I am taking a break on this blog from fine art and Western philosophy
to write about the philosophy of Westerns. The ones I have seen lately have
impressed me with the depth and complexity of their understanding of the human condition.
I grew up with TV Westerns: Cheyenne, Maverick, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke, but I
have no recollection of watching them at the movies. I do recall that during a hospitalization
at the age of five for a tracheotomy I had an argument with another patient about
whether to watch Howdy Doody or Hop Along Cassidy. I wanted Howdy Doody and he
wanted Hop Along Cassidy. The latter with his ten-gallon hat already seemed
dated to this five year old. I don’t recall who won that argument.
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| Solidarity Poster with Gary Cooper |
That there was something more to them than the idealization
of the Marlboro man in the wide open spaces of Monument Valley became obvious
to me years later, when a Polish friend in Paris, Bogdan Borkowski, a filmmaker and photographer,
who went on to document the Solidarity uprising (I just found a picture of him today June 5 2020 with
Lech Walesa), invited me to participate in his very private ritual,
which involved a screening of Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch”.
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| Bogdan Borkowski and Lech Walesa |
Drinking rectified
vodka ahead of time, which is almost 200 proof, we prepared ourselves for the delirium
of the last scene, where the Mexican Federales are picked off one by one, and fall to their death from the
rooftops of the Mexican town they are holding hostage. During this scene Bogdan
shouted out at the top of his lungs in utter approval of the massacre. I don’t
recall the response of the other theatre goers; maybe his cries were masked by
the sound of the machine gun fire, but for an outrageously disruptive public
display it ranks up there with Charles Giuliano cracking jokes about the play
we were watching during a performance at the A.R.T. and getting the audience immediately
around us to laugh in approval.
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| Peckinpah directing the "Wild Bunch" |
For Bogdan the over the top delirium of “the Wild Bunch”,
his cheering on of the massacre was a purge of all those years of emotional
repression and enforced sadness in Poland. Under the Communist regime, one’s
emotions were always in check. It was PC run amok. What did the authorities know
about you? Who was in the Party and who wasn’t? Were you going to end up in
prison for a seemingly benign comment about the regime? There was little personal
wealth to allow for any self-indulgence. At a restaurant once in Paris, the
waiter asked us what we wanted for dessert. Bogdan, in a typical gesture of
extravagance, ordered another round of steak. Poland was a world of enforced equality,
where gray was the operative color of the scenery and the soul.
I came across a poster on the Internet from the era of
Solidarity in Poland. To promote its cause it borrowed an image from
“HighNoon” of Gary Cooper striding down the center of town. While the Americans at
the time were promoting a notion of détente in their dealings with the Soviets,
the citizens of Soviet controlled countries were looking to symbols and stories
of raw individualism from the West for inspiration in their struggle against the
totalitarian regime. It is a film that is quintessentially American, and, although
not chosen by Bogdan for his blow out, it is even more iconic than the “Wild Bunch”
of the struggle of the individual against the oppressive weight
of the group. My recollections of the “Wild
Bunch” are thirty- five years old. If I can discuss “High Noon” in some depth, it
is because it shows up at least once a week on cable.
Being an artist, a rather solitary profession, I identified with its theme of
the loner, who is willing to risk his life for what he thinks is right. The
depiction of the crowd, which only thinks of material wealth and comfort and
seeks the easy way out of the impending crisis, is well drawn and accurate. Most
people in the town believe the arrival of a criminal, who has just been
released from prison before the end of his sentence for murder by a weak-kneed
judge, does not concern them. It was the Sherriff Kane (Gary Cooper) who put him
away and it is Kane he wants, not the town’s folk. They tell Kane, who is about
to leave on a honeymoon with Mrs. Kane(Grace Kelley), to get out of town, hoping it
will deflate the impending crisis.
Frank Miller, the bad guy, disrupted the life of the town’s
folk the last time around, making it “unsafe for women and children” as they
say, although the smarmy hotel manager seems to think the rough and ready style
that Miller fostered made town-life a lot more exciting and lucrative, especially
for the undertaker. However, with sidekicks like the sinister (I don’t think he
speaks a word) looking Lee Van Cleef, waiting at the depot for Miller’s return on
the noon train, things probably wont turn out too well for the townsfolk if Kane
leaves. Kane looks world-weary; every step he takes is slow and measured. Abandoned
by his fellow citizens, he also has to fight Lloyd Bridges, one of his deputes, who
wants Cooper to leave, so he can have his day in the sun alone to fight Miller and prove his
mettle. The sense of utter fatigue and the raw drive, that keeps him going, is
inspirational. Like all the Westerns I have seen, people are transformed by
these existential crises. How they respond changes their lives and those around
them for the better.
Religion also plays an interesting role in several of the Westerns
I have seen, where it is perceived as providing comfort for the sheepfold. The
minister at the church, where the whole town is worshipping that ominous Sunday
morning, is against violence on principle, but allows Kane nonetheless to make
his case to exhort the parishioners to defend the town. One of the town fathers
seems to agree that they must support the Sheriff, as he begins his speech, only
to end it by saying it would be bad PR for the town’s economy, if the shootout
takes place. Kelley, who plays Kane’s wife, has lost family to gun violence and
has converted to Quakerism. She abandons Kane and prepares to leave town on the
next train. At the depot, she finds herself, surrounded by Miller’s sidekicks, waiting
for Miller to arrive. Kane is abandoned by everyone.The level of anxiety mounts
as the clock moves closer to high noon.
Cooper’s ex–lover, Helen Ramirez, who is also the ex-lover
of the antagonist is leaving town on the same train that Miller is arriving on.
Earlier at the saloon she owns, Ramirez meets Mrs. Kane and tells her in no
uncertain terms that she should stand by her man. At the train station, when Kelly
hears that a fight has broken out, she runs furiously back into town. Kelley abandons
her religious dogma, and kills Miller, just as he is about to take down Kane, in what is the deciding moment of the shoot out.
Religion is perceived as irrelevant in this film for not
seeing their prohibition against killing in the context of society as a whole,
where murder and mayhem and outright sadism are the standard mode of operation
of the bad guys. The only way to control them is through the bold actions of
the courageous few who step up to the plate. The minister, who lets Kane
interrupt his Sunday sermon to make an appeal to the townsfolk for more deputies,
conveys his helplessness in the face of the impending arrival of Frank Miller,
when he says he is constrained by his faith to not encourage violence. All he can
say limply is: “I am sorry”. One message of the movie is that you don’t have to
embrace religion to do good. Life is messy and to maintain a semblance of order,
sacrifices have to be made. The hero is self-less in a way that all religious doctrine
seems to encourage. In the final showdown Kane christlike is bereft not only of the support
of the people but also of any excess of bravado. There is no swagger in his
gestures, just a man doing his job, fulfilling his destiny. But I suspect that this selflessness has
different origins than the selflessness of a monk or a saint. It may have its
origins in a notion of the warrior, or of feudal knights, as depicted in ‘The
Seven Samurai’, which provides the story line for “The Magnificent Seven”.
Their values derive from their selflessness and loyalty to the feudal lords. Self-discipline
and emotional control were the code of honor crucial to their success as
guardians of their lords, that prepared them to act efficiently and forcefully
at a moments notice. Their code of honor states implicitly: slovenliness and
lack of self-control are sins to be eradicated in oneself and in others. Like
Kane they no longer act for either the town folk or some higher authority, but
to live up to a personal code of honor.
“High Noon” has been a political football from its first
showing. The screenwriter was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, which leads
some commentators to see it as a commentary on McCarthyism. Although Gary
Cooper appearing before HUAC didn’t name
names, he is reported to have said he didn’t know much about Communism but as
far as he could see “it was not on the level.” John Wayne, appalled by the possible
allegory of McCarthyism in “High Noon” and the inability of Kane to drum up
resistance to Frank Miller had Howard Hawks make “ Rio Bravo”, where Wayne
succeeds in putting together a ragtag group of deputes to fend off the bad
guys.
“High Noon” was a favorite of both Reagan and Clinton, who
frequently showed it in the White House. But the essence of the film is a critique
of any sort of groupthink that threatens to undermine notions of fairness and
decency. To be chosen by Solidarity as a symbol of its uprising clearly skews
the film in my opinion toward an anti-communist line.
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| Alan Ladd in "Shane" |
My artist friend the late Addison Parks was a fan of Westerns. He
recommended “Shane” which like Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” deal with the moral
ambiguity of the gunslinger. They are referred to as "guns for hire" .The term may
imply that they are amoral but in the end they tend to risk their life for a
sense of what is right. But what is right and how do you know it? The film deals with the historical transition
from open range grazing to farming. One is no better than the other. These protagonists
are not ideologues nor do notions of Marxist inevitability make them students
of history. In “Shane”, as in the “Seven Samurai”, the farmers are perceived as
vulnerable and in need of protection: the very group nature of their activity
and the required patience and gentle care for the crops and cattle make them
ill-suited for self-defense. Of course it helps that Shane in the past had been
a lover of the woman, the farmer’s wife. Again, the decision to protect the
farmer is totally personal.
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| "Ride the High Country" |
There is always a code in play that is adhered to. In
“Ride the High Country” all the same themes reappear that we saw in “High Noon”: the
limitations of religion, the necessity of decision and the moral ambiguity of
what is right and wrong. The code seems to say that there is no moral
relativism in the face of moral sloth and sadism toward the weak. When the
younger sidekick in “Ride the High Country” hits on the girl who has joined up
with them to escape her fundamentalist father’s beatings, the two older gunslingers
put him in his place with a few judiciously placed punches. It is intriguing to
me that the two actors Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are in their sixties. Any
superiority they have over those younger than them obviously does not come from
raw strength, but from being more seasoned and wise in the way they use their
limited strength. When the miner, that the girl is trying to rejoin and ends up
marrying, turns out to be a moral reprobate, McCrea and Scott, through
subterfuge, succeed in annulling the marriage. They subvert societies’ law
entrusted to the slovenly lush of a justice of the peace, by forcing him at gunpoint
to forswear the validity of his legal authority to perform marriages. Their
personal code is more important than the laws of society.
It is interesting that just annulling the wedding cannot
enforce the code in the end. It has to be enforced in a battle of wills and
ruse. Enforcing the code is not an academic exercise: Evil is never seen for
what it is until good eliminates it. Of course sacrifice is inevitable. In the
final shootout, the dissolute miners, who have learned of the ruse used to annul
the marriage, have come to the woman’s farm to retrieve the young bride. They kill her father and in the shoot out Joel
McCrea dies, probably the most noble of the three. The most intriguing aspect
of the story is that Randolph Scott conspired to steal the gold that McCrea hired him to help bring down from the miner’s camp. He is arrested and tied up by
McCrea, a former lawman,who will turn him in, when they get back to civilization.
He escapes, but in the end reappears to fight in defense of McCrea, the girl and
the young sidekick at the farm. Even the self-serving plans of Scott do not
impair his sense of right and wrong, when it comes to protecting the good against the bad.
The girl ends up with the young sidekick, who is no longer
the randy young man he was at the beginning of the film. Like a scene out of
Shakespeare the wrongs of the world are righted; the woman finds the right
man..
The films I saw in college at the film society were all European.
They didn’t show Westerns. Just Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, and Godard. “The 400
Blows” was always my favorite and still is. It is a film, whose plot is always
rolling down hill and inexorably ends with Antoine Doisnel having nowhere to
go. French films have a knack for choosing gloomy endings. I remember seeing
“Sideways” with Paul Giamatti, which has a choice of having either a French or
American ending. I was betting on the French ending (he would lose the girl). I
was wrong. The subject of the film may have been about a French grape, pinot noir,
but the “terroir” was clearly American.
There is sometimes in European films, especially the Latin
ones, a notion of grace that seems to transcend the heavy sensuality
of the lives of the characters for example at the end of “La
Dolce Vita”, when Mastroianni, after a night of carousing, sees a blissfully
innocent girl on the beach, that puts all his sensuality in doubt. Is she a
reincarnation of Dante’s Beatrice? a glimpse of transcendent beauty that lifts
the individual out of the mundane. Catholic
grace still plays a role in this most earthbound of filmmakers.
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| Last frame of "The 400 Blows" |
The Europeans have a bias toward the metaphysical. Bergman
in the “Seventh Seal “struggles with “Death”. Godard embraces Nihilism to such
a degree that every gesture and every scene in “Pierrot Le Fou” seems to
radiate emptiness and futility. All the activity fits into the ideological
mold. The same can be said of ”Mon Oncle d’Amerique”, which rigidly has each
character portray the grim materialist philosophy of scientific Marxism. It is
interesting to put the American and European movies side by side. Postwar, the horrors
of the devastation, which America had not experienced on its soil, were still
fresh in the minds of the European filmmakers. Two hundred years of revolution
and two world wars have made them skeptical of big political aspirations. In
the sixties America had civil rights to aspire to, the protest against the war
in Vietnam and the hippies romantic return to the land and nature. All good causes. Except for
the short lived burst of freedom on May ’68, and their obsession to transcend
their violent history with technocratic management, the Europeans have little to
get them excited.They tend to look to America for their enthusiasms. It was the
German filmmaker, Wim Wenders, who said he was saved by Rock and Roll. The French films have
of course adultery. Life always seduces, tantalizes you with its endless illusions.
The message of these European films is that life is either surface or
nothingness or surface and nothingness combined as in Godard . Truffaut’s
ending to “Jules and Jim” makes a sudden chilling shift from surface to nothingness
with the
cremation of their lover in their
ménage a trois.Or the message is often bittersweet, as in the heavy nostalgia of Truffauts’s “Stolen Kisses” with
the Charles Trenet’s theme song
“What is left of our love” .
I commented once to my French brother in law (my wife’s’
brother to be distinguished from my sister’s husband who is French and interestingly
enough a fan of American westerns) on how I liked the honest gloomy endings of
French films. His take was less sanguine: he said it was a reflection of the rigidity
of the French social structure. The society was and still is hierarchical and,
when you can’t move up you either go round and round on a carousel or just
down. What is done to the young Doinel in “The 400 Blows” is just the nature of
things. There is no critique of the system or an attempt to see his fate as possibly
turning out better, if the reform schools reformed themselves. The society is
structured with a sort of original sin, which ignores the individual for the
sake of some perverse sense of order and hierarchy. Antoine is born into an
unloving family, an unloving world. He struggles against it but is entrapped
like a fly in a spider’s web. When Doinel grows up in
“Stolen Kisses” he is
totally disaffected and disinterested in pulling his weight in the world of commerce.
He is in love with love. Life is a carrousel. It is his turn to go around on the
circle of life. The options are around and aroud but only slightly up before you move down again.*
Growing up, the messages I got from the boy’s prep school I
attended and my family were clearly on the side of machismo. We still had a
religiously oriented daily chapel service and sports taught us that life was
the constant agonic battle against ones peers and oneself: Self-surpassing,
self-discipline, added to academic self-consciousness. In reaction, I was
attracted to the irony of Woody Allen, the nihilism of “The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner” or the romanticism of nature in the novels of Knut Hamsun. But
you can’t live your life successfully beyond a certain age with any of these principles as guides. Pragmatically, there are always decisions to be made on how you interact
with other people. Cynicism, a gloomy melancholic stance, or the pagan love of
the wild are of no help in the day to day navigating of the politics of ones
multiple societal roles of parent, spouse and of the work place. Although the
typical character of Westerns has failed in marriage, they do provide a model
for acting within society without having to feel like you have been bought and
sold by some higher social order. You do good, you save the day. The only
fantasy that does not have any practical relevance to day to day life is riding off
into the sunset.
