"To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing."
-Anne Carson
"Nothing lives long. Only the earth and the mountains."
-Cheyenne death song, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
During the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner got up on stage to deliver his Frontier Thesis to the American Historical Association. He argued American character was forged by the frontier experience and that its closure in 1890 marked the end of a chapter in American history. On that same day, later into the afternoon, Thomas Edison presented the Kinetoscope. The first image on it was a cowboy on a horse. In the same day the West ended, the Western was born.
The grand scheme of history reduces the era of the West to a relatively short period of time, from the end of The Civil War in 1865 to the closing of the frontier around 1890. The end of this period of time was only expedited by the invention of barb wire in 1876. Patented by Joseph Glidden, it proved ideal for western conditions. As the wide- open spaces became less wide, less open, less spacious, the days of the free roaming cowboy were numbered. It didn't solely affect cattle ranchers. Native Americans called it "the devil's rope" as it further squeezed the lands they had always used.
Before the first shadows of a rugged cowboy in a dusty town, blood was spattered amidst feathers and boots. We are imbued with the myth at an early age. We hear of the legendary figures of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickock casting shadows over frontier towns, calling out whoever they want to a duel. The accounts of the opening of the American West have risen into the thousands with most of the concentration on the period from 1860 to 1890. As historian Dee Brown put it "It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it."
The myth of the American West presented in classical Westerns is a distorted reflection of American culture and history.
The cowboys vs. Indians or white hat, black hat narrative simplifies it into something easily digestible. Acknowledging the moral complexity of the Western history does not require us to surrender the mythic power associated with the region. The ancient Greeks knew that myths resting on tragedy and unforeseen consequences have far more power than stories of simple triumphs and victories.
Historian Greg Grandin's The End of the Myth presents the case for how relentless expansion profoundly shaped American's domestic politics. The ability to move outward provided a "gate of escape," helping to deflect political and economic conflicts. This deflection meant the country's problems from racism to inequality were never confronted directly. The 2008 financial meltdown, the unwinnable wars in the Middle East, and the ever-growing ecological crisis have slammed the gate shut. The 2016 election ripped off the mask of American empire, and this confrontation has only exacerbated with Donald Trump's second term.
Mexican author Octavio Paz would write in the 1950s:
"America was, if anything, geography, pure space, open to human action. Since it lacked historical substance- ancient social classes, established institutions, religions and hereditary laws- reality presented no obstacles other than natural ones. Men struggled not against history but against nature. And wherever there was an historical obstacle-indigenous societies, say- it was erased from history, reduced to a mere natural fact, and dispensed with accordingly...Evil is outside, part of the natural world, like Indians, rivers, mountains, and other obstacles that must be domesticated or destroyed."
When Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act, it drove Native Americans west and white settlers and planters who got their land experienced an extraordinary degree of power and popular sovereignty. Settlers moved across the frontier and continued to win a great liberty by putting down people of color.
During this time, the culture of the American Indian was destroyed and out of it came all the myths of the West. Only on occasion was the voice of the American Indian heard and when depicted on film, there were viewed as either the savage or hapless. In John Ford's Stagecoach, they are portrayed as stoic warriors without voice. In one scene, a Native American is essentially used as a background prop. In exploding the myth of Native American as savage, we can look back to see other myths of the genre. The ones that have entered the culture. As each decade marches on, these cultural totems became more eroded. Giving way to uncomfortable but necessary truths about how the west was won and the legends that populated the landscape. The western is a malleable genre that has moved with the times, adapting to audience moods and social pressures.
From the film genre's beginnings in the early to mid-twentieth century into the 21st, each generation has further deconstructed the myths commonly associated with the stereotypical presentation of American history.
Beyond deconstructing the myth of the past, the Western has become a genre in which artists can confront, challenge and reflect on aspects of American culture.
The western is considered to be regarded as a monolithic form, its creed, the mindset of its characters fixed. Richard Slotkin would write "the mythic space of the genre should be thought of as a field for ideological play which is attractive precisely because a wide range of beliefs and agendas can be entertained there." It is inarguable that the western has been used as a tool to forge a sense of national identity.
In the book Renegade Westerns, Kevin Grant writes:
"Just as the archetypes and iconography have been deployed to support the dominant ideology, however, so they have been ranged against it. Many westerns, with all the trappings in place, have pushed against the confines of jingoistic pride that once limited-at least in theory- the genre's freedom of expression. By challenging the assumptions behind American exceptionalism and denying the legitimacy of Manifest Destiny, they have highlighted the contradiction in national self-image that have always attended fictional stories and popular histories of the frontier."
The Western then, can act as a stage for deconstructing the very myths American traditionalists prop up. It is a genre that has remained a constant in our collective psyche. Narrative cinema in America can be traced back to Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery from 1903. The genre configurations are already in place- a group of desperadoes rob a train and discover a posse hot on their heels. At the turn of the century, the moviegoers were aghast at a moving train on screen. 120 years later, Killers of the Flower Moon follows Ernst who is brought into Osage County on a train.
As Quentin Tarantino put it: "More than any other genre, even though they take place hundreds of years ago, Westerns reflect the decade in which they were made more than musicals, period dramas and even comedies."
DEPICTION OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN
The Native Americans consist of a multitude of tribes, each with a distinct language. Yet they get thrown in a bucket of similar characteristics and features. One language, braids, war paint, they speak broken English. It rhymes with the idea of them not being Native English speakers and incompatible with Western morals and values thus creating a justification for their extermination. Historically, Native Americans were polyglots. They spoke the language of other tribes and people they were in trade with.
When you look at the dynamic of how Native Americans have been represented in the West, you have to go back to the Wild West shows. It is a direct link to how it played out in the American mind. This was around the 1870's, where stage plays were put on and had Native Americans performing who had been veterans of these expansionist wars. When these stage plays toured the country, it was the publics first view of what Native Americans looked like. Many of them from the Northern Plains. So what you have is the Northern Plains style of dress. These plays would showcase "White civilization against Indian savagery" propaganda of how these wars played out.
The earliest films we have of Native Americans are the ones in the 1890s starring Annie Oakley. That these films came about parallel to the birth of American cinema is not coincidence. 100s of Indians were used in these early silent films. Native American filmmaker James Young Deer made a number of films showing Indians having agency and pushed against a lot the tropes of the time. This work has been largely forgotten by the general public.
The advent of sound caused the work Native Americans previously had to dry up, causing them to go back to their reservations. It created a void which led to the proliferation of a practice known as red face, where a white actor would be sprayed with a reddish powder giving them a darker kind of appearance.
HAYS CODE
We can't talk about the development of the Western into what it is today without bringing up the Hayes code. There was a period of five to ten years in the late 1910s and early 20s where films had gotten a little racy. The Goldwyns and Lanskys and Mayers and Zanucks wanted to stay behind the scenes and keep making their movies and their money but in order to do that they wanted to send a message that they weren't going to rock the boat any more in terms of the stories they were telling. They got together an d hired a man named Hays, who instituted the Hays Code in 1934 which proclaimed, "Obscenity in spoken word, gesture, episode, plot, is against divine and human law, and hence altogether outside of the range of subject matter or treatment." This was the executives in Hollywood saying, let us run the show, and you will get 150 features a year that glorify innocence and the absence of conflict. These rules governed all of film and television from 1934 to 1968.
These creative shackles didn't hold on all artists during this time. In particular, film noir and the Western became genres in which saw subversive subject matter, dark undertones and peeling back of Americana during the post-World War II era.
"If you're an artist, when you're confronted with those kinds of strictures, you can refuse to participate or you can try and find a way to internalize them such that it doesn't distort the story you're trying to tell. And so some of the great storytellers in films of the thirties and forties extrapolated a character who was very laconic."
David Milch writes of the Hays Code in his book A Life's Work.
BEGINNINGS OF THE ANTI-WESTERN
Historian Patricia Limerick's book Legacy of Conquest helps deconstruct the idea of the West from a traditional perspective. "If Hollywood wanted to capture the center of Western history, its movies would be about real estate. John Wayne would have been neither a gunfighter nor a sheriff, but a surveyor, speculator or claims lawyer. The showdowns would occur in the land office or the courtroom; weapon would be deeds and lawsuits, not six-guns. Moviemakers would have to find some cinematic way in which proliferating lines on a map could keep the audience rapt." The demands of story draw out the larger-than-life characters of the genre.
Indeed, Western history is a story structured by the drawing of borders. Hollywood and it's 'dream factory' image wouldn't take the genre to a place of such business minded venture. Instead, it relied on classical storytelling. Through this storytelling however, filmmakers would be able to smuggle in ideas contrary to the white hat, black hat narrative.
By the 40s and 50s, the archetypes had already been established. The lawman, the loner, the outlaw, and the gunfighter. We don't see the cracks in ardent patriotism of the frontier until the 40s and 50s. When we get to The Ox-Bow Incident in 1943, William A. Wellman showcases a diatribe against lynch law, decrying the human tendency to follow false leaders, create scapegoats and succumb to criminality in the name of protecting society. It was the first film to shine a light on the darker corners of the genre that went unexplored. The Western until then was a rallying cry on which people would turn to when confronted with progressive reforms. When The Ox-Bow Incident premiered, America was not ready for it. Box office receipts were lackluster. Henry Morgan shared an anecdote in an interview where he was in the theater during it's premiere and Orson Welles was there. The audience was not receptive. After the film was over, Welles pulled him aside and told him "they don't realize what they just saw." Somewhere in another theater, a teenage Sam Peckinpah would be watching the same movie and he knew exactly what he saw, a masterpiece of acting, writing and directing.
Riding on the coattails of Wellman was Samuel Fuller, whose I Shot Jesse James is one of the earliest example of the anti-western. In both narrative and aesthetic, Fuller upends the conventions of the traditional Western. Bob Ford who is paranoid and insecure is put front and center in the narrative. When we think of images of the genre we think of wide shots and landscape. Fuller instead gives up close ups and interiors.
JOHN FORD
John Ford hit the ground running in 1939 with Stagecoach. It was the first of the 'adult westerns.' It took character types like the drunken doctor, the hooker with a heart of gold, the unscrupulous banker, the good badman, the gentleman with a dubious past and mixed them into this subversive recipe. The movie is an ensemble piece and Ford manages to keep every character alive and interesting. It made John Wayne a star. But the other players are nothing to sneeze at: Claire Trevor, George Bancroft, Andy Devine, Thomas Mitchell and John Carradine all have exceptional performances. During the action centerpiece/wagon chase of the film is a stuntman jumping from horse to horse that had me holding my breath. The modern action genre can be traced back to this particular scene and how Ford handles the direction of it. Over the course of his career, his take on the western would evolve with time.
When we get to his post WWII work, specifically My Darling Clementine, there is a darkness hanging over the characters. They are lost, alone. The hero of the film, Wyatt Earp, like several Ford heroes, rights wrongs and goes away. We see it in the titular Young Mr. Lincoln, we see it in Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath and Ethan in The Searchers. Wyatt Earp has noble intentions and seeks law and order. Yet he puts on a badge for four days just to avenge the murdered James Earp. Both Wyatt and Pa Glanton, the antagonist, are bound to the wilderness code. To enter the world of Wyatt Earp is to enter a world hurdling toward doom.
It's impossible to talk about the proliferation of American Myth through the Western without talking about John Ford and John Wayne. And it is equally impossible to talk about both without talking about The Searchers. The film can be seen as having two concerns. The first being the depiction of racism toward the Native American. The second coming from the time in which it was made; the Cold War narrative of being Red or dead. The Searchers brings these two concerns into the framework of a fable and makes a crucial connection between the ideological basis of domestic racism and the ideological premises of the Cold War. When it is revealed Debra has started to assimilate into the Indian tribe, Ethan Edwards takes on a 'better dead than red' mentality when he threatens to shoot her.
It is a film which turns Western heroism inside out, showing the lone gunman who acts in the name of a nascent civilization as a warped, destructive force. Before making the film, Ford told film critic Jean Mitry, "I should like to do a tragedy, the most serious in the world, that turned into the ridiculous." In the character of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards, the film mocks the very idea of solitary heroism by having the goals of the quest- the finding of Debbie and the killing of Scar- fulfilled by other people while Ethan's efforts are nihilistically concentrated on trying to kill his niece. As Ethan's search intensifies through the film, it becomes clear him and Scar are the only characters who fully understand each other. Scar's rationale for killing white settlers resembles Ethan's rationale for killing Indians: Scar tells him, "Two sons killed by white men. For each son I take many scalps."
By the end of the picture, it is not about rescue but about the endless cycle of violence perpetuated by a populist narrative. Ethan Edwards is left wandering.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is Ford's most wistful about the death of the untamed frontier. The visual contrast between this film and The Searchers is stark. Gone are the vistas and majestic buttes of Monument Valley, replaced by soundstage work both realistic and expressionistic. In this way, Liberty Valance almost resembles a theater piece, with an emphasis on interiors that give a sense of enclosure.
It is a profoundly skeptical reexamination of American history and mythology. Acting as both a career summation to Ford and a precursor to films like The Wild Bunch, the film anticipates the country's loss of faith in government and acknowledges the growing brutality in American life and the Western genre.
By shooting Liberty Valance, while taming the forces of anarchy and making room for civilization to prosper, renders obsolete the pioneer values of self-reliance represented by Tom Doniphon and corrupts Ransom Stoddard's moral character. Joseph McBride points out "the framing of the duel between Stoddard and Valance, eerily foreshadows the "grassy knoll" and the ambiguities surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The kind of public skepticism that watershed event unleashed is at the heart of Liberty Valance, whose hidden story of behind-the-scenes manipulation suggests that American history and the democratic process itself are something of a sham, a confidence trick played on the public by slick politicians and compliant reporters."
Through these four films, we see not just John Ford's idea of the western evolve, we see the genre itself evolve with them. Ford was known as a mythmaker. Toward the end of his career, he decided to reevaluate the genre he helped shape. At the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when the reporter delivers the iconic line "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend" then shows how Stoddard is doomed to live a false image. When we look back on the western before this film, we see the legend play out in myriad ways. When we look forward, we see the echoes of fact ring throughout the rest of the genre.
HOWARD HAWKS
Howard Hawks has showed how deft he is at taking on any genre. Whether it is screwball comedy, crime, or horror. Howard Hawks had a simplistic way of filmmaking when contrasted with Ford, who was a more poetically visual storyteller. Simplistic doesn't equate to bad, it just means there was a more basic storytelling approach. Everything is thought out and briskly paced.
John Ford made John Wayne a Star with Stagecoach. Howard Hawks turns him into an Actor with Red River. He flips Wayne's stardom by having him play an unlikable character. One that certainly had to have influenced Ford's decision to have him play an unlikable character in The Searchers.
Rio Bravo sees American individual heroism only arising because of the collective efforts of a group.
A reoccurring theme of Hawks pictures is that of the professional measuring someone else. It a code by which the men in his films live by. In Rio Bravo, John Wayne's John Chance asks Dean Martin's Dude, "Do you think you're good enough?" It's about competence and courage in confrontation. Dude reclaims his competence by making a quick draw to take out the man perched like a hawk in the corner.
During the Cold War, John Wayne became one of Hollywood's biggest stars. His roles such as Ethan Edwards and a Civil War captain who goes on to subdue the Apache on the Western frontier in Fort Apache are emblematic of the type of values of not just Wayne, but of America at the time. An America that divided the world into good guys and bad guys. Wayne's heroic masculinity would become a touchstone of manhood for the white Christian male.
THE 50s
The 50s might as well be called 'the decade of the western'. In 1950 alone, 100 westerns were made. The decade saw big name directors like Fred Zinneman, William Wyler, George Stevens and Nicholas Ray try their hand at the genre while stalwarts like Ford and Hawks continued to put out classics.
After the premiere of High Noon, Fred Zinneman stated "we wanted to see whether we could take the rigid classic form of the western and give it new meaning." The screenwriter Carl Foreman wrote, in part, about his experiences with the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC). Foreman was considered an uncooperative witness when he refused to implicate 'fellow travelers'; before High Noon was finished, he took himself to England knowing he would be blacklisted.
Johnny Guitar has entered cinephile ranks as one of the more subversive Westerns of the fifties. It realigns gender roles and presents a political subtext relevant to the time- the paranoia of the established order. Ward Bond who was one of the leaders of the anti-Communist witch hunts in Hollywood plays the evil sheriff leading the lynch mob with Mercedes McCambridge. Sterling Hayden was compromised by the blacklist because he had to name names.
The film doesn't just subvert the genre through political means, it does it by aesthetic choices. For the entire first act, Nicholas Ray shoots the film inside of Vienna's bar. Having studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright, it is noticeable how in love with interiors he is as opposed to the traditional Monument Valley sets other filmmakers would use. This was Ray's first color film and there is an abundance of bold primary colors in the outfits the characters wear. Martin Scorsese observes how the use of color here reverses the genre's iconography. Black is the color of Mercecdes McCambridge and her lawmen while the outcasts were endowed with rich colors or even pure white.
Director Nicholas Ray is able to re-enact the rituals of the Western while disturbing its equilibrium through an all-female showdown at the end, allowing it to measure up to the most progressive films in the genre during that decade.
William Wyler intended The Big Country to be an allegory for The Cold War. Where one family, the Terrills, represent capitalist America and the Hennessy's represent the Soviet Union. Burt Ives, who plays Rufus Hennessy makes a 'we will bury you' speech reminiscent of Khruschev's warning to Western leaders. Gregory Peck's character of James McKay can be considered as almost a stand-in for the UN because of his pacifist stance. Both Wyler and Peck were more liberal leaning and want a peaceful resolution to the problem between both parties. Like many westerns made in the 50's, The Big Country deals with the notion of negotiating with the enemy rather than engaging in violent confrontation.
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Two names in particular are synonymous with the West in the 50's and they are Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher.
From 1950 to 1960, Anthony Mann made 19 films and 11 of them were westerns. Most famous of these is Winchester '73. The film has us follow a tool of conquest: the rifle. It ends up in multiple hands throughout the picture which asks us about its place in terms of a larger place in American history. James Stewart portrays his protagonist with emotional honesty and self-doubt in a film which portrays violence, even if morally justifiable, as psychologically damaging.
In Budd Boetticher's Ranown cycle of Westerns, low budget B pictures, we begin to see the prototype of the kind of film Peckinpah and Leone would take further. One where the characters on the screen, good or bad, are capable of dying. No one is afforded special status by the narrative. In The Tall T for example, there is not a single man who isn't violent or selfish or has a disregard for the land they inhabit. It's a remarkably honest film for the time it came out of. Boetticher's western take on another theme, that of the loner. In Ride Lonesome, Boetticher regular Randolph Scott craves revenge on the man who hanged his wife. By the end of the picture, he comes to understand the toll vengeance takes on him.
In 1950, 34% of the films in America were Westerns. By 1963, Westerns represented 9% of Hollywood output. The Western was dying in America. There was another country whose filmmakers saw this decline and took it upon themselves to give their own flavor.
1964- 1978
The Spaghetti Western
It takes an outsider to understand America. Or at the very least, paint a depiction without any filter. The Italian directors of the 60s making their films on America grew up under fascism. The legacy of the 'Spaghetti Western' is that of a boomerang. Italian filmmakers grew up on Ford and Hawks and made their own version of the Western. In doing so, they would end up influencing American directors who came after them.
The neo realism films coming out of Italy during the 40s and 50s were critical darlings, though in strictly economic terms, their impact was marginal. The taste of Italian audiences was more geared toward the American cinema of the time.
Since the 50's, the Italian film industry depended on its economic well-being by turning out films in cycles. An occasional success would prompt an avalanche of cheaply made films, financed by guarantees from distributors or help from abroad. Just as suddenly, the industry would re-tool for a different product, which was thought to be repeatable. This approach would not lead to stability; Italian newspapers would report the film industry in a slump every five years. What it did lead to were a lot of films. One such example of this cycle is the Spaghetti Western. All roads that spring out from this period lead back to Sergio Leone.
Leone had made over 50 films as an assistant director before taking the reins as director. It's when he learned about the close-up. When we see the close-up in a Sergio Leone film, it's an expression of emotion. He learned from Vittorio De Sica's attention to detail by working with him. The neo-realists were not his only source of inspiration. When asked in 1984 whether or not he took part in the fascination of Italian intellectuals for America in the postwar period his response was: "Let's be frank: I was impatient to get away from neo-realism. For me, cinema is imagination. It can say things by using the resources of the fable. The doctrinal sort of film never appealed to me...So the encounter with Wise, Walsh and Zinneman was essential for me, above all to understand how a certain kind of cinema was constructed. I believe the experience helped open certain windows on a kind of cinema which could have thoughts, and at the same time be spectacular."
Italian novelist and journalist Alberto Moravia incisively points out:
"The dominant theme is no longer the struggle between the lone, intrepid individual and the negative forces of nature and society: the dominant theme is the scramble for money. The main characters are everyday delinquents who were in the background of American films but who, in Italian ones, have invaded the foreground to become the protagonists. The qualities which make them attractive, in the eyes of our public, are not generosity and chivalry, but guile street wisdom and 'ingenuity'.
1964 is when Leone would release the first in what would be known as 'The Dollars Trilogy'. The film is A Fistful of Dollars and the protagonist is The Man with No Name played by Clint Eastwood. The Spanish factions or mafia which runs the towns in the film are a substitute for law and order. There is a complete absence of morality. We want Eastwood's character to be the good guy. We need to believe in someone in this town. Instead, we continue to see him take money from the Rojos and the Baxters and set one against the other. We don't see him commit a moral act until 2/3rds of the way into the picture when he tries to protect the family and set them towards the border to the United States. Instead of the 'man's got to do what a man's got to do' type of character, we get a far more pragmatic character.
If Sergio Leone had all the grace, Sergio Corbucci had all the rough edges. In the Video Archives podcast, Roger Avary mentioned how director Sergio Corbucci in particular observes "that unregulated human behavior is a product of and responsible for the rape, murder, theft, corruption and veritable cornucopia of cretinous constitutionals that built this country to become the glory that it is today." Corbucci is entirely not concerned about a hero in his films. There is nothing heroic about the leads in his Westerns. They are avengers who have blood- soaked revenge they need to quench. A decade earlier, these characters would be the bad guys.
1969- 1992
When the Vietnam War started in 1964, supporters and critics described it another frontier war. As the war escalated, soldiers in the field dubbed their air and ground operations "Sam Houston," Daniel Boone," and "Crazy Horse" and cut the ears off dead Vietnamese as trophies. "It was," the historian Richard Drinnon noted, "as if Cowboys and Indians were the only game American invaders knew." In the book Dispatches, Michael Herr writes: "You couldn't use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter."
On March 16, 1968, American soldiers of the Twenty-Third Infantry Division entered the Quang Ngai Province village of Son My. They believed two hamlets of Viet Cong were harbored there from the retreat after the Tet Offensive two months earlier. Following orders to destroy walking, crawling, or growing, Charlie Company soldiers slaughtered men, women, children, and infants. All told, between 350 and 500 Vietnamese died in what came to be known as the Mi Lai Massacre.
Back home, racial unrest reached it's nadir with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Political unrest at home and abroad helped foment protest and rebellion toward the status quo.
Between his first feature, Ride the High Country and what would be considered his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah had suffered a string of setbacks. An artist who refused to compromise his values, he had made his fair share of enemies in Hollywood, alienated power brokers and was a heavy drinker. It seemed like his career as a director was over. That is, until he was able to achieve a triumphant return. Set in Mexico, The Wild Bunch was a love letter to the country which had a sharp contrast to the country Peckinpah had grown up in. To Sam, the United States was a place of soul-crushing technocrats, where the human spirit was devoured. Where freedom was sacrificed for the comfort of conformity. Mexico, by contrast was a place where people understood life comprises both angels and devils. A place where people expressed emotions openly. It was the opposite of America's sterility.
During the production of The Wild Bunch in 1968, the Hayes Code had been lifted. The effect going forward would allow Peckinpah, among a myriad other directors to not hold back in their depiction of the more unsavory and darker aspects of the Western. For Peckinpah, his reception toward westerns of the fifties would inform his approach toward how far he would go. In his mind, John Ford didn't go far enough with the villainous sensibilities of Ethan Edwards of The Searchers. A director who did push the boundaries for him was George Stevens in Shane. He used his own experiences from World War II to show how ugly violence was and what death was really like.
There is no sugarcoating anything in The Wild Bunch. In the opening five minutes we are introduced to a group of savage killers. Yet as the film goes on, we see their dedication to each other and how that dedication eventually leads them to do something for someone else.
The idea of going to Mexico to pretend the Old West is still alive but even there we see the automobile. "I saw one just like it in Waco" Pike says to his gang. We get throughout the picture the sense of the ending of things.
Perhaps most haunting of Peckinpah's work is Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. His vision is an eulogy in its telling. The strains of Bob Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door haunt the frames of a Slim Pickens stumbling over to the side of a river to die. A lyrical destiny awaits the fates of both main characters. Two gunfighters who have sold out to the powers that be and all they have left is to stare at their broken reflections.
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid tells the story of how American power and greed corrode freedom and friendship. He deromanticizes everything then romanticizes that deromanticization. The real-life Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid lived long enough to create larger than life legends that swept away facts. Pat Garrett was a southerner who fled the wreckage of the Confederacy for the Southwest when he was still a teenager. He eventually became a US marshal and Texas Ranger. Billy the Kid would be dispatched by Pat Garrett at the age of twenty-one. Dozens of actors have portrayed Billy the Kid on screen. None quite match the performance of Kris Kristofferson.
The film represents the last Western Sam Peckinpah would make. It showcases a world where bohemians, drifters, outlaws roamed free. Men born out of time only for their inevitable demise to come to bare. The western before Peckinpah was a mourning for the frontier and cautious optimism for the approach of civilization. Peckinpah brought out a resigned eulogy for it. Pat sleeping with five women is less celebratory than giving into the inevitability of a degrading future. The rejection of social power structures and embrace of subjective morality make Peckinpah a crucial author of the Western narrative.
When Robert Altman set out to make McCabe and Ms. Miller, he wanted to make 'a western with no dust.' Then again, no genre Altman has taken on produced a conventional result.
Set designer Stan Dragoti plays a large role in Altman's production. He made the entire town look dirty, dingy and cold. Every part except the whorehouse. The choice represents the contrast of what McCabe brings to the town vs. what the people of the town have been dealing with. A staple of the community is the church and after it burns down and people go to the whorehouse, they see a place brimming with humanity. Something the church did not have.
One of the common motifs of the genre is the lone man who comes into town and changes the course of history. When we see McCabe come into town underscore by Leonard Cohen's ballads, we get the sense that greatness will not fall on this man. When he sets his eyes on Mrs. Miller, he pretends to be more than what he is in order to impress her. Mrs. Miller herself organizes herself upon the embrace of illusion. We see these types of illusions play out all over Altman's work. Yet he never sentimentalizes the individuals or their community which are intoxicated by them.
HEAVEN'S GATE AND BEYOND
All parties eventually come to an end. On November 19, 1980, Heaven's Gate premiered. A film that faced numerous setbacks, went over budget (going from $12 million to $44 million) and received bad press throughout it's production. When it was released, United Artists pulled it from theaters after critical backlash. It wound up grossing only $3.5 million and signaled the end of director driven film production. United Artists ceased to be an independent studio and was sold to MGM. The career of its director, Michael Cimino, never fully recovered.
For the next five years, no studio wanted to touch the western. What happened instead was the genre donned a different duster in the form of the sci fi film and horror. Films like Near Dark, The Hitcher and Outland smuggled in Western tropes into their respective screenplays. It wasn't until 1985, when Clint Eastwood released Pale Rider, the genre was given a much-needed boost. It was his first western since 1976's The Outlaw Josey Wales. After this, Walter Hill would release Extreme Prejudice, a Peckinpah coded action flick, John Landis gave us the Western comedy Three Amigos and Young Guns was released a year after.
The Eighties saw a drought of this particular genre more tied to creative risk than any specific political under current. Yet it would be amiss to call the two mutually exclusive. Heaven's Gate was a film based on the Johnson County War and revolved around a dispute between land barons and European immigrants of modest means in Wyoming during the 1890s. Cimino's vision concerned reconstruction and going forward to build something new. It is about what happens when people were desperately trying to become Americans.
Two months after Heaven's Gate premiered, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Putting the ball in motion toward a new political climate. The loss in Vietnam had radicalized a generation of veterans, pushing many into the ranks of white supremacist groups. Ronald Regan effectively tapped into this radicalization, which helped lift him to victory in 1980. With his presidential victory, he helped contain this radicalization by reigniting the Cold War and by doing so, prevented the radicalization from spilling over into domestic politics. He focused on Central America, giving support to the Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. This generated millions of refugees who would flee to the United States.
His administration would craft the Immigration Reform and Control Act. This act would increase enforcement and require employers to confirm citizenship status of their employees. The bill would come under fire by many migrants' rights advocates because of it conditioning reform on the impossible to fulfill promise that border could be sealed through an expansion of police power. Despite this, enough Republicans and Democrats came together to pass the legislation. As a result, an estimated 2.7 million undocumented residents became citizens.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States became the world's lone superpower. In June 1989, Reagan's successor George H.W. Bush said "We saw the frontier beyond the stars, the frontier beyond ourselves. In the frontiers ahead, there are no boundaries."
With the so-called liberation of Kuwait under Bush, the lingering effects of the 70s were over. "The New Right project of re-sanctifying the mission was successful." Greg Grandin states in The End of the Myth. "Reaganism, as an ideological realignment, hit its stride promising to overcome limits. But it would eventually hit its own limit in the cultural politics of immigration."
In the interim between the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 attacks, an insidious quiet fell over politics. A few soundbites penetrated this veil. "Read my lips, no new taxes. I did not have sexual relations with Miss Lewinsky." Having lived through the 90s and adorning it with so much love for the nostalgic joy it has brought, it can be easy to romanticize the decade. For that matter, any decade someone grows up in can bring them to romanticize it. "Things were so much easier back then. It ain't like it use to be. Times were much simpler back then."
Bill Clinton would be inaugurated as the 42nd President of the United States on January 20, 1993.
Both parties would pitch NAFTA as an answer to this loss of purpose, preventing the country from backsliding into isolationism. The effects it would have on the American worker however, proved disastrous. Chris Hedges describes it as the greatest betrayal of the working class since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
The Clinton years normalized the most severe consequences of border militarization and mass detention. Building on Reagan's legislation, he would pass the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Acts. These would expand the category for aggravated felons and widen the net for deportation of legal permanent residents with minor convictions.
There were other nefarious acts passed by Clinton through the 90s. The 1994 Crime Bill which militarized police, the deregulation of the FCC, the repeal of Glass Steagall which helped precipitate the housing crisis of 2008. NAFTA's targeting of indigenous lands and union jobs, fatal border militarization and deportation of legal residents helped push the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and push the Republican Party so far to the Right they echoed full on fascism.
The 90s opened with a bang for the genre. Dances With Wolves swept Best Picture and Best Director at the 1991 Academy Awards. While its attempts to paint the Native American as three dimensional and sympathetic are admiral, it still falls back on the Caucasian hero. It replays the trope of the white man as the noble savior of a primitive people. Kevin Costner and screenwriter Michael Blake crafted a film while radically breaking in convention, still maintains notions of sentimentality and romanticism.
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There is a key scene in Unforgiven which takes place in a jailhouse. In it, Sheriff Bill Daggett brings up English Bob's bio 'The Duke of Death' or 'The Duck of Death' as he calls it. He enters into a dialogue with Bob's biographer Beauchamp and corrects him on what really took place in the Blue Bottle Saloon described in the biography. Because he was there. Piece by piece, Bill methodically takes apart the lies spun. We see myths being debunked in real time. Cut down before they grow on to become legends spun around a nighttime campfire. We see a story which gave English Bob the reputation of being one of the more feared gunmen into one of luck and coincidence.
It is immediately followed by a campfire scene between Will Munny, Ned and the Scofield Kid in which the Kid asks Will about 'that business up in Jackson County' on how Will pulled out his pistol and two men who had their rifles trained on him. and shot them. He doesn't recollect the incident which sets him apart from Daggett, who does remember the event he was a part of. Daggett's almost gleeful inability to forget and Munny's willfulness to forget horrific events bring them toward a fatal confrontation.
In both scenes, the movie explores truth vs. myth.
Unforgiven doesn't stop there in its debunking of the Western genre. The character of the Scofield Kid embodies all that is larger than life about it. A person whose shadow outsizes his actual stature. In a genre filled with gunfighters racking up body counts and stealing women in saloons, Eastwood's picture shows just how difficult it is to take a life. American culture is rife with macho masculinity and guns. We see it on bumper stickers, ads and campaign slogans. The Scofield Kid brags about killing five men but can't see more than 50 yards. When it comes to take action against someone and he does, the conflict shakes him to his very core. "Hell of a thing killin' a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have." Mummy tells Scofield. Many people nowadays think they are William Munny when in reality they are the Scofield Kid.
A year later, another iconic western would be released. Tombstone, a film depicting quite a different Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday from previous versions of the story. Here is a Wyatt Earp who comes out not with the word HERO but HUMAN BEING. In keeping with the subversion of previous versions the relationship between Wyatt and Earp is fresh because there is no confrontation between the two. Something we have seen time and time again. Dramaturgy would suggest pitting the two leads against each other at some point but history suggests something far more interesting.
This doesn't let Doc escape from the fact of being a stone-cold killer. A fearless one at that. Wyatt's two brothers Virgil and the youngest, spiritual minded Morgan round out the complexity. On the darker side of the characters, Curly Bill and The Ringo Kid and Ike Clanton represent light. Each of these performances and characters are fully realized and multi-dimensional.
THE 00s
In the 80s and 90s, the border between Texas and Mexico became a zone of lawless violence and impunity. For the most part though, the border, for all of its paramilitized cruelty, remained apart, a world away from the American heartland. The news from the border, however cruel, stayed beyond the nation's consciousness as Reagan launched us beyond the frontier and Clinton separated the US interests from the world's interests.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon gave American politics a sense of purpose. Something that had been languishing since the end of the Cold War. The sense of purpose and collective mourning gave way to Americans being exploited by the powers that be through the Patriot Act and the 'othering' of the Muslim community. The blame was quickly assigned to the Middle Eastern man who works at the local deli. Its reverberations are still felt to this day as a justification for the various wars in the Middle East. Looking at what is going on today, 9/11 truly feels like it broke the back of America and it hasn't recovered from the event. The same people who praised NAFTA as the moral equivalent of the frontier now said the same thing about invading Afghanistan and Iraq.
The disastrous occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and pushing through one of the largest tax cuts in the nation's history helped foment discord at home. Photographs came back from Abu Ghraib prison showing U.S. personnel cheerfully torturing prisoners. After the photos circulated widely, many people came to believe that the war was not just illegal, but deceptive in its justification and immoral in its execution.
The twenty-first century mythic figure of the tall, bearded and roughly handsome white man in a checkered keffiyeh wrapped around his neck and a black rifle in his hands has become the reincarnation of the rugged frontiersman. The role of this figure is to bring law and order to the fringes of the empire and to protect the white family from the brown-skinned natives incapable of appreciating the virtues of civilization and democracy.
Every president since Regan has raised ethical stakes through murderous wars in third world countries and corporate trade treaties and every president coded the justification as a 'moral necessity.' "The disillusionment generated by Bush's war on terrorism, the velocity with which the whole event was revealed to be a sham, was extraordinary." Greg Gandin writes in End of the Myth. In the last months of the Bush Presidency, the housing and credit markets began to collapse. Mortgage and foreclosures spiked. It was over for the Republican Party. For now.
Three years after the 9/11 attacks, Deadwood premiered on HBO. The series creator, David Milch, originally conceived the show as centering around the Apostle Paul, whose life and vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, revolved around attempting to forge a new society. After he pitched his show to HBO, they declined the offer because they already had a show centered around Ancient Rome, titled appropriately, Rome. Milch needed another character, time and place. Stumbling on the town of Deadwood proved fruitful. Nero becomes America, apostles become gunslingers and the cross that drew them became the promise of gold.
In a scene in which a minister delivers a sermon during a funeral he tells us of St. Paul. "By one spirit, we are all baptized into one body. Whether we be Jew or Gentile, bond or free, and they've all been made to drink in 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 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. 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."
As much as its forebears The Wire and The Sopranos were about the fracturing of America, Deadwood was about the coming together of community. Instead of order devolving into chaos, the show imposes order onto chaos. Throughout the show, characters continue to make sacrifices and adjustments that are necessary to accommodate being part of society. The need for community cuts to the fundamental core of humanity.
Self Determination Theory holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do, they need to feel authentic in their lives and they need to feel connected to others. These needs far outweigh other values like beauty, money, status in regard to determining human happiness. One such example of this intrinsic need for community is how early European settlers often preferred to join Native tribes due to their rich communal life.
The Good Fences Make Good Neighbors premise of the rugged individual which has been parroted ad infinitum through the conservative mindset goes against human nature. When a disaster occurs, it is not everyone for themselves. People help each other out. The people who benefit from individualism are the wealthy. Those who control the narrative. You are propagandized in America to believe people cannot be better than that. In this sense, the show Deadwood cuts to the core of human nature and the belief in community.
When a tragedy occurs in the town of Deadwood, the understanding was that how to distract the populus from any spiritual unease is to give them a more convenient object in order to accommodate their anxieties. The architect of this accommodation is Al Swearengen, who opens up a saloon to answer for the spiritual yearning of the townsfolk. The proper receptacles for anxiety are drugs, gambling, women and alcohol. All of which Swearengen deals in. It is his character and Sheriff Seth Bullock who act as the dueling gods of the town.
In an interview with Keith Carradine, David Milch explained how back in the days of the Hays Code, the more gifted writers who worked within the western genre were able to internalize the pernicious effect of controlling statutes like the Hays Code censorship by finding equivalence within the story without doing violence to the character of the story. You try and conceive a character for whom obscenity is an expression of weakness. This was the source of development for the cowboy. A man of few words but deep uncomplicated morality.
This exploration of language continues further into the series Deadwood. Known amongst it's fans as the filthiest Iambic Pentameter spoken, it takes Shakespearean themes and dialogue and coats it in the obscenity of the 1880s. This language spoken by the likes of Al Swearengen is pitted amongst the language spoken by more highly educated (read: book smart) characters whose dialogue is born out of the popularity of Victorian literature of the time. Even a character like Mr. Wu whose entire vocabulary consists of 'cocksucker' and 'Swearengen', can modulate those words to form an idea or concept.
The show only lasted three seasons before being canceled in 2006. It would be given a proper send off in 2019 in the form of Deadwood: The Movie.
A year after Deadwood's finale, three films came to dominate the awards circuit and film landscape of that year- There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford.
The first of these, There Will Be Blood, fulfills the economic realities of the West which Patricia Nelson Limerick's book Legacy of Conquest discusses. Limerick's book critiqued Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis which the core idea was the frontier being the primary force shaping American character, self-reliance and American exceptionalism. Limerick counters that the west was an unbroken legacy of conflict, resource extraction and environmental struggle. The source for There Will Be Blood being Upton Sinclair's Oil! couldn't prove to be more fitting in this instance. Loosely inspired by the American oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, the book was a critique of unchecked capitalism and the conflict between labor and capital.
Paul Thomas Anderson dips his brushes in a mixture of oil and blood to paint a picture of Daniel Plainview, a prospector who possesses a single minded and ruthless determination into being a "self-made" businessman. The familiar building blocks of the genre are there: horses, trains, magnificent vistas. Yet as we follow Plainview down his path of relentless greed, there is no John Wayne or Gary Cooper coming to give Plainview his comeuppance. What obstructs his path are minor humiliations and inconveniences. He wants no one to succeed and yet, there is no end goal in sight.
The idea of the self-made billionaire is a myth that is perpetuated to this day. In the wake of the economic collapse and the facade of Middle Eastern wars pulled over the eyes of the American public in order to extract oil and other resources, There Will Be Blood could not have come at a more prescient time. The concept of Daniel Plainview is one that stretches back to JP Morgan, Rockefeller and points forward to Elon Musk.
We arrive at the end of the film with the husk of a man. Passed out from being drunk and committing acts of violence. This is after he denounces his son as being a "bastard in a basket." Instead of a commentary of the westerns of old or a morality play, PTA gives us a character study rivaling what you would expect from a novel. Fiction is a vehicle to hear a character's innermost thoughts. It is through Daniel Day Lewis' performance we see this interiority.
I've done deep dive into No Country For Old Men in a past post, so all of the analysis come be found there.
The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford invites discussion just by the title alone. It's the statement of a crime and both the victim and the perpetrator are revealed. The entire movie moves toward this predetermined outcome, thus carrying the weight of inevitability as we come to that moment where Jesse James decides to climb up a chair and dust a picture. This moment cleaves the film in two: where everything before tells of Jesse James while everything after the assassination gives us over to the narrative of Robert Ford.
The first words of narration are "He was growing into middle and was living then in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue." The use of past tense immediately frames the story as more of a eulogy than a traditional voiceover. At one point the narrator mentions James' blinking more than normal. This narration unfolds over Jesse not blinking at all. This deception carries on through the film.
It is a lie that reveals a deeper truth about memory. This is how Jesse James was remembered. The narration acts almost as an amalgamation of the people who read about his misdeeds in a newspaper or shared stories of him in a saloon. Memory is unreliable. When we remember someone, we tend to highlight what made them stand out. Qualities about them tend to fall away. To be narrated about it to be fixed in someone else's tense. It engages the listener and tells them what they are listening to are the facts of what they are seeing. But when the narration and visuals don't match up, it creates a dissonance. Thus, the use of narration can be an act of violence just as much as it is an act of preservation.
What we watch unfold then has the mood of a ghost story. We're being given a guided tour through a museum littered with the ghosts of the past and the main exhibit is one Jesse James.
The engine that drives Robert Ford is his wanting to be Jesse James. His thought is if he could be Jesse, he wouldn't have to worry about his brothers or anybody else not respecting him. Even through a brutal train robbery, Ford still sees James in a positive light. This warped perspective is captured by Roger Deakins' cinematography in a technique that uses a flaw in old vintage lenses called Lens Abberation. It causes a unique blur along the edge of the frame, showing how our perceptions can be wrong.
Through Jesse's taunts at a dinner table and continued scrutiny from his brothers, Bob slowly becomes disillusioned with the man Jesse is yet fixated on the man Jesse was. Admiration turns into resentment. In a key scene between Robert Ford and his brother Charlie, Robert tells his brother "Jesse is just a human being." Deconstructing the myth of James before carrying out his murder of the man.
After the assassination, the narrative switches to Robert Ford. 10 years go by in a mere 20 minutes. We watch his realization of what he has done. We watch the apathetic look on his face as if the only thing he inherited from him is his depression. The film ends on a note of tragedy. There are no heroes here. Only a broken man whose desperation leads to his undoing.
Kelly Reichardt's 2010 film Meek's Cutoff presents the male ego as a barren wasteland in which a group of settlers must traverse. It's a Western but doesn't function like one. At least not in the traditional sense.
During the Obama Administration, the Western genre would morph into many shapes. Some familiar. Some not so familiar. The Coen Brothers would remake True Grit in 2010, providing a more faithful adaptation to Charles Portis' novel than the 1969 Henry Hathaway classic. 8 years later, they would make The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Quentin Tarantino released Django Unchained in 2012, using the slave as the gunfighter. Continuing his revisionist history he started in his last film, Inglorious Basterds. He would release The Hateful Eight three years later. Trading in wide open vistas for a haberdashery. A film whose confined quarters and paranoia recalls The Thing and sense of mystery recall Agatha Christie.
2016
We come back to the John Wayne archetype. He could hardly be the poster boy of "family values" with his marital history of being married twice and thrice divorced. He was a chain-smoker and a hard drinker. None of this mattered. Especially to the Evangelical crowd who molded their values around him. He was a model of masculine strength, aggression and redemptive violence. Despite being rough around the edges, he would capture the hearts and minds of American evangelicals in the same way Donald Trump would. Both exhibit the view that toughness is a virtue and mercy is weakness.
John Wayne's own daughter would agree with this, endorsing Trump's Presidential run in 2016. Standing in front of a fake desert background and a wax statue of the gun toting Wayne at the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, Iowa, Trump intoned: "When you think about it, John Wayne represented strength, he represented power, he represented what the people are looking for today because we have exactly the opposite of John Wayne right now in this country."
Western tropes continue to infect American culture and politics. The white hat/black hat narrative forces simplistic, dangerous views on complex societal issues. Writer and TV showrunner Noah Hawley explains this in an essay he wrote for the Atlantic titled 'High Noon in America'.
On my way to work and especially around my neighborhood, I see flags constantly. Tied to bumpers of 4x4 trucks, bumper stickers, decals and stickers, they are on hats, shirts. This patriotism does not however, have a 1 to 1 correspondence to civic responsibility. In fact, it wholly rejects it. Sebastian Junger puts it, "The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile."
The resurgence of these trends has caused filmmakers to respond. The fifth season of Fargo, a show created by Hawley, focuses on Roy Tillman. Roy believes in tradition. The man is the head of the household and under him, the woman abides. He is the villain of the piece. The season received criticism for being 'woke' and 'needlessly applying anti-Trump messaging to Fargo's legacy', the application raised the question: is it justified? To that I answer, it fits like a hand in glove. Or a head in a ten-gallon hat. All art is political. Fargo is a distinctly American story. So, for the fifth season to have themes of the Western, it didn't feel forced so much as it felt inevitable.
We are told via the Western, the final showdown will settle things once and for all. A good guy with a gun will put down a bad guy with a gun. The word 'showdown' has become so ingrained in American vernacular, it has become an expectation when we see a narrative with a good guy and a bad guy. We expect the showdown in the third act. This is not what happens in the 1996 film Fargo. Nor does it happen in the show. Or, more importantly, real life. The fifth season of Fargo responded to the current times by championing the sense of justice and not the exploits of a single person. Hawley sets out to spotlight the collective efforts of a team of hardworking public servants who put in the hours and solve cases to bring the wicked to account.
What if the narrative was flipped though? What if a collective existed not to serve justice but greed?
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Killers of the Flower Moon is about a series of murders of the Osage people to bilk them out of their wealth they had accumulated after their discovery of oil on their land in the 1890s. At that time in history, the Osage were the richest people per capita anywhere in the world. Based off the 2017 David Grann book, Martin Scorsese took on the project
We see the narrative unfold through the eyes of Ernest Burkhart. Ernest is someone who came back from the war and immediately goes to his uncle, William Hale. Having been gone, he needs to learn how the country works and it is Hale who is his teacher. Ernest is a part of a long line of Scorsese characters who are small minded. Frank Sheeran in The Irishman. Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. These characters
Like Deadwood, Killers of the Flower Moon touches on the importance of language. Hale coaches Ernest by telling him when he is with the Osage, it is better to keep his mouth shut. They are a quiet, contemplative people. A key scene between Ernst and Molly takes place in her house during a storm and they are seated at a table. No dialogue. Just silence. The use of silence has been used throughout Scorsese's filmography. A notable example is the phone scene between Damon and DiCaprio in The Departed. In that scene, silence is used to create tension. In Killers of the Flower Moon, silence is used as a counterpoint to the constant dialogue from the white characters in the town. They scheme, plan, conspire, to steal and murder members of the Osage tribe.
The storm scene, as Soraya Roberts points out in her review for Defector, shows a collective inability in our culture to sit in silence without saying something reflexively, particularly when that silence is pregnant the with kind of contradiction art is meant to produce. The criticism of Lily Gladstone's performance is indicative of the conditioning filmgoers have had after 120 years of the stereotypical 'stoic Native American.'
Hale is able to integrate himself in the good graces of the Osage by speaking their language. He is someone who believes he is doing the right thing. He sees what he is doing as inevitable. So why not let 'nature take it's course.'
Frank Zappa once said, "The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see a brick wall at the back of the theater." Killers of the Flower Moon's denouement does not take place in a Mexican standoff. It takes place in a theater. It's a radio show where the director Martin Scorsese tells us what happened in the aftermath of the Osage murders. It is a scene in which the director shows his own complicity in the wiping away of the Osage and an attempt to make a corrective while also acknowledging his limited ability to do so. As with William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, Scorsese's film is just as much about the act of not stopping violence as the act of violence itself. Killers of the Flower Moon is a film not just about the Osage, but about settler America's relation to the Osage and more largely, to the world.
In 1903, a train from The Great Train Robbery caused people to run out of a theater in fear it was coming straight at them. Now, 120 years later, there are no exit doors on the theater anymore. Any idealism we have been sold for the past decades has been disposed of by continuous betrayal of the working class. We have no other option but to confront the lies and the myths sold to us.
The advent of social media has made it all the harder to maintain these pernicious facades. Whatever propaganda is spewed on mainstream media, it is debunked hours later on alternative media. Hatred of the elites started well before the rise of social media. The information economy has only exacerbated it. They have been bled of their legitimacy and the hemorrhaging is fatal. A prescient year where so many things came to a boil was 2020.
In 2025, I sat down in a theater and saw a movie that digs it's claws into this subject. The movie was Eddington. Set in 2020, it focuses on the hostilities between Sheriff Joe Cross and Mayor Ted Garcia against the backdrop of Covid, BLM protests, and civil unrest in the town. If the first act comes across as cringey 'both sides' centrism, then the second act only shows Ari Aster revealing his hand. Both sides are presented as unhinged because of how social media operates. So much of 2020 was spent inside on screen and phones.
When people's emotional and material needs are not being met, they turn elsewhere. In the case of Louise, Joe's wife, she turns to cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak to address the sexual abuse she suffered as a child. Ari Aster has said Peak is the embodiment of the internet. The danger of living in a digital ecosystem where people equate content with self-discovery.
Both cults and corporations (the data centers) present themselves as the threat amidst the red vs. blue battleground. Opportunists waiting in the shadows who leech off the division of those trapped in a vicious, binary cycle. This is by no means lessening the villainous motives of Joe Cross. He is a character who has seen all the classic John Wayne flicks and is consumed by patriotism. He is living in a Western.
When faced with uncertainty and threat, we crave comprehension and control, even more than usual. When these urges are on overdrive, they encourage us to latch onto any story that fits the bill. The more unstable the country becomes, the more people depend on narratives from social media and the news to make sense it all. These narratives will not enact change because it would break that dependance on those news cycles.
Eddington continues the tradition of the western as a space where beliefs and agendas can be entertained and demystified.
So what does a 250-year-old empire in decline look like when presented through the lens of a filmmaker? The Western genre has been called 'dead' before the advent of sound. It was declared dead after the failure of Heaven's Gate. In the ever-evolving landscape of the Western, I only see films with sharper teeth being able to poke through as new filmmakers continue to strip away the myths their predecessors meditated upon.
