Horizon

Talking of landscapes and artificially created realities, I remember reading an article a while back about how Western movie-makers latched onto the scenery of Utah's Monument Valley because of its stunning visual qualities, and used it again and again until it became an essential part of a Western, even though the 'real' West looked nothing like it at all.

John Ford loved Monument Valley; I'm not sure how many times he used it. I know he used it in The Searchers (which I do not consider a great movie) and I'm pretty sure the setting was supposed to be Texas.

What's wrong with The Searchers? (A genuine question, for once: I've never seen it but I know how much folks ooh and aah about it.)

Yeah, Bobby, what's wrong with it? I think it's a great film.

I think the Technicolor was a mistake. I find most of the acting unconvincing, which, when combined with the color, makes the film a sort of cartoon. It is an enjoyable film, but I can't call it great. As always - in my book - Ward Bond is a pleasure.

But I'm a My Darling Clementine and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance sort of guy.

I can't stand The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The only thing that keeps my guts in place through it is knowing that Jimmy Stewart was a decorated fighter pilot and John Wayne was a draft dodger.

Okay, why can't you stomach Liberty Valance? Which westerns can you sit through, besides McCabe & Mrs. Miller?

Jimmy Stewart was a decorated fighter pilot and John Wayne was a draft dodger.

Bomber pilot, actually; B-17s. I think you're being a bit unfair to Wayne. A married man in his mid-to-late thirties with a large family wouldn't have been generally expected to serve in the front line.

I'm not being unfair to Wayne because he drew his persona from letting audiences assume he had real-life knowledge of warfare. But I'll say "draft exemptee" instead of "draft dodger" if you'd rather.

Correction duly noted re: Stewart but he was still a real-life hero.

I can stand most other Westerns. I just can't stomach the pretense that a lawyer who has heard of the Constitution is less honorable than a crude bully who has good enough aim to shoot the previous alpha bully. It's a film-length parable of the "rough men" claim.

But I'll say "draft exemptee" instead of "draft dodger" if you'd rather.

I would. I think we have a responsibility to use strong terms like draft dodger with precision. I don't think Bill Clinton's shifty record over his Vietnam non-service was something to be especially proud of, but he wasn't a draft dodger and I don't think the label applied there. It doesn't apply here either.

It's a film-length parable of the "rough men" claim.

Are you suggesting that the "rough men" claim (I assume you're referencing Orwell here) isn't true? It may not be the whole truth, but it's surely part of it.

Liberty Valance is a story about the end of the "rough men." And in that sense it's Wayne's most sympathetic role. He's a hero, not because he's the one who shot Liberty Valance but because he recognizes the days of his kind are over; he commits one last violent act (in a noble cause) and then turns the future over to law and order, as represented by the Stewart character. He loses everything: the girl and the reign of rough justice.

Notes on the general discussion:

I find the Searchers an enjoyable film and I thought John Wayne's acting in it was one of the more focused roles in his CV (It's difficult for politically aware people to react to Wayne's back catalogue honestly): She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a great performance: Ford got the best out of him.

Liberty Valance: it would have been ok for Martha if Wayne had been blacklisted ten years previously (see above). I understand this: I can never leave my detestation of Swarzenegger outside of his films. The most amazing thing about the film is the size of the steaks being fried in the kitchen scene at the start.

The Rough Men claim: don't expect Martha to make much sense of this--she thought Concientious Objectors were braver than front line soldiers.

I like McCabe and Mrs Miller, though it's a little too diaphanous and tedious even for my kidney (I can see why Martha likes it: a good man bashing exercise. By the way does she like Johnny Guitar?)

Yes, those steaks in Liberty Valance are magnificent. I remember seeing it at a drive-in with my parents, so it's possible my loyalty to it is based more on nostalgia than cold viewing. Which doesn't doesn't explain why I so like Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine.

You have to take those westerns for what they were: part of that mythologizing of the (white)American experience necessary for the American Century. There's an innocence to them, although an innocence with a dark underbelly (Henry Fonda's "What kind of a town is this?" in Clementine haunts me).

McCabe falls on the revisionist side of the American western, and though those films may be cynical and seemingly empty, they come off as more honest.

Has anyone seen Michael Winterbottom's The Claim? It feels like the final revisionist/demythologizing statement on the American West.

mythologizing of the (white)American experience

You know in the black-and-white film heyday there was an entire genre of westerns aimed at black audiences, starring black actors/actresses. I generally have little exposure to old westerns so have never seen one, but ran into some clips at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame last weekend.

I wonder if their themes differed from the white westerns at all. Probably a bevy of scholarly studies out there in academy-land.

I have attended an all-black rodeo (in Wild, Wild North Philadelphia), if that trumps the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.

Robbie, I don't know where you got that atrocious lie about my opinions on relative bravery, but you should get it through your head that it's possible to respect one group of people without detracting from another.

==

Re: "Liberty Valance," yes, it's about the end of the Rough Men, but there's a gratuitous spiteful twist in the story. Jimmy Stewart isn't merely a different kind of man representing the more civil character of the newer West. He's also portrayed as having built a political career on a lie. We're led to see Wayne as violent but brave and honest, and Stewart as cowardly, an incompetent fighter, and finally a liar too. With results that sound an awful lot like "People who talk about the rule of law and constitutional rights are probably hiding something; alas for the days of the roughnecks who shot first and asked questions later." The John Wayne approach is all very nice so long as Liberty Valance is the man to be shot. But I'm reading Joaquin Miller on frontier California, and some of his stories about "shooting first" are much sadder.

Settle down back there, you two!

Martha, no more nasty insinuations. Robbie, no more name calling.

Don't make Alan pull the car over. You wouldn't want that, would you?

Or as they say where I come from: stop starting, or I'll start stopping ...

Well, Steward is certainly an ineffectual "rough man", but I don't remember him as cowardly. It's true his career is founded on the lie that he shot Valance, but he's no scoundrel. He tries to avoid selection as a delegate to the territorial convention, and when he returns for Wayne's funeral he tells the truth. It's the newspaper man who has the famous line: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." In a small way, Ford is kicking off the revisionist movement with this movie.

I'd forgotten Stewart does at least create a chance for the truth about him to be known. That's something. But I still don't like the notion that Stewart is able to do his work because of Rough Men. If there had been fewer Rough Men in the West there'd be fewer half-buried, undermourned chunks of evil festering out there in the sagebrush ready to turn anyone who touches them into hermit crabs.

If there had been fewer Rough Men in the West there'd be fewer half-buried, undermourned chunks of evil festering out there in the sagebrush ready to turn anyone who touches them into hermit crabs.

Is this a metaphor gone haywire or are you actually referring to something semi-subterranean that can hurt you if you touch it?

'I don't know where you got that atrocious lie about my opinions on relative bravery, but you should get it through your head that it's possible to respect one group of people without detracting from another.'

I've got it through my head; got it through years ago.
As for the atrocious lie, this is how I arrived at writing that: sometime ago on abg-o--I searched for it but could turn it up, though I'm going to look for it again when I have time--discussion came up about soldiers; you, in your way of always looking to turn an accepted view on its head and find a victim (in that sense I'm surprised you're more concerned with offenders than crime victims: still, everyone's got their own kind of infracaninophilia I spoze) you, as I recall, blithely said (you seemed to be in that 'dunno why you guys go on about world war one so much' mood) that it took more guts to stay out of the war than it did to fight it. Something like that, which caused some chaffing and then it got cleared up somehow. That's how I remember it. I am willing to be proven wrong.

>If there had been fewer Rough Men in the West
>there'd be fewer half-buried, undermourned chunks
>of evil festering out there in the sagebrush ready
>to turn anyone who touches them into hermit crabs.

Is this a metaphor gone haywire or are you actually referring to something semi-subterranean that can hurt you if you touch it?

Sorry, it's a metaphor gone haywire. Was hoping people would remember the final scene of "Time Bandits" where God takes charge of a chunk of "Evil" and tells the child's parents not to touch it or it will turn them into hermit crabs. They ignore him and it does. Turn them into hermit crabs, I mean.

What I was trying to say really is that the frontier period in the inland U.S. West produced huge traumas that were sublimated instead of being seriously thought about or talked about or mourned, and Western politics and culture are still warped by those old unhealed grievances, and the Rough Men of the romanticized old days had a lot to do with creating lasting patterns that it will take a lot of patience and goodwill to undo.

Martha, can you give us an example of these "lasting patters" or "unhealed grievances"? I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about either.

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about either.

It's obvious to me Ben: your frontiersmen, farmers, cattle magnates and soldiers should have been multicultural, feminist social democrats, and then all would have been well.

Settle down, Robbie. Figure I can form my own opinion from Martha's answer, if she gives us one.

Incidentally, I don't know if you care or not, but you can italicize text by inclosing it in I tags: <i>foo</i> yields foo

I'm resuming an old landscape history project centered on the far northeastern corner of California, which is scarred by an especially contentious Japanese Internment camp history; an especially nasty frontier history involving great violence by both Indians and settlers; a pattern of employing low-paid Mexican immigrants to do farm work that has not to my knowledge entailed any union activity whatsoever; and a running hundred-year-old water-rights dispute whose real cause is poor planning by previous generations of federal officials, but whose result has been to put fishermen and farmers at each other's throats in a context of anti-environmentalist rhetoric. I don't know the area as well as I would like to, and I hope to know more soon, and I hope my view of the place becomes happier with more knowledge -- but what I know is extremely sad. A lot of people talking past each other and misplacing blame for problems that can only be handled if the people affected can agree on some shared sense of justice. As corners of the West go, this one has a really unusually tangled history, but I'm gathering these same long-term traumas run through the whole region in less concentrated form.

They don't have hermit crabs up there. They do have a lot of volcanic scoria, which encourages unhappy thoughts I suppose.

Going back to Liberty Valance, I think one needs to make the distinction between the “rough men” and the “bad guys” (at least in the movies; I’m not sure you can make that distinction in real life). Tom Doniphon (Wayne) is not in opposition to the rule of law, but he does understand, at least in the transition from frontier to statehood, that law has no authority without the threat of force. He has a moral sense, which is completely lacking in Valance and his gang. Doniphon’ s violent acts have the strength of that moral sense (except when he burns down his ranch – but then, he was disappointed in love).

Doniphon has that quality that Joan Didion describes in On Self-Respect (and your comments on how the “West was Won”, Martha, made me think of this passage):

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: "Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it." Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, "fortunately for us," hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnee.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you're married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

One more thought: Valance is the film where Wayne applies the moniker "Pilgrim." I don't think this was an accident in script writing. Wayne does seem to stick it on Stewart derisively; but it is Wayne's way of telling Stewart that he (Stewart) has come to a strange and hostile land, and it is a sort of prophetic moment for Wayne, using it as an admission of grudging respect for Stewart.

Grand words from Didion, and probably true ones, but I'm not sure they quite apply here. General Gordon, despite his other faults, was hardly uncivilized, and neither was a Father who could remain absorbed enough in his reading to neglect the arrival of "strange Indians" in his own house.

The backstory of the Westerns is the U.S. Civil War. The John Wayne and Clint Eastwood characters are old soldiers who function best in crises and can't see the point of most civilian niceties. They often do fit the fine heroic archetype of the scarred "damaged goods" character who feels unsuited for more delicate things but who knows they have value and sacrifices to make them possible for others.

Still, though, am I *not* right that the audience is invited to feel contempt for the Stewart character?

I probably could have cut a lot out of the Didion section. But I think they do apply in that they explain the difference between the "rough men" who claimed the West and the louts who just made life miserable for everybody. At no point do I get the sense that the Wayne character enjoys the violence he engages in, which cannot be said of Lee Marvin character. Doniphon "knows the price of things," he has "the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts." He knows that sometimes you have to shoot the bully or life isn't going to be worth living.

I'll have to watch it again, but I don't think the movie invites one to view Stewart with contempt. Tells you something about the nature of reality, doesn't it, that we have each seen a different Liberty Valance? In the end, it's just a movie.