and conversation in a place where no one knows his past. At one point describing the lack of options in Bridger’s Wells, he tells Carter that all there is to do is “eat, sleep, drink, play poker or fight. Or you can shoot some pool.”6 In his depiction of this setting—not quite a ghost town though significantly removed from the liveliness of cities or even more bustling stops along the newly built railroads—and its forlorn inhabitants and visitors, Clark draws directly from his knowledge of Nevada, where he spent most of his childhood through his undergraduate years before leaving the state for better employment options. Later in the story, readers learn that Bridger’s Wells is a former stagecoach stop gradually becoming obsolete through the voice of an embittered character named Bill Winder. Winder once operated a successful coach business transporting people between Bridger’s Wells and Reno, and he continues to suffer the loss of his vocation. At one point, he proclaims, “It’s like those damn, thievin’ railroads … they robbed men of honest to God men’s jobs from Saint Looey to Frisco, didn’t they?” as a defense of his belief in the corruption of law.7 Winder’s companion, a man named Gabe, reaffirms his sense of alienation and desperation. The relationship between democracy and a weakening of representation where resources are lacking in places such as Bridger’s Wells becomes a focal point in The Ox-Bow Incident. Everyone retains a stake in a collective voice of the town, in theory; yet the mob’s formation and the mob itself reveal the discrepancy between professed ideals and reality. Some characters such as Winder are disempowered and others such as Gabe are disengaged, and their responses to compounding losses bolster an unspoken belief that a democratic system may not be working to better their lives. Though they are not the actual sparks that start the formation of the mob, the experiences of those such as Winder and Gabe are latent factors that amplify the sense of everyday injustice. The resulting social atmosphere of the town is symptomatic of a situation where laws and established routines of a democratic society could easily be contested and overturned due, in part, to the ways in which poverty fosters indifference and bitterness. Clark further highlights the contrast between people thriving elsewhere and the downtrodden in Bridger’s Wells with his depiction of Rose Mapen, the one character who finds a better life after

SIMMERING MADNESS: MOB JUSTICE AND THE OX-BOW …

95

escaping. Croft refers to her in describing Carter’s greatest disappointment upon their arrival in town, and she makes a later appearance as the mob pursues the imagined cattle thieves and crosses paths with her riding in a coach with her new husband, Swanson. Rose’s change of fortune shocks some of the mob’s members, though the kindness she displays toward them simultaneously prompts their embarrassment “at this pleasantry when they thought of the job they were supposed to be on.”8 The injured Croft immediately becomes more interested in the encounter between Rose’s new husband, a wealthy and well-dressed businessman from a large city, and his partner, Carter, who comes face-to-face not only with his lost love interest, but also with a level of wealth and wellbeing he cannot imagine. Rose’s abandonment of Bridger’s Wells and her increased social standing serve as a reminder to Carter and Croft that their way of life, as with the majority of their fellow mob members involved in ranching, leaves little room for social advancement and kindles to doubt that they live and participate in a fair system. Because of economic disparity, The Ox-Bow Incident also suggests that a disempowered mentality flourishes, one that rewards a few select figures to the detriment of a collective group of others who cede their representation due to a lack of perceived power or influence. Two characters worth considering more closely in this regard are Nate Bartlett and Major Tetley. An older rancher and the only one who appears to live in Bridger’s Wells, Bartlett emerges as the first strong voice in favor of mob rule after a rider rushes toward Canby’s with news of Kinkaid’s alleged murder. The location of the crime is outside of town on lands that comprise part of Drew’s ranch. Drew is the largest rancher in the area, but he remains absent from the novel until the end of the story when the mob returns to town. Therefore, Bartlett represents ranch ownership interests and a significant voice given that what’s left of the town depends heavily on the industry. From Bartlett’s point of view, cattle rustling is rampant and lawful responses to the local Judge Tyler’s democratic trials have failed. He goes as far as to blame the town’s adherence to Tyler’s authority for encouraging cattle rustling, proclaiming that justice works differently in places such as Texas, where they “know they can pick a rustler as quick as any fee-gorging lawyer that ever took his time in any courtroom. They go and get the man, and they string him up.”9 Implied in Bartlett’s zeal is that the scant livelihoods of many of the men are at risk unless they take action. The men respond forcefully in his favor, though Croft privately questions their behavior. He notes, “None of the men he was talking to

96

J. WILLIAMS

owned any cattle or any land. None of them had any property but their horses and outfits. … Some out of that many were bound to have done a little rustling on their own, and maybe one or two had even killed a man.”10 Most do not carry guns. Although there are other prominent speakers who follow in support of Bartlett, he initiates the mob to take justice into their own hands and receives mass allegiance given his status as a property owner and influential speaker in the town. Collectively, the men mobilize in response to the fear of the potential loss of their livelihoods that Bartlett promulgates. He speaks to the only future they can imagine by suggesting that what little they have can vanish without taking immediate action. If Bartlett represents an influential voice of warning and fear mongering, Major Tetley embodies mob leadership in a move that completely undermines the notion of an engaged democracy by resting on the assumption that a former military leader from a prior historical era merits authority indefinitely. Notably, prior to Tetley’s appearance in the story, Bartlett sends his son to call Tetley to the scene, knowing the sway the former Confederate officer might have over any of the undecided listeners. Rationally, there is little reason for the men to follow Major Tetley. He is the son of slave owner who absconded from the South following the Civil War; appears to be living in Bridger’s Wells as a refuge. Tetley is not heavily involved in town affairs or any of the other men’s lives, and having lost his wife at some point during the prior decade, he lives with his son Gerald at the edge of town. Aloof, he rarely speaks to anyone not affiliated with his home or ranch. Nonetheless, Croft suggests that Tetley’s past military experience still carries much influence, especially when he arrives in his Confederate uniform. Croft writes, “With military rigidity he was riding alone on his tall, thin-legged palomino … He wore a Confederate field coat with the epaulets, collar braid and metal buttons removed, and a Confederate officer’s hat, but his gray trousers were tucked into an ordinary pair of cowboy’s shin boots.”11 His attire firmly cements his stature and influence because the otherwise older and frail Tetley does not convey strength. Tetley, along with a ranch hand and his son, arrives at a pivotal moment when the discussion has just turned in favor of dispersing the mob. However, when his ranch hand tells the crowd that he witnessed what appeared to be three rustlers moving to the West, the momentum switches back in the direction of mob anger and they look directly at Major Tetley for leadership, simply because of his prior military experience. He steps up, countering principal peacemaker

SIMMERING MADNESS: MOB JUSTICE AND THE OX-BOW …

97

and local general store owner Arthur Davies’s plea to prevent a lynching by claiming that he will “abide by the majority will.”12 This claim is empty and fruitless because in reality, in terms of his appearance, Tetley evokes the romance of the Lost Cause to assume command and fan the flames of mob rule. Following Davies’s plea, Judge Tyler admonishes Tetley that the mob should bring back any captured rustlers for a fair trial, to which Tetley replies that he will oversee “order and true justice,” an implied correction to democratic law he rejects.13 Tetley’s quick rise to power highlights the third factor of mob formation: the danger associated with a lack of a diverse set of voices and interests in influential positions of power. Throughout the novel, there are racist references and derogatory attitudes directed at every non-white ethnic group in 1880s Nevada, including Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. Additionally, the one woman who participates in the mob, and the only woman aside from Rose Mapen in the story, is Jenny Grier, whom the narrator describes in masculine terms: “middle-aged and massive … always unkempt …she always appeared soiled and greasy …strong as a wrestler, probably stronger than any man in the valley except Gabe.”14 The presentation of all non-white and non-male characters is key to The Ox-Bow Incident ’s larger critique of white-driven and -enacted notions of Western expansion. In his analysis of the novel, L.L. Lee argues that Clark uncovers “a controlling set of attitudes” associated with white masculinity in reference to the development of the country: “nature can be overcome only by the violent efforts of the individual, and in the face of nature, all men are equal.”15 For Lee, this exposes the tension between competing notions of democracy and individualism. However, even as it aptly identifies the damaging perspectives that inform what evolves into the murder of three innocent individuals, part of Lee’s argument rests upon a false assumption that the people Clark presents retain equal power within Bridger’s Wells. This assumption is emphatically false—particularly in reference to Sparks, the novel’s one African American character. Sparks is the centerpiece of the novel’s critique of how cultural homogeneity harms the well-being and development of a democratic society. Although he lives in a shack “out in the tall weeds behind the boarded-up church,”16 Sparks is just as likely to be sleeping near anywhere where he can find work. In relation to his assets and social position, he most resembles Monty Smith, whom Croft describes as a racist town bum with a penchant for inciting others and commenting on events. However, Sparks

98

J. WILLIAMS

is diametrically opposite from Smith in demeanor. He is quiet and volunteers to work for anyone who will offer him an opportunity. Rumored to be a former preacher from Ohio, Sparks does not openly discuss his past, yet nearly everyone is willing to trust him. His long tenure in town, willingness to work, and sociable temperament make him central to Bridger’s Wells and the concept of democratic participation just as much as his race excludes him from full respectability. When his voice is most needed as the mob begins to form, race again sidelines him to the margins. Croft’s presentation of his experiences with Sparks is one of The OxBow Incident ’s principal strengths because it reveals how respect for non-white others may have helped prevent the tragedy. At first, Sparks’s presence makes Croft feel guilty and uncomfortable. He witnesses the men making casual jokes about lynching around Sparks and reflects, “It seemed wrong to yell about a lynching. I felt it too, that someone might be listening who shouldn’t hear; and that in spite of the fact that everybody in town knew.”17 Later in the novel, however, as the mob pursues the rustlers, Sparks appears to trust Croft enough to share his perspective. He claims that the idea of a “man takin’ upon himself the Lohd’s vengeance … is full of error,” and questions if Croft can defend the idea of playing God and killing someone.18 Notably, this is a private conversation, but one that rattles Croft, who replies, “I’m not sure I’ve got a conscience anymore.”19 Sparks continues by sharing with Croft that he once witnessed the lynching of his own brother as a child, an intense moment that, for Croft, builds upon a prior situation in town when he witnessed his partner Carter recount the horror of seeing a lynching while working in Montana. Croft’s reaction after Sparks concludes his story is, “There was still nothing for me to say.”20 Not without irony, the testimony quiets him for one moment in a similar fashion as those in town have silenced Sparks for the entirety of his life. Their interaction leaves many what-ifs and unanswered questions, but also a powerful sense that if others respected what Sparks had to say, the lynching would not have taken place. It effectively places the entire mob on trial, not only for the injustice associated with their actions, but also their unwillingness because of racism to listen to others who might have prevented the murder of three innocent individuals.

SIMMERING MADNESS: MOB JUSTICE AND THE OX-BOW …

99

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) Today, William A. Wellman’s film adaptation of The Ox-Bow Incident is more revered than celebrated among classic Westerns, and films from directors John Ford or Howard Hawks or featuring the likes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood remain significantly more popular. The film pairs more easily with Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), partly due to their shared critical stance, which prompted one critic to refer to The Ox-Bow Incident as “the first tragic western.”21 The troubling nature of its source material is likely the main reason, and even during the preproduction phase, executives at Twentieth Century Fox suspected that it would not fare well. The film received a low budget from the get-go, and many of its outdoor scenes were shot within the studio rather than on location. Consequently, viewing The Ox-Bow Incident today is akin to watching a low-budget feature from the 1940s, albeit one with an arthouse sensibility from an inspired director. In addition to Wellman’s work, the principal reasons the film is now a classic rather than one of the many now-forgotten Western movies of its time are the efforts of screenwriter Lamar Trotti and the creative freedom that Twentieth Century Fox allowed them, along with a memorable performance from actor Henry Fonda, who portrays Carter. In the ways that it directly confronts mob violence and critiques the concept of mob justice, the film adaptation still merits attention today, but is easier to appreciate in tandem with Clark’s novel rather than as a standalone work of art. Through the use of an omniscient camera, the compression of the story, and the greater representational emphasis on Sparks and an additional final scene featuring Carter reading a letter, the film complements the novel’s scrutiny of the threat of mob justice to democracy. The most notable change in the film is the use of an omniscient camera, which lessens the precision of the story, but better captures the chaotic nature of mob formation and action. Clark’s novel oscillates from Croft’s exterior observations to his interior thoughts as he processes the various elements of the unfolding situation. The omniscient camera presents a stark contrast, especially without any accompanying narration from any one character, and with a greater focus on action. As a result, the novel’s layered unpacking of mob justice is almost entirely lost, and the film lacks the psychological insight of its source material. However, the omniscient camera better enables audiences to visualize how larger group dynamics function during tense conflicts. Audiences see characters join the mob

100

J. WILLIAMS

casually and quickly in response to what they hear. Unspoken acts of solidarity among various members appear as simple as lighting a cigarette in unison, standing beside or behind certain characters, and sitting together at a bar in the aftermath of tragedy. The cumulative effect of detailing how swiftly a mob can form and act in solidarity against established rules of law is one of the film’s strengths. With an atmosphere of unease, the movie suggests that the combination of a lack of respect for due process and poor leadership can quickly dismantle the most basic forms of protection that the law affords. If the psychological lucidity of the novel is lost, its absence forces audiences to reckon with everyone involved, and while it would be incorrect to label the film as a horror film, its implications are deeply disconcerting, especially as presented in the context of American Westerns that more clearly delineate differences between good and bad and right from wrong. Though the use of the omniscient camera simultaneously detracts from and enhances what the film conveys about mob justice, the necessary truncation of the novel in the adaptation process reduces the complexity of events that precede and inform the hangings. The film is only seventyfive minutes, assuredly a consequence of its limited budget, but also the impetus for trimming chunks of the novel. Some critics view the necessary abbreviation as a strength. For example, David Meuel argues that the limitations regarding sets and filming locations contribute to The OxBow Incident ’s claustrophobic atmosphere because director William A. Wellman focuses the camera closely on human action. Meuel claims that the resulting tension shares some likenesses with other hallmark movies of a 1940s subgenre that later came to be identified as film noir, and he suggests that Wellman focuses on the essence of the story and strips away all unnecessary components. Consequently, he writes, “nothing really important is lost and the story is enhanced.”22 The film may complement the story, but Meuel—who appears not to have read the novel closely when he credits Wellman for departing from the original story by casting Sparks as an African American character—presents a faulty assessment that the film is an unequivocal improvement.23 To offer one problematic instance, the film ignores much of the first two chapters, when Croft and Carter arrive in Bridger’s Wells, to move directly to the action. This necessitates a significant reduction of a key debate between Carter and bar owner Canby about the meaning of a painting behind the bar that calls attention to the interpretation of unfolding events, as well as the

SIMMERING MADNESS: MOB JUSTICE AND THE OX-BOW …

101

motivations for taking action. The cumulative result is a lack of character depth via omission that downplays some of the underlying social and economic issues in Bridger’s Wells, which shape decisions about who the men believe, who they support, and ultimately how they behave. The abbreviation of the novel and the absence of Croft’s narration also prompt other alterations pertaining to the aftermath and the lasting effects of mob behavior. The two most prominent are those that Clark himself noticed while watching the film’s premiere: a scene which shows Sparks singing a spiritual song following the hangings and another of Carter reading a letter from one of the executed men (Martin) among the mob members while back in Canby’s bar in one of movie’s concluding scenes.24 Some readers consider the novel’s primary weakness to be a lack of character development, and in each of these instances, Wellman attempts to convey more information about Sparks and Carter in relation to mob violence.25 The presentation of Sparks reveals the extent of his isolation as the sole African American character in Bridger’s Wells and deepens the parallel between the mob terror there and racially motivated violence directed toward African Americans throughout the United States, stretching from prior to the film’s 1880s setting through the then present early 1940s. For present-day viewers, the use of spiritual music associated with African American culture and multiple shots that focus on Sparks respectfully protesting mob behavior may seem underwhelming or dismaying, and even racist, but the director’s decision to foreground Sparks was a progressive choice for his time. Wellman further protests mob violence in the film’s most famous scene, when Carter reads Martin’s letter. As the mob members sit quietly at Canby’s bar, Carter reads a letter in which Martin champions the rule of law and condemns his murderers: My dear wife, Mr. Davies will tell you what’s happening here tonight. He’s a good man and has done everything he can for me. I suppose there are some other good men here, too, only they don’t seem to realize what they’re doing. They’re the ones I feel sorry for. ‘Cause it’ll be over for me in a little while, but they’ll have to go on remembering for the rest of their lives. A man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurtin’ everybody in the world, ‘cause then he’s just not breaking one law but all laws. Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity. There can’t be any such

102

J. WILLIAMS

thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody’s conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived? I guess that’s all I’ve got to say except kiss the babies for me and God bless you. Your husband, Donald.26

As Carter reads the letter, Wellman uses a close-up shot of his partner’s hat brim to cover up his eyes. As a result, viewers hear the contents of the letter but cannot see the effect that it has on Carter and the others. The effect is one in which the film counters mob emotion by stressing the importance of the rule of law. Actor Henry Fonda, who had previously witnessed a terrifying, real-life lynching of Will Brown as a fourteen-yearold boy in Omaha, Nebraska, reads the letter with a bitter sense of the injustice his character and the others administered.27 As John Calhoun notes, the scene’s “truly eccentric job of framing” calls extra attention to what amounts more to a “sermon about law and justice” than a more easily imaginable final letter from a husband to a wife.28 If the letter shortchanges Martin’s character, its larger effect is to convey the impact of the lynching on Carter’s consciousness, as well as the others. It is a stronger concluding scene that better aligns with Clark’s vision than the brief one that Wellman adds afterward, “a soft substitute ending” for Croft’s somber urgency to leave town in the novel which features Carter and Croft riding out of town in hopes of finding and supporting Martin’s widow.29 Though this scene suggests the possibility of some sort of redemption, it is far less memorable than Carter reading Martin’s condemnation of mob rule. One needs to look no further than the thousands of hours of video footage of mob behavior during the shocking storming of the United States Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 to understand that both the novel and film adaptation of The Ox-Bow Incident remain highly relevant today. Like the events in The Ox-Bow Incident, the violence quickly manifested within the span of a day, with outgoing President Donald J. Trump remaining silent while thousands of additional spectators experienced the event via live streams, videos, and news broadcasts. Five people lost their lives, and in the following weeks and months, police apprehended and charged more than seven hundred people for crimes ranging from breaking and entering to committing violent acts. How the formation of the mob occurred, how it managed to breach security officials, the

SIMMERING MADNESS: MOB JUSTICE AND THE OX-BOW …

103

aftermath of its violence and repercussions, and what the event meant for American democracy all remain pressing concerns. Neither version of The Ox-Bow Incident presents a guaranteed blueprint for upholding the rule of law or nurturing American democracy, but they caution readers and viewers about the great cost of inequality, which fosters disillusionment, disaffection, and anger—three emotions capable of mobilizing mob participants who have little or no economic or material interests at stake. They condemn an unchecked, winner-takesall economic system that cruelly rewards and empowers a select few to the detriment of all remaining Americans, and they forewarn about how a lack of diverse voices in positions of influence and power contributes directly to maintaining racism in the United States. If Clark’s innovative novel remains numbly existential in tone, offering a far stronger warning rather than a neat solution, and Wellman’s stark and fast-paced film fails in its attempt at offering a better outcome, both collectively suggest that American democracy is always at risk. They reveal the easily dissolved lines between society and lawlessness and order and disorder, and they insist on the consideration about where the specter of the mob may next appear in America, amplify tensions, seek to solidify factions, precipitate violence, murder, and mayhem. Finally, they demand that Americans follow the rule of law and put forth other social and legislative measures not only to combat mob rule, but also to help prevent its formation.

Notes 1. The Editors of Time. “Editors’ Preface” to The Ox-Bow Incident, v– x. New York: Time, 1962; Bates, Barclay. 1968. “Clark’s Man for All Seasons: The Achievement of Wholeness in The Ox-Bow Incident.” Western American Literature 3, no. 1: 37; Fadisman, Clifton. “From ‘Make Way for Mr. Clark—The O’Neill Family Afloat and Ashore,” New Yorker, 12. October 1940. Reprinted in The Ox-Bow Incident, 245–246, New York: Modern Library, 2004. 2. Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. 1940. The Ox-Bow Incident. In The Western: Four Classic Novels of the 1940s & 1950s. New York: Library of America, 2020. 3. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. 2000. The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century Short Story, ed. Blanche H. Elfant and Lawrence Graver, 209–211. New York: Columbia University Press. 4. Hada, Kenneth. 2001. “Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident.” The Explicator 59, no. 3: 147–149.

104

J. WILLIAMS

5. Webb, Walter Prescott. 1960. “Afterword.” In The Ox-Bow Incident, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, 223–224. New York: Signet. 6. Van Tilburg Clark, 10. 7. Van Tilburg Clark, 41. 8. Van Tilburg Clark, 122. 9. Van Tilburg Clark, 31. 10. Van Tilburg Clark, 32–33. 11. Van Tilburg Clark, 84. 12. Van Tilburg Clark, 88. 13. Van Tilburg Clark, 89. 14. Van Tilburg Clark, 72–73. 15. Lee, L. L. 1965. “Walter Van Tilburg’s Ambiguous American Dream.” College English 26, no. 5: 382–387. 16. Van Tilburg Clark, 67. 17. Van Tilburg Clark, 68. 18. Van Tilburg Clark, 113. 19. Van Tilburg Clark, 113. 20. Van Tilburg Clark, 114. 21. Crain, Mary Beth. 1976. “The Ox-Bow Incident Revisited.” Literature/ Film Quarterly 4, no. 3: 240–248. 22. Meuel, David. 2015. The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943– 1962. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 23. Meuel, 30. 24. Benson, Jackson J. 2004. The Ox-Bow Man: A Biography of Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. 25. Andersen, Kenneth. 1970. “Character Portrayal in The Ox-Bow Incident.” Western American Literature 4, no. 4: 287–298. 26. The Ox-Bow Incident . 1943. New York: Kino Lorber, 2016, Blu-ray. 27. Strand, Pamela Joy. 2018. The Shocking Lynching of Will Brown 100 Years Ago. History News Network. https://historynewsnetw ork.org/article/170085. Accessed 25 March 2022; A Horrible Lynching. Nebraska Studies. www.nebraskastudies.org/en/1900-1924/ racial-tensions/a-horrible-lynching/. Accessed 25 March 2022. 28. Calhoun, John. 2004. “The Ox-Bow Incident.” Cineaste 29, no. 3: 55– 56. 29. Flora, Joseph M. 1979. “Woman with Parrot in The Ox-Bow Incident.” American Notes & Queries 17, no. 5: 74–76.

The Loner on the “Frontier of Unfilled Hopes and Threats”: Serling’s Old West in Kennedy’s New Frontier Christina M. Knopf

A man on horseback crosses an open field. Drums and an accordion blend in a haunting but daring melody, urged on by an insistent brass staccato, voicing the rider’s tragic past and tenacious progress.1 Narration rises above the instrumentation to introduce television audiences to The Loner: In the aftermath of the bloodletting called the Civil War, thousands of rootless, restless, searching men traveled west. Such a man was William Colton. Like the others, he carried a blanket roll, a proficient gun, and a dedication to a new chapter in American history... the opening of the West.

The year was 1965, one hundred years since the Civil War ended and the US army turned its attention to conquering the frontier while veterans created a new itinerant labor force in the American West, setting the stage for heroic cowboys, desperate criminals, and warring Natives to become

C. M. Knopf (B) Communication and Media Studies Department, State University of New York, Cortland, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_7

105

106

C. M. KNOPF

stock players in Western fiction for decades to come.2 And it was just five years since John F. Kennedy urged Americans to turn their aspirations to a “new frontier,” calling upon that same Western myth, which dominated popular culture throughout the 1950s into the 1960s. In 1955, TV audiences were introduced, first, to The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, and, shortly after, to Gunsmoke. Within two years, Westerns comprised one-third of all evening viewing time. By 1959, more than half of the top twenty television shows were Westerns.3 In 1960, thirty Westerns were on the air, with CBS offering eight: The Deputy, Frontier Justice, Gunslinger, Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, Rawhide, The Texan, and Wanted Dead or Alive. It seems, then, only fitting, that when CBS aired Kennedy’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention that same year, that Kennedy called upon those scenes and characters so familiar to American TV viewers: For I stand tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch three thousand miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world here in the West. They were not the captives of their own doubts, the prisoners of their own price tags. Their motto was not “every man for himself” – but “all for the common cause.” They were determined to make that new world strong and free, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from without and within.4

Such determination, Kennedy argued, was needed again. “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier – the frontier of the 1960’s – a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils – a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” Kennedy was using part of America’s mythic past to help Americans make sense of their present and to face their future. But, he was not the only man on CBS in 1960 to use myth as an analogy and parable. Also on CBS, writer Rod Serling was hosting the second season of The Twilight Zone, a fantasy anthology series that tackled a range of controversial social and political issues while appearing innocently fantastical and uncontroversial.5 Moreover, in 1960, Serling proposed to CBS his own idea for a Western series, described by Serling biographer Gordon F. Sander as “a kind of existential Western about a Civil War veteran searching for meaning and meeting up with adventure,” though it would be five more years until CBS was interested in The Loner.6

THE LONER ON THE “FRONTIER OF UNFILLED HOPES …

107

Serling was an admirer and supporter of Kennedy.7 Political scientist Leslie Dale Feldman has noted that multiple episodes of The Twilight Zone hinted at Serling’s interest in Kennedy’s agenda.8 After Kennedy’s assassination, Serling was recruited by the United States Information Agency to prepare a documentary about Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.9 And, Serling paid tribute to Kennedy’s death in The Twilight Zone episode “I am the Night – Color Me Black,” in which hatred and revenge seemingly doom society to darkness, black clouds shrouding communities around the world, including one, notably, “over a street in Dallas, Texas.”10 It comes as no surprise, then, that The Loner, conceived at the outset of Kennedy’s embarkment across the “new frontier” and broadcast two years after Kennedy’s death by gunfire in a southwest town, was a Western that explored Kennedy’s “question of the New Frontier” and the national choice “between the public interest and private comfort […] between determined dedication and creeping mediocrity.”11 In his “New Frontier” speech, Kennedy argued that the country was at a pivotal crossroads and needed to turn toward the future rather than the past, framing these challenges in the mythology of the American West, with a visionary goal of conquering a new frontier.12 But, he cautioned, “the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. […] Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”13 Historian Elliott West has argued that the Western of the 1950s–1960s, which promoted a vision of violent, White, masculine hubris, was a poor metaphor for Kennedy’s optimistic call to arms against the forces of ignorance, poverty, and prejudice.14 Nonetheless, the election of Kennedy as president coincided with the release of Western films, such as The Magnificent Seven, that shared his view of communal service over the rugged individualism of the previous administration.15 Serling, too, shared Kennedy’s passion for themes of racial and generational tensions and saw The Loner as a vehicle for using the established Western form to make a statement about peace and war.16 Such a statement was consistent with Kennedy’s own representation of a generation that had experienced World War II and was ready to assume political responsibility in facing the challenges of the time.17 The result of Serling’s Kennedy-esque philosophy was a mature Western series—a unique “cross between Westerns and Hitchcock” that made sophisticated use of close-ups, zooms, and narration.18 Lasting

108

C. M. KNOPF

only one, 26-episode, season, The Loner starred Lloyd Bridges as William Colton, an ex-Cavalry officer working through the trauma of the American Civil War by traveling West.19 Colton’s journey is more philosophical than physical, offering a dialogue, rather than gunfire, a heavy morality tale. This chapter examines six of the early episodes—three which focus specifically on the aftermath of war and three which explicitly deal with issues of prejudice. All six were written by Serling and arguably look to Kennedy’s “unsolved problems of peace and war” and “unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice.”

Aftermath of the Bloodletting Episode one of The Loner, “An Echo of Bugles,” originally aired on September 18, 1965. It established Colton’s character, provided the traumatic backstory for his adventures, and is remarkably poignant for the politics of the twenty-first century. In the episode, which opens “one month after Appomattox” (where the Civil War ended), Colton defends a Confederate veteran from being taunted by a young bully. The youth challenges Colton to a duel, which he reluctantly accepts. Troubled at the prospect of having to kill a young man, Colton experiences flashbacks to his wartime service. The story begins when Colton wanders into a saloon and witnesses a young drunk, Jody (Tony Bill), tear down a Confederate “stars and bars” battle flag from a display of war souvenirs. Wearing the flag like a cape, Jody mocks the South and General Robert E. Lee. Spying an aged man, Nichols (Whit Bissell), in a gray coat, Jody turns his ire on him. The dialogue of the confrontation that follows is particularly notable to audiences of the twenty-first century—viewers who witnessed the removal of nearly a hundred Confederate monuments in 2020.20 Holding the flag, Jody demands of Nichols, “Hey mister, know what this is?” Nichols replies, “I know what it was, son.” Emboldened by the North’s recent victory and the whiskey he was drinking, Jody presses the man in gray about whether his allegiances now are “to the Union, or to this rag here?” Nichols, recently released from a prison camp, states, “I’m a practical man, son, I don’t owe allegiance to a ghost. And that’s what the Confederacy is now. It bled to death in a couple of hundred battles. But an affection, a respect for it, I’ll carry this to my grave.” When Jody throws the flag to the floor, empties the spittoon on it, and then kicks it, Colton intervenes, physically forcing him to pick up, dust off, and fold the flag before handing it to Nichols. Colton asserts, “Now I don’t owe

THE LONER ON THE “FRONTIER OF UNFILLED HOPES …

109

any allegiance to that flag either, but too many good men died for it to let me sit by and see it get desecrated by a dirty little loudmouth who had no hand in bringing it down.” After the altercation, Colton remarks to Nichols, “The flag dies harder than a man, doesn’t it.” Expressions of affection and respect for the flag and the “good men [who] died for it”—in dialogue written in the 1960s—are consistent with post-war revisionism. As Erin Blakemore reported in National Geographic, “By the early 20th century, white Southerners had mythologized an imagined South that fought the war not to uphold slavery but to protect states’ rights and a genteel way of life—an idyll endangered by ‘Northern aggression’ and interference.”21 Efforts to memorialize the Confederate dead began as soon as the war ended and took hold as Confederate veterans began to die in the early twentieth century. Confederate monuments and increased adoption of the “stars and bars” as a symbol of Southern heritage, memory, and rebellion soon followed. Despite the nostalgic mythologizing of the Confederate flag by Nichols and Colton, two lines of their dialogue resonate in the 2020s. Nichols’ initial reaction of “I know what it was ” is a reminder that the Confederate States of America no longer exists, and its flag is that of a defeated and traitorous people. And Colton’s final observation that “The flag dies harder than a man” is a poignant reminder that the Confederate flag retains its associations with centuries of racial injustice, that it resurges time and again to defy civil rights efforts, and that racism kills but does not die. Killing, and death, is the focus of The Loner’ s inaugural episode—introducing the theme that would run through the entirety of the season. Colton’s impending duel with Jody triggers a series of war flashbacks to Colton’s last battle before Lee surrendered at Appomattox. The first flashback begins in slow motion, a powerful display of the cinematic aesthetic Serling brought to the television Western, as Colton leads a cavalry charge against a line of Confederate soldiers. The riders advance through cannon fire, some falling, and the moment they meet up with the enemy for faceto-face and hand-to-hand combat, the scene unfolds at normal speed. A Confederate boy drops from a tree onto Colton, who turns and runs the soldier through with his saber. In the next flashback, the battle is over, and each side is attending to their wounded and dead. A messenger rides up and announces, “Lee just surrendered at Appomattox. The war’s over. Thank God. It’s all done.” A few moments later, the Confederate Captain retrieves their fallen flag and

110

C. M. KNOPF

says, “It would appear that we must lay down our arms now,” to which Colton replies, looking across the field covered with bodies, “It would appear to me, Captain, that it was about time.” The third flashback is brief. Colton is looking at the soldier he ran through as his sergeant asks, “How old would you say he was? 16? 17?” Colton responds, “Not any older. No older. Thanks to me, no older.” The young man moves and Colton calls a stretcher bearer. The final flashback happens as Jody counts off the paces for the duel. Colton is now in the army hospital where the Confederate boy has died. A colonel tells Colton that such moments are the cost of war and part of serving the military. Colton decides to resign his commission, noting that if he had killed the Confederate soldier, “five minutes ago, it would have been murder. The difference being a place called Appomattox, two generals, and a signed piece of paper.” He declares that he will go West to, “Try to get the cannon smoke out of my eyes, the noise out of my ears, maybe some of the pictures out my head.” The colonel cautions him, “A killing is a killing, Mr. Colton, and a death is a death, with or without bugles.” Back in the present moment, the duel commences. Jody fires and misses. Colton returns fire, wounding the young man with a clean shot in the shoulder, deliberately choosing to not kill him. Nichols, who watched the confrontation says that he’s “obliged that nobody died this afternoon.” These moral questions about killing and murder, the distinction being merely a contextual matter of time, place, and socio-politics with the result of either being death, recur throughout the series and seem to be at the center of what Colton is searching for in the West.22 The quandary speaks to both the personal and the political aftermath of war. The acceptability of violence is revisited in episode two, “The Vespers.” Continuing his travels, Colton visits a man, Booker (Jack Lord), who saved his life at the battle of Shiloh during the war. Booker was a skilled marksman who made a living for a while as a hired gun, but eventually renounced violence, pledged his life to God, and became a Reverend. He and his wife now spend their lives moving from town to town, trying to stay ahead of posses seeking vengeance for the outlaws Booker killed. Colton, in his visit, is determined to convince Booker that he must again pick up a gun to defend himself saying, “I’d accept your point of view, Reverend, if I were someplace else, say a sitting room in Boston, someplace where I wouldn’t have to put it to a test.” Later, when Booker finally fires a gun to save the lives of his wife and unborn son, Colton reassures

THE LONER ON THE “FRONTIER OF UNFILLED HOPES …

111

him, “You took some lives tonight, Reverend, but you saved some, too.” Booker vows that he will remember and dwell on that and asks for God’s forgiveness. The experiences of killing and death also speak to the personal impact of war. Posttraumatic stress is suggested by Colton’s flashbacks in “An Echo of Bugles”—each set against a close-up shot of Colton’s face, symbolizing his private war of, and with, his memories. Posttraumatic stress is foregrounded in episode five, “One of the Wounded.” Colton gets a temporary job as a farmhand to help the wife of a catatonic army veteran, Colonel Phelps (Paul Richards), left emotionally damaged by the horrors of the Civil War. The wife, Agatha Phelps (Anne Baxter), is despondent at the responsibility of taking care of both the farm and her invalid husband and cannot comprehend why a man who has “not a mark on him, not a mark, not a saber wound or a bullet hole or a scar from a minié ball” can hardly move or speak. Colton tries to explain that “some wounds are too deep for a surgeon’s scalpel, and they don’t come with scars.”23 He asks her, “Do you know how much hell a man has to go through to take away his speech and his strength? More hell, more misery, and more anguish than you ever knew existed.” Colton reveals that he and her husband have a lot in common: We both had our stomachs full of war, and as a result your husband can’t walk and I can’t stop running. Men react differently and the scars are different. The disabilities are different. There’s two-thousand miles from here to Appomattox and four years since the first Bull Run. But none of it, none of it, is more than a moment away or farther than across the room.

Such invisible wounds of war were always at the heart of Serling’s creations—just as Kennedy’s military service in World War II played an important role in his 1960 campaign.24 Plagued by nightmares of his time in the Pacific theater during World War II, Serling revealed that he was “traumatized into writing by war events,” and that he turned to writing as therapy for his bitterness and restlessness.25 Like “An Echo of Bugles” and “The Vespers,” “One of the Wounded” also explores the moral complexities of violence. When local bullies harass Colton, calling the wounded colonel a “dummy,” and questioning the morality and nature of the arrangement between Colton and Mrs. Phelps, the confrontation leads to a late night siege on the farm. When the attack begins, Mrs. Phelps pleads with Colton to not fight and to talk with the

112

C. M. KNOPF

posse outside. “Where have you been, Mrs. Phelps?” he asks. “Talk and reason were the first casualties of the late war.” The sound of gunfire prompts Colonel Phelps to put on the remnants of his army uniform and to enter the fray, eventually bringing him out of his shock. After the fight is won, he asks, “Does it ever end? The killing, does it ever end?” Colton answers, “Sometimes. Sometimes you have to make it end.” The next morning, Colonel Phelps observes that walking into rifle fire is “instinct, the same instinct that an animal has to kill.” When he adds, “I sometimes think that a man can die from killing as well as being killed,” Colton notes that is “one of the things that distinguishes him from an animal.” The struggle between war and peace—violence and pacifism, physical force and logical dialogue—creates the narrative tension for The Loner. As Allen Glover writes in TV Noir: Dark Drama on the Small Screen, “Colton’s conditional pacifism is to be repeatedly challenged, not only by the harshness of the landscape and its hardened settlers, but by the conventions of the Western itself – the genre’s emphasis on violent resolution.”26 Colton seemingly abhors violence but repeatedly finds it necessary. In “The House Rules at Mrs. Wayne’s,” as in “The Vespers,” Colton finds himself in the company of pacificists while visiting an old friend. Forced to defend himself, he again turns to his gun. When he is challenged that violence is not honorable, he suggests that “To know right and to know wrong, and to stand alongside one and face the other” is honorable. But he concedes, “Maybe someday there’ll be a new breed of man – your breed. They won’t wear guns. They won’t have to. But it’ll take some time and it’ll take some doing. And it can only come after my breed is out of the way.” Colton’s arguments and actions in these episodes align neatly with Serling’s own worldview amidst the mounting international tensions of the Cold War. Anne Serling wrote of her father, Rod, that he described the war in Vietnam as “a tragic bleeding mess – dishonest, immoral and self-defeating,” but he was not a pacifist. He was “proud of his own army service and willing to consider that force must often be met with force” and “in the early days of the Kennedy administration [was] willing to accept the argument that counter-insurgency in Vietnam could halt the spread of Communism throughout Asia.” But Serling soon became disillusioned with the war and wanted the violence to stop and the United States to retreat honorably.27 This is the worldview he gave to Colton who he described “as an onlooker to the battle of life and death. He

THE LONER ON THE “FRONTIER OF UNFILLED HOPES …

113

sees in that sudden clarity that comes after protracted combat something of the value of human life and something of the tragedy of death.”28 The Loner, setting out across his own “frontier of unfulfilled hopes,” seemingly shadows Kennedy’s own brief journey as a politician acutely aware of US vulnerability in the Cold War, who simultaneously supported increased civil defense efforts and greater diplomacy via international friendships.29

Rootless, Restless, Searching Men Man’s inhumanity to man as a central theme of The Loner extends from the warfront to the home front. As Glover observes, “Serling’s take on mankind’s innate capacity for cruelty and hatred is clear-cut: the setting may be the wild and lawless Old West, but the place is America, in the uneasy years between ‘I Have a Dream’ and a shot ringing out in the Memphis sky.”30 Though prejudice rears its ugly head through the first six episodes in the guise of North–South animosity, religious intolerance, and mental health stigmas, racism makes its first explicit appearance in episode seven, “Widow on the Evening Stage.” Sharing many characteristics of the traditional Western of TV and cinema, the story begins when twenty people on a wagon train are massacred by Apaches. As Colton helps to collect the dead, he finds the body of a man he knew in the war. Befriending the man’s father, Sullivan (Lloyd Gough), Colton soon finds himself embroiled in social controversy when the man’s widow, an Indigenous woman, shows up with their infant child. Embittered by the deaths of their loved ones, the town is out for revenge. Sullivan declares, “Indians. Savage animals, that’s what they are. Would to God they all die, all of them. Destroy them, burn them, kill them,” and rejects his daughter-in-law, Sue (Katherine Ross), and grandchild when they arrive.31 Meanwhile, the townsfolk have captured a lone Indigenous man and plan to torture and kill him, sending his body back into the desert as a message to other “Indians.” Colton tries to get Sue (whose name is notably a homophone of Sioux) and her child out of town and away from the bloodthirsty mob, but she is weary of White man’s conceit and decides to stand up to them. Originally airing on October 30, 1965—three years before Native American activists formed the American Indian Movement group, four years before the occupation of Alcatraz, and seven years before the Trail of Broken Treaties March on Washington, DC—it provided a critique

114

C. M. KNOPF

of racism against Indigenous peoples that was ahead of its time. In one outstanding line of dialogue, for example, Colton is trying to engage Sue in conversation, and she responds, “What’ll we talk about, Mr. Colton? The late war? The Indian school in Montana where I learned to wear dresses and shoes and speak the language of the civilized White man?” It would be another fifty-plus years before the injustices of such Indian Boarding Schools would take center stage in American media, following the discovered remains of more than 1,300 First Nations students at the site of one such school in Canada.32 Racism returns in episode ten, “The Homecoming of Lemuel Stove,” another timeless story about conditions applicable to the mid-nineteenth, mid-twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. As the story opens, Colton is under attack by a Comanche raiding party. By all accounts, the episode is typical of its genre, with whooping “Indians” inflicting seamlessly senseless violence on an innocent White man, bullets ricocheting off rocks while horses and men alike exhibit impressive acrobatic skills. The story quickly departs, however, from a traditional “shoot ‘em up” when Colton is saved by a nearby Black army veteran, Lemuel Stove (Brock Peters), on his way to see his father who had moved West during the war. Colton quickly befriends the young man, giving him his boots in return for saving his life, and they camp down for the night, sharing their rations. The relationship is strained when they arrive in town and discover that Stove’s father had been lynched the night before by a hood-wearing White supremacy group. When Stove sets out to get the justice, in the form of revenge, that the local law will not provide, Colton tries to dissuade him from the path of violence. Stove movingly responds, “How come your kind thinks an ex-slave is less than a man, but you expect him to have the patience of a God?” The line, first uttered on television on November 20, 1965, doubtlessly speaks to the Watts Rebellion that resulted in the murder of twenty-eight Black people in Los Angeles, California in August of that same year, after violence broke out between police and a frightened Black man arrested in a traffic stop. Stove’s dialogue also resonates with debates that would rage fifty-five years later surrounding the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” Stove argued, just as activists in 2020 would argue, that the active, urgent, advocacy for Black justice is not a subversion of the justice system, but a necessity to ensure that the system is truly serving all citizens.33

THE LONER ON THE “FRONTIER OF UNFILLED HOPES …

115

Citizenship, and the protection it promises, is at the heart of the final episode discussed here, and the last one in the series to directly tackle the gap between the promise of the American Dream and the reality of socio-political inequities. Episode eleven, “Westward, the Shoemaker,” focuses on the journey of Hyman Rabinovitch (David Opatoshu), an immigrant shoemaker from Latvia whose dream of opening a cobbler’s shop is jeopardized by small-minded locals. When Colton, on his way to a job at a ranch, encounters Hyman along the trail, he gives him a ride into town. Along the way, Hyman reveals that he has been in America for one year. Serling pokes a little fun at the Western genre when Hyman indicates that he has learned to “talk American, talk like cowboy: ‘Howdy. Okay. Giddyap.’” When Hyman hides from passing US Cavalry troops, believing them to be Cossacks who, back in Latvia, burned houses and killed people, including members of his family, Colton reassures him that there are no Cossacks in America. And, again, Serling takes some light jabs at typical Western motifs as Hyman makes sense of his new country: Every time I see uniform, I see Cossacks after Hyman. But, but I am wrong, eh? Not in America? Not in Wild West? No Cossacks here? Indians after Hyman? Yes. Bandits after Hyman? Possibly. But no Cossacks.

The freedom from Cossacks is soon translated into the freedom promised by the American Dream. Hyman possesses four-hundred dollars that he got by selling his family’s heirloom ring to a man in New York who urged him to “go West” because “everybody go West. Everybody need shoes. So, Hyman, go West.” And out West, Hyman finds the perfect storefront for sale to set up his own cobbler’s shop. But soon, an unscrupulous card sharp and con man tricks Hyman into losing his fortune at the saloon’s gaming table, egged on by locals having fun at Hyman’s expense. Colton appears and seems to save the day by beating the gambler at his own dishonest game. Just as things look promising for Hyman, it is revealed that his money is worthless Confederate States Dollars and the assembled saloon patrons laugh mercilessly at the naïve immigrant. As Hyman breaks down in despair, the shop owner drops the selling price and gives Hyman a silver dollar to use toward his down payment. Shamed, the others follow suit and soon the cobbler’s shop is within Hyman’s grasp.

116

C. M. KNOPF

The moral of the story is captured in one of Hyman’s lines, “You know something? I love America.” Though it is nearly a jingoistic variation of the Horatio Alger myth, playing on every ideal of the United States as a land of opportunity and freedom from persecution, its message arguably carried additional weight when it aired on November 27, 1965. The Civil Rights movement and the emerging counterculture marked a shift away from racial and ethnic discrimination, reinforced by such policies as an immigration quota system that favored residents from northern Europe. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 changed that, diversifying the flow of immigrants into the country.34 Serling hated bigotry and prejudice, frequently condemning them in not only his writing but also in his public statements.35 In all three of these episodes—“Widow on the Evening Stage,” “The Homecoming of Lemuel Stove,” and “Westward, the Shoemaker”—Serling draws attention to the particular problem of the mob.36 In “Widow on the Evening Stage,” he tells Sue, “We could stand here until dawn and discuss the phenomenon of prejudice, but part of that phenomenon is that if you stick good men into a mob, take away their names, faces, identity – take away their responsibility – they’re no longer good men.” The mob returns beneath the Klan-like hoods threatening Lemuel Stove, who Colton mocks as cowards, “all covered up and huddled together.” And it even returns surrounding the card table where Hyman the shoemaker’s dreams are shattered—men and women all going along with the crowd to either berate or benefit Hyman. In critiquing The Twilight Zone, Feldman observes, “Serling, like Hobbes, understood that humans are only civilized under the threat of compulsion.”37 The anonymity provided by the mob removes the compulsion and humans revert to belligerence and selfishness. The Western genre, suggests professor of political theory John S. Nelson, is well suited to represent, and explore, such aspects of Hobbesian authority, given its concerns with the politics of spectacle, vengeance, and virtue.38

A New Chapter and a New Frontier Most episodes end with the time-honored Western cliché of the lone cowboy riding off into the sunset, or at least into the direction of the sunset—West, the same direction that Kennedy faced when he called on Americans to be courageous “pioneers on that New Frontier.” Kennedy asked the country to simultaneously emulate and reject the past. This

THE LONER ON THE “FRONTIER OF UNFILLED HOPES …

117

paradox, likewise, marked Colton’s journey. As Glover notes, “The grip of the past is integral to the plotting of The Loner. Its half-hour format and lack of continuing characters aside from Colton require that each episode begins with a conflict already in place – a strategy contingent upon a complex layering of the past over the present.”39 Colton continuously moves West, to a new frontier and new challenges, but he repeatedly encounters his past. Though he “carries ‘a proficient gun,’ he’s averse to gunplay; while sensitive to inequality, to the suffering of others, he’s among the ranks of those dedicated to ‘the opening of the West,’ a euphemism for the bloody campaign of expansionism wrought by American manifest destiny.”40 Likewise, Kennedy’s political record would be mixed, caught between a promising new vision and old myths and habits—a “Cold Warrior who shared responsibility […] in bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war,” escalating the conflict in Vietnam, and failing to advance civil rights policy.41 The Loner is a quest. Colton says in “The Vespers” that he’s looking for a “pot of gold maybe, maybe the secret of longevity, maybe just a man better than myself.” But what he was looking for was what voters were looking for in 1960, and again in 1964—an answer to the human condition, a way past the bloodshed that marked the country’s founding, a way out of the Cold War’s threat of total annihilation, and a way beyond the social, political, and racial divisiveness of the 1960s. At the end of “The Homecoming of Lemuel Stove,” as Lemuel’s father and several of his attackers all lie dead, the town’s preacher asks, “Necessary, was it, Mr. Colton? This much death?” to which Colton says, “I’d like to find the answer to that myself, Reverend. And I’d like to live with it.” Kennedy’s successor would eventually suggest the answer in his 1964 campaign, stating, against a picture of a girl in an open field, much like the one Colton crossed at the beginning of The Loner, “We must either love each other, or we must die.”42

Notes 1. James Southall, “Stagecoach/The Loner,” Movie Wave: Film Music Reviews, December 19, 2012, http://www.movie-wave.net/stagecoachthe-loner/. 2. David D. Smits, “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865–1883,” The Western Historical Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1994): 312– 338; Susan Kollin, “Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac

118

C. M. KNOPF

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

McCarthy and the Contemporary Western,” Contemporary Literature XLII, no. 3 (2001): 557–588. Elliott West, “Shots in the Dark: Television and the Western Myth,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 38, no 2 (1988): 72–76. John F. Kennedy, “Acceptance of Democratic Nomination for President,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, July 15, 1960, accessed August 29, 2021, https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/ historic-speeches/acceptance-of-democratic-nomination-for-president. Leslie Dale Feldman, Spaceships and Politics: The Political Theory of Rod Serling (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), Kindle edition. Gordon F. Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of TV’s Last Angry Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 205. Anne Serling, As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling (New York: Citadel Press, 2013), Kindle edition, loc. 2175. For example, “The Mirror” makes a case against dictatorships in the early days of the Kennedy’s anti-communist presidency, and Kennedy’s Cold War diplomacy is echoed in “The Jeopardy Room” and “The Whole Truth.” (Feldman, Spaceships and Politics.) Sander, Serling, 193; Serling, As I Knew Him, loc. 2188. Paul, “‘A Street in Dallas’: JFK and the Twilight Zone,” Shadow & Substance, November 22, 2013, https://thenightgallery.wordpress.com/ 2013/11/22/a-street-in-dallas/#more-1950. Kennedy, “Acceptance of Democratic Nomination for President.” Quoted in, Andreas Etges, “‘The Man for the 60’s’/’The Man of the 60’s’: John F. Kennedy and the Thousand Days,” in Revisiting the Sixties: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on America’s Longest Decade, ed. Laura Bieger & Christian Lammert (Frankfurt: Campus Verglag, 2013), 132–134. Kennedy, “Acceptance of Democratic Nomination for President.” West, “Shots in the Dark,” 74. Douglas Brode, Dream West: Politics and Religion in Cowboy Movies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), Kindle edition. Sander, Serling, 207. Etges, “‘The man for the 60’s,’” 140. Sander, Serling, 206. The Loner, the complete series, created by Rod Serling (Twentieth Century Fox, 1966; Los Angeles, CA: Shout! Factory LLC, 2016), DVD. Rachel Treisman, “Nearly 100 Confederate Monuments Removed in 2020, Report Says; More than 700 Remain,” NPR, February 23, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/02/23/970610428/nearly-100-con federate-monuments-removed-in-2020-report-says-more-than-700-remai. Erin Blakemore, “How the Confederate Battle Flag Became an Enduring Symbol of Racism,” National Geographic, January 12,

THE LONER ON THE “FRONTIER OF UNFILLED HOPES …

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

119

2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-confed erate-battle-flag-became-symbol-racism, para. 10. For more on these moral quandaries and distinctions, see for example, Tony Waters, When Killing is a Crime (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007). The wounds that do come with scars, and the ways that such wounds run more than flesh deep, are explored at length in episode nineteen, “The Trial in Paradise,” in which three maimed veterans seek retribution against the Major who led the ill-fated mission that doomed them. Etges, “‘The man for the 60’s,’” 136–137. Quoted in Allen Glover, TV Noir: Dark Drama on the Small Screen (New York: Abrams, 2019), Kindle edition, 176; also see, Serling, As I Knew Him, loc. 738. Glover, TV Noir, 177. Serling, As I Knew Him, loc. 2205–2211. Glover, TV Noir, 178. See, Philip Nash, “Bear Any Burden? John F. Kennedy and Nuclear Weapons,” in Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945, ed. John Lewis Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 120– 140; Phillip E. Muehlenbeck, “Kennedy and Touré: A Success in Personal Diplomacy,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 19 (2008): 69–75. Glover, TV Noir, 178. It is important to note that a White actor, Ross, played the part of an Indigenous woman in this episode, undermining the story’s call for inclusion. See, Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, “Indian Boarding Schools’ Traumatic Legacy, and the Fight to Get Native Ancestors Back,” NPR, August 28, 2021, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/08/28/103139 8120/native-boarding-schools-repatriation-remains-carlisle; also, Mary Annette Pember, “Death by Civilization,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/tra umatic-legacy-indian-boarding-schools/584293/. See, for example, the viral parable of Black Lives Matter and the lost sheep, explained by Megan, “Why Black Lives Matter,” St. Thomas Episcopal Church, accessed February 8, 2022, https://saintthomasepiscopal. org/why-black-lives-matter/. “Immigration in the 1960s,” Boundless, July 3, 2017, https://www.bou ndless.com/blog/60s-immigration/. Feldman, Spaceships and Politics, loc. 2258. The irrationality and violence of mobs feature into multiple episodes of The Twilight Zone, as well, such as “The Shelter,” “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “I Am the Night – Color Me Black,” and “He’s Alive.”

120

C. M. KNOPF

37. Feldman, Spaceships and Politics, loc. 397. 38. John S. Nelson, Cowboy Politics: Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns from The Virginian to Unforgiven and Deadwood (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2018). 39. Glover, TV Noir, 181. 40. Glover, TV Noir, 177. 41. Etges, “‘The man for the 60’s,’” 138–139. 42. Tony Schwartz and Monique Luiz, Peace, Little Girl: Daisy Political Spot, 1964, video, https://www.loc.gov/item/mbrs01185386/.

No Man’s Land: Film Cycles, Femininity, and Female Empowerment in the Western Farrah Hersh

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she insires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance—Budd Boetticher Without a woman, the Western wouldn’t work—Anthony Mann

Introduction It is a truth universally acknowledged that women in the Western receive the short end of the stick in both scholarship and screen time. The Western is one of the most recognizable genres in terms of its conventions, tropes, and treatment of both men and women. Popular best-of lists frequently highlight male-driven Westerns that feature cowboys rustling cattle and riding off into the sunset or sheriffs saving the day and killing the villain. Consider the American Film Institute’s (AFI) Top 10 Westerns: The Searchers (1956), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), Unforgiven

F. Hersh (B) Department of English, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_8

121

122

F. HERSH

(1992), Red River (1948), The Wild Bunch (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Stagecoach (1939), and Cat Ballou (1965). The cast list order changes depending on the site accessed, but there is only one woman who consistently receives top billing: Jane Fonda, for Cat Ballou at number ten. Furthermore, AFI categorizes the film as a Western, comedy, and satire and imdb.com as a comedy, romance, and Western. The one film that stars a woman is a hybrid, containing elements of other genres. Frequently, the more female-centered genres originate in musicals, romantic comedies, and melodramas. Yet, strong female characters exist in the above films and throughout the Western genre. Certainly, Grace Kelly’s Amy Foster Kane, in High Noon deserves recognition for saving her husband’s life, as does Katy Jurado’s character Helen Ramirez who owns the saloon and convenience store in town. Joanne Dru as Tess Millay knows how to shoot a gun in Red River and Julie Christie’s Constance Miller owns the brothel in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Still, as Sue Matheson argues, “the scholarship about the western’s gender relations (and expectations) has been primarily concerned with issues of masculinity, masculine desire, and masculine display.”1 Indeed, women are often relegated to the supporting role in the Western genre, portraying characters such as wife, mother, prostitute, schoolmarm, and squaw, among others, with no real agency or independence. Recently, an influx of Westerns debuted on television between 2014 and 2017 specifically showcasing women in lead roles and in professions mirroring those of the women in previous Western films. While the men in these series are helpless or hindered in some form, the women are strong and resilient. Premiering around the #metoo movement, Strange Empire (2014), Wynonna Earp (2016), and Godless (2017), introduces female characters who challenge the stereotypes and conventions of the Western genre, undertaking careers regularly reserved for men, like Wynonna Earp (Melanie Scrofano) who becomes a Marshal like her great, great grandfather Wyatt Earp, or sheriff, like Maggie (Merritt Weaver) in Godless who assumes the role when her brother, the real sheriff repeatedly leaves town. These women are constantly surrounded by men who cannot protect their community or worse aim to harm the women, forcing them back into the familiar and stereotypical roles of prostitute, homemaker, and mother. The leading ladies in the above series certainly break barriers and for the most part seize the opportunity for a better life.

NO MAN’S LAND: FILM CYCLES, FEMININITY, AND FEMALE …

123

As unfamiliar as this may sound for the genre, it is not the first time a cycle of female-driven Westerns appears on screen and at a culturally critical moment for women in society. In fact, since the silent era, several film cycles portray women as lead protagonists protecting their property as a saloon and ranch owners or their community as sheriffs and marshals. In the late 1930s, Dorothy Page starred in Water Rustlers, Ride ‘em Cowgirl, and The Singing Cowgirl meant to capitalize on the success of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, the singing cowboys. The 1940s brought women top billing in Arizona (1940) starring Jean Arthur, The Lady from Cheyenne (1941) starring Loretta Young, and Red Canyon (1949) featuring Ann Blyth among many others. No longer were women reduced to subordinates and second-billed cast members. It is noteworthy that female-driven Western cycles premiere during challenging times. As film cycles arise during social and political turmoil, they capitalize on important and significant events in American popular culture. Essentially, through cinema, audiences, historians, and scholars reflect and investigate past and present moments from the world at large and how they impact art. At least three or more female-led Westerns, premiered during the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s, 1990s, and 2010s; all pivotal moments for women in history as they seek the right to vote, demand employment, equal pay, and the right to protect their bodies. Though this chapter does not cover all the above cycles, it investigates the 1950s film cycle, a period in which the Western is at its peak, and the 2010s television cycle, a time when women’s roles in traditional male genres are on the rise. The earlier decade showcases the conflicting messages from that era: as women demand to be included in the workforce, they are also bombarded by images that reinforce traditional gender roles and a return to American values. Furthermore, the 1950s influences future women’s Western cycles including the latter half of the 2010 cycle in which the outdated stereotypical roles for women in the Western are transformed. Debuting during the #metoo movement, in which hateful rhetoric and sexual violence are at their highest following the 2016 campaign for president, along with the Harvey Weinstein scandal, this cycle examines the continued professionalization of women as they enter careers in law enforcement. These are critical periods for women in cinema and television; the rise of female protagonists and female-centered narratives in long-established male genres signifies that women’s stories are finally taking hold and those who want to tell women’s stories are not silenced.

124

F. HERSH

The Film Cycle According to Amanda Ann Klein, film cycles, much like film genres, “are a series of films associated with each other through shared images, characters, settings, plots, or themes.”2 Additionally, cycles provide an alternative way of investigating films within a particular genre, including timeliness, financial viability, and public discourse.3 In other words, film genres can last a significant amount of time, while film cycles are the variations of those genres over time. Cycles can expand our knowledge of familiar conventions and tropes so easily identifiable in individual genres. Klein suggests that “film cycles accurately reveal[ing], the state of contemporary politics, prevalent social ideologies, aesthetic trends, and popular desires and anxieties.”4 Indeed, film cycles arise during the political and social upheaval, reflecting the general population in a timely manner. Furthermore, cycles demonstrate the evolution of genres by illuminating different relationships such as gender and genre. Certainly, the Western perfectly exemplifies the ebb and flow of a film cycle. Wildly popular in the early days of the classical studio system and producing several famous stars and directors including John Ford and John Wayne, the popularity of movies begins to wane as television encroached on cinema throughout the 1950s. The studios adapted the genre to the changing times and thus premiered several variations on the traditional Western including elements from film noir like Winchester ’73 (1950) and epics like Giant (1956). Most importantly, they released close to 50 films starring women as either the lead protagonist who received top billing or significant supporting roles. Gaylyn Studlar notes from a piece in the New York Times, the appearance in postwar Westerns of top women stars in important female roles recognizes a “new movie trend” even as it was occurring.5 Stars previously seen in screwball comedies, film noirs, and melodramas were now famous for Westerns including Anne Baxter, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, and most notably Barbara Stanwyck who starred in several Westerns throughout the 1950s. The popularity and bankability of the women above give credence not only to the studios but the Western itself as a genre for all audiences. However, the decade created a binary among individual women. Having previously left domesticity behind in the early 1940s to help with the war effort, they are subsequently pushed back into the domestic sphere through repeated images in magazines, on television screens, and in films. Though this did not happen to all women, there was a

NO MAN’S LAND: FILM CYCLES, FEMININITY, AND FEMALE …

125

deceptive call to return to American values and traditional gender roles. Martin Halliwell suggests, “Rigorous advertising campaigns promoted this suburban ideal, and it was not until late in the decade that rigid gender roles were widely questioned.”6 Representations of women cooking, cleaning, and tending to children are included in magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Women’s Weekly, and Woman’s World. Furthermore, scenes of the happy wife and mother are frequently found on television series like I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the female-driven Western, despite the masculine themes, found ways to highlight these conventional images in the 1950s women’s Western cycle. Regardless of the beginning of a new entrepreneurial Western woman, one who owns saloons and gambling houses, who has the power to run their own ranch with male employees, who have only occupied this male-dominated space as wife and prostitute, is inevitably returned to the home and the heteronormative relationship by the end of the films. Each of the following films contains at least one or more images of women preparing a drink or meal for a man or in need of rescuing; The Furies (1950) Outlaw Women (1952), The Moonlighter (1953), Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) Johnny Guitar (1954), and The Buckskin Lady (1957). Female characters are pushed and pulled in two different directions; thus, two different versions of women emerge, the career woman who feels empowered by her newfound freedom and opportunity, and the homemaker, consigned to the home for cooking, cleaning, and caring for husbands and children. It is these two diametrically opposed portrayals of women in the 1950s that foreshadow the complex women in today’s modern Western.

The 1950s Women’s Western Cycle The female-led Western film grants women access to spaces they would have otherwise occupied only in a subordinate role or else been altogether forbidden to enter including the saloon and ranch or participating in professions such as sheriff, deputy, or doctor. Much like the decade before in which the number of employed women had leaped 60 percent by 1945, the dominant trend of films during this period are the remarkable number of narratives that portray working women and business owners.7 Comanche Territory (1950), Outlaw Women (1952), The Redhead from Wyoming (1953), Johnny Guitar (1954), The Maverick Queen (1956), and The Buckskin Lady (1957) feature women as gamblers, saloon

126

F. HERSH

owners, or both. Additionally, The Furies (1950), Cattle Queen (1951), Rancho Notorious (1952), Cattle Queen of Montana (1954), and Forty Guns (1957) highlight female ranch owners. Oklahoma Annie (1952), and The Moonlighter (1953) deputize women; women in Strange Lady in Town (1955) and Texas Lady (1955) establish a medical practice and newspaper, respectively, in frontier towns. However, their independence is fleeting, as the traditional gender roles are reconstituted by the end of several films and the women are again part of a couple; their accomplishments are forgotten; and their gender is reinforced. For instance, in Johnny Guitar, the film slowly reconstructs the gender norms of the period. At the beginning of the film, Vienna (Joan Crawford) is in charge and the men she employs work the kitchen, the bar, and the gambling tables. One of them speaks directly to the camera as if talking to the audience: “I’ve never seen a woman more of a man,” he says, as if to make sure the audience knows her femininity has been left behind and no “womanly” feats will be performed. She never steps foot in the domestic space of the kitchen because of her male cook. Despite this, once her former lover, Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) returns to town, Vienna cannot sleep and searches for Johnny, finding him in the kitchen with a drink. When he first arrives at the saloon, he drinks at the bar via shot glass or teacup and never in the kitchen. Vienna wears a reddishpurple nightgown, signifying the passion that remains for him. Normally, Vienna dresses in button-down shirts and pants, a signal to her employees and the townspeople of her power and mirroring the men in Westerns of the past. In the kitchen, her face is partially covered in shadow intimating both love and hate for her former lover. He demands that she tell him she loves him, that there have been no other men and that he is the only one for her. As she repeats the words her face contorts, from smiling and happy to see him, to anger: no matter her love for him, she wants to tell him on her own terms, not be commanded to do so. This does not take place in the bedroom or the bar itself, but the kitchen, a place frequently gendered female, a place where images of women are put on display in glossy magazines of the 1950s to sell products for the home. The film slowly restores the well-established convention of the masculine hero aiding the damsel in distress. Johnny rescues Vienna from hanging and tells her to change her clothes because her white dress is a beacon in the dark. Emma (Mercedes McCambridge) and the rest of the angry mob of townspeople continue to chase Johnny and Vienna to a hideout. Safely in the hideaway, Johnny sits at the kitchen table

NO MAN’S LAND: FILM CYCLES, FEMININITY, AND FEMALE …

127

drinking coffee and Vienna cooks breakfast for him, cracking eggs and frying bacon. Whether this action is repayment for saving her life or because she still loves him, the fact remains that she encapsulates the look of the housewife. Furthermore, the idealized picture of 1950s America continues as Jennifer Peterson suggests, “at the kid’s hideout… it resembles a 1950s ranch home more than it does an outlaw’s lair, perched atop a mountainous rock and silhouetted against the blue sky. The women fight it out on porch of this domestic, homelike space.”8 The 1950sstyle ranch house on screen mirrors the suburban homes of the white middle-class audience that frequented theaters at that time and the houses featured on television sitcoms. Additionally, the shootout with Emma happens on the porch and not in the dusty streets of the town center as is common in male-dominated Westerns. The significance of the porch is indicative of the female. The front porch extends the idea of home, partaking in both the inside and outside world, and the porch serves equally as a public and private space. Women use the front porch to feel included in the neighborhood. The porch gives them a chance to converse with neighbors and friends. The final scene of the film solidifies the return to these traditional family values when Vienna and Johnny embrace and kiss. Once again, the heteronormative couple is restored. The Furies (1950) takes the return to heteronormativity one step further. Vance (Barbara Stanwyck), an opinionated and happily single rancher’s daughter prepares to inherit the family business. When unforeseen circumstances arise and she is subsequently disowned, Vance succeeds in purchasing the ranch out from under her father, T.C. (Walter Huston). Vance is also fiercely independent. For example, when her father suggests she marry, Vance declares “my husband will be my choice, not yours” and when a suitor, Rip (Wendell Corey), begins to court Vance, she asks him “do you mind if I take the reins? I like to know where I’m going.” The film hints at a return to the formal role women bear in the Western. There are repeated scenes where Vance scratches her father’s back and attends to his needs. Her courtship with Rip is infused with rhetoric that purposely puts Vance in a subordinate role specifically when Rip slaps Vance or when he asserts “I won’t be your husband, but you’ll be my wife.” Perhaps, the most deliberate point the movie makes is at the end of the film, when T.C., is shot and killed in the town; Vance and Rip bring him back to the ranch for burial. When they arrive at the entrance, she announces that they will marry and name their first child, a son, after T.C. After battling for her independence and control of The

128

F. HERSH

Furies, Vance returns to wife and mother status, a familiar character in the male-centered Western film. The final sequence in The Moonlighter (1953) ends similarly to the previous films. It features Barbara Stanwyck as Rela, a woman who works on a ranch. Her former boyfriend, Wes (Fred MacMurray), his brother Tom (William Ching), and Wes’s friend, Cole (Ward Bond) steal money from a bank Tom is recently fired from. Tom is Rela’s new boyfriend, and they plan to marry but he is shot and killed by the bank president. Rela vows to get Wes and his accomplice. She asks the sheriff to deputize her, and he insists “we don’t deputize ladies, the posse will catch those devils.” Rela demands to be deputized knowing she will be the only one to catch the thieves. She tracks down Cole (Ward Bond), and shoots him, reaffirming the conventions of the Western genre, the shootout. When she finds Wes hogtied, she loosens the ropes and reties them so she can turn him into the sheriff. She kills one man and captures another, yet on the journey back to town, she falls into newly formed rapids. Consequently, Wes rescues Rela and after recuperating, announces he will turn himself in if she is willing to wait for him. She agrees and the last shot is Rela and Wes riding horses toward the sunset, continuing the trope of the women civilizing the outlaw and reaffirming the traditional heteronormative couple. Despite the dominance these women bring to their leading protagonists, in the end they are forced back into the roles demanded of them: wife, mother, girlfriend, a lasting image, and further encouragement of the advertising campaigns during the 1950s.

The 2010 Women’s Western Cycle In 2006, Tarana Burke, an activist based in New York, coined the term metoo giving a voice to herself and so many others who suffer from sexual harassment and abuse. The term was not widely known until 2017 when Alyssa Milano and others tweeted #metoo in reference to the Harvey Weinstein scandal that rocked Hollywood. This led to the downfall of powerful men in entertainment and elsewhere. Additionally, it led to the uprising of a new women’s movement around the world. Out of the #metoo movement, came TIMESUP, initially a call from top female Hollywood power players to support victims of sexual harassment, it has become a not-for-profit organization supporting victims and supplying them with a legal defense. All of this led to an unprecedented spike in female-driven films and television series in the genres of action,

NO MAN’S LAND: FILM CYCLES, FEMININITY, AND FEMALE …

129

sports, war, and the Western, all genres that are distinctly male-centered. According to Ritu Prasad, in 2018, the entertainment group Creative Artists Agency and the tech company shift7 published a study confirming that women-led films saw bigger success at the box office between 2014 and 2017.9 This investigation is important because the infiltration of male genres demonstrates that women’s stories are finally emerging both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. It also signifies the public’s demand for more women-centric narratives as cycles tend to produce the same generic conventions because they are financially viable. Women are redefining the traditional and stereotypical male professions in which these genres came to be known, adapting the character archetypes so familiar within the masculine genres. In the contemporary gender cycle, the narrative action in the Western genre does not stop with the women, instead the action moves with them. The majority of the stories center on the individual woman or an ensemble of women who free themselves from the more feminine generic conventions. The reconstruction of gender norms that audiences observe in the 50s cycle is disrupted in the more modern Western. Though all three Western series end with relationships like the 1950s films, they differ from their 1950s counterparts. The 1950s must re-establish the heteronormative couple at the end of the film so that the American family, the American dream, and American values remain unbroken. The newer series end in more modern ways: two of the three relationships are samesex couples, including Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley) and Nicole (Katherine Barrell) from Wynonna Earp and Maggie and Callie (Tess Frazer) in Godless . The heteronormative relationship ends not as equals riding off into the sunset or a singular man but rather as Wynonna and Doc Holliday (Tim Rozon) ride into the sunset on Wynonna’s motorcycle with her in the driver’s seat. Finally, in Strange Empire the series ends with a former prostitute Isabelle (Tattiawna Jones) proposing to the new marshal Kat so Isabelle can gain access to the money she was promised by her dead husband.

The Working Women as Business Owner The classic and contemporary Westerns share easily identifiable conventions and tropes. The more contemporary films and television series preserve the familiar generic elements of the Western setting including

130

F. HERSH

the frontier. The new frontier places settings in New Mexico, the Alberta– Montana border, and Purgatory, near the Canadian Rockies. Indeed, most classical Hollywood Westerns take place outdoors and in out West. Certainly, the outdoor environment is essential to the Western as it represents the wilderness, the uncivilized nature of the cowboy and soldier, and the unconquered land, yet Hollywood’s observations on the indoor environment such as the saloon or gambling house specifically in “women westerns” is revealing and significant. Diana Reep suggests “the saloon is a primary location - a place where characters can easily gather and where human conflicts simmer just beneath the surface noise of the clinking glasses and the thumping piano.”10 Saloons are often mirror images of the outside world. The clash of civilization and wilderness brought into an enclosed space. Frequently, men fight over a cheating hand of cards or other slights. On the other hand, women in saloons are generally prostitutes or singers, trapped in the public sphere with unsavory reputations. Unless a man comes to rescue them, they are destined to stay. However, if the film is female-centered specifically on the musical Western or melodrama, women become the fighting party in films like The Harvey Girls (1946), a musical set in the West in which the good girl Judy Garland and the saloon girl Angela Lansbury come to blows over a man. The same fight happens in the film Outlaw Women, a fight breaks out among them, and the men encourage it by hollering and carrying on; only when a female bouncer steps in who breaks up the fight, does it end. The women-owned saloon in a female-led Western becomes femininized compared to those of previous Westerns with male protagonists. The room resembles those of the living rooms often seen on the sitcoms of the 1950s. The spaces are clean with no dust or dirt from the customers, representing the domestic spaces women had previously attended to. The silk tapestry on the walls in Outlaw Women is pink as a reminder that this place is “different” because it is owned by a woman. In Johnny Guitar, the outside of Vienna’s saloon has the familiar swinging doors, but the glass doors and windows are covered with white lace curtains, further feminizing a space normally reserved as a gathering spot of men for companionship and community. On the other hand, films with women who are in supporting roles and own property like Helen Ramirez (Katy Jurado) in High Noon (1952) keep the traditional men’s saloon in dark colors without feminine touches. Even the names are different depending on who owns the saloon. Helen’s place is called the Ramirez Saloon depicting her last name while Vienna’s is her first name.

NO MAN’S LAND: FILM CYCLES, FEMININITY, AND FEMALE …

131

If the saloon is a place reserved for men and their dalliances, then the new modern Western presents an interesting predicament. The men in the new Westerns are all but obsolete, suffering from disease or death. For instance, almost all the abled men in Godless are killed in the town of La Belle after the mine they are working caves in, leaving the women to run the town. Therefore, no men mean no need for prostitution and no saloons for men to drink and gamble. An event in Strange Empire occurs much the same way as it does in Godless. Several men are killed in a raid perpetrated by John Slotter (Aaron Poole) who runs the town in which a group of women, men, and children are passing through. Looking to turn the women into prostitutes for the men who are working his mine, he claims the party is attacked by “Indians.” Rather than work for Slotter, the women form their own community aptly named Janestown and provide a place where the men of the mine can drink and eat earning their own money by providing food and drink but nothing else. The newly formed saloon consists of tables and chairs outside, leaving women rooms of their own indoors. Finally, Shorty’s Saloon is a modern-day bar in the town of Purgatory, where the series Wynonna Earp takes place. In an homage to the old West, the bar is named after the saloon Wyatt Earp frequented back in his day. Though Shorty’s is owned by Wynonna’s uncle, he is deceased in the first episode and the deed is transferred to his wife Gus. In the episode “I Hope You Dance, Wynonna,” Wynonna gives birth to a daughter on a pool table in the bar. Women-owned businesses proliferate in the Western granting a new perspective on this once communal place for men. Nonetheless, the 1950s version continues to reinforce a gender perspective, separating a woman-owned saloon in a female-led Western as more feminized. Other spaces reserved for men include the ranch and sheriff’s office. Just as the saloon features dance hall girls and waitresses downstairs and prostitutes upstairs, the homestead portrays women in the kitchen cooking or cleaning. Homesteaders, usually wives and mothers cook and clean the house and grounds surrounding their home, while the men work the land. On the ranch, women ride horses but have no real occupation. Rarely were these women employed as lawyers, doctors, or newspaper reporters and never in the legal professions as sheriff, deputy, or marshal. Gradually, as society granted women the right to vote, incidentally beginning with the Western state of Wyoming, women slowly begin working in professions once held by men. The western films reflect these cultural moments, especially in the 1950s and 2010s. As has been

132

F. HERSH

established, the 1950s created a complex women’s narrative as they were pulled and pushed in different directions. The 1950s cycle represents the single woman, unattached from a boyfriend, husband, and children at the beginning of the film, only to acquire one or three of the above by the end of the film. For instance, in the film Strange Lady in Town, Greer Garson arrives in New Mexico Territory circa 1880 as “a woman doctor.” The residents are under the impression J.W. Garth is a man and they continually express their surprise uttering “well we’ve never seen a woman doctor before” and “a woman doctor is a strange thing, like a chicken with two heads.” The vilest of the residents is the male doctor, O’Brien (Dana Andrews), who regardless of having a daughter, continues to criticize, argue, and condescend to Julia (J.W). As with most of the films of the decade, a strong independent woman is refashioned into a wife and mother. By the end of the film, after proposing once and being turned down, he saves her from an angry mob of townspeople, and declares “She’s the best doctor Santa Fe has ever had and she’s going to be my wife.” This allows the conventional Hollywood ending to take place; women and men embrace, kiss, declare an engagement, marry, or ride off into the sunset, especially in postwar America. Yet, these longestablished personalities that occupy the Westerns of yesteryear no longer matter in the new Westerns.

The Professions The more contemporary women in film and television certainly break barriers like their predecessors, protecting towns much like their male counterparts in classical Hollywood cinema and for the most part take charge of their own well-being. For instance, in Godless (2017) Maggie (Merritt Weaver) takes over as guardian of the town, inhabiting the role of mayor and sheriff. Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery) is a widower and single mother who lives on a ranch separated from the community, raises her son, and works on her land. In Strange Empire, Kat (Cara Gee) is elected sheriff to protect the small community of women who have built themselves a town without men. Lastly, Wynonna Earp (Melanie Scrofano) returns to Purgatory, her former home to protect her little sister and is enlisted as a Marshal to rid the town and community from evil. It is important to note that the occupations of women change the closer films and series move to contemporary times. Women in earlier films, in classical Hollywood were divided into prostitutes, ladies from the east or

NO MAN’S LAND: FILM CYCLES, FEMININITY, AND FEMALE …

133

society women, wives, and homesteaders, or “others,” Mexican or Indigenous women in male-centered Westerns. As the rights of women grew so do their occupations to more “legitimized” work and property ownership. As Pam Cook argues, the “bad girls” of the Western, the ones she deems shady ladies, “threaten to upset the applecart by challenging men on their own ground…demand equal status and refuse to take second place…they wear pants and brandish guns, own land, property, and business, demand sexual independence.”11 These women are regularly surrounded by men who are unable to protect their community or worse aim to harm women, forcing them back into the familiar and traditional roles of prostitute or housewife. The modern Western genre disrupts and challenges these masculine roles, and the recognizable actions and abilities they inhabit are questioned. No longer are male cowboys, sheriffs, and Marshals in charge. In fact, these characters all but virtually disappear when men inhabit the role. The women are empowered to lead, presiding over a town and community both professionally and personally. The men who remain are incapacitated or insubstantial, riddled with disease or inexperience who underestimate the strength and fortitude of the women. Furthermore, the traditional homemaker becomes obsolete in the sense that they strictly serve males. The women keep house for themselves while also taking on traditional men’s professions, like running a makeshift saloon, town mayor, or sheriff. In addition, they are mothers both by proxy and traditionally. By exploring the characters and tropes of the stereotypical Western genre, the women must perform double duty, balancing their identities with the masculine characteristics of the classic Western alongside the bold new woman for our present age. While circumstances force women into unlikely positions of authority, they choose to remain there, fighting instead of shrinking from their new responsibilities. The Western genre endures because of the familiarity audiences have with time-honored, yet conventional characters; the Sheriff who protects the town, the Marshal who captures the villain, and the cowboy who herds the cattle. All are recognizable, well-known, and distinctly male. Michael Kimmel suggests “some cultures, like our own, encourage men to be stoic and to prove their masculinity.”12 However, these familiar characters are destabilized in the films and series throughout the Western women’s cycle. In the towns and territories of the West, the rule of law is run by the people with the most power and money, regardless of the law present in the territories. Certainly, the legal professions were never held

134

F. HERSH

by women, yet time and again, in the 1950s cycle and beyond, women insist on providing law and order and in certain circumstances upholding what is true. Outlaw Women, The Moonlighter, and Johnny Guitar provide three different scenarios of how the law and particularly the men who hold these positions are perceived at the beginning of the 1950s. In the film Outlaw Women there is no law to speak of in the town La Mujeres or the neighboring territories. The town of all women who are employed at The Paradise, the gambling house and saloon run by Iron Mae is such a success that the men in her life want to either partner up to get to the money or shut her out by electing themselves the law which would stop the illegal gambling house. Her former partner Woody wants to play one hand of poker for The Paradise, but Mae declines the offer. Woody insists on bringing his friends from Silver City to secure his vote for Marshal; the women have no voting power currently. Mae suggests they play one hand of poker for control of the new Marshal. Before this final hand is decided the outlaws come to the saloon and Woody and Mae form a new partnership, sealed with a kiss. Woody becomes Marshal, and Mae is charged with crimes, but the charges are dropped because the new Marshal is also her husband. This ensures that her assets and the women who work for her are protected. The role of the Marshal in Johnny Guitar is equally pointless. As the townspeople try to evict Vienna from the community, gathering at her saloon, one individual calls out to the Marshal, “we don’t need you anymore, Marshal,” but then everyone asks the Marshal to do something, suggesting that either he is not up to fulfilling his authoritarian position or the townspeople will take matters into their own hands. He gives Vienna 24 hours to leave town, but she doesn’t. The Marshal has no power over her. Finally, in The Moonlighter, Rela, whose job is undisclosed, overhears her former boyfriend, Wes, and his accomplice, Cole plans a bank robbery, which would involve her new boyfriend and Wes’s brother, Tom. She declares to Wes that she will “have a badge pinned on myself and I’ll come after you, and I’ll bring you back if anything happens to Tom.” After Wes, Cole and Tom rob the bank, Tom is shot and killed. Rela asks to be deputized by the sheriff who in turn replies “Oh no we don’t deputize ladies, Rela. The posse will catch those devils.” Rela, newly deputized, kills Cole and captures Wes. In each of the films the women hold the power to sway the law for their own benefit and the men, despite their badges, have no real authority.

NO MAN’S LAND: FILM CYCLES, FEMININITY, AND FEMALE …

135

In the more contemporary Westerns, the power and authority squarely lie in the hands of the women. Bill McNue (Scoot McNairy), the reluctant sheriff of Godless , is losing his sight. Repeatedly leaving LaBelle to seek a remedy for his impending blindness, he returns to the town only to be called “coward” by some of the women. The deputy, Whitey Winn (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), has a flair for guns, but is lackadaisical in his professional duties, often eating and sleeping on the job, which is why he dies by the end of the series. The cowboy, Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell), arrives hurt, and Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery) reinjures Roy by shooting him. Finally, Marshall Cooke (Sam Waterston), following Frank Griffin’s (Jeff Daniels) posse across the West finds himself surrounded by them and is gunned down in a local saloon. Wynonna Earp’s Sheriff Nedley chooses to look the other way when strange occurrences take place in his town, calling the murdered women either “runaways or whores” and U.S. Marshal Dolls, his name indicating a toy for little girls, is afflicted with a peculiar illness. Both need women to aid in their investigations. Strange Empire boasts no law to speak of, only a Marshal, considered an “other” because of Native American blood, is located on the other side of the border in Canada, and appears hopeless in his abilities to track down and arrest bounty hunters, something that Kat has no problem with. The lack of law and those individuals that enforce it allow women the opportunity to seize power and occupy territory once held by men. Each of the series features women in positions of authority: Wynonna becomes a special agent, Kat is a marshal, and Maggie is a sheriff.

Conclusion By examining the women’s Western cycle, new avenues are forged in the West and the masculine spaces and professions of the genre are questioned. Like Vienna in Johnny Guitar and Julia in Strange Lady in Town these women initially reflect the factory workers and women working outside the home, during and post-WWII, occupying places and jobs once held by men. Furthermore, the films and television shows of the #metoomovement cycle of the late 2010s Strange Empire, Godless , and Wynonna Earp are direct descendants of the original “shady lady” Westerns of the 50s. With their femininity largely hidden behind men’s clothing and their identities concealed, the women in these films and television series, are continuously misjudged and underestimated because of their appearance. They shoulder the burdens of the so-called men’s

136

F. HERSH

work of the Western genre crafting a valid effort to escape the traditional roles of Western women while additionally maintaining their femininity and identity. These “gender cycles” coincide with historical and cultural movements revealing the progress women have made in the supposed traditional masculine space of the Western. The “shady ladies” represent the start of the respected working woman in the modern Western.

Notes 1. Sue Matheson, “Introduction,” in Women in the Western, ed. Sue Matheson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 1–2. 2. Amanda Ann Klein, American Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, & Defining Subcultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 4. 3. Ibid., 4. 4. Ibid., 9. 5. Gaylyn Studlar, “Freud, ‘The Family on the Land,’ and the Feminine Turn in Post-War Westerns,” in Women in the Western, ed. Sue Matheson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2020), 76. 6. Martin Halliwell, American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 40. 7. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 59. ProQuest Ebook Central, http:/ /ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=625135. 8. Jennifer Peterson, “The Competing Tunes of ‘Johnny Guitar’: Liberalism, Sexuality, Masquerade.” Cinema Journal 35, no. 3 (1996): 3–18. https:/ /doi.org/10.2307/1225762. 9. Ritu Prasad, “Is a Female Lead Now Key to Box Office Success?” BBC News.com, December 17, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-uscanada-46543086 10. Diana C. Reep, “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have: The Saloon in Western Films,” in Ed. Paul Loukides and Linda K. Fuller Beyond the Stars: Studies in American Popular Film, vol. 4, Locales in American Popular Film (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993, 204). 11. Pam Cook, “Women and the Western,” in Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 35–36, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203337820-11. 12. Michael S. Kimmel, The Gendered Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.

Horse Operas Talk Back: History, Memory, and the Black Cowboy Performing Indigo Recker

Introduction Ishmael Reed’s 1969 novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down begins with a direct address to the reader: “Folks, this here is the story of the Loop Garoo Kid. A cowboy so bad he made a working posse of spells phone in sick … a desperado so ornery he made the Pope cry and the most powerful of cattlemen shed his head.”1 In an interview, Reed claimed that the novel’s narrative style was based, in part, on “old radio scripts in which the listener constructed the sets from his imagination—that’s why radio, also because it’s an oral book, a talking book.”2 The novel’s opening address to the reader establishes this “speaking to” and riffs on the traditional revenge narrative of the Western genre. Creating a vibrant set in our imagination with an outrageous cast of characters, the novel follows the Loop Garoo Kid, a Black cowboy, and Neohoodoo houngan, or voodoo priest, as he enacts vengeance on the villainous rancher Drag Gibson for murdering his friends in the fictional town of Yellow Back Radio. The novel exists in a long tradition of representing Black cowboys in the American West that has enjoyed a resurgence in films like Netflix’s The

I. Recker (B) Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_9

137

138

I. RECKER

Harder They Fall and Lil Nas X’s widely successful country-trap single, “Old Town Road,” both of which use a similar irreverent approach to Western genre aesthetics. Most recently, this tradition is continued with Jordan Peele’s neo-Western horror, Nope. In an interview, Peele noted the significance of the Black cowboy and claimed that his film, “more than anything, is about the Hollywood mythology of the Wild West-and not only the sugarcoating of the barbarism of it, but the erasure of the Black cowboy.”3 As many scholars have pointed out, the cowboy figure is iconic in the American imaginary and Black cowboys played an integral role in the history of these communities. Freed and enslaved African Americans were expert “riders, ropers, and herdsmen” working on ranches, cattle drives, and performing in rodeos throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.4 This chapter is a story about those stories and a story about their history. But it’s also a story about how stories, in their telling, can remember in ways that history forgets. Specifically, I explore how cultural representations of the Black cowboy (in literature, film, art, music, etc.) can act as historiographic disruption, a process of rearticulation where the cowboy narrative, in its various modes of artistic expression, can highlight how our processes of historical knowledge-making are fraught with questions of power. When we talk about historiography, we aren’t referring the study of historical events, people, or patterns but instead the study of history as a scholarly (or non-scholarly) field that creates knowledge through historical writing. Historiography asks how history, as a type of knowledge, remembers in certain ways through its synthesis of the past. What’s interesting about the historiography of the Black cowboy in the American West is how often historians preface their writing with a discussion of the erasure of the Black cowboy from history. We might say that a key historiographic element in how the Black cowboy is remembered in Western history is that the topic is always held in tension with its own forgetting. Some of the first people to write about Black cowboys were themselves—famous Black cowboy figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century like Nat Love who published their own autobiographies and memoirs. This same period also saw the publication of historical fiction and early biographies like that of James P. Beckwourth; however, in The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, the author withholds any mention of the central cowboy figure’s race at all. As literary critic Michael K. Johnson notes, these early primary documents reflect the richness of evidence left behind that traces the Black experience in the

HORSE OPERAS TALK BACK: HISTORY, MEMORY …

139

West but their strategic erasures also reflect a narrative of the West that ultimately prioritizes the “chivalrous white men” taming a wild frontier into “civilization.”5 This type of whitewashing is prevalent in other texts and its proliferation has prompted historians to consider the “erasure of race [as] one of the dominant tropes of Black western writing.”6 By the 1950s and 1960s, historical interest in the Black cowboy was reinvigorated (some argue in tandem with the Civil Rights Movement) especially with works like Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones’ seminal The Negro Cowboys, William Loren Katz’ The Black West, and Kenneth Porter’s The Negro on the American Frontier. But at the same time, texts on general Western history only mentioned the Black cowboy in passing or not at all.7 In a similar way, the New Western History movement in the 1990s built on this midcentury scholarship with works like Blake Allmendinger’s The Cowboy: Representations of Labor in an American Work Culture and Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas but seminal texts like Richard White’s It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the American West barely mentioned Black cowboys at all.8 There have been far more in-depth studies of the Black cowboy since. Indeed, historians who study African American communities in the West situate themselves in this tension between memory and erasure, including Sara Massey’s Black Cowboys of Texas, Michael K. Johnson’s Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West, and Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, behind the Badge. What this historiography suggests is that Western history has been shaped in relation to how, when, and why it remembers the cowboy figure as only white, and not in the richly diverse way that is historically accurate. In these ways, we might ask how history works as a function of power to support a very specific worldview and how remembering the Black cowboy is a political act that attempts to reshape the whitewashed story of the cowboy to challenge this power. Reed’s talking-book-novel-radio-show offers a good starting point to think about this erasure and political reshaping especially as it relates culture, and perhaps gets to the heart of what Reed means by this idea of a “talking” book. How can a book talk back to history? These questions are tied up in the fields of history and historiography but are also of interest to scholars in the field of performance studies, with several writing specifically about the intersection of performance, history, and memory. There are two theorists whose work I think might help us understand this connection between the history of the Black cowboy and

140

I. RECKER

Reed’s “talking book:” Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas and Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Both Taylor and Schneider are interested in how performance can exist as a “bracketed event” to be analyzed like we might normally think of a play or a concert, but also as a lens through which we can analyze other events (or texts) as performance.9 Among other things, reading history through the lens of performance might help us better understand how it creates and transmits knowledge. History, as a body of knowledge, is not the past, it’s an approximation of it. It can only approach the truth of the past (as it was present) knowing that it will never fully capture it. In these ways, history is a bracketed event that is both constructed and real, just like scholars conceive of performance. What happens if we start to think about history as a play, a present event that represents a past event that actually happened (history). It would be clear that the audience is not watching the actual event but that also doesn’t mean that there isn’t something valuable to learn from the present event or that it doesn’t, in some capacity, reflect the society in which both events happened. This is also where scholars like Taylor and Schneider stress the importance of the archive as one of the defining elements in this performance of history. The archive can be thought of as a collection of pieces accumulated over time that allows us to know the past, and so becomes a key structure in using a performative lens to think about history and how it creates and transmits knowledge. It is the archive of accumulated pieces that make up the sets, props, characters, and dialogue in our history play. The archive is crucial to this understanding of historical remembering because as much as we can only know who we are in relation to what we remember about our past, we are helped in our remembering by the accumulation of physical materials of the past.10 If a stagehand forgets to place a prop on stage, it changes the audience’s experience watching the play. They will experience the absence, even if they are unaware of it. The archive, thus, becomes fundamental to the shaping of our present experiences of history.11 And so, as scholars like Schneider argue, within the context of historical knowledge-making, the archive “performs acts of disappearance just as it acts to preserve.”12 Additionally, if history performs its approximation of the past, then both the writer (historian) and the audience (the readers) become important facets of this moment, making decisions about who gets cast, who is onstage, who gets the most lines, who is seen and heard—it becomes

HORSE OPERAS TALK BACK: HISTORY, MEMORY …

141

a flurried exchange of interconnected moments that ultimately determine whose stories are told and who matters. This is what scholars mean when they say that history performs, and this performance is deeply political. So, considering what we know about the historiography of African Americans in the West and the Black cowboy as a topic intertwined with its own erasure, this chapter explores how historiography and performance engage in processes of forgetting and remembering. Where do we see these performances in Reed’s novel? And how do more contemporary representations of the African American cultural traditions reinterpret and reperform the Black cowboy to disrupt (or talk back) to a dominant history that is determined to forget them?

Part 1: Porous Time and Power in Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down How does Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (a cultural text, a performance, and an archive of the Black experience) push against the dominant history of the West in its representation of the Black cowboy? The novel tries to capture the complexity of historical remembering by representing performance (in the various circus characters and formula conflicts) while it also exists as a performance itself (the book as the primary vehicle for talking back). The novel was published at a time when the media and culture industries were involved in wider political movements for racial justice. Indeed, scholars note that Reed first published the novel under his own newly created Yardbird Publishing Company to address white monopolies in both publishing and broadcasting.13 Additionally, Reed capitalized on looser FCC regulations for novels depicting sex and violence, especially when compared to the more strictly controlled television at the time including the widely popular Western shows like Cheyenne, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza.14 Through its quasi-surreal premise and its fractured, vernacular narrative voice, Reed’s novel tries to be all things at once (absurd, comical, violent, poetic, scandalous) and in being all things, disrupt assumptions about what art can be, and perhaps, should do. The story opens with the Loop Garoo Kid and his friends, Zozo Labrique, Jake the Barker, the Juggler, and a dancing bear who all make up a traveling circus on their way to the town of Yellow Back Radio. Upon arrival, they discover that the children of the town have chased the adults away for forcing them to work and go to school and the children beg the circus for a performance.15 Meanwhile,

142

I. RECKER

in a neighboring town called Video Junction, the Banker, Marshal, and Doctor of Yellow Back Radio sell the town to Drag Gibson in exchange for him taking it back from the children by force. Drag Gibson, who has hired the circus as a distraction, plans an ambush. After the show is over and the town has gone to sleep, Loop is woken by Drag’s men burning the town and killing the children who are not fortunate enough to escape; he watches as his friends are murdered and he is forced to flee from Yellow Back Radio. One of the most telling elements of the novel that signals its preoccupation with history is its treatment of time as porous. Reed creates a narrative world that knows itself to be constructed, and characters that know they’re formulaic pieces in the Western genre. According to Schneider, imagining time as porous means thinking of history as being “full of holes or gaps and art as capable of falling or crossing in and out of the spaces.”16 In the world of the novel, past and present and future meld together with references to modern culture and the characters commenting on this modern culture throughout. After the Loop Garoo Kid escapes the ambush, he wanders in the desert before being surrounded by “neo-social realists” in bellbottoms and is rescued from them by Chief Showcase (the sole indigenous character) who was flying by in his helicopter on his way to Europe to meet with his tailor.17 As they move through the Western landscape, characters are not bound by the knowledge that is normally associated with their nineteenth century genre setting: they talk about soul music, Mae West, George Gershwin, and Martha and the Vandellas. Later in the novel, when Drag hires the historical outlaw, John Wesley Hardin, to kill the Loop Garoo Kid, Hardin enters talking about his own history as it exists in the reader’s past, the narrative’s present, but the historical character’s future, saying: “Nothing to fear, John Wesley Hardin is here … When I was 15 which is about 60 years from now I killed some insolent devil who didn’t know his place.”18 And after Loop defeats Hardin, Drag Gibson calls in the medieval Pope Innocent to put down Loop’s hoodoo curse even though, as the talking pigs in the town note, “ain’t no Pope supposed to be visiting the States until New York 1966.”19 As we can see here, time is slippery in the world of Yellow Back Radio and this slippage helps bring the idea of time itself, and its relationship to the main conflict of the novel (history), to the forefront. The porous time highlights how the production of historical knowledge exists as a function of power. This drives the primary conflict of

HORSE OPERAS TALK BACK: HISTORY, MEMORY …

143

the novel with the Loop Garoo Kid facing off against all the ways the Western genre transmits orthodoxy (empire, capitalism, religion, white supremacy, and hegemonic masculinity). Loop’s revenge becomes a fight over knowledge—what is the message being broadcast by the history of the West and what has the power to defeat this broadcast? The idea of alternative types of knowledge is seeded early in the novel. When the circus troupe first arrives in Yellow Back Radio, Jake the Barker tells the children a story of the lost city of Cibola, a paradise “without gurus monarchs leaders cops tax collectors jails matriarchs patriarchs and all other galoots who in cahoots have made the earth a pile of human bones under the feet of wolves” and without the power structures that existed in Yellow Back Radio that forced the children to learn “lies bent upon making [them] behave.”20 The “galoots in cahoots” here make up a matrix of social, political, and religious power structures reflected in the various villains assembled for Loop to fight: the capitalist rancher and banker (who accumulate land and resources to benefit from expansion); the marshal, the congressman, and the military officer (who make possible expansion and who maintain order) and the preacher (whose social and cultural frameworks justify expansion). Like the lost city, Loop’s revenge seeks to destabilize the cohesion between these figures as they hold the dominant, whitewashed, historical narrative of the West together. Loop enacts his revenge by first placing a curse on Gibson. While Gibson plans his wedding to a woman named Mustache Sal, he receives reports that strange occurrences are happening in Yellow Back Radio as a result of the curse. The wedding is interrupted by the Loop Garoo Kid, who whips Gibson with “strange magic,” scourges the Marshal out of town and puts “bad waves” in the town’s radio transmitter before escaping into the mountains.21 Loop’s revenge comes not only in the form of physical violence to Gibson but to the town’s ability to speak, to broadcast, to shape knowledge, so that the “galoots in cahoots” may never again “burn carnivals and murder children.”22 Loop’s Hoodoo magic is a “revolutionary force” that disrupts Yellow Back Radio, as both a place and broadcast, so that its “signals were needless to say becoming very very faint. In fact it seemed that the whole valley would soon be off the air.”23 As Drag falls sick with Loop’s curse, he becomes more and more desperate to kill him, including hiring Hardin, whom Loop defeats easily, telling Drag that “no amount of romantic dosage is going to save your neck … [no] heroes given to hyperbole.”24 Drag finally has to call in the

144

I. RECKER

Pope to defeat Loop because his romanticized, yet no less violent, heroic assassins failed. When the Pope arrives, Drag asks him, as the leader of Western religious practice, what kind of magic the curse is using. The Pope replies that it’s hard to know for sure because specific knowledge about these things has become obscured by the Western erasure of Black communities, cultures, and traditions in history. The Pope says, “we’ve tried to hide the facts by ridiculing the history of Sub-Sahara Africa and claiming that of North Africa as our own. Notice how the term ‘blackamoor’ was dropped from St. Augustine’s name, and how our friends the German Aryan scholars faked the History of the Egyptians by claiming them to be white … [even though] the overwhelming majority of their art depicts black people.”25 Thus, Loop’s magic, an American Hoodoo version of Haitian voodoo, itself a version of African “juju,” is a Black aesthetic representing the truth of the Black experience and holding it up to the dominant history to expose its erasure. And most importantly, as Drag cannot understand this knowledge because it has been erased, historical erasure ultimately turns on those who have made possible this collective forgetting. Reed positions Loop’s magic, as a performance of Black cultural memory, as the overwhelming force that defeats Drag Gibson, the town of Yellow Back Radio, and the (historical) message it broadcasts. And Loop’s curse isn’t just magic, but magic born from the neo-Hoodoo aesthetic form of Black art as Black life: a performance of power that is alive, unrestricted, radically creative, and transformative as it disrupts and disjoints the dominant broadcast. We see this in the curse itself, where Loop arranges his altar with offerings to his Loa, saying: Oh Black Hawk American Indian houngan of Hoo-Doo please do open up some of these prissy orthodox minds so that they will no longer call Black People’s American experience ‘corrupt’ ‘perverse’ and ‘decadent.’ Please show them that Booker T and the MG’s, Etta James, Johnny Ace and Bojangle tapdancing is just as beautiful as anything that happened anywhere else in the world. Teach them anywhere people go they have experience and that all experience is art.26

Imaginative culture invoked in the performance of ritual works here as Loop’s power, rendering the Black experience as its own type of broadcast, an impulse that counters the violence of historical knowledgemaking. Reed’s invoking the Neohoodoo gods opens up a porous time

HORSE OPERAS TALK BACK: HISTORY, MEMORY …

145

to not only curse the novel’s villain, but also to project the aesthetic value of Black culture as both experience and art, and the performance of the Black experience as art. Loop’s curse is a performance of cultural memory that becomes the ultimate downfall of the villain, with the transmission of the Black cultural impulse as art superseding the historical performance of disappearance that exemplifies the dominant narrative of the history of the West in the novel. This includes the town of Yellow Back Radio, as both place and broadcast, so that in the wake of Loop’s curse, it seemed as if the town was “falling apart, its batteries were going on the bum and soon the whole kit and caboodle would blow a fuse.”27 The juxtaposition of history, art, time, narrative, and performance within Loop’s curse exemplifies ritual performance as an embodied and reconstituted history that pulls the dominant narrative off the air. Once Pope Innocent arrives, he helps Drag Gibson and his gang capture Loop, and they plan to hang him in what Drag calls an “old fashioned lynching that … Americans love so much and that’s a traditional source of entertainment.”28 The night before the hanging, the Pope visits the Loop Garoo Kid in jail, and it is revealed that they know each other. The Pope heavily implies Loop to be the brother of Christ and says he only came West to convince him to return to heaven. Loop refuses to go back with him, instead wanting to finish his “horse opera,” which he compares to Christ’s martyrdom. Loop remarks that his horse opera will be: A much richer art form than preaching to fishermen and riding into a town on the back of an ass. And that apotheosis. How disgusting. He had such an ego ‘I’m the son of God.’ Publicity hound, he had to prolong it for three hours, just because the press turned out to witness. And his method had no style at all. Compare his cheap performance at the gravesight of Lot—sickening—and that parable of our friend Buddha and the mustard seed. One, just a grandstand exhibition, and the other beautiful, artistic and profound.29

In speaking to the Pope, we see how Loop’s power isn’t necessarily in his revenge, but in his performance and even his death. A ‘horse opera’ is not just another name for a Western movie, but one that follows a specific or cliched pattern. We might even think of it as a scenario, pulling from Diana Taylor’s work on performance and the archive, to describe a performance that “allows us to more fully recognize the many ways in which the

146

I. RECKER

archive and the repertoire work to constitute and transmit social knowledge.”30 A key aspect of the scenario as performance is the presence of an audience, which is exactly what Loop needs to complete his encore performance (his own death). But this horse opera also implicates the reader (as audience) for participating in the scenario of Western history by placing “spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics.”31 The next day, as Loop is brought out to be hanged, the children of Yellow Back Radio return with an army of Amazons claiming to have found the lost city of Cibola. As the people brought out to witness Loop’s death are distracted by the promise of a technological paradise, Gibson is eaten by his own sentient talking pigs, and Loop, robbed of his martyrdom, rides off into the Pacific Ocean to catch the Pope.32 It’s hard to reconcile the disparate and chaotic ending of Reed’s novel, but perhaps the spectacle is part of the disruption that Reed refuses to explain: the novel becomes all things—socio-political and religious heterodoxy, life as the absence of witnesses, the endless promise of “American dreams” to placate people with, the ramblings of madmen, all wrapped up messily into a vaudeville Western show. As Rebecca Schneider notes, the performance of history becomes the “not quite” of times meeting in which the past disrupts the present, just as the present disrupts the past in a partial and porous persistence as it thinks “through ‘mutually disruptive energy’ [and] implies that the bygone is not entirely gone by, and the dead not completely disappeared nor lost, but also, and perhaps more complexly, the living are not entirely (or not only) live.”33 Reed ends his novel with this persistent, partial, and porous disrupting, in which the novel becomes the performance. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down becomes the talking book that encodes, in its narrative and structure, an exposing of the United States’ historical tendencies to love “being conned if you can do it in a style that is both grand and entertaining.”34

Part 2: ‘Put My Grief Onstage’ Performance as Archived Embodied Memory While these elements in Reed’s novel work toward a literary representation of performance and we can use performance as a lens to think about the implications of this representation, it’s also worthwhile to look at performances in the more traditional sense, as bracketed events in and of themselves that do this same work in relationship to history, memory, and

HORSE OPERAS TALK BACK: HISTORY, MEMORY …

147

the Black cowboy. One recent example that I think does this well is Dom Flemons’ 2018 musical album, Black Cowboys , co-produced by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Flemons is a “songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, actor, music scholar, historian, and record collector” whose repertoire covers “over 100 years of early American popular music.”35 He is an “expert player on the banjo, guitar, harmonica, jug, percussion, quill, fife and rhythm bones,” a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and has multiple Grammy and Grammy nominations for “Best Traditional” and “Folk Albums,” including Black Cowboys .36 The album is comprised of original and reimagined cowboy songs that tell the story of African American communities in the West. The album is accompanied by forty pages of liner notes that give interpretive direction to the music’s potential as performative disruption. The songs include traditional Euro-American folk songs that are reimagined and reinterpreted like “Old Chisholm Trail,” “Red River Valley,” and “Home on the Range” to meld with Black musical genres like field hollers and blues. This reinterpretation highlights the compositional similarities between these repertoires to show how they developed side by side, and informed each other, over time.37 Flemons also includes photographs from his childhood and the historical figures that he sings about, but also uses original photographs showing Flemons and his accompanying musicians staging themselves as traditional cowboy songsters. The inclusion of “Home on the Range” in the Black cowboy musical repertoire is especially important because of its own performance and archival history. One of the first recordings of the song was in the 1910 collection, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads by the seminal folk music ethnographers, John and Alan Lomax. Not only did the Lomaxes make archival and typological distinctions between “cowboy” and “negro” songs in their work, but they also used “Home on the Range” to promote an image of the cowboy as a “golden-haired prairie Galahad” even though they gathered and recorded (and archived) the song from a Black cook on the Texas cattle trail.38 In addition to these well-known, yet reinterpreted, cowboy songs that demonstrate a melding of musical traditions to disrupt the folk music archive, Flemons incorporates original songs that work to disrupt as well. In “Steel Pony Blues,” Flemons reimagines the life of the famous cowboy Nat Love, who, according to the liner notes, was “born into slavery in Tennessee, and at a young age … made his way out West to work on

148

I. RECKER

a ranch in Holbrook, Arizona. By 1890, he retired from the ranch and began to work on the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad as a Pullman porter.”39 But the song itself tells the story of Flemons’ own travels across the US as a performer, covering “nearly 100,000 miles of highway, crossing every original cattle trail and Indian trading post along the way. [Flemons] began [his] journey at the Gateway Arch of St. Louis, Missouri, following the path taken by Lewis and Clark, accompanied by their slave, York. [He] witnessed the grandeur of the redwood forest, the Rio Grande, and the glorious Grand Canyon in [his] home state of Arizona.”40 In the song, Flemons sings: “Now they call me Mr. Flemons ‘cause I’m a Pullman Porter now/I caught the first thing smoking down the road somewhere/I caught the first thing smoking down the road somewhere/Well I caught my steel pony and boys I’m gonna ride.”41 Flemons sings himself as, and through, Nat Love’s historical remembering. And as he sings, he lives in the history of the West yoking the past of the Black cowboy with the present of his own performance. Consistent with what Diana Taylor notes about the archive and the repertoire, Flemons’ album exists as enacted embodied memory archived in the performance, where both artist and audience exist in relation to the same event, producing and reproducing knowledge that “keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning.”42 When we think about embodied memory here as Taylor talks about it, we can consider all the ways the Black cowboy exists not in the distant past, but deeply experienced present of Flemons’ performance: the reverbed thrumming of his fingers picking the guitar or banjo, the deep inhales of his breath, the pitches and warbles of his singing, the compositional qualities of each song as a conversation between instrument and human voice meeting to interpret the narrative of the lyrics. All of these elements give meaning to the performance as they collectively exist to remember the Black cowboy. And a similar process happens with each subsequent listening of the recorded songs as archive, with the audience consuming these past (and captured) performances in their own present: hearing and feeling and creating meaning of their own, in an ongoing “keeping” and “transforming.” Similar to Reed’s novel, Flemons’ objective for the album is a historical re-claiming of the erased African American narrative in the history and cultural memory of the West but also a continuance of these traditions, communities, and cultures. The album works to show that the Black cowboy cultural tradition is not just something of the past that should be

HORSE OPERAS TALK BACK: HISTORY, MEMORY …

149

remembered, but something present, alive, and ongoing. As the “American Songster,” Flemons writes, “the legacy of the “original black cowboy singer continues to live on … I am continuing to preserve the traditional folk repertoire, and it is important to me to reclaim cowboy music as a part of African American culture.”43 This type of framing is especially important considering other communities like the Compton Cowboys in Los Angeles, the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club in North Philadelphia, and the all-Black Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, that represent the living, and ongoing, Black cowboy traditions across the United States. The album exists as both musical performance and archive, producing knowledge through the intertextual performance of music, narrative, research, and visual culture that melds past, present, and future in a system that is “relentlessly citational and remaining.”44 The album offers a fascinating reiteration of the Black cowboy tradition that builds on the work done in texts like Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down but that ties together the theoretical threads between the archive, performance, and memory. Flemons internalizes and embodies the Black cowboy figure even as he transmits a new version of it in his contribution to the musical genre as a type of captured knowledge. In these ways, the album, as a collective performance of both reimagined and original cowboy songs passes along the memories of the Black cowboy in a way that links the historical past, present, lived experience, and future knowledge yet to be produced by new performers, new audiences, new cowboys.45 While Reed’s novel and Flemons’ album work along similar streams of historiographic disruption via performance, there are other contemporary moments that I think complicate some of these ideas even though on the surface they have little to do with the Black cowboy. One moment, which I think is important enough to consider, at least briefly, is Ishmael Reed’s response to the critically acclaimed Broadway musical, Hamilton. According to Reed, Hamilton, which famously recast the Founding Fathers as people of color and set the life of Alexander Hamilton to the genres of hip-hop and rap, has a historiographic problem. Reed indicts the play for framing Hamilton as an abolitionist and implicates Hamilton’s (white) biographer, Ron Chernow, whose historical biography was the primary text upon which the play was based. As a response, Reed wrote and produced his own play titled The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, using the narrative structure of A Christmas Story (in which various Black historical figures, including slaves owned by Washington, Hamilton, and the Schuyler family haunt the famous playwright) to critique Hamilton’s

150

I. RECKER

construction of historical knowledge. In one scene, the character Diana, an enslaved woman who escaped from the Schuyler family home, implores Miranda (the character) to help find her bones so that she can be put to rest: Mr. Miranda you wrote that lovely scene where Alexander and Elizabeth are mourning their son Phillip who was killed in a duel. The audience mourned with the actors on the stage. Mr. Miranda, you must write a scene for me…What about my father? What about my mother? I was playing in the yard when these White men came and snatched me….Write that scene for me Mr. Miranda, as you did for the Hamilton’s boy…Please Mr. Miranda, put my grief on stage.46

Miranda responds by saying, near tears: “I was just following Ron’s book.”47 I wanted to end with this example, because I think it marks where the elements discussed in this chapter (history and memory and erasure, performance and knowledge, culture and art, past and present) converge. And crucially, I think it highlights the stakes of this convergence. Diana Taylor notes that performance carries within it, “the possibility of challenge, even self-challenge, within it.”48 The term itself can refer to a process, an intervention, a type of knowledge, a form of being within various social and political spheres, in a way that marks its potential to challenge all the ways we understand history and memory.49 And indeed, the various struggles to define and delimit its scope, what Taylor calls its “untranslatability,” further highlight how it can work as a “necessary stumbling block that reminds us that ‘we’ whether in our various disciplines, or language, or geographic locations throughout the Americas— do not simply or unproblematically understand each other.”50 Reed’s performance of The Haunting Lin-Manuel Miranda that represents Miranda’s performance of history in his own performance Hamilton, strikes me as a kind of stumbling, a stutter step that tries to catch this simplifying impulse. In thinking about how this relates to the Black cowboy, I wonder if we can use this moment of performances passing through each other as a bookmark for whatever future representation of the Black cowboy emerges, and how they relate to both the structures that produce them and the audiences that witness them, paying attention to what feels easy, simple, and unproblematic, instead of intervening, untranslatable, and remaining.

HORSE OPERAS TALK BACK: HISTORY, MEMORY …

151

Conclusion In Yellowback Radio Broke-Down, the Loop Garoo Kid challenges another character, Bo Shmo, who argues that all art must be political. Loop asks: “what if I write circuses? No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumbling of wild men saddled by demons.”51 What I think we can take away from these moments is the idea that art (or culture), in all its forms of being, does things; or at least has the potential to do things, when viewed through performance: a novel can perform memory against forgetting; a song, re-sung, can sing against its own archival capture; a photograph can call attention to a gap in the viewer’s knowledge even as it fills it; a grief can flow through time when it is given the freedom to keen onstage. What happens when the Black cowboy is at the center of these “beings” and “doings?”; for the history of the West, for the cowboy as a pop culture image, for the Western genre. Clearly, we are still wrestling with these questions and this chapter only gestures toward answers. I have argued here that represented and embodied performances of the Black cowboy function as historiographic disruption, that reshape historical knowledge through acts of artistic expression and that interrogate the tension between remembered past, lived present, and possible future. Looking at these “events” together complicates understanding of the dominant history of the American West and situates these performative acts in a constantly shifting matrix of African American cultural production that includes literature, visual art, music, film, and theater. What I hope to have shown is that, in trying to do, and be, all things, these moments lay bare how historical knowledge is constructed upon processes of remembering and forgetting, and how culture can talk back against these processes in an earnestly disruptive, and often comically absurd, stumbling.

Notes 1. Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000), 9. 2. qtd. in Pierre-Damien Myuvekure, “‘Scatting Arbitrarily’ and Blowing HooDoo [Western] like Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker: Loop Garoo’s Be-Bop/ Hoodoo Improvisations in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down” in A Casebook

152

I. RECKER

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Study of Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000), 4–5. Jordan Peele, “Nope’s Jordan Peele: ‘I believe there are aliens out there,’ interview by Joshua Rothkopf. Around the Table, EW, July 20, 2022. Albert Broussard, “Foreword” Black Cowboys in the American West: On the Range, on the Stage, behind the Badge (Normon: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), viii. Michael K. Johnson, Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West (Jackson: University of Press of Mississippi, 2014), 7. Johnson, Hoo-Doo Cowboys, 8–9. David Goldstein-Shirley, “Black Cowboys in the American West: An Historiographical Review. Ethnic Studies Review, 20, no. 6 (1997), 2–3, 4. Goldstein-Shirley, “Black Cowboys in the American West,” 6. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press), 2–3. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in the Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 97–99. Schneider, Performing Remains, 97–99. Schneider, Performing Remains, 97–99. Nicholas Donofrio, “Multiculturalism, Inc.: Regulating and Deregulating the Culture Industries with Ishmael Reed. American Literary History, 29, no. 1 (2017), 102–3. Donofrio, “Multiculturalism, Inc,” 102–103, 106. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 16. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 6. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 34–40. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 115. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 176. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 16, 25. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 82–83. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 62. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 118. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 117. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 153. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 64. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 134. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 167. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 163. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 32. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 32. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 174.

HORSE OPERAS TALK BACK: HISTORY, MEMORY …

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

153

Schneider, Performing Remains, 15. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 34. “About” The American Songster, 1 March 2022. “About” The American Songster, 1 March 2022. Dom Flemons, “Liner Notes,” Black Cowboys. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2018, 27. Robert Cantwell qtd. in Johnson, Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos, 8. Flemons, “Liner Notes,” Black Cowboys, 23. Flemons, “Liner Notes,” Black Cowboys, 24. Dom Flemons, “Steel Pony Blues,” recorded 2018, track 12 on Black Cowboys. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20. Flemons, “Liner Notes,” 9. Schneider, Performing Remains, 101–102. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20–21. Ishmael Reed, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda (New York: Archway Editions, 2020), 36–37. Reed, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda, 37. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 15. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 15. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 15. Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, 36.

Aristophanes in Spurs: Blazing Saddles, Attic Comedy, HBO, and the Politics of Democratic Laughter Simon Stow

Comedy too knows about Justice; and what I say will be shocking but it will be right. —Aristophanes, The Acharnians

Soon after it began showing Mel Brooks’s 1974 classic comedy Western Blazing Saddles in July 2020, the streaming service HBO Max quietly added a short introduction to the movie presented by Jacqueline Smith, a professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Not quite a disclaimer—unlike her introduction to Gone with the Wind, the only other film to which HBO felt it necessary to append an explanatory note—Stewart’s foreword to Blazing Saddles sought to “ensure that the film was put into the proper social context.” More specifically, Stewart sought to explain that although the film was rife with racist language and attitudes, “those attitudes are espoused by characters who are explicitly portrayed here as narrowminded ignorant bigots.”1 Not only did the film not endorse these attitudes, she suggested, it

S. Stow (B) College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_10

155

156

S. STOW

employed comedy to undermine them. Despite Brooks’s frequent assertion that the movie could not be made today2 —even though Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank, an animated version of the story aimed at children was released in 20223 —HBO’s preface drew howls of derision, especially from the political Right. Paul de Quenoy declared that “HBO no longer wanted its paying customers to think for themselves,”4 while Kyle Smith, writing in the National Review asserted that “[i]f they have to do this with Blazing Saddles , they’ll have to slap trigger warnings, labels and introductions on practically everything.”5 Much hostility arose from the belief that HBO was patronizing its viewers. Many opined that the movie’s parodic form was so obvious as to make the introduction insulting. “This is the dumbest thing I have seen in a very long time,” wrote Brendan O’Neill, “…this ‘contextualizing’ lecture is artless, patronizing and ridiculous. Blazing Saddles is one of the great satires on racism. Everyone knows that.”6 While others eschewed the idea that the movie had any broader significance at all. Of Stewart’s introduction, Jack Marshall wrote: “Blazing Saddles is falsely re-framed as movie written to make social justice points, when in fact it was made for a single purpose: to make people laugh.”7 Ultimately, many shared O’Neill’s indignation. “Who do these people think they are?” he asked. “How dare they interject in an artistic work and declare that it is okay for us to watch it so long as we do so with the right mindset?” O’Neill’s comment—albeit inadvertently—raised a number of questions about comedy, democracy, and the disposition demand by both. Such questions have a long pedigree. For its founders, the Ancient Greeks, democracy was more than a commitment to proper procedure and majority rule. Rather, it was a good in itself, one that demanded the cultivation of an appropriate way of being—an ethos or disposition—toward the city, its institutions, and citizenry. The Great Dionysia, an Athenian theatrical festival, was the most important means by which the city sought to inculcate a democratic ethos. Attended by the entire citizenry, the Dionysia presented the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and others. Tragedy sought to teach audiences about the unpredictability of human existence, the inevitability of suffering, and the complexity of moral judgment. As such, it is no coincidence that tragedy has long been employed as a lens through which to view the Western. The moral ambiguities and sudden reversals of, for example, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, High Noon, or The Searchers, have been seen as echoes of The Oresteia or Oedipus Rex, and thus, a resource for American democratic education. Comedies offered

ARISTOPHANES IN SPURS: BLAZING SADDLES, ATTIC COMEDY …

157

a different take on the democratic, one that seemed to disparage all the city held dear. The relationship between Attic comedy and democratic governance is no less complex than that between tragedy and democracy. Setting out the nature of this relationship, and identifying the parallels between Ancient comedy and Blazing Saddles , reveals the way in which the latter might too offer a democratic pedagogy, one that demands a particular disposition in its audience. The relative absence of this disposition in the contemporary polity, it will be argued, may explain HBO’s perceived need to preface a satire with an explanation of how satire works. In this, Blazing Saddles might show both how comedy might work to educate its contemporary democratic audience, and the limits on that pedagogy absent an appropriate disposition toward the comedic. The very centrality of the Western to America’s mythology and self-understanding makes a Western parody a particularly useful lens for considering what this possible absence might say about American politics. The essay proceeds by outlining the key features of Attic comedy and its relationship to Greek democracy. It then contemplates the extent to which the comedic plays of Aristophanes and others might serve as a heuristic for considering the relationship between Blazing Saddles and contemporary democracy. Having established the legitimacy of this relationship, the essay turns to identifying the parallels between Mel Brooks’s movie and Ancient comedy, pinpointing aspects that might be thought to offer a similar democratic pedagogy to its audience. Having examined the film’s general contribution to democracy, the essay considers how it engages with the specific—the issue of race—that Brooks considered to be the engine of the movie. Pointing to the ways in which the movie seeks to uproot racist attitudes, the essay nevertheless considers how it falls short and what this tells us about the ways in which racism renews itself even in the face of the most scathing attacks. It is an argument that suggests the ongoing value of the Western as a resource for thinking about American politics, and more controversially, perhaps, the possible democratic necessity of HBO’s preface.

Attic Comedy (On the Fart as Democratic Discourse) Unlike tragedy, which always took place in the past, Attic comedy took place in the democratic present. While Socrates observed that the characters in tragedy acted as if nobody was watching, comedy was acutely

158

S. STOW

aware of its audience, repeatedly breaching the fourth wall. Characters addressed spectators directly, engaging in metatheatricality by frequently drawing attention to the play as a performance. In Aristophanes’ The Clouds for example, the fictional Socrates—comedies often featured exaggerated versions of real citizens—points out the clouds over a conspicuous mountain in Athens’ skyline. Because the theater was one of the few places in the city from which it was impossible to see the mountain, Socrates’ pupil complains that he cannot see them. He is then advised to look along the entry ramp to the stage. Likewise, in Frogs, Xanthias is warned not to engage in the kinds of vulgar jokes said to be the hallmark of inferior poets. Aristophanes then employs those same vulgarities. This is not only evidence of the irony in Attic comedy, but also its commitment to causing offense. To say that Attic comedy was vulgar is to say too little. Masturbation, excrement, phalluses, sex, homosexuality, and double entendres were persistent tropes. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, men denied sexual intercourse by wives seeking an end to war grace the stage with oversized erections; in the Clouds, the entire audience is accused of being passive homosexuals; and the sausage-seller in the Knights—who boasts of his relationship to the city’s “open- mouthed citizens”—is clearly not just interested in retailing meat. Heavy on the scatological, the plays were rife with depictions of flatulence often associated with the lowborn heroes of Attic comedy. Indeed, Wilfred Major identifies comedy’s persistent paralleling of farting with political speech, capturing the way in public discourse is literally hot air. Likewise, the comic poet Timocles made a pointed connection between beans and flatulence among both humans and animals, reducing the former to the latter.8 As Wilson Carey McWilliams observed, comedy is of the body, its “characteristic sound…not a trumpet but a fart.”9 It was, nevertheless, understood to be a form of democratic pedagogy. In discussing comedy’s democratic pedagogy, Stephen Halliwell distinguishes between playful and consequential laughter.10 The former is marked by a lightness of tone, psychological relaxation, and acceptance of its shared conventions; a thing unto itself, it is directed to no particular end. Consequential laughter, on the other hand, aims at something beyond pleasure, such as causing shame or embarrassment, or expressing hostility. The distinction between the playful and the consequential is not always clear cut, with the former sometimes spilling over into the latter. Comedy was used to mock political opponents, critique the city’s values,

ARISTOPHANES IN SPURS: BLAZING SADDLES, ATTIC COMEDY …

159

or to expose hypocrisy. Very little was not up for grabs; democracy itself was, however, most decidedly not. Criticism of the polis and its citizens took place against the backdrop of the Great Dionysia, a festival whose rituals celebrated the city. Indeed, a genre in which very little was considered sacrosanct never attacked the fundamental principles of democracy: the rule of the d¯emos and its constitutional structure. This reluctance recognized two key understandings of laughter in democratic Athens. First, that because laughter cannot always be contained, it is a potentially dangerous force that belies the claim ‘it’s only a joke.’ To mock democracy would be to mock the thing that made comedy possible. Second, the multitude of ways in which comedy cultivated a democratic ethos. Foremost among these is that it demonstrates that the world might be otherwise: that politics and culture are not our masters but our creation. This offers a counterweight to any possible calcification of a system where—as in comedy—the rote can become debilitating. This recognition sought to cultivate a recognition of the contingency of the citizenry’s worldviews. Comedies were often tragedies in parodic form. This paratragedy set up an ongoing conflict between the two dramatic forms, a conflict reflected in the structure of the Dionysia where tragedies were followed by comedies. Such conflict made the notion that discussion or debate can ever be over, impossible. Citizens were thus encouraged to inhabit a position in which there were no final answers—beyond the value of democracy itself—only an ongoing dialogue between citizens who recognized that their views were not irrefutable. Thus, comedy cultivated a dualistic worldview—what William Connolly calls a “bicameral orientation”11 —as an engine of critical reflection on the values of the city and those of the citizen. Such was the democratic ethos that comedy sought to inculcate in its audience. Democracy and comedy were, furthermore, seen to make each other possible. It is no coincidence that when the demos was most powerful in Athens, comedy was at its zenith.

Comedy and Democracy (Ancient and Modern) It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that comedy plays the same role in contemporary democracy as it did for Athens. Contemporary comedy lacks the festival context that both permitted and contained the role of Greek laughter. Similarly, contemporary comedy’s reach is considerably less than in the Attic world. No matter how popular a contemporary

160

S. STOW

comedy, it will never be presented to the entire citizenry all at once. Indeed, part of Greek theater’s democratic pedagogy was the opportunity to watch the reactions of one’s fellow citizens. Seating in the Theater of Dionysos was set out in a semi-circle, enabling its audience to see and be seen by their countrymen, to learn what they found funny—and what they did not—reflecting on themselves and their fellow citizens, and thereby cultivating the dualistic worldview that helped make democracy possible. Film viewing—in the dark with all its audience members facing the same way, or at home with a much smaller audience—could hardly be said to be conducive to the development of a democratic ethos in the same way. Nevertheless, a commonplace of movie criticism suggests that people laugh louder and harder when they are together in a movie theater than they do at home: that there is something about collective viewing that creates an experience bigger than any individual might experience on their own. This similar but different experience is, perhaps, the perfect analogy for thinking about the democratic role of contemporary comedy. It is a lesser experience but one that might allow us to use Attic comedy as a lens through which to understand the democratic role of contemporary comedy. Blazing Saddles is particularly suited to this purpose, filled as it is with Aristophanic tropes. In this, it offers a complement and partial correction to the tragic focus of contemporary Western scholarship. Steven Johnston has made much of tragedy and the Western, offering insightful readings of the genre’s potential role in cultivating a democratic ethos, primarily by reminding its audiences of the dangers of embracing dogmatic perspectives. One of Johnston’s most innovative proposals is to sketch a contemporary Dionysia held on the Fourth of July, with screens on the National Mall showing John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.12 The proposal is particularly pertinent because the Western is an American genre which scholars—from multiple disciplines—have employed as a lens to view the present. Such analysis has, however, paid far less attention to the pedagogical function of the Western comedy. It is a puzzling omission given the juxtaposition of tragedy with comedy in the Dionysia, and the productive tension between them that is central to the festival’s pedagogical function. Comedy was, furthermore, frequently a comment on tragedy, a way of throwing into question even the lessons and/or experience that the latter offered its audiences. If Westerns are understood as American tragedies, then Blazing Saddles —a Western parody—should be interrogated with the same attention lavished on the non-comedic.

ARISTOPHANES IN SPURS: BLAZING SADDLES, ATTIC COMEDY …

161

Blazing Parallels In 2016, Mel Brooks observed “I’ve never been political.”13 It is a puzzling claim for someone who has skewered Nazis, the Klan, antiSemites, corrupt politicians, and, most famously, in Blazing Saddles , racists. What, perhaps, Brooks meant is that he is non-partisan, certainly almost everybody in the movie—with the notable exception of its Black characters and Gene Wilder’s Waco Kid—is subject to ridicule. Indeed, Beth Bonnstetter argues that by playing Governor Petomane—a name which means ‘Fartomatic’ in French—and a Yiddish-speaking Native American, Brooks makes even himself ridiculous.14 Likewise, among the miscreants lining up for Hedley Lamarr’s racist posse—including Klansmen, Mexican bandits, several Arab tribesmen, Nazis, and two members of a motorcycle gang—Brooks includes a stereotypical film director, skewering Hollywood, and by extension himself, for being part of an industry plagued by pernicious racism. His most persistent target is, however, the Western itself. “The whole notion of a parody,” Brooks observed, “…it works on the hundreds and thousands of clichés that we all know.”15 Just as Attic comedy engaged in the paratragic, Saddles subverts the conventions of America’s tragic form. Indeed, just as the Western rewrote American history, Saddles employed the genre’s clichés to offer a comedic take on the Western and its whitewashed historical predicate. Central to this was an attack on its hierarchy and exclusion. Just as Attic comedy’s heroes came from the lower echelons, Blazing Saddles embraces the perspective of the marginalized and exploited, the Black, Chinese, and Irish railroad workers and Bart, the railroad worker who becomes Rock Ridge’s first Black sheriff. In so doing, Brooks punctured the Western’s, and America’s, myths about how the West was won. Just as the white historian Frederick Jackson Turner all but excluded Blacks and Indians from his account of the Western frontier, Hollywood largely excluded Blacks or portrayed them as subservient to whites. Likewise, Indians were made savage and alien. In Saddles Brooks comedically inverts these conventions in multiple ways. Asked by white overseers to sing “a good old n***** work song,”16 Bart and his compatriots offer up an anachronistic, harmonically sophisticated rendition of Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You.” When the puzzled overseer suggests they sing the slave spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the men feign ignorance, as they do for the subsequent suggestion, of the minstrel song, “Camptown Races.”

162

S. STOW

Faced with the workers’ apparent ignorance, the overseer and his men engage in an enthusiastic rendition of the song, complete with minstrel dancing, revealing the whiteness beneath the faux Blackness of minstrelsy, and leading the Black and Chinese workers to snigger at white absurdity. In this moment, the racial roles are reversed, the Black workers are the sophisticates who make white men dance for their amusement. As with Attic comedy, this inversion destroys supposedly immutable hierarchies, exposing, in the process, the myths of white supremacy and Manifest Destiny that structure the telling of American history, and their depiction in the movie Western. Likewise, the Native American engagement with Bart and his parents as they cross the prairie. While some contemporary audiences might baulk at Brooks in red face, his depiction of the Native American is comedic—but not in a way that mocks his subject—in its inversion of the conventional depiction of the violent and uncivilized native. In Brooks’s telling, it is the natives and the Black characters who are compassionate and civilized, and the whites, savage. Echoing Ancient comedy’s paratragic aspects, Saddles also selfconsciously parodies the geography, values, and conventions of the Western. Just as in the ‘straight’ Western, the railroad, the prairie, the wagon train, the saloon, the main street, the church, and the jailhouse, constitute the mis en scène. Each is, nevertheless, subverted in different ways. In perhaps the movie’s most famous scene, the stock image of cowboys sitting around a campfire is undercut—in an Aristophanic manner—by several long and loud farts. Absent from the straight Western, the scene offers a more accurate account of gassy life on the range. Frequently, the comedy emerges from the Western’s conventions played straight in a comedic context. The film opens with Frankie Laine’s rendition of the John Morris and Mel Brooks penned title song. Not realizing that the film was a comedy, Laine—an artist responsible for the title songs of several ‘straight’ Westerns—sang in his usual overwrought style, drawing attention to the genre’s melodramatic form. Likewise, Slim Pickens, a veteran of many straight Westerns, plays the henchman Taggart, with Brooks subverting the genre’s conventions to comic effect. (The subversion would have been more pronounced had the iconic Western actor, John Wayne, accepted Brooks’s invitation to play the Waco Kid). Other characters both echo and parody Western staples. Madeline Kahn’s cabaret singer, Lily Von Shtupp—her surname Yiddish for sexual intercourse—parodies Marlene Dietrich’s role in the 1939 movie Destry Rides Again. Saddles also depict the genre’s stock characters—the preacher, the

ARISTOPHANES IN SPURS: BLAZING SADDLES, ATTIC COMEDY …

163

mayor, the little old lady, the land speculator, the brainless ‘heavy,’ and town notables—in ways that subvert their Western archetypes. That all the townspeople have the surname Johnson suggests not only an incestuous inbreeding among whites concerned with racial purity, but also their very interchangeability as stock characters, their two-dimensionality parodying the genre itself. Here, as elsewhere, the movie employs dramatic irony to appeal over the heads of its characters to its audience. Such metatheatricality—which echoes that of Attic comedy—is, however, most evident in Brooks’s repeated breaking of the fourth wall. Bart’s first appearance as sheriff, on a horse with Gucci saddlebags— the anachronism draws attention to the movie’s self-conscious temporal conflations—is marked, as in the standard Western, by the character’s seemingly non-diegetic theme tune, in this case, the 1932 song, April in Paris, suggesting the urbane sophistication that distinguishes Bart from the white characters. As he rides across the plain, it soon becomes evident that the music is diegetic, the camera revealing Count Basie and his Orchestra. After a quick greeting between bandleader and sheriff, the latter rides off to the accompaniment of Basie’s performance. Of this scene, Brooks observed: “That’s my whole method of working as a director in a nutshell. Find the fourth wall, then smash the hell out of it.”17 This takes many forms in the film, with characters—as in Attic comedy—addressing the audience directly: drawing attention to the genre’s hackneyed conventions: in response to the suggestion “we’ll head them off at the pass,” Hedley Lamarr declares, “I hate that cliché.” Likewise, when the townspeople refuse Bart’s request to postpone their departure, he observes “You’d do it for Randolph Scott.” The invocation of one of the Western genre’s most famous leading men is enough to make the townspeople remove their hats, stand to attention, and reverently repeat Scott’s name. In a delightful moment of metatheatricality, the mention of Scott sways Rock Ridge’s citizens to Bart’s side, revealing that Bart was right, they would do it for Randolph Scott. The most significant example of Brooks breaking the fourth wall comes in the film’s conclusion. Near the end of the movie, at Bart’s urging, the townspeople construct replicas of both Rock Ridge and themselves, to fool a marauding posse into sparing the real town. The artificiality of the replicas draws attention to the artificiality of the actual Rock Ridge, itself a movie set, and its two-dimensional characters. As a fight breaks out between the citizens and marauders, the camera pulls back and upwards,

164

S. STOW

the artificial crane shot drawing attention to the scene as a movie. Thereafter the camera pulls higher and further back, panning to reveal the Los Angeles skyline and the movie studio lot upon which the film is being shot. It then focuses in to reveal a soundstage where an elaborate musical number with male dancers clad in top hats and tails, with canes. In an echo of Attic comedy, the dancers code as effeminately gay. Indeed, the title of their song, The French Mistake, which calls for them to stick out their “toosh,” refers to a straight male engaging in an ostensibly homosexual act that he later regrets. The scene further emphasizes Saddle’s fictive nature, suggesting that it, like the musical, is a genre piece. Brooks then ups the ante when the Rock Ridge citizens and their attackers break through the set wall, to continue their brawl on the musical set. When the musical’s director briefly manages to halt the conflict, Slim Pickens—embodying both the character of Taggart and the actor who plays him—declares “I work for Mel Brooks,” before punching the director and precipitating an even larger brawl as the dancers wade into the fray. The movie then cuts to the studio commissary populated by other stock movie figures: bikini clad young women; a Tarzan with chimp; an actor playing Adolf Hitler (“They lose me, right after the bunker scene”); and antebellum Southerners, the latter two suggesting Hollywood’s racism and anti-Semitism. When the brawl breaks through the commissary wall, the conflict becomes a pie fight, invoking early Hollywood comedies. Cutting to the outside, the camera reveals a group of tourists taking the studio tour who shortly thereafter are shown covered with pie residue. This is followed by an even bolder breaking of the fourth wall when the brawlers run out of the studio—past signs saying “Warner Bothers Pictures,” and “Employees”—into the surrounding city. Last among them is Hedley Lamarr and/or Harvey Korman, the actor by whom he is played, who hails a taxi (“Get me out of this picture”) that takes him to Hollywood’s Chinese Theater. There he buys a ticket for a movie called Blazing Saddles . This movie within a movie reveals the arrival of Bart/Cleavon Little at the same theater. Lamarr/Korman flees only to encounter the sheriff. After a shootout in which Lamarr is killed, the Waco Kid arrives and he and his partner check out the movie, hoping for a happy ending. In that movie, bidding farewell to the townspeople, Bart/Little and the Waco Kid/Wilder ride away only to swap their horses for a limousine before driving off into the proverbial sunset. The breathtaking mobius strip of self-referentiality that concludes the movie serves to entertain, amuse, and disorient its viewers: confounding

ARISTOPHANES IN SPURS: BLAZING SADDLES, ATTIC COMEDY …

165

their expectations of a film’s narrative flow, revealing the movie to be a construct, and, in so doing, problematizing the genre it lampoons. While the sheer number of Westerns made in Hollywood normalized a history far removed from reality—coming in effect to stand in for and replace that reality in the American mind—by uprooting the conventions of the genre, Blazing Saddles did not necessarily destroy them so much as to call them into question, thereby possibly cultivating the dualistic and questioning ethos or disposition that democracy requires. The viewer could not, perhaps, view straight Westerns in the same way again: their understanding of them, their enjoyment of them, and their relationship to the history they depicted, could not but be as simple, straightforward, and one-dimensional as they might have been absent Blazing Saddles . In this way, perhaps, the movie that Brooks immodestly observed should be ranked as “the first, second, third, and fourth” funniest movie of all time (he placed his subsequent movie Young Frankenstein fifth), might, in the right circumstances, be thought to cultivate the same disposition in its audience that was engendered by Attic comedy for its public.18 Where Saddles perhaps deviates from the Attic model—which seldom focused on a specific political concern—is in the way in which the disposition it sought to cultivate was focused on a particular issue largely ignored by the genre it parodied: race.

The Western in Black and White “[T]he engine that drove the movie, observed Brooks, “was the hatred of the Black; it was race prejudice. Without that the movie would not have had nearly the significance, theforce, the dynamism, and the stakes that were contained in the film.”19 The reaction he expected to the film— “I envisioned a race riot”20 —suggests his commitment to provoking the American public, not just for provocation’s sake, but for a deeper political purpose, his explicit eschewal of the latter notwithstanding. In many ways, the election of Rock Ridge’s first Black sheriff, and the town’s hostile reaction to him, was an analogy for Brooks’s insertion of a Black Western sheriff into the American world in which the movie was itself an artifact. The response of Rock Ridge’s citizens to its new sheriff is best characterized by one of Bart’s first interactions with the townspeople. Having ingratiatingly greeted an old lady, the woman responds “Up yours n*****.” The movie employs the n-word at least seventeen times over 93 minutes. While Westerns rarely used the term—not least

166

S. STOW

because Blacks were so often absent—Brooks’s commitment to verisimilitude through comedy to the American past (and present) was such that he recognized the term’s necessity. The way Brooks tells the story of the word’s inclusion in the movie is nevertheless redolent of a certain type of white liberalism, that which employs minorities as means and not ends. Brooks recalls telling a friend, “… we need a Black guy. Otherwise, we can’t use the N word, and we’ve gotta use the N word many, many times.”21 Thus, Richard Pryor, who contributed much to the script, is demeaningly presented as something of a human shield against certain types of criticism. Interestingly, beyond noting that the bad guys would have used the N word, Pryor—who employed the word liberally in his stand-up comedy—is said to have shown more interest in writing the film’s non-racial humor, in particular the campfire scene and most of Mongo’s lines. The problematic racial politics of the film’s development was further suggested by the studio’s refusal to consider Pryor for the role of Bart, a job that Pryor has assumed was his throughout the writing process. The choice of Cleavon Little, a more clean-cut, and considerably less threatening, figure than the anarchic Pryor suggests that Little/ Bart’s overcoming of the townspeople’s prejudice embodies a politics of respectability that resonated beyond the film. Indeed, the film might have been more radical in its critique had Brooks been able to bring his first vision—a Western blaxploitation flick called Tex-X —to the screen. That he could not should not, however, overshadow that which he was able to achieve: a provocative and potentially transformative comedy about race. Given the claim that comedy’s pedagogy sought to engender a dualistic perspective on the political, it might be objected that racism is an issue without two sides, and thus racial comedy is potentially counterproductive. This critique suggests that such comedy encourages only playful laughter that spills over into the negatively consequential when made acceptable through repetition. Thus, when Brooks, rejecting the desexualization of Black males in the traditional Western, makes Bart’s sexual prowess such that the nightclub singer Lily Von Shtupp—whose cabaret act made clear her boredom with men—becomes irresistibly attracted to him, he simply reinforces a cliché rather than subverting it in any sense. Nevertheless, it is precisely the potentially dualistic impact of comedy that makes such examples useful. Much of the right-wing hostility toward HBO’s attempts to contextualize the movie’s depiction of race arose from the sense that such commentators not only knew what racism was, but also that they were not themselves racist. Paul de

ARISTOPHANES IN SPURS: BLAZING SADDLES, ATTIC COMEDY …

167

Quenoy’s characterization of the African American Jacqueline Stewart as “Aunt Jacqueline”—which reduced an accomplished scholar to an offensive stereotype—suggests his lack of awareness of his own problematic racial views, and, indeed, his ignorance of American history; certainly, a slave woman who sought to explain issues of racism to a white man would have been unlikely to survive. For these audience members—and especially those who claim that Saddles was simply a comedy with no greater purpose—there would appear to be no hope. Nevertheless, there are others who also fancy themselves as free of racist views for whom Blazing Saddles might offer a useful democratic pedagogy. Jokes are what Ted Cohen calls “hermetic:” they require an understanding of shared background assumptions—the sort of thing that the later Wittgenstein calls ‘stage-setting’ information.22 If we hear a joke whose account of the world is one that we might consciously reject—such as one predicated on racism or homophobia—we might not laugh, but, because of what Freud calls the “technique of the joke,” the bafflement and then the dawning of light, we might nevertheless find ourselves in an uncomfortable position.23 Faced with the puzzle of a joke we are often helpless to avoid trying to ‘solve’ it, in much the same way, perhaps, that once literate, we cannot help but read whatever is put in front of us. To solve such puzzles, we have to remind ourselves of the stage-setting information—the crude stereotypes upon which such jokes are predicated—which might serve to remind us of how much problematic baggage we carry with us, no matter how enlightened we believe ourselves to be. The reminder of that which we might wish to deny, forget, or reject, is part of what can make comedy so unsettling, and that which serves to cultivate a dual perspective on ourselves and the values of our community. In the case of Blazing Saddles , for example, the comedy arising from Bart’s interactions with Lily Von Shtupp emerges, in part, from certain stereotypes about the sexual prowess of the Black male. The joke offers a dualism to its audience, some of whom will simply see it as playful laughter even as it reinforces the stereotype that it would subvert, and some for whom the laughter will be consequential, forcing them to reckon with what their laughter—or discomfort—reveals about themselves and their professed values. In recent years, Mel Brooks has lamented the way in which the political value of comedy has been undone by would-be progressive social movements. Blazing Saddles could not, he suggests, be made today “because we have become stupidly politically correct, which is the death of comedy.” Although “[i]t’s okay not to hurt the feelings of various

168

S. STOW

tribes and groups. However, it’s not good for comedy. Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks.”24 It is a claim that seems to confuse the playful with the consequential, for while the former might hurt the feelings of marginalized groups, the latter can inflict more lasting harms on those already rendered sufficiently other to be the target of ridicule. As has already been noted, playful laughter can all too easily become consequential with even the most seemingly innocuous jokes at the expense of a minority cultivating or perpetuating a society in which that minority is subject to discrimination and/or violence. Thus, while Brooks uses humor to depict the ugliness of racism, subverting its tropes in the interest of undoing its damage, his depiction of the effeminate dancers in one of the film’s final scenes simply serves to perpetuate harmful stereotypes that negatively affect the gay community. There is, perhaps, no degree of contexualization that would make the exaggerated effeminacy of these dancers unproblematic for the gay community, except, perhaps, a knowing reappropriation of the same by that group. This, it might be argued, shows us something about why the much-scorned HBO preface might actually serve an important democratic function. In 2008, the University of Wisconsin issued a formal apology to a Black student whose white instructor had played in the classroom the opening scene of Blazing Saddles in which the overseer employed the n-word and asked the railroad workers to sing like slaves. The university’s actions precipitated a strong but surprisingly reasoned response. In a letter to the university newspaper, political science major Eric Schmidt expressed frustration with the paper’s spotty coverage of the incident. There was, he suggested, insufficient information in their story to know whether the university’s actions might be considered legitimate. Absent this information, he suggested, the effect of the university’s actions and the newspaper’s reporting of it might be considered chilling of free speech and academic freedom.25 Likewise, noted political science professor Donald Downs suggested that the use of such racial epithets in the classroom setting should be judged according to the instructor’s intent. “Invidious uses of such words are wrong,” he said, “…[but] given the university’s strong commitment to nondiscrimination and equal respect, it is best to assume non-invidious intent as a default position unless evidence exists to the contrary.”26 It may be, however, that this focus on intent in both delivery and reception of a joke is what makes comedy such a double-edged sword for democratic education. The student who received the apology was one of only two Black students in a 40-person

ARISTOPHANES IN SPURS: BLAZING SADDLES, ATTIC COMEDY …

169

seminar. The subject class was described as a ‘mental health training seminar’ with no apparent connection to issues of race or racism. The assumption that seemed to underpin the instructor’s action, and indeed, of those who expressed concerns about the university’s apology, was that Blazing Saddles was so obviously a parody that nobody could possibly take offense—the position of those who objected to HBO’s preface. For these groups, such laughter could only be understood as playful: there was nothing that they could learn from it because they understood racism to be bad, and themselves to be innocent of it. In this they aligned themselves with the anti-racist Waco Kid, whose observation about the citizens of Rock Ridge—“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know, morons”—exemplifies the perspective of the selfidentified non-racists on those who do not recognize the movie’s parodic form. For such folks, their supposed comprehension of the film’s antiracist pedagogy spares them a critical reflection on their own problematic attitudes, most obviously their failure to recognize that what might be playful laughter for them is often consequential laughter for those for whom they would purport to be allies. What the Wisconsin student wrote in their complaint to the university in which they identified “an ongoing problem with little consequence to its perpetrators because they no longer believe it to be a problem,” captures the problem for minority groups of those whose ‘knowingness’ about their own perceived lack of bias leads them to harm, through humor, those with whom they see themselves aligned.27 It is a problem of context and ethos, that which leads them to see some perceived notion of political correctness—not themselves—as the problem when objections are raised to their actions. Despite having declined Mel Brook’s offer to star in Blazing Saddles , John Wayne was said to have loved the script, promising to be “the first one in line to see it.” The same John Wayne who, in an infamous 1971 interview with Playboy, declared, among other bigoted remarks, “I believe in white supremacy.”28 If Wayne did indeed find Saddles funny, it raises the question of what he believed he was laughing at, whether he, like the critic Jack Marshall, just saw it as an exercise in playful laughter with no broader purpose. If this was indeed the case, one might seek to qualify the claims made on behalf of the movie’s supposedly consequential laughter with regard to race, not only in terms of those—like Wayne—who simply seem to miss it, but also for those whose confidence in their own understanding of parody and/or racism is such that they believe the movie’s

170

S. STOW

pedagogical function is only for others. What the University of Wisconsin incident should, perhaps, remind us is that context is key: what might play well in a class about race and comedy does not have the appropriate context to make it anything but negatively consequential for the two out of 40 Black students in a mental health training seminar. Thus, Blazing Saddles should be understood as a parodic Western, but that pedagogy of parody requires both an appropriate context and an audience attuned to the nuances of an often unnuanced form. Ancient Greece had the Festival of Dionysia and a keen understanding of comedy’s role as an educator of the demos. America has neither and, thus, even a movie such as Blazing Saddles , filled as it is with often-hilarious recontextualizations of the culture’s most persistent cultural form—the Western—can, despite its intent, often suffer from ‘knowing’ responses which undermine its potentially democratically beneficial effects. This is true, it has been suggested, both for those whose concerns are labeled ‘politically correct,’ as it is for those who, secure in their own worldviews, scorn the latter for its supposedly comedy-killing effects. It is in this context that Jacqueline Stewart’s HBO preface should be understood. Stewart’s introduction, it might be suggested, is not the problem, but rather the symbol of problem for a polity whose democratic ethos is now such that consequential laughter—both good and bad—has to be properly contextualized for it to have any possibility of engendering positive effects.

Notes 1. Ryan Parker, “HBO Max adds ‘proper social context’ intro to ‘Blazing Saddles,” The Hollywood Reporter, August 13, 2020. https://www.hollyw oodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/hbo-max-adds-proper-social-context-introblazing-saddles-1307351/. 2. Maane Khatchatourian, “Mel Brooks: ‘Blazing Saddles’would never be made in today’s ‘Stupidly Politically Correct’ Culture, Variety, September 23, 2017. https://variety.com/2017/film/news/mel-brooks-blazing-sad dles-pc-culture-1202568893/. 3. Leo Baraclough, “First look: Animated comedy ‘Blazing Samuri,’ starring Michael Cera, Samuel L. Jackson, Ricky Gervais,” Variety, February 25, 2021. https://variety.com/2021/film/festivals/blazing-samurai-melbrooks-michael-cera-samuel-l-jackson-1234914961/. 4. Paul de Quenoy, “Disclaimer: Mel Brooks is Cancelled,” The Critic, August 19, 2020. https://thecritic.co.uk/disclaimer-mel-brooks-is-cancel led/.

ARISTOPHANES IN SPURS: BLAZING SADDLES, ATTIC COMEDY …

171

5. Kyle Smith, “Trigger warning attached to Blazing Saddles,” National Review, August 14, 2020. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tri gger-warning-attached-to-blazing-saddles/. 6. Brendan O’Neill, “Don’t even think about cancelling Blazing Saddles ,” Spiked, August 18 2020. https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/18/ dont-even-think-about-cancelling-blazing-saddles/. 7. Jack Marshall, “HBO adds disclaimer for morons onto ‘Blazing Saddles,” Ethics Alarms, August 15 2020. https://ethicsalarms.com/2020/08/ 15/hbo-max-adds-a-disclaimer-for-morons-onto-blazing-saddles/. 8. Wilfred Major, “Farting for dollars: A note on Agyrrhios in Aristophanes Wealth 176,” The American Journal of Philology 123, no. 4, (Winter 2002): 551–553. 9. Carey McWilliams, “Poetry, politics, and the comic spirit,” PS: Politics and Political Science 28, no. 2, (June 1995): 198. 10. Stephen Halliwell, “The uses of laughter in Greek culture,” The Classical Quarterly, 41, no. 2, (1991): 279–296. 11. William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 5. 12. Steven Johnston, American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 13. A.D. Amorosi, “Mel Brooks on John Wayne, Improv and the presidential race,” Metrophiladelphia, May 20, 2016. https://metrophiladelphia.com/ mel-brooks-on-john-wayne-improv-and-the-presidential-race/. 14. Beth Bonnstetter, “Mel Brooks meets Kenneth Burke (and Mikhail Bakhtin): comedy and burlesque in satiric film,” Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1, (Spring 2011): 18–31. 15. David Fear, “Why ‘Blazing Saddles’ is the funniest movie ever made,” Rolling Stone, August 31, 2016. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/ movie-features/mel-brooks-why-blazing-saddles-is-the-funniest-movieever-made-252004/. 16. All references are to Mel Brooks, director, Blazing Saddles , Warner Bros, Pictures, 1974, 1 hr, 33 min. 17. Fear, “Funniest movie ever made.” 18. Jeff Labrecque, “‘Blazing Saddles’ at 40: A conversation with Mel Brooks,” ew.com, May 1, 2014. https://ew.com/article/2014/05/01/ blazing-saddles-mel-brooks/. 19. Lisa Doris Alexander, Expanding the Black Film Canon. Race and Gender Across Six Decades (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 57. 20. Labrecque, “‘Blazing Saddles’ at 40.” 21. Labrecque, “‘Blazing Saddles’ at 40.” 22. Ted Cohen Jokes, Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 12.

172

S. STOW

23. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious translated by Joyce Crick (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 83. 24. Khatchatourian, “Mel Brooks.” 25. Eric Schmidt, “‘Blazing’ gaps in Herald reporting,” The Badger Herald, October 15, 2008. https://badgerherald.com/opinion/2008/10/15/ blazing-gaps-in-hera/. 26. Donald Downs, “UW should not stifle debate,” The Badger Herald, October 28, 2008. https://badgerherald.com/opinion/2008/10/28/ uw-should-not-stifle/. 27. Kevin Barges, “UW apologizes for showing film with racial slurs,” The Badger Herald, October 14, 2008. https://badgerherald.com/news/ 2008/10/14/uw-apologizes-for-sh/. 28. Tom Breihan, “Blazing Saddles punched up—knocking out horses and a racist America in one swing,” November 1, 2019. https://www.avclub. com/blazing-saddles-punched-up-knocking-out-horses-and-a-ra-183937 0209.

The Adaptable, International West

Towards Assimilationist Politics on the Filmic Frontier: Mid-Twentieth Century Westerns in Australia Scott Pearce

Introduction This chapter is focussed on two Australian films about frontier settlement and conflict with First Nations people. These films, Uncivilised (Charles Chauvel 1936) and Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart 1950), are illustrative of broader political narratives regarding the status and place of First Nations people in Australia. They are also examples of the colonising narratives that strived to reconcile and minimise the genocidal horrors or historical colonisation. This chapter understands the Western genre as an international genre. Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper see that the Western resonates with nations and experiences outside of America and that international incarnations adapt and resist the American version. They note “Australian Westerns, like their American counterparts, are tales of rugged white pioneers building a nation by conquering a trackless wilderness.”1 As such, comparing American film Westerns with their counterparts from other countries reveals as many similarities as it does nuances.

S. Pearce (B) Alia College, Hawthorn East 3123, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_11

175

176

S. PEARCE

This chapter begins with a brief examination of Uncivilised and its position that First Nations people in Australia are a dying or doomed race. It then provides a thorough examination of Bitter Springs , which, like Fort Apache (John Ford 1948), was produced during a shift in government policy towards assimilationism. Fort Apache was one of several American films that presented a more complex picture of race relations between First Nations groups and Anglo colonisers than had previously been seen. Angela Aleiss argues that “postwar movies had ventured into new territory by suggesting a commonality between Indians and whites.”2 As policy, this began in America under President Truman, and his push for vocational education for First Nations groups. Then, under the Eisenhower administration and The Indian Relocation Act (1956), this push became more commonplace. However, this type of assimilation, as Aleiss argues, was a “mutual coexistence [that] demanded a sacrifice of Indian identity”3 Assimilation is not equality or equity but rather it is defined in these films as offering only limited and conditional membership in the new world to First Nations people. Fort Apache identifies the causes of frontier disharmony and conflict between First Nations groups and colonisers as premised on cultural misunderstandings or the egregious self-interest of select individuals. Uncivilised and Bitter Springs do much the same. Moreover, assimilation does not desist with the notion of the dangerous Other, the uncivilised savage, who will not assimilate and thus must be subdued, controlled, or eliminated. Such reasoning, in Uncivilised and Bitter Springs , seeks to negate broader criticism of systemic racism, past and present, while using the past as a relative scapegoat that is depicted as, while at times unfortunate, predominately populated by white figures with the best of intentions.

Charles Chauvel Uncivilised by the prolific Australian director, Charles Chauvel, who is perhaps better known for the films Forty Thousand Horsemen, (1940) Rats of Tobruk (1944), and Jedda (1955), demonstrates the influence of the American market on Australian representations of self. The impact of American cinema on the Australian film industry was the subject of the Commonwealth Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia (1927–1928). The Commission determined that the ease with which Hollywood films were being imported and distributed came at

TOWARDS ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICS ON THE FILMIC …

177

the expense of the Australian product. Despite its recommendations to address this influence, Stephen Gaunson finds that ultimately, the “Australian film industry would remain a satellite of Hollywood despite its desire to create a niche in the global cinema landscape.”4 Uncivilised demonstrates a willingness to shape the Australian experience, that of encounters between First Nations people and Anglo colonisers, into somewhat of a reflection of established American frontier narratives. This is achieved by positioning encounters between First Nations groups and Anglo colonisers as a conflict of irreconcilable differences. It is the way the differences are presented and addressed that typically distinguishes the Australian Western from the American Western. Chauvel strives to present the Anglo-Australian experience in a form that is recognisable enough to American audiences and Australian audiences alike. Charles Chauvel had, before Uncivilised, written and directed films that worked to shape an Australian identity forged by colonisation. Films such as In the Wake of the Bounty (1933) and Heritage (1935) dramatised historical moments and, with In the Wake of the Bounty, promoted historical figures that played important roles in Australia’s colonising narrative, such as William Bligh. Stuart Cunningham, while positioning Uncivilised as part of “Chauvel’s visionary essays attempting to grasp the slippery fish of national, colonial and empire identity”,5 also sees that it was equally a film that demonstrated “a concerted attempt by Chauvel and his production company, Expeditionary Films, to break into the American market”.6 This dual focus was something Chauvel continued after Uncivilised with Forty Thousand Horsemen and Rats of Tobruk, which both focussed on Australia’s participation in World War I and World War II, respectively. Chauvel’s most well-known film, Jedda, like Uncivilised, focussed on the friction between colonisers and First Nations people and the impossibility of cultural equality. Unlike the American frontier that seemingly must be won through violent confrontation, such in John Ford’s loosely connected cavalry trilogy that began with Fort Apache, Chauvel’s narratives promote a seemingly unbridgeable divide between two distinct groups of people that come from two distinct and incompatible races: the so-framed superior white race and the inferior non-white race or Other which needs, for its own good, and the good of the civilising project, to be curtailed.

178

S. PEARCE

Uncivilised Uncivilised begins with an intertitle superimposed over a shot of three First Nations men, two with backs to the camera, one in profile, sitting around a fire. The intertitle states: “The North-West corner of Australia— a land of terrible illusions to navigators in the seventeenth century, is still embalmed in mystery.”7 This intertitle, specifically the phrase “terrible illusions” and the word “embalmed,” provide a thematic framing of the film. The “terrible illusions,” the ideas and dreams, of “navigators,” or colonisers, seemingly refers to their inability to conquer the land in Australia. Yet, the word “embalmed” while speaking to the preservation of the unconquered frontier, also indicates death, or the temporary preservation of the dead for public viewing as part of a burial rite. As such the film presents itself as a type of public viewing of First Nations people and culture while conveying them as stagnant, a living dead. The viewer in this transaction is aligned with the white protagonists, firstly, journalist Beatrice Lynn (Margot Rhys) who is tasked with travelling into the Australian wilderness to find a mysterious white man, known as the White Chief, Mara (Dennis Hoey), who governs a First Nations tribe, and secondly with Mara himself. Cunningham states that “Aboriginal culture is represented in a complex mesh of discourses including the inexorably disappearing race.”8 The “disappearing,” or dying race, notion speaks, in part, to the inevitability of First Nations people “naturally” dying out, but it also refers to the uncivilised becoming the civilised or Anglophied. Peter Hoffenberg sees this downplaying of conflict between First Nations people and colonisers as distinctly Australian: “conflict with Australian Aboriginals did not qualify…unlike those with the indigenes in New Zealand or South Africa, much less the USA.” In Australia, the “frontier offered combat with the self, nature and the landscape, more so than in the ‘open’ with the Aboriginal in the popular memory and consciousness of such Australians.”9 As such, colonisation and civilising are inexorably linked, but also conflated to mean the acquisition of land and the eradication of First Nations culture. Uncivilised consolidates this position for its audience and in doing so it dismisses any notion that acts of colonisation were forms of violence or terror; unless it was for the coloniser in their struggle to consolidate civilisation. Graeme Turner also sees that, in terms of normalising or naturalising the destruction of First Nations people and their culture, while

TOWARDS ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICS ON THE FILMIC …

179

also endorsing a racial hierarchy that places whiteness in the hegemonic position, defining “the Aboriginal as a dying species rather than a subordinated culture is to explain their condition as the result of the inevitable operation of natural forces rather than as the product of a specific history”10 (140). That natural force being the racially superior whiteness that consumes non-whiteness. To make such actions palatable to the white viewer in the twentieth century there is also a focus on the supposed threat, or the potential threat, that First Nations people present to the process of colonisation. The threat from First Nations people is made clear in the second intertitle of Uncivilised that contextualises the relationship between First Nations people and the colonisers: “Australian Mounted Police penetrate to the heart of this country and learn the movements of the tribes— of those natives wanted for spearing cattle—stealing women—or for murder.”11 This better specified in the following scene when Beatrice’s publisher, John Hemmingway (Victor Fitzherbert) asks her to search for Mara as part of the news article. He articulates the position of First Nations people: “the native is still the stone age savage, practicing his black magic and hunting as he did in the dawn of time.” Beatrice then makes mention of Moopil, “the black killer.”12 Jeanette Hoorn sees such characterisation as typical of the time period, arguing that First Nations people are rarely nuanced or complex characters in the early decades of Australian film, but function as props and plot devices that “provide an exotic backdrop for the playing out of romantic adventures by members of the white settler society”13 (44). Early Australian films present a construction of First Nations people that reinforces the notion of primitivity and one that highlights the irreconcilable differences between whiteness and non-whiteness. Suneeti Rekhari argues that a “consistent reinforcement of Aboriginal racial stereotyping is… marked cinematically through the existence of binary oppositions, or dualisms, within the filmic narrative.”14 These dualisms are evident in the naming of the film Uncivilised. This paternalism is clear in Uncivilised in the role of the Mara and his position as caretaker/ chief of the tribe that kidnapped him when he was a child. His leadership is what maintains order and what secures the tribe’s safety, just as a white rule outside the film governs First Nations people. The film endorses the idea that First Nations people need white guidance to save them from their non-Christian superstitions. Allison Holland writes that the interwar years in Australia were marked by an “increasingly authoritarian” government approach to First Nations people and that,

180

S. PEARCE

“protection bureaucracies loomed like dictators in Aboriginal lives.”15 This is highlighted, as Julie Cassidy, sees, “at the removal and detention of, in particular, part-Aboriginal children” something that became “a national policy at the first Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities in 1937,”16 coming barely a year after the release of Uncivilised. It confirmed the broader belief in the incompatible differences between whiteness and non-whiteness, as well as masking cultural destruction with paternalism.

The Assimilationist Myth The gradual move towards more complex race relations in films regarding frontier conflict only provides minimal disruption to established cinematic modes of address. Modes of address, the formal and thematic structure of a film, as Elizabeth Ellsworth argues, “offer seductive encouragements and rewards for assuming those positions within gender, social status, race, nationality, attitude, taste, style, to which a film is addressed.”17 With regard to films about frontier conflict, specifically Uncivlised and Bitter Springs , the addressed audience is a white audience: a white audience that is the long-time beneficiary of colonising practices, past and present, and an audience that can identify with white protagonists who will allay doubts as to the necessity and objectives of colonisation. The persistence of a reconstructed past, one presented as a white narrative in which defined Others have subsidiary roles, as sympathetic characters, antagonists, or otherwise, is the persistence of a racial hierarchy. Films that employ a sympathetic position on the suffering experienced by First Nations people during colonisation, something Fort Apache and Bitter Springs both present, are not akin to an acknowledgement of systemic marginalisation, nor is it redress, it is only an overt attempt to stabilise whiteness. In terms of Westerns, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster claims that “the master narrative of Westerns is that all Indians must be destroyed, even the best of them—the noble savages.”18 It is the forms this destruction takes that is the notable change in the thematic mode of address. Assimilation, informed by paternalism, is a more palatable form of destruction than conquest achieved through sustained violence, be it as direct conflict or through governmental policy. Yet, all forms seek to consume First Nations culture and identity. For Brian Dippie, the “distinction between cultural absorption and racial absorption was

TOWARDS ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICS ON THE FILMIC …

181

always a fine one, and that between racial absorption and racial extinction even finer.”19 Thus, this assimilationist narrative in Fort Apache and Bitter Springs , and other such films—the American Westerns, Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves 1950), Apache (Robert Aldrich 1954), or further Australian incarnations, Jedda (1955), and Dust in the Sun (Lee Robinson 1958)—seeks to placate disruptions and challenges to national myths and the dominant national identity, by presenting colonisation not as a conquest, but as amalgamation. As colonisers spread out and consolidated their hold on vast tracts of the Australian landscape, their relationship with First Nations people changed. Nicolas Peterson and Will Sanders make the point that “in the early days of colonial settlement, official correspondence frequently drew a distinction between British subjects and ‘Natives’, treating the two groups differently and separately”20 (4). Yet, this distinction was not one of recognition of First Nations sovereignty, but the emergence of Othering. Indeed, as Mark McMillan and Sophie Rigney make clear, the “incorrect application of terra nullius permitted the acquisition of Indigenous lands for the British and ensured that the Australian legal system was established upon incorrect assumptions about Australia’s Indigenous peoples”21 (764). This pushed First Nations people into a political and social indeterminate state, so that “Aboriginal people were increasingly set apart, legally and physically, as a distinct class of colonial subjects.”22 Thus, as Elizabeth Burrows notes, “From 1869 to 1911, state Protection Acts were passed and Protection Boards appointed that legalized state control of Aboriginal people, reserves and communities”23 (474). This aggressive paternalism was, as Smithers writes, because “for the majority of settlers, convicts, and pastoralists the Australian Aborigines represented a distinct and separate species who stood in the way of British colonial expansion”24 (88). By denying First Nations people as sovereigns, then as subjects or citizens, it allowed for the systematic and deliberate abuse and dismantling of tribal and family groups because First Nations people were not recognised as having the same rights and entitlements as whites. The genocidal intentions are overt and clear. Andrew Pike, writing in 1977, makes the point that “Aboriginals are in fact absent from the majority of Australian feature films… and the absence reflects a lack of awareness and comprehension of Aboriginal existence.”25 This point is emphasised by Pike’s finding that “feature films focussing directly on Aboriginal characters began to emerge after World War Two, but none existed before the 1940s.”26 Bitter Springs as an assimilationist

182

S. PEARCE

film presents a sympathetic approach to frontier conflict, but not one in which the coloniser engages with individual First Nations characters. And it provides a solution between First Nations people and Anglo colonisers through the removal or subjugation of First Nations people to the coloniser’s demands. This solution reflects the assimilationist ideas emerging in Australia in the post-World War II era, in which First Nations people were forcibly integrated into the colonising endeavour and were denied sovereignty and cultural expression. Bitter Springs Bitter Springs presents frontier conflict coming because of a misunderstanding driven by the hard-headed approach of white pastoralist Wally King (Chips Rafferty) regarding access to much-needed water for his sheep. Wally’s conflict-driven approach, that includes a demand that the Karragani people relinquish their water supply to him and leave their traditional lands, as he proclaims himself King in name and title, does not come with any significant consequences. Indeed, King is ultimately rewarded. The film clearly perpetuates the notion of white supremacy but advocates a diplomatic approach to its implementation. The notion of assimilation, therefore, becomes a rebranding of the colonising project. The film opens with a single shot that takes in the background and foreground. In the background is a mountain range and, in the foreground, men are on horseback herding sheep. The space between is barren and parched. The scene mimics that of a Western cattle drive, seen in films such as Red River (Howard Hawks 1948), and a narrator sets the scene for the film: “1900. Sheep country’s getting pretty scarce around the Australian coast, families are growing, land that was big enough for dad is too small for his sons and their families… folks like Wally King and his brood decide to pack up traps and move, six hundred miles.”27 There is a clear Australian accent rather than something faux British. The scene and narration also promote a sense of adventure that is quickly subdued when Wally and family, arriving in a small town, attempt to hire workers to assist in their journey. Those gathered around Wally are cautioned by an anonymous voice, “Abos. Wild blacks. Hundreds of ‘em.”28 Despite this warning there are no guns to be seen. No guns on hips. No rifles. This distinguishes the film, at this point, from its American counterparts. Yet, there also seems to be widespread public knowledge that the

TOWARDS ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICS ON THE FILMIC …

183

homogenised “blacks” present a very real threat to anyone that journeys too far away from the protection of the civilised towns. The film, however, produced by British studio Ealing is, for Adrian Danks, an important work of Australian cinema due to its willingness to “confront and reflect upon race relations and, less overtly, the policies of assimilation then taking hold in government.”29 However, First Nations characters have minimal development in the film and their position is clarified for Wally by the arrival of Trooper Ransom (Michael Pate). In Ransom and King there are similarities to Capt. Kirby York (John Wayne) and Lt. Col. Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) from Fort Apache. Wally is a variation on Thursday, while Ransom stands in for York. Ransom, despite being the state-sanctioned authority in the area and with the demonstrated ability to speak a First Nations language, seems content to let King do things his own way. Unlike other Anglo characters, Ransom does not refer to First Nations people as “blacks” but by name: Karragani. This demonstrates an understanding, to some degree, of the diversity present in First Nations groups, their individual needs and how these intersect with the desires and wants of the colonists. Trooper Ransom’s knowledge and perspective highlight the discriminatory practices of white colonisers like Wally, but also demonstrates that the State, despite having the power to act, is unlikely to get too heavily involved. Ransom tells Wally the place he and his family are going is Karragani land, and that it “has been their tribal home for a thousand years. Two perhaps,” and that from their perspective, “one day, a bloke walks into the government office in Adelaide 800 miles away, bangs down eighty quid, they hand him a bit of stamped paper and Karragani haven’t got a tribal home anymore.”30 For Andrew Pike “Bitter Springs was constructed specifically to explore the problems of Aboriginal land rights and the dispossession of Aboriginals by white settlers.”31 The exploration is limited to Trooper Ransom’s advice to Wally: “when whites takeover Abo land there is three ways of dealing with the natives: One, you can shove ‘em off. Two, you can ease ‘em off. Three, you can find some way of taking ‘em in with you.”32 These solutions, in basic form, mark the stages of colonisation since Anglo settlement. Yet, none of these solutions consider First Nations agency, they reflect, as James Jupp argues, a widespread “expectation that Aborigines would either die out or that colour would be ‘bred out.’”33 These are the specifics of the assimilationist agenda in the film. The Karragani’s refusal to die out means that the bred-out approach needs nuance, and that nuance comes in the form of annihilation.

184

S. PEARCE

Hired-hand Mac (Gordon Jackson) and hired-hand Blackjack (Henry Murdoch), a character presented as sharing a language with the Karragani, but not specifically identified as Karragani, both question Wally’s initial approach towards the Karragani once the group reaches Bitter Springs. At the first meeting, the Karragani, via Blackjack, make it clear the land is theirs, but that Wally and his troop can stay awhile. Yet, as Wally’s group establishes a permanent base, Blackjack tries to caution Wally. “Boss, I’ve been talking with blackfella. They give you trouble… They say you stay too long. They say, you go.”34 Despite Blackjack’s loyalty to Wally, Wally is rude and dismissive of him. “Mind your own business, Blackjack. Tell ‘em to mind theirs too… this is my land, my family’s land. We do as we like on it.”35 Wally’s aggressive white supremacism consumes Karragani land, lives and presumably culture. Wally might be jarring but the values he expresses are not per se anti-assimilationist. Amy Fung contends that “social and racial hierarchy of white settler nations ensured whose histories and whose narratives continued to circulate”36 (127). Assimilation in this sense has no desire or need to converse with First Nations people, rather it assumes racial and cultural dominance and then offers First Nations people limited space within this new paradigm that they can either except or face more violent action. Mac is sympathetic to the Karragani. Wally’s son, John (Charles Tingwell), and Mac shoot a kangaroo that some Karragani men were stalking, the Karragani then kill a sheep belonging to Wally. On hearing this news, Wally has everyone in his group gather their guns. His outrage is that he feels the Karragani have not respected his space, his racial superiority. He sees the land and everything on it as exclusively his. Wally’s actions and statements elevate and proclaim the law-and-order of the colonisers as trumping any claim the Karragani have. Indeed, he seems frustrated that the Karragani don’t immediately accept him and his position as superior to their own wants, needs and beliefs. He describes them as “thieving swine!”37 In a tense encounter, John shoots and kills a Karragani man that seemed ready to attack Wally. Mac describes the shooting as “murder.”38 Mac’s use of the word “murder” is important as it identifies John as having committed a crime under the coloniser’s law. Mac, by doing this, applies the law equally to the colonisers and to the Karragani, something Wally and John are unwilling to do. Trooper Ransom, arriving just in time to stop the dispute, sides partly with the Karragani. Wally argues the killing was justified because, “those blacks were stealing our sheep,” but Ransom counters, “You don’t shoot a man for

TOWARDS ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICS ON THE FILMIC …

185

that Mr. King. You think I’m going to let this ride? Think again.”39 Ransom defines his role as protecting both groups, although Wally sees this as unreasonable, believing his racial superiority means that the laws must be applied differently and that his actions, or John’s actions, always have authority over the Karragani. Wally’s perspective again reflects, as Mike Cole states, an “adherence to terra nullius [that] allowed the white invaders to rationalize their behaviours as ‘settlement’ and allowed the governments (colonial and later federal) to ignore the people who were not supposed to exist in the first place.”40 Ransom states that John will face consequences for his actions, which suggests that the law does not discriminate to the degree that Wally does and that there will be some form of protection for the Karragani. Mac, as a Scottish migrant, also challenges Wally. He asks Wally: “Well, whaddya expect of them? You’ve driven food from their country, you’ve murdered one of them. You just go marching in here saying you’re the boss and expect them to clear off their own land.”41 In the context of the film, its setting, and its time of production, it demonstrates the emergence of a far more considered understanding of the cause of violence and disharmony, one that attributes blame more on the white coloniser. Mac’s own heritage could be in play here with Scotland having suffered under oppressive English rule. Wally’s response— “Just because a few blacks have been scratching around here for a thousand years doesn’t mean they can keep it. Face it, Mac, the white man’s on the way in and no preaching Scot’s going to stop it,”42 —is one that reveals the base on which so-called assimilation of the time is premised. Molloy contends that “King’s callous remarks provide a generally accurate description of the process of white appropriation of black land in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”43 It is also a restructuring of earlier attempts at elimination. Ultimately, Mac stays with Wally, and like Ransom is a passive bystander. Vocal opposition or tacit approval does not provide critique that will encourage change. However, for the film’s viewers it provides relatable characters that have, in comparison to Wally and John, a veritable plausible deniability. The killing of the Karragani man leads to the Karragani kidnapping Wally’s young son Charlie and the burning of the newly built King house. When hired-hand Tommy (Tommy Trinder) finds Charlie in the company of the Karragani, he attempts to rescue Charlie but is also captured. Interestingly, he has a gun but does not use it. In the following scenes, the Karragani and the Waragani, a neighbouring group, discuss how to drive

186

S. PEARCE

Wally and his family away. These conversations are in a First Nations language so that Charlie, Tommy, and the film’s viewers, have, presumably, no understanding of what is being said. It is one of the spaces in the film where there are extended scenes of First Nations cultural practices and a sense that First Nations groups are distinct and have their own boundaries. Yet, it also marks the distinction between the coloniser and the colonised. The Karragani and the Waragani, successfully keep Wally and his family from accessing the water in Bitter Springs through a strategic corralling, but there is also a sense of Karragani incompetence. When Wally approaches the waterhole there is an attempt to spear him, but despite his remaining stationery, all the spears miss him. The Karragani threat is not what it might be. Later, John attempts to sneak down to the waterhole alone in the early morning as his family is thirsty. He fills a bucket but is seen at the last moment. Again, several spears are thrown, again they all miss. Then John is speared in the back by a man hiding in a tree. John drops the bucket but manages to shoot and kill the man who speared him. John’s spearing can be seen as retribution for his earlier killing of the Karragani man. His actions, however, elevated and exacerbated tensions. His killing of the Karragani man was, as Mac pointed out, “murder.” His injury here is not life ending and he has again killed. The relative absence of violence in the film, for Molloy, is one that washes over historical reality, one in which “the Aboriginal groups who chose to fight were usually annihilated”44 (194). For the film’s audience, the film argues that frontier violence was uncommon and came because of poorly implemented assimilationist practices and not because of ingrained and institutionalised racism. Despite the protests against Wally, however, that included Blackjack temporarily leaving Wally and joining the Karragani, at the film’s crisis points, both Blackjack and Mac inevitably return their allegiance to Wally. Towards the end of the film Wally and his family are trapped inside the burnt out remains of their house, without water and seemingly on the verge of collapse. Suddenly, Karragani and Waragani voices ringing out from the bush as they appear to charge the position Wally and his family hold, but it is soon revealed they are fleeing Trooper Ransom, who has, like the cavalry, saved the day. Interestingly, no shots are fired, and no one is killed. Tommy and Charlie, having fled captivity with the help of Blackjack, return, having procured the service of Ransom. Blackjack, returning his

TOWARDS ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICS ON THE FILMIC …

187

allegiance to Wally, demonstrates an understanding of white superiority. Wally commends him, “Well done, Blackjack.”45 Ransom again provides a passive critique, “Well you’ve got everything your own way, Mr. King. You wanted the blacks off your land, and you’ve forced the government to do the job for you.”46 Wally’s overt sense of entitlement has permanently damaged the Karragani. Indeed, that Karragani and Waragani men are shackled and being taken away in a wagon demonstrates that the law is applied unevenly. John, despite the Trooper’s earlier threat that his killing of a Karragani man will not stand, and despite being the only character in the film to have killed, remains with the family recovering from his wound. Consequences, in terms of state sanction, do not materialise, suggesting that Ransom for all his insight and seemingly balanced perspective, in comparison to Wally, agrees with Wally’s agenda. While those Karragani and Waragani that resisted Wally’s invasion and his son’s use of lethal force, are now criminals, chained and incarcerated. The destruction of the Karragani is reconciled, however, by Wally’s willingness to have them integrate into the civilising practice. He asks Ransom, “If they’d only help me grow wool. Get new water dug. Could I ever make them understand?” Ransom’s response is one that again defines the assimilationist agenda: “Maybe. The point is, you understand. That’s the big thing. It’s a start.”47 Here, Ransom refers to Wally’s obligation, seemingly because of his whiteness, to give the Karragani a role in the new world wrought by colonisation, one that has no space or consideration for divergent cultural practices. There is no compromise for Wally, but there is also no accountability in the film and thus no critique. Rekhari sees that “assimilation portrayed Aboriginality as a thing of the past, based not only on race but also on a notion of race and shared values,”48 that is, the values shared by colonisers like Wally, or his descendants, that were promoted as conducive to the development of the land and the frontier space. These were then projected favourably against those seen as belonging to First Nations people. This cuts to a scene on a large sheep station. It is a time jump, and, in the foreground, Wally and a First Nations man both shear sheep. The First Nations man is wearing Western pants, but is shirtless, and thus presented as partially “civilised.” In the background other First Nations men herd sheep. Wally and the First Nations man he is shearing with, stop to smile at each other as the scene fades out. Pike notes “the film ends by showing the Aboriginals working happily on King’s station, and it is very clear who is the master.” Yet, Pike also believes that “the film

188

S. PEARCE

is for the most part imbued with genuine concern for the plight of the Aboriginals, and the white settlers are far from sympathetic characters.”49 The concern, however, is for how the Karragani, and other First Nations groups, can be assimilated. More, the concern is also an expression of frustration at the reluctance of the Karragani to immediately agree they are, in comparison to colonisers like Wally King, racially and culturally inferior. Likewise, for Molloy, “the ending of Bitter Springs showing amicable black-white relations in productive cooperation both idealises the process whereby Aboriginal land has been ““civilised,” and legitimises the dominant position of whites and their appropriation off Aboriginal lands.”50 More than this, perhaps, the film narrativizes frontier conflict, in the past, as palatable, at least for the mid-twentieth-century audience. By advocating for racial harmony through cultural homogenisation and commercial development, the film thoroughly endorses Wally’s actions. The Karragani are never differentiated, only Blackjack, a racially motived naming, is, apart from the white characters, capable of having an individual identity, and even then, it is slight. The Karragani, operating as a single entity, are not, for the viewer, to be given any more than passing consideration. Indeed, the names of those killed are not given. The Karragani language is for Wally and the film’s viewers indecipherable, as are cultural practices, but only because there is no want, no need, to decipher. Bitter Springs fills in the space and ensures that the voice given to First Nations people is one which ultimately confirms whiteness as superior and its history of settlement as, at times, troubled, but not as ever unreasonable or unwarranted.

Conclusion Uncivilised and Bitter Springs reveal, like their American counterparts, such as Fort Apache, the potency of nationalist myths, particularly those pertaining to colonisation. Both films, as contextual artefacts, reflect the political and social discourses present at the time of production pertaining to the processes and consequences of historical colonisation, specifically the notion of assimilation. For Sarah Maddison and Jane Mills “the invasion and colonisation of terra australis saw Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples massacred, dispossessed of land and contained through legislation” which was followed by “assimilationist policies intent on destroying their languages and social structures.”51 Both films also state the need for the perpetuation of exclusive nationalist mythologies,

TOWARDS ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICS ON THE FILMIC …

189

mythologies that avoid thorough introspection and accountability. Such introspection, it seems, would void the political principles of democracy and egalitarianism so foundational to modern Australia. These narratives and characters do not seek to address the historical consequences of colonisation for First Nations people. Rather, they seek to address white anxieties. Specifically, those anxieties emerging at the time of production and release of such films, those pertaining to the validity of national myths and the process of settlement, a process by which many viewers have inherited privilege, wealth and opportunity, often beyond that of non-whites.

Notes 1. Miller, Cynthia J. and Van Riper, A. Bowdoin. “Introduction” in International Westerns: Re-locating the Frontier. Edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A Bowdoin Van Riper. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2014, xix. 2. Aleis, Angela. “Who Was the Real James Young Deer? The Mysterious Identity of the Pathè Producer Finally Comes to Light.” Bright Lights Film Journal, vol. 80 no. 1 (2013). https://brightlightsfilm.com/whowas-the-real-james-young-deer-the-mysterious-identity-of-the-pathe-pro ducer-finally-comes-to-light/#.YoLpU6hBw2w 3. Ibid. 4. Gaunson, Stephen. “Australian (inter)national Cinema: The Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia, 1926– 1928, Australasian Films ltd. and the American Monopoly.” Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 6, no. 3 (2012): 298. 5. Cunningham, Stuart. Featuring Australia: The Cinema of Charles Chauvel. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991, 27. 6. Ibid, 110. 7. Uncivilised. 1936. Directed by Charles Chauvel. Kew, Victoria: Umbrella Entertainment, 2015. DVD. 8. Cunningham, Featuring Australia, 112. 9. Hoffenberg, Peter H. “Memory and the Australian War Experience, 1915–18.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 36, no. 1 (2001): 128. 10. Turner, Graeme, “Breaking the Frame: The Representation of Aborigines in Australian Film.” Kunapipi, vol. 10, no. 1 (1988): 140. 11. Chauvel, Uncivilised. 12. Ibid. 13. Hoorn, Jeanette. ““Strong Women Became Weak Under Its Influence”: The Uses of Pituri in Charles Chauvel’s film, Uncivilised (1936).” International Journal of Mental Health & Addiction, vol. 2, no. 2 (2005): 44.

190

S. PEARCE

14. Rekhari, Suneeti. “The “Other” in Film: Exclusions of Aboriginal Identity from Australian Cinema.” Visual Anthropology, vol. 21 (2018): 129. 15. Holland, Alison. “‘Does the British flag mean nothing to us?’ British Democratic Traditions and Aboriginal Rights Claims in Interwar Australia.” Australian Historical Studies, vol. 50 (2019): 325. 16. Cassidy: Julie. “The Best Interests of the Child? The Stolen Generations in Canada and Australia.” Griffith Law Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (2006): 116. 17. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. “Mode of address: It’s a Film Thing,” in Film, Politics and Education: Cinematic Pedagogy Across the Disciplines. Edited by K.S. Sealey. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008, 80. 18. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/ constructions in the Cinema. New York: State University of New York Press, 2003, 138. 19. Dippie, Brian. The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 269. 20. Peterson, Nicolas and Sanders, Will. “Introduction” in Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities (Reshaping Australian Institutions). Edited by Nicolas Peterson and Will Sanders. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 4. 21. McMillan, Mark and Rigney, Sophie. “Race, Reconciliation, and Justice in Australia: From Denial to Acknowledgment.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 41, no. 4 (2018): 764. 22. Peterson and Sanders, “Introduction,” 6. 23. Burrows, Elizabeth. “Interrogating and Interpreting the Mediation of an Emerging Australian Aboriginal Social Movement Between 1923 and 1940.” Social Movement Studies, vol. 15, no. 5 (2016): 474. 24. Smithers, Gregory D. Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780–1940. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 25. Pike, Andrew. “Aboriginals in Australian Feature Films.” Meanjin, vol. 36, no. 4 (1977): 592. 26. Ibid, 595. 27. Bitter Springs. 1950. Directed by Ralph Smart. Kew, Victoria: Umbrella Entertainment, 2014. DVD. 28. Ibid. 29. Danks, Adrian. “South of Ealing: Recasting a British Studio’s Antipodean Escapade.” Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 10, no. 2 (2016): 223. 30. Bitter Springs . 31. Pike, “Aboriginals in Australian Feature Films,” 597. 32. Bitter Springs. 33. Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera, 9. 34. Bitter Springs. 35. Ibid.

TOWARDS ASSIMILATIONIST POLITICS ON THE FILMIC …

191

36. Fung, Amy. “Is Settler Colonialism Just Another Study of Whiteness?” Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol. 53, no. 2 (2021): 127. 37. Bitter Springs . 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Cole, Mike. Racism: A Critical Analysis. London: Pluto Press, 2016, 138. 41. Bitter Springs. 42. Ibid. 43. Molloy, Bruce. Before The Interval: Australian Mythology and Feature Films, 1930–1960. Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1990, 193. 44. Molloy, Before The Interval, 194. 45. Bitter Springs. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Rekhari, “The ‘‘Other’’ in Film,” 128. 49. Pike, “Aboriginals in Australian Feature Films,” 597. 50. Molloy, Before The Interval, 194. 51. Maddison, Sarah and Mills, Jane. “Settler Colonialism and Genocide in Australia,” in The History of Genocide in Cinema: Atrocities on Screen. Edited by Jonathan Friedman and William Hewitt. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017, 16.

Ideological Uses of the Western in Film Depictions of Post-war Polish Borderlands Marek Paryz

In the history of Polish film, the 1960s mark the time of a very strict control of film production by state institutions. After a period of social and political unrest, caused by the emergent liberal tendencies in the wake of Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, the Polish United Workers’ Party—or the communist party as it was commonly called—assumed a very strict course, aimed not only at quenching all manifestations of political dissidence, but also at controlling in the greatest possible degree every sphere of social life and cultural activity.2 The institutions that controlled the Polish film industry were supposed to promote the agenda of the ruling party. In the words of the film historian Tadeusz Lubelski, “[i]n the 1960s Polish filmmakers were subjected to all sorts of limiting ideological pressures.”3 The communist party even issued a statement defining the priorities of Polish cinematography, in which it emphasized the ideological, moral, and didactic needs and purposes of the nation “in its progress toward socialism” that films should serve.4 A number of Polish films produced in the 1960s were set either during the Second World

M. Paryz (B) Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_12

193

194

M. PARYZ

War or soon after it, and they invariably depicted the Polish war experience in terms of heroism, patriotism, and martyrology, also stressing the historical justice of the war’s aftermath.5 This essay discusses three films representing this tendency, but singular in its context because of their employment of the Western genre: Prawo i pi˛e´sc´ (The Law and the Fist , dir. Edward Skórzewski and Jerzy Hoffman, 1964), Wilcze echa (Wolves’ ´ 1968), and Południk zero (Meridian Echoes , dir. Aleksander Scibor-Rylski, Zero, dir. Waldemar Podgórski, 1970). They use the conventions of the Western selectively—adapting its plot variants, borrowing its archetypes, or evoking its visual cues—to symbolically enhance the legitimacy of the system of power established in Poland after the war. Although The Law and the Fist , Wolves’ Echoes , and Meridian Zero have different settings—Lower Silesia in the southwest, the Bieszczady mountains in the southeast, and Masuria in the northeast, respectively—all these settings can be described as post-war Polish borderlands. As a result of the agreement between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt in Yalta in 1945, new borders of Poland were delineated. Poland acquired a stretch of territory along the Oder river in the West and Warmia and Masuria, the southern part of former East Prussia, in the northeast. These territories were described as ethnically Polish, and thus they came to be known as the Regained Territories. However, their ethnic status was not so obvious; they were originally settled by the tribes that formed the basis for a future Polish state, but as a consequence of consecutive waves of migration from the West—the process that began in the middle ages—Germanspeaking populations dominated these regions for centuries.6 After the Second World War, the communist authorities invested a lot of effort in reasserting the Polishness of the Regained Territories and instilling such a conviction in the consciousness of the general public. The acquisition of new lands by Poland, albeit presented as a sign of historical justice, was in reality a form of compensation for the loss of a huge territory in the East to the Soviet Union (within the present borders of Belarus and Ukraine). During the war and for several years after its end, the Bieszczady mountains were the arena for the fights between Ukrainian nationalist partisan forces and the Soviet and the Polish armies. The establishment of new Polish borders entailed mass migrations: the Germans were removed from the Regained Territories, and the Poles who lived in the areas incorporated into the Soviet Union chose to or were forced to resettle, and they often headed for the Regained Territories.

IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE WESTERN IN FILM …

195

The communist authorities aimed to unite the Poles around the idea of an ethnically homogeneous nation, and the efforts undertaken for this purpose were part and parcel of a larger strategy of legitimating the postwar political system. The authorities created, as Marcin Zaremba describes it, “a symbolic infrastructure of power,” which was to enable “the control over people” through “the control over symbols.”7 The “Polish Westerns” discussed in this essay can be seen as an emanation of cultural practices engineered by the communists and conceived of as ways of strengthening the bond “between the authorities and the nation with its heroic past.”8 The Law and the Fist , Wolves’ Echoes , and Meridian Zero jointly tell the story of a new beginning after a time of turmoil. They portray protagonists confronted with empty spaces, and it is their heroic actions that transform these spaces into areas fit for settlement. In turn, settlement is equated with the establishment of a new order, the process symbolically represented as an advent of the rule of law. The three films under discussion accept the ideological dogma rather than reassess historical or political ambivalences. They explore the sensational or adventurous dimensions of the Western so as to veil complex issues of the Polish past and present; they tell stories that incite imagination and disregard difficult questions. The use of the Western formula in these films contributes to a specific reduction of historical contexts, which are conveyed through what then seemed to be a set of truisms about a regenerated nation with a clearly defined direction of progress.

A Reluctant Hero: The Law and the Fist The Law and the Fist features Andrzej Kenig (Gustaw Holoubek), a former member of the Polish resistance movement and a survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, who travels to Lower Silesia with the hope of finding a peaceful place to settle down. He joins a group of men who have been entrusted with the task of securing the public property in a deserted former German town and preparing the place for the arrival of Polish repatriates. The leader of the group is Mielecki, called the “Doctor” (Jerzy Przybylski), and apart from Kening he has four other men under his command: Czesiek (Zdzisław Maklakiewicz), Wijas (Ryszard Pietruski), Smółka (Wiesław Gołas), and Rudłowski (Zbigniew Dobrzynski). ´ Soon after their arrival at the town, the six men receive a surprising visit: four women emerge from a side street and explain to Mielecki that they want to search the empty houses

196

M. PARYZ

for clothes. He reluctantly allows them to stay. The following day the men begin their inspection of the town, and Kenig and Smółka discover a collection of old books and paintings, abandoned by the withdrawing German soldiers. Smółka, a simple-minded man, is curious to know how much such things are worth, and this is how Kenig finds out that Mielecki wants to steal everything that is valuable and the other men are in conspiracy with him. Smółka’s strange behavior alerts Mielecki, who begins to suspect that Kenig knows about his plan and may want to intervene. He therefore speaks openly with Kenig and gives him a day to decide whether or not he joins the gang and gets a generous share of the profit. Kenig tells him he is in, but just as they are departing he runs the truck he is driving into a building to block the trucks behind him. He jumps out and runs, and Mielecki and his men go after him. A spectacular chase in the streets and on the roofs culminates in a wine cellar where Kenig confronts Mielecki. The Law and the Fist has been often discussed by the critics as an exemplary Polish cinematic appropriation of the Western. Piotr Skurowski writes that, “[i]t is a morality tale where the solitary hero conducts a lonesome fight against evil characters, with justice and order prevailing at the end. It is action-packed and contains a lot of violent scenes including fistfights and a final showdown between the hero and the villains.”9 Skurowski further observes that the setting in the film brings to mind the symbolic uses of space that have been defined by American Westerns: “[t]he deserted Graustadt, or Siwowo, is presented as a lawless frontier town, a truly liminal space in transition caught in between its recent German past and the soon-to-prevail new social and political order.”10 Łukasz Plesnar identifies several analogies between The Law and the Fist and High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1952), especially with respect to narrative solutions. He points out, for instance, that the final sequence of the Polish film closely resembles the corresponding part of the famous American Western: the most dramatic events take place on the eerily empty streets, and after the showdown the hero immediately leaves the town.11 The critic also notices similarities between Kenig and the eponymous Shane in George Stevens’ classic Western (1952): just like Shane, he has a mysterious past about which he speaks with reluctance and handles a gun with impressive skills.12 In his discussion of The Law and the Fist , Jerzy Franczak makes a reference to Will Wright’s typology of plot variants in the Western and argues that it is modeled on what Wright terms the classical plot13 wherein the hero, who is “autonomous and unique,”

IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE WESTERN IN FILM …

197

“alone and outside,” settles a conflict between society and the villains over land.14 The Law and the Fist generally subscribes to the dominant post-war narrative of the Polish nation rebuilding itself after the historical cataclysm of war. Franczak observes that the film shows the Polish resettlement of the Regained Territories as an act of historical justice and glosses over possible questions about the legitimacy of the Polish acquisition of the areas that had been inhabited mostly by German-speaking people for centuries.15 The film portrays the representatives of the new state apparatus, especially the militia, in a positive light, although it ascribes only secondary roles to them. The militia would have failed to prevent Mielecki from completing his plan, but their arrival at the town in one of the final scenes attests to the definitive direction of the social and political process triggered after the war. The militia is soon to be followed by the new settlers: the film’s last shot shows people in wagons heading for Graustadt, a possible allusion, no matter how unspectacular, to American pioneers on their way west. However, the ideological implications of The Law and the Fist are a bit more ambivalent than the film’s overall treatment of postwar Polish historiography suggests. This ambivalence has to do with the depiction of the protagonist as a disengaged character, so to speak. His agency manifests itself exclusively through physical actions, and in a sense this provides a foil for his renunciation of political agency, whether as a supporter or an opponent of the new system of power. There is a vagueness about him that makes it difficult to see through him and thus to control him. His disengagement can be seen as an expression of his resignation in the face of the regime that perceives a plurality of attitudes as a threat and aims to shape people’s minds according to a predetermined ideological mold. Kenig does the right thing whenever it is necessary, but it seems that he always pays a price, whether in the form of physical inconvenience, material loss, or psychological discomfort. This is already suggested in the film’s opening sequence, in which he prevents a rape attempt. As his train comes to a stop at a station, he spots a beautiful young woman in an impeccably white blouse, and their eyes meet for a longer while, but the spell of the moment is broken by the cry of another woman. Kenig gets off the train reluctantly to check what is going on, sees three men dragging the crying woman away, and intervenes. When he comes back, the beautiful woman is gone, and so is his train. This initial situation shows him as a misplaced hero, so to speak. He seems to entertain some

198

M. PARYZ

doubts about the legitimacy of the Polish presence in a place like Graustadt, although he never voices them directly. In a scene in which he is with Anna (Zofia Mrozowska), one of the four women, in an apartment they have come to in search of clothes, he asks her if she does not feel “a sort of distaste.” Offended, Anna tells him about how the Germans tortured and killed her husband. While Kenig understands the kind of indomitable craving for justice that Anna articulates, he does not fully share it despite his own suffering during the war. In general, he lacks conviction, and this raises questions about his moral motivation in light of his analogy to the archetypal Western hero. In a later conversation with Anna, who tries to dissuade him from thwarting Mielecki’s plan, he says, “I have to destroy all these wrongs to regain my peace. I have to convince myself that an honest life is possible.” Kenig’s detachment from the realm of social relations makes him appear quite useless in the sense that he is not going to contribute to the welfare of his nation at a time when such participation is most needed. Upon finding out that Kenig was trained as a teacher, the delegate of the state authorities who is organizing the mission to Graustadt offers him a job in school, and Kenig declines right away. He says that he wants to be a forester and live in the woods. Whatever his actual intention, this statement expresses his existential choice, which is a willful withdrawal from most of the forms of social interdependence. His departure from the town right after the showdown brings archetypal Western heroes to mind, however, unlike Shane, he is not going to virtually merge with the landscape—he has an unknown future before him. Attitudes like Kenig’s, rooted in a sense of personal autonomy, introduce an element of contingency into the functioning of the regime. He even doubts the values for which he was ready to make the highest sacrifice as what he helped to protect has hardly any significance to him. He did what he should have done, but he does not feel satisfaction; rather, he is disoriented. Ultimately, his questioning of social attachments undermines the meaning of his heroic action. The enactment of the Western-like Manichean conflict in The Law and the Fist is accomplished in such a way as to reflect the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the war. This has specifically to do with the film’s foregrounding of the problem of szaber, which means in Polish the theft of abandoned property. Zaremba writes that szaber was common during the war, but in the months that followed its end it became a massscale phenomenon, especially on the former German territories. Gangs of

IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE WESTERN IN FILM …

199

thieves were often very well-organized, and they easily corrupted soldiers, militiamen, or employees of state offices.16 Franczak observes in reference to The Law and the Fist that szaber encapsulates “the egoism of the stage of transition,” a form of degraded and anti-social individualism, unleashed by a temporary absence of social organization and state control.17 What the film tellingly shows about szaber is how easily people yielded to its temptation, thus emphasizing the corrupting impact of the war and—less directly—the immensity of the effort to be undertaken in order to put the nation on a right path. The men in Mielecki’s gang represent very different walks of life. Smółka, a simple-minded man from the country, wants to own a farm and to restore the only way of life that he links with peace and stability. Rudłowski, who was a student before the war, assumes the pose of an intellectual to conceal his vulnerability and actual cowardice, the weaknesses that make him susceptible to Mielecki’s manipulation. Wijas, a brutal and insensitive man, may have a gangster past. Czesiek’s past remains unknown except for one fact—that he was a prisoner of several concentration camps. Such a portrayal of the villains deprives them of an archetypal guise, and they come to embody a range of wartime experiences which at the time of the film’s release were still disturbingly relatable.

Erasure of History: Wolves ’ Echoes Wolves’ Echoes is set in the Bieszczady mountains in the year 1948. The protagonist, named Słotwina (Bruno O’Ya), who has been discharged from the border patrol for disciplinary reasons, amidst the woods encounters and defeats three robbers who turn out to be militiamen. He takes their horses and heads for the town of Derenica where they are stationed to find out what has happened to his friends in the local militia unit. There is a completely new group of militiamen and their commander, Moron´ (Mieczysław Stoor), speaks rather vaguely about the whereabouts of the men from the previous team. When a man whom Słotwina has met to learn something about this strange situation gets killed, Moron´ arrests Słotwina for murder. The prisoner breaks free and escapes, having taken with him Tekla (Irena Karel), a woman employed on the militia outpost who has helped him, and Aldek (Marek Perepeczko), a man from Moron’s ´ company whom the hero intends to “resocialize.” Tekla takes them to Witold (Zbigniew Dobrzynski)—as ´ it turns out—the only surviving member of the previous group of the militiamen in Derenica,

200

M. PARYZ

who tells Słotwina the details of Moron’s ´ conspiracy against his predecessor. Moron´ and his men have been searching for the valuables that the “bandits” from a local Ukrainian partisan unit took away from the Poles. Słotwina and Witold ambush and arrest the false militiamen. The former man is to deliver the prisoners to the place where they will stand trial, but he grows suspicious about the latter’s insistence that they leave right away. Witold knows where the valuables have been hidden and want to get rid of Słotwina to remove them. His plan falls through after Słotwina’s intervention. The protagonist is appointed the commander of the militia outpost in Derenica, but he soon has to leave it because of his lack of discipline. Richard Maltby observes that the Western’s iconography “provide[s] a shorthand system enabling a knowledgeable viewer to glean a great deal of information about the characters and the situation simply from the way the characters are dressed, the tools they use, and the settings in which the action takes place.”18 In a like vein, Jeanine Basinger, in her discussions of the analogies between war films and Westerns, points out that, “[i]f an audience can be taught what real war looks like from documentation, it can also be taught it can look like a Western movie: they already know what Westerns look like.”19 Wolves’ Echoes relies to a great extent on visual cues borrowed from the Western, more so than on specific plot developments. The film is framed by the images of horsemen in the mountains, used as a background for the opening and the closing credits; of course, they are not Westerners, nevertheless, there is a strong suggestion that they embody a type of frontier heroism. The establishing shot quite unequivocally defines Wolves’ Echoes as a Western: a high-angle long shot of a lone horseman in the middle of a shallow river in a mountainous valley. Słotwina’s attachment to his gun is emphasized on several occasions. For example, the opening sequence, in which his commander informs him that he has been discharged, ends with the camera zooming in on his gun, knife, and wartime photograph. The fenced militia outpost looks like a modest version of the barracks in American cavalry Westerns. Upon first entering Moron’s ´ office, Słotwina notices a single wanted poster on the wall. Last but not least, Wolves’ Echoes abounds in scenes of fistfights, chases, and ambushes. Lee Clark Mitchell writes that, “[f]rom the beginning, Western stars have been celebrated for their physical attractiveness—for clear eyes, strong chins, handsome faces, and virile bodies,”20 and Wolves’ Echoes establishes an analogous image in the figure of its protagonist. Apart

IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE WESTERN IN FILM …

201

from Słotwina’s physical appearance, the film showcases its version of masculinity as a spectacle of strength, agility, endurance, and resourcefulness. The hero performs a series of acrobatics, which may even seem exaggerated in comparison with representative heroic performances in American Westerns. Słotwina’s great physical strength also manifests itself through how he endures pain: after he has been captured by Moron´ and his men, they give him a whipping, and he receives it in silence, just looking ahead angrily. However, it is Słotwina’s flamboyance that draws the viewer’s attention, and it has to do with his boyish manners manifested as insouciance, overconfidence, and unruliness. He is discharged from the border patrol for having crossed the national border illegally, but he does not feel that he did something wrong because he was chasing smugglers. His commander treats him like an incorrigible youth, and the pose that Słotwina then assumes bespeaks exactly this. Having fought in a partisan unit for the entire war, he longs for the excitement of that time. A settled life is not for him, he simply gets bored too quickly. In its handling of some of the conventions of the Western, especially with regard to plot and character, Wolves’ Echoes corresponds with Spaghetti Westerns with comic themes. This is a coincidental, but meaningful, parallel—the Polish film was released exactly at the time when ´ the Spaghetti Western reached its heyday. Aleksander Scibor-Rylski, the director of Wolves’ Echoes, mentioned in an interview that he based the conception of the plot on “classic cowboy films,”21 and it cannot be determined whether he was familiar with contemporaneous Italian productions in the Western genre at all. In any case, Sergio Corbucci’s comic Westerns Johnny Oro (1966) and Django (1966)—the latter film uses its somber beginning and end to frame an extended comic subplot— furnish examples that shed light on the method of the reworking of the Western in Wolves’ Echoes as they abound in plot twists enabling the protagonists to show off their extreme daring as well as good humor. Django in particular includes what appears to be one of the most contrived sequences the Western genre has known. In his attempt to steal gold from his renegade friend Hugo, the leader of a Mexican band, he makes use of his memorable attribute: a coffin with a machine gun inside. He therefore has to move the heavy coffin from his room in the saloon to the barn where the gold is kept, all this happening over the heads of the Mexican guards. Wolves’ Echoes includes a sequence which is no less baffling to the viewer of Westerns than Django’s maneuvers. Słotwina and Witold ambush Moron´ and his men in a shed on a clearing and

202

M. PARYZ

chase them out with smoke, using for this purpose human-sized dummies attached to horses. The horses are dragging bundles of burning firewood and the dry grass around the shed catches fire. The adventure plot in Wolves’ Echoes almost reaches occasionally the verge of absurdity. The foregrounding of the sensation-cum-adventure plot results in the thinning down of social, historical, and political reality that Wolves’ Echoes evokes—the continuing fights between the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Polish army in the Bieszczady region after the war. In September 1944 the recently established Polish government, controlled by the Soviets, and the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic signed an agreement on the basis of which the Poles living in Soviet Ukraine and the Ukrainians living in Poland were to be removed to their respective countries. This large-scale operation was aimed at sanctioning and securing the newly delineated border.22 In consequence, Ukrainian partisan formations, opposing the Soviet regime, intensified their military activities. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army concentrated its efforts on the Bieszczady region as its bridgehead, initially conducting brutal attacks on the Polish civilian population, and later prioritizing actions targeted at the prevention of the removal of the Ukrainians and members of other ethnic minorities from the area. Grzegorz Motyka writes, “They destroyed railways, bridges, and telegraph lines, burnt deserted villages, carried out ambushes, and attacked selected outposts of the Polish army and the border patrol.”23 The Polish forces largely outnumbered the Ukrainian partisans so the quenching of Ukrainian resistance was a matter of time, thus after massive removals in the year 1946 the fights in the Bieszczady became sporadic and ended in 1948.24 For several decades after the war, the Poles in general had very limited knowledge about the conflict on the Polish-Ukrainian border and understood its outcome as yet another heroic Polish achievement. As Sławomir Bobowski observes, “the state authorities strictly controlled the subject of the Polish fights with the UPA.”25 On the average, the Poles were not aware of the complex ethnic structure of the Bieszczady region before the war or of the violence that was inflicted on the autochthonous populations in its aftermath. Such knowledge could undermine the vision of an ethnically homogeneous Polish nation and the perception of the supposedly model Polish-Soviet relations. Wolves’ Echoes treats the historical situation that it refers to as a given. It introduces the historical context in unequivocal moral terms by means of voice-over narration: “The Bieszczady mountains. The southernmost

IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE WESTERN IN FILM …

203

corner of Poland. The war lasted there three years longer than in the rest of Europe.... [T]he nationalists from the UPA burnt villages and towns and slaughtered their inhabitants.... When the fighting finally ended.... it would take many more years to restore law and justice in those parts.” As Franczak rightly observes, the film asserts the Polish rights to the Bieszczady within the Polish borders and identifies Ukrainian fighters as intruders, and this simple division makes irrelevant all the nuances regarding the ethnic diversity of the region.26 The “regaining” of this territory attests to the fulfillment of the only possible course of history: the bloody conflict is remembered, but its solution is definitive, and the region can now follow its desired path toward progress. This is implied by the fact that Wolves’ Echoes features no Ukrainian characters, with the exception of the last surviving member of the band led by a cruel commander named Tryzub. Interestingly, although Tryzub is dead and thus absent from the plot, his name evokes the most disquieting associations as it equates Ukrainian nationalism with an extreme form of banditry. His name means “trident” in English and it directly refers to the Ukrainian national symbol. The valuables collected by Tryzub’s band most likely belonged to Polish peasants—poor, decent, and hardworking people. When Witold opens the box with the treasure, he picks up a gold chain with a cross—this is not so much to convey a religious message as to acknowledge Polish martyrdom. The Western-like scenario of Wolves’ Echoes helps to create a black-and-white image of the postwar eastern Polish borderlands and to perpetuate a convenient simplified moral interpretation of a complex past conflict.

Illusions of Sovereignty: Meridian Zero Meridian Zero begins with the arrival of three delegates of the Polish state authorities at a secluded town of Rosł˛ek in Masuria. The man in charge is Bartkowiak, a demobilized lieutenant of the Polish army, and his companions, Filip (Tadeusz Kwinta) and J˛edrek (Andrzej Kozak), are members of the communist youth organization (ZWM). They are greeted by a bunch of armed Poles, and their leader, Szczygieł (Janusz Kłosinski), ´ from the beginning behaves as if he considered himself Bartkowiak’s right-hand man. Despite his apparent subservience, Szczygiel repeatedly undermines Bartkowiak’s ideas and decisions, especially concerning the treatment of the local people. He says time and again that they are all Germans, and what they deserve is punishment and not empowerment.

204

M. PARYZ

Bartkowiak insists on the establishment of a town council, believing that the Masurians are Poles and they need to learn to exercise their newly regained sovereignty. He calls up a meeting of the townspeople with the intention of appointing the members of a temporary town council, but the men who have shown up view him with distrust. He nevertheless succeeds in singling out the person who will preside over the council, a senior man named Kukulka. Realizing that Szczygieł and his men embody a serious threat, Bartkowiak tells them that he expects them to leave, hoping that he can get rid of them with the help of the Masurians. This leads to a confrontation between Szczygieł’s gang and Bartkowiak and his men. A shooting breaks out, and the bandits are eliminated one by one. J˛edrek gets fatally wounded and dies. The film ends with a double funeral—of J˛edrek and Kukulka, who was shot by the bandits. Meridian Zero’s affinity with the Western genre is no less noticeable than in the case of The Law and the Fist and Wolves’ Echoes . The first shot of the film, against which the opening credits are displayed, introduces Bartkowiak and his two companions as figures traversing a boundless plain, albeit walkers and not horsemen. At first, they can only be seen as small points quivering on the horizon, and the motionless camera registers their movement until they walk past it. Before reaching the town, they walk through wooded swamps and cross a river, an indication of the town’s far-away location. The plot of Meridian Zero is quite similar to that of The Law and the Fist and it revolves around the fight of a lone upright hero with a gang of bandits. Bartkowiak has two companions, but he cannot be sure that they will stand by his side to the end. Whereas Kenig in The Law and the Fist can be seen as having been modeled on Shane, Bartkowiak rather resembles John Wayne’s characters in film such as Rio Bravo (dir. Howard Hawks, 1959) and El Dorado (dir. Howard Hawks, 1966), community leaders who undergo a test of commitment. Although the Masurians of Rosł˛ek look at Bartkowiak with suspicion, his attitude toward them ultimately triggers a change of their mindset. He is a driving force behind the consolidation of the Masurian community of Rosł˛ek and he will stay with these people to witness their development. As Meridian Zero addresses the problem of ethnic diversity in a region newly incorporated into the Polish territory, it conveys a much more direct ideological message in comparison with the other two films under discussion. This message concerns the re-acknowledgment of the Polishness of the Masurians. In essence, however, the film registers a series

IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE WESTERN IN FILM …

205

of acts of imposing a new collective self-definition on a subordinate group, and thus the process it portrays amounts to a form of recolonization. The Masurians are a people whose forefathers migrated in a succession of waves from central Poland and settled in what is presently the northeastern part of the country, the process that began in the middle ages. Their native language was Polish, but because for centuries they lived in small isolated communities and mixed with the German-speaking inhabitants of Masuria, they did not develop any actual affinity with Polish culture or statehood.27 Andrzej Sakson describes them as a people of the borderlands, who were exposed to the norms and values of two different cultural models—Polish and German—but as a result of their relative separation created their own endemic culture. He writes, “For centuries, the Masurians lived in their own self-contained world, in a unique spiritual atmosphere, and in the face of the systematic, organized pressure of assimilation they guarded its limits even more carefully.”28 As Sakson points out, the Masurians had a peripheral status both during the Prussian and German rule and after the incorporation of their region into the Polish territory. The social organization of Masurian rural communities was based on self-sufficiency, “direct personal contacts of all members of a given community,” and “a uniform material status.”29 The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the process of a gradual erasure of the ethnic specificity of the Masurians: first, in the interwar period their population underwent a far-reaching Germanization, and in 1945 they found themselves within a new social, political, and cultural system, which they often perceived as hostile.30 Notwithstanding contextual differences, the portrayal of the Masurians in Meridian Zero corresponds with the depiction of Native Americans in Westerns insofar as it employs a method quite analogous to what Armando José Prats terms “the mystique of cultural appropriation” in his discussion of American Westerns that concentrate on the white protagonist who joins an Indian tribe.31 Such a character, due to his immersion in native life, functions as an “authority in matters concerning the Indian,”32 but he never “lose[s] his essential whiteness.”33 His ability to appropriate the Indian ways confirms his heroic status34 and “testif[ies] to the genius and magnanimity of his own race—a race that could embrace the other and yet remain fundamentally unaltered, serene and certain, unswerving in the pursuit of its high destiny.”35 Prats writes, “This mystique... assumes that appropriation is thorough and thoroughly valid, and that it is also ‘natural,’ as if it required neither effort nor doubt.”36 In

206

M. PARYZ

Meridian Zero, Bartkowiak does not really adapt himself to the Masurian ways, but he sympathizes with the autochthonous people of Rosł˛ek and speaks for them, a role especially symbolic given their reluctance to speak. Moreover, it can be said that he knows who the Masurians are better than they do themselves, and from the beginning insists on calling them Poles. Bartkowiak also assumes the role of the guardian of the historical legacy of Rosł˛ek. He finds out about an interwar political activist named Majka, who tried to organize a referendum to officially determine that Masuria should join Poland. To Bartkowiak, Majka is a local paragon of Polishness, an embodiment of patriotic feelings that the people of Rosł˛ek unconsciously share, it only takes time to rekindle those feelings in them. Meridian Zero registers what is supposed to be interpreted as the reawakening of the Polish identity of the Masurian people and their regaining of a sense of sovereignty. In essence, this newly achieved sovereignty is an illusion because it signifies an unconditional acceptance of an imposed political system and a set of new cultural norms. The film suggests that the Masurians can finally overcome an impasse caused by their long-lasting separation from the structures of the Polish state. The action of Meridian Zero spans only several days, and this is enough to show a profound change of the Masurian mindset. The first image of the Masurians in the film is that of a conquered people: intimidated and humiliated. While walking around the town with Szczygieł, Bartkowiak sees three men transporting firewood in a cart, and one of them is pulling it wearing the reins. Bartkowiak objects to this, but Szczygiel insists that they get what they deserve as they share the responsibility for German crimes during the war. A turning point is Bartkowiak’s meeting with the people of Rosł˛ek at the end of which he intones a patriotic song, and the gathered Masurians join him one by one, uncertainly articulating the lines. During the final shooting, Bartkowiak receives unexpected help from Adalbert Majka (Edward Wnuk), the grandson of the pre-war activist. Adalbert was forced to fight in the Wehrmacht at the time of war, and Szczygieł put him in prison for that. Thanks to Bartkowiak, he regains his sense of Polishness virtually in no time. In the final scene, the joint funeral of Kukulka and J˛edrek—a respected local men and a delegate of the Polish state, respectively—attests to a Masurian future within the Polish nation. The film denies the existence of a separate Masurian identity. Only after accepting their Polishness can the Masurians overcome their inferior ethnic status. After centuries of separation from Poland and decades

IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE WESTERN IN FILM …

207

of Germanization, being a Masurian amount to a degraded version of Polishness, and the film registers the process of recovering the “proper” identity, as it were, by degrees. This is specifically shown on the example of two characters: Kukulka and Adalbert Majka. At the town meeting, Bartkowiak points out Kukulka, asks his surname, and when he hears it he immediately corrects it to “Kukułka” (in Polish, there is a difference in pronunciation). And in response to Kukulka’s assertion that he is a Masurian, he says, “A Masurian is also a Pole.” Kukulka accepts this silently, as if the matter were settled, however, what the viewer witnesses is an act of symbolic violence, as Bartkowiak completely disregards Kukulka’s feelings and intuitions that have shaped his sense of ethnic belonging. The film interprets Kukulka’s death as a sacrifice in the name of the Polish nation, leaving out the question of what he willed in actuality. While Kukulka is a Masurian “transformed” into a Pole, Adalbert still needs to embrace his Masurian legacy, a stage preceding the reawakening of his Polishness. In his first talk with Bartkowiak, he insists that he is a German, and the officer calls him a Masurian. Bartkowiak then takes Adalbert to the cemetery where his grandfather is buried to make him acknowledge his origin. Bartkowiak tells him, “If you renounce this, there will be nothing left.... You must remember that you are a Masurian.” Adalbert’s recovery of what the film shows as his true identity comes as easily as his discarding of a Wehrmacht jacket he has been wearing for a good part of the film. Thus, as a story about the regaining of identity and sovereignty, Meridian Zero veils a symbolic scenario of collective taming.

Conclusion In his seminal The Six-Gun Mystique, John G. Cawelti describes the “basic situation which various Western plots tend to embody” as “the epic moment when the values and disciplines of American society stand balanced against the savage wilderness.”37 Accordingly, “[t]he situation must involve a hero who possesses some of the urges toward violence as well as the skills, heroism, and personal honor ascribed to the wilderness way of life, and it must place this hero in a position where he becomes involved with or committed to the agents and values of civilization.”38 The fundamental dichotomy at the heart of the American Western accounts for the genre’s adaptability across a range of contexts in which analogous forms of symbolization have emerged. In reference to the Polish context, Skurowski writes that the imaginings about the

208

M. PARYZ

Regained Territories “consisted of some elements which were also notoriously present in the myth of the American West: the ‘emptiness’ of the social space; the great opportunities awaiting the settlers; legitimacy of possession...; and the notion that the tough life in the new borderlands reinforces the ‘masculine’ traits of heroism and physical prowess.”39 The Law and the Fist , Wolves’ Echoes , and Meridian Zero employ some of the popular conventions of the Western to convey a simple moral interpretation of the complex social and political reality of the post-war Polish borderlands. They rely on sensational plots as a way of glossing over difficult historical questions. They show the course of events conditioned by the state’s ideology as a natural development, and this is precisely how they serve this very ideology.

Notes 1. The Polish United Workers’ Party was formed in 1948 after the union of two earlier parties with communist/socialist agendas and it stayed in power until the political breakthrough in 1989. 2. The Polish United Workers’ Party was formed in 1948 after the union of two earlier parties with communist/socialist agendas and it stayed in power until the political breakthrough in 1989. 3. Tadeusz Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego. Twórcy, filmy, konteksty (Katowice: Videograf II, 2009), 235. All translations from Polish are by the autor. 4. Qtd. in Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego, 236. 5. See Lubelski, Historia kina polskiego, 236–246. 6. Beata Halicka, Polski Dziki Zachód. Przymusowe migracje i kulturowe oswajanie Nadodrza, 1945–1948 (Kraków: Universitas, 2015), 54. 7. Marcin Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm. Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja władzy komunistycznej w Polsce (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo TRIO, Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2005), 96. 8. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm, 312. 9. Piotr Skurowski, “Dances with Westerns in Poland’s Borderlands,” European Journal of American Studies 13, no. 3 (2018): par. 6. https://jou rnals.openedition.org/ejas/13595. 10. Skurowski, “Dances with Westerns,” par. 6. 11. Łukasz Plesnar, “Dziki Zachód, Dziki Wschód. Konwencje westernowe w Prawie i pi˛e´sci Jerzego Hoffmana i Edwarda Skórzewskiego oraz Wilczych ´ echach Aleksandra Scibor-Rylskiego,” Kwartalnik Filmowy 95 (2016): 140, 142.

IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE WESTERN IN FILM …

209

12. Plesnar, “Dziki Zachód, Dziki Wschód,” 144. 13. Jerzy Franczak, “Dziki Zachód, dziki Wschód. Western a sprawa polska,” Przestrzenie Teorii 24 (2015): 86. 14. Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1975), 138. 15. Franczak, “Dziki Zachód, dziki Wschód,” 82–83. 16. Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga. Polska, 1944–1947 (Kraków: Znak, Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2012), 297–299. 17. Franczak, “Dziki Zachód, dziki Wschód,” 86. 18. Richard Malty, Hollywood Cinema (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 86. 19. Jeanine Basinger, The Word War II Combat Film (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 129. 20. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 158. 21. Qtd. in Sławomir Bobowski, “Tematyka ukrainska ´ w powojennym polskim filmie fabularnym do 1989 roku,” Studia Filmoznawcze 37 (2016): 166. 22. Grzegorz Motyka, W kr˛egu Łun w Bieszczadach (Warszawa: Oficyna Wydawnicza RYTM, 2009), 12. 23. Motyka, W kr˛egu Łun w Bieszczadach, 68. 24. Motyka, W kr˛egu Łun w Bieszczadach, 83. 25. Bobowski, “Tematyka ukrainska,” ´ 155. 26. Franczak, “Dziki Zachód, dziki Wschód,” 93. 27. Andrzej Sakson, Mazurzy—społeczno´sc´ pogranicza (Poznan: ´ Instytut Zachodni, 1990), 1. 28. Sakson, Mazurzy, 26. 29. Sakson, Mazurzy, 28. 30. Sakson, Mazurzy, 64. 31. Armando José Prats, Invisible Natives: Myth and Identity in the American Western (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 13. 32. Prats, Invisible Natives, 13. 33. Prats, Invisible Natives, 201. 34. Prats, Invisible Natives, 13. 35. Prats, Invisible Natives, 201. 36. Prats, Invisible Natives, 202. 37. John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970), 66. 38. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique, 66. 39. Skurowski, “Dances with Westerns,” par. 3.

210

M. PARYZ

Filmography Django. Dir. Sergio Corbucci. 1966. El Dorado. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1966. High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. 1952. Johnny Oro. Dir. Sergio Corbucci. 1966. Południk zero. Dir. Waldemar Podgórski. 1970. Prawo i pi˛e´sc´ . Dir. Edward Skórzewski and Jerzy Hoffman. 1964. Rio Bravo. Dir. Howard Hawks. 1959. Shane. Dir. George Stevens. 1952. ´ Wilcze echa. Dir. Aleksander Scibor-Rylski. 1968.

Magnificent Strangers: Visions, Vibrations, and Violence in a Fistful of Dollars Char Roone Miller

The horror of this spectacle caused the people to remain for a time stupefied and satisfied. Machiavelli, The Prince I want to take a look at this. Joe, A Fistful of Dollars

While the screen is still dark a repetitive guitar run starts, then a white rotoscoped circle collapses into the distance, evoking a lens flare or a closing iris, revealing a bloodred screen. Bright white circles zoom out toward the viewer, a cartoon version of light flashing in a camera’s lens across the red screen. The sound of galloping horses’ hooves joins the circling and vibrating guitar. Someone starts to whistle a lonely melody. A single white cut-out of a man on a horse gallops in the center of the screen. Clint Eastwood’s name drops to the middle as two gunshots go off. More red and black silhouettes of men on horses ride across the

C. R. Miller (B) George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, US e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4_13

211

212

C. R. MILLER

screen and the music builds. The title appears to the sound of a ricocheting gunshot—Per Un Pugno Di Dollari—later replaced by A Fistful of Dollars for international distribution (1964, US release: January 1967). Gunshots blast away the title. The music starts to gallop. And then the killing starts. Black and white silhouettes of horses appear from various directions. Gunshots, scored as part of the music, pop and whiz as arms of cartoon men fly up suggesting the impact of the sonic shots. The music comes thundering in. Eleven animated killings in the opening credits. The rotoscoped credits end with the bright white circle returning and growing into a desert sun. The music subsides. Abstracted bodies, brutal violence, stark visuals, and inventive sonic interaction with the listener; the opening credits provide a stimulating summary of the film. Moreover, the title sequence created by Luigi Lardini reveals the film’s engagement with the hybridization or intimacy of people with technology.1 Rotoscoping creates a cartoon drawn over a real performance; a deliberate creation of artificiality built out of a captured film image. It renders filmed bodies strange and it highlights the film’s attention to conceptions of organization (and story telling) made possible not just in narrative but by the technology of film. Later, Eastwood said about the film and its sequels: “You ask most people what those films were about and they can’t tell you. But they tell you the ‘look’ [he mimes throwing the poncho over his shoulder] and the ‘dada-da-da-dum’ [he hums the opening bars of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly] and the cigar and the gun and those little flash images that hit you.”2 Lardini’s rotoscope work clues the viewer into the importance of artificiality to the film, suggesting that in addition to its concerns with the roles of narrative in establishing a polis, this film is also concerned with cinema as a technology that operates in ways that do not necessarily conform to narrative styles and genres created in theater or novels. It may often be forgotten, as Eastwood suggests, but Fistful follows many of the concerns of American Western stories in which a gunslinging stranger arrives in a small violence riven town and uses his guns to establish a legal regime. Joe (Eastwood) rides his mule into the dusty border town of San Miguel, and after getting a couple of drinks, tells the bartender that, “I never saw a town as dead as this one.” Silvanino (played by José Calvo), the bartender, explains to Joe that two violent gangs—the Baxters and the Rojos—run the town. As if the town was not dead enough when he first arrived, when Joe leaves town at the end of the film every member of both gangs will be dead (94 assorted Rojos and

MAGNIFICENT STRANGERS: VISIONS, VIBRATIONS …

213

Baxters scattered around town for Piripero, the busy local casket maker, to gather up and box).3 This narrative structure satirically echoes the film Shane (1953) in which a stranger breaks up a deadlock between two settler communities.4 Shane’s exploration of the violence associated with political founding has been well-discussed by philosophers and political theorists. Robert Pippin, in his lectures on the mythic founding narratives in Westerns, turned to Shane to consider the transformation of the United States into a modern commercial society.5 Bonnie Honig finds in Shane’s gothic narrative a community covering up its violence by scapegoating a stranger.6 Steven Johnston adds that Shane’s friend Joe Starrett (whose name is referenced in the name of Fistful’s central figure) is the real hero of the film, in that he stays with the community and lives with the consequences of the violence that he and Shane deployed.7 Fistful hits many of these marks—its working title was Il Magnifico Straniero (The Magnificent Stranger)—even as it highlights the illegitimacy of the two gangs competing for sovereignty. Crucially, it does not resolve the (extensive) violence in the founding of a legitimate democratic regime. Additionally, as Eastwood pointed out, its biggest impressions are more easily described as visual and sonic. The narrative fades from memory but its distinctive examination of political violence strikes a visual and sonic chord that continues to resonate—“dada-da-da-dum”.

Opening Shots: Sovereignty and State Violence Set on the border of the US and Mexico just after the American Civil War, Fistful was filmed in Spain and Italy.8 “Almost wholly mythic, nearly placeless, wholly typological, largely ahistorical,” Robert Pippin says of the “Italian Westerns of Sergio Leone.”9 Made with German and Spanish funding, it is considered one of the first Spaghetti Westerns, but its overlapping national concerns go further than Italy.10 A remake, by an Italian director—Sergio Leone, of the Japanese film Yojimbo (1961) by Akira Kurosawa, (which was itself inspired by American Westerns), Fistful featured an American television star (Eastwood), an Italian stage actor (Gian Maria Volonté, under the pseudonym Johnny Wels), and a West German television star, Marianne Koch. Calling it an Italian Western misses many of the different national political identities at play in the filming and, moreover, misses the film’s view from a border—a place not secured under one sovereign regime. Joe, unlike Shane, does not secure the territory for a sovereign regime. It isn’t an abstract singular

214

C. R. MILLER

government that Joe runs from in the end, it is a place of contestation between the American and the Mexican governments. “You mean the Mexican government on one side? Maybe the Americans on the other side?” He asks Silvanito in the concluding scene. “And me right smack in the middle? Uhn-hn. Too dangerous. So long.” The violence of the film left many viewers expressing shock. The New York Times critic, Bosley Crowther blamed Pugno for the wave of violence in American cinema before it had even played in the United States: “early next year is coming the film that helped to goad this wild parade. It is ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ … don’t say you haven’t been warned.”11 I suspect it wasn’t just the number of dead but the way the violence did not resolve into a defense of singular American sovereignty; a presentation in line with the growing public awareness of American national violence toward peoples in the western part of North America and around the world in places like Vietnam. In 1967, the year the film arrived in the United States, the U.S. Marines destroyed a village twelve miles (20 km) southwest of Da Nang, killing eight civilians (1 February).12 Operation Pershing began that same month, which eventually killed 5,401 soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 852 U.S. soldiers, and more than 30 people in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.13 Crowther’s own newspaper reported in March of that year that “American Jets Bombed Village in South Vietnam, U.S. Reports.” The jets bombed the village of Langvei, explained The New York Times, which was crowded with refugees, killing at least 100 Vietnamese civilians and wounding 175 others.14 American soldiers treated these villages much like Joe treated the town of San Miguel, except Joe didn’t kill nearly this many people. Leone’s friend Sergio Corbucci, the Italian director who Leone encouraged to see Yojimbo (1961), when Leone initially realized it would make a great Western, later suggested the political force of the new violent international Westerns: “Soon the Americans will understand how things are. For the time being, they remain attached to honest fights and legal duels.”15 Don’t say, he could have added, that you weren’t warned. American promotional materials for the release of Fistful referred to Joe as “the man with no name.” Erasing a name that often signified Americans (especially in the post-World War II usage of “GI Joe”) helped Americans distance themselves from serious political engagement with the

MAGNIFICENT STRANGERS: VISIONS, VIBRATIONS …

215

film, rendering it in Pippin’s words, “almost wholly mythic.” The excessive violence, which failed to resolve into a “legitimate” authority, moreover, disrupted accounts of state violence as exceptional or mythically foundational. Critics missed Fistful’s satirical warning of the continual experience of state violence within a regime or across regimes. I suspect there is more to this denial than mere hypocrisy or oversight concerning how things really were. Charles Mills points out that our perception of violence is an effect of a racialized distinction between civilization and barbarism. This split drives, “perception,” he writes, “with whites aprioristically intent on denying what is before them.” This violence is precluded from normal modes of perception established in relation to a sovereign order of things. “Then here,” he wrote, “it is the blindness of the concept itself that is blocking the vision.”16 Insecurities produced by whiteness make it difficult to see the exercise of violence as violence, so long as it secures the perspective of sovereign power, according to Mills. Commenting on this passage from Mills, Erin Pineda connects it to ways of seeing violence that affirm state or racist power: “white supremacy produces and reproduces an epistemic context in which the conceptual categories of perception, memory, and action are shaped by the simultaneous justification and erasure of domination.”17 Identification with domination or state power, in fact, structures meaningful interpretations of violence as justified, meaningful, or even simply visible. For Pineda this is what it means to “see like a state”, particularly, “the adoption of the ends of the state as the normative starting point.”18 In showing the audience an American destroying an entire village without attempting to justify that violence in terms of serving the ends of the state, Fistful makes violence visible in a way that counters depictions of state violence as morally distinct and legitimate. By not structuring the violence to the needs or interpretive terms of the state, Fistful leaves it more confused and shocking. Most Westerns end with a pronouncement of the clarity of the sovereign; rifts between farmers and ranchers, for example, are settled. Shane delivers the valley to the farmers; then he and his pistols permanently exit the town. Fistful, on the other hand, did not justify its violence by aligning with the ends of the state. Joe rides away on his mule before the American or Mexican government can arrive to consolidate his actions into violence oriented to the ends or beginnings of a state. American television executives perceived this as a problem and tried to fix it.

216

C. R. MILLER

When it first aired on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network on 23 February 1975, the network added an introduction in which an American government official played by Harry Dean Stanton offers a man playing Eastwood a pardon from prison. “That pardon is yours if you do a job for us,” Stanton’s character assures a stand-in for Eastwood. Shot from awkward angles to avoid revealing that Eastwood was not actually in the role, Stanton’s character asks if the fake-Eastwood is familiar with the town of San Miguel. The town is a “hellhole,” the official explains, two gangs have moved in and turned the locals into “slaves.” “I want the place cleaned out and I don’t care how you do it,” he says, providing a national justification for the violence that Joe brings to San Miguel. The two gangs are always at each other’s throats but they do come together to “handle strangers who come into their town: they kill them, no questions.”19 Which is exactly what the official orders Joe to do. Joe’s crimes and the crimes of the gangs will be indistinguishable. The hyper-violence that was such a concern to film critics becomes acceptable if performed for the U.S. Government—even if it is simply the inverse of the destruction portrayed in the film. Leone’s original film, however, offers little state security for violence. Even in the televised version, Joe leaves the town in the end still on the border between contesting sovereigns.

Democratic Orientations Joe’s exit highlights an important element of the democracy imagined in many Westerns: that it can be separated from the violence of its creation. Shane, for example, killed three gunmen who work for the ranchers. These murders, necessary for the founding, were excluded from the selfperception of the newly founded community when Shane left. Shane’s actions, for Pippin, cannot be reconciled with the “idealization (from this point of view) of the pacific virtues of such a finally settled domestic life.”20 Moreover, this violence, according to Pippin, needs to be hidden from the community. It “seems that a civilized order must view itself as founded by heroic and unproblematic violence, so this truth about founding must be hidden by a lie.”21 Similarly, Stanley Cavell writing about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, points out that “justice, to be established, must not be seen to be established.”22 If Pippin and Cavell think a lie needs to be told, what kind of person could live with the truth?

MAGNIFICENT STRANGERS: VISIONS, VIBRATIONS …

217

Honig and Johnston imagine a citizenry strong enough to take the truth, such as the truth about American violence in Vietnam, or the racism highlighted by Mills, or the “imperialist colonization or even wars of extermination,” that facilitated the establishment of the United States.23 It takes a tragically oriented citizen, Johnston answers, to live with the truth of a founding murder. Starrett can live with the crime and with the contingency it brings. “Shane cannot live with the ambiguity of the founding achievement,” Johnston writes, “though he prefers to wrap it in nobility, while Starrett must find a way to address it and the other tragedies certain to come, the mark of a tragic comportment to life and politics.”24 Johnston suggests that a tragic orientation requires a public recognition of the violence. To deny the violence that the community is capable of is to set up worse violence in the future. Great achievements can bring great failures; knowledge that will not deter a tragically oriented person from acting, according to Johnston. Such people are prepared to act and to live up to the tragic consequences of their actions and to not lie to themselves about their involvement in terrible actions. Like Pippin, Richard Rorty advocates a big lie or at least a big dream. Teaching about a nation-state’s terrible crimes, such as its history of imperial colonization, attempts at extermination of indigenous populations, or the violent conflagration in Vietnam, threaten, according to Rorty, to undermine and make farcical national appeals to democracy. In “a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce,” he argues, great achievements become virtually impossible.25 A democracy needs clean hands for Rorty, even if that takes a lot of scrubbing to get the spots out. Honig picks up Rorty’s claim about the gothic and finds it to be a genre messy enough for democracy. What kind of people can live with the truth that democratic life is founded on murder? According to Honig: a gothic people.26 Honig and Johnston agree that the drive for the community to hide its violence from itself leads to dangerous self-conceptions, especially a democratic community’s inability to know their own united strength. If we lie to ourselves about our violence we fail to understand how strong a united community can be. “Thus, we tell ourselves, the violence that touches our regime is contained and final rather than boundless and cyclical. Our clean hands come at a price, however, the price is our own democratic power, the power to act in concert as a sovereign people.”27 Honig finds this concerted power in Shane. Shane, she discovers, may be the town’s scapegoat; his guilt covering up the violence they committed.

218

C. R. MILLER

“What if the stories they tell about themselves suggest instead that they are actually quite powerful, powerful enough to do the violence that their (re)founding requires (let us say they do … face off with Riker’s men), and powerful enough to blame a scapegoat for it, even generating a cover story that almost conceals their implication in the violence and seeks to relieve them of responsibility for it?”28 Drawing on René Girard’s account of the community’s need for scapegoats, Honig flips the narrative back onto the community. They have done it, and it could only be done by the group.29 The community should bear the knowledge of its violence. Counter to the claims of Pippin and Rorty, Honig and Johnston understand that a democratic community needs to realize the strength to confront and live with its violence—even if that is living and acting with the knowledge of the 100 dead refugees in the village of Langvei or villages throughout western North America. Honig’s turn to Girard suggests that this loss of political distinction spreads wider, into questions of subjects and objects. It isn’t just a distinction of regimes that’s at stake, it is a wide range of distinctions. The gothic and the tragic, which Honig and Johnston find at work in Shane, often designate breakdowns in modes of establishing difference. As Girard claimed about tragedy: “the hidden violence of the sacrificial crisis eventually succeeds in destroying distinctions, and this destruction in turn fuels the renewed violence.”30 That is, in Girard’s terms, the tragic is a breakdown in conceptual distinction. Fistful exemplifies the pressure of such a breakdown by treating the “legal” regime as virtually indistinguishable from lawless violence, in a manner that suggests Girard’s concern with the violence that erupts around the collapse of differences, including the difference between legal and illegal violence. The sheriff is the patriarch of the Baxter gang, a man of un-compromised compromise, early in the movie he threatens Joe with arrest only to pay for his services a few scenes later. Moreover, the gangs themselves are virtually indistinguishable, the Rojos trade alcohol and the Baxters trade guns. The Rojo gang (led by three brothers) may offer a lively bit of excitement, especially in the sadistic glee of Ramón Rojo (played by Gian Maria Volonté), compared to the tired family resentments of the Baxters (led by an equivocating father and a resentful mother) but both groups are terrible. The tensions created from a lack of distinction generate, for Girard, the potential for violence. Joe’s arrival intensifies the violence in a place where, as Girard wrote of ancient Greek struggles, “the difference between blood spilt for ritual and for criminal purposes

MAGNIFICENT STRANGERS: VISIONS, VIBRATIONS …

219

no longer holds.”31 There is a loss of difference between outlaws, sheriffs, gangsters, and heroes; or, that is, not much difference between the good, the bad, or the ugly. Shane also illustrates this Girardian loss of difference, in which the violence between the competing groups is generated in part by their attempts to distinguish themselves. In Shane, for example, both the farmers and ranchers justify their presence in relation to the United States government. They are rivals, each staking claim to a more authentic America. As Girard says of this kind of violence: “The rival desires the same object as the subject, and to assert the primacy of the rival can lead to only one conclusion. Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it.”32 What is revealed in these narrative rivalries is the social mimesis of desire: that we copy our desires from others. Shane’s relationship with Joe Starrett (played by Van Heflen) exemplifies this dynamic; Shane wants to be Joe, so he copies the objects of his desire. Pippin misses this structure of desire when he writes that “Shane is greatly attracted to the Starrett family he is staying with precisely because it is a family, because he experiences the reality of familial love, especially the pleasures of a child.”33 The relationship between Starrett and Shane is a model of triangulated desire, in which Shane mimics the desires of Starrett, for a farm, a family, and—most viewers suspect— Marian, Starrett’s wife. Shane’s exit from the farm defuses the violence that almost assuredly would erupt between himself and Joe. The lack of difference between Joe and Shane threatens to unleash a contagion of violence. Girard’s account of desire highlights the broader loss of order and the increased awareness that the desires we fight over are not authentic and distinctive but generated through mimesis and competition. Girard extends this collapse of differentiation well beyond the human social, political, and religious worlds, to include a collapse in all modes of differentiation. There is, Girard claims, “an affiliation between violence and nondifferentiation,” and that relationship spreads out to include the natural world. “Natural differences are conceived in terms of cultural differences, and vice versa. … because there is no real difference between the various modes of differentiation, there is in consequence no difference between the manner in which things fail to differ; the disappearance of natural differences can thus bring to mind the dissolution of regulations pertaining to the individual’s proper place in society—that is, can instigate a sacrificial crisis.”34 Girard suggests a broader more all-encompassing

220

C. R. MILLER

loss of differentiation. That results, in some ways, from the loss of the sovereign violence as fundamentally different but also as the mechanism for securing difference. Fistful exposes the interchangeability of violence—making viewers confront the national violence they would rather hide or deny. The loss of differentiation that Girard discusses extends to a loss of natural order and created orders. No state provides Joe or the rest of the city any mode of legitimacy. It is difficult to distinguish the bootleggers from the gunrunners. It is also difficult to distinguish American soldiers and the Mexican army from gunrunners, highlighted in the scene in which the Rojos dress as American soldiers. The loss of the correct placement within a sovereign order of who and what matters threatens violence. The violence in Fistful unfolds through the loss of sovereign modes of distinction and classification. Not just at the level of story or genre but in terms of an aesthetic or affective experience. In this regard, the film elides other differences, especially those between technology and humanity or humanity and animality. The film even renders the distinction between film as a visual medium or a sonic medium difficult to maintain. As the back of the American vinyl LP proclaimed, “The music matches the excitement … note for note, shot for shot.”35

Shot for Shot Returning to Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack—“dada-da-da-dum”—the first element of the film experienced by viewers: as they watch the film, it starts to play before anything appears on the screen. You don’t have to have seen the film to be familiar with the sound and music—the “dadada-da-dum”; at this point, the style of the soundtrack is a Western cliche. It is a central part of the experience of the film—virtually a music video— since the dialogue of this international production was reduced to such a minimum. The soundtrack displays Morricone’s ability to take avantgarde conceptions of music, influenced by John Cage, and introduce them into popular culture in a tremendously influential way. To watch and listen to Fistful in relation to Honig’s gothic, Johnston’s tragic, or even the abstraction that Pippin finds in gunfighter narratives, is to be struck by Fistful’s awareness of itself as a film. It is not just a film that adopts earlier structures of novels or dramas; it is also a film that engages the technologies of film, such as the soundtrack, to explore community and violence, and, moreover, to reflect on our attachments to

MAGNIFICENT STRANGERS: VISIONS, VIBRATIONS …

221

it and to one another. It puts disparate elements together in the manner of a montage or a stimulating display of sights and sounds; techniques of visual and sonic stimulation that can assemble new groups and new bodies. Morricone’s music influenced the final structure and editing of the film, illustrating the importance of the soundtrack to the thinking that is going on in the film. “Some of the music was written before the film, which was unusual,” Morricone explained in 2007. “Leone’s films were made like that because he wanted the music to be an important part of it; he kept the scenes longer because he did not want the music to end.” According to Morricone, this explains “why the films are so slow— because of the music.”36 The soundtrack directly contributed to the scale and scope of the film. The sound structures the view. The film influenced Morricone’s perception as well; particularly in the ways he thought about his work in terms of color. “I have always believed that the inventive use of tone color is one of a film composer’s most important means of expression. … I began to experiment with music made expressly for the stage, but above all for the protagonist in Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars ) (1964) and all Leone’s other films. The western helped me, because the genre, at least as Leone intended it, is picaresque, exaggerated, excessive, playful, dramatic, entertaining, and caustic.”37 And, I would add, Leone’s version of the genre engages with productive confusion over the identity of the film: perhaps, a viewer might wonder, the film is just a visual track for music and sound. Morricone’s soundtrack underscores (so to speak) the conceptual instability of the idea of “film”, not just the way that the sound or the rotoscoped credit scenes might need to be taken seriously but how the experience of the film occurs at a bodily level. Humans and film think together. Music highlights an exposure of the human body. Eardrums and bodies move often without rational engagement with the experience. Sound destabilizes notions of individual autonomy. Music and sound synchronize our experiences as a group or assembly. As Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Art of War: “When well handled, this music regulates the army, which by moving in paces that correspond to its beats, easily keeps in rank. Thence it is that the ancients had whistles and fifes and musical instruments perfectly modulated; because, just as one who dances moves in time with music and keeping with it does not err, so an army moving in obedience to music does not get disordered.”38 Contemporary sound studies have made a lot more clear the power of sound to act on the body.

222

C. R. MILLER

Joachim Ernst-Berendt points out that, “as soon as volume exceeds 80db, blood pressure rises. The stomach and intestine operate more slowly, the pupils become larger, and the skin gets paler—no matter whether the noise is found pleasant or disruptive, or is not even consciously perceived. … They become alarmed.”39 Steve Goodman claims that “alarm” comes from the Italian “all’arme,” which means “a call to arms”. When we hear noise our bodies are “called to arms” even if our brains don’t recognize it.40 Goodman explains, via Joseph Ledoux and William James, that sound bypasses the cognitive brain functions: shocking noises like gunshots “are routed straight from the thalamus lower down in the brain to the amygdala.”41 Fabrizio, one of Machiavelli’s characters in The Art of War, relates a story that Alexander automatically grabbed his weapons when Phrygian music was played.42 This short circuit causes the body to react in a number of ways without what we would typically call rational reflection. Motor stimulus plays out in sound which evokes, as well, the motor stimulus of a gunfight in which the bodies on the screen or in the seats move to the instant stimulation of the guns. In addition to the “dada-da-da-dum”, gunshots are a part of Morricone’s music, as are the sounds of whips and whistles. According to Morricone, “those sonic interventions happened effectively ‘outside’ the images. They were aimed directly at the spectator.”43 Viewer’s bodies respond to the filmed sounds of shots. The French film Irreversible (2002), directed by Gaspar Noe, added “infrasound” to the soundtrack, the noise that police broadcast to crowds to upset their stomachs. “A lot of people can take the images,” Noe said about the film’s violent imagery, “but not the sound. Those reactions are physical.”44 While not pitched to those extremes, Fistful is a film very aware of how the sound of the film makes the viewer a part of it; the viewer is not a sovereign authority judging the actions or behaviors of others on the screen but rather is actively stimulated by the film in an assembly of eyes, ears, screen, and soundtrack. The sound of gunshots is central to the experience of watching Fistful. Their sound can shock and stimulate the viewer. Additionally, the camera tracks a line-of-sight much like a gun. As Joe arrives in San Miguel, the camera travels behind him duplicating his perspective, overlapping Joe’s vision with the view of the camera. Joe pauses to get a drink of water and watches a young boy sneak into a building; re-staging the opening scene of Shane in reverse. In Shane, the young boy, watches the gunman approach the homestead; viewers of Shane watch the gunman arrive from

MAGNIFICENT STRANGERS: VISIONS, VIBRATIONS …

223

the boy’s perspective. In Fistful the gunman and viewers watch the boy. This overlapping of Joe’s perspective (that of the gunman) and the camera also overlays with the guns that Joe carries. In Fistful, guns often point along the camera’s trajectory. In the massacre of the soldiers, for example, Ramón Rojos points a machine gun at a group of soldiers and mows them down. Surprisingly, for the viewer, in several shots, the camera follows the line of sight of the gun, as the sound of the gun fills their ears. Watching directly down the barrel of the gun. Two similar pieces of technology—gun and camera—provide bodily experiences for the viewer in terms of stimulating sound and visual perception. Such technological intimacy gives new ways to see and hear the world; that is, new ways to put it together. This line-of-sight is replayed later, when Ramón guns down all the Baxters as they flee their burning home. In several shots, the camera is staged from the perspective of the gunmen. The coffin maker sneaks Joe out of town, after a cruel torturous beating by Ramón’s men. Passing by the conflagration, from inside a coffin, the abused Joe tells the undertaker, “Stop. I want to take a look at this.” There are close-ups of the sadistic faces of the men shooting and, surprisingly, shots from their perspective. Joe’s vision sometimes runs along the lines of gunfire. Joe’s virtually dead body (stiff and clumsy like the rotoscoped bodies in the opening cartoon) includes, conceptually, the camera and the gun. The film provides a new perceptual experience as it thematizes new bodies of flesh and technology. Imagined in the wake of a loss of stable categories, the stiff movement of the rough rotoscope cartoons in the credit sequence evokes these new bodies. “The rotoscoped body,” according to Lisa Cartwright, “sometimes performed in ways that pushed the limits of viewer expectations about how a given body will, or should, move, in space or across the screen.”45 The movement of rotoscoped figures reveals a strangeness of the human body in a world with less stable categories; bodies can include technology and other animals.

Conclusion Joe guns down Ramón and the rest of the Rojo gang in the Main Street of San Miguel in the final shootout. Joe survives because he wrapped his chest in metal, an assembly of his body and metal that mirrors the hybridization of bodies with guns. Ramón is dumbfounded by this sort of strange hybrid and can’t adapt his behavior. After shooting him, Joe rides

224

C. R. MILLER

away on a simple mule—an animal with its own categorical confusions— the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. “Very strange to say,” Herodotus wrote concerning the political significance of mules, “what aided the Persians and thwarted the Scythians in their attacks on Darius’ army was the braying of the asses and the appearance of the mules.”46 The Scythians found the mules to be strange and stupefying. When Joe first entered San Miguel, appearing with the same mule, a group of Baxter men scared the mule with gunfire and insults—shooting at the ground near his hooves, much like the shots they directed at the young boy in the opening scene. Shots also startle the viewers in the theater. After learning from the bartender of the town’s bifurcation between the two gangs, Joe walks back to the men. “Go get your mule,” one of the men says to Joe, “you let him get away from you?” Joe removes the stub of a cheroot from his mouth and responds, “that’s what I wanna talk about. He’s feelin’ real bad.” The Baxter’s are surprised by the claim to defend an animal’s feelings, “Huh?” One responds. “My mule. You see, he got all riled up when you fired those shots at his feet.” The men remain puzzled and ask Joe, “Hey, are you makin’ some kinda joke?” Joe says, “Now, I understand you were playin’ around. But the mule, he just doesn’t get it. If you were to all apologize….” Joe offers his own feeling about the interaction between the men and the mule, “I don’t think it’s nice, you laughin’. See, my mule don’t like people laughin’. He gets the idea you’re laughin’ at him.” Escalating the conflict, Joe provides the men with an easy but unacceptable response: “Now, if you apologize, like I know you will, I might convince him that you really didn’t mean it.” The men don’t apologize. We knew they wouldn’t. They end up the first of many dead Baxters. The mule survives and returns to carry Joe out of town as the film concludes. Joe looks lonely as he rides out of town but even in that scene, he’s united with technology and animality as something of a magnificent stranger. The camera is our eye as we watch them ride into the desert, listening for—“dada-da-da-dum”— and more sounds of new communities that might include technology and animals. A world experiencing a crisis in the loss of differentiation, like that of Fistful, is also a world alive to strange interactions of humanity with animals and technologies of sight and sound; a world, that is, of assemblages of strange magnificence.

MAGNIFICENT STRANGERS: VISIONS, VIBRATIONS …

225

Notes 1. Christopher Frayling, “The Making of Sergio Leone’s ‘A Fistful of Dollars’,” Cinéaste, 25, no. 3, 14–22, (2000), Referenced on 22. 2. Frayling, 18. 3. Death count from Mark Huerta, “What to Watch: A Fistful of Dollars’” The Stanford Daily Oct 20, 2020. https://stanforddaily.com/2020/10/ 20/what-to-watch-a-fistful-of-dollars-1964/ 4. Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death, (NY: Faber and Faber, 2000), 127. 5. Robert Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth, (NY: Yale University, 2010), 143. 6. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, (Princeton: Princeton University, 2001), 35. 7. Steven Johnston, American Dionysian (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2015), 244–248. 8. Howard Hughs, Once Upon a Time in the Italian West, (NY: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 2. 9. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, 161, footnote 22. 10. Frayling, Sergio Leone, 130. 11. Bosley Crowther, “Back in the Saddle,” New York Times, D1. In William McClain, “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the “Death of the Western” in American Film Criticism, Journal of Film and Video, 62, no. (1–2) (Spring/Summer 2010), 52–66. Reference on 56. 12. James Willbanks, Vietnam War Almanac: An In-Depth Guide to the Most Controversial Conflict in American History. (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 191. 13. George MacGarrigle, “Combat Operations: Taking the Offensive, October 1966 to October 1967.” (United States Army Center of Military History, 1998), 321–324. 14. “American Jets Bombed Village in South Vietnam, U.S. Reports,” New York Times, March 6, 1967, 6. 15. Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 187. Also see William McClain, “Western Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism,” Journal of Film and Video, 62, no. (1–2), (Spring/Summer 2010), 52–66; Reference on 60. 16. Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 27. 17. Erin Pineda, Seeing Like an Activist, (NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 174. 18. Pineda, 41.

226

C. R. MILLER

19. Available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ppZuqec9lq0. Also See, Amy Merrick (24 August 2014). “A Fistful of Dollars Ad”. The TV Guide Historian. http://tvguidegal.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-fistful-of-dollarsad.html. 20. Pippin, 144. 21. Pippin, 80–81. 22. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed. Enlarged Edition. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 58–59. 23. Pippin, 21. 24. Johnston, 28. 25. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 95, quoted in Honig, 116. Also see Johnston, 64–68. 26. Honig, 121. 27. Honig, 38. 28. Honig, 35–36. 29. To borrow phrasing from Stanley Cavell’s comments on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “No single man can establish it, only men together, each granting the other a certain right over his own autonomy” (Cavell, 58). 30. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: JHU Press, 1977), 49. 31. Girard, 43. 32. Girard, 145. 33. Pippin, 144–145. 34. Girard, 56. 35. A Fistful of Dollars , RCA Victor, 1967. Stereo LSO-1135. Ellipses in the original. 36. “Q & A—Ennio Morricone” The Guardian, 18 March 2007. 37. Ennio Morricone and Sergio Miceli, Composing for the Cinema. Translated by Gillian Anderson (New York: The Scarecrow Press, 2013), 167. 38. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War, in Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, Vol. 2 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 621. 39. Joachim-Ernst Berndt, The Third Ear (Perth: Element, 1985), 79 in Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010), 65. 40. Goodman, 65. 41. Goodman, 69. 42. Machiavelli, 621. 43. Morricone, 168. 44. Goodman, 66. 45. Lisa Cartwright, “The Hands of the Animator: Rotoscopic Projection, Condensation, and Repetition Automatism in the Fleisher Apparatus,” Body & Society 18(I) 47–78, from 48.

MAGNIFICENT STRANGERS: VISIONS, VIBRATIONS …

227

46. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A. D. Godley. (Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920), 129:1.

Index

A A Fistful of Dollars (1964 film), 6, 212, 221, 226 Aristophanes, 156–158, 171 Aristotle, 25, 27, 43, 66, 72–74, 77, 83, 84

B The Bible, 13 Bitter Springs (1950 film), 175, 176, 180–182, 188, 190, 191 Black Cowboys (2018 album), 147, 153 Blazing Saddles , 5, 155–157, 160, 161, 164, 165, 167–171 Bond, Ward, 128 Bridges, Lloyd, 108 Brody, Richard, 65, 80 Brooks, Mel, 5, 155–157, 161–168, 171, 172

C Chauvel, Charles, 175–177, 189

Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 89–91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101–104 Crawford, Joan, 124, 126

D Deadwood (2000s television series), 4, 11–14, 23–26

E Eastwood, Clint, 5, 30, 45, 99, 211, 212

F Flemons, Don, 147–149, 153 Fonda, Henry, 90, 99, 102, 183 Fonda, Jane, 122 Ford, John, 4, 5, 30, 36, 43, 45, 47, 48, 50, 57, 61, 63, 65, 73, 80–82, 85, 99, 124, 160, 176, 177 Foreman, Carl, 65, 81

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. K. Picariello (ed.), The Western and Political Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27284-4

229

230

INDEX

Fort Apache (1948 film), 49–51, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 176, 177, 180, 181, 183, 188 The Furies (1950 film), 125–127

G Godless (2000s television series), 122, 129, 131, 132, 135

H Hamilton (musical), 149 Hang ‘Em High (1968 film), 5, 29, 30 Hawks, Howard, 65, 99, 182, 204 High Noon (1952 film), 4, 5, 65, 66, 73, 79–81, 99, 121, 122, 130 Hobbes, Thomas, 28, 29, 36, 43–45, 66–68, 72, 73, 75, 80, 82, 83, 86

J Johnny Guitar (1954 film), 125, 126, 130, 134, 135

K Kennedy, John F., 5, 106, 107, 111, 113, 116–119

L The Law and the Fist (1964 film), 194–199, 204, 208 Leone, Sergio, 6, 30, 213, 214, 216, 221 Lil Nas X, 138 Locke, John, 1, 2, 7, 28, 29, 42–45, 75, 84, 85 The Loner (1960s television series), 5, 105–108, 113, 117, 118

M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 47, 58, 221, 222, 226 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962 film), 5, 29, 30, 47, 51, 65, 66, 73, 80, 84, 85, 156, 160, 216, 226 Matheson, Sue, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 122, 136 Meridian Zero (1970 film), 194, 195, 203–208 Milch, David, 4, 11, 13, 24 The Moonlighter (1953 film), 125, 126, 128, 134 O Outlaw Women (1952 film), 125, 130 The Ox-Bow Incident (1940 novel), 89, 91 The Ox-Bow Incident (1943 film), 89, 91, 99, 100, 104 P Peckinpah, Sam, 6 Plato, 13, 25, 28, 43, 65 Poague, Leland, 51–53, 58, 60, 61 R Rawls, John, 28, 29, 36, 44, 45 Reed, Ishmael, 137, 139–142, 144, 146, 148, 149, 151–153 Rio Bravo (1959 film), 65, 204 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 28, 44 S Serling, Rod, 5, 106, 107, 118 Shane (1953 film), 121, 213 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949 film), 49, 55, 57, 58, 62 Smart, Ralph, 175, 190

INDEX

Socrates, 11, 13, 28, 157, 158 Stanwyck, Barbara, 124, 127, 128 Stewart, James, 30 Strange Empire (2010s television series), 135 U Uncivilised (1950 film), 175–180, 188, 189 W Wayne, John, 30, 61, 65, 99, 124, 162, 169, 171, 183 Wellman, William A., 90, 91, 99–103

231

Wolves’ Echoes (1968 film), 194, 195, 199–204, 208 Wynonna Earp (2010s–2020s television series), 135

Y Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969 novel), 137, 146, 151–153

Z Zanuck, Darryl F., 90 Zinnemann, Fred, 4, 5, 65, 66, 81, 82, 99, 196